Natural Selection got blamed for causing a school shooting in Mexico

On January 10, 2020, an 11 year old boy started a school shooting at the Cervantes school in Torreon, Mexico, killing one teacher and injuring six students before committing suicide. The assailant wore a white T-shirt with the "Natural Selection" quote and pants with black suspenders, making an obvious reference to Eric Harris, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre.

Despite all the clear clues about the main inspiration of the shooting, Miguel Riquelme, governor of the state of Coahuila, commented that the shooter “was apparently influenced by a video game called Natural Selection, and whose T-Shirt had the game logo on it”. He also believed that the shooter was trying to “recreate” the game.

However, this was an obvious excuse to hide the truth, Natural Selection is a Half-Life mod created by Unknown Worlds Entertainment in 2002, and the sequel was a standalone game published in 2012 only on PC, and they both consist in a first-person shooter/real-time strategy videogame set in a futuristic era where space marines and aliens fight each other. While the game popularity was pretty high in its time, nowadays it's not a very common videogame amongst PC gamers or gamers in general.

After many periodists, social-media users and youtubers affirmed that the "Natural Selection" quote on the kid's T-Shirt was inspired by the Columbine shooting instead of the namesake videogame, Miguel Riquelme retracted his words and commented that he "probably got influented by the media".

Although this can be obvious, it should be noted that in later months, no relation was found between the kid and the videogame, instead, it was discovered that his family had a lot of criminal records, the child's mother died in an operation a few years earlier and his father was not present and spent time in prison for trafficking methamphetamine in El Paso, Texas, so the child lived with his paternal grandparents. The 58-year old grandfather also had a record of drug trafficking.

It's also worth to mention that the school apparently did nothing to solve bullying cases in previous times.

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