Retired Firefighter's Life Torn Apart After Twitter Mob Falsely Accuses Him of Murder of Capitol Police Officer

AP Photo/Julio Cortez

Folks on social media have been trying to dox people who were at the Trump rally and the Capitol on Jan. 6.

But they’re not just going after people who actually violated the law. They’re going after some of the thousands who were there peacefully and were not involved in any illegal acts. Not to mention because they’re not the police, they’re going after and wrongly identifying people who were actually not involved at all.

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Like poor David Quintavalle.

He was accused by leftist trolls of being the man who threw a fire extinguisher at Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. Video emerged of a man throwing a fire extinguisher toward a group of police officers. As we reported, while there were reports about Sicknick being hit with a fire extinguisher, they haven’t confirmed it. There were questions about the nature of Sicknick’s death because he returned to the office after the Capitol incident and then collapsed. There were also reports about an underlying medical condition.

But a picture was then circulated of the man who allegedly threw the extinguisher at the group of officers, with what appeared to be a fire department cap on his head.

People then claimed it was Quintavalle, without any evidence. But it wasn’t true. Quintavalle is a retired Chicago firefighter. But he wasn’t anywhere near the incident at the time. He was having a birthday dinner for his wife and his Chicago police officer son in attendance, over 600 miles away.

But then, Quintavalle’s life changed, according to Patch.

“I got a phone call from a friend who said, ‘You should see what they twittered about you,'” Quintavalle said.

“Some woman from British Columbia showed the [surveillance] picture of the guy wearing CFD stocking cap and a beard like I’ve had, and file footage when I was protesting the city inappropriately scoring the fire lieutenants exam, and said, ‘This is the guy.’ And the ball started rolling. Everybody started saying, ‘Here’s the guy.'”

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Suddenly he began receiving death threats, people began digging up every detail of his life, he began receiving calls accusing him of being a “f**king” murderer, TV news media even staked out his house. He had to get police protection outside his house.

His attorney said they had presented all the evidence to the FBI that Quintavalle had nothing to do with it and police have in fact arrested another man, Robert Sanford, accusing him of throwing that fire extinguisher.

“Social media has killed David Quintavalle. This has been an absolute disaster to him personally and his family. There’s a cop car outside his house. It’s over a picture that kind of looks like him because people sitting behind a keyboard with no proof or evidence are throwing out these tweets, and they’re wrong. Holy smokes, it’s eye-opening how terrifying social media can be when something like this happens.”

But the tweets and posts accusing Quintavalle were all over Twitter and some are only now being taken down.

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Twitter’s TOS are supposed to cashier people for doxxing. But there has been all kinds of doxxing like this and they’ve allowed it. The accounts doing it and harming people like David Quintavalle are still up.

So much for Twitter trying to lend to the conversation, as Jack Dorsey claimed last night. Some TOS violations are more equal than others.

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