Conspiracy theories have flooded social media since a cargo ship hit a Baltimore bridge March 26, causing its collapse into a river.
One attempted to tie the accident to the death of Angela Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s sister-in-law, who died Feb. 11 after she drove her Tesla into a Texas pond.
A March 26 Instagram post shared a screenshot of an X post that read, “PLEASE READ THIS! IT’S IMPORTANT! (McConnell’s) sister in law that recently drowned in a Tesla is listed as the CEO of the company that owns the ship that hit the bridge.
The author of the X post shared multiple variations of the claim in replies to other X posts. It appears her aim was to draw more attention to the claim by sharing it in commenting threads from high-profile accounts.
This Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
In a separate X post the author of the original X post wrote that there’s “no way a ‘suspicious’ death” of the CEO of a shipping company that owned the ship that hit the bridge is a coincidence.
But the premise of her claim is wrong.
First, Chao’s death was not suspicious. Although Chao died in February in what her family described as a car accident, more details emerged in early March when The Wall Street Journal reported that Chao mistakenly put her Tesla in reverse at a Texas ranch, where she was spending a holiday weekend with friends, backed over an embankment and into a pond, where she drowned. Chao was the sister of McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, the former Trump administration secretary of transportation.
A Blanco County Sheriff’s Office’s report released March 20 said that Chao was intoxicated and had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.233 at the time of the accident, CNBC reported. The police report called it an “unfortunate accident.”
Second, there is no connection between Chao, her company, and the ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in what state and federal authorities have called an accident.
Chao was the CEO of her family’s shipping company, Foremost Group, which is headquartered in New York and charters out ships to carry dry goods around the world.
But Foremost does not own the Dali, the Singapore-based freighter that struck the bridge. That ship is owned by Grace Ocean Private Ltd., Synergy Marine Group, which manages the ship, said in a news release.
The ship was chartered by shipping giant Maersk. It was carrying its cargo, but Maersk did not have any personnel on the ship, the company said.
Chao’s biography on Foremost’s website and on her personal website do not list any connection to any of those companies.
The person who first posted on X about Chao’s connection in a March 27 X post accused Google of changing its search results about the owner of the ship.
The claim that Chao was the CEO of the ship that hit the Baltimore bridge is False.