Sandy Hook hoaxer Wolfgang Halbig has been arrested and charged with the unlawful possession of personal identification, following a complaint by Leonard Pozner, whose son died in the shooting. Read our 2016 report on Halbig and Pozner
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.
Lenny, who has a goatee and a middle-aged paunch, lives by himself a few miles from Veronique. Since relocating, he has moved apartments four times and gets his mail delivered to a P.O. box on the other side of the state. “It’s part of what I need to do to stay vigilant,” he said. After eight months in his newest home, the living room was sparsely furnished, save for a painting of Noah and a cluttered coffee table topped with his daughters’ Barbie dolls and a book called The Meaning of Life.
Lenny may have been the first Newtown parent to discover that conspiracy theorists didn’t believe his son had been killed, because he used to be a serious conspiracy theorist himself. “I probably listened to an Alex Jones podcast after I dropped the kids off at school that morning,” Pozner said, referencing the fearmongering proprietor of InfoWars. Pozner had entertained everything from specific cover-ups to geopolitical intrigue and saw value in skepticism.
Pozner was kicked out of the group, but several people sent him messages saying they had more questions. “There was a segment of the population that wanted to have these things debunked,” Pozner said. “All they know is what they’re seeing online, the buzz of all of this disinformation, and someone needed to provide the service of offering accurate information should they want it.
After lunch, Halbig drove me to his four-bedroom house, where Coco, a small white Havanese, yapped away as Halbig showed me his home office. On the floor were a dozen laminated posters featuring aerial photos of Sandy Hook and blown-up police dash-camera footage. His desk was covered in green file folders marked “CT State Police,” “FBI,” “Pozner Lawsuit.” There was also a handgun. “It sure looks real, doesn’t it?” Halbig said with a laugh after picking it up and telling me it was a fake gun.
Not long after he emailed Cox, Halbig says, two Florida police officers visited his home to relay a message from police in Connecticut that he risked being charged with harassment if he continued contacting people in Newtown. The incident made him a celebrity in the hoaxer world: Here was a real example, they believed, of the authorities trying to silence their investigation.
The attacks weren’t confined to adults. One of Halbig’s favorite Sandy Hook theories is that Sasha Davidson, who was killed, is in fact alive and living as another Newtown girl named Allison Rodriguez. The two girls happen to look alike if you pick the right photograph from the right angle. If Rodriguez Googles her name — she is now 12 years old — she will be confronted with a page full of results declaring that she is actually her dead schoolmate.
Pozner had found decent traction scrubbing Noah’s Google results of hoaxer content, but he knew that would do little to stop Halbig’s investigation, which he worried was going to lead to more than just nasty YouTube videos. “Wolfgang gives crazies the justification to go out and do what they do,” Pozner said. He cited a Southern Poverty Law Center report that tied nearly a hundred murders to stormfront.org, a white-supremacist website.
Halbig didn’t find anything when he looked through the Sandy Hook insurance claims, either, but decided to stop by the school on his way out of town. “Make sure you got your camera rolling,” Halbig said to Mert Melfa, a retiree from upstate New York who had taken to filming Halbig’s quest.
Pozner knew that by prodding the hoaxers, he had perhaps brought more vitriol upon himself and that many in Newtown viewed his campaign as counterproductive. But he denied kicking a hornet’s nest. “People don’t understand what trolls are,” he said. “If you don’t feed them, they don’t just go away.”
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