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associated press
Robbie Parker, the father of 6-year-old Emilie who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, speaks during a press conference Saturday, Dec. 15, 2012, in Newtown, Conn.
Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012 | 2 a.m.
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NEWTOWN, Conn. — Inside the four-bedroom colonial set on a small rise, Nancy Lanza was already dead. But it was early yet, and it would be hours before her body was found — time enough for her son to unleash a slaughter.
For now, though, all seemed idyllic in this 300-year-old town under crystalline skies.
Adam Lanza, 20 years old, fascinated by computers and recalled by former classmates as painfully awkward, left the house in his mother's car and drove past fine old churches and towering trees. It was the holiday season, and lawns were decorated with lights and electric reindeer. It was just five miles from home to Sandy Hook Elementary, where hallways and classrooms rang with talk of Hannukah and Christmas.
Inside the music room, a group of fourth graders were watching the movie "The Nutcracker."
Theodore Varga and some other teachers were meeting. Their students, the oldest kids in the school, were in specialty classes like gym and music. The glow remained from the previous night's fourth-grade concert.
"It was a lovely day," Varga said. "Everybody was joyful and cheerful. We were ending the week on a high note."
The school appeared secure, it's entrance monitored by closed-circuit camera and opened only when employees in the main office buzzed somebody in. But Lanza wasted no time, breaking through the window and opening the door.
And then, suddenly and unfathomably, gunshots rang out. "I can't even remember how many," Varga said.
Someone turned the loudspeaker on, so everyone in the building could hear what was happening in the office.
"You could hear the hysteria that was going on," Varga said. "Whoever did that saved a lot of people. Everyone in the school was listening to the terror that was transpiring."
The sounds reached a room where Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school therapist Diane Day along with a school psychologist, other staff members and a parent were gathered for a 9:30 meeting.
"We were there for about five minutes chatting, and we heard 'Pop! Pop!, Pop!'" Day told The Wall Street Journal. "I went under the table."
A custodian ran around, warning people there was a gunman, Varga said.
"He said, 'Guys! Get down! Hide!'" Varga said.
He survived.
___
At 9:30, Marci Benitez unlocked the door to Fun Kuts, the children's hair salon she and her husband run in the Sandy Hook neighborhood's small downtown, and prepared for the day. Minutes later, the first police car streaked past, sirens screaming. Then another. And another. And another.
Police radios crackled with first word of the shooting at 9:36, according to the New York Post.
"Sandy Hook School. Caller is indicating she thinks there's someone shooting in the building," a Newtown dispatcher radioed, according to a tape posted on the paper's website.
___
In the school, Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach leaped out of their seats and ran out of the room. Hochsprung viewed her school as a model, telling The Newtown Bee newspaper in 2010 that "I don't think you could find a more positive place to bring students to every day." She had worked to make Sandy Hook a place of safety, too, and in October, the 47-year-old principal shared a picture of the school's evacuation drill with the message "Safety first."
On this morning, Hochsprung didn't think twice about confronting the gunman. She died attempting to overtake Lanza, who was armed with two handguns and a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, his primary weapon.
Sherlach also rushed to defend her students.
"Mary felt like she was doing God's work, working with children," her son-in-law Eric Schwartz told the South Jersey Times. She, too, was killed.
In a classroom, teacher Kaitlin Roig heard the shots and barricaded her 15 students into a tiny bathroom, sitting one of them on top of the toilet. She pulled a bookshelf across the door and locked it. She told the kids to be "absolutely quiet."
"I said, 'There are bad guys out there now. We need to wait for the good guys,'" she told ABC News.
"The kids were being so good," she said. "They asked, 'Can we go see if anyone is out there?' 'I just want Christmas. I don't want to die. I just want to have Christmas.' I said, 'You're going to have Christmas and Hanukkah.'"
One student claimed to know karate. "It's OK. I'll lead the way out," the student said.
In the school library, clerk Maryann Jacob was working with a group of 18 fourth-graders when she heard the commotion.
"We locked all our doors and then started hearing shooting," she said.
At first, she herded the children into a classroom within the library, but "when we realized the (classroom) door wouldn't lock, we had to crawl across the room into a storage room."
There, they locked the door and barricaded it with filing cabinet. There happened to be materials for coloring, "so we set them up with paper and crayons."
In the gym, crying students huddled in a corner. One of them was 10-year-old Philip Makris.
"He said he heard a lot of loud noises and then screaming," said his mother, Melissa Makris. "Then the gym teachers immediately gathered the children in a corner and kept them safe."
Another girl who was in the gym recalled hearing "like, seven loud booms."
"The gym teacher told us to go in a corner, so we all huddled and I kept hearing these booming noises," the girl, who was not identified by name, told NBC News. "We all started — well, we didn't scream. We started crying, so all the gym teachers told us to go into the office where no one could find us."
An 8-year-old boy described how a teacher saved him.
"I saw some of the bullets going past the hall that I was right next to, and then a teacher pulled me into her classroom," said the boy, who was not identified by CBSNews.com.
Robert Licata said his 6-year-old son was in class when the gunman burst in and shot the teacher. "That's when my son grabbed a bunch of his friends and ran out the door," he said. "He was very brave. He waited for his friends."
He said the shooter didn't utter a word.
___
"The shooting appears to have stopped," the dispatcher radioed at 9:38 a.m., according to the Post. "There is silence at this time. The school is in lockdown."
And at 9:46 a.m., an anguished voice from the school: "I've got bodies here. Need ambulances."
___
A half mile away, nurse Maureen Kerins was loading a broken chair into her car at about 9:45 when her cell phone rang. A friend wanted to know if her children were safe. There had been shooting at the elementary. Kerins' five kids are older, but she jumped in her car and raced to Sandy Hook. When she told police she was a nurse, they let her through.
As she approached the school, teachers were leading their children out single file, each had their hand on another's shoulder.
"It was very orderly. They weren't even running, they were just walking, following their teacher," she said. "Nobody was screaming. Parents were racing around looking for their kids, but the kids were just in line, following their teacher. Some were crying, but mostly they were calm."
She made a couple more trips with children, then went back to the school and waited with another nurse and a pediatrician to help treat the wounded. None ever came out.
"You expected them to be bringing out more kids," said Debbie Leidlein, the school board president, who was home sick but rushed to the school when she heard the news, "and it just wasn't happening."
Kerins waited for two hours, watching as police officers came and went but never brought any more children outside.
"Finally they said to us they didn't need us anymore. We knew it was bad."
Carefully, police searched room to room, removing children and staff from harm's way. They found Adam Lanza, dead by his own hand after shooting up two classrooms. No officer fired a gun.
Student Brendan Murray told WABC-TV it was chaos in his classroom at first after he heard loud bangs and screaming. A police officer came in and asked, "Is he in here?" and then ran out.
"Then our teacher, somebody, yelled, 'Get to a safe place.' Then we went to a closet in the gym and we sat there for a little while, and then the police were, like, knocking on the door and they were, like, 'We're evacuating people, we're evacuating people,' so we ran out."
As they were led away, children were warned to close their eyes so they would not see the gruesome aftermath of the attack.
Parents rushed to the scene. Family members walked away from a firehouse that was being used as a staging area, some of them weeping. One man put his arms around a woman as they walked down the middle of the street, oblivious to everything around them.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and other public officials came to the firehouse. So did clergymen like Monsignor Robert Weiss of Newtown's St. Rose Roman Catholic Church. He watched as parents came to realize that they would never see their children alive again.
"All of them were hoping their child would be found OK. But when they gave out the actual death toll, they realized their child was gone," Weiss said.
He recalled the reaction of the brother of one of the victims.
"They told a little boy it was his sister who passed on," Weiss said. "The boy's response was, 'I'm not going to have anyone to play with.'"
Long into the night, Leidlein sat with parents who had lost their children, trying to do what little she could to offer consolation.
"They were asking why. They can't wrap their minds around it. Why? What's going on?," she said. "And we just don't have any answers for them."
___
Associated Press writers Jim Fitzgerald, Matt Apuzzo and John Christoffersen in Newtown, Jocelyn Noveck in New York and Bridget Murphy in Boston contributed to this report.
Without a doubt this was beyond a terrible horror, but what if worse is yet to come? What if we've spun out of control as a nation and don't recognize it, don't want to? For one, there's that entire set of things that need to be explained by not even being able to see this as different. I mean, we're becoming so accustomed to these mass attacks that we've allowed the laws of probability to be used as explanation. And in doing so can't see the difference in this case, and this case due to the symbolic innocents being the targets, that marks this situation as unique; in fact, as not only worse but with a pattern since what happened in Colorado was so recent. And, yet, the difference can be explained. It fits deviance as definitive of a broken society since new patterns of deviance have long been known as the standard of a society's failure. (the yardstick may even be history's long standing marker of sacred places and rites being abused once a society is about to fall. but this society is secular so innocence stands as a substitute.) In other words, deviance is something that actually has a pattern. With the social scientist Durkeheim being quite clear about how it was integral to a society. It's the way the other means of life was supposed to transpire not normal life, and in his time the sick, the criminal, and the insane were even housed together. So that he could chart records of change in the stats and match them to general conditions, correlate them that is to the overall state of affairs, accurately; and that is what is going on here, today, in America. Sure, unbelievably, mass murders are still occurring, and, we don't have but this one instance of such a set of helpless victims. But that's the point. New deviance isn't going to be as large in number as standard deviance, period. So that what is actually happening is the same unraveling of a society that just so happens to be in denial about itself. "The we're number one at everything ethic" at the same time most people in the country are on some type of assistance has gone on way to long not to have effects. Effects that show how indeed this ethic is being manipulated to have hope substitute for solution. Or to have the wive's of former mayor's who are in no way shape or form fit to lead do so. And to have wealth so skewed in a nation based on doing, so skewed that 6 individiuals of a retail fortune hold as much wealth as thirty percent of the population!! Doing so because of efforts and developments so many have helped to create...we can only be in denial not to address it...we can only be a broken nation if shouts of we're number one have replaced days of blindly taking orders from kings and queens mean everything...broken to the point that we even are manipulating into believing Lindsay Lohan is as bad as it gets when we talk about innocence...when worse, much worse, is yet to come from leaders who keep fighting only for the rich instead of doing their jobs!!
Doomsday prepper family. Sophisticated home weaponry, Saiga street sweeper shotgun, Bushmaster .223, 10 mm Glock hand cannon. Home was fortified, Home schooled. Relatives said they were worried about "the government"...like the Tuscon shooter who was described by friends as "someone who hated the government."
Then look at the drumbeat of hate on talk radio and FOX directed against the public schools and school teachers. Limbaugh constantly describing this nation's school children as: "young skulls of mush" as he brags about giving teachers a "hard time" when he was in school.
There is the mix, hate schools, hate teachers, hate the government, and cling to guns as the solution. The computer will show that the news came from the paranoid right wing media, Drudge, WND, Breitbart, etc.
'2nd Amendment remedies' are not and never will be the answer, no matter what defeated GOP senate candidate crazy Sharron Angle says.
Questions for the pro-gun crowd:
- The counter argument seems to be that people kill people, not guns. Can you please point out the solution to the gun violence problem in this childish, overly-simplistic argument? Excuses are not solutions.
- Are those 20 kids, along with the 6 adults, along with the recent gun rampage victims in OR, CO, VaTech, Columbine, etc. - perfectly acceptable to you as unfortunate collateral damage so you can walk around strapped? If not, what is your solution?
- What was the practical purpose of Ms. Lanza having 6-guns, including a semi auto assault rifle? What was she looking to do with a gun that shoots .223 bullets? I believe Newtown has had 1 violent crime all year, so certainly she didn't need a cache of weapons for protection. It appears to me as if mom is the perfect example of the perverse infatuation some Americans (gun nutters) have with firearms.
- Do you see any problem with Ms. Lanza keeping 6-guns in a home with a mentally unstable child? If so, what is your solution?
- I am a gun owner (1 ahotgun that never leaves the house), and know many super-responsible gun owners that treat these as the dangerous weapons they are. Why do responsible gun owners consistently fall back on the ridiculous NRA meme 'guns don't kill people..." instead of taking ownership of the situation and demanding legislation that regulates guns to only be in the hands/household of those who are sane and responsible? One would think the responsible people would want to stop the irresponsible people from ruining their party. Instead the responsible gun owners jump right in bed with the gun nutters. Which has resulted in craziness such as the gun show loophole and suburban moms with crazy kids being allowed to own 6 freaking guns! 6 guns in Mayberry! Why?
Let's see -- paranoid, govt hating, gun-worshiping mom and social misfit son who was trained by unhinged mother in the use of military-style assault weapons ...
Hmmm, what could possibly go wrong?
It's very convenient for the anti-gun crowd to blame the dead mother since she can't defend or account for her actions.....that's okay....they are as feckless and weak as the media on this matter. The shooter didn't own one gun. He stole the guns from his mom. I guess gun laws aren't to blame. Very sad day indeed.
LastThroes, stick to something you know about. I guess that would eliminate all of your posts though. Ooops.
As an aside to the usual barbs that get thrown around on this board. The picture on this article is of the father (Robbie) of one of the victims, Emilie Parker... I hope most of you have seen his "press-conference" from yesterday.
We all could stand to learn from the humility and humanity of this man... that he could speak, as he did, in such an hour of grief about his daughter and life in general was truly inspirational.
The pro gun crowd will tell you there is no solution. If they say enforce the current laws, fine, great, but then you will need a lot more prisons. Solution? Raise taxes and build more prisons. They'll tell you no more taxes. Next suggestion. Mental health treatment. Well, for that you're going to need more mental health professionals for those who can't afford it. Solution? Raise taxes and fund more mental health facilities. They'll tell you no more taxes. And on and on goes the circus.
In a sentence the pro gun rights crowd will likely tell you Sandy Hook has no solution.
Not sure why his gun loving mother was keeping an arsenal in a home with a documented "problem" kid..but she was within her rights. I wouldn't do it, but I tend to side on common sense.
It's just too bad that he just didn't take the gun and blow his head off in the basement instead of destroying these poor, helpless kids and their families.
While there were signs that this was not a "normal" family, the gunman had to go to a very dark and evil place in his mind to conjur up such an heinous act, and for whatever reason wanted to inflict as much pain as possible on the community.
Hey Tom,
The "pro gun" crowd does not run this country, they are not a majority, so you are barking up the wrong tree.
If you want change contact your representatives in washington, however, you may have to wait on a response until they finish stuffing their pockets with NRA cash.
Maybe --- Anybody ever give any thought to maybe enacting a Criminal Control Law instead of a Gun Control Law ? Everyone is always claiming it's the Criminals that Kill, NOT the Guns. Sure, GUNS are the TOOL used in a lot of these types of crimes or acts of Violence. But then so are Knives, Hammers, Hatchets, Poisons, etc. BUT the common denominator here is the Criminal Nut Case.
Seems a simple enough solution if one thinks about it. Control the Criminal Nut Case. NOW the BIGGIE ~~~~~ How does society go about doing that?
TOO often, the Criminal doesn't want to get their Hands Dirty, so that leads to the implementation of some type of tool. Take the Gun - they'll use a knife, take the knife, they'll use a rope, take the rope they'll just use something else. So why not just take the Criminal, and NOT worry about the Rest? Yeah, I know, NOT so easy is it ..........
The "pro gun" crowd does not run this country, they are not a majority, so you are barking up the wrong tree.
If you want change contact your representatives in washington, however, you may have to wait on a response until they finish stuffing their pockets with NRA cash.
-------
The gun lobby is considered to be THE most powerful in the country. They may not "control" the country but their power and influence is unprecedented. I'll be the first to say no citizen should be able to buy an automatic weapon. No citizen needs a 20 round clip. Handguns and rifles are a way of life for some and that will not be infringed for the law abiding but there are limits on everything. Sensible gun/ammunition laws are a must.
Tom please....
defense, mining, wall st., big oil, and big pharma dwarf the NRA when it comes to spending and influence.
Or are you saying congress will kowtow to anyone that shows up with a decent size check?
BTW no private citizen is allowed to buy or posses an automatic weapon in this country.