Reports That 'Bernie Gores' Died In Both Uvalde School Shooting And ...

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Reports that ‘Bernie Gores’ died in both Uvalde school shooting and Afghanistan are fake 7 June 2022

What was claimed

Bernie Gores was reported to have died in both the Robb Elementary School shooting and in Afghanistan.

Our verdict

Both reports of the death of a man named Bernie Gores are fake.

A number of posts spreading false reports of a man’s death are circulating on Facebook.

The posts share two side-by-side images of a man supposedly named Bernie Gores, one of which claims that he was a teacher killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas last month, and the other of which claims he was a CNN journalist killed during the evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.

The posts appear to use these images to suggest that the same man has been reported as having died twice. However, the posts are not true.

The first image claims: “Elementary school teacher Bernie Gores died sheltering his students from gunfire at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.”

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It is sadly true that two teachers died in the shooting at Robb Elementary School on 24 May, however neither of them were called Bernie Gores and both were women.

The second image, a screenshot purportedly from a CNN Twitter account, claims: “#CNN Journalist ‘Bernie Gores’ executed in #Kabul by #Taliban soldiers.”

The post claiming that a CNN journalist named Bernie Gores died in Afghanistan is from a fake account. CNN itself has previously described the claim as “absolute fiction”.

We’ve previously debunked similar posts claiming that ‘Bernie Gores’ died in Ukraine and also in Afghanistan, as have other fact-checking organisations including Factcheck.org and Reuters. 

Reuters has identified the man in the image as a YouTube gamer called Jordie Jordan, who is not dead and continues to stream regularly on his channel.

Image courtesy of President Biden

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because both screenshots featured in the post are fake. A man named Bernie Gores was not among the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting, and was not a CNN journalist killed in Afghanistan.

• By Hannah Smith

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