Sandy Hook Elementary Was Open, Part One: The Lobby

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For the absurd theory that Sandy Hook Elementary School closed in 2008 and was later repurposed as “storage” before being used for a staged shooting in 2012 to hold up, you’d have to believe the building was meticulously dressed to look like a fully functioning elementary school—solely for the benefit of a set of heavily redacted crime scene photos that most people were never going to see in the first place. Unsurprisingly, proponents of this theory make no attempt to grapple with just how elaborate and unnecessary such staging would have been.

The photographs are packed with mundane, easily overlooked details—exactly the kinds of things that exist in an actively used school and are difficult to fake convincingly. Even the most obsessive armchair investigators have managed to miss many of them.

Let’s take a look at a few of those details, starting in the school’s lobby (with a brief detour into the kitchen), where Adam Lanza first gained entry by shooting out a large window to bypass the building’s strikeplate security system.

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

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“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”
Chapter Four
By: James Fetzer

James Fetzer, pushing hyperbole past the point of self-parody, once heralded his warped interpretation of Shannon Hicks’s now-iconic evacuation photographs as a “smoking gun.” Apparently unwilling to relinquish that fantasy, Fetzer has recycled his earlier blog post on the subject, padded it with appropriated images, and stretched the result—paper-thin though it is—into an entire chapter of this book. So what, exactly, does Fetzer believe makes this photograph so supposedly “damning”?

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

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“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”
Chapter Two
By “Dr. Eowyn” aka Maria Hsia Chang

“Infowars reporter Dan Bidondi said (5:45 mark), “The school’s been closed down for God knows how long. [Neighbors] can’t understand why there were kids in that building because it was condemned.” pg. 30

Dan Bidondi—a never-was professional wrestler turned “reporter” for Alex Jones—doesn’t bother to name a single one of these supposed “neighbors.” Not one. Meanwhile, interviews with actual local residents are widely available, and they show the opposite: no confusion whatsoever about Sandy Hook Elementary being open and occupied by students. If the school had truly been closed or condemned, as Fetzer and his contributors insist, it strains credulity to believe that not a single resident would have publicly questioned why children were suddenly inside the building.

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

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Disgraced former professor James Tracy—fired from Florida Atlantic University for using university resources to spread disinformation and then lying about it—spends much of this chapter obsessing over the routine errors and inconsistencies that inevitably appear in breaking news coverage. This is an old, well-documented phenomenon, one only exacerbated by the 24-hour news cycle. These kinds of reporting mistakes are so commonplace that entire books have been written about them, including Howard Rosenberg’s No Time to Think and Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. If this reality still surprises Tracy, he is very much in the minority.

Rather than belabor the obvious—that misinformation flourishes in the chaos of early reporting—I will focus my fact-checking on claims that do not rely exclusively on those initial, error-prone reports. Exceptions will be made when necessary, or when a claim is so egregious that it demands attention regardless.

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