Photo falsely tied to Wisconsin school shooting suspect Natalie Rupnow

After a teenager opened fire on a Madison, Wisconsin, Christian school classroom Dec. 16, some social media users spread the unsubstantiated claim that the shooter was transgender.

“We need less pharmaceuticals and more institutional insane asylums,” a Dec. 16 Instagram post said, sharing an image of Natalie Rupnow, 15, who police identified as the shooter, alongside another picture of what looked like a young man in a tie.

We saw the same two photos shared on X, but identifying the shooter as “Samuel Hyde, a trans student.”

The Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

Police say Rupnow, a student at Abundant Life Christian School, killed two people — a teacher and a student — and injured six others before taking her own life.

Asked on Dec. 16 whether Rupnow was transgender, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said he did not know, calling the shooter’s gender “of no consequence at this time.”

“I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify,” Barnes said.

We traced the social media photo of the young man in a tie to a photo included in a 2003 yearbook from Wilton High School, a public school in Connecticut. The yearbook identified the person as Samuel Hyde.

Screenshot from Instagram

Samuel Hyde, now 39, is a comedian whose name and photos have repeatedly been used by internet hoaxers. PolitiFact has debunked several claims mentioning Hyde and other variations. We reached out to Hyde via his Instagram account to verify the yearbook photo is his, but did not immediately receive a response.

We have seen social media posts falsely tie mass shootings to transgender people before. But as PolitiFact has reported before, there is no evidence of rising violence among people who identify as LGBTQ+. We also found no credible evidence to support claims of widespread transgender extremist violence.

We rate the claim that a photo of a young person in a tie shows Rupnow False. 

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.