A man from suburban Kansas City was falsely accused in social media posts of being a mass shooter at the Super Bowl parade for the Kansas City Chiefs last month. And now that man has filed a defamation lawsuit against Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, who helped spread the inaccurate claim, according to KCTV.
Rep. Burchett shared a photo of Denton Loudermill on X, with the caption, “One of the Kansas City Chiefs victory parade shooters has been identified as an illegal Alien.”
Aside from falsely implicating Loudermill in the shooting on Feb. 14, Burchett also called him an “illegal alien,” another statement that simply wasn’t true. The mass shooting killed one person and wounded 22 others, including 11 children. Three people—23-year-old Lyndell Mays, 18-year-old Dominic Miller, and 20-year-old Terry Young—have been charged in the shooting.
Loudermill was just trying to leave the parade area after the chaos of the shooting and tried to duck under some police tape, according to his lawsuit. Loudermill, who wasn’t charged or cited for anything, was only briefly detained, but photos of him in handcuffs started to circulate online with a sinister narrative.
Five days after his original tweet, Rep. Burchett deleted it, blaming “incorrect news reports” as the source of his information. But he didn’t retract the claim that Loudermill was one of the shooters.
“It has come to my attention that in one of my previous posts, one of the shooters was identified as an illegal alien. This was based on multiple, incorrect news reports stating that. I have removed the post,” Burchett tweeted.
Burchett blamed “news reports,” but there wasn’t a single reputable news outlet that claimed the man in that photo was an illegal alien nor someone who’d been arrested for perpetrating the shooting. It was all bullshit being peddled by far-right X accounts like End Wokeness, an anonymous account popular with X’s owner Elon Musk.
Rep. Burchett appears to have gotten his “news” from X accounts that have no problem with spreading false information that fits with their narrative.
In fact, many X accounts used photos of Denton Loudermill while falsely claiming he was someone named “Sahil Omar,” a name that’s been used previously by right-wing trolls to insist all mass shooters must be foreign born. The fictional “Sahile Omar” has been blamed for other crimes, including mass shootings in Las Vegas and Prague, according to the BBC.
Loudermill’s lawsuit is seeking $75,000 in damages from Rep. Burchett, according to KCTV, though it’s not yet clear if he’s going to sue others who helped spread the false claims on social media.
“The false identification of Plaintiff as an ‘illegal alien’ and ‘shooter’ has caused [Loudermill] in Kansas to receive death threats and to suffer mental distress from having been exposed to public view and more specifically to experience periods of anxiety, agitation, and sleep disruption and such damages are likely to continue into the future,” the lawsuit states, according to KCTV.
“The acts and conduct of Defendant caused Plaintiff to suffer injuries and actual damages including mental distress, sleeplessness, anxiety, and agitation…as well as emotional suffering, humiliation, embarrassment, insult, and inconvenience.”