A man who claimed to have thrown things at the El Paso mass shooter in an attempt to save victims was arrested Monday while visiting the White House to be honored as a hero. In addition, El Paso police said video surveillance of the shooting does not show what the alleged “hero” claimed.
The Washington Examiner reported that Chris Grant was arrested by the Secret Service Monday as he was about to attend the White House event honoring heroes of the El Paso shooting. Grant had an outstanding criminal warrant. He also had a criminal record — but that shouldn’t matter if his act of heroism actually occurred.
But Sgt. Enrique Carrillo, spokesman for the El Paso police department, said no one checked with them to corroborate Grant’s account of the shooting. On August 3, a gunman entered an El Paso Walmart, killing 22 people and injuring many others. Grant was shot in the ribs and kidney during the attack. Grant told multiple news outlets that he threw bottles at the gunman to try and stop him.
“Nobody bothered to check with us,” Carrillo told the Examiner. “They would have been informed, as I am telling you now, that our detectives reviewed hours of video and his actions did not match his account.”
He added: “His statements were inconsistent with what was revealed on video.”
Grant was interviewed previously by CNN’s Chris Cuomo, where he claimed to have tried to stop the shooter.
“To deter him, I started just chucking bottles, I just started throwing bottles, random bottles at him,” Grant said on CNN. “And I’m not a baseball player, so one went this way, one went that way. And then one went right towards him and then that’s when he saw me … When I got hit, it was like somebody put a hand grenade in my back and pulled the pin.”
In an interview with the El Paso Times, Grant’s former wife Laura Hromatka said he told her “that the shooter was targeting Mexicans and was passing whites, African Americans.”
Even though Grant was not at the White House ceremony, a member of his family attended. Trump said of Grant:
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.
Grant may not have acted the way he claimed during the shooting, but he is still a survivor.
Unlike David Briscoe, who claimed that he helped save children during a high school shooting in Santa Fe in 2018. Briscoe was interviewed by multiple media outlets, including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and TIME. IN April 2019, it was revealed that not only did Briscoe not save children as he claimed — he wasn’t even at the school during the shooting, nor did he even work for the school district.