Tampa Woman Believed Sandy Hook Was A Hoax
A Tampa woman is facing charges after making threats towards a parent of one of the children killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre.
Lucy Richards, 57, believed the massacre in Newtown, Conn. was staged. She now faces four counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce after sending four messages in January. The messages said things such as, “You gonna die. Death is coming to you real soon,” according to an indictment made public on Wednesday and obtained by the New York Times.
Lucy Richards. Photo: Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.
Each of the charges against Richards carry a maximum five-year sentence upon conviction.
The New York Times said the indictment stated the threats were sent to a parent recognized as “L.P.”, which allegedly refer to Lenny Pozner whose son, Noah, was the youngest of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Pozner now resides in Florida and works to expose the many conspiracy theorists who suggest the that the Obama administrations orchestrated the massacre using actors to further his gun-control agenda.
According to the United States attorney’s office in Miami, Richards’s belief “that the school shooting was a hoax and never happened allegedly motivated her to make the threats,” the office said in a statement to the New York Times.
While Richards is the first person to make threats towards Pozner, she’s not the first to criticize him. Pozner has filed complaints with law enforcement, private companies and the attorney general’s office about conspiracy theorists.
A September article in New York magazine said he also wrote a 165-page book raising questions about a champion of the hoax theory.
“People don’t understand what trolls are,” Pozner told that magazine. “If you don’t feed them, they don’t just go away.”
Last year Pozner wrote in an essay in The Sun-Sentinel newspaper about a Florida Atlantic University professor, James F. Tracy. When Pozner asked Tracy to stop posting pictures of Noah the professor sent him a certified letter asking for proof that the boy existed.
The tenured professor was soon fired and blamed Pozner for it.
Fake news has been a problem on the internet for some time, especially during the presidential election. Mark Barden lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, in Sandy Hook. He said he never received any threats nor encountered any conspiracy theorists, but knows they are out there.
