“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”
Appendix A
This is it—the infamous “FEMA manual” James Fetzer just can’t stop gushing about. Don’t worry if you find it disappointingly underwhelming. That’s probably because it’s an obvious amateur forgery. But before we dive into the weeds, let’s start with a little background.
Tony Mead, owner of Absolute Best Moving Company—winner of the prestigious Least Creative Company Name award for 24 consecutive years—is a loud and proud (emphasis on loud) Sandy Hook denier from the sad and ugly swamplands of Florida. Because, really, where else would he be from?
Perhaps jealous that his buddies James Fetzer and Wolfgang Halbig were hogging all the attention (and donations), Tony—an exposed liar and all-around trash human being—miraculously got his greasy mitts on a so-called “FEMA manual.” Naturally, he uploaded it to his personal MediaFire account in October 2014.
Where did it come from? Who knows.
The document was never authenticated. It never appeared on any government website or server. For all intents and purposes, it originated solely with Mead.
Of course, this complete lack of provenance never mattered to the denier community—does it ever? Fetzer, a man who claims to have taught courses in critical thinking while demonstrably applying none, latched onto the document with gusto. He references it no fewer than six times in Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, then republishes it in full as Appendix A.
Beyond its sketchy origins, the “manual” is riddled with glaring problems. Most notably, it is almost a direct copy of a legitimate government document available on Massachusetts’ state website:
It’s painfully obvious that Tony—or whoever duped him, which likely wasn’t difficult—downloaded this file, performed a lazy find-and-replace on the placeholders, and exported it as a PDF to make further tampering harder to spot. A shame, really, because this thing desperately needed a proofreader.
Right out of the gate, the document identifies itself as instructions for a “Site Activation Call-down Drill.” In emergency preparedness, a call-down drill is defined as:
a series of telephone calls from one person to the next used to relay specific information… during emergency situations such as a flu pandemic.
In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with school shootings.
The fact that the clown who fabricated this couldn’t even find a remotely relevant template to plagiarize is impressive in its own way.
Next, there is no record anywhere of an “Emergency Response for Mass Casualties Involving Children” drill on FEMA’s website. The closest thing is an entirely unrelated online course titled Preparing for Mass Casualty Incidents: A Guide for Schools, Higher Education, and Houses of Worship—a short, self-paced program open to the public. Its description reads:
This course will help you understand the threats and challenges of mass casualty incidents, and present ways you can improve your level of preparedness should the unthinkable occur.
So we’re not even past page one, and we’re already waist-deep in horseshit.
By page five, under “Handling Instructions,” the barely literate author enters:
Agency POC:
Tom Romano
Federal Emergency Management Agency
860-256-0844 (office)
thomas.romano@ct.goveExercise Director:
Not Available
Yes—ct.gove.
That typo was lifted directly from a Connecticut Department of Emergency Services & Public Protection webpage that also contained this error, proving the document was stitched together from scraped fragments of legitimate sources.
They also never bothered to verify Romano’s actual role. He is a Region 5 Training Coordinator for Connecticut DEMHS—not FEMA.
Even better, they left the Exercise Director field blank. This becomes a spectacular problem a few pages later, when the document itself explains just how essential that role supposedly is:
- Exercise Director/Controller/Evaluator. This position has the overall responsibility for planning, coordinating, and overseeing all exercise functions. He/she monitors the status of play and the achievement of the exercise design objectives.They declare when the drill starts and ends and manage the flow of the drill. This is the only participant who will provide information or direction to the players. However, because the drill focuses on the collection of time-based metrics, they should not intervene in timed activities while the drill is in progress.He/she is responsible for timing the overall drill, gathering individual call data collection sheets, computing metrics, and taking notes to identify areas for improvement.
And again on page fifteen:
If a real emergency occurs that affects the entire exercise, the exercise may be suspended or terminated at the discretion of the Exercise Director/Controller… The exercise is scheduled to run until the Exercise Director/Controller determines that the exercise objectives have been met.
Since the forger also removed the exercise duration field, and never assigned an Exercise Director, does this drill just… continue forever?
These omissions alone invalidate the document within the first five pages.
And yet it somehow gets worse.
On page ten, the author accidentally leaves “Mass Prophylaxis” from the original template while adding these laughably on-the-nose “Target Capabilities”:
- Mass Death of Children at a School by Firearms
- Suicide or Apprehension of Unknown Shooter
- Use of Media for Evaluation
- Use of Media for Information Distribution
A little subtlety would have been nice.
Not only is it absurd to combine mass prophylaxis planning with a school shooting scenario, none of these additions are real FEMA Target Capabilities.
Here is FEMA’s actual Target Capabilities List from 2012 (Source):
You’ll notice that “Mass Prophylaxis” appears—because it’s legitimate. The four added items do not—because they’re fictional.
Pages fifteen and sixteen also insist that all communications during the exercise must begin and end with:
“This is a drill.”
This phrase does not appear in a single 911 call, radio transmission, or written report from Sandy Hook. Not once.
Sandy Hook Facts has an excellent breakdown of the many ways the real-world response diverges from standard active-shooter drill protocols.
Page eighteen contains this gem:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the RAND Corporation have developed a data collection spreadsheet and scoring metrics computation spreadsheet, for assessing site call-down capability.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?
Almost as if this was written for a mass prophylaxis exercise.
Because it was.
As Metabunk user Kelbel succinctly summarized:
I’m going to try and keep this as short as possible, because this document is so blatantly fake, it shouldn’t even need to be explained this many times.
The exercises are planned and executed at the above mentioned levels (state, local, tribal, etc.) and NOT the Federal level. The fake document has FEMA and DHS as the Sponsoring Agency(ies). The fake also contains at least 4 different “Exercise Names”, including “National Preparedness” and “National Incident Management System”, which are NOT scenarios, they are actual THINGS.
While exercises are planned with the guidance from FEMA and DHS, those agencies are not those who carry them out:
The Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) doctrine consists of fundamental principles that frame a common approach to exercises. Applying these principles to both the management of an exercise program and the execution of individual exercises is critical to the effective examination of capabilities.
- Guided by elected and appointed officials
- Capability-based, objective driven
- Progressive planning approach
- Whole community integration
- Informed by risk
- Common methodology
If you’d like to see what a real active shooter exercise plan looks like, compare this to Purdue University’s July 2010 example. The differences are staggering.
Finally, in April 2016, Tony Mead tried to distance himself from the forgery, claiming it came from someone named “JB Lewis.”
Unfortunately for Tony, the YouTube video he cited was uploaded on October 8, 2014:
His MediaFire upload occurred one day earlier:
Oops.
And where was this TOP SECRET FEMA document supposedly discovered?
On Webs.com—a platform where anyone can create a free anonymous site.
Very official.
Better luck next time, Tony.
Hoaxers really believe this thing is genuine? How absurd!