By Lenny and Veronique Pozner

It’s been three years since we last embraced our precious little boy, Noah. At six years old, he was the youngest child murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. While our family may have managed to live through this tragedy, the passage of time has nowhere near dimmed the vivid memory of that day nor made it any less difficult for us to cope with the pain and anguish of losing our only son.

 

The heartache of burying a child is a sorrow we would not wish upon anyone. Yet to our horror, we have found that there are some in this society who lack empathy for the suffering of others. Among them are the conspiracy theorists that deny our tragedy was real. They seek us out and accuse us of being government agents who are faking our grief and lying about our loss.

 

Each new high-profile act of violence inspires more conspiracies and creates new victims of harassment and defamation, whether it be the Boston Bombing, the terrorist attacks in Paris, or the most recent massacre in San Bernardino, CA. In that instance, a lawyer for the family of the shooters said Sandy Hook did not happen. And don’t get us started on Donald Trump and his rantings on the Alex Jones radio show. It is obvious by the demographics of the show’s audience that Trump appeared as a guest looking for votes from the conspiracy crowd.

 

Although many of these tormentors persecute us behind anonymous online identities, some do so openly and even proffer their professional credentials in an attempt to lend credence to their allegations.  In this piece, we want to focus on someone who is chief among the conspiracy theorists — Florida Atlantic University Professor James Tracy.

 

A plethora of conspiracies arose after Sandy Hook, but none received as much mainstream publicity as Tracy, who suggested that the shooting never occurred and the Obama administration had staged the “event” to prepare the country for strict gun control measures.

 

More than 800 news organizations covered the story of his denial. As a result, this professor achieved fame among the morbid and deranged precisely because his theories were attached to his academic credentials and his affiliation with FAU. Tracy has enjoyed tremendous success from this exposure and has since leveraged it into a popular Internet blog and radio program. Worse yet, it has elevated his status and fame among the degenerates that revel in the pleasure of sadistically torturing victims’ families.

 

It cannot be denied that Tracy has carved out a significant presence in the same Sandy Hook “hoax” conspiracy movement that has inspired a wave of harassment, intimidation, and criminal activity against our family and others.

 

In fact, Tracy is among those who have personally sought to cause our family pain and anguish by publicly demonizing our attempts to keep cherished photos of our slain son from falling into the hands of conspiracy theorists.

 

Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image. We found this so outrageous and unsettling that we filed a police report for harassment. Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the “unfulfilled request” was “noteworthy” because we had used copyright claims to “thwart continued research of the Sandy Hook massacre event.”