El Paso ‘hero’ arrested on warrant before receiving honor — then discredited

(Video screenshot)

New evidence has shown that an El Paso shooting survivor who was celebrated by both the White House and the media as a “hero” is, in fact, a liar, a fraud and a convicted criminal.

And he’s not just any old liar — he’s one who was arrested on Monday right before he was set to attend a White House ceremony in honor of him and other El Paso heroes.

Following the shooting last month, survivor Ernest Christopher Grant, 50, weaved a tale to CNN about how he’d thrown soda bottles at the gunman to distract him while the other shoppers fled. The network then ran with the story without actually verifying it.

“I saw him popping people off,” he said to CNN host Chris Cuomo on Aug. 4, a day after the shooting. “To deter him, I started just chucking bottles. I just started throwing random bottles at him. I’m not a baseball player, so one went this way and one went that way.”

“That’s when he saw me. He just — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom — just started firing off rounds at me.”

Listen:


Source: CNN

Except that it was all a lie.

“CNN ran with it and didn’t bother to verify it. … [W]hat he said is not truthful,” a spokesperson with the El Paso Police Department has confirmed with local station KVIA. “We saw his actions and it’s not like he described. What Grant did amounted to an act of self-preservation.”

“We’ve never had anything like this happen, never had a victim’s report so skewed from what actually happened,” another department official, Sgt. Robert Gomez, reportedly added.

But thanks to CNN’s incompetence, Grant’s far-fetched tale wound up going viral anyway and attracting the attention of Democrat presidential candidates and even the White House, both of whom made the error of trusting the network’s habitually incorrect reporting.

After the story went viral, President Donald Trump invited Grant and his family to the White House so that he could be awarded for his alleged heroism. En route to the event on Monday, however, Grant was arrested, according to a report from Time magazine:

“As he and his family arrived to meet the President on Monday, the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) arrested him. … Washington D.C. police confirmed to TIME that a man named Ernest Christopher Grant was detained on Monday. Mug shots of arrests in Texas under the name of Ernest Christopher Grant match images of Grant taken by CNN and shared on Facebook by Grant’s family.”

To be clear, his arrest was not prompted by the lie he’d told. All that’s known is that Grant had been a “fugitive from justice” — and that the agency that had initially put out the warrant ultimately declined to extradite him after he was taken into custody Monday.

“It was subsequently determined that while the arrest warrant was still active, the agency that issued the warrant would not extradite, at which time the individual was released from Secret Service custody,” a USSS spokesperson said to Time.

The release reportedly occurred sometime after the awards ceremony. Because of Grant’s absence from the event, his mother wound up accepting the award for him.

“Chris Grant was picking out snacks for his kids when he suddenly saw the murderer firing at innocent shoppers a few aisles away from him,” the president said at the event in his honor.

“Chris grabbed — listen to this — soda bottles and anything else in front of him, and began hurling them at the gunman, distracting him from the other shoppers and causing the shooter to turn toward Chris and fire at Chris, whereby Chris suffered two serious gunshot wounds. But he is recovering well and we wish him the best. His family is here. So please thank Chris for us, please.”

Watch:

 

It’s unclear whether the White House has been made aware of what had really transpired on the day of the El Paso shooting. It’s also unknown whether CNN intends to take any responsibility for this fairly large screw-up.

As of Thursday afternoon, it appeared that the far-left network had yet to publish a single correction clarifying its false reporting. Meanwhile, its original reports were still active.

Given that this was just one of many, many, many screw-ups by the far-left network in the past couple of years, it doesn’t seem shocking that the network’s ratings continue to decline.

Nor does it seem shocking that so many Americans views CNN as nothing but “fake news”:

But some also aimed criticism at the president for failing to fact-check CNN’s dubious reporting:

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Vivek Saxena

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