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ID Portrait Used in Early Suspect Reports

Tightly cropped identification-style portrait of a young man in a dark navy collared shirt against a flat blue background

What This Image Shows

A tighter crop of the same identification-style portrait: head, neck and shirt collar only, against the same flat blue backdrop. Short light-brown hair styled upward with faded sides, sparse stubble along the jaw, a dark navy collared shirt with a thin white line at the collar. Again there is no text and no caption in the frame.

The existence of two crops of one portrait is itself informative. It tells you the image was passed hand to hand and re-cropped as it moved — the ordinary lifecycle of a photograph during a breaking story, and one of the reasons early identifications are so unreliable.

The man pictured was released without charge and was not the shooter. No allegation is made against him here. The image is retained as documentation of how the September 10 misidentification propagated, not as a suspect photograph. See Zach Qureshi, the other crop, and the news feed screenshot.

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