Fact check: Baseless 'false flag' conspiracy theory on Nashville shooting circulates online

Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY
·5 min read

The claim: Nashville school shooting was a false flag operation

A March 28 Facebook post (direct link, archived link) shows images of Nashville, Tennessee, shooting suspect Audrey Hale's shoes.

"FALSE FLAG," reads the post's caption. "Nashville shooting is a hoax planned by freemasons to push gun control. It's all adding up, from her allegedly killing 3 kids and 3 adults 33, to the school address number that starts with 33 and shape shifting shoes we are seeing. One video the shoes is a 'Puma Suede', the next it's 'vans old skool.'"

Similar posts have generated hundreds of shares on Facebook.

Our rating: False

Police statements, extensive media coverage, eyewitness accounts and surveillance footage of the attack show the March 27 Nashville elementary school shooting was not a false flag operation. A spokesperson for the Nashville police department said there is no evidence Hale changed shoes during the attack.

Nashville shooting not a false flag

The claim of a false flag operation has no validity, Brooke Reese, a Metropolitan Nashville Police Department spokesperson, told USA TODAY.

A false flag operation is a "military action carried out with the intention of blaming an opponent for it," according to BBC News. Experts previously told USA TODAY that conspiracy theorists regularly misuse the term to falsely claim major news events were a hoax.

Hale, a 28-year-old who police say identified as transgender and used male pronouns on social media, gunned down three children and three adults at the Covenant School on March 27 before being confronted and killed by police, as USA TODAY reported. Hale was reportedly a former student of the private Christian school.

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Hale had detailed maps of the school and left behind writings related to the incident, police said. Hale also sent messages to a friend minutes before the attack, saying Hale planned to die and will be heard about on the news, the friend told USA TODAY.

Authorities released surveillance footage from the attack that showed Hale firing shots inside the school as well as body camera footage of officers clearing classrooms and chasing Hale down.

Five of the victims were pronounced dead at nearby Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, and the sixth was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.

Police and experts debunk shoe change conspiracy theory

There is no evidence that Hale changed shoes during the attack, according to Reese.

The Facebook post points to how Hale’s shoes looked black and white upon entering the school, as seen in the surveillance footage, but later appeared to have a red and yellow streak, as seen in the body camera footage of a police officer when Hale was shot down.

Multiple forensic experts said there are a variety of reasons why the shoes might appear to be a different color in the later footage.

V.S. Subrahmanian, a computer science professor at Northwestern University, told USA TODAY that any reddish glow on the shoes in the second footage “might be due to the interplay between the sunlight coming through the window and the reddish floor beam in the center of the latter image.”

“I don’t see any significant visual inconsistencies in the imagery of the shoes when the perpetrator first enters the school and the video showing the shooter down,” Subrahmanian said. “The latter shows similar shoes with a similar pattern.”

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Siwei Lyu, a digital media forensics expert at the University of Buffalo, agreed, noting that the image of the shoe on the right in the Facebook post was shot near the footboard of the room, which has red color in it.

"So the light in the room will have red light reflected from that part of the room, and if the materials of the shoes reflect a small amount of red light, it will appear reddish to us," Lyu said. "On the other hand, the image (on the left) was shot in a well lit situation, where input white light of all spectra are somewhat equally absorbed so the object appeared black."

When trying to identify whether objects in different videos are the same, color is only one factor to consider, according to Seth Stoughton, an affiliate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. Shape, size and design also come into play.

"The uppers and lowers (of the shoes) looked consistent and what I could tell about the design on the front of the shoe looked consistent," Stoughton said.

James O'Brien, a forensic analysis expert at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed that there isn't anything unusual about the shoes.

"The lobby camera footage is fairly clear, while the body-cam footage is severely compressed. I think it is the compression artifacts that are changing the appearance of shoe color," O'Brien said.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: False claim Nashville shooter's shoes prove 'false flag'

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