Elizabeth Williamson

Ten families are pursuing lawsuits against Jones over his role in spreading bogus claims about the shooting, including that the victims’ families were actors in a plot to confiscate firearms from Americans. The families have endured death threats, stalking and online abuse.

Jones, a far-right provocateur and owner of Infowars, a radio show and website on which he sells diet supplements, survivalist gear and gun paraphernalia, has come under growing scrutiny during the past year and has lost access to much of his online audience. Facebook, Twitter, Apple and YouTube have all banned him, and a recent deal for his show to stream on Roku was revoked last month after public outrage.

The suits by the Sandy Hook families have advanced on several fronts in recent weeks.

A Texas judge on Jan. 25 ordered Jones and representatives of his company to submit to questioning by lawyers for Scarlett Lewis, the mother of Jesse Lewis, one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. The judge also granted access to Jones’ relevant business records and denied his lawyer’s motion to keep the records sealed.

In Connecticut, a judge ordered Infowars representatives and business partners to testify, and a ruling is expected as soon as mid-February on the families’ request to depose Jones and several Infowars “reporters” and associates.

They include Wolfgang Halbig, a former school administrator and Infowars contributor who for years has deluged Newtown officials with open records requests, demanding, among other things, records from the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45-60 gallons of blood.”

Some families of the victims have been subjected to years of harassment from people who have embraced the bogus crisis-actor theory promoted by Jones.

Robbie and Alissa Parker’s eldest daughter, Emilie, 6, died in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that killed six adults as well as the 20 first-graders.

In October 2016 in Seattle, Parker was walking to meet his family at a hotel, he said, when a middle-age man, dressed in khakis and a sport coat, approached him. The man, Parker said, asked if he had lost a child at Sandy Hook.

“Yes, my daughter,” Parker responded, offering his hand. The man ignored it, and instead spewed obscenities at him, Parker said.

The man trailed him, “jabbering in my ear,” Parker recalled in an interview, as he walked for blocks, trying to put distance between the harasser and his family.

“It was absolute venom,” said Parker, who is a plaintiff in one of three defamation suits against Jones. “He was absolutely disgusted with the person that he believed that I was.”

Jones did not respond to requests for comment. His lawyer, Marc Randazza, acknowledged the series of decisions in favor of the families, but said, “If you’re keeping score here, this is just the coin toss.”

Jones’ role in spreading baseless conspiracies about the families began within days of the shooting.

The night after the shooting, Parker had agreed to meet a news crew in front of a Newtown church to share a statement about Emilie. Surprised to find a sea of waiting reporters and cameras, he gasped out a nervous laugh before stepping forward to speak.

“This world is a better place because she has been in it,” he said, his voice cracking.

The footage ricocheted among conspiracy theorists, and Jones seized on it. “He’s laughing, and then he goes over and starts basically breaking down and crying,” Jones told his followers, according to court documents. “This needs to be investigated. They’re clearly using this to go after our guns.”

On another show, Jones mocked Parker’s emotions as “method acting.”

Randazza said the issue was not one of taste but of Jones’ First Amendment rights.

“If we’re going to reset the rules about what you’re allowed to say, then let’s reset them for everyone,” Randazza said. “And I don’t think anybody would be happy with that.”

Jones, once an obscure radio personality, gained national visibility in 2015, when Donald Trump appeared on his show as a presidential candidate, praising his “amazing” reputation. Jones has invited a number of Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists on his show, shared video footage and some families’ photos and personal information.

Trump has echoed Jones’ claims that establishment media companies have conspired to silence conservative voices online, and in November, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders used a misleading Infowars video to bolster the administration’s claims that a CNN reporter had manhandled a White House aide.

As the lawsuits inch toward trial, Jones is fighting to shield his records and himself. Last week the Connecticut Supreme Court rejected his appeal, letting stand the lower court’s ruling granting access to his records. Also last week, Jones’ lawyers and Halbig, who is representing himself, filed a request to change the location of an eventual jury trial from Fairfield County, which encompasses Newtown, to a Connecticut county more distant from the scene of the shooting.

The families are asserting that the case is about preventing harmful falsehoods from proliferating in the “post-truth” ecosystem of the internet.

“This was not journalism. It was marketing; Jones used these lies to sell his Infowars brand products for profit,” the families’ Connecticut lawyers wrote in court documents. The families are represented by Koskoff Koskoff &amp; Bieder in Connecticut, and by Farrar &amp; Ball in Texas.

Though Infowars and its affiliates are private and do not report financial results, a 2018 New York Times investigation found that, in 2014, Infowars’ revenue was more than $20 million a year, according to testimony Jones provided in an unrelated court case. Jones recently claimed revenue of up to $50 million, saying on his show that it “all goes to lawyers.”

This past week, police arrested a man suspected of stalking Emilie Parker’s family sporadically for years, sending letters that terrified them, because they realized he knew where they lived.

Authorities said the man, Kevin Purfield, 51, of Portland, Oregon, was arrested on stalking charges after he repeatedly called and wrote the editor of The Oregonian, asserting that its reporting on Sandy Hook and other mass shootings was false, because they never happened. Purfield was imprisoned in 2013 for harassing victims’ families after the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. When his probation ended, he resumed harassing the Parkers, Parker said.

Parker and his family joined the legal effort against Jones only after speaking with a family whose daughter died in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 in Parkland, Florida.

“The mom said, ‘My husband did a media interview, and now he just gets attacked online by all these conspiracy theorists,'” Parker said.

“I thought, ‘These people aren’t going away,'” he said. “It’s time for us to see what we can do about it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/us/politics/alex-jones-sandy-hook.html" id="0765d65f-363f-3b77-a765-6e60e71a8bf1">The New York Times</a>.

Families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims have won a series of victories in their defamation suits against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that would open Jones’ business records to them and compel him to speak under oath.

Jones Suffers Setbacks in Suits by Families of Sandy Hook Victims

Soon after the Dec. 14, 2012, mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Jones, the right-wing provocateur, began spreading outlandish theories that the killing of 20 first-graders and six educators was staged by the government and victims’ families as part of an elaborate plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms.

Many of the most noxious claims originated in the mind of Halbig, a retired Florida public school official who became fixated on what he called “this supposed tragedy” at Sandy Hook. Court records and a previously unreleased deposition given by Jones in one of a set of defamation lawsuits brought against him by the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims show how he and Halbig used each other to pursue their obsession and promote it across the internet.

Over several years, Jones gave Halbig’s views an audience by inviting him to be a guest on Infowars, his radio and online show. Infowars gave Halbig a camera crew and a platform for fundraising, even as Halbig repeatedly visited Newtown, demanding thousands of pages of public records, including photos of the murder scene, the children’s bodies and receipts for the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45 to 60 gallons of blood.”

Given practical support and visibility by Jones, Halbig harassed families of the victims and other residents of Newtown, and promoted a baseless tale that Avielle Richman, a first-grader killed at Sandy Hook, was still alive.

The deposition and its details about Jones’ operation and his interactions with Halbig was made public Friday, days after Avielle Richman’s father, Jeremy Richman, killed himself in Newtown’s Edmond Town Hall, where Avielle Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to brain science that the family established in their daughter’s name, had an office.

The deposition and records are part of a defamation lawsuit against Jones brought by Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis died at Sandy Hook, moving forward in Texas. The families of 10 Sandy Hook victims are suing Jones, Infowars, and associates such as Halbig in four lawsuits, one in Connecticut brought by eight victims’ families and a first responder, and three in Texas brought by the parents of two more victims.

In the videotaped deposition, conducted this month, Jones says under oath that his sources for reports aired on Infowars include conspiracy theorists like Halbig, random emailers and anonymous users on the chat room 4chan. Jones claims the same First Amendment protection provided traditional news media for his false claims.

Jones acknowledged in the deposition that Halbig had been a considerable source of information for him about Sandy Hook. Asked by a lawyer for the families if he would agree that Halbig was “a raving lunatic,” Jones responded: “He seemed very credible and put together earlier on, but — I can’t remember the exact number — he seemed to get agitated about four years ago, three years ago.”

The heightened profile Halbig gained through Jones and his skepticism about mass shootings drew him into the orbit of the National Rifle Association, as well. On Feb. 15, 2018, the day after 17 people died in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Mark Richardson, a program officer for the NRA, emailed Halbig to stir doubts about the facts of the shooting, according to a document in the Texas lawsuit that was first reported by HuffPost.

Referring to Sandy Hook, Richardson wrote to Halbig that “there is so much more to this story,” wrongly speculating in the message that the Parkland shooter “was not alone.”

Halbig, 72, lives in a gated community in Florida with his wife and a white Havanese dog named Coco. He calls himself a “national school safety consultant” and former Florida state trooper, though his résumé suggests he held the trooper job for at most a year in the mid-1970s. A 1999 Orlando Sentinel report quotes him as Seminole County public schools’ security director, saying a school shooting “can happen any time, anywhere.”

Halbig displays a folksy affect, and frequently says that as soon as his demands for information are met he can “get back to my life with my grandchildren.” But when thwarted, Halbig publishes the personal information of his targets, spurring torrents of abuse and threats.

“I’ve said nobody died,” Halbig said in an interview last month, but “I’ve never ever been given the documents to form a true and honest opinion. We want to know the truth so we can teach other school districts to prevent this.” Halbig did not respond to emails and telephone messages requesting comment for this article.

While not the only person to stalk and harass the families, Halbig has been particularly relentless. And as Infowars boosted Halbig’s profile, the victims’ family and Newtown officials have struggled to stop him. He repeatedly has asked Newtown educators to give him the identities of children from the Sandy Hook choir who performed in a salute to the victims at the 2013 Super Bowl, seeking to “prove” Avielle Richman and other dead children attended.

In 2015 police stopped Halbig and an Infowars crew from filming residents and children outside St. Rose of Lima Catholic church and school in Newtown. Exhibits in the Texas case viewed by The Times include a letter from an official at the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, ordering Halbig to stay away.

Halbig sent reams of rambling, misspelled emails to Infowars and others asserting that Avielle Richman is living under an assumed name with another family in Newtown, repeatedly naming the other girl online, the families’ lawyers said.

In the wake of Richman’s suicide, his family has appealed for privacy, and police have not released the contents of a note he left. But his death has surfaced more outrage from the Sandy Hook families about the harassment they have endured, and calls to do more to stop it.

Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse Lewis died in the same Sandy Hook classroom as Avielle, said that for more than six years, the shooting has been “a constantly publicized event, a political agenda and then you become a target of this conspiracy stuff? It has a tremendous effect on you.”

At the time of his death Richman and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, were among eight Sandy Hook victims’ families suing Jones, Halbig and Infowars for defamation in Connecticut.

Halbig has attended hearings on his public records requests in Newtown with an Infowars camera crew in tow. He has repeatedly posted photos of Avielle and a girl who currently lives in Newtown online, with an “expert” analysis contending the images depict the same child.

Nelba Marques-Greene, whose daughter Ana perished at Sandy Hook, called Halbig “a certified lunatic” on Twitter after he posted harassing messages to her last month. “He’s been asking for pics and dash cam crap forever,” she wrote. “These aren’t bots. These are real people. I’m like- for real you think we faked this? You think first responders did? What a depraved mind. Depraved.”

Another parent, Leonard Pozner, whose son Noah died in the same classroom as Ana, reported the abuse, and after six years of appeals, Twitter suspended Halbig’s account last month. Pozner founded the HONR Network, a nonprofit combating online hate, after Noah was targeted by the conspiracy theorists.

Halbig has raised at least $100,000 to finance his records quest, according to Pozner, whose HONR Network volunteers reported Halbig’s activities to GoFundMe, successfully getting his fundraising page taken down.

In a 2015 email to Infowars’ news director, Rob Dew, Halbig asks him to thank “Infowars Nightly News” host David Knight “for allowing me the interview. It has raised $1545.00 since last night.”

Pozner at first tried to engage Halbig, asking to speak with him in a 2014 email. He received a response, viewed by The Times, from Kelley Watt, one of Halbig’s fellow hoaxers. “Wolfgang does not wish to speak with you unless you exhume Noah’s body and prove to the world you lost your son.”

Halbig helped spread a 100-page background check containing Pozner’s addresses, relatives’ addresses, and Social Security number among the hoaxer community. Pozner and Noah’s mother, Veronique de la Rosa, live in hiding as a result of harassment.

In his deposition, Jones acknowledged that some of what Halbig and others were telling him about what happened at Sandy Hook “was not accurate.” But he also said that “retired FBI agents and other people and people high up in the Central Intelligence Agency have told me there is a cover-up in Sandy Hook.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/alex-jones-infowars-sandy-hook.html" id="d4fd7b8f-1208-304e-a9ad-f7df4b8d805e">The New York Times</a>.

How Alex Jones and Infowars Helped a Florida Man Stalk Sandy Hook Families

In the world of conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones and Wolfgang Halbig fueled each other’s darkest tendencies.

Given practical support and visibility by Jones, Halbig hounded families of the victims and other residents of Newtown, and promoted a baseless tale that Avielle Richman, a first-grader killed at Sandy Hook, was still alive.

The deposition and its details about Jones’ operation and his interactions with Halbig was made public Friday, days after Avielle’s father, Jeremy Richman, killed himself in Newtown’s Edmond Town Hall, where Avielle Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to brain science that the family established in their daughter’s name, had an office.

The deposition and records are part of a defamation lawsuit against Jones brought by Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis died at Sandy Hook, moving forward in Texas. The families of 10 Sandy Hook victims are suing Jones, Infowars, and associates such as Halbig in four separate lawsuits, one in Connecticut brought by eight victims’ families and a first responder, and three in Texas brought by the parents of two more victims.

Halbig frequently says that as soon as his demands for information are met he can “get back to my life with my grandchildren.” But when unsuccessful in getting the information he is seeking, Halbig publishes the personal information of his targets, spurring torrents of abuse and threats.

While not the only person to pursue and torment the families, Halbig has been particularly relentless. And as Infowars raised Halbig’s profile, the victims’ family and Newtown officials have struggled to stop him. He repeatedly has asked Newtown educators to give him the identities of children from the Sandy Hook choir who performed in a salute to the victims at the 2013 Super Bowl, seeking to “prove” Avielle and other dead children attended.

In 2015, police stopped Halbig and an Infowars crew from filming residents and children outside St. Rose of Lima Catholic church and school in Newtown. Exhibits in the Texas case viewed by The Times include a letter from an official at the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, ordering Halbig to stay away.

In the wake of Richman’s suicide, his family has appealed for privacy, and police have not released the contents of a note he left. There is no public evidence of a link between the suicide and the activities of Halbig and Jones. But his death has surfaced more outrage from the Sandy Hook families about the harassment they have endured, and calls to do more to stop it.

At the time of his death, Richman and his wife, Jennifer Hensel, were among eight Sandy Hook victims’ families suing Jones, Halbig and Infowars for defamation in Connecticut.

Nelba Marques-Greene, whose daughter Ana perished at Sandy Hook, called Halbig “a certified lunatic” on Twitter after he posted harassing messages to her last month. “ I’m like- for real you think we faked this?” she wrote. “You think first responders did? What a depraved mind.”

With the Aid of Infowars, He Waged a Campaign to Hound Sandy Hook Families

TV Martí, which aims broadcasts at Cuba, aired a segment in May that called financier and Democratic donor George Soros, a longtime opponent of authoritarianism, “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals.”

Voice of America, the flagship of U.S. government efforts to promote its values abroad, was rocked in October when 15 of its journalists were fired or disciplined after an internal investigation found they accepted “brown envelopes,” or bribes, passed to them by a Nigerian official.

And only weeks later, Voice of America fired the chief of its Mandarin-language section after a billionaire Chinese exile who is championed by some on the U.S. right and is known for making unsubstantiated charges against Beijing was promised a three-hour live broadcast.

The debacles are the latest problems that for years have plagued the government’s efforts to meld journalism and political messaging across its array of radio and television channels around the world.

And they suggested that under President Donald Trump, the broadcasts are at risk of greater ideological tilt as more political appointees eventually join the organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Trump’s nominee as chief executive of the global government media agency is Michael Pack, who runs a conservative filmmaking business out of his house in suburban Washington. He declined to be interviewed.

Pack would join a couple of other Trump loyalists in the operation who some employees say have already shown a clear political tilt in their approach to broadcasting. Among those working in the Cuba office, for example, is Jeffrey Shapiro, a former Breitbart News writer who played a prominent role in a politically charged battle over the agency’s direction this year. Shapiro, an acolyte of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.

Pack, who is awaiting Senate confirmation, has collaborated on films with Bannon, a former head of Breitbart News, and has asserted that liberal political correctness is stifling the documentary film industry. If confirmed, he would hold considerable power. Recent legislation concentrates authority with the agency’s chief executive and would replace its current bipartisan board with an advisory council.

The current top managers, appointed in the Obama administration and drawn largely from traditional media backgrounds, expect to lose their jobs if Pack comes in. They include the agency’s current chief executive, John Lansing, a journalist and former president of Scripps Networks, and Amanda Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who runs Voice of America. For now, though, they have intensified its efforts to encourage professionalism, reinforce ethical standards and remind staff of safeguards against political interference.

The agency’s work, and the episodes that suggested an ideological shift to the right from some staff members even before Trump’s team takes full control, have drawn particular scrutiny after signals from the president that he would like to see the government play a bigger role in developing a message separate from the news media.

In a Twitter post last month, Trump criticized the way CNN portrays the country and raised the possibility of the United States’ starting “our own Worldwide Network to show the World the way we really are, GREAT!”

At risk from the recent missteps and the potential for Trump to impose his own self-interested vision of news, media analysts say, is the agency’s brand as an objective, trusted source of information in nations where freedom of the press is under attack. Reports by the government network’s 3,500 journalists reach more than 345 million people in 100 countries each week.

“What’s at stake here is the credibility of the United States as a beacon of information, free speech and truth,” said Frank Sesno, a former broadcast journalist and the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. “If we go down the road of turning our international broadcasting into a product that appears to be manipulated or becomes a conspiracy network or an apology network for anyone, we will lose stature and standing as a country.”

The agency’s journalists are legally shielded from political meddling, but it is unclear how those protections would be enforced. For decades, an uneasy mix of politics and journalism has led to management problems, turf battles and inertia. In congressional testimony in 2013, Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, called the agency “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.”

Lansing took over as chief executive in 2015, after a management restructuring. He, Bennett and a team of seasoned journalists have boosted the networks’ global weekly audience by more than 100 million and developed models for measuring effect. They have expanded their use of platforms from encrypted live broadcasting to shortwave radio to push content into countries that jam or ban U.S. programming.

Current Time, a network broadcasting news, features and documentaries for Russian speakers, started in 2017. Polygraph and Faktograph are new websites aimed at combating a torrent of disinformation by Russia state-controlled media. A new Persian-language service, VOA365, begins broadcasting early next year.

As autocratic governments bar, detain and harass the agency’s journalists, it has been deploying freelancers in alias and sending reporters to remote areas to cover protests, national disasters and elections outside the immediate reach of authorities.

But change has been difficult, as the spate of recent journalistic and ethical problems has shown, leaving some employees concerned that the Trump administration or its allies could exploit vulnerabilities as an excuse to reshape the agency’s mission.

“Is this going to be fuel for people who want to take us in a very different direction?” Bennett said of the recent scandals. “Who knows?”

Lansing says he has experienced no high-level interference, and he pushed back on reports of discord and nervousness among career staff. But he and his team acknowledge that in a global, federally funded enterprise whose employees embrace a variety of views, there is clear potential for political views to become an issue.

This year, reports emerged that Shapiro, the Trump administration adviser, had allied with a longtime agency executive, Andre Mendes, in an effort to position themselves as Trump-era leaders in the agency.

Mendes subsequently transferred to the Commerce Department, but Shapiro remains in the Cuba office, which he has reportedly accused of sympathizing with the communist government in Havana.

After Voice of America’s Mandarin service chief, Sasha Gong, was put on leave following the live interview with the Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, she appeared, while still on the federal payroll, in “Trump@War,” a documentary directed by Bannon.

Gong was fired last month. She is contesting her dismissal.

The agency’s standards editor, Steven Springer, a former CNN journalist, said he has struggled to instill a culture of political balance in the Cuba office, where the broadcast maligning Soros originated.

He said that at times “people don’t quite understand certain little aspects of how journalism is supposed to work,” including basics like sourcing, attribution and avoiding plagiarism.

Tomás Regalado, the White House-appointed director of the Cuba office, is a former Spanish-language journalist who was previously the mayor of Miami and said he was recommended for the post by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Regalado said that when he arrived at the broadcaster in June, “Some of the hosts of the programs asked me the first thing, ‘Can we call Raúl Castro a dictator?’ And I said, ‘Of course. Go ahead. Bring it on.’ ”

Regalado was not involved in the anti-Soros broadcast and called it “a nightmare.” But in an interview he said Judicial Watch, the conspiracy-minded conservative group relied on by the broadcast for some of the false or misleading material it contained, was a “good source.”

The piece about Soros was presented by a TV Martí journalist, Isabel Cuervo. The multipart broadcast leveled unfounded, anti-Semitic claims against Soros, including that he ignited the 2008 financial crisis and that his Open Society Foundation is “a facade for investing in and looting countries.”

The material was distributed on Martí television, radio and its website for days. The broadcast drew scrutiny only in October, after a pipe bomb was sent to Soros’ home.

Lansing wrote letters of apology to Soros and the Open Society leadership and ordered an investigation into the episode and a review of all Martí content aired over the past year by outside journalists. A report on the broadcast is due out in early January.

Regalado said that two contractors have been fired and four federal employees suspended, including Wilfredo Cancio, Martí's former news director, and Cuervo, who continues to display the broadcasts on her personal Facebook page. Links to the broadcasts still appear on Martí's website. Soros’ representatives are calling for additional oversight of the agency.

Bennett said that it was important that the problems, although embarrassing, be made public.

“We want to use these incidents to say, ‘Here’s our standards, and having these principles is really important,’ ” Bennett said. “It’s a fight worth fighting.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/us/politics/voice-of-america-trump.html" id="7ae65d08-d832-33d7-a797-93448ac15bac">The New York Times</a>.

Troubled by Lapses, Government's Voice to the World Braces for New Trump Management

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government’s broadcast service to the world has a problem: It is becoming the news itself.

And also, she said, “to say my final goodbye to you.”

Mackenzie’s mother, Brenda Bushey, blames her daughter’s fears on monthly active-shooter drills at Sheehan High. “I understand they’re trying to think about the children’s best interests,” Bushey said in an interview. “But you can’t help but think of how it’s affecting them.”

Nearly every American public school now conducts lockdown drills — 96% in 2015 and 2016 — according to the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Law enforcement officials and many school administrators say they are crucial for preparing and safeguarding students, but methods vary widely and now include drills that child trauma experts say do little more than terrify already anxious children.

“A whole new cottage industry has emerged where people who don’t know anything about kids are jumping in and adapting protocols for groups like police officers or people preparing for combat,” said Bruce D. Perry, founder of the ChildTrauma Academy, whose clinical team assists maltreated and traumatized children through counseling, research and education. As a result, Perry said in an interview, “The number of developmentally uninformed, child-uninformed and completely stupid ideas is mind-numbing.”

The news media attention and policy debate surrounding school shootings, and the heartbreaking details of massacres like Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland, heighten the perceived risk among parents and students alike. After the shooting last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, nearly 60% of American teenagers said they were very or somewhat worried about a mass shooting at school, a similar proportion as parents, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

In fact, while the vast majority of gun-related homicides involving children occur in the United States, only a tiny percentage occur on school grounds. But August’s spate of mass shootings, including in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Odessa and Midland, Texas, have lent urgency to a flood of new preparedness efforts.

“Every shooting event brings a spike in contacts by people who say ‘we need to be doing something,’” said Greg Crane, founder of the ALICE Training Institute, which teaches seminars for school officials and law enforcement, who then run their own drills.

In mid-August in Muncie, Indiana, school officials running a back-to-school emergency preparation class for children as young as 11 played a 911 recording of a teacher’s agonized pleas for students to hide during the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado.

A week later in Florida’s Volusia County, police officers videotaped their arrest of a 15-year-old boy who made a shooting threat while playing Minecraft online, and then released to the public as “a warning” the recording of the child in handcuffs and his weeping mother.

Public school officials in Jefferson County, Colorado, distributed buckets and kitty litter to use as makeshift toilets during an extended lockdown, and felt-tip markers for marking the time a tourniquet was applied on the arms of potential victims.

The number of armed assailant drills in American public schools increased after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, when the Education Department changed its active-shooter response recommendations from sheltering in place to “options-based” approaches like “run, hide, fight” — training created for adults faced with workplace violence.

The security industry responded, promoting and selling programs that schools and local law enforcement officers adapt with fake blood, menacing masked “shooters” and simulated gunfire. Last year at Short Pump Middle School in Short Pump, Virginia, school officials staged an unannounced active-shooter drill featuring multiple fire alarms, loud noises and unseen people jiggling the handles of classroom doors.

Thinking it was a real attack, students wept and texted goodbyes. Afterward, parents were furious.

Crane, the founder of ALICE and a former Texas law enforcement officer, said that such drills are necessary and could make the difference between life and death. ALICE is an acronym for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.

“The training is not designed to scare anyone,” he said in an interview. “I don’t have to make it real to get you to understand how the strategies work.”

In guidance updated in 2017, the National Association of School Psychologists and the National Association of School Resource Officers acknowledged that such drills had the potential to empower staff and save lives. But the groups warned that “without proper caution, they can risk causing harm to participants.”

Psychologists and many educators say frequent, realistic drills contribute to anxiety and depression in children, and they have begun urging school systems to rethink active-shooter training for children and to teach preventive measures, like recognizing and seeking help for troubled classmates.

“The best way to make school safer is to focus on proven policies and programs instead of extreme drills that rob children of their belief that schools are in fact extremely safe places,” Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, said in an interview.

Perry of the ChildTrauma Academy said that as school shooting drills proliferated during the past two decades, research into their effectiveness failed to keep pace. Children’s brains and coping skills are still developing, he said, and not all children react to stress in the same way, complicating efforts to study how well drills work.

“People tend to forget that if your child reacts to a drill in a way that’s tolerable, it doesn’t mean that others do,” he said. For some children, intense preparedness exercises “can be so overwhelming that they tune out, or can’t process it.”

Active-shooter training, he said, should focus on adults. “If the teachers in the situation stay relatively calm, then the children will literally reflect that emotional state, and follow through with whatever they’re asked to do,” he said. Scare tactics, he added, “do not make kids more thoughtful, compassionate or empathic. It does the opposite.”

Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, a former Sandy Hook teacher, describes in her memoir, “Choosing Hope,” how she tapped similar skills to save 15 students during the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting, which killed 20 children and six educators.

Hiding with her students inside her classroom’s tiny bathroom while shooting raged outside, Roig-DeBellis recalled reminding herself that first graders would model their teacher’s behavior.

“If I panic, they’ll all panic,” she wrote, adding, “It’s a very difficult thing, putting on a cool front in the midst of what I know is life and death.”

Alice Forrester, the chief executive of the Clifford Beers Child Clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, was part of a team that helped notify and counsel Sandy Hook victims’ families, and helped devise an emotional health program for surviving children returning to school. She also served on the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, a multidisciplinary body whose final report recommended a range of measures to help reduce the chances of a similar tragedy.

Early on, the commission focused on school security. “Then we heard from Dr. Marisa Randazzo, one of the authors of the Safe Schools Study,” Forrester said. The 1999 shooting deaths of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School prompted the study, by the Secret Service and the Education Department, of 37 prior episodes of school violence.

The agencies found “that in almost every instance, people had concern about the shooter and that the shooter had indicated need for help,” Forrester said.

An additional 2008 report, known as the Bystander Study, found that people who knew in advance about an attacker’s plans were friends, classmates or siblings, suggesting attacks “might have been avoided with proper observation techniques and more open sharing of information.”

Many school drills “are done without a whole lot of thought, to show the public that we’re doing something,” said William Modzeleski, the former director of the Education Department’s Safe and Drug-Free Schools program, and an author of the 2008 report.

Communities need to create multidisciplinary assessment teams focused on violence prevention that “can conduct a thorough threat assessment in order to gain an understanding of the individual. They then can help the person get appropriate services,” Forrester said, countering threats long before “the shooter is right outside the door, and you’re under your desk.”

This article originally appeared in

When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect

WASHINGTON — After the first day of school at Mark T. Sheehan High School in Wallingford, Connecticut, Mackenzie Bushey, a 15-year-old junior, came home upset that a teacher enforced a no-cellphones policy by confiscating students’ phones before class. She needed her cell, Mackenzie told her family last month, to notify police should a gunman attack her school.

<h1>WASHINGTON — The U.S. Agency for Global Media, the government’s foreign broadcast service, already struggling to clean house after a series of scandals last year at flagship operations like Voice of America and TV Martí, is now being rocked by two new cases that have raised further questions about its journalistic and financial management.</h1>

In one, Tomás Regalado Jr., a reporter for TV Martí, which broadcasts into Cuba, and a cameraman for the network, Rodolfo Hernandez, were suspended amid allegations that they faked a mortar attack on Regalado during a broadcast from Managua, Nicaragua, last year.

That incident surfaced only days after Haroon Ullah, the former chief strategy officer at the global media agency, which operates Martí and foreign-language networks around the world, pleaded guilty on June 27 in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to stealing government property.

Ullah, a former deputy to the agency’s chief executive, John Lansing, admitted to fleecing the government of $37,000 between February and October last year by claiming reimbursements for expensive hotels he did not book, double-billing the government for official travel and forging a doctor’s note to allow him to fly business class. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

The new problems are unrelated to each other; in the case of Ullah, the agency said its internal controls flagged the expense fraud. But along with many others over the past two years, the scandals have brought intensified scrutiny and criticism to the agency, formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Created during World War II to be an objective, trusted source of information in nations where freedom of the press is under attack, the agency has 3,500 journalists who reach more than 345 million people in 100 countries each week.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media initiated an investigation into the allegedly faked segment at TV Martí “immediately after these concerns about the footage in question were raised,” the agency said in a statement. “As the agency has made clear, we have zero tolerance for failing to honor clear and universally accepted standards of professional journalism. We also owe it to all involved to conduct a thorough and clear investigation to get all of the facts.”

“I take seriously any breach of professional journalistic standards at any USAGM network. I have asked for a thorough and swift investigation,” Lansing said in an emailed statement. “I expect all USAGM networks to adhere to truthfulness, fairness and accountability in their reporting.”

Regalado is the son of Tomás Regalado Sr., the director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and TV Martí. The senior Regalado was hired last year and said he would help raise the outlet’s professional standards after it came to light that Martí had previously aired multiple broadcasts calling the financier and Democratic donor George Soros, a longtime opponent of authoritarianism, “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals” and other slurs.

Results of an investigation into those broadcasts, released in May, found that “the video, radio and web content of Radio Televisión Martí falls far short” of the agency’s ethical standards and stated mission and in a misguided way mixes propaganda with the foreign policy objectives of the United States. Several staff members and contractors were dismissed for their roles in the anti-Soros broadcast.

The younger Regalado did not immediately return phone calls or respond to a text message seeking comment. Hernandez declined to comment, citing the investigation. The allegedly faked broadcast from Nicaragua has been removed from Martí’s website.

Rare for the Trump era, the agency is still run by Obama-era executives, including Lansing, a journalist and former president of Scripps Networks, and Amanda Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and editor who leads Voice of America. President Donald Trump has nominated his own choice to lead the agency — Michael Pack, a conservative documentary filmmaker and associate of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former strategist — but the nomination awaits a vote in the Senate.

The Regalado family is active in Florida politics. The elder Regalado is a former Spanish-language journalist and mayor of Miami. He said in an interview last year that he was recommended for the job by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The younger Regalado worked at Martí before his father took the job there.

In an interview, the senior Regalado said that he had raised questions about the appearance of nepotism before taking the top job at Martí. “Legal counsel said there is no issue because he was there before, and I would not ever be his supervisor,” he said.

Regalado declined to speak about the investigation, saying he had recused himself from it. He added that he planned to continue in his role at Martí.

The disputed report from Nicaragua showed the younger Regalado reporting from a mostly empty street when a small explosion occurred behind him. Regalado’s Facebook page displays an Instagram photo that appears to be from the Martí broadcast, saying it was taken “in the streets of Managua near the university after a mortar landed less than 2 feet away from me, shot by the rebels from the back of a make shift wall.”

Footage aired last week on the Spanish-language media outlet CiberCuba and others shows three young men, two of them with their faces obscured by a balaclava and a bandanna, placing a small explosive into a pipe and lighting its fuse. The camera follows the device as it arcs from the pipe and explodes with a small bang in an area behind Regalado, who then jogs forward. Laughter can be heard. Regalado’s Facebook post and other materials were viewed by The New York Times.

In December, the Agency for Global Media awarded Hernandez, a cameraman with decades of experience, its David Burke Distinguished Journalism Award for “his intrepid determination and enthusiastic reporting from Colombia, Nicaragua” and other places. A videotaped tribute to Hernandez shows him traveling with Regalado, saying, “In Nicaragua, his reporting on the political demonstrations and government violence kept Cubans informed.”

Ullah, an expert in South Asia diplomacy, joined the agency in 2017 from the State Department. He was hired by Lansing, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to lead the agency in 2015.

Under Lansing’s leadership, the agency has introduced new coverage of Russia and Iran, while working to counter a string of ethical scandals.

Voice of America, the flagship of U.S. government efforts to promote its values abroad, was shaken in October when 15 of its journalists were fired or disciplined after an internal investigation found they accepted “brown envelopes,” or bribes, passed to them by a Nigerian official.

Weeks later, Voice of America fired the chief of its Mandarin-language section after a billionaire Chinese exile who is championed by some on the American right and is known for making unsubstantiated charges against Beijing was promised a three-hour live broadcast.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/politics/us-agency-for-global-media-scandals.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

New scandals rock government's foreign broadcasting service

In one, Tomás Regalado Jr., a reporter for TV Martí, which broadcasts into Cuba, and a cameraman for the network, Rodolfo Hernandez, were suspended amid allegations that they faked a mortar attack on Regalado during a broadcast from Managua, Nicaragua, last year.

Built with a $15 million grant from General Electric, the employer of the father of the gunman who killed Jesse, the center will open this summer as an anchor meant to bring the community together. But to Lewis and some others who lost family at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the new center feels more like a wound.

“It’s painful to see,” Lewis said, “because I know what I lost in order to pay for it.”

In the 6 1/2 years since the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history, more than $100 million in federal, state, corporate and private money flowed into this community of about 28,000 in southwestern Connecticut. While the tidal wave of aid bore witness to the power of human kindness, so much money engulfed the vulnerable, wounded Newtown that it inevitably sowed division. The town became a case study of how Americans’ material expressions of grief can become more an obstacle than an aid to recovery.

At the heart of the trouble was a question: Should donations in the aftermath of tragedy go to the victims’ families or be shared with the entire community?

After the shooting in December 2012, a dispute over that question broke out between the United Way and the families of some victims, and scars from that battle fed anger about the community center. Adding to the tension were donations that poured in to 77 recipients, including not only local charities, houses of worship and parent-teacher associations, but also ad hoc fundraising websites that were unprepared to track or distribute the largess.

Merchandise arrived by the truckload, including 60,000 teddy bears and more bicycles than Newtown has children. So many flowers and stuffed toys clogged intersections that the town gathered, composted and burned them, aiming to incorporate the resulting “sacred soil” into a memorial to the victims.

“Whether you have direct involvement in the tragedy or not, you’re hurting, and you’re going to have anger,” said Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, died at Sandy Hook. “If you throw money into that, then that is like gasoline on a fire.”

The families embraced acts directly memorializing their loved ones. Firefighters built 26 playgrounds dedicated to the victims in towns ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. Monte Frank, Newtown’s general counsel, founded “Team 26,” which each year makes a long-distance bicycle trek to other communities touched by gun violence; this month the group rode to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And virtually all of the relatives of the 26 who died established foundations or public service endeavors in their loved ones’ memories.

Newtown remains a lesson in the unintended consequences of well-intended generosity. Part of its legacy has been a shift in approach by other communities grappling with the fallout from mass shootings and attacks. Starting with the Boston Marathon bombings the year after Sandy Hook, civic leaders began bypassing established charities to set up independent, special-purpose funds devoted solely to helping the victims and the families of the dead.

“The American people have an incredible charitable impulse,” said Kenneth Feinberg, who administered the victim compensation funds after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and volunteered to adjudicate in Newtown. “But nobody knows exactly what to do when the money comes in.”

— Disbursement Disputes

“Our hearts are broken today, for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults that were lost,” President Barack Obama, struggling to maintain his composure, said in a televised statement hours after the shooting. He has called it the worst day of his presidency.

That same day — Dec. 14, 2012 — the United Way of Western Connecticut, which as an established nonprofit was able to immediately receive tax-deductible contributions, worked with Newtown Savings Bank to create the Sandy Hook School Support Fund. A United Way news release said the goal was to “provide support services to the families and community affected by this senseless tragedy.” Millions of dollars began rolling in.

The families were warned early on that there could be trouble. In the first days after the shooting, survivors of other mass tragedies contacted them to tell them that established charities like the United Way do not always transfer donations to the people most affected, but retain money for other, separate needs — after-school or jobs programs, for example.

They were right. Kim Morgan, the United Way chapter’s CEO, said at the time that her organization had solicited unrestricted gifts on purpose. It intended for the community to decide how best to spend the money, citing all Newtown residents’ long-term counseling needs.

Parker, the father of Emilie, was not happy. The United Way chapter “used our children’s names and photos to raise money, saying it was to support ‘the families of Newtown,’ and then they fought to give it to the entire community,” he said.

“Granted, there’s an argument that community services have to be really heightened after something like this. I agree with that,” he said. “But in my opinion, you can’t mislead the public to donate. I just felt like they weren’t being very transparent.”

Morgan, who still leads the United Way of Western Connecticut, declined to comment beyond saying that “we continue to be concerned and have compassion for everyone affected by this terrible tragedy.”

By March 2013, the United Way had collected more than $10 million and created the Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation, putting a board of five community leaders in charge of distributing the money. But the United Way retained an advisory role, and some families felt the organization would influence the outcome.

“I don’t want to paint anyone in a bad or negative picture,” said one board member, the Rev. Robert Weiss of St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, who officiated at the funerals of eight children. “It was a challenge. We were just five local citizens trying to do the best we could.”

The foundation scrutinized the thousands of donor notes and emails that came with the money to try to determine the donors’ intent, and by April reached a decision: $7.7 million would go to the families of the 26 victims, to two wounded educators and to 12 families of surviving children who were in classrooms where children and educators were killed. The remaining $3 million and any future donations would stay with the foundation.

The outcome did not satisfy all of the families, and Feinberg was brought in to arbitrate. Controversy raged into the summer of 2013, but by July, a committee led by a retired federal judge established a formula for allocating the $7.7 million among those directly affected, with the bulk of the money going to families of the dead children and educators.

The next month, the Connecticut attorney general released a letter saying the United Way’s decision to designate $7.7 million for victims’ families did not legally violate the donors’ intent. But he criticized the organization and Newtown Savings Bank for a lack of transparency.

“It was an abuse of the goodwill of Americans and the international community who thought that when they were giving, they were giving to the families,” Nelba Marquez-Greene, whose daughter Ana Grace died at Sandy Hook, said in an interview. “I don’t know anyone who cared about the money — nothing replaces our loved ones — it’s just that if you’re going to raise money, then it should go to victim families. Full stop.”

— Reflections on Charity

By November 2013, with the wounds from the United Way fight still fresh, General Electric announced its $15 million gift to Newtown to build “a central meeting space for the whole community.”

The company, then with its headquarters in neighboring Fairfield, Connecticut, employed many Newtown residents and had sent a team of GE executives to Newtown after the massacre to support overwhelmed town officials. But among some Sandy Hook parents, the nearly completed center stirs outrage.

“Do you know what it feels like to drive by a 15 million dollar center built ‘in honor’ of 12-14 for THE COMMUNITY when so many people are going without support?” Marquez-Greene wrote in March on Twitter. “It makes me angry. It’s shameful.”

Pat Llodra, who was Newtown’s first selectman on the day of the shooting, stood in her Sandy Hook kitchen recently, reflecting on the role of charity in promoting healing in Newtown.

“My heart is very much with the community center,” Llodra said, adding that most in Newtown agree. But in 2013, she favored rejecting GE’s money.

Llodra acknowledged “many missteps, a few ‘redos’ and doubts,” she said. “But this was balanced by the sense of trying to accomplish something worthwhile for the community.”

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Scarlett Lewis sees reminders of her son Jesse — who died at age 6 with 19 classmates and six educators in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting — in photographs on her refrigerator door, in portraits she painted of him from memory and now, uncomfortably, in the Newtown Community Center, a soaring new complex.