SANDY HOOK HOAX was a closed Facebook group; you needed an invitation to join. Its page was topped with the image of a child ghoul, her eyes ringed in black, a mud-encrusted finger pressed to her lips.
Its nightly discussions drew from a dozen to a couple hundred people. Some still struggled with the enormity of the crime. Other, darker types obsessively posted photographs of the young victims, comparing them with living children in an ostensible effort to “prove” they were still alive, that they had attended their own funerals. Many Sandy Hook hoaxers didn’t tell family members about their membership in the group. Others admitted, with an “ugh” emoji, that their families questioned their sanity.
Tony Mead experienced no such qualms. He was in his mid-fifties, with a florid complexion and a broad, thin-lipped mouth, the pouchy slope of his neck from chin to collarbone giving him a vaguely reptilian profile. Mead runs Absolute Best Moving in Tamarac, Florida, schlepping home and office furniture. “All my business is referrals and repeats,” he told me. “I don’t have to advertise, and that’s good because I’ve gotten so much bullshit,” he said, meaning people who connected his business with his online pursuit and dinged him on Yelp or on RipOffReport.com.
