Teacher’s ‘heroic’ claims during shooting a hoax

NEW YORK: After last year’s mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, a man calling himself David Briscoe described how he had barricaded the door of the classroom he was teaching in and instructed students to lie down and cover their mouths as gunshots rang out nearby.
But the school district said the story was false, and no one by that name had ever worked for the school. The story fell apart when The Texas Tribune began making inquiries following a phone interview in April and discovered that it appeared Briscoe was never at the site of the shooting.
“We can confirm that there has never been an employee (part-time or full-time), substitute, vendor, contractor or intern working in Santa Fe ISD named David Briscoe,” a spokeswoman for the Sante Fe Independent School District said.
The district’s superintendent, Leigh Wall, said on Monday that the apparent hoax was an example of how fast misinformation can spread, “especially when the amount of detailed information available is limited.”
The operator of the Twitter account under Briscoe’s name did not immediately respond to a direct message. The Twitter account told the Tribune that he had never lived in Texas, that one of his employees had stolen his identity and that the employee had been the one quoted by other news outlets.