Does an image shared on social media show the Silver Rail Elementary School shooting suspect in Bend, Oregon? No, that's not true: It is a photo of an unrelated person named Hadyn Dollery, whose image was taken from a Virginia sheriff's office website. Law enforcement identified the real suspect the following day as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published by @brettkeaneshow on Oct. 16, 2026. The post contained offensive language. It opened:
Another #atheist Trans Fag strikes again. Always They/Them Usual Suspects. Three children and a teacher were killed, when a 16-year-old armed with a pump-action shotgun purchased by his mother, according to a law enforcement official, broke into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon on Thursday.
The bottom of the image shared in the post showed a name, implying that this person was identified as a suspected shooter:
Atheist Haydn 'Sophie' Dollery...
This is what that picture looked like on X at time of writing:
(Image source: post by @brettkeaneshow on X.)
The implication was that the person portrayed in the above image had something to do with this specific incident.
The shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, took place on Oct. 15, 2026 (archived here).
The next day, law enforcement identified the suspect as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II (archived here), using pronouns he/him to refer to that person. According to the New York Times, the suspect's mother used the same pronouns during a brief exchange with journalists after the shooting. The same newspaper reported that she described her child as a son in 2020 as well.
The viral image attached to the post reviewed in this fact check was unrelated to what happened in Bend.
A reverse image search showed that the same picture of the same person appeared on the Loudoun County, VA, Sheriff's Office website in April 22, 2026. The press release (archived here) read:
Hadyn Dollery, 19, of Chantilly, was arrested and charged with Threats of Bodily Injury after LCSO received information through the Safe2Talk app indicating that Dollery made statements threatening violence at John Champe High School on an online platform.
Dollery had previously worked as a substitute teacher.
On Oct. 13, 2026, WJLA-TV (archived here) reported that Dollery was guilty of four charges and not guilty of one (archived here).
As Lead Stories previously reported, social media frequently link unrelated people to shootings. One trend is to blame comedian and podcaster Sam Hyde (archived here) for such incidents. He was falsely accused of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO and shooting at Donald Trump during his election campaign rally in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2024. Made-up people with similarly sounding names such as "Samzuki Hydaiko", "Samoylo Haidyuk", "Semen Hydenko" or "Samantha Hyde" were incorrectly described on social media as suspects in other criminal cases.
