December 18, 2015
A Florida professor is facing dismissal after reportedly making claims that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax.
Florida Atlantic University on Wednesday gave associate professor James Tracy 10 days to file a grievance before facing termination, Time reports.
Tracy has reportedly written that the mass shooting at the school in Newtown, Conn., was staged, despite news media reports that 26 people died in the incident.
The parents of one of the victims responded last week with an op-ed in the Sun-Sentinel.
In the piece, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, whose son Noah was the youngest child killed in the shooting, called for Tracy's dismissal.
"The heartache of burying a child is a sorrow we would not wish upon anyone," the couple wrote. "Yet to our horror, we have found that there are some in this society who lack empathy for the suffering of others. Among them are the conspiracy theorists that deny our tragedy was real. They seek us out and accuse us of being government agents who are faking our grief and lying about our loss."
The letter also states that Tracy sent the couple a "certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image."
A response apparently written by Tracy appeared on the “Sandy Hook Hoax” Facebook page several days after the op-ed piece ran. The post defends Tracy's arguments that the event was staged and no one died.
"As the new book, NOBODY DIED AT SANDY HOOK (2015) demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt, the school had been closed by 2008, which means there were no children there for Adam Lanza to have shot," the post reads.
The post continues with examples of research Tracy claims are evident in the book.
The book even includes the FEMA manual for a two-day drill, with the rehearsal on the 13th and "GOING LIVE" on the 14th. Many of the participants did not understand the difference, where donation sites for the families of "victims" were put up the day before the “shooting," and even Adam Lanza's death was initially recorded in the Social Security Death Index as having occurred on the 13th. This would have made it difficult for him to kill so many the following day.
According to Florida Atlantic’s website, Tracy earned his doctorate at the University of Iowa, and he “teaches courses examining the relationship between commercial and alternative news media and socio-political issues and events.”
