FBI agent describes horror of Sandy Hook and years of harassment that followed as Alex Jones defamation trial opens

FBI SWAT team member William Aldenberg was training with colleagues at a police range in Middletown early on the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, which was the day Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 people.

“The team doctor received a call from one of the paramedics from the state police team,” Aldenberg testified Tuesday. “It was something about … something in Newtown. It was some type of active shooter situation at a school in Newtown. I didn’t work that end of the state, so the first thing I said was, “Where is Newtown?’ ”

Aldenberg was transferring insignia and other gear from one bullet proof vest to another when the call came in and never got to finish, something he would testify continues to trouble him, even today.

“We probably left the range in less than five minute if not quicker,” he testified. “I just grabbed my stuff and threw it into the trunk of my bureau vehicle.”

At that point, the remembering and the telling of the story became difficult and Aldenberg had to pause to collect himself, the first of many times he did so Tuesday. He was the first witness called by the relatives of Lanza’s victims, who are suing broadcaster and right wing provocateur Alex Jones over the harassment and death threats they experienced as a result of his claims to an audience of millions that the elementary school massacre was a hoax and a pretext for gun control.

Aldenberg, father of three and a veteran law enforcement officer, is one of the 15 plaintiffs in three consolidated suits that went to trial Tuesday in Waterbury. Aldenberg’s testimony touched on the main points the families want to put before jurors — unimaginable grief, the enormous reach and profitability of Jones broadcasting and internet platforms and the continuing harassment of the victim families by Jones’ followers, who have been convinced it is all a fraud.

Aldenberg was portrayed as a Sandy Hook victim twice. Once by what he witnessed as one of the first to enter the school and encounter the bodies of 21 first graders and six educators cut down by Lanza with a military style assault rifle. And a second time, by what he said is years of threats against him by people who believe Jones’ specious proposition that the shootings never happened, the heart-broken parents were actors and Aldenberg is not really an FBI agent.

“We were there, at the school, I think within 30 or 40 minutes of the shooting,” he testified Tuesday.

“The four of us FBI agents, we got our gear and we moved up the access road to meet the rest of the team,” he testified. “Coming up the road, I see a uniformed trooper — again I wasn’t’ really sure what was going on. And when I came up the road there was a state trooper who was being led away by a colleague, and he was like, he was in hysterics.”

“And I’m wondering, what was going on,” Aldenberg testified. “That was unusual. Most law enforcement people don’t get too emotional. And I thought, ‘What was going on and what was happening?’ ”

“And we got closer to the school,” Aldenberg testified. “And I see another trooper who I had worked cases with over the years. And I said, ‘Dave. What is going on?’ And he just said, ‘Bad. It’s bad.’ ”

When Lanza entered the school, he shot Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Scherlach in the school lobby, then turned left and murdered the children and teachers in two first-grade classrooms.

Aldenberg said he and his team were ordered into the school to search for survivors and possible additional threats. After clearing classrooms on the right side of the building, Aldenberg said he was ordered to the classrooms on the left.

“We entered the first classroom through the door,” Aldenberg testified, halting at times. “What you saw in that classroom was very bad.”

In the second classroom he said he saw teacher Victoria Soto’s body and remembers her cellphone lying beside her, flashing, as if someone were trying to call her. Soto’s sister, Carlee Soto Parisi testified later in the day that she had been calling after learning of the shootings.

“Our senses were like … that overwhelms your senses,” Aldenberg testified. ”It is pretty horrible. So we went through the two classrooms. We cleared each room. We were in such a panic. I was in such a panic.”

“Was it fake?” Christopher Mattei, one of the family lawyers, asked.

“No sir,” Aldenberg said.

“See any actors?” Mattei asked.

“No,” Aldenberg said.

“Were those children real?’’ Mattei asked.

“It was awful,” Aldenberg said. “Awful.”

As he prepared to enter the school in his SWAT gear, Aldenberg was captured in a Hartford Courant photograph distributed to news organizations across the country. Because he had never completed the transfer of FBI insignia and other bureau-issued gear from one vest to another, Jones used the photograph on his various media platforms to make a case that Aldenberg was not a real agent, but an actor.

Aldenberg said internet posts have used comparison photographs to push a conspiracy theory that he and the father of one of the victims are fictional characters portrayed by the same actor.

“You can’t even describe it,’ Aldenberg said. “It is crushing. Their children got slaughtered. I saw it myself. It was one of the worst things that ever happened, if not the worst thing that ever happened to them. And for people to say it didn’t happen and try to get rich off of it …”

Aldenberg testified that he learned about Alex Jones within weeks of the shootings. He had been appointed to a position in the FBI’s New Haven division that required him to supervise the services the division offers to crime victims.

For 18 months, Aldenberg said 99% of the work of his victim outreach was dedicated to Sandy Hook families who were stalked, harassed and threatened by people who shared Jones’ view that they were part of a government conspiracy to repeal the second amendment.

“Death threats,” Aldenberg said. “People calling all kinds of numbers in Newtown saying, ‘This is Adam Lanza. I am going to come and kill you.’ Telling people that their children are not dead. They are actors. Families are not real. Serious stuff.”

“It continued long after 18 months,” Aldenberg testified. “It has been going on for 10 years. It’s going to continue after today. It is not an understatement that some of these people are deranged. When we walk out of the courthouse today, they could be outside the courthouse.”

Earlier in the day, in his opening statement to jurors, Mattei argued that Jones cynically and intentionally spread false conspiracy theories over broadcast and internet site that reached an audience of tens of millions because he had sales analyses that showed Sandy Hook denial programming increased his sales of products such as nutritional supplements and survivalist gear. His solely owned company, Free Speech Systems, his co-defendant, made as much as a quarter million dollars a day when he began portraying Sandy Hook shooting as a hoax.

Mattei said the families will show that Jones assiduously tracked his company’s profitability and pushed the Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy because he knew his audience and sales spiked when he did so. Mattei said Jones knew his claims to be false, but broadcast them out of greed.

Jones’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, conceded that Jones’ right wing conspiracy theories may be false and abhorrent, but said Jones has the right to believe them and share them with his audience. People who find them objectionable can change the channel, Pattis said.

“He also is the guy who worries that chemicals in our water are turning frogs gay,” Pattis told the jury. “Which of these messages do we use to decide to shut him off? Or do we regard him as a crank on the village green?”

Mattei urged the jury to award damages that would put Jones out of business. Pattis asked for a nominal verdict that would compensate the families, while protecting free speech rights.

Before the presentation of evidence began, Bellis imposed a punishing sanction on Jones that prohibits him from using analytics of his website sales to argue to jurors that he didn’t profit from his denial of the Sandy Hook school massacre.

Whether Jones profited by his denials is expected to be a significant factor in the jury’s determination of compensatory and punitive damages to the victims.

Lawyers for the victim families told Bellis that they obtained a copy of the analytic materials last week after Jones had long denied having or using the materials. Bellis said Jones’ failure to comply with legal requirements to disclose the sales analyses is part of a pattern of failing to comply with court orders concerning the exchange of evidence between the parties..

“This stunningly cavalier attitude with respect to their discovery obligations is what led to the default in the first place.”

Bellis was referring to her default ruling last year which effectively settled the question of Jones’ liability in favor of the victim families. It was an extraordinary legal sanction or punishment of Jones for abusing court procedure and ignoring her orders to participate in reciprocal exchanges of information with the victims.

The ruling found for the victims on a central point of their suit — that Jones’ false broadcasts were the cause of the harassment and mental anguish experienced by the victim families. Jones and Infowars cannot defend themselves under the default finding, but can try to minimize what they have to pay in compensatory and punitive damages.