The Jacksonville Shooting 'Ravenchamps' Misidentification

On 26 August 2018, a mass shooting occurred at the GLHF Game Bar at Jacksonville Landing in Jacksonville, Florida, during a Madden NFL 19 video game tournament. The attacker was David "Bread" Katz, a 24-year-old competitive gamer from Baltimore who had participated in the tournament, been eliminated, and returned with murderous intent; acting alone, he shot and killed two people, wounding 10 others, before killing himself. Because the tournament was inadvertently live-streamed, more information was initially available to the public than is typical in mass shootings, yet questions persisted about the shooter's identity and motive.

A day after the attack, a group of far-right outlets — the fringe sites Infowars and Gateway Pundit, plus commentator Mike Cernovich and reporter Ian Miles Cheong — announced they had found the shooter's Reddit account, 'Ravenchamps,' a handle similar to Katz's frequent video game username 'Ravens2012champs.' They amplified the account's rhetoric slamming the president, highlighting a comment calling users 'Trumptards'; Infowars headlined that the 'Jacksonville Madden Shooter Criticized "Trumptards" on Reddit.' But the groups were wrong: the account belonged to Pavel, an uninvolved Minnesota factory worker.

Pavel logged on after work to find 60 or 70 unread messages from people using his username and claiming he was the dead shooter — 'Half of them are messages like "I hope that person's dead,"' he told NBC News. He responded publicly with humour, writing 'I'm alive you know?' and then taking questions on Reddit's AskMeAnything board, where he said he was 'Confused at first, now I'm just laughing about it.' Strangers had pored over his history in detail, down to identifying the Minnesota plates on a photo of his Mazda he had posted years earlier.

As Pavel surfaced, Gateway Pundit appended two question marks to the headline tying him to the shooting, and Cernovich apologized, saying 'The mass shooter's Reddit handle is different from one that previously circulated.' NBC News noted it was not the first time Gateway Pundit had misidentified an attacker, having wrongly named individuals after the Charlottesville car attack, the Las Vegas shooting and the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting.

On Reddit itself, the r/Madden community modeled the opposite behavior. The user who broke the news, rdmrdm1, warned: 'Unless you have a legitimate link, don't post anything related to the subject. If you turn out to be wrong it may well ruin that person's life,' and a moderator added, 'Please also refrain from posting rumours about who was responsible etc. until we have something definitive from a reputable news source. Let's avoid a Boston Marathon fiasco' — a reference to Reddit's 2013 misidentification of missing student Sunil Tripathi as the Boston bomber. Slate contrasted that caution with the QAnon subreddit r/greatawakening, where users mused the shooting was a deep-state ploy to deflect from Sen. John McCain's death, and read the Madden moderators' vigilance as recognition that subreddits now function as news sources.