Exposing the Sandy Hook hoaxers

Lenny Pozner used to believe in conspiracy theories — until his son's murder became one. Now he's taking on the people who say the Sandy Hook massacre never happened.

One father retaliates.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Carlo Allegri)

On December 14, 2012, Lenny Pozner dropped off his three children, Sophia, Arielle, and Noah, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Noah had recently turned 6, and on the drive over they listened to his favorite song, "Gangnam Style," for what turned out to be the last time. Half an hour later, while Sophia and Arielle hid nearby, Adam Lanza walked into Noah's first-grade class with an AR-15 rifle. Noah was the youngest of the 20 children and seven adults killed in one of the deadliest shootings in American history. When the medical examiner found Noah lying face up in a Batman sweatshirt, his jaw had been blown off.

It didn't take long for Pozner to find out that many people didn't believe his son had died or even that he had lived at all. Days after the rampage, a man walked around Newtown filming a video in which he declared that the massacre had been staged by "New World Order global elitists" intent on taking away our guns. A week later, James Tracy, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote a blog expressing doubts about the massacre. By January, a 30-minute YouTube video titled "The Sandy Hook Shooting — Fully Exposed," which asked questions like "Wouldn't frantic kids be a difficult target to hit?" had been viewed more than 10 million times.

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