It’s not so hard to be public in public, the Wheelers tell me. They’re both performers; it’s only natural, says David, that trauma would force them back into comfortable roles. It’s much, much harder to have to be public all the time, Francine explains—in Newtown, the families of the twenty-six carry the celebrity of all tragic figures. Everyone in town knows their names and the names and faces of their dead; they are perpetually exposed, even in their everyday routines. There are three groceries in town, but Francine likes Caraluzzi’s best, and she has a hard time there, even now, because she visited so frequently with Benny. She would let him loose in the aisles, to the annoyance of the other shoppers. It is horrible, she says, to have to break down in a place where everyone knows exactly who you are and what, exactly, happened to your kid. “My greatest need of strangers is to treat me like a stranger.”
Stories circulate among the twenty-six of those who, in stabs at empathy, have said entirely the wrong thing: “Move on,” or “This too shall pass,” or “Will you hug me for me?” The rest of the town, even those very close to the grieving, find themselves on eggshells, constantly worried they’ll misspeak or misstep. Nelba Márquez-Greene can feel how much other people in town want her to be better. “We are the face of every parent’s nightmare,” she says. But nothing makes her feel better. “I feel terrible, and I’m giving myself permission to say I feel terrible.” She is a tiny, neat person, with a dispassionate way of talking, and is working for Sandy Hook Promise now, busily giving keynote speeches and a TED talk, but the idea that her work life might console her or ease her pain is laughable. It’s as if, she tells me evenly, you needed a liver transplant and someone came up and gave you a heart.
Every day, Francine Wheeler makes a list of the things she’s grateful for, and she always includes her morning coffee. Around her neck, she wears a tiny picture of Ben in a tiny square frame and a silver pendant in the shape of a treble clef. When I admire it, she tells me that Ben’s ashes are enclosed in the necklace. “He had perfect pitch,” she says.
When I visit them at home, David shows me his amulets, too, more ashes in a pendant, a bracelet of green agate, another one, on a leather thong, strung by Ben’s counselor at camp. But by three o’clock, the Wheelers are distracted. Nate is due home from school, and they’re listening with all their nerve endings for the squeak of the bus. Nate was at Sandy Hook Elementary School on 12/14 as well. When he arrives, on time, he shows his parents the new Guinness book he got that day at school. He has his brother’s ashes in a pendant, too.
• • •
In October, a coalition of gun groups announced that it was declaring the first anniversary of the shooting “Guns Save Lives Day.” Pat Llodra, the first selectman, was flinty in her response. “We will not host a political rally of any stripe on that day and we hope that all such inclined persons understand that they and their agenda are not welcome. We ask for privacy and expect that all caring folks, including the media, will accommodate us.” And then, like the schoolteacher she used to be, she added the unveiled threat of her own judgment: “Those persons … who choose not to accede to our request … show the world their own personal and ethical fiber.”
This is the question before the town now: how to lay claim to an uncertain future, to move forward without moving on and build unity among the various factions. What is an acceptable tribute? What is too much? Some locals have told me that, when out in the world, they try not to say the name of the place they live; “Newtown” evokes in outsiders such horror. “This is a good town,” says Arguello, the pediatrician. “We don’t want to be remembered just for that day.”
Monsignor Weiss has a hunch that the future of Newtown will not include him. Pastor of St. Rose for fourteen years, he is haunted, he says, by the memory of crunching glass under his shoes, for when he approached the school that day, a police officer asked if he cared to enter and give the children a blessing and he declined. “It gets me,” he says, beginning to cry. “I said, ‘You know what? These children don’t need a blessing. They are with the Lord already.’” He turned around and went back to the firehouse, feeling that the living needed him more.
But that memory and the eight funerals he performed in five days and self-doubt over his leadership these past months continue to torment him. He never wanted to be the face of the town, he says, the small-town priest consoling his decimated flock. But walking away from the firehouse late that first day, he was mobbed by reporters, and “all of a sudden,” he says, “you find yourself talking to Katie Couric.” He’s chronically ill now; his digestion is shot; he can barely control his emotions. “I feel like I’m a museum piece. Everywhere I go, people stare at me. I think I make people uncomfortable.” Friends in the priesthood are counseling him to save his health and find another post or another parish, and he is taking their advice seriously. “Every time I stand at the pulpit, I wonder, Am I a reminder of 12/14?”
Llodra has taken a different approach. Petite, blonde, and seventy-one, she had been in her mayorlike position for three years and was getting ready to retire when Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary. The events of 12/14 forced her into a role she could hardly have imagined and to which, by most accounts, she magnificently rose: She was the sensible, compassionate den mother to a collection of people screaming in pain and acting out, as people do, in anger and selfishness and love. It was Llodra’s idea to ask the wrecking crews at the school to sign stringent nondisclosure agreements such that no photos of the interior ever appear online and that no souvenirs from the school ever show up on eBay. She redeployed her staff to cope with the influx of goods and visitors; she tried to smooth relations between the families and the board. In the waiting room to her office on the day I was there hung the green sign that has become the hopeful mantra of so many: WE ARE SANDY HOOK. WE CHOOSE LOVE. (Some I spoke to rolled their eyes at the phrase, knowing how fractious the town has been.) She introduced the metaphor “sacred soil” to describe the shrines she cleaned up last winter, a deft bit of wordsmithery that allowed the entire town to feel good about turning a nation’s love into compost. Llodra is a pull-yourself-up, brush-yourself-off kind of person, and now, she feels, enough is enough.
“It’s not all about the victims,” she told me during an interview in her office. “It could have been any one of these children. By happenstance, he turned left instead of right.” Newtown must not become absorbed in its own victimhood, she believes. It must “grow through that specialness and not become the thing that defines them.” In July, Llodra announced on her blog that the town would no longer be hosting special events. And last month, as the anniversary approached, she asked well-wishers to keep their gift-giving impulses in check and to express their generosity through other means.
For many people in Newtown, the killing of those six- and seven-year-olds resurrected the pain of previous trauma or loss. In interviews, I heard about the death of a brother in a car crash; the near death of a child; an attempted rape; a gunshot wound. Llodra is one of these. Four years ago, she lost her forty-two-year-old daughter, Sharon, and Llodra believes that her own experience with grief helped her understand the incomparable suffering of losing a child. Many in Newtown, she believes, have been like families stuck in the initial phase after a death, when the women with casseroles are still coming by to stock the freezer. The next phase is harder and more personal but necessary. “I would give anything to have my daughter back,” she told me, “but I like who I am now better than who I was then.”
Llodra is no longer planning to retire. She has a lot of things to do: resolve the acrimony around Fairfield Hills, the campus of the dilapidated psychiatric hospital in town, which is now the focus of a development fight. Manage the issue of armed guards in the local schools, on which the town remains divided. And, of course, rebuild Sandy Hook Elementary School. The 400 Sandy Hook kids have taken over an empty school building in Monroe, ten miles away; parents are complaining about the length of the bus ride and the stress on their
kids. Once again, Llodra is in the position of having to acknowledge generosity without bowing before it. Monroe has been great, but “these are our kids,” she says. She wants Newtown to become again what she knows it can be: a place where there are great schools and playgrounds and where parents on the sidelines of sports events, she says, can be overheard “crabbing about taxes.”
• • •
That jocular, suburban normalcy seems possible, even now, if only in glimmers. There are all kinds of places to eat and drink in town—pizza, passable Japanese, a bowl of chowder—but probably the most popular is My Place, a regular Italian joint of the vinyl-booths variety. The real draw is the pub, tucked in the back, where, in an amber haze, amid televisions and twinkling lights, the co-owner, Mark Tambascio, pulls the taps on a wide selection of microbrews. I went there during the first game of the World Series to meet Rob Cox of Sandy Hook Promise; he wanted to show me the bar stool dedicated to the Flatliners, the name of his Frisbee team, so called because all the players are approaching heart-attack age. When I arrived, every seat was taken. People stood in clumps, holding pints and greeting newcomers by name—high fives and backslaps for all.
Nancy Lanza, Adam’s mother, whom he shot four times on the morning of December 14 before driving to the school, was a regular at My Place, and I had the strong feeling that everyone at the bar could tell me which stool had been hers: down near the end, by the entry to the restaurant. The Frisbee team regularly retires to My Place after its Tuesday-night game, and Cox recalls occasionally exchanging small talk with Nancy. Tambascio was friendly with her and is a neutral party in town—his bathrooms are marked YANKEES and RED SOX, because in Fairfield County, even tight-knit families can have split allegiances. For all these months, he hasn’t spoken ill of her.
Cox arrived, on his way to a 10:40 p.m. hockey game in a neighboring town—it’s hard to get ice time—and introduced me around. There was Terrence Ford, enormous, with a biker-guy look, who showed up out of nowhere to help direct traffic in Sandy Hook that day; cop cars were screaming so fast down the hill he could smell their brake pads burning. “That day was shit,” he hollered, over the din. “It’s still shit. It will always be shit.” There was Scott Wolfman, who works pro bono at Sandy Hook Promise and was busy organizing a trip for a few of the dads to see Pearl Jam that weekend in Hartford. There was the girl Cox took to the sixth-grade dance, now standing in a posse of moms, all of whom had just been to a seminar at the library about how to handle teenagers’ moods at home. Just shrug it off, the experts said. Laugh. Be goofy. Don’t engage. It wasn’t clear how much of this camaraderie was built in the aftermath of the shooting and how much survived it. But the atmosphere in My Place that night was very much the town’s own idyllic picture of itself.
And on TV, the Red Sox were winning; the Cardinals had committed three errors in one game. Nelba Márquez-Greene came in to meet me, texting on her phone, having just finished taping a TED talk. Someone else had a picture on their phone of Márquez-Greene speaking, gazing up and smiling, but Nelba seemed embarrassed by the attention. The conversation turned to Wolfman’s Halloween party: an annual event, a bawdy blowout, no kids allowed. Cox was teasing Márquez-Greene, encouraging her to come, but she said she probably wouldn’t be in a party mood. In the meantime, though, right now, she thought she might be persuaded to have a drink.
Rolling Stone
FINALIST—REPORTING
You may not know this story, but you certainly remember the cover. When Rolling Stone published a selfie of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, on its cover, the magazine was quickly denounced for glamorizing someone even the editors called “a monster.” Overlooked in the ensuing frenzy was the quality of Janet Reitman’s reporting. Reitman would later admit being surprised by the reaction to the cover, but this was not the first time one of her stories had provoked controversy: her Rolling Stone piece “Inside Scientology” was also a Reporting finalist in 2007. Nor was it the first time Rolling Stone had put a monster on the cover. The magazine won its first National Magazine Award in 1971 for a story about Charles Manson.
Janet Reitman
Jahar’s World
Peter Payack awoke around four a.m. on April 19, 2013, and saw on his TV the grainy surveillance photo of the kid walking out of the minimart. The boy, identified as “Suspect #2” in the Boston bombing, looked familiar, thought Payack, a wrestling coach at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. On the other hand, there were a million skinny kids with vaguely ethnic features and light-gray hoodies in the Boston area, and half the city was probably thinking they recognized the suspect. Payack, who’d been near the marathon finish line on the day of the bombing and had lost half of his hearing from the blast, had hardly slept in four days. But he was too agitated to go back to bed. Later that morning, he received a telephone call from his son. The kid in the photo? “Dad, that’s Jahar.”
“I felt like a bullet went through my heart,” the coach recalls. “To think that a kid we mentored and loved like a son could have been responsible for all this death. It was beyond shocking. It was like an alternative reality.”
People in Cambridge thought of nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—“Jahar” to his friends—as a beautiful, tousle-haired boy with a gentle demeanor, soulful brown eyes, and the kind of shy, laid-back manner that “made him that dude you could always just vibe with,” one friend says. He had been a captain of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin wrestling team for two years and a promising student. He was also “just a normal American kid,” as his friends described him, who liked soccer, hip-hop, girls; obsessed over The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones; and smoked a copious amount of weed.
Payack stared at his TV, trying to reconcile Dzhokhar, the bomber accused of unspeakable acts of terrorism, with the teenage boy who had his American nickname “Jahar” inscribed on his wrestling jacket. He’d worn it all the time.
That afternoon, Payack spoke with CNN, where he issued a direct appeal. “Jahar,” he said, “this is Coach Payack. There has been enough death, destruction. Please turn yourself in.”
At that precise moment, just west of Cambridge, in suburban Watertown, Jahar Tsarnaev lay bleeding on the floor of a twenty-two-foot motorboat dry-docked behind a white clapboard house. He’d been wounded just after midnight in a violent confrontation with police that had killed his twenty-six-year-old brother, Tamerlan. For the next eighteen hours, he would lie quietly in the boat, as the dawn broke on a gray day and thousands of law-enforcement officials scoured a twenty-block area in search of him. He was found just after six p.m., though it would take nearly three more hours for FBI negotiators to persuade him to surrender.
The following morning, Payack received a text from one of the agents with the FBI’s Crisis Negotiating Unit. He’d heard Payack’s televised appeal, told him he’d invoked the coach’s name while speaking with Jahar. “I think it helped,” the agent said. Payack was relieved. “Maybe by telling Jahar that I was thinking about him, it gave him pause,” Payack says. “Maybe he’d seen himself going out as a martyr for the cause. But all of a sudden, here’s somebody from his past, a past that he liked, that he fit in with, and it hit a soft spot.”
When investigators finally gained access to the boat, they discovered a jihadist screed scrawled on its walls. In it, according to a thirty-count indictment handed down in late June, Jahar appeared to take responsibility for the bombing, though he admitted he did not like killing innocent people. But “the U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians,” he wrote, presumably referring to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. … We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all,” he continued, echoing a sentiment that is cited so frequently by Islamic militants that it has become almost cliché. Then he veered slightly from the standard script, writing a statement that left no doubt as to his loyalties: “Fuck America.”
• • •
In the twelve years since the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there have been more than twenty-five plots to strike the United States hatched by Americans, most of which were ill-conceived or helped along by undercover operatives who, in many cases, provided their targets with weapons or other materials. A few—including the plots to blow up the New York subway system and Times Square—were legitimate and would have been catastrophic had they come to fruition. Yet none did until that hazy afternoon of April 15, 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the marathon finish line on Boylston Street, killing three people, including an eight-year-old boy. Close to 300 more were injured by flying shrapnel, with many losing a leg or an arm or an eye: a scene of unbelievable carnage that conjured up images of Baghdad, Kabul, or Tel Aviv.
An uneasy panic settled over Boston when it was revealed that the Tsarnaev brothers were not, as many assumed, connected to a terrorist group, but young men seemingly affiliated with no one but themselves. Russian émigrés, they had lived in America for a decade—and in Cambridge, a city so progressive it had its own “peace commission” to promote social justice and diversity. Tamerlan, known to his American friends as “Tim,” was a talented boxer who’d once aspired to represent the United States in the Olympics. His little brother, Jahar, had earned a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and was thinking about becoming an engineer or a nurse or maybe a dentist—his focus changed all the time. They were Muslim, yes, but they were also American—especially Jahar, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11, 2012.
Since the bombing, friends and acquaintances of the Tsarnaevs, as well as the FBI and other law-enforcement officials, have tried to piece together a narrative of the brothers, most of which has focused on Tamerlan, whom we now know was on multiple U.S. and Russian watch lists prior to 2013, though neither the FBI nor the CIA could find a reason to investigate him further. Jahar, however, was on no one’s watch list. To the contrary, after several months of interviews with friends, teachers, and coaches still reeling from the shock, what emerges is a portrait of a boy who glided through life, showing virtually no signs of anger, let alone radical political ideology or any kind of deeply felt religious beliefs.
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