On December 14, 2012, Robbie Parker’s life was profoundly and permanently altered when his 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, died with 19 other first graders and 6 educators in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.
Parker, an Ogden native, and his wife, Alissa, were raising their three young daughters in Newtown, Connecticut—a small, picturesque town with a charming rural feel. Emilie was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
On that fateful Friday morning, Parker enjoyed a tender moment with Emilie.
“She was sitting on the edge of her bed. I got a chance to just sit next to her and give her a hug and tell her how much I loved her,” he recalls. “That wasn’t something I got to do very often before I went to work.”
The Unthinkable
(AP Photo/Jessica Hill)
A few hours later, parents were notified that all Newtown public schools were placed on lockdown due to a shooting at one of the schools. Soon, word spread that the shooting had occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Parker rushed from work to meet Alissa at the local firehouse where a crowd of parents gathered, still waiting to be united with their children and desperate for information. As the day wore on, an officer approached the Parkers and asked for a description of their daughter. Then, nothing. Finally, Governor Dannel Maloy arrived and began addressing the room “in a manner that suggested none of our children had survived,” Parker describes. Then the governor confirmed it.
Stunned, Parker wrapped his arm around Alissa as they began making their way to their car, only to be greeted by a sea of cameras furiously snapping their photo. Within hours of Emilie’s death, they were being bombarded with phone calls from reporters.
“I didn’t know how to respond,” he recalls.
Parker finally decided that the reporters weren’t going to stop, so the best thing to do would be to give a statement.
“I figured if I gave them something to chew on for a while that they would leave us alone.”
He would be completely unprepared for the consequences of that decision.
The Press Conference
The next evening, Parker faced the throngs of reporters for the first time. As he walked into the blinding lights and found his way to the podium, he laughed nervously and attempted to get his bearings.
“I’d never done anything like that before,” he says. “I was confused and nervous.”
Parker, raw with grief and emotion, lovingly described his daughter in hopes that the press would be satisfied and his family could be left in peace.
Instead, Alex Jones, prominent conspiracy theorist and Infowars host, accused him of being a “crisis actor” and insisted that the Sandy Hook shooting was “a total hoax” orchestrated by the government to take guns out of the hands of Americans.
Parker, along with the other parents, became a target of hate and harassment as misinformation about the Sandy Hook shooting spread like wildfire.
Grief, Lies, and Threats
As they clung to the love and support from family, friends, and strangers, the Sandy Hook families were also subjected to unimaginable cruelty as they struggled to grieve the loss of their loved ones. Rampant conspiracy theories amplified their pain and turned them into targets.
“Imagine being told that your child never never existed,” says Parker. “That you are a liar and your grief isn’t real.”
Parker was consistently targeted by Alex Jones and his followers. As a result, he received numerous death threats and was accosted in public on multiple occasions. In his new book, A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook, Parker describes Jones’s attacks as “calculated, relentless, and deeply personal.”
“What’s evil about what Alex Jones did is that he exploited our grief for profit,” he says. “He inflicted these lies and conspiracies about who I am and who Emilie was in a way that harmed me and my family. He was doing that because it made him millions of dollars.”
As shared in HBO’s documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones, at one point, a staggering 24 percent of Americans—about 75 million people—believed that the Sandy Hook shooting was either “definitely” or “possibly” staged.
“I already felt like I failed Emilie as a dad when she was alive because we sent her to school that day. And I was starting to feel like I was failing her in her death because of what people were saying about her and what they were saying about me trying to remember her,” says Parker.
Parker spiraled into a vicious cycle of guilt, anger, and self doubt.
“I disconnected from myself. I lost so much, and I was suffering silently,” he recalls. “I replayed that day over and over, wondering what I could have done differently. I finally came to the realization that guilt doesn’t honor Emilie’s memory, and I was doing the best I could.”
That realization became a turning point for Parker. As he began to slowly find his strength and resilience, he also began to embrace a new mission: to fight misinformation, reclaim his daughter’s legacy, and protect others from the harm his family has endured.
The Lawsuit
After declining previous requests over the years, Parker united with several Sandy Hook families to sue Alex Jones in what their lawyer described as “the most egregious case of defamation in American history.”
“We wanted to make it as hard as possible for Alex Jones to spread more harm and more lies,” Parker says. “I wanted him to hurt, to feel the pain he inflicted.”
Even so, Parker felt some sympathy for Jones during the trial.
“He’s somebody that I feel like is hurting, and he does what he does because he needs to fill something up that feels empty inside of him,” says Parker. “And so I have compassion for him as a person. I had a lot of pity for him when I saw him in court.”
In October 2022, Jones was ordered to pay the families $1.5 billion in damages, and Parker himself was awarded $120 million—the largest sum out of all the families.
“It was never about the money. We were willing to give up everything that we needed to give up to ensure that Jones wasn’t able to continue doing what he does,” says Parker. “This was about me reclaiming a lot of the things that I felt like one were taken away from me and things that I had given up. I missed out on a lot, and it took a long time for me to recognize that and a lot of work for me to get to a point where I felt like I could fight back. This was about doing that for myself. It was about doing it for Emilie and my family. That’s what I’m most proud of.”
Hope and Healing
For Parker, being vulnerable enough to put his experiences in writing has been a major part of his healing journey.
“I realized that once I started sharing my story, I began connecting to myself again. And then people felt safe connecting with me, and they would share their stories,” he says. “There are so many people who suffer silently through the worst things that are happening to them. Finding my voice and using it has been a catalyst for healing, and I hope others can find healing from my book.”
Parker has also learned that healing isn’t linear. “It’s a winding road we had to learn to navigate. Healing isn’t about forgetting the pain but remembering the love.”
As he and his family mark another anniversary of Emilie’s death, they continue to focus on the amazing person that she was.
“One of the things that I miss the most about Emilie was the love that she had. She loved hard, and she wasn’t afraid to show it,” says Parker. “That’s something I really struggle with, so that example in my life is what I miss the most about her.”
Read more about Robbie Parker’s experience in his new book, A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook.
Now available on Amazon.
► You’ll also like: Live Like Sam: Honoring One Teen’s Legacy by Helping Youth to Become Their Best
