Sandy Hook Parents Go After Alex Jones

In the five years since the Sandy Hook shooting, Infowars host Alex Jones has repeatedly labeled the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax involving actors, ran a segment last April called "Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed," and accused CNN and Anderson Cooper of using a green screen to stage scenes. Now, the parents of two 6-year-old sons killed at the school are suing over defamation, with the two suits filed Monday saying the lies shoveled by Jones and Infowars (which the HuffPost notes is still running a story headlined "FBI Says No One Killed at Sandy Hook") have spurred death threats. Each suit is seeking more than $1 million in damages. Neil Heslin, father of one of the boys, also named Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer in his suit.

In a 2017 interview with Megyn Kelly, Heslin spoke of holding his dead son "with a bullet hole through his head." Shroyer said Heslin must be lying, because the children were ID'd through photos, not in person. Heslin counters that he absolutely did hold his son when the body was released to him for burial. As for the death threats, the HuffPost reports there's an Infowars element: Lucy Richards was last summer sentenced to five months in prison for leaving parent Leonard Pozner voicemails threatening death; his suit notes that her sentence barred her from visiting Infowars. The New York Times reports the suits were filed in Travis County District Court in Austin, where Jones resides, by Houston lawyer Mark Bankston. It's not Bankston's first defamation filing against Jones and Infowars: He filed such a suit in April over their false ID of a Massachusetts man as the Parkland school shooter. (More Alex Jones stories.)