FACT FOCUS: Minneapolis shooting prompts spread of misrepresented and fabricated images online

Misrepresented and fabricated images spread widely on social media in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Wednesday.

Soon after the shooting, photos emerged erroneously identified as showing the victim, a 37-year-old mother of three. Others were fabricated to falsely show the face of the officer involved or were misrepresented to say he had a Nazi tattoo. And an old video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was said to show him speaking about the incident.

Here's a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: Images show the ICE officer who shot Good without a mask at the scene of the shooting.

THE FACTS: This is false. The images were fabricated. They appear to be screenshots from a video of the shooting, as the background matches the location where it took place. But that footage never shows the officer without a mask.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics and misinformation expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the images appear to have been generated by AI and that they are unlikely to reflect what the officer looks like.

“We have previously studied the application of AI to ‘enhance’ facial images,” he said. “Under considerably more favorable conditions than in this example of the masked ICE agent, AI enhancement/reconstruction is not consistently reliable.”

He continued: “In this situation where half of the face is obscured, AI (or any other technique) is not, in my opinion, able to accurately reconstruct the facial identity.”

CLAIM: Two photos of a blond woman with a small child show Good.

THE FACTS: False. The photos are of Renee Paquette, a former WWE wrestler, and her daughter.

One photo shows Paquette kneeling on the ground while her daughter hugs her. She posted it to Instagram on International Women’s Day in 2023, writing that “raising a strong, independent, free thinking, confident woman is my main objective.” The other photo shows Paquette kissing her daughter’s cheek as her daughter sticks out her tongue. It was posted in 2024, on her daughter’s third birthday.

Paquette commented on one of the posts misrepresenting her photos: “Wrong Renée. My condolences to her family.”

CLAIM: A photo of a woman with short, pale pink hair wearing a green sweater shows Good.

THE FACTS: False. The woman in the photo is not Good, it is Gabriela Szczepankiewicz. Photos of both women appeared in a 2020 Facebook post from Old Dominion University announcing the winners of a poetry prize.

Szczepankiewicz earned an honorable mention in the undergraduate category for that year's Academy of American Poets Prize. Her photo, which is captioned with her name, is the first to appear in the Facebook post.

Good — who is identified as Renee Macklin in her photo — won the undergraduate category. Her photo appears third.

CLAIM: An image of a man with a Nazi tattoo on his neck shows the ICE officer who shot Good.

THE FACTS: False. The image, which comes from a video posted to Instagram on Jan. 5 — two days before the shooting — is of a different man. Video of the shooting shows that the ICE officer involved does not have a tattoo in the same place as the man in the image spreading online.

In the Instagram video, a man behind the camera confronts the man with the tattoo outside of a restaurant on Lyndale Avenue South in Minneapolis. The tattoo is visible in the first few seconds of the video. It consists of two black lightning bolts that resemble the SS bolts symbol, which was used by the Nazi guard, and appears on the right side of the man’s neck, directly behind his earlobe.

The tattooed man says he “had this done years ago” and that he “ain't had no time to change it" as he walks away.

In footage from the shooting, the ICE officer who shot Good is seen walking down the street about one minute in with a mask covering the bottom half of his face. He does not have a tattoo behind his right earlobe. In addition, his earlobe is shaped differently than that of the man in the Instagram video.

CLAIM: A video shows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defending Good.

THE FACTS: False. The video is from an interview DeSantis did in June on “The Rubin Report,” an online political talk show, amid protests that month over President Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles.

“And we also have a policy that if you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety," DeSantis, a Republican, says in the clip spreading online. "And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you. You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”

DeSantis was not referring to Good. He was answering a question about Florida's policies on protests that block roads.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

Law enforcement officers attend to the scene of the shooting involving federal law enforcement agents, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Tom Baker)

VATICAN CITY (AP) — In his most substantial critique of U.S., Russian and other military incursions in sovereign countries, Pope Leo XIV on Friday denounced how nations were using force to assert their dominion worldwide, “completely undermining” peace and the post-World War II international legal order.

“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading,” Leo told ambassadors from around the world who represent their countries’ interests at the Holy See.

Leo didn’t name individual countries that have resorted to force in his lengthy speech, the bulk of which he delivered in English in a break from the Vatican’s traditional diplomatic protocol of Italian and French. But his speech came amid the backdrop of the recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro from power, Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and other conflicts.

The occasion was the pope’s annual audience with the Vatican diplomatic corps, which traditionally amounts to his yearly foreign policy address.

In his first such encounter, history’s first U.S.-born pope delivered much more than the traditional roundup of global hotspots. In a speech that touched on threats to religious freedom and the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and surrogacy, Leo lamented how the United Nations and multilateralism as a whole were increasingly under threat.

“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies,” he said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”

“Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence,” he said.

Leo did refer explicitly to tensions in Venezuela, calling for a peaceful political solution that keeps in mind the “common good of the peoples and not the defense of partisan interests.”

The U.S. military seized Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, in a surprise nighttime raid. The Trump administration is now seeking to control Venezuela’s oil resources and its government. The U.S. government has insisted Maduro's capture was legal, saying drug cartels operating from Venezuela amounted to unlawful combatants and that the U.S. is now in an “armed conflict” with them.

Analysts and some world leaders have condemned the Venezuela mission, warning that Maduro’s ouster could pave the way for more military interventions and a further erosion of the global legal order.

On Ukraine, Leo repeated his appeal for an immediate ceasefire and urgently called for the international community “not to waver in its commitment to pursuing just and lasting solutions that will protect the most vulnerable and restore hope to the afflicted peoples.”

On Gaza, Leo repeated the Holy See’s call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and insisted on the Palestinians’ right to live in Gaza and the West Bank “in their own land.”

In other comments, Leo said the persecution of Christians around the world was “one of the most widespread human rights crises today,” affecting one in seven Christians globally. He cited religiously motivated violence in Bangladesh, Nigeria, the Sahel, Mozambique and Syria but said religious discrimination was also present in Europe and the Americas.

There, Christians “are sometimes restricted in their ability to proclaim the truths of the Gospel for political or ideological reasons, especially when they defend the dignity of the weakest, the unborn, refugees and migrants, or promote the family.”

Leo repeated the church’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia and expressed “deep concern” about projects to provide cross-border access to mothers seeking abortion.

He also described surrogacy as a threat to life and dignity. “By transforming gestation into a negotiable service, this violates the dignity both of the child, who is reduced to a product, and of the mother, exploiting her body and the generative process, and distorting the original relational calling of the family,” he said.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Pope Leo XIV holds his weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV holds his weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Pope Leo XIV holds his weekly general audience in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)