Did The Oregon Shooter Post About His Crime Online?

Shortly after the tragic shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on Thursday, a troubling post started to surface on social media. A screenshot, reportedly from the online message forum 4Chan, seemed to show a warning about today's shooting, possibly posted by the shooter. "Don't go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest," the message reads. Chris Brinton, a Twitter user whose page says he is in Washington state, posted a screengrab of this thread around noon PDT on Thursday, just after the news of the shooting began reaching national outlets.

The Northwest is the region of the country where Umpqua Community College is located, and where today, as many as 10 people are dead, with more wounded. 4Chan disabled the page where the exchange supposedly took place. We reached out to the forum to ask why it had been removed, but have not heard back.

4Chan users are posting similar screengrabs and beginning to debate their veracity. "Ohh shit. Was that anonymous [sic] thread bout shooting up a school yesterday or two days ago?" an anonymous 4chan user wrote in message number 22804991. In message 22805025, another anonymous user responded, "I remember seeing that thread, looks like OP was serious." (OP is slang for "original poster," or whoever first posted the message).

Sites like 4Chan and Reddit are notorious for speculating about the causes and culprits of crimes — and it's worth noting that they've often been entirely wrong. Following the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon, 4chan and Reddit posts inspired many to suspect an innocent man. The man they accused, 22-year-old Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, had been missing for some time. Authorities later found his body in the Providence River.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Sunil Tripathi took his own life following accusations that he had participated in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. There is no known connection between Sunil Tripathi's death and his misidentification.