Gene Rosen took in six children and kept them safe during the Sandy Hook Shooting, and for his kindness he is being payed back with harassment from conspiracy theorists.
A month ago, Rosen found six children and a bus driver sitting at the end of his driveway in Newtown, Connecticut. A little boy told Rosen “We can’t go back to school, our teacher is dead.”
He brought the group inside, giving the kids juice and cookies. He even gave them some toys to play with. He called their parents and then sat with them and listened to them recount the horrors they’d just witnessed at their school just down the street.
In the days that followed, Rosen did a lot of interviews. He wanted to speak on the bravery of the children who were briefly in his care. It did more than that though, it made Rosen a target for conspiracy theorists who’ve taken to harass Rosen at every turn.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’”
Someone has posted photos of Rosen’s house online. Google+ and Youtube accounts have been made in his name. There are messages on white supremacist boards making fun of the “emotional little Jewish guy”. It doesn’t stop there. There are dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” Rosen as a fraud.
One email stated:
“How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”
Rosen is overwhelmed by the quantity of material aimed at him by Sandy Hook Truthers. The group believe fervently that the shootings were a hoax or training exercise. The good Samaritan and his wife are in fear for their safety, logging every email and call until the police are able to handle the matter.
The harassment has turned Rosen’s life upside down.
“There must be some way to morally shame these people, because there were 20 dead children lying an eighth of a mile from my window all night long,” he said, choking back tears. “And I sat there with my wife, because they couldn’t take the bodies out that night so the medical examiner could come. And I thought of an expression, that this ‘adds insult to injury,’ but that’s a stupid expression, because this is not an injury, this is an abomination.”
Rosen has said that the calls, the emails make him feel a searing rage that he’d never felt in the past. There are occasions though where someone will approach him, and tell him they think of him as a hero, and that he is not a tool of some shadowy conspiracy. For every angry call or email, there any many praising and thankful ones:
“I get the most beautifully written cards, wonderful calls.”
And it is these little glimmers that keep Gene Rosen from caving into hate and anger.
Nation
Do you believe that even in the search for “truth” people can go too far?
