Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) posted and then quickly deleted a tweet this morning erroneously blaming white supremacy for the Tuesday mass shooting at a New Jersey kosher market that left four people dead, including a detective.
Before we get to her tweet, here’s a recap detailing the full extent of what happened Tuesday:
At least four people, including one police officer, were killed in a shootout in Jersey City on Tuesday. The incident began near a cemetery in a residential neighborhood and ended with a prolonged gun battle between police and two suspects who barricaded themselves inside a Jewish grocery store.Officials said the two suspects were killed in the gunfight.It started when officers engaged two people who looked suspicious near the cemetery. Veteran detective Joseph Seals died from injuries sustained at that scene.The suspects then fled in a stolen truck to the Kosher grocery store, where they shut themselves in and spent hours exchanging rifle fire with police and other law enforcement officers. After the shootout, five people were found dead at the store, including two believed to be the suspects, Jersey City Police Chief Michael Kelly said Tuesday night.
Although New Jersey’s attorney general says it’s too early to determine a motive, some believe that the suspects deliberately targeted the store:
Fears that a deadly shooting at a Jewish market in Jersey City was an anti-Semitic attack mounted on Wednesday as authorities recounted how a man and woman deliberately pulled up to the place in a stolen rental van with at least one rifle and got out firing.[…]But Mayor Steve Fulop said surveillance video of the attackers made it clear they targeted the kosher market, and he pronounced the bloodshed a hate crime against Jews, as did New York’s mayor and governor.Also, investigators believe the two dead attackers — who were thought to be a couple — identified themselves in the past as Black Hebrew Israelites, a movement whose members have been known to rail against whites and Jews, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.In addition, authorities have found social media postings from at least one of the killers that were anti-police and anti-Jewish, the official said. The FBI on Wednesday searched the Harlem headquarters of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which is the formal name of the Black Hebrew group, according to the official.
Here are photos of David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50, the now-deceased suspects:
This information had been widely reported before the now-deleted tweet Tlaib posted this morning, in which she wrote, “This is heartbreaking. White supremacy kills”:
After (presumably) finding out who the actual perps were, did Tlaib post a corrected tweet afterward still noting “this is heartbreaking”? As of this writing, no.
Indeed. Why?
In addition to Detective Seals, the other three victims are Mindy Ferencz, 31; Moshe Deutsch, 24; and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49. Read more about them here, and please remember their families in your thoughts and prayers.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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