Does The FBI Admit Nobody Died At Sandy Hook?

Somehow, some way, there are still people out there who believe the FBI openly admits that the Sandy Hook massacre never occurred. This isn’t something these folks claim happened once or twice by mistake and was quickly swept under the rug forever. No, they believe that this incredible admission of guilt has been public this whole time, posted for all to see on the FBI’s official website. That would be the very same website in which they also include the twenty-seven killed and two wounded during the attack in their Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013:

And that’s only one of over one hundred and fifty references to the shooting on their site, none of which state that it was just a “drill” or that no one died. Go ahead and check.

So of course the claim never made any sense. Why would the FBI, of all people, purposely and continuously expose one of the worst mass shootings in American history – a shooting they themselves responded to and investigated – as a total fraud? And on their very own website, nonetheless, where the tragedy still looms large otherwise. It’s nonsense.

While such absurdities are to be expected from Sandy Hook deniers, what has managed to catch me a bit off guard is how often they leave comments about it here, on this site, as if they’ve finally stumbled upon indisputable, bombshell evidence that I either haven’t seen yet or don’t have an answer for. The reason this is so baffling is because I thoroughly debunked this hooey back in 2016. It’s not even that long an entry! I guess the “do your own research” crowd is just dogshit at doing theirs.

So, for the sake of increased visibility, I’m going to debunk it again, this time in its very own entry. After all, my previous takedown of this particular claim has only ever been published as part of my series on Jim Fetzer’s rancid “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”. And since Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists have proven themselves unwilling or unable to use the site’s search feature (it’s literally the second result when you search “FBI UCR”), maybe they’ve just never seen it. Regardless, it’s long overdue.

The story goes something like this: if you view the summary of Connecticut’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data for 2012 on the FBI’s website, you’ll see zero murders listed for Newtown, which is of course the location of Sandy Hook Elementary School as well as the Lanza residence:

But if Adam Lanza murdered twenty-seven people, how is that possible?

There’s actually a very simple explanation, and that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the FBI’s UCR program itself.

The data on the FBI’s site, which again is just a summary of the full UCR data provided to them by the state of Connecticut (and can be viewed in its entirety here), is intentionally organized by reporting agency, which does not always coincide with where the crime actually took place. And since the shooting was ultimately handled by Connecticut state police rather than Newtown PD, it was the former that submitted the information to the FBI. That means that Connecticut state police are the reporting agency and therefore the data appears under their totals, which are of course the state totals. This is not a mistake; it is by design. From the FBI’s own Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook:

3. Federal agencies should report offenses within their investigative jurisdictions if they are not being reported by a local/state law enforcement agency.
4. When two or more local, state, tribal, or federal agencies are involved in the investigation of the same offense and there is a written or oral agreement defining the roles of the investigating agencies, the agreement must designate which agency will report the offense.
5. When two or more federal agencies are involved in the investigation of the same offense and there is no written or oral agreement defining their roles, the federal agency having lead or primary investigative jurisdiction should report the data. If there is uncertainty as to which is the lead or primary agency, the agencies must agree on which agency will report the offense.

This objectively disproves the following ridiculous claim, made without evidence on page 172 of “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”:

“After all, murders are reported in the communities or jurisdictions in which they have occurred, not on the basis of the agency or organization that investigates them.” pg. 172

The FBI has been in charge of the UCR program since 1930, and according to their own documentation, this is objectively not true.

While murders and other crimes are usually investigated and therefore reported by local law enforcement agencies, it is not required and obviously not always the case. And it was not the case with Sandy Hook, a fact further confirmed to me personally by both the FBI’s Crime Stats staff as well as Connecticut’s DESPP (Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection) Crime Analysis Unit. In their response, Connecticut’s DESPP Crime Analysis Unit even cited the horrific Petit murders as another example of a high-profile case that was handled by state police rather than local law enforcement. Sure enough, while three members of the Petit family were killed in the gruesome attack, the FBI’s 2007 UCR data for Connecticut only lists two murders taking place in the Petit’s hometown of Cheshire that year:

Those two murders were the victims of a February murder-suicide, completely unrelated to the Petit tragedy. Since the investigation was handled by Cheshire police, they were the agency that reported the murders to the FBI, which is why they are included in their totals and the Petit murders – which took place in Cheshire but were handled by state police – are not.

Unlike many other Sandy Hook deniers, hucksters Maria “Dr. Eowyn” Chang and Jim Fetzer have at least acknowledged Connecticut’s full UCR report from 2012. Still, in a sad attempt to rescue their demonstrably bogus claim, they ask you to just jump right ahead to page twenty-six. But in doing so, you’d skip over the enormous, full page dedication to the victims of Sandy Hook, right there on page four:

You’d also miss two more obvious references to the twenty-seven victims of the attack, which appear on pages twelve:

As well as page twenty-five:

Again, that’s before we even get to page twenty-six. In total, throughout the entire document, the shooting is mentioned fourteen times.

Still, the authors stubbornly insist that it is on page twenty-six (and page twenty-six only) that you will find the truth. They make the claim that:

“At the intersection of ‘Murder’ with ‘<10’ (below 10 years of age) for 2012, you will find the number ‘0’!“

But if you actually read the header for that table (which was not cropped out of their screenshot, leading me to believe they really had no idea what they were looking at), you’ll see that it says “Arrest Statistics” for year 2012:

What this actually means is that no one in Connecticut under the age of ten was arrested for murder in 2012; not that no one under the age of ten was murdered. Remember that two highly-educated “researchers” wrote all six pages of this chapter together, so they really have no excuse for bungling this one as badly as they have. Unless, of course, they are intentionally misrepresenting data. Which leads me to my next point…

Over and over again, the authors insist that this data is actually supposed to represent the number of people who have died in a particular area:

“The Connecticut State Police submit information to the FBI that asserts 27 people died in Connecticut, but at the same time denies that they died anywhere in Connecticut.” pg 175

The Connecticut State Police have done nothing of the sort. Again, this data, when you actually look in the right location, represents the number of offenses reported by law enforcement agencies. If they represented the number of people who have “died”, then where are the fatal automobile accidents? Where are the drownings? Etc.

It’s not just Sandy Hook. Or the Petit murders. Virginia’s UCR data for 2007, as it is published on the FBI’s website, is similarly missing some very notable information: the thirty-two victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, which took place in the town of Blacksburg, VA:

This is particularly notable because James Fetzer, as revealed in his disastrous Reddit AMA, believes the Virginia Tech shooting to be entirely legitimate. Following his own logic, since this crime actually happened, shouldn’t the murders be listed under Blacksburg’s totals rather than State Police totals?

Finally, Fetzer and Chang make the claim that…

“It is a federal crime to report false statistics to the FBI, so the CTSP tacked on a new category of ‘State Police Misc.’ as though that solved the problem” pg. 173

Demonstrably false. There’s absolutely nothing “tacked on” about the State Police Misc. totals: you can find them in every single UCR document available on Connecticut’s DPS website, which goes all the way back to 1992:

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Fetzer sees this and makes the claim that this is proof they’ve been planning Sandy Hook for twenty-four years.