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Gene Rosen was walking out of his house to get lunch at a diner in his hometown of Newtown, Conn., when he came across six children and an adult sitting in his driveway. Confused, the retired psychologist asked them what they were doing.
The date was December 14, 2012. Less than a mile away, a shooter had just opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The adult was a school bus driver who had just driven the children away from the scene of the violence.
Rosen, 69, who happens to be Jewish, quickly took the children into his house and allowed them to stay there until their parents and the authorities arrived to pick them up. It didn't seem like an extraordinary act of heroism, just something most people would do in similar circumstances.
But in a disturbing twist, Rosen's modest act has now landed him in the middle of a storm of hatred. Conspiracy theorists who claim that the Newtown shooting either didn't actually happen or was somehow concocted for political gain are targeting him as crucial evidence in their argument.
Rosen has been harassed by telephone and by email. Fake social media accounts have been created in his name. His story has been the subject of dozens of YouTube videos, one of which mocks his account of the episode as an "audition tape" for his TV debut. The video shows Rosen, distraught and sobbing, explaining to a reporter what, happened from the moment he saw the Sandy Hook children in his driveway.
In the video, Rosen, his voice cracking between sentences, recounts that the children said to him: "What are we going to do for a teacher? Our teacher is dead."
Rosen's...