Fact Checking “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”, Chapter Ten

“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”
Chapter Ten
By: “Dr. Eowyn” (aka Maria Hsia Chang) and James Fetzer

Chapter Ten is an interesting read — not because it suddenly delivers anything resembling compelling evidence (spoiler: it absolutely does not), but because its central claim was thoroughly debunked years ago by Metabunk, Snopes, USA Today, and plenty of others. To their credit — sort of — the authors even admit this right in the opening paragraph. And yet, for reasons known only to them, the chapter keeps going. What follows is James Fetzer and Maria Chang tripping over themselves in an attempt at a rebuttal that basically amounts to “nuh-uh.” Gripping stuff.

Aside from a truly bizarre detour involving Nancy Lanza’s supposed “real” identity, this mercifully short chapter (six pages total — three each!) is almost entirely devoted to clinging to the claim that the FBI itself admits no one died at Sandy Hook.

Their entire argument hinges on a fundamental misunderstanding of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.

Conspiracy theorists love pointing to the UCR summary showing zero murders reported by the Newtown Police Department in 2012. And since we know that at least 27 people were murdered in Newtown that year, they treat this as a smoking gun.

But the explanation is actually very simple.

UCR data is organized by reporting agency, not strictly by where a crime occurred. And in the case of Sandy Hook, the investigation was handled by the Connecticut State Police, not Newtown PD. That makes the state police the reporting agency, which means the murders appear under state totals, not Newtown’s.

This isn’t a clerical error. It’s how the system is designed.

The FBI’s own Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook spells this out clearly:

3. Federal agencies should report offenses within their investigative jurisdictions if they are not being reported by a local/state law enforcement agency.
4. When two or more local, state, tribal, or federal agencies are involved in the investigation of the same offense and there is a written or oral agreement defining the roles of the investigating agencies, the agreement must designate which agency will report the offense.
5. When two or more federal agencies are involved in the investigation of the same offense and there is no written or oral agreement defining their roles, the federal agency having lead or
   primary investigative jurisdiction should report the data. If there is uncertainty as to which is the lead or primary agency, the agencies must agree on which agency will report the offense.

That alone completely demolishes this claim from Nobody Died at Sandy Hook:

“After all, murders are reported in the communities or jurisdictions in which they have occurred, not on the basis of the agency or organization that investigates them.” pg. 172

That statement is simply false. The FBI has overseen the UCR program since 1930, and their own documentation directly contradicts it.

While local police often investigate and report murders, it’s neither required nor universal. Sandy Hook is one such exception — a fact personally confirmed to me by both the FBI’s Crime Stats staff and Connecticut’s DESPP Crime Analysis Unit. DESPP even pointed to another well-known example: the Petit family murders. That case, too, was handled by state police rather than local authorities.

And sure enough, the FBI’s 2007 UCR data for Connecticut shows only two murders for the Petits’ hometown of Cheshire:

Those two murders were unrelated — a February murder-suicide handled by Cheshire police. Because the Petit case was handled by state police, it appears under state totals, not Cheshire’s — despite occurring there.

Undeterred, Maria “Dr. Eowyn” Chang and Jim Fetzer try to salvage their claim by pointing readers to page 26 of Connecticut’s 2012 UCR report. Conveniently, they ignore the massive, full-page dedication to the Sandy Hook victims on page 4:

They also gloss over two more explicit references to the 27 victims on page 12:

And another on page 25:

But according to Fetzer and Chang, page 26 — and page 26 alone — reveals “the truth.” They write:

“At the intersection of ‘Murder’ with ‘<10’ (below 10 years of age) for 2012, you will find the number ‘0’!“

Technically correct — and completely misleading.

What they don’t mention (because they cropped it out) is that the table header clearly reads “Arrest Statistics.”

In other words, no one under the age of ten was arrested for murder in Connecticut in 2012. It says absolutely nothing about how many children were murdered. You’d think two supposedly highly educated “researchers” working together could avoid making an error this basic — unless, of course, it wasn’t an error.

They repeatedly insist this data reflects deaths:

“The Connecticut State Police submit information to the FBI that asserts 27 people died in Connecticut, but at the same time denies that they died anywhere in Connecticut.” pg 175

This is nonsense.

The claim relies on a fundamental misrepresentation of what UCR data is and how it works. This selective cropping and mislabeling is not accidental. Throughout the chapter, the authors repeatedly—and deliberately—conflate offenses reported, arrests made, and people killed, treating them as interchangeable concepts when they are very clearly not.

If UCR tables actually represented the number of people who “died” in a given jurisdiction, then fatal car crashes, drownings, workplace accidents, medical emergencies, and every other non-criminal death would all appear alongside murders. They do not—because that is not what the data measures. UCR tables track criminal offenses as reported by law enforcement agencies, not human mortality.

This isn’t unique to Sandy Hook. Virginia’s 2007 UCR data also appears to “omit” something rather significant: the 32 victims of the Virginia Tech massacre in Blacksburg, Virginia:

Yet James Fetzer—conveniently—considers Virginia Tech to be a real shooting.

According to the very logic Fetzer and Chang apply to Sandy Hook, those murders shouldn’t have happened either. But instead of reconsidering their premise, they simply ignore the contradiction. When the same reporting artifact undermines a shooting they accept as real, it suddenly ceases to matter.

Finally, we get this gem:

“It is a federal crime to report false statistics to the FBI, so the CTSP tacked on a new category of ‘State Police Misc.’ as though that solved the problem” pg. 173

Except there’s nothing “new” about it. The State Police Misc. category appears in every Connecticut UCR report going back to 1992. Of course, knowing Fetzer, it’s probably only a matter of time before this gets rebranded as proof Sandy Hook was planned decades in advance.

Conclusion

The claim that the FBI or Connecticut State Police “admitted” no one died is also flatly contradicted by the broader documentary record. Multiple official investigations — including the Connecticut Sandy Hook Advisory Commission report and the State’s Attorney’s final report — explicitly detail the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the separate killing of Nancy Lanza.

The FBI has since released extensive investigative files on Sandy Hook describing the victims, the crime scenes, and the forensic work in detail. The notion that the FBI simultaneously conducted and documented a mass-murder investigation while “admitting no one died” is incoherent on its face.

“Zero murders in Newtown” reflects who filed the paperwork, where it was filed, and when it was filed — not whether anyone was killed. The only thing this chapter actually proves is that Fetzer and Chang either do not understand the UCR system they are citing, or they are deliberately betting that their readers won’t.

Next: Chapter Eleven: “Are Sandy Hook Skeptics Delusional With ‘Twisted Minds’?” by James Fetzer and Kelley Watt