Leonard Pozner has lived through unimaginable pain. His son Noah was shot to death during the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, in which six adults and 20 children were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut. Then, after that incomprehensible tragedy, conspiracy theorists and gun-rights advocates have continued to harass him. Pozner is suing InfoWars' Alex Jones for defamation after Jones repeatedly claimed Pozner was a fake "crisis actor."
Now, Pozner, who lives in South Florida, claims in a new federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that a local cop in Delray Beach illegally accessed his private, personal information by exploiting the state license-plate database.
The suit does not state why the Delray Beach crime analyst, Rhea-Lyn Gerstenkorn, accessed Pozner's records using the state Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID) system, which catalogs every Florida driver's date of birth, photograph, address, phone number, Social Security number, emergency contacts, and other highly personal information.
Could Pozner have been targeted over his work as a gun-safety advocate and his status as a conspiracy-theory magnet? Pozner's lawyer, Mark E.
"Do I think so? Yes,"
Gerstenkorn and Delray Police did not respond to messages from New Times about the lawsuit.
Florida cops are frequently caught misusing DAVID for personal reasons, for everything from stalking ex-lovers to harassing police critics.
In Pozner's case, he says one Delray PD employee, Gerstenkorn, viewed his private information three times August 12, 2017. The suit says Pozner filed a
Pozner and his ex-wife,
But thanks in large part to InfoWars, Pozner and de la Rosa have been targeted by significantly more people than just Tracy. Pozner says he was forced to move seven times since the massacre and regularly receives death threats from people who think he staged the tragedy. (YouTube search results for "Leonard Pozner" still turn up thousands of conspiracy theorists' videos.) In July 2018, Pozner and de la Rosa also wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in which they begged the Facebook CEO to take greater action against conspiracy theorists spreading hoaxes on his social network.
"Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected," Pozner and de la Rosa wrote. "What makes the entire situation all the more horrific is that we have had to wage an almost inconceivable battle with Facebook to provide us with the most basic of protections to remove the most offensive and incendiary content."
In addition to suing Delray Beach, Pozner's suit against Jones remains open in Texas court. Jones in August lost a bid to have the case thrown out — Wired magazine in August said