Parents testify of pain inflicted by Sandy Hook deniers

WATERBURY, Conn. — A mother who lost one of her sons in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre testified Tuesday that her biggest fear is that people who believe the shooting was a hoax will harm her other son, who survived the attack at his school.

Nicole Hockley and her former husband, Ian Hockley, were the latest family members of the 26 victims of the school shooting to testify at the defamation trial of Alex Jones, where a jury is deciding how much the conspiracy theorist must pay for spreading the hoax lie.

Ms. Hockley said she’s been called an actress and threatened with violence by people who have written to her that her 6-yearold son, Dylan, either never lived or never died.

She keeps knives and a baseball bat by her bed because she fears being attacked, and has taken out a large insurance policy in the event she is killed.

“I got sent pictures of dead kids, because I was told that as a crisis actor, I didn’t really know what a dead kid looked like, so this is what it should look like,” she said.

One piece of hate mail, she said, came from someone who cursed at her and her slain child and wrote, “We’re going to extend an RIP greeting to you,” with the words “rot in pieces” in parentheses. “I got a piece of mail telling me to slit my wrists before they did it for me,” she testified.

Ms. Hockley said her biggest worry is what would happen if her now 18-year-old son, Jake, is confronted by similar threats, “he won’t know the right choice to make if he’s approached, because of what that might do to him in terms of making him angry because someone is questioning his own life, questioning the life and death of his brother, his parents.”

Earlier, Mr. Hockley testified that he was ridiculed online as a “party boy” and an actor after posting a video of the memorial service for Dylan, because when he found the service uplifting, he smiled.

“That is what that video started to attract is people saying this must be fake,” he said. “He’s an actor. He’s smiling. ‘Oh, you’re out of character,‘ all of those things started to appear until we took our video down.”

He said it was “abominable” and “frightening” that the hoax lie was spread to millions of viewers of Mr. Jones’ Infowars show.

Earlier in the trial, other victims’ relatives also gave often emotional testimony describing how they endured death or rape threats, in-person harassment and abusive comments on social media by people calling the shooting a hoax. Some moved to avoid the abuse.

Judge Barbara Bellis last year found Mr. Jones and his company liable by default for damages to plaintiffs without a trial, a consequence for what she called his repeated failure to turn over documents to their lawyers.

The jury of six will determine how much in damages Mr. Jones and Infowars’ parent company should pay relatives of five children and three adults killed at the school, for saying the shooting didn’t happen and inflicting emotional distress. An FBI agent who responded to the shooting also is a plaintiff.

Last week, Mr. Jones got into a heated exchange with plaintiffs’ attorney Christopher Mattei, accusing him of “ambulance chasing” and saying he was done apologizing for claiming the shooting was staged. In recent years, Mr. Jones has acknowledged the massacre happened, but says the families of victims are being used to push a gun-control and anti-free speech agenda.

Outside the courthouse and on his Infowars show, Mr. Jones has referred to the proceedings as a “show trial” and a “kangaroo court” and called Judge Bellis a tyrant, posting an image of her with lasers shooting from her eyes. Judge Bellis said she would refrain from issuing a gag order against Mr. Jones, but added that could change.

Also during the trial Tuesday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers played a video of a deposition earlier this year of a former Infowars producer, Nico Acosta, who said Mr. Jones “not infrequently” said things on his show he knew was false.

Mr. Acosta, who worked for the show from 2013 to 2018, said he left Infowars because he had “reached a saturation point with the toxicity,” alleging a lack of ethics in how Mr. Jones covered stories. He said he didn’t like the effect the content was having.

Defense attorney Norm Pattis is arguing any damages should be limited and accused the victims’ relatives of exaggerating the harm the lies caused them.

In a similar trial last month in Austin, Texas, home to Mr. Jones and Infowars, a jury ordered Mr. Jones to pay nearly $50 million in damages to the parents of one of the children killed in the shooting, because of the hoax lies. A third such trial in Texas involving two other parents is expected to begin near the end of the year.