Sandy Hook Evidence: Dawn Hochsprung Interview, December 13th

In this article we will go over digital Sandy Hook evidence. As you may know It has been reported that on the morning of Dec.14/2012 the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dawn Hochsprung, was shot and killed while trying to protect her students from a man with gun.

Read the article from ABC here.

What you may not know is, that the morning of the event in Newtown, the local paper “The Newtown Bee” ran an online story, which read in part exactly as follows, including errors in spelling:

“Sandy Hook School principal Dawn Hochsprung told the Bee that a masked man entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shows – more than she could count – that went “on and on.”

This, of course, is impossible since the principal, Dawn Hochsprung, according to official reports, was one of, if not the first, person to die in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The original page for this story now contains the Newtown Bee’s retraction. The original version of the page is gone. The retraction was made 3 days later, as claimed by the Bee, but neither I, nor anyone with whom I have spoken, saw it until 7 days later. You can see a larger screenshot of the article in question here.

Retraction:

“An early online report from the scene at the December 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School quoted a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school. The woman was not the school’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Friday morning attack. The quote was removed from subsequent online versions of the story, but the original story did remain in our online archive for three days before being deleted. We apologize for whatever confusion this may have caused our readers and for any pain or anguish it may have caused the Hochsprung family.”

At this point you may say that this could easily be a simple mistake/miscommunication by someone who assumed they were speaking to the principal. Please note the wording.

“A woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school.”

Unfortunately the story does not go on to explain exactly how that contact was made. By phone? text? in person? At this point it may be instructive to note that Newtown contains approx. 27,000 people. The Newtown Bee has been a family owned business since 1887 and is located less than a mile and a half away from Sandy Hook Elementary. The paper has run innumerable stories on the school system many of which, over the last year and a half, have included Dawn Hochsprung. People knew who she was.

The first Newtown Bee reporter on the scene that day was Associate Editor, Shannon Hicks. It is assumed Ms. Hicks received this quote although no credit is provided in the original article or retraction. In this interview with Time she tells the story of the iconic photograph of children being led from the school.

“At 9:59 last Friday morning, Shannon Hicks pulled her 2006 Jeep Wrangler off the road just outside Sandy Hook Elementary school. As associate editor and photographer for Newtown, Connecticut’s local paper, The Newtown Bee, she was responding to a radio dispatch heard over a local police scanner.”

The interviewer, speaking for Ms. Hicks, then goes on to say…

“But as she pulled up to the school, what she saw and heard removed all doubt.

Stated in this article.

“Pulled up to the school”?

Did she pull over…or drive to the school? How could she have driven to the school through all the backed up ambulances and police tape at the firestation?

This is what the road to the school/fire station looked like that morning. This photo was taken by Ms. Hicks.

The interviewer even manages to provide us with the make and model of the vehicle Ms. Hicks was driving that day but alas, that is where her curiosity expired. If this is where this story had ended I may have been inclined to write it off as some type of misunderstanding, as unlikely as that may have seemed. For the sake of posterity a bing cache of the page was found and saved. It was at that point the cache date was noticed. Dec 13/2012

Sandy Hook Evidence

Cache December 13th!

Check the cache date for the Dawn Hochsprung interview from Bing search engine in the following picture:

Another screenshot can be seen here.

LARGE SCREENSHOT

Here is the link to the cached page, you may have to refresh it once or twice. (Update, Bing has deleted the cached page)

Shooting Reported Sandy Hook Elementary School | The Newtown Bee

It was decided at this point to try and obtain confirmation from bing on the accuracy of the timestamp.

Since bing has no option for phone assistance I contacted them by email.

Not wanting to raise suspicion I told them I had prepared some time sensitive

information that was not to have been released until a certain day. I then told them that the information had been caught by one of their webcrawlers a day early and, if true, was very problematic. I requested some type of confirmation as to the accuracy of the server that cached and date-stamped the page.

I exchanged 4 emails with bing over the course of 24 hours before I finally had to provide the url for the main page at the Newtown Bee so they could determine which server had cached it. In their final email to me they did confirm that their server had cached the page but when I pressed them for more concrete confirmation they stopped responding.

I has now been 4 days since I heard from them.

The investigation into this matter is ongoing and updates will be provided.

-swansong-

Update

I contacted the Newtown Bee to speak with the first known reporter on the scene, Shannon Hicks, to ask about this particular aspect of the day’s events. When I explained to Ms. Hicks what it was I was looking into she informed me that it would be a matter best left to the Editor of The Newtown Bee, Curtiss Clark.

I explained to Mr. Clark that I was a freelance journalist looking into allegations of fraud connected to fundraising in the wake of the Newton event. I went on to explain that during my research I had come across the Newton Bee’s retraction regarding Dawn Hochsprung and wondered if that too was being considered an act of fraud/mischief.

Mr. Clark became immediately defensive at the insinuation and began talking over me to explain how it was a simple mistake. I explained to Mr. Clark that I was in no way attempting to spin this story into something it wasn’t but rather may have been confused by the specific wording of the retraction, “a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal”, which made it appear as though the woman may have acted with deliberate intent to mislead. I was assured by Mr. Clark that this was not the case and he went on to explain the mistake as, “just something that happened in all the confusion”.

I told Mr. Clark that his explanation for the source of the confusion seemed very logical and suggested that my investigation would likely need not go any further. Mr. Clark then said something that put the defensiveness I perceived into context. “There’s a lot of conspiracy nonsense around this.” I told Mr. Clark such things have no interest for me. He then went on to say, “and a lot of them are coming from Canada. You should get your editor to check some of the blogs up there.”

I found out subsequently that the Newtown Bee had been contacted by a Canadian truth seeker who had led them to a forum/blog post that contained many suspected inconsistencies in the Sandy Hook story. I then understood why he seemed “touchy”.

Before I wrapped up our conversation I asked Mr. Clark who it was that took this statement and how it was delivered. He told me the reporter was John Voket (who “is on vacation and won’t be back til next week”). Mr. Voket is an associate editor at the Newtown Bee and has worked for the paper for 8 years. Mr. Voket is also a radio announcer, active in the community and owns his own recorded dance music company. He is also in the process of organizing a benefit concert to aid the affected families of Sandy Hook.

LINK

Until this point I had been under the mistaken impression that the statement from “the woman” was delivered to associate editor Shannon Hicks as she seems to be the only named reporter from the Bee associated with this event.

To be as clear as possible about the circumstances surrounding the misidentification I asked Mr. Clark how contact was made between “the woman” and Mr. Voket. Was it in person, phone, etc…? Mr. Clark informed me that he didn’t know but thought it may have been face to face. I must admit it surprised me that Mr. Clark would not know the answer to my question. As one who has worked in media for many years I couldn’t imagine a mistake like this being made at such a widely exposed event without the editor getting the details on how the mistake occurred. This was almost a month after the fact.

I also asked if “the woman” had eventually been identified and again, he was unsure but stressed it was a small matter in comparison to the overall event. I chose not to press the matter and thanked Mr. Clark for his time. I ended our conversation by asking if it would be alright for me to contact Mr. Voket upon his return should I have further questions. He said that would be fine.

Update

A quick internet search found Mr. Voket’s email address so I decided to drop him a line rather than phoning. In my mail I briefly went over my conversation with Mr. Clark and explained that I had a couple of questions that Mr. Clark had said only he could answer.

These were my questions…

How did this woman pass along her statement to you…in person or by some other means?

Did you ask about her connection to the school?

Did you ask her name? (I have no wish to know it)

Just to be clear…there is no current effort to locate this woman and local and state police do not view this as an unlawful/mischievious event…is that correct?

Were you not familiar with Dawn Hochsprung?

John Voket responded the very next day.

“We know who the person is – the mistaken identity may have been my fault due to all the commotion happening around me when she and I spoke. She also shared a number of physical attributes with the late principal, which initially compounded the confusion.

We also were having website issues which may have prevented us from pulling that incorrect report from the web sooner.

There is no issue regarding this person.”

Below you can find various news articles and even a video from the Newtown Bee featuring Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung. It does seem odd that John Voket would not have recognized Dawn Hochsprung given her numerous appearances in the paper for which he is associate editor.

New Principals Prepare For First Days In The District

A ‘Musical’ Work Of Art Taking Shape At Sandy Hook School

One School One Read Sparks ‘Lemonade War’ In Sandy Hook

Full-Day Kindergarten Considered

Dawn Hochsprung Newtown Bee Video

Should current investigative efforts bear fruit I may choose to contact the Newton Bee one more time to give them an opportunity to respond to this article and any new findings. For now I will let the comments speak for themselves.

Update

I have received another email from bing apologizing for the delay in responding and once again asking for what it is I specifically need.

Since the last time I had heard from bing I had done some more searching and managed to find another page from the Newtown Bee that had been cached with the same date stamp, 2012/12/13.

This is the original.

LINK

And this is the page cached by bing.

LINK

Assuming that I may need to give bing more specific information to help facilitate my request I provided them this page and cache to help them narrow down the server that, I assume, cached both pages. I told them I was hesitant to pass along the actual page due to it’s sensitive nature but hoped that this one would suffice.

As of this writing I have been waiting 3 days for a response.

A friendly forum member has passed along the whois info for the server that cached the Newtown Bee page in question. You will note that their servers are in the US so the notion that the early cache date is a function of overseas servers appears to be unfounded. Admittedly this is not my area of expertise so if anyone has an informed rebuttal I will be happy to hear it.

WHOIS

Update

Since beginning my quest for information regarding this cache date from bing I have sent 7 and received 5 emails to/from bing over the course of 16 days. I have yet to receive any type of confirmation of accuracy and am left to conclude that they have little interest in providing one.

Update

I have found a video shot and narrated by John Voket, from the fire station, on the morning of the 14th. I will assume it captures all the chaos and “commotion” of the scene that morning.

-swansong-

About the Author -swansong- Is just a guy...sick of the lies. A guy who is sick of the constant manipulating, spinning, massaging, altering, sensationalizing and outright bastardizing of the news. There's a reason they're called the "public" airwaves. They belong to us...and it's time we took them back.