After her husband committed himself a year later, a lady whose daughter was murdered in the Sandy Hook incident in 2012 talked about the terrible sorrow of having others wonder whether both of their deaths were staged.
One of the 20 first-graders killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012 was Avielle Richman’s mother, Jennifer Hensel. The tragedy claimed the lives of six other adults, including Victoria Soto, Avielle’s instructor.
Hensel gave a testimony on Wednesday in the defamation damages trial of Infowars presenter Alex Jones, a proponent of conspiracies, in Waterbury, Connecticut. Jones began asserting on his programme that the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012 was manufactured by the government as a justification for limiting gun rights only hours after it happened.
Hensel reported that immediately after the assault, she and her husband first discovered that Jones was spreading this fraud. She added that the hoax believers’ assertion that Avielle never lived in the first place was what stung the most.
“From something like this, I don’t believe you recover. I believe that you carry loss with you forever and that you rebuild joy in your life. On some days, one replaces the other. When you include in the notion that you made things up for attention or that your kid didn’t exist, it just becomes worse, according to Hensel.
Hensel said that since her daughter was her and her husband’s only child at the time, she found it tough to work knowing that others questioned the very real death of her daughter.
“I make a livelihood writing, yet I couldn’t construct sentences. It makes working challenging. It becomes challenging to get out of bed every morning. Because you have to push it aside — that constant cacophony — it makes it difficult to do so, Hensel added.
In 2019, Hensel had a second tragedy when her husband committed himself, leaving her to raise their two children, who were born after Avielle died and are now five and seven years old, alone.
People once again questioned if her spouse had indeed passed away. She said that neighbours had informed her that people had begun prowling the graveyard looking for evidence of her husband’s death. Hensel said that she delayed purchasing a burial monument for her spouse because she was unsure of how she wanted to pay tribute to him at the cemetery. People then said there was proof that he had never really died.
The loss of her spouse has also increased her fear for the safety of her family.
“There were two eyes already around, looking in the rear of our automobiles, looking around us… who’s on the horizon that’s going to cause trouble? When I had Jeremy with me and parenting with me. It’s simply how we had been used to living, and suddenly it seems like everything rests solely on my shoulders, even ensuring that my children, my home, and my refuge are secure.
Hensel said that since her kids are so young, they are unaware of the events at Sandy Hook, and she wants to shield them from that for as long as she can.
There are a tonne of individuals who might harm them but shouldn’t harm them, speak about them, or even be aware of them. They will eventually be aware of it because of what transpired after 12/14 and this hoax, but for the time being, I want to protect their innocence as much as I can, Hensel stated.
Hensel said, “I’m going to have to explain a lot, and that’s going to be very, really hard, when they’re old enough to find out.
Jones was due to testify on Thursday but was not asked to appear on Wednesday. At a half-hour press conference outside of court on Wednesday at lunch, he said that the case was being used to attack the First and Second Amendments and that he felt he had sufficiently apologised to the families.
For the second day in a row, he referred to the judge as a “tyrant” and said that the plaintiffs were being represented by “ambulance chasing attorneys,” who, in his words, had “transferred their fury from” the shooter to me.
The proceedings will establish Jones’s liability for defamation based on a default judgement and how much he owes the plaintiffs in damages. A jury in Texas issued a verdict in a case like this one in August, finding Jones liable for roughly $50 million in damages to the parents of one of the Sandy Hook victims.