After three police officers were killed and another three wounded in a 17 July 2016 shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officials identified the suspect as Gavin Eugene Long, a 29-year-old former Marine from Kansas City, Missouri, who was shot and killed at the scene.
The report sent many people scurrying to find a picture of Gavin Long online, with quite a few of them hitting a (since removed) Facebook profile bearing that name. However, that profile was clearly a fake which had just been established earlier in the day and populated with some backdated posts and a profile photo:
This bit of prankishness soon resulted in pictures of not-Gavin being featured in other social media posts identifying him as the "Baton Rouge shooter":
The image used for that phony "Gavin Long" Facebook profile was one that appeared among the first entries in a Google Image search on the phrase "black guy":
Clicking on the photograph in the Google Image search results led to a Photobucket album of pictures of guests at a birthday party, in which the faux Gavin Long was identified as "Eerin the token black guy."
According to law enforcement sources, this is a picture of the real Gavin Long, who used the pseudonym Cosmo Setepenra and posted at least one video on YouTube about oppression and police protests:
