Part 7: "A Geography of Trust" Sandy Hook Part 2

Part 2

When I started Elizabeth Williamson’s book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,  I expected her to delve into the mindset of Adam Lanza, the shooter. I thought Williamson would probably do a profile on the young man and his spiral into mental illness and obsession with violence. I was certain that the book would start with the nature of one such evil doer, and then expand in scope to other school shootings, ultimately arriving at the various solutions, plans, and protocols that have been proposed and deployed as responses to school safety. I couldn’t have been farther from what she in fact did in her book. 

The book did not target Adam Lanza. In fact, as I stated earlier, it barely discussed him at all, and very little was devoted to his planning, how he actually entered the school building, or his exact path of deadly destruction. As mentioned, there were details scattered throughout the book, but it clearly was not Williamson’s focus or aim in writing it. 

The individuals that took on villainous roles in this account were the conspiracy theorists and the four individuals who amplified their theories by steadily supplying them with the fodder with which to bombard the social media waves and catalyze the algorithms into spreading the falsities to a significant sector of the population. As Williamson documented  the lives of the Lewis family, the Pozners, and the Parkers for the decade following the loss of their respective children, she was simultaneously logging the abuse they received precisely at those moments they were most vulnerable and most in need of nurturing from their communities. The monster was, therefore, not only Adam Lanza, but also the “relentless, and often murderous neutrality” of the algorithms that drove false news reports by four individuals – Wolfgang Halbig, James Fetzer, James Tracy, and most notably, Alex Jones – constantly to the top of people’s newsfeeds. 

Those susceptible to the misinformation, according to Williamson, far from being insensitive to the trauma of the Sandy Hook violence, were paradoxically those who were most upset and disturbed by it. In fact, many of the individuals who were swept up in the perpetuation of false portrayals were mothers themselves who simply could not imagine the life-shattering, crippling grief that the Sandy Hook families were experiencing. When confronted with the situation, incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of those families, many of these individuals found it easier to seek alternative explanations, to accept and tout alternative scenarios. They simply could not carry the pain of women and children being executed in the very place where they are supposed to be fostered, nourished, and  safe. One of the most adamant and volatile of the deniers, Kelly Watt, who was mentioned in the previous blog, claimed that her entire life was devoted to children. Even before she became a mother of two, she ran a scouting group. 

“My whole life has been about kids,” she said. “Aw, I wish I was a teacher. I would have had a cute little school classroom. I would have decorated it so cute. 

“That’s my biggest regret in life. I should have been a teacher. I would have been a really good first grade teacher.”

Watt has a Pinterest board called “Beautiful children.” She has posted more than one hundred photos there of babies, toddlers, and prepubescent girls, many of them twins. They wear fur-trimmed hoods, chick, berets, oversized bows, earrings. Their hair is often flowing, framing enormous eyes with irises in unusual colors. They smile and hub, peek through doorways – a fantastical, eerie ideal for how children should look and live. (127)

Her fantastical portrayals of innocence seem hard to reconcile with the vitriol with which she attacked family members like Lenny Pozner. However, Williamson believes that she simply chose not to see Lenny or the others as real family members. Her “strong sense that this didn’t happen” was bolstered by her overzealous powers of observation that led her to conclusions that the families were moving forward too fast, that the parents seemed too old to have kids of that age, that their hairstyles seemed old and outdated. As Williamson states, “they seemed ‘too perfect,’ and also ‘not perfect enough.’” And finding facts that suited her own narrative, she took the step of actually mocking the grief of parents such as Chris and Lynn McDonnell whose child, Grace, had been shot by Adam Lanza that day:

“‘Ohhhhh, Grace. She loved loved loved loved loved Sandy Hook, and we’re glad she’s in heaven with her teacher, and she’s with her classmates, and we feel good about that,’ [Watt] said. ‘She had a white coffin, and we busted out the Sharpies and drew a skillet and a sailboat.’ (128)

And then in an explosion of volatility, turning on a hinge, she would bark an accusation, “NOBODY CRIED!” as if she had been there with the McDonnells. 

What allowed such cruel skepticism to spread from single individuals such as Kelly Watt to larger circles was a combination of American mass psychology and the new accomplice – social media:

Sandy Hook was the first mass shooting to ignite viral, fantastical claims that it was a phony event staged by the federal government as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms. Since Sandy Hook, virtually every high-profile mass tragedy has generated similar online theories.

The worst elementary school shooting in American History, Sandy Hook capped a brutal year for mass shootings. It was viewed by Americans on both sides of the gun policy debate as a watershed event and by a segment of gun-owning conservatives as a signal threat. 

The tragedy occurred amid surging growth in the use of social media, whose algorithms boosted sensational and outrage-producing content. Sandy Hook drew months of online furor, including among people who out of delusion or political expediency decided to cast it as a hoax. 

The most lethal American shooting before Sandy Hook was in 2007, when an undergraduate with a history of mental health problems killed thirty-two and injured seventeen at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg. (86)

However, in the case of the Virginia Tech shooting, we didn’t have the disinformation campaigns that the social media platforms allowed.

In 2007, the major social media platforms hosted only a fraction of the users they did just five years later, when Sandy Hook ignited millions of posts pushing false claims. Facebook, by far the largest social platform, had twenty million global users in 2007, compared with more than a billion in December 2012. Youtube averaged an explosive one hundred million videos viewed per day in late 2006, at the time of its sale to Google. But by 2012 a single video – “Gangnam Style,” Noah Pozner’s favorite – was the first Youtube video to exceed one billion views. Twitter was barely a year old in 2007, with five thousand tweets per day. By the end of 2012, users sent five thousand tweets every second, or four hundred million tweets per day.

Most consequently, Sandy Hook occurred on the cusp of a profound shift in American politics, in which politically expedient “alternative facts” muscled out objective truth. From the dregs of the internet to the White House, the decision by a broad swath of Americans to replace our nation’s self-evident truths with partisan lies helps explain how the murder of children and educators in a quiet New England town grew into a battle over truth itself. (86)

Another key factor in the new Sandy Hook phenomenon is the fact that liability law, which prevents standard news media such as the New York Times from defaming individuals, even public figures, does not apply to social media platforms such as Facebook or Youtube. While recognizing the internet as extraordinary in its educational value and power to unite people, Congress has sought to protect it from regulation, giving it, as Williamson notes, “unfettered possibilities for growth” (207). Thus social media platforms are treated merely as conduits for information and user-created content, and bear none of the accountability that news media companies do. The result is that users are largely free to spread harmful and abusive content as long as it steers clear of child pornography (censored largely because advertisers do not want their products associated with it) and copyright infringement (the one weapon that Lenny Pozner found to be effective in his fight to remove photos of his son from the internet).

As for the willingness to believe the theories propagated by individuals such as Halbig, Fetzer, Tracy, and Jones, it has far less to do with the substance matter, and more to do with the sense of belonging, the group mentality that social media platforms have facilitated. This phenomenon, termed “relationship enhancement” (153), is precisely what helped elevate the status of deniers within their groups from their mundane identities as moving van drivers, housewives, jobless individuals collecting unemployment checks, to self-proclaimed, more prestigious or even glamorous occupations such as “investigative journalist,” “researcher,” and  “private detective.” Therefore, a day spent doom scrolling through the internet could be recast as part of a formal investigation or as part of the respectable and worthwhile endeavor of “critical research.” Members of denier groups were published in books and had their statements included for much larger if not downright vast audiences in the millions to consume, digest, and respond to by outlets such as Infowars. To be quite frank, while Infowars was gaining profitable sums of capital with the increased exposure gained as a result of Sandy Hook outrage, the members of these conspiracy groups had a lot to gain in the way of social capital. 

Williamson targets four prominent figures driving, fueling, and amplifying the denial movement. Two of these individuals – James Fetzer and James Tracy – were professors at distinguished universities, white the other two – Wolfgang Halbig and Alex Jones – belonged to the world of alternative news channels. The most damaging was the one with the largest audience and biggest megaphone, and that was, of course, Alex Jones. 

James Fetzer was behind much of the hype around the shooting at Sandy Hook actually being a staged drill that was seized upon by opportunistic liberals who wanted a reason to ban guns. Williamson writes:

James Fetzer, a bombastic, self-promoting philosophy professor retired from the University of Minnesota Duluth, had repelled his academic colleagues with his wacky theories since the early 1990s. He lurched from political left to right over time, claiming, for example, that both Gerald R. Ford and Lyndon B. Johnson helped plan John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In 2006, Fetzer attended a 9/11 conspiracists’ conference in Los Angeles. He appeared on a panel moderated by Alex Jones, making Jones look sedate by comparison. 

Days after the shooting in Newtown, Fetzer blamed Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, of orchestrating it. He soon revised that, saying the shooting didn’t occur at all but was a Federal Emergency Management Agency drill. 

Fetzer often boasted that his Sandy Hook “research group” included six PhDs, and he imagined himself to be their bard. He eventually compiled a collection of their articles into a book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. The free PDF version of the book has been downloaded more than ten million times. (105)

The book included articles by Kelly Watt, the “great mom” turned research scholar, as well as Wolfgang Halbig, who will be discussed below. After Amazon took the book down (due to outcries by Lenny Pozner and his online group, HONR), Fetzer asked Alex Jones for help promoting the free PDF version. However, after Infowars posted an article “Sandy Hook Truth Book Banned by Amazon: Online Store Suppresses, Censors Book Presenting Controversial Ideas,” the article and accompanying tweets were taken down. Williamson speculates that Infowars was wary of jeopardizing their diet supplement sales for the outspoken, volatile Fetzer. The efforts to remove the book from Amazon, and their willingness to pursue slanderous libel was making Pozner and his group of supporters at HONR a formidable opponent, certainly catching the attention of Alex Jones, who stated that “Fetzer had been Pozner’d.”

The other professor who had inflammatory claims about Sandy Hook attached to his credentials was James Tracy:

Tracy was a forty-seven-year-old journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. He posted his “questions” about Sandy Hook on his personal blog, called Memory Hole, a reference to George Orwell’s 1984. References to Tracy’s false claims were reprinted in more than eight hundred news accounts. Though the vast majority did not give them credence, repeating them helped them spread. His status as a journalism professor granted him an air of credibility that drew adherents and imitators. Tracy reveled in the “national notoriety” (his words) he received and rebranded himself as a “media scholar, educator, and political analyst.” (109)

Infowars would jump on Tracy’s credentials to promote doubts about the events at Sandy Hook, posting an article titled “College Professor says ‘Crisis Actors” may have Played Part if Sandy Hook was indeed a Hoax.” It quoted Tracy’s objections to how the story played out: “After such a harrowing event why are select would-be family members and students lingering in the area and repeatedly offering themselves for interviews? A possible reason is that they are trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drive [sic] home the event’s tragic features” (111). As Tracy’s assertions made headlines, CNN addressed the issue when Anderson Cooper stated, “Normally, we would not dignify these claims with airtime… But it turns out one of the people who’s peddling one version of this conspiracy theory is actually a tenured professor at Florida Atlantic University, a state university that gets taxpayers’ money…” (111). Cooper went on to outline some of the highlights of Tracy’s theory that the parents of the children purportedly killed are not who they say they are but actually come from a company called “Crisis Actors,” which provides actors to use in safety drills. Of course internet searches for “Crisisactors. Org” surged as a result of both CNN and Infowars' mention of their name. 

Lenny and Veronique Pozner, in response to Tracy’s claims, wrote a guest essay in Florida’s Sun Sentinel. Williamson includes the following excerpt in her book:

Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photograph image… His blog post was echoed dozens of times on conspiracy websites, including one maintained by Tracy’s colleague and frequent collaborator James Fetzer, a Holocaust denier…

FAU has a civic responsibility to ensure that it does not contribute to the ongoing persecution of the countless Americans who’ve lost their loved ones to high-profile acts of violence. (202)

In January 2016, after Tracy had responded in a letter also published in the Sun Sentinel in which he promoted Fetzer’s book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, he was fired by Florida Atlantic University. Tracy sued the university to get his job back, but lost. 

The third and fourth of the amplifiers occupy increasingly larger portions of Williamson’s reporting – Wolfgang Halbig and Alex Jones. Halbig was a retired teacher, coach, and assistant principal in the Florida education system. From 1995 to 1999 he was a security director for Seminole County Public Schools.  

In retirement, Halbig cast about for a second act. He spent years failing to parlay his school security experience into steady work as a consultant or an expert witness. That quest prompted him to email Newtown Public Schools after the shooting, and after his pitch fell through the cracks, he decided the town had conspired to stage the crime. (182)

Halbig was supported and even employed by Jones’ Infowars when he regularly attended public records hearings to pressure the state of Connecticut to pursue various claims about the young victims, especially that all of them were still alive and well. In 2015 he approached the local Catholic church in Newtown with an Infowars film crew with the aim of proving that one of the girls killed at Sandy Hook was now attending the St. Rose school (adjacent to the church). Any attempt to reign him in or ban him from various locations only fueled his ardor for his cause. He was filmed demanding answers from officials for the Town of Newtown and the Board of Education, and when given none, he would rasp into his microphone “We deserve better, we deserve better than what we saw in here today!” He hysterically addressed board meetings, and would only be silenced when his three minutes of public commentary were up. His relentless tormenting of the town and the educational board, always with a microphone and Infowars camera, took a toll, traumatizing those who attended the meetings and placing the servants of the town in real danger when their identities and personal information, including their home addresses, were posted for the entire nation to see. In Williamson’s book, Monte Frank, who served as outside counsel for Newtown, stated the following:

“… it doesn’t surprise me that you’d have people trying to promote themselves and advance their own interests through a denial theory following Sandy Hook… The maddening part of all this, the infuriating waste of it, was the fact that the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists had literally hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence available to them incontrovertibly proving that the shooting happened. Connecticut state agencies from the Office of the Child Advocate to the state police had released reports and research. The Hartford Courant had sued and won access to more state police records about the gunman. The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission had released a two-hundred-page report, plus appendices and videotapes of all its meetings. Lenny [Pozner] had released proof of Noah’s life and death. Every scrap of this evidence was available online, cataloged and searchable. But instead of it being a source of answers, the conspiracists found in the data proof of the plot, picking at specious details or ambiguities to bolster their phony claims. Halbig had been given hours of hearings and hundreds of pages of records in response to his questions. But he continued to deny the truth, because he had no receipts for portapotties.” (190)

But Halbig was just a piece of the larger Infowars puzzle, and when we talk about Infowars, we are talking about the man behind it… Alex Jones. For six years, 2012 to 2018, Jones and Infowars consistently cast doubt on the events of Sandy Hook, profiting from the outrage, grief, disbelief, and confusion. For as long as the social media companies allowed their algorithms to drive the news cycle, Infowars questioned the facts and even blatantly accused the victims, the families, and those who aimed to protect them and help them heal. Ultimately, Williamson, as a result of her personal interview with Jones during the trial brought on by Lenny Pozner and Neil Heslin, concluded that Jones doesn’t imagine real people when he is speaking to his audience. He sows hatred within a field of abstraction made of likes, dislikes, and shares. Such abstraction allows Jones to inspire everyday people to form thinkbubbles, and work themselves into the kind of frenzy that would allow someone to make inhumane demands such as the one made to Lenny Pozner that he dig up the body of his child to prove they were actually dead. 

Alex Jones was no less involved in the Parkland shooting, which took place on February 14, 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Nikolas Cruz, who had been expelled from this school killed seventeen of his former classmates and teachers, and wounded more than a dozen others. There were two immediate results from this national tragedy. 

The first was the “March for Our Lives” in which young people in more than eight hundred cities across the country and around the world against gun violence in schools. More than two hundred thousand marched at the main event demanding that Congress pass laws restricting guns such as the AR-15 used at both Sandy Hook and Parkland. 

The second was much more predictable. Williamson points out that now “bogus false flag claims” are as much a feature in the wake of school  gun violence as “thoughts and prayers” from Congress (308), so, following the script from Sandy Hook, conspiracists shifted blaming President Obama (out of office in 2018) to blaming socialists and the “deep state.” Infowars saw another opportunity to increase views, hoping to ride the momentum from their constantly elevated opposition to Obama’s administration into the much more harmonious relationship they found in theTrump era. Jones’ Infowars embellished a false claim that a twenty-four-year-old Mark Fontaine was also linked to the Parkland massacre, rushing to capitalize on the spreading falsehood by reposting photos of Fontaine under headlines such as “Reported Florida Shooter Dressed as Communist, Supported Isis.” At this point, Infowars had thirty million views per month, and the threats against Fontaine began immediately (309). In a turn of events, however, a personal injury lawyer took up Fontaine’s cause:

Mark Bankstone, an internet-savvy Houston personal injury lawyer active in far-left circles, watched the Fontaine attacks gain speed. In him, Fontaine found a sympathetic and like-minded advocate. 

In early April, Bankston sued Jones and Infowars for defamation on Fontaine’s behalf, seeking a judgment of $1 million. Bankson filed the suit in Travis County, Texas, where the Austin-based Infowars operates. 

Lenny [Pozner] read the lawsuit, which contained this passage: “Mr. Jones’ recklessly opportunistic career is littered with the fallout from his willful pattern of malicious defamation, most notably a series of high-profile incidents over the past years Mr. Jones garnered significant attention for his slander against the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, claiming he has seen ‘evidence’ that could lead people to believe ‘that nobody died there.’” (309)

Lenny Pozner had tried unsuccessfully to sue Wolfgang Halbig when his attempts to inform him )that his son was a real person, that he was shot and killed at Sandy Hook, and that he and Veronique had buried him) were ignored. In 2015 Lenny had sued Halbig for invasion of privacy. Lenny sued James Fetzer in 2016. While he won the suit against Fetzer, Halbig had proved to be a more difficult opponent with deeper pockets. In 2017, after spending more than 30,000 dollars of his own money, Lenny was forced to drop the lawsuit. During the suit, Halbig had raised more than 100,000 dollars by touting his cause against Lenny, casting the entire affair as a strategy by left to silence him from telling the truth about Sandy Hook. 

Lenny had always wanted to sue Alex Jones. But it was Neil Heslin (father of Jesse) who actually contacted Bankstone. In Bankstone both he and Lenny felt they had found the right lawyer. While it is surprising to any reader given how egregiously cruel Jones had seemed in broadcast after broadcast, many lawyers had been reticent to take the case, some believing that it was legal to defame dead people, others demanding that they would only file if all twenty-six families joined together. Bankstone, however, was different. He filed separate lawsuits for both Lenny and Neil on April 16, 2018 to try to hold Jones accountable for five years of denying them their respective losses. 

Of course, Jones went berzerk:

On April 17, the day after Lenny and Neil filed their suits across town in Austin, Infowars aired “Alex Jones’ Full Statement on Frivolous Sandy Hook Lawsuit.”

Jones’ “statement” was essentially a four-hour jeremiad, interspersed with ads for ProstaGuard, Real Red Pill, and Bodease supplements, Superblue fluoride-free toothpaste, and Alexapure water-filtration systems. 

“The Deep State is going into hyperdrive war against President Trump and basically all of his supporters in an attempt to bully and silence free speech,” Jones began, grinding his teeth more than usual. 

“It’s George Soros financing the lawsuits against me. Two more filed yesterday.” He heaved a theatrical sigh. 

“Talked to two top law firms. They read the lawsuits, and they said, ‘These are the most frivolous things we’ve ever seen. They are not even based in reality.’

“What they say we said against the Sandy Hook families we did not even say.”

Jones re-aired his false flag claims about the shootings in Parkland and Las Vegas. He repeated most of his false claims about Sandy Hook, complaining he’d been unfairly edited, taken out of context, just asking questions, playing devil’s advocate. 

“It’s just the mainstream media and the whole combine, using children and using hurt families to try to get them on board, to not just go after the Second Amendment but also the First Amendment.”

The families weren’t going after the First Amendment, they were going after Alex Jones. His insistence that the Constitution freed him to torment them would finally be tested, and in his home state. (313-314).

Mark Bailen, a partner of Washington-based BakerHostetler, one of America’s best-known firms (219), represented Alex Jones. 

On May 23, 2018 six Sandy Hook families (along with on FBI agent) filed a separate suit in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The six families in Connecticut were represented by Koskoff and Bieder.  Thus, in total, eight Sandy Hook families were suing him in two separate states. 

The challenge was that the families had to show not only that they were emotionally harmed by the things that Alex Jones had said on his program, but also that he was negligent and that he did not take the necessary measures to corroborate any of the facts behind the claims he was making. A steep uphill battle. However, as Williamson notes, the families made very sympathetic plaintiffs, and the strategy in both suits was to try to get the cases in front of a jury. 

One of the points argued by the defense was that parents Veronique and Lenny had made themselves public figures, she by speaking out against assault weapons and he with his articles criticizing the likes of James Fetzer. The judge acknowledge that they may have become involuntary public figures to which their lawyer Bankston countered that through the group HONR, Lenny was combating the hurtful messages while endeavoring not to bring attention to himself. It was, as Bankston argued, Alex Jones himself who was turning Lenny into a public figure:

Judge Jenkins, who hadn’t known anything about Jones prior, looked alternatively bemused and disgusted as Bankston regaled the room with the story of Jones displaying Lenny’s mailing address on his broadcast and taking the call from the follower who warned, “Lenny, if you’re listening, you day is coming.” (351)

Lenny had created a site dedicated to the memory of his son, Noah, in 2013. There many of the deniers posted hateful comments, which were then countered by sympathetic visitors. The website became a battleground. One of the supportive visitors was quoted by Williamson:

“We would chime in and we would fight with these hoaxers. Lenny didn’t like that, because his Google+ was basically supposed to be about honoring Noah,” she said. The Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous group was a better place for those discussions, at least for the people who weren’t so far gone they could never be convinced.” (169)

The Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous group would become, as Williamson states, “the core of Lenny’s hoaxer pushback, a network of volunteers who ensured he didn’t fight alone” (171). Renamed HONR, the website explained HONR’s mission:

“We bring awareness to the cruelty and criminality of Hoaxer activity and, if necessary, criminally and civilly prosecute those who wittingly and publicly defame, harass, and emotionally abuse the victims of high profile tragedies and/or their family members. We intend to hold such abusers personally accountable for their actions, in whatever capacity the law allows.”

On the home page, Lenny posted a plea. “Families in grief have the right to do so in peace and dignity,” it said. “We need to band together as a community of caring individuals, and act to stop these abusers from inflicting any further harm to people who have committed no crime, and simply want to be left alone to grieve their loved ones and live out the rest of their lives in peace and anonymity." (172)

Many of those who eventually volunteered on HONR’s website had actually been conspiracy theories themselves, who, when presented with the facts by individuals such as Lenny, had left the dark corners of the hoaxers’ world and devoted themselves to scanning the web for hours, most often for copyright violations of family photos, which was the single most effective tool with Facebook and Youtube to get hateful messaging taken down. 

HONR had waged a game of cat and mouse, or whack-a-mole, for years with Jones and Infowars. In 2015, after Jones posted the article about Noah “dying again” in Pakistan, Lenny filed a copyright notice and Youtube deleted the entire day’s broadcast from the channel. 

Jones went apoplectic. ON February 12, 2015, he devoted most of his show to Lenny and HONR. 

Jones’ backdrop that night was a photo of a tortured-looking man with duct tape plastered over his mouth, FREE SPEECH scrawled on the tape. Jones, in a light gray pin-stripe suit and open-collared white shirt, seemed out of break. He frothed for two hours between ads for Survival Shield, Super Male Vitality, Super Female Vitality, and Ancient Defense Diet Supplements. He displayed close-ups of the takedown notice several times, sharing with millions of viewers Lenny’s name, email address, and the address where he received his male. 

Jones repeatedly showed Noah’s photo, defying Lenny. 

And so, since 2013, Lenny’s days had been spent working with HONR volunteers pasting links to the day’s offenders (including Infowars), and then report the entire list at the end of the day. The accounts given in court during the trial only bolstered the sympathy the judge and jury had for Lenny, Veronique, and Neil’s cause. 

Of course there were other cases of great agency on the parts of the parents leading up to the two lawsuits filed against Jones. Erica Lafferty, who filed the lawsuit in Connecticut on May 23, 2018 was actually the daughter of the principal, Dawn Lafferty Hochspring, who was the first to confront Adam Lanza, and the first to be shot. She began working for gun safety advocacy groups after the event. 

In 2013 Erica threw her support behind an unsuccessful bill requiring comprehensive background checks before gun purchases. She spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in support of Hillary Clinton’s stance on guns. She also subsequently endorsed Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania and cosponsor of the background check bill, for reelection. (329)

Erica wrote an editorial piece in 2016 for USA Today after Trump’s victory decrying the claims that mass shootings were elaborate, government-manufactured hoaxes and highlighting how hateful and hurtful it was to her and the others who had lost family members. Of course, Infowars had targeted her as well. 

Alissa Parker, whose daughter Emilie had died in the shooting and whose husband Robbie had made the first public statement just days after the shooting had taken a much broader approach. She and Michele Gay, whose daughter Josephine had died with Emilie, rallied security professionals willing to contribute their talents and created a nonprofit advocating for ways to secure American school buildings. Their nonprofit was called Safe and Sound Schools. Alissa and Michele were firmly convinced that the death toll could have been much less than it was and that the shooting might have been prevented completely. 

Predictably the NRA had proposed their own solutions to the deficit in school safety, which was to supply armed guards inside every one of the nation’s ninety-nine thousand schools. This was the occasion when the president, Wayne LaPierre delivered the famous line, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” (88). While many institutions including school administrators and law enforcement spoke against such a policy, “the NRA dug in, catering to the most radical elements among a membership it claims is four million strong. Donations surged. So, too, did gun sales” (88).

A quick examination of the Safe and Sound Schools website and some of the posts found on that website reveals that over the course of its history, Safe and Sound Schools experts have distinguished between school safety drills and active shooter simulations. In the next installment, I plan to discuss this distinction and its impact on how the place/space of the classroom began to be reimagined after the Sandy Hook tragedy. For now, suffice it to say that Safe and Sound Schools supports rigorous drilling in preparation for such a tragic event without exposing the students to dangerous levels of trauma. 

Programs such as those provided by Safe and Sound Schools seem to be balanced and very aware of the potential to add to the trauma the threat of school violence poses. Nonetheless, from the inception, as stated by Alissa Parker, the program is meant to address a deficit. Adding the awareness of the potential for violence could have minimized the number of deaths at Sandy Hook. Simple changes, such as being able to lock classroom doors from the inside may have saved the children in rooms 8 and 10. Having covers over every hallway door window might not have alerted Lanza that students were in the classrooms to begin with. What became painfully clear is that no amount of relational trust between the students, teachers, administrators, and parents could have saved the twenty students. The six educators gave everything they had for the students. The principal was the first to stand in Lanza’s path. Not far from where Neil Heslin’s son, Jesse, lay was the body of Dylan Hockley. He had autism and attended class with a devoted behavioral therapist, Anne Marie Murphy. She had died in the gunfire with her arms around Dylan. Protecting Dylan, shielding him from the bullets, was Murphy’s last action alive. 

The image of the educators who died defending their students is certainly one of great heroism. It shows the love the educators have for their charges. It is the proof that the teachers of Sandy Hook had honored the deep relational trust between themselves and the students. There was nothing greater they had to give in those last crucial moments when facing Adam Lanza, and yet it was not enough to save the children’s lives. The six dead educators found amidst the twenty students, in addition to being an image of great sacrifice, was also an image of the failure of relational trust. No amount of kindness, no amount of going beyond the expectations required of a teacher, no amount of self-sacrifice could have succeeded in protecting them from the rain of bullets from the AR-15. The image, therefore, honoring the selflessness of the educators was also the flashpoint for changes in the place/space that is the classroom. 

In the last blog, I ended with mention of an image that haunts the places/spaces of a school. I referred to it as the spectre of simulated terror. While organizations such as Safe and Sound Schools actually advises against the practice of active shooter simulations, the images of classrooms as bloody, horrific scenes are, arguably, conjured to varying degrees regularly in the minds of both educators who now find themselves rankled by thoughts of active shooters especially when larger assemblies are taking place where exits might form choke points. It’s worth revisiting a quote included earlier about the Sandy Hook tragedy: “That day we took the first steps down the road to lockdowns, active shooter drills, and ever more horrors” (123). 

While the drills and simulations that were inspired by Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Robb Elementary (in Uvalde Texas, 2022), the town of Newport marks December 14, 2012 in a very particular, quiet, even private manner. The town encourages a moment of silence, and the flags are flown at half-mast. 

The first memorial was the constellation of 26 stars over the roof of the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire and Rescue building. Elizabeth Williamson’s tour of Newtown, including a stop at the Fire and Rescue building, initiates her in-depth coverage of the aftermath of the tragedy. It was the Sandy Hook Fire and Rescue building at which families were reunited with their children. At the time of the shooting, the artist, a former Newtown resident named Greg Gnandt, imagined 26 stars in the sky, one for each of the victims. Seventeen days after the incident, there were 26 stars on the roof of the Fire and Rescue Building. The memorial is completed by a plaque on the side of the firehouse with the names of the victims and the quote, “Hitch your wagon to a star.” The artist happens to be cousins with the Assistant Chief of the Volunteer organization, and funding and support for the project was immediately available. While quite spontaneous, the rooftop stars have remained a permanent feature of the town of Newtown. 

Looking up at those copper stars today, a viewer is struck by a tragic and unsettling irony. The six larger stars representing the educators sit side-by-side with the twenty smaller stars representing their students—a poignant visual testament to a community bound forever in grief, but also a stark reminder of the limits of human devotion. The educators at Sandy Hook made the ultimate sacrifice, with teachers like Victoria Soto and Lauren Rousseau literally placing their bodies between a gunman and their students. Yet, this monument of profound love and heroism simultaneously underscores a grim reality: no amount of selfless action, courage, or instinctual protection could shield those children from the devastating power of a modern automatic weapon. In this way, the firehouse constellation does more than honor the dead; it marks the symbolic fracture of relational trust—the historical, unwritten understanding between student and teacher that the classroom is inherently a sanctuary. Elizabeth Williamson has repeatedly pointed out that in the Sandy Hook tragedy, a new kind of response to tragedy was born amongst those who, for a diverse array of aforementioned reasons ranging from avoiding the intensity of facing the grim details of the death of twenty children to profiting from the sensationalism that the story struck, actually denied that the event ever happened. The result was a result of the power of social media, which enabled the online communities to become large-scale echo chambers. I am arguing that simultaneous to the denier phenomenon, a paradigm shift was born. The old relational bond between teacher and student, teacher and parent, and teacher and administrator was replaced by a modern contractual trust, where safety is no longer a natural byproduct of a teacher's care, but a calculated, institutional obligation defined by locked doors, bulletproof glass, and active shooter drills.

A decade after the copper stars were hastily affixed to the firehouse roof, the opening of the official Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial in late 2022 marked the bureaucratic and institutional completion of this tragic narrative. The road to its creation was long and fraught with local tension. For years, the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission debated over a dozen potential locations, facing intense pushback from residents who feared that a large public monument would invite invasive "tragedy tourism" or disrupt protected open spaces. Ultimately, the town selected a secluded five-acre clearing down the road from where the original elementary school once stood—which itself had been completely razed and rebuilt behind heavy security barriers.

Designed by the landscape architecture firm SWA Group, the permanent memorial intentionally mirrors a sense of organic serenity, yet its physical structure tells a deeper story of modern containment. The heart of the memorial is a large, circular granite water feature embedded in the earth. At its center sits a single, resilient sycamore tree, surrounded by a gentle, swirling vortex of water that creates a continuous, low hum. The names of the twenty-six victims are deeply engraved into the stone rim of the pool, where visitors are encouraged to touch the water cascading over the letters. This water feature is surrounded by a network of gracefully curving, accessible paths that loop through a landscape planted with native flora. These paths are not merely aesthetic; they are highly structured, directing the foot traffic of the public through a deliberate, controlled path of contemplation that keeps visitors moving forward rather than gathering in large groups.

Analytically, this official space solidifies the very transition from relational to contractual trust represented by the firehouse stars. Where the 2013 stars were a spontaneous, exposed cry of grief on a working first-responder building, the 2022 memorial is a meticulously planned, multi-million-dollar psychological sanctuary. This institutional control was most evident when the memorial opened. The town intentionally chose to skip any public opening ceremony or formal dedication, explicitly stating they wanted to avoid putting "the bright lights of the world" back onto the grieving families. By banning the media spectacle and preventing a mass public gathering, the town authorities treated remembrance as a highly private, regulated contract of healing. It is a physical manifestation of the modern, post-Sandy Hook landscape: a space tucked away from view, highly managed, and structurally designed to absorb trauma. In choosing a design centered on a literal vortex of water, the memorial reflects a bittersweet reality. It provides a peaceful place for families to weep, but it also codifies the tragedy into the permanent topography of the town. The sanctuary is no longer found in the living relationship inside the classroom; it has been externalized into a secure, dedicated zone of engineered remembrance.

Williamson’s book does not find its closure in the families of the victims or in the passage of any meaningful legislation against social media companies or gun manufacturers. There is some relief at the end of her book in the court decisions made against Alex Jones and Infowars. Williamson writes:

Jones had pledged to fight to the death, to defend before a jury his constitutional right to say whatever he wanted. But in the end he lost that opportunity, by denying the authority of the justice system. His money, lawyers, even his reliable dad couldn’t save Alex Jones from himself. By the end of 2021, Jones had lost all four Sandy Hook Lawsuits. It was a clean sweep, a responding victory for the families of Noah Pozner, Jesse Lewis, Dawn Hochsprung, Ben Wheeler, Daniel Barden, Dylan Hockley, Aviell Richman, Vicki Soto, Mary Sherlach, and Emilie Parker. 

Judges in Texas and Connecticut ruled Jones liable by default, for refusing to provide critical evidence ordered by the courts… Texas came first. In a scalding ruling on September 27, 2021, Texas District Court judge Maya Guerra Gamble wrote that for more than three years Jones and his legal team exercised ‘flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules,” abuses that characterized every case Jones was involved in. In rejecting lesser sanctions, the judge considered “Mr. Jones’s public threats, and Mr. Jones’s professed belief that these proceedings are ‘show trials.’”

In Connecticut the Jones defendants weren’t just careless, Judge Bellis wrote in her November 15, 2021 ruling. “Their failure to produce critical documents, their disregard for the discovery process and procedure and for Court orders is a pattern of obstructive conduct that interferes with the ability of the plaintiffs to conduct meaningful discovery and prevents the plaintiffs from properly prosecuting their claims.” (430)

Of course, he promised to appeal, and on his next Infowars show, he began asking for money. 

On October 14, 2025 the Supreme Court rejected Jones’ appeal of the Connecticut Court decision that held him responsible for 1.25 billion dollars. On August 21, 2026 the Texas third court of appeals issued a ruling to slash the original 50 million dollars for which he was found liable to six million. On June 14, 2024 a Texas state court had ordered that Infowars be stripped of all of its assets and liquidated. All of Jones’ private assets had already been  stripped and liquidated in June 14, 2024. 

On April 30, 2026 the courts ordered a pause on the finalization of The Onion’s bid to buy Infowars. While the auction of Infowars has been temporarily blocked, The Onion currently pays a licensing fee to operate under the Infowars name.