Twin Falls police gave their fullest account of Saturday's attack at an In-N-Out Burger at a press conference Sunday afternoon, at 2:02 p.m. local time. [4] The gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Investigators believe he acted alone. No motive has been released. [1][4]
Three people were killed and seven were injured. Of the injured, two were treated and released, three were in stable condition and two were in critical condition. Police described those figures as preliminary. [1][4]
One of the three killed was an In-N-Out employee. Police have not released the names of any of the dead, and the company did not name her. Lynsi Snyder, In-N-Out's president, said in a statement, "We lost one of our beautiful Associates tonight," and said the employee was taking care of customers when the shooting happened. [2] Among the survivors is Terry Dudley, a driver for North Star Taxi. His employer wrote that he "has a very long road ahead of him," and a fundraiser for him describes a man who "quietly puts others before himself." [2] Crisis counselors were available in Twin Falls on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at Rock Creek Elementary School. [2]
That is the record as of Sunday night. A different version has been moving faster. A video captured in our weekend roster sweep carries the title "Left-Wing Gunman OPENS Fire On In-N-Out…Then A Cowboy Steps Up And Does The UNTHINKABLE." [5] Two claims are doing the work in that sentence: that an armed bystander ended the attack, and that the attacker was left-wing. Neither survives contact with what police have said.
Where the bystander account came from
The bystander version was not invented. Two people did return fire. Police have confirmed that an off-duty Idaho State Police trooper and an armed civilian exchanged gunfire with the gunman. [4][2] Police Chief Matthew Hicks said so from the podium and went out of his way to praise them: "We want to take a moment and commend the actions of the off-duty officer and the citizen, and their heroic action to stop this incident." [3] Hicks added that investigators believe "their actions helped drive the suspect away from the scene, preventing further casualties." [3] Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson was blunter, calling them "true heroes in our community" who "without a doubt saved many lives." [4]
In a chaotic scene, with two armed responders firing and a gunman found dead, the shortest path between those facts is that one of them shot him. Early accounts of mass shootings are revised routinely and for good reasons: the first counts come from people running, the first attributions come before an autopsy, and the agencies themselves are working from partial information. The Al Jazeera report our own newsroom drew on Sunday morning carried the bystander framing; that story now states the gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. [3]
What police are saying is narrower and different. Driving an attacker from a scene is not killing him. Hicks's own account credits the two responders with preventing further casualties, not with ending his life, and the department's finding is that the wound was self-inflicted. [1][3][4] The correction is not that the trooper and the citizen did nothing. It is that the thing they are being credited with in the title is not the thing police say they did.
Where the motive claim came from
Nowhere, so far. No official source has released a motive or a political affiliation for the attacker. Hicks declined to discuss motive at Sunday's press conference and said the investigation is open. [4][1] That is the whole of the official record on the question.
This half of the title gets a different rating than the first, because the standards are different. The bystander claim is contradicted: police have stated a cause of death that rules it out. The "left-wing" characterization is unsupported, which is not the same as disproven. Investigators may yet release a motive, and it may be anything. Until they do, a political label attached to a mass shooting inside the first 36 hours is an assertion with no source behind it, and it is doing the heaviest lifting in the sentence.
One more thing is worth conceding on the video's side. A title written in the hours after an attack is a fast product made under the same fog everyone else was in, and a fast product is not the same as a considered claim. The problem is that titles do not carry timestamps. This one is still circulating against a police account that now contradicts it, and nothing in the title tells a viewer which version of Saturday they are getting.
Our own brief
We carried it too. The Pixel Politics wire brief filed Sunday morning stated that an armed bystander returned fire and killed the attacker. That came from the Al Jazeera report as it read at the time, and it was wrong. The brief has been corrected to the police account: self-inflicted gunshot wound, investigators believe he acted alone, motive not released. [1][3][4]
We are printing that here rather than quietly fixing the file, because the correction we are running tonight would not mean much otherwise.
What is settled and what is not
Settled, per Twin Falls police as of Sunday evening: three dead, seven injured, an attacker who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and is believed to have acted alone, and two people who returned fire and were publicly credited by the police chief and the county sheriff with saving lives. [1][3][4]
Not settled: the names of the three people killed, which police have not released; the motive, which the chief declined to discuss; and the final casualty figures, which police themselves labeled preliminary. [1][2][4]
The claim in the title is rated false. Police say the gunman shot himself. The political characterization has no official source of any kind behind it. The people who ran toward the gunfire are real, and they have already been thanked by name, by their own police department, for what they actually did.
