Gov. Greg Abbott’s team slapped down a viral Twitter claim that his staff approached a Uvalde massacre victim’s family with a threatening offer of payola for propping up a pro-gun message.
And hours later, after being contacted by The Daily Beast, the person behind the Twitter account surfaced to claim that they had been hacked and were trying to remove the post.
As of Thursday evening, more than 32,000 users had retweeted the account @MyCancerJourne3’s description of a supposed encounter with a representative from Abbott’s office just after viewing their nephew’s body.
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As the thread spread across social media, with some blasting Abbott and others suggesting it was a hoax, the embattled Republican governor denied the incident ever happened.
“This is completely false,” a spokesperson wrote to The Daily Beast. “No truth to it whatsoever.”
As several Twitter users have noted, the account had previously described falling victim to an array of personal tragedies, and the post about the purported nephew contained some apparent contradictions. It reported that they had gone to see their “living nephew’s body” but also said the nephew was dead.
Further, last year, the account tweeted that a sheriff in Eastern Washington State had killed another nephew with no other details provided.
The account has also tweeted the CashApp handle of a man residing in Washington State, whose Facebook page reflected the same sports team allegiances as @MyCancerJourne3, and shows the same given name the account has used to refer to itself. The Facebook page was deleted after The Daily Beast reached out to the man, and he called shortly after publication to claim an unknown interloper had hijacked his social media, and that he had contacted Twitter to have the page disabled.
“Somebody somehow got into my account,” he said, insisting he had no relatives or associates in Uvalde. “It's got nothing to do with me or my family in any way.”
He insisted he had been in touch with an attorney to press charges, but would not share the attorney's name or contact information.
@MyCancerJourne3 has on several occasions solicited financial assistance from followers for colon cancer treatments, including multiple now-deleted GoFundMe accounts. A screenshot of one such account, which @MyCancerJourne3 appeared to acknowledge was their own, included a photo of the Spokane man and the name of a woman with whom he appears to share an address. The woman did not immediately respond to outreach by The Daily Beast, and the Washington State man identified her as his estranged mother-in-law.
The account has also tweeted about suffering a stroke, getting placed in a medically induced coma, and receiving approval for assisted suicide—all of which the Washington State man maintained was accurate in his phone call to The Daily Beast.
Eileen Grench contributed reporting to this story.
