Does a viral photo show the Altoona McDonald's employee who made the 911 call to report a sighting of Luigi Mangione in Pennsylvania? No, that's not true: The photo shows a comedian from New York. A profile on Facebook that contained the original version of the image also placed that person in New York, not Pennsylvania.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on December 11, 2024. It opened:
Nancy Parker of Altoona, PA is the snitch.
She outed herself on FB, bragging about being the snitch.
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Wed Dec 18 17:46:05 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search on Google, Yandex, Bing, TinEye and PimEyes did not lead to the original version of the photo.
Lead Stories compared images of women named Nancy Parker on Google to the image in question via the Amazon Rekognition face comparison tool (archived here), and it showed a match:
(Source: Amazon Rekognition screenshot taken on Tue Dec 17 19:24:27 2024 UTC)
The photo on the left came from an announcement of an upcoming standup comedy show (archived here) featuring comedian Nancy Parker. The event's description introduced her as "one of the first female stand-up comedians in the early seventies in New York City" who "appeared on major talk shows" and "performed her comedy at Carnegie Hall."
Lead Stories found a profile of Nancy Parker on Facebook with the original, better-quality version of the photo in question:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Dec 18 18:05:56 2024 UTC)
The photo was uploaded in mid-September 2024. Its description mentioned a restaurant in New York City, suggesting that that was where it was taken.
The profile said that Nancy Parker lives in New York, not Pennsylvania. It didn't list McDonald's as a place of employment.
A search on Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) showed that the Altoona McDonald's employee who made the 911 call (archived here) that led to the arrest of the suspect (archived here) in the UnitedHealthcare CEO's murder case (archived here) was not publicly identified by name in credible news reports, as of this writing.
Lead Stories contacted the owner of the Nancy Parker profile on Facebook, McDonald's and Altoona police for further comments, but did not receive a response.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims mentioning Luigi Mangione can be found here.
