A jury in Wisconsin has awarded $450,000 to Leonard Pozner after he filed a defamation lawsuit against writers who claimed that the mass shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School never happened.
In June, a Wisconsin judge ruled that James Fetzer, a retired University of Minnesota Duluth professor now living in Wisconsin, had slandered Leonard Pozner, saying he had fabricated a death certificate for his six-year-old son Noah.
"I have now had to defend my son's existence against these hoaxers for longer than he was alive," Pozner said, as quoted by the CNN.
Noah was the youngest of the 26 people killed in the shooting.
In a Dane County court in Wisconsin, Pozner thanked the jury for acknowledging "the pain and terror that James Fetzer intentionally caused to me and other victims of these terrible mass events, such as the shooting at Sandy Hook."
In a book written with co-author Mike Palacek, Fetzer stated that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax invented by the Obama administration as part of efforts to tighten gun laws.
Fetzer’s book and later blog entry contained several false allegations of Noah’s death certificate, including allegations that Pozner had distributed fabricated copies.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened on 14 December 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 20 first-graders, six staff members, and then shot himself in the head.
