Part 6: “A Geography of Trust” - Sandy Hook Part 1

The 2022 book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth does the deep dive into the 2012 school shooting that I was hoping to find for this blog. Elizabeth Williamson examines the tragic events of December 14, and then explores the phenomenon that followed the incident in which, by the year 2016, nearly one-fourth of the country (352) didn’t believe that the slaughter of twenty school children and six faculty members at Sandy Hook did not actually happen. By 2020, nearly one-fifth of all Americans thought that all school shootings were faked (92). Many came to believe, because of the nefarious propagation of false information on social media, in particular by Alex Jones and his far reaching but near sighted news organ called Infowars, that the incident that took place in Newport, Connecticut, was actually a drill conducted by FEMA  and then seized by pro-gun-control activists in order to get a ban on assault weapons. 

Williamson begins with a detailed account of the events of December 14, 2022. 

At 9:30 in the morning, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza entered his former elementary school by shooting out the side window next to the main entrance. The school principal and school psychologist had heard the shots and confronted Lanza in the hallway and were both shot. Lanza continued to room 8 where he had shot two teachers before opening the door to a small bathroom attached to the classroom. There, laughing with glee he shot more than a dozen second graders who had huddled there. Then he moved on to classroom 10 where he shot a teacher, a caregiver, and three more students. Williamson doesn’t dwell too much on the gory details of the incident. Her angle is very different. The point of her book is to link the classroom violence to false information on social media to the post-Truth era we now find ourselves in. 

Williamson’s account of the actual tragedy, the actual events that took place the morning of December 14, 2012, are diffuse and scattered throughout the four hundred page book. There is never a sustained retelling of Adam Lanza’s actions, and that is undoubtedly intentional. Williamson did not find Adam Lanza to be the only monster behind this tragedy. The loss of the twenty-six lives was not the end of the tragedy either. For the families of those killed the horror was just beginning. Far from being a story about one troubled individual who turned to violence, the book would find monsters lurking in all corners of the nation, and many of them were in public view commanding large audiences on alternative news channels and social media platforms. 

This is not to say Williamson glosses over Adam Lanza’s murder spree. In one of the more graphic passages, as she describes her conversations with parent Lenny Pozner, father of the child victim Noah, she writes:

Their teachers were already dead when the gunman found Noah, Joey, Charlotte, Emilie, Grace, James, Sammy, Ana, Caroline, Chase, Ben, Maddie, Jack, Catherine, and Jessica hiding in the bathroom. He shouted and laughed as he fired more than eighty rounds, shattering drywall, wood, porcelain, flesh, bone, their lives, Lenny’s, Veronique’s, all the families’.

They found Noah, sixty-one pounds and an inch shy of four feet tall, lying faceup on the floor. He wore black pants, and the red Batman hoodie. From its folds Carver retrieved a small-caliber bullet, deformed from impact. He inscribed it with the number 852 – the 852nd bullet retrieved from a body by the Connecticut medical examiner’s office. 

Lenny wondered whether it was Noah whom Sergeant Bill Cario described when he wrote in his report: “As I stared in disbelief, I recognized the face of a little boy… I then began to realize there were other children around the little boy, and that this was actually a pile of dead children.” (145)

Unmatched by any previous school shootings with twenty second-grade victims, the author, Williamson, decides to focus on three of the families. As noted above, she held in-depth conversations with Lenny Pozner and his ex-wife Veronique about the violence and the aftermath. Williamson focuses on two other families – parents of Emilie, Alissa and Robbie Parker, as well as Jesse’s parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis.

The book begins with a tour of the town of Newtown given by Neil Heslin. He takes her to see the site of the school, which had been demolished after the incident, and the golden stars. Twenty-six stars adorned the Newtown firehouse, one for each of the twenty children and six educators that were killed by Adam Lanza. The firehouse was where the families were reunited with their children in the immediate aftermath of the school shooting, or, in the case of twenty families, were not reunited. 

Neil and Scarlett had their son in 2006, but had subsequently split up after he was born. They did, however, both remain near Newtown to share his parenting. Williamson writes:

Jesse had stayed with Neil the day before the shooting, in the house Neil had inherited from his parents in Shelton, about seven miles southeast of Scarlett’s place, a modest ranch with a deep, wooded front yard. About 7:30 in the morning on Wednesday, December 12, Neil drove up Scarlett’s gravel drive, past the red barn, to collect Jesse. While his parents chatted, Jesse scratched “I love you” into the light frost coating Scarlett’s car door, surrounding the message with hearts. Scarlett told him to stay put and ran into the house for her camera. Her last photo of Jesse is of him squinting in the morning sun, showing off his handiwork. His ski jacket was open, revealing an untucked rugby jersey with blue and black stripes, the shirt he died in. (9)

Emilie’s parents, Alissa and Robbie, were from Utah. After having Emilie, they had eventually followed Robbie's career in neonatal medicine from Utah to Oregon to Washington to Montana to New Mexico and finally to Newtown, Connecticut. Newtown had impressed Alissa as a classic, quiet East Coast town with top-rated schools for their child. Williamson writes:

Emilie entered Sandy Hook for the first grade in the fall 2012, again a newcomer. Chatty and outgoing, she made friends easily. 

Emilie was a Sandy Hook student for less than a year. After her death, her bed remained unmade and her artwork half-finished on the table nearby, as she had left it on her last morning. (39)

It was Robbie Parker who made the first public statement made by a family to the press. He told Williamson that he believed if he made the statement, then the media might leave him and the other families alone. After the incident, reporters had camped in front of each of the twenty families’ houses harassing them and intruding in their lives to the point where a state trooper had to be assigned to each of the families. Williamson writes:

So, on December 15, the day after the shooting, Robbie called his friend in Utah. He told him to tell the reporter who had contacted him to send a Connecticut based colleague to the LDS church in Newtown at five that evening. He would meet the reporter there and provide a statement…

He put on a black suit, white shirt, and deep red tie. He composed a few simple remarks and favorite memories of Emilie in his head and wrote them on letter-sized paper. Alissa hugged him, and accompanied by his little brother, James, and sister-in-law, Natalie, he drove to the church, a single-story building edged with shrubbery and bordered by a parking lot. He and Alissa had avoided watching or reading the news, shrinking from the wall-to-wall coverage of Sandy Hook. So when he arrived at the church, Robbie had no idea he was the first family member to speak publicly. 

“I showed up there thinking there was going to be one person and a camera,” he told me. “It was twelve cameras, and the parking lot was full of people. I became really, really nervous.”

“I didn’t want to be there, to have any part of it. I was expecting someone to tell me what to do,” he said. But the only ones there besides the reporters were their bishop and family members. He had worked on some notes, laboring to capture in a brief speech their Emilie: a chatty girl whose first word was “happy,” painter of mammoth butterflies and tree-sized flowers, picky eater, ringleader big sister, Sleeping Beauty.

At 5:22 pm Robbie and the small knot of family and clergy, all dressed as if for services, filed outside. Someone had dragged a heavy wooden lectern from inside the church to the parking lot, a few feet from the church door. 

Robbie stood suddenly alone in a narrow strip of space between the wall and the waiting lectern, bristling with microphones bearing media logos. He glanced apprehensively outward as a woman in a parka surged forward to place another recorder on the lectern, then at his family, who hung back, deferring to him. 

Robbie turned as if to say something to one of them. Overwhelmed by the surreal nature of it, he smiled incongruously, tilted his head back toward the others in a gesture that in any other circumstance would suggest a cocky aside. “I gave this kind of chuckle, like, ‘What’s going on?” he recalled. “It was more like me taking a deep breath.”

“Start?” he asked no one in particular as everyone watched him in silence. “Okay.” Clutching his notes in his left hand, he moved from the sheltering glow of the church entrance as the camera strobes came on, exposing him with a daylight glare. Still grinning, he laid his speech down and his smile died when he looked at the words, as if finally absorbing what they meant. His breath emerged slowly and his jacket opened as his arms moved back, hands searching briefly for his pockets. Lips pressed tight, he closed his eyes and opened them to the waiting reporters, blinking as if emerging from underwater. He breathed sharply in and out to settle himself, the fateful rush of air the only sound. Then he began. (42)

He told the assembly his name, and he offered condolences to the other families. Then he spoke of Emilie and the person that she was. How he and Alissa took comfort in how many she had touched in her short lifetime. How she was a mentor to her little sisters and how she loved to dance and read and paint. How her last words were “I love you” in Portuguese, a language she and her father, Robbie, were learning together. 

What was an earnest expression of love and grief, however, became a moment that was scrutinized over and over again, as the statement was played repeatedly not only on major news networks, but also on alternative and fringe news programs, not to mention social media platforms. The loop became a text within the post-Truth world of “hoaxers,” as another one of the parents, Lenny Pozner, referred to the self-proclaimed skeptics of Sandy Hook, who referred to themselves paradoxically as “Truthers.” Every mannerism of Robbie in that newsclip was scrutinized as they played it over and over again, pausing especially on his nervous mannerisms prior to reading his statement he had prepared. Williamson writes:

Infowars.com posted an article about Robbie Parker’s media appearance a day after Emilie’s murder, in which he reminisced about her life. 

FATHER OF SANDY HOOK VICTIM ASKS ‘READ THE CARD?’ SECONDS BEFORE TEAR-JERKING PRESS CONFERENCE

Robbie didn’t say any such thing. He had smiled and asked whether he should “start.” He did not use cue cards or index cards. He carried 81/2-by-11-inch paper, the type you would use in a computer printer, folded in half lengthwise in his left hand as he approached the lectern. The sheets contained notes he had written himself. All this is clearly apparent to anyone who views his news conference, which lives on YouTube to this day. Jones was instructing his followers to disbelieve their own eyes. (95)

Alex Jones, who claimed he was just asking questions, was transforming the event into a sensational story about a plot to end the Second Amendment Rights of all Americans. In a postmodern move, he began a relentless campaign to reverse the regular order of things, in which a drill is meant to simulate a real event, with his claim that the actual event – the murder of twenty-six children and educators – was actually a simulation. He claimed the liberals, which included the Obama administration in collusion with the mainstream press, had seized upon the simulation and promoted it as a necessary sign for the end of gun ownership. 

The [Infowars.com] article was accompanied by a video titled “Sandy Hook Shooting Exposed as Fraud.”

“It appears that members of the media or government have given him a card and are telling him what to say as they steer reaction to this event, so this needs to be looked into,”Jones said in a statement in the article.

Jones spent most of his broadcast that day dourly predicting the end of the Second Amendment. Then he homed in on Robbie’s press conference. 

“We’re going to play a clip from a CNN press conference with Robbie Parker,” Jones said. Mischaracterizing Robbie’s appearance as being somehow organized by CNN, a big Infowars target, was another way of undermining its credibility. 

“I’ve seen this before, and he’s laughing, looks really excited,” Jones said , frowning. “And then he walks up like he’s an actor, and then breaks down on camera.”

Jones launched into a hammy, concocted rendition of Robbie facing the media, focused on Robbie’s brief smile and side comment to his family as he stepped to the lectern that night….

“Unbelievable,” Jones said. “I mean he does look like a soap opera actor. Handsome guy, he has a very suave walk. Perhaps that’s how you handle it when you’re really nervous, but that is a smile of absolute satisfaction.”

Jones couldn’t stop talking about those six seconds in an eighteen-minute appearance filled with grief. (96-97)

Then, in a manner that would become a pattern for most of the Sandy Hook families, emails and phone calls began pouring in with trumped-up evidence that the murder of Robbie’s daughter, Emilie, never happened. One email focused on the photo the Parkers took with President Obama during his December visit to Newtown to console the families. In the photo were both of Emilie’s surviving sisters, one of which the deniers would claim was Emilie herself, and that she was still very much alive, enjoying a moment with the president. The abuse not only of the Parker family, but also their friends and relatives began a relentless downpour. Williamson writes:

The Parker’s high school friends received abuse and threats on the Facebook page they created to collect money for Emilie’s funeral costs. The Parkers took down a Facebook memorial page for Emilie because deniers were posting links to Jones’ broadcast with comments like “How much money are you making by selling out to Satan?”...  He got a Facebook friend request from “Adam Lanza” [the deceased shooter]. (99)

The Pozner family, another of the three families Williamson profiles in this book, experienced something similar. Veronique, about a week after the tragedy, agreed to go on CNN with Anderson Cooper to discuss her loss for the nation. Williamson documents her appearance in the following way:

“He was just a bundle of energy, like he was supposed to be.”

Behind her the windows of the red-brick, white-columned building, [Edmond Town Hall in Newtown], a hub for the community and police meetings after the shootings, shed yellow light on the granite steps. It was decorated for the holidays, evergreen wreaths gracing the arched transsomes of the main entrance and windows. While Veronique spoke, a girl walked up to read the messages attached to the bouquets of yellow, pink, and white roses mounded from the steps to the sidewalk, their cellophane wrappings quivering in a faint breeze. 

“How are you holding up?” Cooper asked Veronique.

“Most of the time, I’m kind of numb,” she replied. “You know, I think every mom out there can relate to the fact of how long it takes to create a baby, those nine months that you watch every ultrasound and every heartbeat. And it takes nine months to create a human being, and it takes seconds for an AR-15 to take that away from the surface of this Earth. And it wasn’t just my son. It was 25 other souls that left this Earth that day because that weapon fell into the hands of a tormented soul. And that haunts me.” (69-70)

Jones would seize upon this news loop as well. He would often feature clips of Robbie’s laughter with Veronique’s CNN interview, milking the drama he was generating. In the case of Veronique, while he could not attack her demeanor as being rehearsed, he zoomed in on a split-second glitch in a copy of the broadcast in which Cooper's nose seems to suddenly blur. 

“He’s supposedly there at Sandy Hook in front of the memorial, and his whole forehead and nose blurs out,” Jones intoned. “I’ve been working with blue screen, again, for seventeen years. I know what it looks like.

“Anderson Cooper has got some explaining to do, because I know blue screen when I see it.” A classic Jones insinuation: carefully hedged calumny plus braggadocio. Blue screen, like green screen, is a plain background that allows a TV production team to drop in whatever background images they choose behind a person speaking. Jones was implying that the white-columned Edmond Town Hall with its heaps of flowers behind Veronique as she spoke with Cooper were projected onto a plain blue backdrop, like the map behind a TV meteorologist. 

Jones was relying on carnival showmanship to sell the verifiably phony claim that Veronique Pozner was performing from a CNN studio. (118-119)

Later, Jones' claim would be debunked by a video analyst who found the original CNN recording, which had no glitch. The glitch Jones was harping about was created when Infowars made their copy of the clip. Thus, Jones and his crew had created the anomaly, and it only existed on their copy. Whether it was intentional or not, the video analyst stated that Jones ought to have known the reason for its presence. 

Like Robbie, Veronique began getting attacked both on their family’s social media pages and elsewhere online. The following is a sample of the kinds of things that were being posted about Veronique:

This interview was the point where I KNEW that Sandy Hook was a hoax. When I saw Veronique Pozners [sic] shawl and perfectly matched earrings… Even her shade of lipstick is the exact red shade for the color of her olive green outfit. 

No mother who has just had her baby shot through with holes would take such care to match an outfit… A Mother (and Father) would be in agony, imagining the terrible fear that their baby must have felt. I am a Mum of five children and KNOW that taking such thought into an outfit, JUST after having your child MURDERED… would NOT be possible. (120)

In a twist on the pattern established with photos of the Parkers’ child Emilie offered as proof that she was still alive, the deniers seized upon photos of Noah from the other side of the world where there had been a massacre of school children in Pakistan. On December 16, 2014, the Taliban attacked a school killing 145 people, including 132 children. In the following outbursts of grief and rage, mourners had used images that might capture the world’s attention by linking their loss to something that Americans could relate to. More than one street mural included a photo of Noah Pozner with the aim of inspiring Americans to view the Peshawar tragedy in a similar vein. Inforwars seized upon this as another inconsistency with the Sandy Hook narrative, attempting once again to raise questions about the media’s reporting. Infowars immediately posted an article titled “Mystery: Sandy Hook Victim Dies (Again) in Pakistan.” Therefore, just as Emilie’s death was questioned, in this case Noah Pozner’s death was challenged, ironically, by throwing his very existence into doubt. Infowars strategy in this case was to simply label Noah’s image as a stock image deployed any time anti-gun activists wanted to make their case. Noah’s photograph, in the hands of Infowars, was deemed counterfeit; the young first grader Noah himself, a fabrication. The claim was that he never even existed. 

One of the more adamant and vocal deniers, a woman fueled by Infowars, was Kelly Watt, a divorced mother of two grown children who went by the user handle “Gr8mom.” It seems she was one of many women, particularly mothers, who made up a large percentage of the Americans who questioned whether Sandy Hook actually happened. Though most moved on after being presented with facts, not Kelly Watt. She scoured clips of news conferences, counting the number of times a medical examiner paused and said “uh” and scrutinizing body language for signs of uncertainty and dissembling. From her residence in Oklahoma, she made hundreds of calls to the Newtown Town Clerk’s Office, the city hall, the Connecticut State Police, the state environment protection agency, and the medical examiner’s office demanding to know further details such as “What company cleaned the crime scene?” When not given the information, she counted that as further evidence of a cover up. Williamson writes:

Watt believes Noah never existed. She insists Noah is actually Veronique Pozner’s son from a previous marriage, born nearly a decade before Noah. Holding out her iPad like an evangelist wields a Bible, she toggles between Noah’s photographs and photos of the young man that she lifted from his Facebook account. Compare, she urges, “the angel bow in the lip, the roundness of the face, the color of the eyes, the bushy eyebrows” of the dead child with those of his living older brother. “Pictures do speak,” she told me, her voice low and brimming with import. Watt watches true crime shows on TV, and when she talks about Sandy Hook, she adopts their narrators’ sonorous tone. (135)

Watt was one of many who formed social media groups devoted to the cause of exposing the “Sandy Hook Fraud.” She hailed every inconsistency, every pause or awkward silence in interviews that were actually filled with outpourings of grief, every piece of information kept from the public eyes for matters of privacy or even human decency as a sign of a cover up or hoax, and when presented with the information or evidence she demanded, she would ignore it. Williamson herself confronted Watt about the clean-up process:

Watt told me she had visited Clean Harbors’ website. “Now it might have changed, but it said, ‘We clean up harbors and waterways from oil spill.’ Which told me they don’t clean up urine and blood and guts from elementary schools.”

That’s wrong, I told her. It had taken me one phone call to confirm that Clean Harbors had cleaned Sandy Hook. The company had performed biohazard cleanup for decades, including of Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks. 

“You told me you made hundreds of phone calls looking for the cleanup information,” I said, working to keep my voice neutral. “Did you ever read the one-page Newtown police report that spells out what you spent years trying to get?”

Watt was momentarily silent. “I haven’t seen that document,” she said blithely. “But where are the receipts?” (139-140)

This type of mindset found in one person we could label as overly obsessed with the incident  wouldn’t be so disturbing if it weren’t the same for hundreds if not thousands of others who formed social media groups devoted to debunking the Sandy Hook tragedy. The father of Noah, Lenny Pozner, eventually offered to join one of the groups that didn’t believe that Noah had ever existed. Armed with photos and his son’s birth certificate, he joined a group chat with the aim of helping them understand that Sandy Hook was not a hoax, not a drill, and that his family and the nineteen others were grieving the loss of their young children. It did not go well.

The group had seized upon misreporting by news outlets such as Jewish Forward, which had stated that Noah had been shot eleven times. In fact it was three bullets, one entering his right shoulder, a second to his lower lip and jaw, and a third to his left hand, destroying his thumb. While the source of the error is unclear, the deniers had pointed out the impossibility of Lenny having an open casket funeral for his son. “There’d be nothing left of him. You’d be picking body parts and tossing them in the casket. You people are so dumb [to believe this].” In his efforts to dispel such assertions, Lenny asked for corrections to news reports about the condition of his son’s corpse and the number of times he had been shot, but was constantly met by the newspapers with demands that he supply the documentation. The news stories and the social media posts had believed anonymous, erroneous sources, but not the father of the victim. So, he armed himself with documents: postmortem medical examinations, birth and death certificates, school report cards, and family photographs and began a decade-long campaign to end the denials of the tragic end to his son’s and nineteen other children’s lives:

on the evening of June 28 2014, Lenny joined one of the Facebook groups devoted to exposing the Sandy Hook tragedy as a staged event:

“Why are you here and how can we help you cope,” Kathryn wrote. 

“I would like to see less abusive videos on youtube,” Lenny responded. “They are irresponsible and downright mean.”

…The group asked Lenny whether Noah had been taken to the hospital (no), whether he’d seen him after his death (yes), and whether he keeps a “Kosher home” (he ignored that one). They posted news photos from the scene outside the firehouse that they had pulled from the internet and asked Lenny to identify people in them (he could not).

…The tone darkened further when Lenny couldn’t recall the first name of Noah’s first grade teacher. Amanda D’Amato was absent on the day of the shooting. Her substitute, Lauren Rousseau, was killed. 

Melissa: “how don’t you know your own kids teacher? You would know if your kid got shot through… You would know it from all the talk and I’m sure the teacher would have offered condolences to you.”

Tony Mead, who’d been lurking in the background, sensed a vulnerability. “You don’t know the name of the teacher that had your son in her custody on the final day of his life? Seriously?”

Mead was heavily invested in discrediting Lenny. He got an enormous ego boost from his leadership of the hoax group. Its members praised his findings and his writing, and laughed at his jokes. He spent up to six hours a day on it. No longer just a house mover, he had begun calling himself an investigative journalist. 

… For hours Lenny answered questions that seemed designed to catch him in a lie, while Mead and his fellow trolls drove off anyone – and there were several – who gave him the benefit of the doubt. Lenny began blocking people who abused him, and those he blocked boasted that he’d done so. 

They asked if Veronique [Lenny’s ex wife who had done the CNN interview] represented Switzerland, lobbying in Washington for gun control… Was it true that the school hadn’t been used in years? Did Noah’s sister Sophia really see a dead body on the floor? Was Lenny ‘data mining’ them? Outing them to the government? (154-158)

There was simply no changing their minds. Eventually, the only tool at Lenny’ disposal was copyright law. While Facebook and YouTube were reluctant to take down any of the messaging that Lenny found hurtful or abusive (or even hate speech), they did slowly begin to respond when Lenny found photos of his son that belonged to the Pozner family that had been used in initial news reports but were now being reposted for the public with the aim of proving that the mass shooting never happened. He would eventually rally a team of supporters, who called themselves HONR, and launch a game of whack-a-mole, informing Facebook and YouTube every time copyrighted photos of his son appeared. The social media giants had been slow to respond to Pozner’s pleas for decency in the midst of the cruel onslaught on the victims’ families, following Zuckerberg’s lead when he was faced with questions about false information (as in the Rohinga tragedies in Myanmar in which false reports of Muslim-led violence against Buddhists was used to justify acts of genocide).

A third family that was profiled in Williamson’s book, was that of the victim Jesse Lewis. Neil Heslin, the father of Jesse, appears at the beginning of Williamson’s book as he gave her a tour of the town, driving to the site of the school before it was demolished and relocated, to the firehouse where the golden stars adorn the building, one for each of the victims, and to the Newtown square and other locations mentioned throughout. On the night of the tragedy, Neil had quietly made his way through the barricades to the body of his son where it lay with the other corpses in the firehouse while teams of medical examiners did their work. He had lifted Jesse’s body into his arms and cradled him, unnoticed by the professionals as the examinations of others continued. When interviewed by Megyn Kelly years later in 2017 for a Fathers’ Day retrospective on Sandy Hook, Neil described holding his dead son at the firehouse. Also appearing on that very program was Alex Jones himself, the megaphone for those who denied the facts of Sandy Hook. The juxtaposition of the grieving father and tapes of  Jones’ crass remarks that had been made over the years, such as, “The whole thing was fake” and “It looks like a drill,” painted Jones as unflatteringly cruel and insensitive, which fueled another Infowars takedown. 

Following the Megyn Kelly interview, Infowars reignited its claims about Sandy Hook being a staged event. Targeting Neil Heslin, the program put together its own timeline of events with the conclusion that it was impossible for Neil to have held his son’s body in the firehouse. The host, Owen Shroyer, aimed to please his mentor and boss with his cocky, cantankerous commentary:

“So, let’s roll the clip.”

The screen filled with the image of Neil in his funeral suit, his face sagging in sad recollection. “I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head,” he told Kelly. “I dropped him off at 9:04, that’s when we dropped him off at school, with his book bag. Hours later I was picking him up in a body bag.”

Shroyer returned. “Okay, so making a pretty extreme claim, that would be a very thing vivid in your memory, holding his dead child,” he said with the jumbled delivery of the amateur sportscaster he was. He aired a network clip from the day after the shoot, of H. Wayne Carver, the Connecticut medical examiner, explaining that the parents were offered the choice of identifying their children from photographs. To Shroyer this suggested Neil owed Infowars an explanation. 

“Okay, so just another question that people are now going to be asking about Sandy Hook, the conspiracy theorists on the internet out there that have a lot of questions that are yet to be answered. I mean you can say whatever you want about the event. That’s just a fact. So there’s another one. Will there be clarification from [Neil] Heslin or Megyn Kelly?” (296-297)

So, how do we come to nearly a quarter of everyone in this country believing that Sandy Hook never happened, or was a FEMA drill conducted by actors and then politicized by liberals? What is the mindset of those who adamantly spout conspiracy theories, attack family members of victims, and even redirect their entire lives to “conducting research” and “investigating the truth” of those events in Newtown on December 14, 2012? 

In the next installment of this series, “A Geography of Trust: Sandy Hook part 2,” We will examine Williamson’s account of the four individuals who drove the conspiracy theorists into the frenzy that would eventually claim this large sector of the population. While it is Williamson’s intention to parse how such disbelief in a classroom tragedy starts and spreads, and how Sandy Hook is the ground zero for such phenomena, it is particularly relevant to this blog series that Sandy Hook is the potential shifting point for the transformation of the classroom. We have been looking at how relational trust has shifted over the years to contractual trust as a basis for the relationships between faculty, students, parents, and the administration. We have alluded to a change in the way students and teachers orient themselves to the classroom itself, from the classroom as a place to the classroom as a space. Much remains to be done to characterize the implications of this shift from place to space, but for now, it can be hypothesized that the events of Sandy Hook might be associated with the re-imagining of the classroom. In particular, the association of the classroom with shooter drills in the form of simulations seems to be associated with the changes that are central to this series. 

In the next installment, after examining the four individuals behind the reimagining of the real tragedy as a simulation, we will look at three responses to these false charges. We will examine Williamson’s treatment of the social media group HONR created to counteract the countless groups that were perpetuating the simulation myth, the lawsuit that was brought by various families against Alex Jones and Infowars, and finally, we will look into the nonprofit, Safe and Sound Schools, founded by Alissa Parker in response to her daughter’s, Emilie’s, death. From there, I hope to start a deeper dive into the new protocols that resulted from a deficit perspective (fueled by the belief that Sandy Hook could have been prevented) focusing especially on the drills meant to simulate the situations created by active shooters on school campuses. December 14, 2012, according to Williamson’s book, was the day our nation took the first steps down the road to lockdowns, active shooter drills, and the haunting spectre hanging over every classroom by simulated terror.