The gruesome photo was posted on X just hours after a man ambushed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas on Sept. 24. The image shows the suspect after he shot himself. Based on contextual information and web searches, the photo appears to be authentic.
The post has disappeared for now, and we don’t know who shared the photo. But the person who divulged it, and whoever posted it, did nothing to speed the investigation or promote respect for law or life. It was gore porn.
Perhaps it was released by accident, or extracted from some unsecured digital source. Media liaisons for the Dallas Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, referred all questions to the FBI. An FBI spokeswoman confirmed none of its agents released or posted the photo. A Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman emailed that officials there knew of the photo but nothing indicated it was posted by anyone in their department. The Dallas County medical examiner’s office did not return a phone message.
The image shouldn’t have been made public at this stage. It is a crime scene photo — evidence in an ongoing investigation. FBI spokeswoman Melinda Urbina Garcia said in an email that agents can be disciplined if they take and share unauthorized photos.
Opinion
If leaking photos transgresses law enforcement ethics, posting them violates human decency. The X account involved specializes in real-life violence, something that shouldn’t be a form of entertainment.
Social media users who weren’t seeking gore came across it. The photo popped up after a simple search for “ICE shooting” on X the day of the ambush. The image added no information of value. Authorities had already announced that the suspect had died by suicide.
In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley encouraged newspapers and magazines to print photos of her son’s disfigured body as it lay in a casket. She wanted the world to see what racists had done to 14-year-old Emmett, who had been killed while visiting a great-uncle in Mississippi. The Black youth had been kidnapped from his relatives’ home, beaten, mutilated, shot and his body dumped in a river after allegedly whistling at a white woman.
The shocking images were proof of a terrible evil that many Americans, including political leaders, were inclined to ignore. Their widespread publication helped lay a predicate for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Something horrific had happened, and publishing the photos was part of the effort to rectify it.
With the ICE ambush, the release of the photo is something entirely different. We have no reason to believe that it was published with the consent of the suspect’s family or lead investigators. The gory image adds nothing to our understanding of the reprehensible attack on the ICE facility, which killed two immigrants and injured a third.
Someone shared and posted the photo to exploit the tragedy, aided by social algorithms that reward rage and gore devoid of context or meaning. It’s one more example of how social media amplifies the worst impulses of humanity.
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