When the blow came, it was absurd in its clumsiness. If you are in this room, the state governor acknowledged, it means that your child is dead. The parents of Sandy Hook elementary school pupils, who had been waiting hours for news, knew they would walk out of that room as different people.
“I could feel the tension holding on to that hope, just like you’re holding this little flame, this flicker of hope,” recalls Robbie Parker, whose six-year-old daughter Emilie was among the dead. “And then with his words, that being snuffed out. It was like a big eruption of emotion and then like a vacuum because none of us had any hope any more. I have a really weird relationship with hope now.”
On 14 December 2012, Adam Lanza, 20, shot and killed his mother at home then entered Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle, two semiautomatic pistols and multiple rounds of ammunition, he killed 20 children aged six and seven, and six adults. When Lanza heard the police closing in, he took his own life in a classroom.
Barack Obama was moved to tears by the tragedy and later described it as “the single darkest day of my presidency”. Parker was the first parent to voice his grief in public after the massacre – a decision that led to a decade-long struggle against the rightwing provocateur Alex Jones, who propagated the lie that he was a “crisis actor” and the entire shooting was a hoax to justify gun restrictions. In that sense, Parker is a double survivor.
Sitting at home in his kitchen in Washington state, Parker speaks via Zoom for more than two hours, holding his composure even when his eyes glisten and his voice cracks. The 42-year-old has written a book, A Father’s Fight, in an effort to “express what I see as a void in the world because she’s not there any more”.
Parker grew up in Texas and Utah, started a medical career focused on child health and safety, and married in 2003. At first his wife, Alissa, struggled to get pregnant and required fertility treatment. Then came Emilie, born on 12 May 2006 – the first of three daughters.
Parker remembers her as an extrovert who was speaking before she grew teeth. She was an avid reader and loved the film Puss in Boots: later he would find a notebook in which she redrew the character over 100 pages until she felt she got it right. “Seeing that determination in her … she never turned that off.
“We’d put her to bed, I’d see her light on and be like, hey, what are you doing, you need to go to bed. She’s like, I have so many ideas in my head and I can’t fall asleep until I get them out. She would be up late and then she’d be up early working on something, getting everything that was in her head out of there.”
The family moved from New Mexico to Newtown in January 2012 for Parker’s job as a physician assistant in the neonatal intensive care unit at Danbury hospital. Emilie finished kindergarten at Sandy Hook then started first grade, though that was disrupted by the death of her grandfather; she missed her class photo but loved it all the same.
The community was preparing for Christmas on 14 December. Emilie had found what she called “the perfect box” to collect toys to donate to other kids. Parker woke early and saw that Emilie was already up; she greeted him in Portuguese, which she had been learning from him (he had lived in Brazil for two years after high school).
“We were able to have our last conversation – obviously I didn’t realise that’s what it was. But it was cute opening the door and seeing her sitting on her bed. I don’t know what she was thinking about but she saw me and lit up and went: ‘Bom dia!’ [good morning] and she smiled.”
Parker was at work when he got a disturbing voicemail from a city official saying that all Newtown public schools had been locked down due to a reported shooting. Then Alissa called, full of fear. At first Parker was told to remain at the hospital, where he might be needed, but he headed towards the school.
He parked behind a shop and sprinted half a mile, past satellite news vans and cameras, towards a small fire station. Alissa and other parents had gathered there, putting their name and their child’s name on a list, then waiting anxiously in a conference room.
Alissa told Parker it was confirmed that 20 children had been killed. A police officer had said no details or names would be shared until everyone was accounted for. She whispered quietly, so no one else could hear: “Robbie, is she dead?” He replied: “Of course not,” and held his wife tight.
He recalls: “I was in denial. I was scared too, and I couldn’t face it.
“The hours spent at the firehouse were hard because the tension was building with every passing minute. Every hour they would come in to give us an update, but they never updated us on anything. The police officer that was in charge would come and leave. You could feel the tension building in the room but everybody had this sense of hope.”
As Parker recalls, the conference room was full of plastic chairs with tables pushed off to the side. Alissa suffered a panic attack and a paramedic gave her an oxygen mask until she recovered. An officer approached the couple asking for a description of their daughter and wrote down details of Emilie’s blond hair, blue eyes and white-and-pink ruffled skirt. Family and friends around the country saw the news on TV and began calling. Still there was no definitive information.
Finally, Dannel Malloy, the governor of Connecticut, and his entourage entered the conference room. He began speaking in a manner that suggested none of the children of those present had survived. A mother interrupted him to demand: “So are you trying to tell us that all of our kids are dead?” The governor looked stunned and could only reply: “Yes.”
Then Alissa asked: “What about the children that went to the hospital? What is their status?” Parker recalls that the governor was like a deer in the headlights as he answered: “They have expired.”
Parker says: “It was as if he hadn’t been briefed that we hadn’t been briefed. I get the sense that he felt like he was coming in to talk to us as if we already knew and we didn’t know and I don’t think he was prepared to be the person that broke it. A lot of parents, when we talk, have issues with the way that the news is broken because that’s how it was.”
That was the moment when hope was extinguished. “It’s like a scene in a movie where you have the character that’s walking through like all the stuff around them but it’s in silence. That’s what my memory is. Alissa and I looked at each other, we looked at our neighbour and we said, thanks for being here.”
Parker and Alissa bolted through a back door in the conference room, breathed in the fresh air and tried to gather their wits. They walked around the corner of the fire station and were confronted by a wall of clicking cameras with no way through. A kind firefighter cleared a path for them to reach their vehicle.
Parker’s voice wobbles as he continues: “It’s hard to describe what it was like getting home and walking into the house. My brother came out when he saw the car pull up and, just [the] look on my face, he knew – we hadn’t said anything and so he came up and gave us a hug. Then you walked in this house that just that morning had so much excitement and love and warmth and it felt as cold and dark as a cave.”
Then they had to tell their younger daughters Madeline, who was four, and three-year-old Samantha, that their sister would not be coming home. Again, despite his medical training, Parker felt inadequate.
“I’ve broken the news to parents that their child had died but I’ve never broken news to a sibling that their sibling had died. I didn’t know how to do that and that bothered me because, again, I’m the one that’s supposed to know how to behave in these situations … So we did the best that we could.”
The media pressure kept building. The Parkers’ phone was ringing relentlessly and there were constant knocks on the door. Other family members were also under siege. Worried that someone might say something erroneous or taken out of context, Parker came up with the idea of making a statement to the media. Alissa backed the idea but did not want to take part.
“The hope was, I’m going to give the media a bone to chew on so that they’ll leave us alone and we can focus on what we need to focus on. That was the intent and there’s all my reasons for feeling like that was the thing to do. I had no clue that was the worst thing I could have done.”
Parker planned to meet one reporter at the church. But when he arrived, there were dozens of cameras, reporters and news crews. Suddenly, less than 24 hours after his daughter’s death, he found himself giving a press conference on live television. Trying to calm himself, he recalls, he let out a weird half-laugh and smile towards some family members supporting him.
He proceeded to deliver a beautiful tribute to Emilie. “I felt like it was a chance to let the world know who Emilie was and what we were missing and what she meant to all of us. I felt like it embodied who Emilie was and is for us and I was able to give it and I got through it and was done. It was one of the few times in my life where I was actually proud of myself in the moment for what had happened.”
But that momentary chuckle and smile before he spoke would haunt Parker for the next decade. It was seized upon by the rightwing conspiracy theorist Jones, who did mocking impressions of Parker, switching from laughing to crying in an instant. He repeatedly used the clip on his Infowars show to spread the pernicious falsehood that Parker and others were “crisis actors” and that the shooting never happened.
“While I was still sitting in the firehouse, he was already on his show telling people to question the shooting and claiming that it was fake and that this was the government and Obama, they’ve been planning this thing and they’re trying to come for your guns. He already had this narrative ready to go.
“When you juxtapose that, you have parents who aren’t even sure if they’re grieving yet – they’re not even aware if their kid’s dead – and you have somebody already spouting off to millions of people that it’s not real and it’s not happening. It’s hard to get anybody, including myself, to wrap your mind around just how awful and evil that is.”
Parker came to blame himself and feel guilt and shame for, in his mind, having started it all. “That quickly became the narrative because I was the first person who spoke out so all that attention could focus on me. I gave them some fodder that they could use because I was smiling and laughing and then I got into ‘character’.
“When they call it ‘a crisis actor’ that sounds benign but to people that imbibe that kind of material and assimilate that worldview, being a crisis actor means that you’re in cahoots and that you are essentially a target. Like, I’m in cahoots with Obama and the Democrats and liberals and I’m part of the problem that’s trying to take away your guns. Now you have my name and my face and you know who to go after.”
Victims’ families were subjected to years of torment, threats and abuse by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show. One father said conspiracy theorists urinated on his seven-year-old son’s grave and threatened to dig up the coffin. A Facebook page honouring Emilie was inundated with hate.
Parker says: “You’re already overwhelmed emotionally from grief but it felt like the second wave of a tsunami coming and hitting us … Then you have people saying you’re a liar. They’re bashing Emilie’s name. They’re calling her horrible things. They’re saying a bunch of horrible things about me and then there are threats. In the weeks afterwards, they called my work, they emailed me, they wrote letters to my home. It’s all very encompassing and overwhelming. The biggest impact is that it robs your ability to grieve.
“You should have those moments right after your loved one dies to remember and cherish them because that’s as close as you’re going to be to them for ever. It’s a very sacred time and that got stolen from us.”
The pressure made Parker turn inward, away from his family and into isolation. A year after the shooting, he quit his job and they moved across the country in search of a fresh start. But even 3,000 miles from Newtown, an Infowars listener accosted him and accused him of being a liar.
In 2018, 17 students were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. Parker knew one of the parents who lost a child and learned that they too were receiving abusive messages and having their grief stolen. In a separate incident, his daughter Madeline saw an Infowars bumper sticker on a vehicle and expressed fear that her father would be bullied by the driver.
These events spurred Parker to join a lawsuit that would hold Jones to account. In 2022 Jones lost a series of defamation cases in Connecticut and Texas and was ordered to pay nearly $1.5bn in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. Later that year he filed for bankruptcy.
Parker watched with grim satisfaction as lawyer Chris Mattei tore Jones apart in Connecticut. Then, to his surprise, Mattei forced Jones to watch the whole of Parker’s press conference. Sitting on the front row of the hushed courtroom, Parker watched Jones’s reaction intently.
“At first he has a monitor in front of him and he’s watching it and he sees me laugh and he laughs and then, as it goes on, he averts his gaze. There are monitors all over the courtroom so I’m watching him try to avoid me everywhere he looks and he couldn’t avoid any of it. He looks so small and uncomfortable with nowhere to go with the truth surrounding him.
“One saying that I’ve appreciated to incorporate in my home life is: every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth and eventually that debt gets paid.
“For me, in that moment, the lies that he had told about me and about that press conference and about Emilie, that debt was starting to not be repaid but it was coming to collect and he couldn’t get away from it. I’m so glad that Chris did that because, seeing his reaction and me watching it again with a new light, I felt proud again.”
After all the years of hate, Parker had made peace with the press conference. “I had despised giving it because of what it did to me and my family and I hated the idea that I did it and I cursed myself for doing it. Then in that moment I could feel happy again that I had done it and I am glad that I did it. I was right there willing and ready to take it back from Alex Jones because it was never his.”
Parker now works in the neonatal intensive care unit at Oregon Health Science University. His wife and daughters – Madeline is now 16, Samantha, 15 – were motivating factors to keep him moving forward through the darkest times. He also had something to fight for: Emilie’s name.
“Grief teaches you so much more than dealing with the loss of your loved one,” he reflects. “It opens you up to who you are as a person. Don’t be scared of opening yourself up to learn more about you and what grief has to offer you. Grief is like a mentor; at first a lot of people hate it and they don’t want to acknowledge this new character, this new essence and power in their life.
“But it has so much to teach you, and my relationship with grief is so much more loving. There’s this mutual level of respect between what it’s offered me and what I’ve learned from it. Opening yourself up to the entire process of grieving would be advice I wish I would have known.”
• A Father’s Fight by Robbie Parker will be published by Diversion on 5 December
