Sandy Hook

told me. Scarlett moved from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Sandy Hook in 1998. She grew up in Darien, Connecticut. An avid horsewoman and artist, she sought a quieter life in Sandy Hook with more room for both. She bought a picturesque spread on Great Ring Road, with a creamy yellow eighteenth-century clapboard house and a red barn for her horses, and named it Wild Rose Farm. Scarlett worked then for a technology firm in New York that had created a financial trading system, a job that involved visiting the financial houses that had flocked into Fairfield County. In 2000, two years after she moved to Sandy Hook, her son J.T. was born, but her relationship with his father frayed a few years later. Scarlett met Neil in the Blue Heron, an antique shop in Milford owned by her mother, Maureen, who had moved to Newtown to be near Scarlett and J.T. Neil had grown up in nearby Shelton and had a small construction business. They struck up a conversation about a tree that had come down on her farm, and Neil offered to remove it for her.

 

"Neil was really fun," Scarlett told me, a problem solver and good-natured partner in part-time farming. She wanted sheep and bought a "spinner's flock," one in every color. Thanks to inexperience and bad timing, they wound up raising lambs born in January inside the farmhouse, drying them and keeping them warm with a hair dryer. "We had lots of farm adventures," Scarlett said, laughing at the memory.

 

Their son, Jesse, was born in 2006. Neil and Scarlett split up when Jesse was a baby, but they shared parenting.

 

Jesse had deep brown, almond-shaped eyes, a broad smile, and a deep voice for a kid that age, bellowing "Heeeere's Jesse!" when he entered a room. He liked to play "army guys," wearing a flopping plastic camouflage helmet and rubber boots on missions around the farm, where he kept a shaggy burro named Turquoise, his pony named Chocolate, and his and J.T.'s drooling mastiff pup, Remington.

 

Jesse had staye

journalist at The New York Times, describes the collective delusion and malice of conspiracists who denied that the [Sandy Hook] shooting happened or asserted that it was a government plot to stoke anti-gun sentiment. . . . [It] also shows how these hoaxers, and the platforms that helped them, created a conspiratorial-industrial complex that has eroded American democracy. The Economist

The Sandy Hook school shooting was a national tragedy; in the decade that followed, it became a focus of many outrageous conspiracy theories driven by people like Alex Jones. This well-researched book takes a look at how these myths came to be and the fight against them. New York Post

"Essential reading." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

New York Times reporter Williamson s searing debut demonstrates that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had its roots in the deeply troubling efforts to claim that the 2012 massacre of twenty-six first-graders and staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax. . . . Williamson s years of research includes interviews with survivors of the school shooting, parents, and first responders, as well as analysis of court documents and other records. She has produced the definitive account of this dark chapter of American history. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An important book that is recommended for anyone concerned about the rise of conspiracy theories in American society, and how families are working to preserve their children s legacies in the aftermath of tragedy. Library Journal (starred review)

Readers concerned about misinformation and the health of democracy will be grateful for this superbly documented account, an outstanding achievement in nonfiction.   Booklist (starred review)

"It is obvious that Williamson began this book as an act of restitution for the families of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, subject to the despicable lies and attacks by Alex Jones and Infowars. But in recounting in agonizing detail the lies and their viral spread the kind of online-driven misinformation that would fuel the rise of Donald Trump and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 Sandy Hook becomes much more than a book about gun violence. It is an essential read about this country s terrifying free-fall into fascism."  Los Angeles Times

Important . . . A sober reminder that we have to trust each other and our institutions (even as we work to improve them). Without bonds of trust, our democracy dies." Houston Chronicle

[A] series of extraordinary portraits of online trolls who created a vast community centered on the lie that Sandy Hook was a hoax and its victims the actual perpetrators. Chicago Tribune

The Sandy Hook massacre . . . was horrific beyond words, but as Elizabeth Williamson vividly shows in her book, the tragedy unleashed an odious campaign by Alex Jones and others to prove that it had been faked for nefarious reasons. The author methodically traces the arc of this campaign and the damage it inflicted on families already devastated by grief, deftly portraying those who fought back against Jones and are succeeding in their battle against a rotted system that too often lets lies fly without consequence. Air Mail

"The central narrative of the book is the battle between fact and fiction." The New Republic
"A marvelous book . . . Equally wrenching are the stories of the parents in the days and hours leading up to the shooting and in its aftermath . . . Author Elizabeth Williamson goes on to detail how the hate driven by false news and media-hammered conspiracies has metastasized into the toxic political brew that put Trump in the White House and that we continue to suffer under." Daily Kos