The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  The biggest fund by far was the one set up by nine p.m. the day of the attack, under the auspices of the United Way of Western Connecticut. By April, it held $11 million, and local psychiatrist Chuck Herrick was named president of the board of the fund, a position that has made him one of the most unpopular men in town. It was Herrick, along with a handful of others, who had to help calculate the disbursements to the parents of murdered children and who had to defend those calculations when the bereaved accused the United Way of being unfair, insensitive, condescending, elitist, paternalistic and, in a mantra recited by the grieving, of “raising money on the backs of our dead.”

  The tension between the families and the United Way reached its first peak in the spring. On April 9, in a letter sent to the families with a press release attached, Kim Morgan, the CEO of the United Way of Western Connecticut, explained that the board had decided to make an “initial” payout of $4 million. E-mails instantly flew among the families. How did they come up with the $4 million figure (less than half the full amount)? Why was it taking so long to decide what to do with the money? Why should they, the grieving and bereft, entrust this process to a disembodied board, comprising, as the Newtown Patch website said, “local dignitaries”: Herrick; Monsignor Robert Weiss, the Catholic priest; a lawyer; a prominent business owner; and a former town finance officer. Didn’t the money belong to them? “This is when it will get cutthroat,” a commenter on the Patch predicted.

  On April 11, Morgan, Herrick, and the rest of the board met with thirty or more family members in an auxiliary room at St. Rose of Lima Church, the enormous Catholic church in town. Chairs were arranged in a circle, remembers one participant, and in a tense exchange, families asked questions. It had been four months, one parent complained. The drawn-out process was adding pain to their pain. What about people who hadn’t been able to get back to work and really needed money right now? asked another. Above all, some expressed fury that the board was making unilateral decisions regarding money they felt was intended for them. The board was less sure. The donations had not been made with a stated purpose, they said, and the fund had been designed from the outset to compensate the victims, yes, but also the community at large. That $11 million reflected a nation’s sympathy, the parents answered; at whom was that sympathy directed if not at them? “Some people were shouting, and some people were crying. It was all pretty new,” says that family member. A few mothers ran out of the room.

  After the shooting, the media became enamored of Newtown’s quaintness, but until that day, whatever “small town” feeling the town possessed was, the townspeople say, mythological. Sandy Hook is officially part of Newtown—governed by the same town council and part of the same school system—but it is a distinct and separate place. Newtown’s center is picture-perfect New England, grand houses settled around a flag. Old-timers remember Sandy Hook as where the riffraff used to live—I heard a legend about a Hells Angels shooting where a guy got his face blown off in front of what’s now Sandy Hook Wine & Liquor—and other than that, it was pasture, “more cows and horses than people,” as Brian Mauriello, who grew up in Newtown, likes to say.

  Over the past twenty years, though, Sandy Hook has grown into a very ordinary exurb: big houses, bigger lots, curvy roads, and cul-de-sacs. It’s an appealing home for busy professionals, attracted by the real estate and public schools. They work in Hartford, Danbury, Armonk, Stamford, and Manhattan, and at the hedge funds in lower Fairfield County. Until “12/14,” it was a place where busy people watched television after a long day, where parents sending their children to the same school might remain strangers for years. Over lunch at her dining-room table, Francine Wheeler told me she can’t count the number of people who approached her after her six-year-old son, Ben, died in his first-grade classroom to say these kinds of things: “I’ve lived down the street from you for years; I’ve seen you playing outside with your boys; I’ve always been meaning to meet you.”

  The tragedy changed the tenor of Newtown, drawing people out of their cocoons and propelling them to something beyond neighborliness. It wasn’t just the meals and the home visits, the endless prayers and letters and offers of help. And it wasn’t just that people started to use their turn signals at the crazy intersection by the flagpole or that they continue to pay it forward at the local Starbucks. It was a kind of solidarity that you see among veterans: When a group of family members helped to draft legislation suppressing crime-scene photos, support in town was nearly unanimous. And when one of the murdered children has a birthday, word often gets around. On the day that Jack Pinto would have turned seven, all the kids in town went to school in their sports jerseys, having organized the tribute themselves.

  Herrick and his fellow board members had initially faced two questions: first, how to calculate disbursements to the grieving, which meant drawing lines around groups of victims and prioritizing their grief. And second, how to weigh the immediate pain of the bereaved against the future (and unknown) needs of the town. The fund’s steering committee spoke early on to Kenneth Feinberg, the attorney who after 9/11 found his calling advising municipalities and families on the best way to collect and distribute funds in the event of a mass shooting or terrorist event.

  Feinberg’s method is bloodlessly simple: Create one independent fund. Collect as much money as you can in a short period of time. Figure out who the victims are and develop an algorithm for distribution, stipulating that such a calculus will never be fair. Distribute the money quickly, and shut the fund down. Feinberg believes subjective measures of victimhood, like “need” or “entitlement,” should never be part of any such accounting. “Don’t send in your tax returns or tell us how much you have in the bank. We’re not going to say Johnny’s death is worth more than Mary’s death,” Feinberg told me. “Money is a poor substitute for loss. That’s it.”

  But the situation in Newtown didn’t subject itself to such cold, actuarial analysis, the board felt. When Adam Lanza opened fire, he hurt everyone in town. As Herrick said, “It’s two degrees of separation.” And unlike in Boston or Aurora or in New York City after the 9/11 attacks, where grief could dissipate over a large geographic area or among a great many people, the grief in Newtown was exponentially more concentrated. Here, if you were the relative of a victim, you had many comrades in grief. And your neighbors, who were grieving, too, often expressed their pain in conflicting ways.

  Adam Lanza took forty victims, a number most—but not all—people in town agree on. He shot and killed twenty first-graders in two classrooms. Those are the victims most have focused on, often called, simply, “angels.” Reports say Lanza made eye contact with the children; some of them nestled in their teachers’ arms as he murdered them. Jesse Lewis yelled “run” before he was shot, his mother, Scarlett, says; reports say Noah Pozner was shot eleven times, losing his jaw and his left hand. There were also adult victims, whose deaths have received less attention: Lauren Rousseau and Victoria Soto, the first-grade teachers; two teacher’s aides; the school psychologist; and the principal. In Newtown, the dead make up the first tier of victims: the twenty-six. Over time, that number came to describe not just the victims of Lanza’s massacre but their immediate families, too. These and two people who were wounded would receive compensation under a Feinberg-type plan.

  But there is another group that Herrick’s committee also hoped to take into account. These are the twelve children in the two classrooms who survived—one little girl in Lauren Rousseau’s class and eleven children in Victoria Soto’s, six of whom survived by running as the shooter reloaded his gun. These kids have been called “survivors” and are also known as “the twelve.” One person I spoke to heard the following version of that morning from a seven-year-old girl: The bad man shot my friend. And then he shot my other friend. And then he stopped, and I took my friend’s hand, and we slipped in blood, and we bumped into the bad man, and we ran and ran and ran and ran. They found their way to a neighbor’s house, where he discovered them, sittin
g in the driveway and crying and reportedly saying the most unbelievable things. “We can’t go back to school.” “He had a big gun and a little gun.” And: “There was blood in her mouth and she fell to the ground.”

  The parents of the twelve were, with the two and the relatives of the twenty-six, initially part of “the forty,” but they have since seceded, forming a separate and nearly impenetrable clan. They are estranged from the twenty-six; they rarely speak to the press. Their kids saw unimaginable things, and the parents are protective above all, worrying about nightmares now and PTSD and behavior problems down the road. But as the town began to weigh and measure degrees of grief, the parents of the twelve saw that in their plight was a horrible paradox and found themselves unable or unwilling to fight very hard for their share of the funds. Their children may have to cope forever with the memory of what they saw. But at least they can be kissed good night.

  To describe the way grief afflicted the town, many people invoke the metaphor of concentric circles, the ripples created by a rock in a lake. At the center are the twenty-six, and then the two and the twelve. Beyond that are all the teachers and children who made it out alive, including the children of Robert Bazuro, who skipped school on the fourteenth in order to honor their uncle, who had recently died. “I feel that my brother saved the lives of my children,” says Bazuro.

  Then there are the cops and the firefighters and the EMTs. There are all the people connected to the people at the school that day: parents, grandparents, cousins, and friends. There are scoutmasters, camp counselors, coaches, pastors, and clerks: the lady at the checkout with a special fondness for a certain kid she’d been saying hi to since he learned to walk.

  Herrick and his colleagues on the steering committee believed that the needs in Newtown would be great and that they would be unforeseen. They talked to folks in Columbine, Colorado. They talked to folks at Virginia Tech and in Oklahoma City. They learned about the slow unraveling that occurs in a community after an event like this, the rise in divorce, spousal abuse, alcoholism, teenage truancy and drug use. They thought that while some of the $11 million might go to the victims’ families, to help them start to heal, some could be used as insurance against such outcomes, to pay for mental-health support and other kinds of preventive services. They saw themselves as the most conservative type of guardians, hoping “to prepare,” as Herrick put it to me, “for the long term.” In an audit this summer, the Connecticut attorney general acknowledged to Kim Morgan and Chuck Herrick that the foundation had not violated donor intent—of the 20,000 envelopes and cards the AG inspected, only 1,373 were addressed to the families. But he also slapped their wrists for mishandling the process: “I am, however, concerned,” he wrote. Poor communication by the board “facilitated the misunderstandings about and inaccurate public information related to the fund.”

  • • •

  Until June, families were allowed to schedule walks through Sandy Hook Elementary School with police escort, and, just before the school was shuttered for good, Cristina Lafferty-Hassinger, daughter of the slain principal, Dawn Hochsprung, took the police up on their standing offer. Cristina, who is twenty-nine and has four young children, lives in Oakville, a thirty-minute drive from Newtown, and had never seen her mother’s workplace. Her mother was fierce, a fighter, and Cristina was having trouble getting a picture of that morning right in her mind; her stepfather, George, came along for moral support. Together, they stopped at the spot where Dawn was gunned down. “I know she didn’t have time to think,” George said later. “But if she did have time, she would have said, ‘Look at you, you scrawny little shit. I could take you.’” On the edge of her bathroom sink on the day I visited Cristina, there was a green rubber bracelet of the Livestrong variety. It said WWDD: WHAT WOULD DAWN DO?

  Among the families of the twenty-six, there are a few who became full-time warriors, and Lafferty-Hassinger is one of these. She believes that she has been freer than members of other families to agitate against the United Way because she does not live in Newtown and is thus protected from the judgment of her neighbors. In February, she had discovered that families were being asked to fill out paperwork to claim any emergency funds (held separately from the $11 million), a fact she found outrageous. Many of the twenty-six families had still not gone back to work; some were still not getting out of bed. “One of the families said they’d rather lose their house than go hat in hand and go begging,” she told me. On February 25, she posted the following message to her Facebook page: “The United Way of Western Connecticut gallantly stepped up to manage the influx of donations, but who are they really helping? They offered their trusted name to evoke confidence from eager donors, but more than two months later the victims’ families are being asked for proof of hardship before even the smallest disbursement is issued. Proof of hardship?”

  Many in town found the public fights about money distasteful. One person told me the phrase “embarrassment of riches” came to mind. In March, Monsignor Weiss told a reporter for the Hartford Courant that the $11 million must not become a “perverted lottery” for the bereaved.

  But Cristina doesn’t really care what people think of her, and she doesn’t believe that grieving people ought to face judgment for simply claiming what’s theirs. She quotes Tom Teves, a new friend who lost his twenty-four-year-old son in the Aurora theater shooting: “If I want to gamble my $200,000 away at a Vegas casino, who cares? My son is dead—it’s none of your business.” A lot of the families agreed with her, Cristina told me, but felt inhibited to speak. “They don’t want to walk into the grocery store and have someone whispering, ‘They’re asking for money because their kid died.’”

  “The process of grieving is as individual as your fingerprint,” Francine’s husband, David Wheeler, told me. Many of the twenty-six will not speak to the press. Some of them are on TV all the time. Scarlett Lewis was on the Today show last week, and as she sat there waiting to talk to Matt Lauer, she thought, This is so surreal that at times your brain just explodes. The twenty-six may be a fractious group, but those I spoke to defend one another’s right to be idiosyncratic—ugly, compassionate, silent, loving, selfish, spiritual, depressed—in their grief. There are also those who feel Sandy Hook Promise has claimed too large a role for itself. And there are those in town who discount Lafferty-Hassinger’s persistent agitating as a symptom of her deeper, broader anger. “It is hard,” Morgan says, “to argue with someone who is suffering.”

  After the April meeting, under pressure from the governor’s office, the board announced that it would not disburse the funds a little bit at a time, as it had planned, but in one lump payment of $7.7 million. And Ken Feinberg was invited to Newtown to advise the board and meet with the families.

  Still, the families were unsatisfied. At a meeting over the summer, when some of them queried the board how it arrived at the $7.7 figure, Second Selectman Will Rodgers pushed back. The families were lucky to be getting anything, Rodgers suggested, according to people who were there. (When asked about his comments, Rodgers says he was speaking about the possibility that other organizations less committed to victims’ compensation could have taken control of the fund early on and that this recollection takes his comments out of context.) In August, each of the twenty-six received a check for $281,000. The two got $75,000 each. And the twelve got $20,000.

  Some in town believe that the twelve were shortchanged. I raise the issue with Lafferty-Hassinger. Don’t these kids, who have been through so much, deserve the benefit of a safety net? She responds with a quip she has heard among the twenty-six. “Okay, it sucks. You only got $20,000. Want to trade?”

  • • •

  Ben Wheeler appears to his mother in dreams. Recently, Francine says, “he just came and hugged and kissed me. I said, ‘Oh, no, it’s a dream. Is it going to turn into a nightmare?’ But no, he just kept hugging and kissing me.” Early on, in January, she had a dream that she rode an elevator all the way down, and when the door opened, Ben was t
here. “Mama,” he told her. “I’m so happy. I’m loved. I’m okay. I’m so happy. I’m okay.” And then, “Don’t let them trademark you, Mama.”

  The Wheelers are among the most active of the Newtown families. In January, David Wheeler gave passionate testimony before the Connecticut State Legislature. In April, the Wheelers stood by the president in Hartford as he pressured Congress to pass gun-control legislation. Just before the vote, Obama handed his weekly video address to David and Francine, who wept as she remembered her son, who wanted to be an architect and also a paleontologist. In May, the Wheelers did a long interview with Bill Moyers, both of them breaking down when David mentioned December 13, the day before the day their lives became unrecognizable to them.

  The Wheelers’ very public displays of grief are incomprehensible to some, though Francine says their outspokenness is a way to make connections with others and continue being good parents to both of their sons—to Ben, who died, and to Nate, who is ten. If they can change the politics of gun violence by telling their story, she believes, they can save lives. But David, formerly an actor, now a graphic designer, always looks devastated, with basset-hound bags beneath his eyes. Francine’s face is more motile, sparkling one minute, crumpled the next.