Almost immediately after news of a brushfire and subsequent shooting on Canfield Mountain broke on Sunday, rumors and conspiracy theories started flying on social media.
It was true that 20-year-old Wess Roley had just shot and killed two firefighters, who responded to a brush blaze police believe Roley set, but basically everything that consumed mostly right-wing social media accounts was wrong or unsupported.
This is typical of fast-moving stories of complex tragedies. Hark back to Cassie Bernall, a student who was killed during the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado in 1999. Shortly after students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 students and then themselves on April 20, a story started circulating that Bernall told Harris she believed in God, and so he killed her.
The Bernall story was only a rumor that’s not supported by evidence. Yet many still believe it’s true, and in a world where the spread of misinformation is exponentially faster than that of verifiable facts, fabrications make an impact on people’s worldviews long before the truth has a chance to get off the ground. And they’re difficult, once established, to reverse.
We’re going to start with the truth, followed by a list of falsehoods reported in right-wing social media accounts and publications.
Here’s what’s credible
- The shooter’s grandfather, Dale Roley, told news organizations that Wess Roley had wanted to be a firefighter, though Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris told The New York Times the county didn’t have any applications or interest forms from Wess. Later reporting in the Spokesman showed Roley may have tried to apply for a firefighting position somewhere in the region.
- Dale Roley also told news agencies that Wess worked for a “tree company,” which could have been Jason Roley’s own Roley Tree Service.
- Wess Roley’s former roommate told the Associated Press that Roley had shaved his head and was starting to “go downhill” early this year. The roommate said Roley was living in his car at the time of the shooting.
- Police say Roley took his own life and was located by one of several federal agencies that responded to the scene using helicopter cell phone signal tracking technology.
- Roley had had five previous contacts with law enforcement, but they were mostly wellness checks, and he didn’t have a criminal record, according to the Times.
- ABC News interviewed a former classmate of Roley’s who said he was obsessed with guns and had gotten in trouble at school for drawing swastikas in notebooks.
- Jason Roley, Wess Roley’s dad and an Army veteran, posted photographs of himself to Facebook displaying an “88” tattoo, a symbol of Nazism. His profile picture is a meme showing the American flag with text reading, “This is my Pride flag.” (He did not respond to a request for comment.)
- Wess Roley’s mother, Heather Lynn Cuchiara, recently visited Washington DC with a man, presumably Wess Roley’s stepfather, where they posed for photos at famous sites, including the Washington Monument, wearing “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hats. She posted the photos to her Facebook account, which appears to have now been taken down — luckily, we archived many of her posts prior to deletion. (She did not respond to a request for comment.)
- After Jason Roley and Cuchiara divorced in 2015, she took out a protective order against him that covered herself and their son, though the order for Wess was later removed.
- While no direct tie between Roley and the Aryan Nations has been identified, the shooting took place on June 29, which is the 24th anniversary of the burning of the Aryan Nations headquarters in 2001 in a training exercise by the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department.
Here’s what we can say isn’t true
Roley’s story is not completely clear yet, but far-right pundits were quick to ascribe leftist motivations to him as soon as the shooting was being reported by local media.
Before we even knew the identity of the shooter, these unsupported claims spread on social media:
- The far-right Spokane pastor Matt Shea reposted a conspiracy theory that the timing of the shooting seemed to be related to the striking of pro-gun measures in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the vast domestic policy bill moving through the federal legislature.
- Lara Loomer, the influential right-wing conspiracy theorist, reposted a Spokesman story from April 2024 about Alexander Mercurio, a Coeur d’Alene student accused of planning attacks on churches on behalf of the Islamic State (ISIS). Her commentary: “2024, Coeur d’Alene, Did you know there is an ISIS terror cell there,” implying the shooter belonged to ISIS. (Norris said there are no indications that Roley had connections to terrorist groups.)
- Countless Facebook, Reddit and forum posts — some of which went viral — suggested Wess Roley was transgender.
- The Idaho Tribune, a far-right, anti-queer publication that writes about North Idaho politics, also tweeted inflated body counts, claiming four people had been killed early during the attack. It noted that information was based on police scanner activity and subject to change.
- The Tribune has also repeatedly suggested on Twitter that Roley was either transgender, or that he was a “Bronie,” a boy or man who likes My Little Pony. The former claim has no evidence to support it, and is part of a growing national trend to try to link shooters to transness and therefore frame trans identities as being inherently linked to violence and mental illness. (It’s also a baseless accusation — most mass shooters are cisgender men.) The latter allegation is based on social media posts of Roley displaying My Little Pony imagery. The Tribune’s post seems to imply that if a man likes My Little Pony — a toy and entertainment franchise that tells the story of colorful, magic ponies — he is queer and potentially represents a left-wing threat to society.
This is a common tactic of far-right commentators trying to vilify queer communities. But liking My Little Pony does not mean someone is queer.
In fact, far-right ideology — including overt Nazism — and an affinity for niche communities like the fandom for My Little Pony are not always mutually exclusive. As Kaitlyn Tiffany writes in The Atlantic, one website dedicated to Bronyism tags hundreds of images as “racist.” Much far-right activism centered around Bronies was organized on the social media community 4chan, which is infamous as an unfiltered hub described in The New Yorker as “a staging ground for incel culture.”
As Wess Roley’s profile came into fuller view in the days after his attack on firefighters, these accounts that initially implied Roley was a left-wing radical seemed to drop that narrative, refocusing on supporting the first responders.
Meanwhile, the firefighters Roley killed should be remembered and mourned. Here are their names: Kootenai County Fire & Rescue Battalion Chief Frank Harwood and Coeur d’Alene Fire Department Battalion Chief John Morrison. A third firefighter was critically injured in the shooting: Coeur d’Alene Fire Department engineer Dave Tysdal.
Efforts to support the Tysdal and the families of Harwood and Morrison have sprung up across the community, including a promotion at No-Li Brewhouse to fund donations to the first responders and local organizations that provide ongoing support for fallen first responders and their families. More information on those efforts can be found here.
For ongoing updates on the Canfield Mountain shooting and fire, we recommend following local reporters like The Spokesman’s Alexandra Duggan on Bluesky, and reading The Spokesman’s coverage here.
