The Christian Post ran two stories on a Maryland Lutheran church’s rooftop cell site, an industry media outlet picked up the coverage, and then Environmental Health Trust published a triumphant press release on July 14 crediting its own “investigatory” work with getting the site removed — “one of the fastest, most gratifying results from an investigation in EHT’s history,” in the group’s own words. The record, once you line the dates up against each other, tells a different story — one where nothing was actually stopped, nobody’s advocacy removed anything, and the coverage repeating the claim didn’t check the one detail that would have unraveled it.
What EHT actually claims
EHT’s press release, citing EHT President Joe Sandri, says a team member “recognized unusual activity” at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Silver Spring, MD, in mid-June, and documented a crew installing an antenna behind a new faux brick chimney directly above the church’s preschool playground. Sandri took his findings to the Christian Post, which published its first story on July 9.
Per EHT’s own account: “the day after the article ran in The Christian Post, our team returned to Saint Luke’s to discover that both the tower and the faux chimney had been removed.” EHT frames this as advocacy in action — publicity applying enough pressure on the church to force a carrier to tear down its own equipment within 24 hours.
The timeline doesn’t hold up
The Christian Post’s own reporting confirms the one-day gap: its July 14 follow-up article states that “on July 10, a spokesperson for Sandri informed CP that the installation was removed” — one day after the July 9 story ran, exactly as EHT describes it.
Set against the physical reality of rooftop wireless work, a same-day-to-next-day teardown — antenna removal, structural disassembly of a faux chimney, contractor scheduling, landlord coordination — in direct response to a single news article is not a credible operational sequence. Site decommissioning of this kind requires advance scheduling, not a reactive scramble triggered by press coverage.
T-Mobile sets it straight
There’s a documented explanation that fits the timeline far better. A T-Mobile spokesperson confirmed to Wireless Estimator that the rooftop site had been operating for decades and had already gone dark before EHT’s team ever showed up with a camera, telling us the equipment “went off the air last fall as part of our planned wider network optimization program.”
In other words, the crew EHT’s team photographed in June wasn’t installing a new site above a preschool — it was in the process of removing a T-Mobile installation that had been inert for roughly nine months, on a schedule set well before EHT’s mid-June discovery and completely independent of the Christian Post’s July 9 story. EHT witnessed a routine decommission and mistook its own timing for causation.
The AT&T detail nobody checked
The Christian Post’s original story points to a Montgomery County zoning filing as its basis for suggesting an AT&T connection: AT&T applied in October 2013 to build a second faux chimney at the same church, for 12 panel antennas, approved by the county in January 2014.
That filing is the entire evidentiary basis for treating this as an AT&T site. An AT&T spokesperson confirmed to Wireless Estimator that the site was never built and that AT&T has never had antennas on the church roof. The application appears never to have been acted on—there’s only ever been one faux chimney at St. Luke, and it belonged to T-Mobile.
In fact, in the submission drawings, available here, AT&T identifies an existing T-Mobile antenna installation behind a faux chimney on the roof, exactly where EHT discovered that a new cell site structure was secretly being built.
That distinction escaped at least one media outlet that picked up the story, which stated as settled fact that the transmitter had been hidden inside a faux chimney as part of a long-approved AT&T wireless facility. It wasn’t. There was no AT&T facility — approved or otherwise — ever built at that address.
Whose outreach was it, really
EHT’s press release states that “reporters” — plural — contacted the church for comment and received no response. The record shows exactly one reporter did that work: the Christian Post’s Ian Giatti, who disclosed in both of his stories that he’d reached out to St. Luke’s directly and gotten nothing back.
Coverage elsewhere simply repeated that non-response without disclosing it originated from CP’s outreach alone — phrasing that, lifted into EHT’s press release the same day, reads as broader media scrutiny than the file actually supports.
Who’s making the claim?
Joe Sandri is not a layperson stumbling into RF policy. His EHT biography lists a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park, followed by a Juris Doctor from The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law with a certification from the Institute for Communications Law Studies. He interned at the FCC’s Mass Media Enforcement Bureau during law school, then spent his career on the industry side of the business he now investigates.
He served as Co-President of FiberTower Corporation, a 5G infrastructure company acquired by AT&T in 2018 when the company was in bankruptcy, and before that as President of IDT Spectrum, managing wireless spectrum assets now held by Verizon as 5G millimeter wave licenses. He’s President Emeritus of the National Spectrum Management Association and a member of the D.C. Bar, the U.S. Supreme Court Bar, and IEEE.
That combination — a journalism degree paired with three decades of hands-on telecom and spectrum management experience, including running a company that built the exact kind of infrastructure he now frames as a hidden threat to preschoolers — means Sandri is professionally equipped to know what a routine site decommission looks like, how long it would take, how zoning applications do or don’t translate into built facilities, and how a press release gets amplified once it’s picked up.
The irony of proximity
Environmental Health Trust’s own headquarters sits roughly 1.3 miles from St. Luke Lutheran Church — just outside the typical 0.25-to-1-mile coverage radius of a dense urban macro site, though within range for T-Mobile subscribers commuting through the area on a given day. The T-Mobile site had been operating there since at least 2005, two years before EHT was founded in 2007. It’s a detail that sits awkwardly next to the group’s donation pitch asking supporters to help “stop big tech companies from using all of our public spaces for their infrastructure” — infrastructure EHT’s own staff may well have relied on for close to two decades before ever training a camera on it.
A donation ask built on a story that wasn’t true
EHT’s press release closes by asking for donations, framed around the story it just told: “This successful round of advocacy is a great reminder of the power we have to stop big tech companies from using all of our public spaces for their infrastructure… Environmental Health Trust regularly takes on these battles; if you can make a donation to assist our efforts, please click below.”
There was no battle. There was a T-Mobile site that had been on the church’s roof for over 20 years and has been dark since the previous fall, being decommissioned on a schedule that had nothing to do with EHT’s cameras or the Christian Post’s article.
The tower didn’t come down because anyone stopped anything. It came down because it was already scheduled to.
