The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Dad describes fighting Sandy Hook ‘hoax’
WATERBURY — While pausing often to compose himself, Robbie Parker told the jury in the Alex Jones defamation awards trial Thursday morning that he had hoped that four years after losing his daughter Emilie in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the clamor over the Infowars host’s contentions that the killings were a hoax had died down.
But in the fall of 2016 as he was walking to back to the Seattle hotel where he and his wife Alissa and their daughters Samantha and Madeline were staying to attend an event tied to the art therapy program they had started in Emilie’s name, a man on the street asked, “didn’t you have a daughter who was killed?”
Robbie Parker explained that his daughter Emilie had been killed in Sandy Hook and reached out his hand, presuming the man was going to offer condolences.
Instead the man started swearing and asking how he slept at night, Robbie Parker said haltingly. “He had so much venom toward me, for who he thought I was.”
At least two jurors winced as Robbie Parker told the story of how the man continued swearing, following him, accusing him of participating in a “hoax.” “Emilie is alive, isn’t she,” the man shouted Robbie Parker said. “She’s alive!”
“This guy was in my face, and he wouldn’t leave me alone,” Robbie Parker said. “I finally said, ‘how dare you, you are talking about my daughter,” who do you think you are?”
It was one of the first times Robbie Parker fought back during the relentless siege of deniers who had confronted the family about Emilie’s death since nearly the day she was killed, he said. “I never had a chance to tell anybody how I felt and what I thought,” Robbie Parker said.
The Parkers were the among
the Sandy Hook family members who gave gut-wrenching testimony this week on the impact Jones and his claims that the shooting was a hoax staged by “crisis actors” had on their lives as they grieved for their children and loved ones who died in the tragedy.
Jones, who claimed that the shootings were a way to take away Second Amendment rights, is in the midst of a second defamation awards trial, this time at the Superior Court of Waterbury to determine how much he should pay the Parkers, seven other Sandy Hook families and a federal agent who had sued him for promoting lies about the tragedy.
Judge Barbara Bellis ruled last year that Jones had defamed the plaintiffs by default when he refused to follow court orders to meet deadlines. The only question before the jury of six is how much in compensation and damages the families and the FBI agent who responded to the shootings should receive. Bellis is also presiding over the Waterbury trial.
A jury in Texas recently awarded
the parents of Jesse Lewis, who was also killed in the shooting, $49 million in compensation and damages during a similar trial in that state.
Jones who abruptly left the state last week after several bombastic outpourings in the courtroom and on the courthouse steps may testify next week, his attorney Norm Pattis said.
There will be no proceedings on Friday or Monday. There is a possibility the trial will conclude next week, Bellis told the jury before they were excused for the weekend Thursday afternoon.
Immediate and sustained harassment
A team of attorneys representing the families have spent days carefully showcasing each Sandy Hook victim by allowing loved ones to speak about them and about the horror of discovering that some people thought the shooting never occurred. In some cases, family members told the jury about being confronted in person and online by people who thought they were lying about what happened.
The Parkers said on the stand Wednesday that they had received vile Facebook comments on a page set up to honor their 6-year-old daughter that included “we’re coming after you.”
Within hours of the tragedy unfolding, Jones had questioned if the shooting that killed six educators and 20 children was a “hoax” staged by crisis actors and repeatedly targeted Robbie Parker and other Sandy Hook family members in his Infowars broadcasts, attorneys for the families said.
Matthew Soto, the youngest sibling of slain teacher Victoria “Vicki” Soto and their mother Donna Soto spoke of her love of education Thursday morning and the aftermath of the killings when people began doubting she was actually dead.
Her brother, the youngest of four, had to be home schooled for two years while in high school to escape fears that his classmates were questioning whether he had lost his sister in the shootings, he said. Matthew Soto recalled on the stand one instance while he was a college sophomore studying to become a teacher that a professor had asked the class if they believed the Sandy Hook shootings had occurred.
Some classmates didn’t raise their hand, he said. He dropped the class immediately and had to take it with a different professor, he said. He was 15 when his sister died, he said. He remembers being proud when President Barack Obama came to Connecticut to speak with the families of the victims. Obama had called his sister a hero, he said. He made a post on Facebook telling his friends about the encounter but within hours his page was inundated with nasty remarks questioning if his sister actually ever existed.
“There were posts saying I wasn’t real, my family wasn’t real, my sister wasn’t real,” he said. “At 15, I didn’t know how to process that.”
The Parkers tried to get on with their lives and escape the followers of Alex Jones by moving across country to the Pacific Northwest, Robbie Parker told the jury. But the image of him smiling seconds before he gave a statement on Emilie’s death the day after the shootings followed him, in part because Jones kept replaying the moment and mocking Robbie Parker on his Infowars platform.
In videos of Jones’ commentary shown to the jury repeatedly between Robbie Parker’s testimony Thursday, Jones can be seen calling the grieving father a “method actor.” In another clip that aired in 2016 around the time Robbie Parker was confronted by the man in Seattle, Jones calls him “a worse actor than Glenn Beck,” a conservative political commentator. In the same video, Jones calls Robbie Parker “disgusting.”
For years Robbie Parker internalized the horrific comments of Jones’ followers, fearing that he had brought on their scorn for his family and all the Sandy Hook families by the one statement he had publicly made trying to memorialize his daughter the day after she died, he said.
It wasn’t until he had a conversation with parents who had lost a child in the Parkland, Fla. high school shooting that he realized that Jones had targeted other people with similar false claims, he said. “It’s the same playbook, he’s doing it again,” Robbie Parker told the jury.
The conversation was a catalyst for him, Robbie Parker said. “It broke open the gate that I had kept everything behind,” he said. He thought about how bitter it was to have to deal with Jones and his followers who were denying his daughter’s death when all he wanted to do was grieve her loss, he said.
“There is something I can do for them,” Robbie Parker said of the Parkland family. “I can fight this fight, I can stand up and I can say something. I can fight this,” he told the jury.