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Cowboys star Amari Cooper responds to tweet that he was shot: 'Fake news'

Cooper was forced to respond to a tweet by a now-deleted account claiming he was shot in a Dallas parking garage.
Image: Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Amari Cooper before a game in New Orleans on Sept. 29, 2019.
Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Amari Cooper before a game in New Orleans on Sept. 29, 2019.Butch Dill / AP file

Reports of the shooting of Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Amari Cooper are so exaggerated that they are completely untrue.

Cooper was forced to respond Wednesday to a tweet claiming that he had been shot in a Dallas parking garage. The account that put out the information, The Offseason, has since been deleted from Twitter.

"That was fake news ya'll, everything good over here," Cooper wrote on Instagram.

The tweet caused a stir online as fans panicked that Cooper could be seriously wounded or even dead. Dallas police responded that there had been no shooting in the city at the time of the post.

"There has been a tweet going viral that Amari Cooper has been shot in the Dallas area," police said on Twitter. "We have NOT found any validity to that tweet occurring in the city of #Dallas."

Dez Bryant, a former Cowboys wide receiver, also responded, calling out the people who would put out such a rumor.

"This world have some real messed up folks in it... coop just text me... I don't get it.. why would anybody start a rumor like that?? Weirdos seriously," Bryant tweeted.

It's unclear whether The Offseason was deleted or was taken down by Twitter, but at one point it claimed that its source was an "eye witness." The account's tweets are no longer available, but it had fewer than 100 followers before it was deleted.

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Twitter wouldn't directly comment on the account, but it pointed to its policies on account notices that said the language used on The Offseason's former page indicated that it had been deactivated.

Cooper, 25, just completed his sixth season in the NFL, the first four of them with the then-Oakland Raiders and the two most recent with the Cowboys. He is a Miami native and played college football at the University of Alabama.

Neither the NFL nor the Cowboys responded to requests for comment Wednesday.