Sandy Hook shooting victim's family has moved six times because of death threats

Noah Pozner was reluctant to go to school that day. A mischievous little boy, who had celebrated his sixth birthday three weeks earlier, he stayed in bed too long and dragged his feet getting ready. “I said to him: ‘Come on, Noah, we gotta get moving,” his father, Leonard (also known as Lenny) recalls, having thought about the morning of 14 December 2012 so often he can almost talk about it mechanically. But the drive was fun: Noah, his twin sister, Arielle, and older sister, Sophia, listened to Gangnam Style, one of Noah’s favourite songs. Noah always sat in the back seat and Leonard tickled his ankle as he drove along. At school, Noah jumped out, his backpack in one hand, his jacket in the other. He was wearing a Batman shirt and Spider-Man trainers. “I said: ‘I love you, have a great day,’ and that was the last thing I ever said to him,” says Pozner. After all, he adds, “Not even Batman could have stopped an AR-15.”

Noah was the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, murdered about half an hour after his father dropped him off. A sweet-faced, big-eyed, brown-haired boy, his tiny body took multiple bullets. His jaw was blown off, as was his left hand, and his beloved Batman shirt was soaked with blood. For his funeral, his mother, Veronique, insisted he have an open casket.

“I want the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said at the time.

Today, Pozner tries to look on the bright side. “I could have lost three kids that day because the other two were in rooms adjacent to Noah’s classroom. They were all in the shooter’s footprint.”

Even in a country all too used to mass shootings, the merciless killing in Newtown, Connecticut of 20 six- and seven-year-olds, along with six of the school’s employees, retains a terrible hold on the US’s imagination, gripping the memory after too many other shootings have faded away. For most, it is too horrible to mention without a shudder. But for a tenacious few, it is too horrible to believe, and soon after Noah was killed, when Pozner thought he had already seen the worst of humanity, he came into contact with the latter group.

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Newtown buries first shooting victims
Just days after the massacre, when the US was still reeling from the tragedy, and Pozner himself was, he says, “pretty much in a catatonic state”, the theories started spreading: Sandy Hook had never happened, it was staged by actors, the children had never existed, it was a ruse by President Obama/the anti-gun movement/the “New World Order global elitists”. So-called Sandy Hook truthers – Pozner prefers the term hoaxer – pored over photos of the families and children on social media, triumphantly pointing to any visual similarities they could find between the dead children and living ones. The families were harassed by hoaxers, online and off, insisting that they stop their fake grieving. When Pozner roused himself from his catatonic grief to post photos of Noah online, hoaxers would leave comments: “Fake kid”, “Didn’t die”, “Fucking liar”.

Pozner and I speak by phone. His voice is sad and heavy, but he talks easily. He and Veronique were separated at the time of the shooting, sharing custody of their kids. They reunited in the wake of Noah’s death, but that soon fell apart. Pozner has moved half a dozen times since Noah’s death, always staying near Veronique and their daughters, and is moving again soon after our interview. Partly, this is because each move is a new start, “and I need that sometimes”, he says. But it is also because he has to keep ahead of the people who, for the past five years, have been sending him death threats, purely because his son was killed in Sandy Hook.

Arielle Pozner, Noah’s sister, at Noah’s grave.
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Arielle Pozner, Noah’s sister, at Noah’s grave. Photograph: Courtesy Leonard Pozner
The week before our interview, a judge issued a warrant for the arrest of Lucy Richards. She is alleged to have sent messages to Pozner, including one that read: “Death is coming to you real soon and nothing you can do about it.” That was bad, Pozner agrees, but not necessarily the most unsettling. After all, others have put photos of his house on the web and reported him to child-protection services. “This is the world I deal with now,” says Pozner.

I started corresponding with Pozner in September 2016, after I read an article about him in a US magazine. He saw me tweeting about it and got in touch. I was surprised at how grateful he seemed for my sympathy about Noah. But then I remembered that he had spent countless hours dealing with people telling him that he should exhume his son’s corpse to prove its existence. I told Pozner that, having lost someone in 9/11, I understood how painful it is for people to use your tragedy for their own self-indulgent obsession. He thanked me again.

Pozner himself used to be into conspiracy theories. When he lived in Connecticut, he often had to commute to New York and would listen to rightwing radio hosts such as Alex Jones and Michael Savage on the long drives. “I’m self-employed, an entrepreneur. I was always looking for more information so I could get an edge on the next guy, to get a better idea of the geopolitical perspective,” Pozner says. Once he got used to Jones’s “raspy voice” he liked him especially: “Alex Jones appears to think out of the box. He’s entertaining.”

Arguably, more than anyone, Jones is responsible for spreading the theory that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake. His radio shows and website, InfoWars.com, have an audience of more than eight million, and they specialise in the kind of conspiracies that had intrigued Pozner: was 9/11 an inside job? Was the US government involved in the Oklahoma City bombing?