Pictures of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting are seen on artificial roses at a roadside memorial December 20, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

A Tampa, Florida woman is facing federal charges for allegedly threatening the parent of a child who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The woman, 57-year-old Lucy Richards, is apparently a Sandy Hook truther – that is, one of the hoaxers who believe the massacre was staged.

Richards has been indicted on four counts of transmitting threats in interstate commerce. According to the criminal complaint, Richards sent menacing messages to the parent in January, at one point writing “you gonna die, death is coming to you real soon” and ”LOOK BEHIND YOU IT IS DEATH.”

Next week marks the four-year anniversary of the carnage at Sandy Hook — when 20 year-old Adam Lanza barged into a classroom, murdering 20 students and six teachers before taking his own life. Sandy Hook hoaxers deny this. Lenny Pozner, a Sandy Hook parent who lost his 6-year-old son, Noah, in the shooting, described his fight against the hoaxers’ harassment and disinformation to New York Magazine:

But by the spring of 2014, as he watched the hoaxer movement bloom, Pozner decided to try fighting back. He released Noah’s death certificate, to convince those who believed he had not been killed, and his report card — “Noah is a bright, inquisitive boy” — for those who believed he had never lived at all. One Friday night, a year and a half after the shooting, he joined a Facebook group called Sandy Hook Hoax, one of the more prominent hoaxer meeting grounds. (Its logo features a ghostly child holding an index finger to her mouth.) Pozner told the group he was there to answer questions, and he expressed empathy for their mind-set. “I used to argue with people about 9/11 being an inside job,” he wrote. Some members of the group asked earnest questions about inconsistencies in the official account. Others simply lobbed bombs. “Fuck you Lenny fuck off and fuck your fake family, you piec [sic] of shit,” one woman wrote. Pozner chatted for more than four hours, but his patience wore thin as the questions grew more absurd:



why don’t u want to look into the newtown police feeds of the nun n the guy in ski mask



cuz my son is dead and it doesnt matter

The name of the parent whom Richards threatened has not been released, though the individual lives in South Florida, says the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. Richards faces a maximum of 20 years in prison — five years for each count. She is due in court December 19.