First, they lost their children. Then the conspiracy theories started. Now, the parents of Newtown are fighting back.

By Susan Svrluga July 8 at 4:57 PM

It was just weeks after 26 people were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School when Lenny Pozner first saw people speculating online that the rampage had been staged, with crisis actors responding to a fake attack.

His 6-year-old son, Noah Pozner, who had gone to school that morning in a Batman sweatshirt, was one of the 20 children killed in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Before the funerals had even concluded, an online conspiracy theory made targets of grieving family members. Strangers hurled insults at Pozner, asking how much he got paid to play his part in the government-sponsored hoax. They used photos of his son, with his tousled brown hair and round cheeks, on websites claiming the shooting was faked to generate urgency for gun-control laws. Then came the death threats.

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To combat the hoaxers, he has used earnest pleas, official complaints, rhetoric, lawsuits. He and volunteers from the HONR Network, a nonprofit organization he founded to combat the harassment, have challenged targets obscure and gargantuan, from lone conspiracy theorists to companies as powerful as Google.

Increasingly, families of others killed at Sandy Hook have started fighting back publicly. Relatives and prosecutors have brought at least nine cases against hoaxers, according to an attorney for a group of plaintiffs, including three in Connecticut consolidated by the court. In recent months, family members have started seeing real gains in a fight most were reluctant to wage.

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