Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Posts on social media torment the wrong man
FORT LAUDERDALE — One Esteban Santiago is accused of killing five people and wounding six in a shooting at Fort Lauderdale’s airport on Friday that has attracted attention worldwide.
Another Esteban Santiago — not the accused shooter — has been targeted by Facebook posters spewing hate. Esteban Marcelo Guzman-Santiago, 23, has gotten dozens of comments, both nasty and kind, from people all over the country.
“Is this the guy???” one wrote. “I’d be a killer to [sic] if I had a face that looked like that,” wrote another. Another, from West Virginia, wrote: “Your a peice [sic] of ---- I hope u burn to death.”
Santiago, frustrated by the misdirected attention, posted a Facebook Live video Friday repeating three times in colorful vocabulary that he is not the shooter.
“Listen, everybody who is messaging me, texting me, calling me, asking me am I this ... shooter,” he said in exasperation. “I just left from work. I just got through from graduating from the training program. How ... am I the ------shooter?”
Guzman-Santiago, who lives in Dania Beach, may have attracted the attention because his Facebook profile lists Fort Lauderdale as his place of residence.
The Esteban Santiago accused in Friday’s shooting is a 26-year-old war veteran who served in Iraq. He lives in Alaska and has a history of mental health problems.
While Guzman-Santiago bears no resemblance to the man in police custody, that didn’t stop people from around the country from speculating on social media that they were one and the same.
“He’s gonna be tripping as soon as he gets online and checks Facebook,” one man predicted — correctly.
Guzman-Santiago noticed the posts about 5:30 p.m. Friday, after leaving the call center where he works as a customer-service rep.
He posted a video at 5:37 p.m. Friday under the heading “It was not me.”
Then, 22 minutes later, he posted this: “Stop Messaging Me I’m Not The ... Shooter!!!”
Both friends and strangers jumped to his defense, offering sympathy and advice.
A few people suggested he change his privacy settings on Facebook.
“I’m terribly sorry for what you’re going through,” one man wrote. “This is the worst of social media in action and you did nothing to deserve this treatment.”
Another praised him for handling the drama with a sense of humor.
One woman reminded him that people can be ignorant.
“Don’t even sweat it,” she wrote. “Do not let these TROLLS raise your blood pressure, Gordo.”
One poster defended him.
“That’s not him the birthdays are not the same the shooter was born in March and he was born in December.”
One woman wrote simply: “Leave this man alone.”
On Sunday night, Guzman-Santiago had four words for the fury of confusion he got caught up in, compliments of social media: “This is just crazy.”
Even his mother got caught up in the drama, he said, when a reporter from Brazil contacted her on Facebook saying he wanted to interview the mother of the accused gunman.
“She told him, ‘My son is not the shooter,’ ” he said. “Then, she blocked him on Facebook.”