Man misidentified as Charlottesville attacker had to flee home; now plans on suing

Joel Vangheluwe, who had been falsely accused by a number of blogs of being the attacker who killed one and injured many during the Charlottesville clashes, plans on filing a lawsuit, CNN have reported.

It was at a family gathering to say goodbye to a relative “not doing so well” when Joel Vangheluwe noticed that something was wrong, CNN reports. Vangheluwe became inundated with social media messages as large swathes of the Internet had begun to incorrectly identify him as the terror suspect responsible for running down dozens of counter-protestors at Charlottesville, Virginia. But Vangheluwe wasn’t even in the right state.

It turns out that a number of online “sleuths” had ran a license plate search on the car that was used to plough into protestors, using photos of the attack where the car registration was clearly visible. That search churned out the name Jerome Vangheluwe, Joel’s father. More sleuthing led to family Facebook pages, where it appeared the car in question had been passed from father to son – a specific photo uploaded to Facebook by Joel back in 2011 was pointed stating that the car would soon be his.

The problem with such amateur online sleuthing such as this is that it didn’t uncover the very pertinent fact that the Vangheluwe family had actually sold the car a number of years ago.

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But the finger pointing didn’t stop. It got worse, and the death threats started. A number of blogs, conspiracy-laden websites and right leaning Facebook pages reported on the inaccurate information, purporting that the attacker was actually a left-leaning anti-Trump activist – many of which mentioned Joel by his name.

Many Facebook pages spread the false information using right wing blogs as their source

But none of it was true, and by the time the news broke that the real attacker – a suspected far-right, white supremacist by the name of James Alex Fields Jr. – Joel Vangheluwe had already been advised by local police to flee his family home for his own safety.

According to Andrew Sommerman, the Vangheluwe family lawyer, the family is now planning on filing a lawsuit against a number of publications that inaccurately pointed the finger at Joel. These could potentially include GotNews.com, Alt Right Real News and The Gateway Pundit, all of which falsely named Joel before retracting or deleting their articles.

“It’s been really bad. They’ve been terribly harassed,” Sommerman told CNN “The family has been devastated.”

“There are consequences to fake news … There are consequences to false reporting.”

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These types of social media witch hunts, fuelled by amateur sleuthing, rarely end well, and this is just the latest entry into the hall of fame, reminiscent of the Boston Bombing social media witch hunt in 2013 that accused a number of innocent people of being those responsible for the terrible events during the Boston Marathon.

As usual, we recommend avoiding such sleuthing, or if you do stumble upon the details of someone who you feel may be responsible for a crime, don’t make their details public, rather go to the authorities who can investigate your findings properly. These types of witch hunts that operate in the public eye are just far too dangerous and invariably get it all wrong.

Read our article on avoiding social media witch hunts here.