A Texas jury on Friday decided that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting $45.2 million in punitive damages.
The announcement came just one day after Jones was ordered to pay a $4 million award for compensatory damages for defaming Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis.
They are the parents of Jesse Lewis, six, who was killed along with 19 other first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.
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Jones, via his company InfoWars, had claimed that the shooting had been part of a government plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms and that the victims’ families had been complicit in the scheme.
Jurors deliberated for about four hours before reaching Friday’s verdict
This is the first of three trials for damages against Mr. Jones.
In September, two more will take place, one in Texas and one in Connecticut, where the shooting took place.
Jurors were told on Wednesday that Mr. Jones’s lawyer had accidentally sent two years’ worth of text messages to the families’ lawyers.
Mr Jones learned this at the same time, while he was on the witness stand.
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