By Jack Queen
(Reuters) -A Connecticut jury on Tuesday ended its second full day of deliberations without a decision on how much conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay families of victims for falsely claiming the Sandy Hook mass shooting in 2012 was a hoax.
Deliberations will resume on Wednesday morning in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where a gunman killed 20 small children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.
Jones claimed for years that the massacre was staged by the government as part of a plot to take away Americans’ guns.
The jury on Tuesday asked the court to clarify instructions for determining damages and later asked to review testimony by William Sherlach, whose wife, Mary, a school psychologist, was killed at Sandy Hook.
In August, another jury found Jones and his company must pay $49.3 million to Sandy Hook parents in a similar case in Austin, Texas, where his Infowars website is based. The Connecticut trial involves different plaintiffs than in the Texas trial.
Lawyers for the families of eight Sandy Hook victims in the Connecticut case said Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems LLC, cashed in for years on lies about the shooting, which drove traffic to Infowars and sales of products there.
The trial was marked by weeks of anguished testimony from the families, who filled the gallery each day and took turns recounting how Jones’ lies about Sandy Hook compounded their grief. An FBI agent who responded to the shooting is also a plaintiff in the case.
Jones, who has since acknowledged that the shooting occurred, also testified and briefly threw the trial into chaos as he railed against his “liberal” critics and refused to apologize to the families.
(Reporting by Jack Queen in New YorkEditing by Noeleen Walder, Mark Porter and Matthew Lewis)
