Claim:
An 11-year-old Montana girl named Patricia Harrington stopped a home invasion by shooting and killing two armed immigrants named Ralphel Resindez and Enrico Garza, and Fox News reported on the story.
Rating:
A rumor that circulated online in August 2025, in particular on Facebook, claimed an 11-year-old Montana girl named Patricia Harrington stopped a home invasion by fatally shooting two armed immigrants named Ralphel Resindez and Enrico Garza, who had entered the U.S. illegally. According to the claim, Fox News reported on the story, and NBC News, CBS News, PBS, MSNBC, CNN and ABC News failed to cover the matter.
For example, numerous Facebook users shared the story in a copy-paste fashion, as did others on Instagram and LinkedIn (archived).
(Lois Castille/Facebook)
Many of the posts read as follows:
11 YR OLD SHOOTS ILLEGALS thanks FOX NEWS for reporting it.
BUTTE, MONTANA — Shotgun preteen vs. Illegal alien Home Invaders...
Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26, probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11-year-old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home. It seems the two crooks never learned two things: they were in Montana and Patricia had been a clay-shooting champion since she was nine.
Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father's room and grabbed his 12-gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.
Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor only to be the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old's knee-crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and gen*t*ls. When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the ...street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive.
It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45-caliber handgun he took from another home invasion robbery. That victim, 50-year-old David 0'Burien [sic], was not so lucky. He died from stab wounds to the chest.
Ever wonder why good stuff never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, or ABC news........? An 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended her home, and herself......against two murderous, illegal immigrants.......and she wins. She is still alive. Now THAT is Gun Control!
Thought for the day.... Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented immigrant' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist.' I like this kind of e-mail! American citizens defending themselves and their homes.
However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets confirming this matter as true. Instead, the searches displayed results for years-old articles, in which publishers debunked the rumor as a fabricated, false story.
Snopes first reported the rumor about 11-year-old "Patricia Harrington" defending her home against two "illegals" as false in May 2007 — all the way back when U.S. President George W. Bush was serving his second term in office, and weeks before Apple released the first iPhone. Even so, users still shared the fabricated story nearly two decades later, despite the availability of multiple outlets having debunked the tale through the years.
Posts featuring the rumor included a picture appearing to show a girl wearing a Harley-Davidson hoodie and holding a firearm. A reverse-image search for the photo found a higher-quality image on Flickr, revealing a woman — not a young girl. The Flickr post displayed tags for "shooting range" and "Utah." The website displayed the picture's capture date as Feb. 5, 2011.
The rumor reappeared in August 2025 during a time when President Donald Trump's second administration was implementing more-aggressive immigration enforcement policies than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, in particular in the manner of arresting and deporting immigrants who allegedly entered the country illegally.
For further reading, a previous fact-check article investigated a false rumor claiming one hundred migrants attacked security officers at a Home Depot store in Chicago in 2024. Also on the subject of immigration, another story confirmed first lady Melania Trump's parents came to the U.S. through a family-based sponsorship, also referred to derogatorily as "chain migration" — a process Donald Trump tried to curb.
Sources:
Freking, Kevin. "House Passes Gun Control Bill after Buffalo, Uvalde Attacks." The Associated Press News, 8 June 2022, https://apnews.com/article/congress-texas-buffalo-new-york-shootings-0d552cfe6c5a4fb8c83a151ea29d467f.
Mikkelson, David. "Did an 11-Year-Old Girl Shoot and Kill 'Illegal Aliens' Burglarizing Her Home?" Snopes.com, 2 May 2007, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/home-invasion-thwarted/.
Montgomery, April, and Ken Mingis. "The Evolution of Apple's iPhone." Computerworld, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.computerworld.com/article/2604020/the-evolution-of-apples-iphone.html.
Weber, Christopher, and Jaimie Ding. "Federal Agents Hid in Back of Rental Truck at Start of Raid Outside LA Home Depot." The Associated Press, 6 Aug. 2025, https://apnews.com/article/immigration-raids-los-angeles-trojan-horse-penske-1b86bc5f2ff716b89f4aba3320a96979.
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