Lynnea Soposki was a veterinarian in Dublin, Ohio. Her husband Luke brewed beer. They kept bees and sold the honey at markets. On April 11, 2026, they and their one-year-old son Logan were killed in a multi-vehicle crash on an interstate in Delaware County.

Four months later, their faces were in a television ad for a U.S. Senate campaign, and their family did not know it was coming.

On August 26, 2026, the Columbus Dispatch's Haley BeMiller reported that the Soposki relatives were asking for the ad to be taken down. The spot was paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to boost Jon Husted, Ohio's appointed U.S. senator, against former Senator Sherrod Brown.

"This is not a statement about immigration policy, and we are not making one for any party or candidate. It is a statement about our family. Lynnea and Luke were not political symbols. ... Our grief is not raw material for a campaign, and their images are not public property to repurpose for anyone's advantage."

The ad used footage from the crash site. It also used a photograph of the three of them, taken by a family friend. The family said they were never asked, and would not have agreed.

The claim the ad makes

The ad says Brown's position on immigration let "dangerous illegals" into the country, and then cuts to the crash and to the man charged in it. It closes on the line: "Because of him, Ohioans paid the price."

There is a problem with that, and it is not a matter of interpretation.

The driver charged in the crash is Modou F. Ngom of Columbus. Authorities said he was driving a tractor trailer that rear-ended the Soposkis' vehicle and pushed it across multiple lanes into other cars. He was charged with multiple counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and vehicular assault.

Ngom's attorney told a Delaware County court in April that he came to the United States from Mauritania 20 years ago and is now a U.S. citizen. Ohio officials later shared information about him with Immigration and Customs Enforcement after learning he had obtained citizenship under an alternate identity — a serious allegation in its own right, and a completely different one from the one the ad makes.

The ad's whole argument is that a border policy let a foreign national in and that person killed an Ohio family. The person it shows is an American citizen who has lived here for decades.

The connection to Brown doesn't exist either

FactCheck.org examined the ad and found nothing behind it.

Asked to justify the claim, an NRSC spokesperson pointed to Brown's votes on immigration bills, saying he voted for "open border policies" and "to protect illegal aliens like Ngom from deportation." FactCheck.org found no evidence of any tie between those votes and this crash. According to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Ngom entered the country sometime in the 1990s, and it is not even clear how or where he entered. Almost every vote the NRSC pointed to came after that — a 2001 amendment, a 2019 bill, a 2021 budget amendment, and Brown's opposition to Trump's border wall, which came after Ngom had reportedly obtained citizenship. The one vote that predates his arrival, against a 1996 immigration bill, made no difference to what became law: the legislation was folded into an omnibus appropriations bill that Brown then voted for. And with so few details about his immigration, FactCheck.org wrote, it is "difficult to say how passing or not passing the legislation would've had an impact on Ngom."

So the ad blames a senator's votes for an event that happened decades after the man in question arrived, involving a man who is a citizen.

What Husted did about it

The family said they did not want to go public. They wrote to the campaign first and heard nothing back. Only after getting no response did they release a statement.

A Husted spokesperson said the campaign forwarded the family's letter to the NRSC.

That is the whole response. Not "we're sorry." Not "we'll ask them to stop." The ad exists to elect him, and when the people whose dead child is in it asked him to make it stop, the answer was that the letter had been passed along to someone else.

The NRSC did not apologize either. Spokesperson Nick Puglia said: "For 32 years, radical leftist Sherrod Brown backed open border policies that cost Ohioans their lives, without ever apologizing. Our ad campaigns will continue to hold Sherrod Brown accountable."

A source familiar with the ad traffic told the Dispatch the spot had run its full cycle and been replaced with new content. It was still posted on the committee's YouTube page.

Update, August 30: he says his campaign had nothing to do with it. The ad says his campaign authorized it.

Three days after the family went public, Husted addressed the ad for the first time. He was at a Republican rally in Hilliard, in suburban Columbus, on August 29, and he told reporters that his campaign had asked the NRSC to pull it.

"Our campaign had nothing to do with it. As soon as we learned that the family didn't like the ad, we told the people who put it up to take it down. I'm with them on this. They've suffered enough. They don't need to suffer any more."

There is a problem with the first sentence.

The Columbus Dispatch's Haley BeMiller reported that an additional, unlisted version of the clip — one that has been viewed more than 5.5 million times — carries a disclosure stating the ad was funded by the NRSC and authorized by Husted's campaign.

That wording is not decoration. The FEC requires a political ad to say who paid for it, and the two available answers mean opposite things. An ad a candidate did not authorize has to say so out loud — the disclaimer must "state that the communication was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee." That is the line on every genuinely independent expenditure. This clip does not carry it. It carries the other kind, the one that names the campaign as having authorized the spot.

A campaign that authorizes an ad is not a campaign that had nothing to do with it.

Three more things from that reporting:

• The ad is still up. It has been replaced on air with new content, but as of August 30 it remained posted on the NRSC's YouTube page — the same thing the family was told a week earlier, when a source said the spot had simply run its cycle.
• Nobody from the campaign has called the family. Lynnea Soposki's brother, Jesse Mallen, said no campaign official had reached out to him or to other relatives since the issue became public. "I'm disappointed that this wasn't just the default behavior," he said. "Why did it need this much attention to do what was obvious to so many was the right thing?"
• Husted still defended the ad's claim. Presented with the FactCheck.org finding that there is no evidence connecting Brown's votes to this crash, he said the broader point still stands, arguing that some undocumented immigrants have improperly obtained commercial driver's licenses. "When you do not follow the rule of law, when you let millions of people into this country illegally, it endangers everyone," he said. "Including on our highways."

The man charged in this crash is a U.S. citizen who came to the United States in the 1990s. He is not currently facing immigration-related charges, the New York Times reported.

So the position, as of August 30, is this: the ad was authorized by his campaign, he says his campaign had nothing to do with it, the ad is still online, the family has not heard from him, and the claim at the center of it — the one a fact-checker found unsupported — is one he is still making in his own voice.

This is a pattern, not a slip

This is the second time this month a fact-checker has taken apart an immigration claim about Sherrod Brown made on Jon Husted's behalf. In the first, Husted told Fox News that Brown backed "Social Security payments for illegals" — a claim PolitiFact rated False after his campaign pointed to three votes, none of which would have handed a federal benefit to anyone in the country illegally.

Both times, the pattern is the same: pick an emotionally loaded immigration frame, attach Brown's name to it, and let the fact-check arrive after the claim has already been made.

The difference this time is who paid for it. In this one, the cost fell on a family in Dublin who lost a veterinarian, a brewer and a one-year-old, and then had to write a public letter asking a sitting senator to stop putting their child's photograph on television.

What we know

An NRSC ad supporting Jon Husted used crash-site footage and a family friend's photograph of Lynnea, Luke and 1-year-old Logan Soposki without their relatives' consent, to claim Sherrod Brown's immigration votes let "dangerous illegals" into the country. The man charged in the crash, Modou F. Ngom, is a U.S. citizen; his attorney told a Delaware County court he came from Mauritania 20 years ago, while state officials put his entry sometime in the 1990s. FactCheck.org found no evidence connecting Brown's votes to the crash. The family wrote to Husted's campaign, got no reply, and went public; his campaign's response was to forward the letter to the NRSC. The ad was still on the committee's YouTube page.

Source

Haley BeMiller, "'Our grief is not raw material' for Husted Senate ad, family says in call for removal", Columbus Dispatch / Newark Advocate, August 26, 2026.