Newtown: An American Tragedy

by Matthew Lysiak

  Art teacher Leslie Gunn and her twenty-three students had been waiting inside a storage cabinet for fifteen minutes when they heard someone banging loudly on the door.

  “Police. It’s okay to open up,” a voice through the door announced.

  Before opening the door the teacher instructed her students to “hold each other’s hands and not let go.”

  As officers continued their room-to-room search they found the bathroom door locked in Kaitlin Roig’s classroom.

  “Police,” an officer said through the door. “It’s okay to come out now. You can open the door.”

  Kaitlin wanted proof before she unlocked her door. “I don’t believe you,” she yelled back. She was concerned that it could be a trick by the gunmen to lure them out. “You are going to have to show me some identification before I open this door. Slide your badges under the door,” she told them.

  After an officer slid his badge to her, Kaitlin still was not sold. “If you really are a police officer, you would have a way in here, you would have a key.”

  A few minutes later the police retrieved the key and opened the door before escorting the class to safety. As the children emerged, the officers tried to reassure them in their best calm, fatherly voices.

  “Everything is fine now,” they said, even as they stayed alert for a possible second gunman. “Everybody hold hands, close your eyes,” they told the children as they led them past the carnage.

  Some officers formed a human curtain around the bodies of Ms. Hochsprung and Ms. Sherlach, to shield the children from the sight as they walked past. Others blocked the doorways of the two classrooms. The children came out in single-file lines, eyes closed, hands clutching each other by the shoulders. Police at all sides, teachers in front and back.

  Outside, armored cars and ambulances and countless police officers swarmed with dogs and roared overhead in helicopters. As new officers continued to arrive, they were warned by the officers standing guard outside the school about the scene inside.

  “If you have children, you especially don’t want to go in there,” they advised.

  Detective Joe Joudy looked at Officer Chapman, covered in blood, walking back inside the school. “They’ve got to get you guys out of here,” he told Chapman.

  Ambulances from within a twenty-mile radius continued racing toward the scene, making a long line up Dickinson Drive. As time passed, EMS workers, many who had children, or had known children, inside the school, had flooded the scene and were anxiously holding their breath, hoping to provide medical assistance to the injured survivors.

  Then came the call that no one wanted to hear.

  The Newtown EMS captain ordered all ambulances and first responders to stand down. This was followed by a horrifying revelation. The directive meant that police were not expecting to find many survivors among the victims. There was no one left to help, no one left alive.

  “Hold all other ambulances.”

  CHAPTER 10

  SOMETHING IS WRONG AT SANDY HOOK

  Parent Tricia Gogliettino was driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning to deliver a gingerbread house she and her first-grade daughter had made together. The previous night she had been at Newtown High School with her brother John Frey to watch her daughters perform in the Winter Concert.

  “At the Sandy Hook Elementary School holiday concert cheering nieces, Joan and Bridget,” he had tweeted from the concert hall.

  When Gogliettino got less than a mile from the school, she spotted five young children running in a straight line up Riverside Road. Some of their bare arms were exposed in the frigid morning air. She stopped the car, rolled down her window, and asked the children where they were going.

  “Someone is trying to kill us. We were told to run,” the children answered.

  “Who is trying to kill you?” Tricia asked as she directed the children into her car and called the school. The phone rang several times but no one answered. She called the Newtown police, who told her to bring the children to the police station right away.

  Susan Ludwig was also heading to the school to make gingerbread houses with her daughter, a first-grader, when she saw Gogliettino standing in the middle of the road with the five children and pulled over to see if everything was okay.

  “Something is really wrong. These boys say someone is trying to kill them,” Gogliettino told Ludwig.

  “Someone is trying to kill them?” she replied. “My daughters are inside the school.”

  Shortly before 9:40 A.M., parents districtwide received a voice mail notification that Newtown schools had been put in lockdown, due to a shooting “as yet unconfirmed.”

  Gene Rosen didn’t want to believe what he was hearing. It can’t be true. Not in Sandy Hook, he kept thinking to himself. But there they were, six young children telling a tale too horrible to have ever been made up.

  He had just finished feeding his cats and had walked out the back door on his way to the diner when he first spotted four boys and two girls sitting in a neat semicircle on his front yard, a school bus driver hovering over them. The children were crying and hyperventilating and shivering in the cold without their jackets as the bus driver frantically tried to comfort them. But his nervous tone was only making them more upset.

  “It’s no problem. I’ll take care of them,” Rosen told the bus driver. He looked down at the children and smiled warmly. “Come up to my house and we can figure this out while we wait for your parents,” he told them, stretching his arms out.

  The frightened students didn’t say a word as Rosen walked them up the gravel path into the small home that he shared with his wife, Marilyn. Rosen, a retired psychologist; he knew something was very wrong as they walked up the hill in silence, but he didn’t ask any questions, not wanting to press the shaken children. His sole focus was to make sure the children felt comfortable until he could get them into the arms of their parents.

  He led them inside and settled them down on the rug in front of the couch in his small living room, brought them glasses of juice, then went upstairs and came down with some toys that belonged to his grandchildren before calling the children’s parents, using cell phone numbers obtained from the school bus company.

  After he had finished making the phone calls, he again directed his attention to the children. They were quiet. Finally, a little boy broke the silence and the room became flooded with pent-up emotion.

  “We can’t go back to the school. We can’t go back to the school. We can’t go back to the school,” the young boy kept repeating, tears streaming down his face. “We don’t have a teacher. Our teacher is dead. Ms. Soto; we don’t have a teacher.”

  After the first child spoke, another boy began to open up about the unspeakable horror he had witnessed with his classmates.

  “He had a little gun and a big gun,” another boy added.

  Then one of the girls began speaking.

  “Mrs. Soto. Mrs. Soto. Mrs. Soto is dead. There is blood,” she added. “She had blood in her mouth and blood coming out of her mouth and she fell.”

  All the while Rosen sat silently, listening, trying to remain calm as some of the other children continued describing what sounded more like a sick nightmare than a morning at Sandy Hook Elementary. As they spoke, one little girl sat silently spelling her name out on a stuffed frog that had the alphabet on its belly. Another clutched a small stuffed Dalmatian to her chest, repeating, “I want my mother,” again and again.

  As Rosen absorbed the unbelievable tale, all that kept going through his mind was, It can’t be true. Not in Sandy Hook. Not here. Not in Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook Elementary had always been a place of joy for him. It was where he took his daughter to use the swings. The parking lot was where he had taught his eight-year-old grandson how to ride his bike. The school was only a stone’s throw from his house, and seeing the children come every morning had always been a joyous experience for Rosen.

  As much as he didn’t want to believe their words were true, as the ch
ildren spoke he remembered he had heard strange noises coming from the school about fifteen minutes earlier. He had heard the sound of gunfire but dismissed it as an obnoxious hunter in the nearby woods or perhaps fireworks. Now he was reconsidering. Could that sound have been the gunshots the children were talking about? he thought, before dismissing the notion, refusing to allow the concept to gel in his mind. No. It can’t be true. Not at Sandy Hook. It can’t be true.

  It was too much to process right now. His only job at this moment, he told himself, was to provide comfort for these children until their parents arrived.

  Susan Ludwig immediately rushed to the school where she saw two police cars outside. She ran to the front door and tried to get in, but a local police officer turned her away.

  “My daughter is inside,” she told the officer.

  “No one is allowed in,” he replied.

  As she nervously retreated to the parking lot to wait for her daughter, she saw another officer emerge from the building; it was Chapman. He was walking out of the front entrance cradling the body of a young girl in his arms. Oh my God, that’s my child, was her first thought as she looked at the girl’s long brown hair from a distance.

  At second glance she felt equal parts terror and relief as she realized it wasn’t her daughter but her daughter’s friend Olivia Engel. The little girl’s body was limp and she was bleeding from her head. Chapman screamed for an ambulance.

  A moment later, a second child walked out escorted by another officer. Ludwig couldn’t believe the sight as she looked at the little girl, who was covered from head to toe in blood, with pieces of flesh hanging off her body, and watched as she ran to the arms of her mother, in the parking lot.

  Ludwig immediately suspected the worst as one by one police cars began filling up the parking lot. This isn’t just a shooting, she thought. This is a massacre.

  At 10:05 A.M. an automated voice mail was sent out from the superintendent’s office directly to the cell phones of the entire Sandy Hook Elementary parent community telling them that there would be no midday bus run and that afternoon kindergarten was canceled.

  A few minutes later, the students began pouring out of the school in single-file lines. Barbara Sibley waited and waited, looking for her son. Finally, after seven classes came out of the building, she spotted him being led by his teacher, Teri Alves. Some of the children were giggling. Others were crying. Her son Daniel had a flat affect. Inside she was falling apart, but as she slowly approached her son as he was being led out through the parking lot, she kept a calm facade.

  “Hi, Mom,” the little boy said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I just happened to be here,” she responded.

  “Well, we are all going to the firehouse. Do you want to come?”

  Two little girls, one in front of him and one behind, were both crying. Barbara put her arms around all three as they walked to the firehouse together in a group hug.

  Jillian Soto was at a Vermont ski slope when her cell phone rang at 10 A.M. It was her mother, Donna, reporting that there had been a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and the school was under lockdown. Jillian’s heart sank. Her big sister, Victoria, was a first-grade teacher at the school.

  Forty-five minutes later, a second call came from her mother. The school had been completely evacuated and Vicki had not come out.

  “Does that mean Vicki is dead?” asked Jillian.

  “No,” her mother responded.

  Soto and her friends packed the car and began the grueling seven-hour trip back to the family’s home in Stratford, Connecticut.

  At 11:17 A.M. a third voice mail from the superintendent’s office hit the phones of parents: “Parents of Sandy Hook Elementary should pick up your child/children from the firehouse. All other schools remain in lockdown.”

  CHAPTER 11

  FOG OF WAR

  The morning of December 14 began as a day of celebration for staff at the Newtown Bee. It had just closed its latest weekly edition, which included a front-page report on how well Newtown schools were meeting state standards, when they discovered one of their employees had won a radio contest. News of the award, a catered Christmas party for the entire office, sparked shouts of joy from inside the small red clapboard house that served as the Bee headquarters.

  Then at 9:35:53 A.M. a short blurb came across the police scanner in the Bee office.

  “Six-seven. Sandy Hook School, caller’s indicated she thinks someone is shooting in the building,” the dispatcher deadpanned.

  A staffer heard the dispatch and alerted Shannon Hicks, an associate editor, who walked to the back of the office toward the scanner in time to hear the next dispatch twenty-two seconds later: “The individual I have on the phone is continuing to hear what he believes to be gunshots.”

  Hicks grabbed her camera and jumped into her 2006 Jeep Wrangler. The school was located only a mile and a quarter from the newspaper’s offices. As Hicks pulled onto Riverside Road, she quickly found herself behind a dozen police officers all racing toward Dickinson Drive at full speed, sirens blaring.

  A shooting at Sandy Hook? It just seemed too difficult to fathom. It just wasn’t the kind of place where school shootings happened. It must be a domestic dispute, assumed Hicks as she followed the speeding caravan of emergency vehicles.

  Over the course of its 135-year history, the Bee has written hundreds of articles about Sandy Hook Elementary School, noting exceptional teachers and chronicling the honor roll activities of the student body. Owned by the same family since it was founded in 1877, the oversize paper’s staff of eight reporters and editors takes pride in its hyperlocal coverage, which circulates to about two-thirds of the community.

  One popular refrain in the office, that no story is too small to cover, is a motto put to practice across the pages of every issue. The happenings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, no matter how trivial, are always fodder for coverage at the Bee.

  As she pulled down Dickinson Drive, with one hand on the steering wheel, Hicks began taking photographs through the windshield of her car. A moment after pulling up near the school, she saw Officer Chapman emerge from the front entrance, cradling a bleeding little girl in his arms as he screamed: “Get the bus!”

  The twenty-plus-year veteran journalist tried to stay focused, composing each image through the eyepiece of her camera. She aimed her lens and pushed down on the shutter. Hicks, who also serves as a volunteer at Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue, then cried out for help. “We need an ambulance,” she screamed.

  As she looked down to study the image on her camera, she realized it was a photograph that would never see print.

  The ambulance pulled up to the entrance. As Officer Chapman approached, he lost his strength and fell to the ground. Several first responders sprang to his aid, picked him up off the ground by his shoulders, and carried the little girl’s lifeless body into the ambulance before racing away with lights blaring.

  The scene quickly descended into further chaos. A line of fourteen anguished children, their hands on their classmates’ shoulders, their eyes closed tightly, was being led out of the school with a teacher in front, a teacher in back, and police at both sides. Looks of horror spread across their faces. Then a second class was evacuated. More children walking single file with hands on each other’s shoulders. Eyes closed. They were talking about the wild animal that had gotten loose inside the school. Followed by parents rushing in from all directions. A police officer holding his rifle tight to his chest was standing near the school’s entrance, ordering parents to stay back. As they stood outside the front entrance, many began yelling for their children by name.

  “What kind of person would do something like this?” a young man standing outside the school began screaming.

  A Connecticut State Trooper got out of his car, put on his flak jacket, and announced loudly, “This scene is not secure.”

  Another reporter from the Newtown Bee had shown up. Shannon Hicks handed him the memory card ou
t of her camera, which had all of her images on it, retrieved her Sandy Hook volunteer firefighter uniform, got dressed, and began helping other volunteers set up a triage area near the baseball field to treat the casualties they expected to soon come out of the school.

  It started out as a breaking news alert at 10:30 A.M.

  The first page from CNN read: “Connecticut State Police are responding to reports of a shooting at a Newtown elementary school in southwestern Connecticut, according to police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance.”

  The Hartford Courant and the Stamford Advocate, along with a CNN live truck and several local print and television media were en route. Seventeen minutes later an alert splashed on the computer screens of editors around the country. The link led to a short story posted by the wire services:

  NEWTOWN, Conn. - Connecticut State Police say they are assisting local police in Newtown amid reports of a shooting at an elementary school.

  The shooting was reported at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, in western Connecticut.

  The Hartford Courant reports there are multiple injuries and unconfirmed reports that one of the shooters is dead while the other is still at large.

  The school superintendent’s office says the district has locked down schools to ensure the safety of students and staff.

  State police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance says they have a number of personnel on the scene to assist.

  Multiple injuries? Two shooters? Inside an elementary school in a small upper-middle-class town? There were still few details, but it was enough for editors to justify deploying resources. A steady caravan of reporters, photographers, and television trucks were immediately dispatched from New York City.

  Meanwhile, the seven fire trucks at the Sandy Hook volunteer firehouse were cleared from their garages to make room for the scores of children being marched along the four-hundred-foot path from the elementary school. John Voket, the Bee’s government reporter, was inside. He went as a reporter, but soon after realizing the scope of the tragedy, focused instead on trying to help in any way he could. As he walked around, trying to get a handle on the situation, concerned parents were calling him on his cell phone, giving descriptions of their children in hopes that he could help find them amid the chaos.