In the days following the deadly flash floods that struck Texas over the 2025 Fourth of July weekend, social media (archived) posts (archived) claimed a 42-year-old man was arrested for using his personal boat to rescue elderly residents.
According to the posts, the man, identified as Deshawn Miller, rescued at least nine people trapped in a flooded retirement complex amid historic flooding in Kerr County. The posts claimed Miller, a former HVAC technician and father of two, "said he launched his boat from a gas station parking lot after seeing distress posts on a local Facebook group." Miller reportedly "ferried stranded seniors," some of whom were in wheelchairs, "through chest-deep waters to higher ground," according to the posts.
Local deputies took Miller into custody "for violating an emergency management plan, operating an unregistered vessel in restricted floodwaters and interfering with official rescue operations," the posts claimed.
Many commenters on a viral TikTok video sharing the claims appeared to take the rumor as fact. Snopes readers also emailed us and searched our website to ask if the claim was real.
However, there's no evidence that a 42-year-old Texas man named Deshawn Miller was arrested after using his own boat to rescue seniors during the July 2025 flooding.
In an email to Snopes, a spokesperson for the Kerr County Joint Information Center said, "No one by that name has been booked into the Kerr County Jail."
Snopes independently confirmed this through a search of jail records for Kerr County, which did not show anyone by the name of Deshawn Miller. The Kerr County Sheriff's Office did not post anything about such an arrest during the flood event on its website or Facebook page, either.
Likewise, searches for "Deshawn Miller Texas flood arrest" on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo did not find any credit media outlets reporting on the incident. If such an arrest had occurred, news outlets would have likely reported on it.
The purported images of Miller that circulated alongside the rumor in July 2025 appeared to be generated using artificial intelligence, AI-detection platforms Hive and Sightengine found, though these platforms are not always accurate.
(Hive AI Detector)
(Hive AI detector)
A Google reverse image search of Miller's alleged mugshot returned only a result for the TikTok video sharing the claim.
Snopes has fact-checked many other claims about the July 2025 floods in central Texas. You can read those reports here.