Families, Remington try to block Sandy Hook denier

“Fetzer’s motion, if granted, would present a distraction from the merits of the parties’ claims and defenses in this litigation, and would only fuel baseless conspiracy theories. [T]here is simply no intersection between his interest in denying the basic facts of the shooting, and the parties’ interests in determining liability in this case.” Remington attorney James Rotondo

NEWTOWN — A Wisconsin man who was ordered to pay $450,000 to the father of a boy slain in the Sandy Hook massacre for claiming the child’s death certificate “was a fake” is trying to intervene in the case against Remington brought by nine families who lost loved ones in 2012.

In a rare moment of unity, the families and the gunmaker are on the same side in trying to keep Sandy Hook denier James Fetzer away from their case.

“Fetzer’s motion, if granted, would present a distraction from the merits of the parties’ claims and defenses in this litigation, and would only fuel baseless conspiracy theories,” wrote Remington attorney James Rotondo in a motion filed Monday in state Superior Court. “[T]here is simply no intersection between his interest in denying the basic facts of the shooting, and the parties’ interests in determining liability in this case.”

The lead attorney for the families agrees.

“The motion to intervene fails to articulate a single cognizable interest that would warrant intervention,” wrote Josh Koskoff in a motion filed on Monday.

The lawyers are referring to Fetzer’s request to intervene in the high-profile lawsuit as part of Fetzer’s appeal of the judgment against him in Wisconsin. Fetzer, the co-editor of a 2015 book, “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control,” wrote to Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara

Bellis that he had been “injured” when the Connecticut Supreme Court wrote in 2019 that 20-yearold Adam Lanza was responsible for the slaying of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“The above quote (about Lanza) from the (Connecticut) Supreme Court was cited by the (Wisconsin) appellate court as authority for the conclusion that people died at Sandy Hook,” Fetzer wrote to Bellis in early September.

The Wisconsin case stems from a defamation lawsuit against Fetzer filed by Leonard Pozner, whose son was among the victims of the 2012 shooting. A Wisconsin jury awarded Pozner $450,000 in late 2019.

Pozner and the boy’s mother are among the nine families suing Remington for unlawful marketing of the AR-15-style rifle used by Lanza.

The families’ attorney Koskoff said in Monday’s motion that the Connecticut case had nothing to do with Fetzer’s petition to Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“Intervention in the underlying matter would have absolutely no bearing on the Wisconsin matter,” Koskoff said. “It would only enable the petitioner to repeat these lies in a new venue.”

Fetzer is not to be confused with conspiracy extremist Alex Jones, the Texas-based host of Infowars, who is being sued for defamation in Connecticut and in Texas by Sandy Hook families for calling the worst crime in Connecticut history “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors.”

The Remington lawsuit has made headline across the country in recent months — first when the gunmaker was accused of dumping 15,000 “random cartoons” and thousands of other apparently irrelevant images into the pretrial discovery documents requested by families lawyers, and then when two of Remington’s four insurers offered $3.6 million settlements to each of the nine families.

On Tuesday the families’ attorneys would not comment on whether any of the families would take the settlement.

Remington was in the national headlines most recently when news got out that its lawyers had subpoenaed the kindergarten and first-grade records of the five slain children involved in the lawsuit.

Bellis has since approved an order to seal those records from the public eye.