Jeremy Richman in the backyard of his home in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2013. His daughter, Avielle, was one of the victims of the Sandy Hook murders.Jeremy Richman in the backyard of his home in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2013. His daughter, Avielle, was one of the victims of the Sandy Hook murders.rom time to time, in this job, you have the privilege of meeting an individual whose vivid spirit stays with you.
Both medical research scientists, they had established a campaigning foundation to study the psychosocial factors that created mass killers, “so that other people might not suffer as we were suffering”. In the months afterwards, we corresponded from time to time about the progress of the foundation’s research, in chatty emails.
There was only one subject about which Richman would not speak, however: the utterly vile conspiracy theories spread on the Infowars YouTube channel by Alex Jones, that claimed the Sandy Hook murders had been faked by the anti-gun lobby; that Richman and his fellow grieving parents were “crisis actors” and their children were still alive. For all Richman’s determined positivity, the fact of Jones’s lies had seemed too much for him to bear.
In March 2019, I received, out of the blue, the shocking news that Jeremy Richman had taken his own life, the 27th victim of the tragedy. Since then, I have followed in detail the legal case brought by the Sandy Hook families against Jones, resulting, in 2022 in a $1.5bn judgment against him. Last week, after, Jones appeared to accept that he will be forced to liquidate Infowars to help compensate the families.