On Monday, Chris Grant was supposed to be at the White House to be honored for his courageous actions during the recent mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart that claimed 22 lives.
“Chris grabbed—listen to this—soda bottles and anything else in front of him,” Trump boasted at the ceremony, according to the Washington Post. “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 very serious gunshot wounds.”
But instead of attending the ceremony, the 50-year-old was detained beforehand by the Secret Service on an open warrant. And to add insult to injury, El Paso police are now calling his heroic feat into question. In fact, they’re calling him an outright fraud.
On Tuesday, El Paso police spokesman Sgt. Enrique Carrillo released the following statement to KFOX14:
“The video evidence of the scene does not support his [Grant] assertions. His actions were captured by surveillance cameras, but they amount to an act of self-preservation, nothing more, nothing less.”
In calling the situation “unprecedented,” Sgt. Robert Gomez explained further.
“We’ve never had anything like this happen,” he told KVIA. “[We’ve] never had a victim’s report so skewed from what actually happened [and receive this much attention].”
“It’s just that what he said is not truthful,” Carrillo added. “We saw his actions [...] and it’s not like he described.”
Days after the shooting, Grant recalled how it all went down from his hospital bed during a widely circulated interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo.
“I heard gunshots, and knew what it was, so I ran towards my mother to try to shield her,” Grant said. “I saw him popping people off. To deter him, I started just chucking bottles. I started throwing random bottles at him. [...] I’m not a baseball player, so one went this way, one went that way.”
As Grant told it, he accomplished his mission when the gunman focused his attention on him.
“That’s when he saw me,” Grant continued. “He just—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—just started firing off rounds at me.”
Grant suffered two gunshot wounds near his rib cage and was placed in a medically induced coma for two days, according to the El Paso Times.
As far as Grant being honored, the El Paso police claim the White House never verified the story with them. The White House has yet to respond to the El Paso Police Department’s allegations.