Newtown: An American Tragedy

by Matthew Lysiak

  “This will all be over soon,” the teacher promised. “I need your patience.”

  Art teacher Leslie Gunn was busy trying to comfort her twenty-three students inside a locked storage room. “Something is wrong and we are going to have to stay here,” she told the children as she tried to remain calm.

  After hearing the commotion through the school intercom, the children became scared and several had begun sobbing.

  “I want to go home,” a child pleaded.

  “I want my mom,” cried another.

  Leslie spoke soothingly to convey to the children that everything was going to be okay. “You are all so brave,” she told them. “I love you.”

  A few minutes earlier she had been preparing to teach her class how to work with clay and make sculptures. As they began their art project, the public-address system had switched on.

  Someone must be working on the roof, Leslie thought, but as the noise grew louder and more persistent she knew that something was horribly wrong. Her hand began shaking as she dialed 911, but after getting a busy signal, she called her husband.

  “I don’t know what is going to happen to us,” she told him.

  Still inside the locked first-aid closet off the main office, secretary Barbara Halstead and nurse Sally Cox prayed out loud in hushed tones as they heard the methodical sound of gunfire stop and start.

  “Please stop. Please stop.”

  “Maybe he’s not actually hurting anyone,” they tried to tell themselves. “Maybe he’s just spraying bullets around.”

  In the rear of the school building, Laura Feinstein had begun playing games with her students underneath her computer desk. The teacher had hoped the activity would distract them but the sounds from the intercom were too clear and too loud to ignore. She had tried calling 911, but her cell phone didn’t have reception so she texted her husband and asked him to call for her as they continued to wait for help.

  Shari Burton, a teacher’s assistant, was sitting on the floor with her sixteen students in the second-grade classroom on the far side of the building, also trying to get through to 911. When they first heard the shots, the teacher tried desperately to lock the door, but it wouldn’t lock. She saw the custodian, Rick Thorne, who shooed them inside the room before running back out into the hall and returning with his master key to lock the door. After securing them in the classroom, Thorne continued running up and down the hallways, warning staff while using the key to ensure the other doors in the hall were locked.

  “When is someone coming? When is someone coming?” Burton kept repeating into her cell phone.

  “What are you hearing?” the operator asked.

  “I’m hearing pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And it isn’t stopping.”

  “Do you think it’s gunshots?”

  “I think it’s gunshots.”

  “I’m going to put you on hold for a minute, ma’am. There’re lots of calls coming in. As long as you’re safe—how many people are in the room?”

  “Sixteen children and two adults, and we are safe now.”

  A moment later a text came through to Shari Burton’s phone. Finally, she thought. It must be one of the three members of her family who were members of the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company, about two hundred yards up the road from the school. She assumed one of them had heard and must be wondering if she was okay. Her husband, Michael Burton, was the department’s second assistant chief. Her son, Michael Burton Jr., was a junior member of the department, and her daughter, Kelly Burton, volunteered as a firefighter and was an alumna of Sandy Hook Elementary.

  It was twenty-year-old Kelly, who was home from college, but she hadn’t heard about the shooting. Instead she wanted to know why her mom hadn’t left the car for her to drive.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up to bring you to school?” her daughter texted.

  “There’s a shooter in the school. On lockdown,” Shari wrote back.

  Kelly stared at the message from her mother with confusion. There is no way, she thought. This has to be some kind of joke.

  Then another text came through from her mom: “There were shots fired. A lot of shots.”

  Chris Manfredonia, an athletic director at the local high school, was walking toward Sandy Hook’s main entrance to help make gingerbread houses with his daughter when he saw the front door’s glass blown away and smelled the sulfur. He knew right away it was gunfire. Not knowing what the scene was inside the school, he crouched down low and began sprinting to the side of the school where he knew his daughter’s second-grade classroom was located.

  Thirty yards away, Officers William Chapman and Scott Smith pulled up in front of the school at 9:38 A.M., emerging from the car with weapons drawn.

  Adam Lanza walked out of Lauren’s classroom and backtracked toward Victoria Soto’s classroom. He let his partially used clip drop to the floor, exchanging it for a fresh one. The first-graders pressed against the far wall were in the throes of complete panic. The sounds of the killings had been coming at them from all directions, echoing through the intercom above and from behind the wall only feet from where they were standing. They could hear the children screaming, the pleas for life, and the popping sound of the Bushmaster rifle before it gave way to the sustained groans of the dying.

  The door opened slowly and for a brief moment the man dressed in black with the pale, gaunt face and the long rifle stood still in the doorway, surveying the class. As he looked at the students, his face was expressionless. Standing at the back of the room near the window was their teacher, Victoria Soto. Before she had time to utter a single word, Adam had turned to his left, pointed his rifle at the young teacher and pulled the trigger.

  Her body fell to the ground, landing near her desk.

  The children broke ranks from their positions next to the wall where they were instructed to stand and began running around the room crying and screaming. Some of the children had gathered in the far right corner of the room near the chalkboard and began holding hands, quietly whimpering to each other.

  With the cries and pleas for mercy muffled by his earplugs, Adam aimed his rifle at random children as they scurried about the room. Then the gunman set his sights on Allison Wyatt, Avielle Richman, Olivia Engel, and special education teacher Anne Marie Murphy. Murphy had put her arms around six-year-old Dylan Hockley in an attempt to shield him from the bullets. Lanza fired at them, shooting and killing them both. They all slumped to the floor in pools of blood.

  Then the shooting stopped. Adam’s rifle had jammed. First-grader Jesse Lewis, who was standing behind the children holding hands, stared directly at the shooter and shouted: “Run!” Four did run, squeezing past the killer standing in the doorway. Two other students ran into the bathroom.

  As the gunman turned his head, six-year-old Aiden Licada, seven-year-old Bryce Maksel, and two of their friends also ran straight past Adam and out the door.

  Adam paused to reload. Then the gunman turned to Jesse and fired a single shot into the brave child’s head, killing him instantly.

  Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

  Outside the school, Officers Chapman and Smith took cover behind their police cruiser. They had heard a report that someone was shooting outside the school. The shots were loud. They desperately looked around, trying to find out where the gunfire was coming from.

  Across the hall from the first-grade classrooms, the fourth-grade teachers had finally stopped marveling at the previous night’s successful Winter Concert and were getting down to the agenda for their team meeting. The harsh cacophony of gunshots and screaming had just flooded the room when suddenly the door burst open.

  It was Rick Thorne, the custodian. “You need to hide,” he told them, his voice full of adrenaline. “There is a man with a gun in the school.”

  The teachers weren’t used to seeing Thorne in the school at that time of day. It was a shift Thorne rarely worked but had agreed to cover for his supervisor, Kevin Antonelli, who was out on vacation. The cus
todian had been on the far side of the building when he first heard the gunfire and had immediately taken off in a full sprint toward the mayhem. As he turned a corner he had seen the two bodies of his friends, the principal and school psychologist, lying on the floor in pools of blood. He had already dialed 911 and was now going from room to room to warn the school.

  Just as quickly as he had entered the meeting room, he was gone. Thorne had closed the door and continued running through the hallways, shouting that there was a “man with a gun,” and turning all the door handles to make sure they were secured.

  The fourth-grade teachers were divided over what to do next. Ted Varga looked around the room. There was no lock. There was no place to hide. My God, he thought. We are only four doors down from the office where the intercom is. We are sitting ducks waiting to be killed.

  Varga believed they needed to make a run for it. “We need to get out! We need to leave,” he pleaded. “We can’t wait in here. There is no place to hide.”

  But leaving the security of the room would be foolhardy, his coworkers argued. Kate Anderheggen, Katherine Gramolini, and Carrie Usher wanted to wait in the room for help. To them, it made no sense to run toward the sounds of violence when they weren’t in immediate danger.

  “Ted, don’t do it. Don’t go,” they begged. “Let’s hide here.”

  In the room next door, there was nothing Kaitlin Roig could do to shield her children from the heart-wrenching sounds. Several of the students, all only six or seven years old, had begun weeping.

  “I just want Christmas . . . I don’t want to die, I just want to have Christmas,” one of the students begged.

  “I want to go home,” another child pleaded, tears streaming from her eyes.

  The teacher cupped the child’s small face in her hands and pulled her closer. “I love you,” Kaitlin said, unable to conceal the emotion in her voice. “I need you to know that I love you all very much and it’s going to be okay.”

  Their little bodies all crammed in the tiny dark bathroom, her students were beginning to grow restless. It had been only three minutes since the first gunshots had shattered the front entrance glass and she had ushered everyone into the bathroom, but to the students it felt as if they had been crushed together for an eternity.

  After this latest round of pops, the only noise anyone could hear was agonized moaning. The children began to whisper quietly to their teacher. Now that it was quiet, maybe they should open the door and take a look?

  “Can we go see if anyone is out there?” a student said in a hushed voice.

  Another volunteered to guide the class to safety. “I know karate, so it’s okay, I’ll lead the way out,” the brave little student offered. The teacher smiled at the moment of levity.

  “Thank you for that,” Roig said. “But no one is opening this door.”

  Silence.

  The shooting had finally stopped. The earplugs muffled the sound of the sirens in the distance, but the unmistakable flashing lights from the squad car were visible from the window. With two educators and five innocent children killed by his bullets lying lifeless on the classroom floor, Adam dropped his Bushmaster near the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. Still in the pockets of his vest, Adam had three magazines for the Bushmaster, each containing thirty rounds.

  Seconds after 9:40 A.M., less than five minutes after first entering the building, Adam Lanza sat himself up in a corner. With his right hand, he placed the Glock handgun up to his head and pulled the trigger.

  After the last shot, an eerie silence overtook the school.

  At 9:41 A.M., Officers William Chapman and Scott Smith turned their radios down and entered the school through the front entrance. In the rear of the building, in the library, Mary Ann Jacob had begun coloring with her fourth-graders. The group of eighteen students believed the door was locked until they saw one of the doors open and the barrel of a gun emerge. It was a police officer.

  After seeing the look of terror on the police officer’s face, Mary Ann realized the danger was far from over. Her students crawled across the floor to a storage room where she passed out paper and crayons and asked them to continue coloring.

  Ted Varga had heard enough. He couldn’t wait in the room another minute. He first tried to knock out the air conditioner that had been installed in the window. The wood holding the unit in place gave way but the hole wasn’t large enough for all of them to fit through. He opened the door of the conference room and peered out. The smell of gunpowder was in the air. He could taste it. He looked both ways and didn’t see anyone.

  “Follow me! Let’s go! Let’s go, let’s go!” he told his coworkers and ran toward the emergency exit near the front side of the building.

  No one followed. Two other teachers were finally able to get through the window, while a third lay hidden under a pile of wrapped gifts, donated for needy children from the school’s charity program. She heard someone jiggling the door handle and the sound of heavy breathing.

  It’s the gunman, she thought. I’m going to die.

  Seventeen minutes after the first gunshots, a voice was heard through the school intercom: “It’s okay. It’s safe now.”

  CHAPTER 9

  FIRST RESPONDERS

  Two miles away, inside the Newtown police station, Officer William Chapman had been sitting at his desk doing paperwork. It had been the kind of lazy Friday morning he had come to expect from this quiet town of 27,000. A handful of traffic tickets and maybe a few runs on domestic disputes could be expected. A mild stir had come earlier in the month after resident Laurie Borst believed she’d spotted a fisher cat on her property. The large predatory member of the weasel family had circled her yard holding a squirrel in its mouth before it scurried away. The story was front-page news on the local weekly newspaper the Newtown Bee.

  In Newtown, big news did not come often. It had been nearly three decades since the town had experienced its last murder. The case of Mary Elizabeth Heath began in April 1984, when she was first reported missing from her Newtown home by her husband, John Heath. Twenty-six years after the missing-person report, a man and his son were renovating an apartment in a barn on Poverty Hollow Road once owned by John Heath. In a cistern under the floor they found Mary Elizabeth Heath’s bones. More of her remains were found stuffed in bedding.

  The investigation revealed that Mary Elizabeth had died from blunt-force trauma to the head and that she had two broken arms, wounds that probably came as she put her arms up to defend herself. Police charged John Heath with murder. He pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. The break in the cold case was the biggest event to have happened in the town that anyone could remember.

  The first call came in at 9:35:52 A.M. from secretary Barbara Halstead. The dispatcher quickly relayed it to the police officers. “Sandy Hook School. The caller is indicating she thinks there’s someone shooting in the building.”

  Without hesitation, Officer Chapman jumped up and ran to his cruiser with his partner, Officer Scott Smith. Sirens blaring, they hit seventy miles per hour as they drove the three-mile residential stretch from the station to the school, all the while listening intently to their radio as more calls were being relayed through dispatch.

  “Someone is shooting in the building.”

  At 9:36 A.M. another call came in. Again, the dispatcher patched it through to the squad car. “The individual I have on the phone is continuing to hear what he believes to be gunshots.”

  The officers began mentally preparing themselves to storm the school, having been trained to react to active-shooter situations by moving toward the sound of gunfire to neutralize the gunman as quickly as possible.

  The car came to a screeching halt in front of the main entrance at 9:38 A.M. The two officers were immediately met with the blasting echoes of gunfire.

  It was rifle fire and it was very close. It sounded like it was coming from outside. They jumped out of their seats and took cover behind the squad car. They looked all around for the s
hooter.

  The gunfire stopped.

  Then six more shots: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

  9:38:10 A.M.: “The shooting appears to have stopped. The school is in lockdown.”

  A few seconds of silence. Then three more shots were fired. Pop, pop . . . pop.

  Officers Chapman and Smith continued looking around for someone to shoot back at but were still unable to locate the gunman outside.

  9:38:50 A.M.: “We’ll stage up the SWAT and go from there.”

  Outside the school, ten more law enforcement officers had just arrived, and began taking positions at various entrances. The tactical officers were putting on their vests and grabbing weapons out of their vehicles.

  9:39:05 A.M.: “Reports that teachers saw two shadows running, past the building, past the gym.”

  Parent Chris Manfredonia was still in a state of confusion. He was hunched over and walking quickly along the exterior of the school, urgently trying to make his way to the window of his six-year-old daughter’s classroom. He kept hearing the gunshots. He was looking through windows, and ducking down, but he couldn’t locate her.

  Two police officers spotted Manfredonia and, with guns drawn, ordered him to freeze. Manfredonia wasn’t taking any chances. He had heard the gunshots and didn’t know if the men in uniform were law enforcement or murderers. He paused momentarily then took off running, first taking a right past the storage shed and then bolting up into the wooded forest with the officers in pursuit close behind.

  9:39:20 A.M.: “Yeah, we got ’em. They’re coming at me.”

  “Hands up! Hands up!” the police ordered. “Get down!”

  “I’m a parent,” Manfredonia answered. “I’m a parent!”

  He slowly raised his hands up in the air and got down on his knees.