A clerical error is to blame for suspected Planned Parenthood shooter Robert L. Dear being listed as a woman on his Colorado voter registration form, officials said Tuesday, a detail that fueled speculation he may have identified as transgender.
After the shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood last week that left three people dead and nine others injured, the error on the form prompted questions about Dear's gender identity.
Most notably, Sen. Ted Cruz referred to a report about Dear being a "transgendered leftist activist."
The error happened in October 2014, after Dear moved from South Carolina to Hartsel, Colorado. Following the move, Dear visited a DMV office in El Paso County to transfer his driver's license, Chief Deputy Clerk and Recorder Ryan Parsell told BuzzFeed News. Whoever filled out Dear's driver's license form mistakenly checked the box identifying him as female, rather than male. The form was then given back to Dear to verify, but he apparently didn't catch the mistake and signed off on the form, Parsell added.
On Oct. 30, 2014, Dear visited a DMV office in Salida, Colorado, and corrected the mistake on his driver's license.
But by then the error had already trickled down to his voter registration documents, which Parsell said draw from DMV forms. Dear registered to vote in Park County, where Hartsel is located, and to fix the voter registration forms he would have needed to send in a separate request for a correction.
A BuzzFeed News reporter in his hometown of Hartsel asked six people who had interacted with Dear about the line in the voter form.
He was a "rough looking, giant dude," neighbor Zigmond Post said. None of the people who had met him had any indication he identified as transgender.
Park County officials did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News' requests for information. However, Clerk and Recorder Debra Green told the Colorado Springs Gazette that Dear did send the request, but the mark identifying him as a male was merely "a small dark spot" and it was unclear at the time if he was trying to make a correction.
Parsell said that the El Paso County DMV processes 500,000 transactions a year, which amounts to millions of keystrokes. While errors are not common, he added, they do happen and Dear's documents are not unique.