‘Fedora man’ in viral picture revealed as local teenager
In the three weeks since the Louvre museum robbery, as investigators try to figure out who was behind it and why the French crown jewels were so easy to steal, another mystery remains: who the “man with the sombrero” was.
The dapper young man in the hat was photographed outside the museum that Sunday and went viral on social media, sparking theories about his identity.
The first two mysteries were quickly solved. Thieves’ carelessness regarding DNA to train identities. director of the Louvre He admitted CCTV security was inadequate.
But the man in the fedora has remained a mystery until now.
The dandy turns out to be a local teenage fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot who was found at the scene of a real crime.
Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux, 15, from Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, told the Associated Press (AP) news agency that he planned to visit the Louvre with his family but found that the museum was closed.
“We didn’t know there was a robbery,” he said.
While he was asking officers questions about the closure, an AP photographer who wanted to capture the cordon took a photo and included Pedro in the frame.
Pedro said the photo went viral, but four days later a friend asked him, “Is that you?” He noticed when he sent a screenshot asking:
When he said it was, his friend said it had five million views on TikTok. “I was a little surprised,” Pedro told the AP.
He was even more shocked when his mother called to tell him the picture had been published in The New York Times. He said it made a big impact on him because he reads the paper and “it’s not every day you get on the New York Times.”
“People said, ‘You’ve become a star.’ I was amazed that you could go viral in a few days with just one photo.”
When asked why he wore an old-fashioned waistcoat and fedora to the museum, Pedro said he had recently started dressing that way, inspired by 20th-century statesmen and fictional detectives.
“I like to be stylish,” she told the AP. “This is how I go to school.”
While wild speculation about his photo circulated online (some wondered whether he was a real detective or a fake AI), Pedro remained silent for weeks.
“I didn’t want to immediately say it was me,” he said. “There is mystery in this photo, so you have to make it last.”
