Ohio Migrant Pet-Eating Conspiracy’s Patient Zero Heard It Fourth-Hand

The social media user who posted what appears to be one of the first claims of Haitian migrants kidnapping and eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio was simply repeating a story she had heard from a neighbor—who’d heard it themselves from a friend, who’d heard it from someone else, according to a new report.

Reporters from NewsGuard, a company that works to counter online misinformation, tracked down the poster, a Springfield woman named Erika Lee, who admitted to being the source of the Facebook rumor that traveled from her keyboard to Donald Trump, who repeated the claims at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, in just a matter of days. But Lee said she had not actually witnessed the story—concerning a cat found hung from a tree for butchering.

Instead, she said a neighbor named Kimberly Newton told her about it. When contacted by NewsGuard, Newton said, “I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” adding that the cat’s owner was the “acquaintance of a friend.” Newton added: “I don’t have any proof.”

City officials and police have repeatedly said there has been no evidence or credible reports of people’s pets being abducted or harmed by members of the immigrant community. But the rumor has taken off since Tuesday’s debate, with many linking to an unrelated animal abuse case as proof. The woman accused of killing and eating a cat some 170 miles northeast of Springfield in Canton, Ohio is an American citizen.

Lee was clear in her since-deleted Facebook post about the fourth-hand nature of this rumor. Posting in a private group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information” earlier this month, Lee wrote that her neighbor told her that her daughter’s friend found her lost cat hanging dead from a tree near her Haitian neighbor’s house like “a deer for butchering.”

Newton, the neighbor in question, told NewsGuard that her daughter was not involved, but that the friend who told her about the supposed incident had learned about it from “a source that she had.”

Lee’s claim took off when it jumped from Facebook to X, and a conservative user named @BuckeyeGirrl with just over 2,100 followers posted a screenshot of Lee’s post on Sept. 5.

JD Vance then double-downed on the claim by tweeting on Monday that while the specifics of the rumor may “turn out to be false,” it represents the real danger they supposedly pose to “suffering Americans.” Right-wing X users have since gone on to flood social media with AI-generated images of Trump protecting cats and ducks. Elon Musk tweeted “Ohio rn” over a screenshot of a Simpsons episode showing Bart and Lisa staring at a cat’s grave.

Prior to the debate, the Trump campaign said in a news release that Haitian migrants had “reportedly been caught ‘decapitating ducks’ and hunting geese and other livestock in public parks—and even kidnapping residents’ pets—then eating them.”

Lee, who described herself as a Democrat who supports Donald Trump, said while she was “shocked” to see Trump repeat a claim she had made on social media, she has not been following the story closely—even with the extensive coverage debunking the rumor.

“Actually, I haven’t really been following the news much on it at all,” she told NewsGuard. “I’ve only really seen it like on Facebook, what things pop up on my news feed, or what other people have shared on things that they have read up on.”