Social media posts wrongly identify New York subway burn victim

It took investigators nine days to identify the woman who was burned alive in a New York City subway car Dec. 22.

Social media hoaxes moved much faster, pushing a false photo and name with the help of artificial intelligence.

A Dec. 23 Facebook post showed an image of a woman with the caption: "The subway burning victim’s Name was AMELIA CARTER. She was 29 years old." Similar Instagram posts in Spanish and English shared the same claim.

Some posts shared the "Amelia Carter" posts with the "We The People" graphic used by the Remembrance Project, an organization that remembers Americans and legal residents killed by people illegally in the U.S. (In reality, the group posted a woman’s silhouette, saying that even though police had not named the victim, they wanted to memorialize her.) 

(Screenshot from Instagram post)

Investigators had not identified the victim who was sleeping on the F train in Brooklyn, New York, when these posts circulated. An expert told us the image was generated with artificial intelligence. 

These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

(Screenshot from Facebook post.)

The New York Police Department identified the victim Dec. 31 as Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old from Toms River, New Jersey. Her identity was confirmed Dec. 30 through fingerprint analysis, a city medical examiner’s office spokesperson told The New York Times. New York Mayor Eric Adams said she had briefly stayed in the city’s homeless shelter system.

Authorities charged Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, a 33-year-old Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. unlawfully after a 2018 deportation, with first- and second-degree murder and first-degree arson.

Hany Farid, professor and digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told PolitiFact that the image was likely generated by GAN, or generative adversarial network, a deep learning model that uses artificial intelligence to create images using text-based prompts or by modifying existing images. 

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"In particular, the tightly-cropped headshot, non-descript background, and alignment of the eyes are consistent with a GAN-generated face," Farid said.

Through a reverse-image search, PolitiFact found the same image in a Dec. 22 X post by the user @minnie1254. It shared a fake statement from the family of "Amelia Carter." A keyword search turned up the same text and image published under the description of a meme cryptocurrency launched Dec. 22 on pump.fun, a cryptocurrency trading platform that allows users to create tokens and meme coins.

The Justice for Amelia (AMELIA) coin launched just minutes after the @minnie1254 X post. 

A Facebook post claims "the subway burning victim’s name was AMELIA CARTER."

That is not the name of the victim. The image was likely created with artificial intelligence. The image and name was used to create a meme cryptocurrency. 

We rate this claim False.