Photo shows “the Sandy Hook girls that did not die like they said they did!”

Survivors of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, graduated high school June 12, more than a decade after 20 of their fellow first grade classmates were killed in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. 

Multiple recent Instagram posts wrongly claim that the girls killed in the shooting were crisis actors who are not dead. 

“Here are the Sandy Hook girls that did not die like they said they did!” the posts say, sharing an image of nine girls posing for the camera alongside portraits of the children who were killed. “I am pretty sure they pay them with lottery money so nobody can find them. This was in 2021 so yeah where are they now they might have their own kids now!” The posts also say that the girls are still “alive and well connected enough” to gather for a “big commemoration photo.”

These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

There is no evidence to support the unfounded claim that the unidentified girls in this photo are the children who died at Sandy Hook. That’s because those children were killed — news reports have recounted the horrors encountered by crime scene investigators in the school and how they affected them. Final reports on the shooting were published on the website of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection and included 911, telephone and radio communications; cell phone recordings; videos of officers processing the crime scene; photographs and more. 

The deaths of 20 children, a school principal, school psychologist and four teachers, unmoored a community and left dozens of grieving families vulnerable to misinformation and false allegations like this one. 

In 2022, for example, we rated as Pants on Fire a claim that a parent of a Sandy Hook shooting victim was a crisis actor. 

That same year, a judge ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $965 million to the family members of victims who Jones falsely claimed were actors hired as a plot to seize Americans’ guns.  Crisis actor claims are often packaged as a supposed scheme to disarm gun owners and such false flag conspiracy theories have followed every mass shooting in recent memory. 

We rate the claim that a photo shows “the Sandy Hook girls that did not die like they said they did!” Pants on Fire!