Newtown: An American Tragedy

by Matthew Lysiak

  It was a parent, who had no idea there was a gunman in the school. The microphone still on, the entire school was now listening as the secretary began weeping.

  “There is a man with a gun. He is shooting inside the school,” Barbara pleaded into the receiver. “Oh my God,” she continued.

  The phone rang a third time. It was Mary Ann Jacob, a library clerk. She had heard the commotion over the school’s intercom system and called into the main office to let them know the microphone must have been switched on by accident. Before she could say a word, Barbara told her about the gunman.

  “There’s a man with a gun,” she whispered.

  Mary Ann put the phone down. “Lockdown!” she yelled at her eighteen fourth-graders before quickly herding them into a corner of the room. “Get down on the floor and stay quiet,” she told them. Mary Ann then ran to the classroom across the hall and told the teacher to lock her door, too.

  Still trying to make her way from the main office to the infirmary, Barbara dragged the phone with her as she crawled on her hands and knees across the floor and dialed 911. “Help, we have a shooter,” she told the operator. “It’s the school. Get help right away.”

  Seconds later, the secretary and nurse ran together from under their desks into a nearby first-aid supply closet. As they hid, they began to pray.

  Principal Dawn Hochsprung instantly knew something was very wrong.

  The conference room where the parent-teacher meeting was about to begin was only twenty yards from the school’s front entrance, where the noise caused by the explosion of bullets and flying glass had come. Principal Dawn jumped up from her seat and ran out into the hallway, followed closely by her colleagues Mary Sherlach and Natalie Hammond.

  Almost immediately after opening the door they were confronted by a nearly unimaginable sight: Adam Lanza, dressed from head to toe in dark clothing, his thin angular face absent of expression and void of all emotion. There were only seconds to react. He was a few feet away and moving toward them, lifting the barrel of a large rifle and pointing it in their direction.

  “Shooter. Stay put,” Hochsprung screamed to her colleagues still inside the room she had just exited. Her shrill voice was picked up by the live microphone inside the main office and her panicked warning cry was amplified across the entire school via the public-address system.

  The principal daringly lunged at the gunman with every inch of her five-foot-two-inch frame, but fell short of reaching the weapon as Adam squeezed the trigger. He shot her at point-blank range. He kept shooting.

  Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

  He struck Principal Dawn several more times. The killer then turned his gun on psychologist Mary Sherlach who had come from the left of the Principal. As Sherlach tried to back away, Adam took aim and unleashed another barrage of bullets in her direction. In total, Adam fired eleven rounds into the hallway, ten with the Bushmaster and one from his pistol.

  Seconds after emerging from the conference room, both women now lay dead in the hallway.

  Kindergarten aide Deborah Pisani was forty feet down the hallway as the scene unfolded. She was frantically trying to bolt her door, which only locked from the outside, when a ricochet bullet struck her foot. She gasped but managed to restrain her scream as she stumbled back inside the room and took cover.

  Lead teacher Natalie Hammond, who had been footsteps behind the slain principal and school psychologist, was also struck in the leg by an errant bullet. She dropped to the ground and lunged back into the conference room where everyone was in a state of panic. The door did not lock. Natalie pulled the handle closed behind her and used her body as a barricade.

  “There is a man with a gun. Stay quiet,” she told Becky Virgalla, Diane Day, and the parent as the three hid under the table and waited, trying to administer first aid to her wound.

  The gunfire filled the corridor with smoke and left the smell of sulfur lingering in the air. The school fell into a quiet hush. The only noise came from Adam Lanza’s boots walking with purpose across the floor tiles. Adam had a choice to make: turn left or turn right. To the right, twenty-five children were rehearsing a play in the school cafeteria. To his left were the first-grade classrooms.

  Adam Lanza turned left.

  In the space of ninety seconds, the reaction of students and faculty inside the building had gone from confusion to alarm and then full-blown terror. The public-address system had amplified the frantic weeping and gasps of secretary Barbara Halstead as she first set eyes on the gunman. Moments later, the entire school had heard the panicked warning screams of Principal Dawn. Then came the unmistakable sound of nine gunshots. An eerie crackling sound now emanated from the speakers as Adam turned the corner and entered the hallway where the first-grade classrooms were located.

  The teachers had only one thing on their minds: protect the children.

  Kaitlin Roig was still seated in a circle on the floor holding the “Morning Meeting” with her first-grade students when she first heard the violent commotion. Oh my God, gunshots! the teacher thought. This is serious.

  There was no way to protect the class from the sounds. They heard everything: the first shots, the crash of breaking glass, then screams and more gunshots. As the onslaught of terrible noises kept streaming into the class, the children’s eyes wandered around the room, toward the window, at each other, until finally settling on their teacher.

  “What was that?” one student asked.

  “Is it an animal?” questioned another.

  “There is an animal loose in the school,” yet another child exclaimed.

  Kaitlin put her arms high up in the air, drawing all fifteen sets of eyes to her.

  “Lockdown! Everyone up, now,” she commanded as she rushed to close the classroom door. Stay calm. The kids need me to stay calm, she kept telling herself as she tried to keep her motions measured to not further alarm her children.

  The teacher closed the door and rounded up her students, quickly shepherding them toward the back end of the room where there was a bathroom. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” she said, her voice beginning to rise as she began physically cramming the children into the small space. As it became apparent that there wouldn’t be enough room for all the children to stand, the teacher began lifting some of her smallest students onto the toilet seat and up on the sink so everyone could fit.

  “Everyone stay here,” she said, before running back out and pushing a wheeled storage shelf in front of the classroom door.

  “We are all going to be okay,” Kaitlin told her students. “There are bad guys out there now, and now we have to wait for the good guys.”

  In the classroom directly to the right, Victoria Soto was standing by her desk when the sounds of shots and screams rang out from all around. At first, the strange noises had excited the children, who began frantically chattering back and forth among each other as they tried to make sense of the chaos.

  “Is that someone shooting? It sounds like someone shooting a gun,” one child said aloud.

  “It sounds like the army,” another student answered.

  The teacher acted to move her fifteen children as far from the danger as possible. “Everyone get away from the door,” she shouted, pointing at the far wall. “The wall. Now. Everyone.”

  The students rarely saw Miss Soto raise her voice, but when she did everyone knew to take it seriously. The children stopped talking and dutifully obeyed, lining up against the wall farthest from the hallway as their teacher hurried to shut the door.

  First-grade teacher Lauren Rousseau knew she was in trouble. Her classroom was the third door down the hallway from the main office, on the left. It was directly next to Victoria Soto’s and two down from Kaitlin Roig’s. Lauren quickly ushered her students toward the back of the room, away from where the sound of screams, popping, and shattering glass were coming.

  But locking the door was not an option. Lauren was only a permanent substitute teacher, filling in for
the regular first-grade instructor Amanda D’Amato, who was out on maternity leave. Since she was not a full-time staffer, she had not been entrusted with a key. With limited options, Lauren did the only thing left to do. She began leading her students away from the door and toward the corner of the room, near the bathroom.

  Across the school, teachers began initiating the lockdown drills they had diligently practiced only three weeks earlier. Standing down the hallway on the other side of the school with her door open was Pam Midlik, an educational assistant. At first she thought the noise sounded like aluminum unfolding but it continued, stopping and starting. Then the intercom came on in her first-grade classroom and she knew it was something much worse.

  An art teacher walked by the door and recognized the sound. “Oh my God, guns! I hear shooting,” she said.

  A moment later, the two women were joined in the hallway by a father who had arrived to help build gingerbread houses. He was equally terrified. Pam looked at the man and instructed him to go to his child’s class and warn the teacher. “Go back to the classroom and tell the teacher it’s a lockdown, and close the door and keep the kids safe,” she told him before running back into her own room and setting the lockdown drill into motion.

  A metal clang echoed down the hallway as Adam, fresh from killing the principal and school psychologist, emptied his magazine, which still contained fifteen live rounds. He loaded a fresh thirty-round clip into his Bushmaster rifle. As he made a left turn and paced down the first-grade corridor, the first classroom Adam reached was where Kaitlin Roig was cowering with her fifteen students.

  The children were still crammed inside the bathroom. They were quiet. The wheeled storage unit was parked in front of the door. A black piece of construction paper was taped over the small window in the door, left over from the recent lockdown drill. She had forgotten to remove it.

  Adam walked past.

  The second classroom that Adam reached belonged to Victoria Soto’s class. The door was shut and the children were standing well away from the door, pressed against the far wall. Miss Soto was standing in front of them, her index finger pressed against her lips.

  Again, Adam walked past.

  Finally Adam’s gaze rested upon the third door on the left-hand side of the corridor. He knew the classroom well. It was where he had sat as a first-grader.

  Now it was Lauren Rousseau’s class. As he opened the door, the young teacher was still furiously trying to shepherd her fifteen students into the back corner of the room near the bathroom. She turned around to look at the killer and was instantly shot in the face. Then he shot her again.

  The students let out terrified screams and clutched each other as the teacher fell to the ground.

  He then pointed his Bushmaster and began firing indiscriminately into the group of helpless children, striking special education teacher Rachel Marie D’Avino, killing Catherine Hubbard, Ana Marquez-Greene, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Josephine Gay, Noah Pozner, Jack Pinto, Chase Kowalski, Madeleine Hsu, Jessica Rekos, Daniel Barden, Charlotte Bacon, Benjamin Wheeler, Emilie Parker, and Caroline Previdi.

  Amid the chaos and bloodshed, one little girl crouched silently in the corner of the classroom’s small bathroom as the killer fired round after round into the children and teachers.

  Adam emptied his clip, which still had rounds left, and loaded a fresh one with thirty more rounds. Less than forty seconds after opening the door, Adam turned around and walked out, closing the door behind him.

  Inside the school the vacuum of silence that followed the initial flurry of gunfire was now being filled by haunting moans. The sound poured out through the intercom and into every classroom.

  A short distance away, separated by only two walls, Kaitlin Roig was convinced she was going to die. The shooting seemed to go on and on until the terrified screams of the children had been dulled to steady groans.

  “If anyone believes in the power of prayer, we need to pray, and for those who don’t believe in prayer, we need to think happy thoughts,” she told her students.

  Was the gunman coming for her classroom next? There was no way for the teacher to know from behind the locked door of the dark bathroom where she was huddled with all the children.

  “Everyone needs to be absolutely quiet,” she continued, her tone measured. “It’s going to be okay.”

  If the gunman was going to shoot his way through her door she knew there wouldn’t be much she could do, but she was determined to make sure the final words and sounds the children heard were not groans and gunshots.

  “I love you,” she kept repeating to her students. “Your parents love you.”

  All across Sandy Hook Elementary School, teachers and students were trying to stay calm, trying to comprehend what was unfolding. The second-graders in Carol Wexler’s class had just finished their yoga and jumping jacks when the first gunshots rang out. At first the children thought they heard hammers falling or pots and pans clanging, but Carol instantly knew it was something else. Now they were gathered together on the floor, in the dark, amid their puffy winter jackets, waiting.

  “Everyone needs to be very quiet,” she said in a whisper. “Keep all eyes on me.”

  She had herded her eighteen students into the corner near their coat hooks before quickly running back to close the classroom door, which also did not lock. Carol shut off the lights. To comfort the children, she began singing holiday songs in a low voice. The children murmured along quietly. “Jingle Bells.” “Silent Night.” “I Have a Little Dreidel.” They did not pause when they heard shots or screams. Some of the children reached into their backpacks for dolls, stuffed animals, worn blankets, anything that gave them comfort.

  As they waited, Wexler held one crying girl in her lap, patiently trying to soothe her because the sounds were still coming through the intercom.

  The eighteen students in Janet Vollmer’s kindergarten class had been hiding in a nook between a pair of bookcases and a wall when the popping noises were replaced by the sick screams of agony.

  “Mrs. Vollmer, I’m scared,” one student said.

  When the kids asked her where the haunting sounds were coming from, at first she tried to blame it on the custodian. “He’s probably just on the roof getting a soccer ball,” she told them while calmly locking the classroom door, covering the windows, and moving the kids into their hiding place. She then began reading them a story. But as the noises became clearer, there was little the teacher could do to protect them from the harsh reality any longer.

  “Some people, they have a stomachache,” one little girl said aloud, trying to provide an explanation.

  As the children became increasingly restless, the teacher projected calm.

  “How come we’re here for so long?” the children asked.

  “Well, it will be a little longer,” she answered. “We’re going to be safe, because we’re sitting over here and we’re all together.”

  Third-grade teacher Connie Sullivan tried soothing words of comfort while the havoc outside was playing out. “Your mommies and daddies will be here soon,” the teacher told her students, who were huddled close together in the corner of the room. “You are loved.”

  Meanwhile, second-grade teacher Abbey Clements continued to sit with her students in the corner of her classroom, reading aloud.

  “Mrs. Clements, you’re shaking,” one student observed.

  A few of the children were crying. Others sat still, looking shocked. Some asked for their moms. Their teacher kept reading.

  Moments earlier, when Clements first heard the loud banging noises, she thought it was folding chairs falling over. She poked her head out into the hallway to get a better look and saw the custodian running full stride down the hallway, along with two students who had been on their way to the office to drop off the class attendance sheet. Both looked rigid with fear.

  One of the children, third-grader Bear Nikitchyuk, thought he heard someone kicking a door as he approached the room where the s
ecretary normally sat. As he fled in the opposite direction, he looked back and saw smoke coming from around the corner where the office was located.

  Abbey grabbed the two students by their arms and yanked them into her classroom, then ran to get her keys, locked the door, and dialed 911. The custodian continued running from room to room, warning anyone he could find.

  “Everyone go to the place where we practice going in emergencies,” the teacher told her students as they piled against the far wall near the closets.

  As noise from the intercom system kept funneling unfiltered through the room, she kept reading, trying in vain to raise her voice loud enough to muffle what they were hearing.

  How do I stop these sounds? These children shouldn’t be hearing these sounds, she kept thinking to herself.

  Down the hall, music teacher Maryrose Kristopik had just pushed play on the DVD of The Nutcracker when they first heard the gunshots, then the screams and cries through the public-address system.

  “Everyone hold hands,” she told her students, a group of nine-and ten-year-olds, as she walked them single file into a large storage closet in the back of the room where instruments were kept. She handed them all lollipops to help keep them from talking and spoke in a hushed tone. “Everything is going to be okay,” she told her students before asking them to hold on to instruments to keep their hands occupied.

  Nine-year-old Nicholas Sabillon held on tightly to a gong as he sucked on his lollipop. This might be the last snack I’m ever going to have, he thought.

  The class continued to hold hands, hug, and wait, trying to block out what they were hearing.

  In Teri Alves’s third-grade class all the children were crouched in the corner, most of them whimpering for their parents.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she kept repeating in a whisper. “Just stay quiet.”

  When she first heard the gunshots Alves had moved fast, especially for someone who was eight months’ pregnant. In under a minute she had locked the door to her classroom, turned off the lights, and taped a piece of white paper over the window.