All the following photos are AP photos except for the final photo.
Here’s a picture from CNN’s website [1] on the Amanda Berry case:
[2]
Now here’s a picture from MSNBC: [3]
[4]
Now here’s a picture of the scene from the Cleveland Plain Dealer
[5]Notice anything odd?
Here’s another:
[6]
Here’s the Google Earth photo (August 2009)
[7]
Notice the flags?
To be fair, MSNBC and CNN aren’t the only ones who used these photos. Fox News [8] is also distributing them on their website as well.
There’s something very strange going on. Either photo editors PhotoShopped the Puerto Rican flag out of the picture and replaced it with an American flag, or someone on scene took the time to actually replace the Puerto Rican flag with an American one, or there’s an explanation I haven’t thought of.
The question is: Why?
Update: This from Yahoo! News [9]
An American flag and a Puerto Rican flag hung outside the front door of the house Tuesday. The Puerto Rican flag bothered Lucy Delgado, a nearby resident with family living in the largely Puerto Rican neighborhood.
And this from a CNN article: [10]
Authorities said Tuesday they had no prior indication anything suspicious was going on at the nondescript home on Seymour Avenue with a Puerto Rican flag hanging from the porch. But a few neighbors said they had called police in recent years after hearing yelling at the house and, in another incident, seeing a naked woman walking in the backyard.
If there was a Puerto Rican AND American flag, surely the police wouldn’t let Lucy Delgado just take down the Puerto Rican one, right? And they surely wouldn’t take it down themselves, right? The odd thing is, in the second photo there appears to be two flags hanging, though if the picture is accurate, it is indeed a very odd way to hang two flags…
But in none of the other photos — whether there’s an American Flag or a Puerto Rican one — you cannot see two flags.
Very odd indeed.
Update X2: The Guardian [11] has this as of 1:00pm, 7 May 2013:
Police have closed off the block of Seymour Avenue where Ariel Castro lived, we now know with three abducted women. From the front of the house it looks like a pleasant white clapperboard home with a flag flying in a light breeze that on one side bears the Puerto Rican flag and on the other the Stars and Stripes.
It appears the photos have not been digitally altered; however, one should note that early photographs of the house only show the Puerto Rican Flag. Sometime in the night, it appears, the flag gains a companion, and all the pictures from 7 May thence contain that image.
Here’s another early picture from DMNews [12], taken before nightfall — like the picture above from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
[13]