Sandy Hook Read online

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  Copyright © 2022 by Elizabeth Williamson

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  ISBN 9781524746575 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781524746599 (ebook)

  Cover design by Steve Meditz; Cover image: A view of the Newtown Meetinghouse and Trinity Episcopal Church as Main Street’s flag flies at half-staff on December 18, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)

  Book Design by Ellen Cipriano, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

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  People should try to treasure each other more. Because life eventually disposes of everyone, and you don’t know when it’s going to happen . . . Sometimes I’m so tired, I have to force myself to do that. To do that extra thing. But then I’m like, “Remember.”

  —Veronique De La Rosa, mother of Noah Pozner

  John J. Crowder

  1963–2005

  Rest in peace

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book documents a battle by victims’ families against deluded people and profiteers who denied the December 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed twenty first graders and six educators.

  The book traces a nearly ten-year effort pioneered by Leonard Pozner, whose six-year-old son, Noah, died at Sandy Hook, to sound the alarm about the growing threat posed by viral lies and false conspiracy narratives, a cultural phenomenon that eventually brought a mob to the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

  These families’ saga, and its societal implications and potential solutions, rests on more than four hundred interviews, including with Sandy Hook survivors, first responders, government officials, lawyers, researchers, political scientists, psychologists, journalists, conspiracists, and others, conducted over three years. My reporting on the exploitation of the shooting by profiteers like Alex Jones of Infowars and others is based on some ten thousand pages of court testimony; business, financial, police, medical, and court records; internal emails surfaced during legal proceedings; online exchanges, videos, and recordings of personal conversations, interviews, meetings, and courtroom proceedings I observed. I have traveled to Newtown more than a dozen times to interview participants and visit places described in the book.

  I did not write about the Sandy Hook shooting at the time of the tragedy. I began researching this book in April 2018, when Noah Pozner’s parents, Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, and Neil Heslin, the father of Jesse Lewis, who also perished in the shooting, sued Alex Jones for defamation in Texas. My first New York Times story about the shooting, “Truth in a Post-Truth Era: Sandy Hook Families Sue Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theorist,” appeared on May 23, 2018, on the day a separate group of victims’ families and an FBI agent targeted by Sandy Hook conspiracists sued Jones in Connecticut. I have covered the lawsuits and the Sandy Hook conspiracy phenomenon for the Times since then.

  The Sandy Hook family members’ activities on the day of the tragedy and during the years following are based on my interviews and correspondence with them; the family members’ own writings in books, in articles, or on social media; their media appearances and coverage; interviews with individuals who interacted with them at the time and thereafter; court testimony; and the work of academic researchers who met with and/or surveyed family members. The endnotes provide a guide. In referencing the Sandy Hook families as a collective, it is not my intention to attribute any action, emotion, opinion, or perception to the entire group. Their experiences and interpretation of the events described are highly individual and to be respected.

  As I embarked on the book, and again closer to publication, I communicated with the broad group of Sandy Hook families, via an email sent through their designated family liaison, to explain the project and offer to answer their questions about it.

  This book is not a treatise on gun policy in America. That is a distinct issue properly addressed by experts, advocates and lawmakers, many of whom have written books on the subject. The gun debate and the firearms industry’s response to mass shootings appear only as context for the spread of false narratives. The Sandy Hook family members presented in this book hold a range of views on guns in America. This book does not explore them except as they relate to conspiracists’ claims about and attacks on them. Mass shooting conspiracy theorists often use survivors’ gun policy views—actual, assumed, or fabricated—to bolster false narratives. My choice to leave that debate to others is intended in part to deprive them of that opportunity. I know from years spent talking with people who believe conspiracy theories that this likely will not work, but that is my intent.

  I reviewed sections of the book pertaining to the experiences, recollections, and emotions of the Sandy Hook families and others at the center of the book with them, in an effort to ensure that I portrayed their stories as accurately as possible. In reporting this book I was guided by recommendations from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and professionals in post-trauma counseling. In referencing the perpetrators of the Sandy Hook and other mass shootings mentioned in the book, I was guided by principles established by No Notoriety, founded by Caren and Tom Teves, whose twenty-four-year-old son, Alex Teves, died in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting in Colorado while shielding his girlfriend from gunfire. No Notoriety calls on the media to limit gratuitous use of the killers’ names to discourage copycat attacks and to shift the focus from perpetrators to victims, survivors, and helpers.

  I denote my personal observations, opinions, and views in the text by describing them in the first person. All errors are mine alone.

  No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.

  —Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943)

  PROLOGUE

  Two days after the shooting, before the funerals began, President Barack Obama arrived to plead with the families of the dead and their neighbors: “Do not lose heart.”


  The president drew on Newtown’s history, its traditions, and the stories of heroism during the shooting to fortify them.

  “As a community you’ve inspired us, Newtown. In the face of indescribable violence, in the face of unconscionable evil, you’ve looked out for each other. You’ve cared for one another. And you’ve loved one another. This is how Newtown will be remembered, and with time and God’s grace, that love will see you through.”[1]

  In the darkened auditorium of Newtown High School that night, the president’s words to Newtown sowed comfort, acknowledged anger, and brought the dawning of a desolate fact. More than three hundred years after Newtown’s founding, technology with the ubiquitous, vaguely whimsical name Google would forever link their town with the murder of children. Unimaginably, in time the words “Sandy Hook’’ would come to symbolize a sinister development in America’s cultural and technological history, transforming a massacre at school into a battle for truth. In an age when facts have never been more knowable and accessible, some Americans would insist that nobody died at Sandy Hook Elementary School and that everyone involved, from the children and educators to those who tried to save them, were actors in a government-led hoax. Driven by ideology or profit, or for no sound reason at all, conspiracy theorists would use technology created to unite the world to hunt and attack vulnerable people.

  It has happened many times since, but Sandy Hook was the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers, whether the mainstream media, law enforcement, or the families of the dead, for whom the torment by deniers added immeasurably to their pain.

  From a decade’s distance, Sandy Hook stands as a portent: a warning of the power of unquenchable viral lies to leap the firewalls of decency and tradition, to engulf accepted fact and established science, and to lap at the foundations of our democratic institutions.

  This book tells the truth of how that happened.

  * * *

  —

  At nine-thirty on the frigid morning of December 14, 2012, as twenty-year-old Adam Lanza drove down forest-fringed Dickinson Drive toward his former elementary school, Sandy Hook, Veronique Pozner bustled through hallways forty miles away, well into a busy Friday at Grove Hill Medical Center in New Britain, Connecticut. An oncology nurse, Veronique tended to patients in a sedate, lounge-style chemotherapy infusion room, its warm air dry and snapping with static electricity. A TV mounted to the wall chirped morning-show pap: holiday gift ideas, a cooking demo, yet another feature on PSY, the South Korean rapper whose “Gangnam Style” video Veronique’s six-year-old son, Noah, played nonstop at home.

  Noah’s mother called him a “one-man tornado,” a chatty, rambunctious little man with big eyes fringed by inky lashes, and a cherub’s full lips. His classmates gave him a hand-decorated T-shirt for his sixth birthday that November 20, drawing hearts and stars in rainbow marker around their names: Joey, Daniel, Charlotte, Emilie, Grace, James, Sammy, Ana, Caroline, Chase, Ben, Maddie, Jack, Catherine, Jessica. A week later Noah lost his first tooth and posed for a photo, mouth open to show the tiny red gap in the bottom row. He loved karate, chocolate fondue, the beach, superheroes, and scaring people with the lifelike plastic insects his parents bought for him at the Rainforest Café in Orlando. A photo captures him on Halloween as Batman, grinning behind his blue plastic mask, his child’s belly puffed proudly over a cloth utility belt.

  * * *

  —

  At Noah’s school, the high-pitched din of 350 children, kindergarten through fourth grade, excited about the coming holidays, filtered through the hallways and into the parking lot as Lanza parked his mother’s black Honda Civic precisely, then walked the few paces to the door. He wore sunglasses and a black bucket-style brimmed hat, a black polo-style shirt with a black T-shirt underneath. He also wore an olive-drab fishing-type vest, whose pockets he’d stuffed with ammunition. He carried a Glock 10 mm handgun in the pocket of his black cargo pants, cinched tightly with a web belt to hold them up on his skinny frame. He had strapped another gun, a Sig Sauer 9 mm, to his leg.[2] In his hands, sheathed in fingerless gloves, he carried a Bushmaster AR-15–style rifle, similar to the one he’d used an hour earlier to murder his mother, Nancy Lanza, shooting her four times while she slept. Nancy had bought the rifle her son used to kill her, along with the Bushmaster and the two handguns. Six feet tall, Lanza weighed only 112 pounds. In his mind, starvation equaled self-control and power. He wore earplugs.[3]

  Classes having started, the school’s front door was locked. Lanza didn’t touch the door handle; germs terrified him. Instead he shot out the wall-sized window to the right of the front door and stepped through, his black leather Nunn Bush sneakers crunching on glittering cubes of safety glass as he passed through the airy front lobby.

  * * *

  —

  At about 9:45 a.m., an emergency text message popped up on Veronique’s cell phone. False alarm, she thought, but then the television began flashing sketchy details of a shooter inside Sandy Hook Elementary. Veronique’s three youngest children went there: seven-year-old Sophia, and her twin babies, Noah and Arielle. Somebody—a patient, maybe a doctor—urged her go, as if she needed to be told. Filled with a primal terror, “like being in a trap,” she tore from the building into the frigid air, wearing just her short-sleeved scrubs. She sped southwest on I-84. The engine light flashed on, and she prayed the car wouldn’t stall out.

  When she reached Sandy Hook thirty-five minutes later, she found the school cordoned off, a bedlam of police and crowds and cameras swirling around the placid village she’d left four hours earlier. She ditched the car and ran for the school. Intercepted by the police, she muscled her way through crowds to the firehouse, where her husband, Lenny, and dozens of parents had gathered. Lenny had found Sophia and Arielle in the parking lot, lined up with their classes. They stood with him, silent and withdrawn. Together the Pozners numbly watched the reunions, frantic parents grabbing children who wept and clutched at them or who stood with arms at their sides, shocked and staring. Noah did not appear.

  * * *

  —

  Sergeant Bill Cario had run into the school with the first wave of police. In the lobby the Connecticut state trooper passed the bodies of the school principal, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, who had rushed into the hallway after hearing the shots in the lobby and confronted Lanza, and the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, who had followed her. In a conference room on his right, Cario found Natalie Hammond, shot in the leg and hand, who’d played dead while Lanza stepped over her, then scrambled back inside the conference room where she, Dawn, and Mary had been having a meeting. Natalie had been holding the door closed while the shooting raged. Cario told her to stay put, and he would be back for her. He ran on, following a Newtown police officer into classroom 10, where he found Lanza, lying in a fetal position, so thin the trooper at first thought he was a child. His hat lay nearby, blown off his head by the shot from the Glock he’d used to end his life.

  “His injury was not consistent with life and I did not check him for vitals or remove the weapons from him,” Cario wrote in his report. The first victim he saw in classroom 10 was Vicki Soto, lying beyond the gunman and closer to the windows on the gray-carpeted floor. Nearby lay three of her students, including Jesse Lewis, a stocky little guy with a big voice who in his last moments yelled, “Run!” Cario dropped to his knees, checking, but none had a pulse. Not far from Jesse lay Dylan Hockley. He had autism and seldom spoke but had a treasured connection with his behavioral therapist, Anne Marie Murphy. She died with her arms around Dylan, shielding him. Moving more slowly now, Cario entered classroom 8. At first it looked empty, a relief. Then he saw the bodies of two teachers on the floor. Opening the door to what he thought was a closet, he saw a damp heap of cloth that in his shock he mistook for some kind of art project.

  Describing what happened next in his report, Cario’s detached off
icial language turned ragged and anguished. “As I stared in disbelief, I recognized the face of a little boy . . . I then began to realize that there were other children around the little boy, and that this was actually a pile of dead children.

  “The face of the little boy is the only specific image I have in that room.”

  * * *

  —

  It had taken the gunman less than ten minutes to murder twenty first graders and six educators, destruction that would radiate, like fallout, from those moments through years.

  That night police erected klieg lights, like the kind used on nighttime construction projects, in the Sandy Hook school parking lot. Their glare illuminated the long, pale-brown tent where H. Wayne Carver, the Connecticut chief medical examiner, waited with his staff. Carver knew it would be easier if the families identified their loved ones from photographs, his team laboring to keep the worst of their wounds outside the frame.

  A slow procession of stretchers and gurneys passed through the bullet-pocked front lobby, past a toppled houseplant, chairs sprinkled with broken glass, and a decorated bin labeled “Bags, Bears, Books & Basics,” collecting holiday donations for Newtown’s needy children. They moved down the terrazzo hallway, its glazed-brick walls festooned with paper snowdrifts and sparkling candy canes. Inside classroom 8, a bulletin board titled hopes and dreams displayed the first graders’ Crayola images of their future selves.

  Noah Pozner lay faceup, Batman’s shield on his sweatshirt no protection against the bullet that passed through his back. Fourteen of his classmates died with him inside their classroom’s bathroom, a 4 ′ 7 ″-by-3 ′6 ″ space into which Lanza fired more than eighty rounds, while shouting and laughing. Only one of the children who signed Noah’s happy birthday T-shirt survived, shielded by the bodies of her friends.