A Sunday of Sorrow in Newtown
NEWTOWN, Conn. — Seeking solace amid overwhelming grief, residents of Newtown flocked to church services and vigils on Sunday, struggling to comprehend a tragedy that left so many children dead, even as the national conversation turned sharply toward gun control.
At the pulpit of the Saint Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, the Rev. Peter Cameron looked out over the packed pews, which included the husband of a teacher killed in the shooting, and summed up the despair with a question: “How do we rejoice in the face of so much sorrow?”
It is a question that has been asked repeatedly in the two days since a gunman forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School here and then sprayed classrooms with bullets, hitting some children as many as 11 times.
All of the children killed in the massacre — 12 girls and 8 boys — were first graders. One girl had just turned 7 on Tuesday. The seven adults killed, including the mother of the shooter, were all women.
The state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, said all of the 20 children and 6 adults killed at the school had been struck more than once.
He said their wounds were “all over, all over.”
“This is a very devastating set of injuries,” Dr. Carver said at a news briefing on Saturday. When he was asked if they had suffered after being hit, he said, “Not for very long.”
Condolences have been pouring in from around the world. In Moscow, Russians piled flowers outside the American Embassy. And on a beach in Rio de Janeiro, crosses were placed in the sand to honor the dead. At the Vatican on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his sorrow and said he was praying for the families of victims.
President Obama is expected to arrive in Newtown later on Sunday to meet with the families of victims and to join in the mourning at an evening vigil, the White House announced.
But even before his arrival, there have been calls for the president to take more decisive action. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, an outspoken proponent of stricter gun regulations, criticized Mr. Obama on Sunday for failing to act on past promises made in the wake of other tragedies.
“The president should console the country, but he’s the commander in chief as well as the consoler in chief, and he calls for action, but he called for action two years ago,” Mr. Bloomberg said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. He urged Mr. Obama to order government agencies to enforce gun laws more aggressively and to press Congress into action, calling it “common sense” to place restrictions on assault weapons with large magazines. He also urged officials to break with the National Rifle Association, calling its influence a “myth.”
“It’s time for the president to stand up, I think, and lead and tell this country what we should do,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “This should be his No. 1 agenda.”
Also on “Meet the Press,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she planned to introduce a bill on the opening day of the next Congress that would limit the sale of assault weapons and restrict high-capacity magazines.
“It can be done,” she said.
As families have begun to claim the bodies of lost loved ones, some have sought privacy. Others have spoken out. Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was among the dead, choked back tears as he described her as “bright, creative and very loving.”
But, he added, “as we move on from what happened here, what happened to so many people, let us not let it turn into something that defines us.”
There were reports that at least one funeral would be held on Sunday.
Amid the anguish and mourning, other details have begun to emerge about how, but not why, the devastating attack had happened, turning a place where children were supposed to be safe into a national symbol of heartbreak and horror.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut said Sunday that the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, 20, had apparently used his weapon to blast through the entrance of the school and committed suicide after he heard police approaching.
“He discharged to make an opening and then went through it, went to the first classroom, as you know, went to the second classroom,” Mr. Malloy said on “This Week” on ABC. “We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that decided to take his own life.”
The Newtown school superintendent said on Saturday that the principal and the school psychologist had been shot as they tried to tackle the gunman in order to protect their students.
That was just one act of bravery during the maelstrom. There were others, said the superintendent, Janet Robinson. She said one teacher had helped children escape through a window. Another shoved students into a room with a kiln and held them there until the danger had passed.
It was not enough: First responders described a scene of carnage in the two classrooms where the children were killed, with no movement and no one left to save, everything perfectly still.
Mr. Lanza, 20, grew up in Newtown and had an uncle who had been a police officer in New Hampshire. The uncle, James M. Champion, issued a statement expressing “heartfelt sorrow,” adding that the family was struggling “to comprehend the tremendous loss we all share.”
A spokesman for the Connecticut State Police, Lt. J. Paul Vance, said investigators continued to press for information about Mr. Lanza, and had collected “some very good evidence.” He also said that the one survivor of the shootings, a woman who was wounded at the school, would be “instrumental” in piecing together what had happened.
But it was unclear why Mr. Lanza had gone on the attack. A law enforcement official said investigators had not found a suicide note or messages that spoke to the planning of such a deadly attack. And Ms. Robinson, the school superintendent, said they had found no connection between Mr. Lanza’s mother and the school, in contrast to accounts from the authorities on Friday that said she had worked there.
Dr. Carver said it appeared that all of the children had been killed by a “long rifle” that Mr. Lanza was carrying; a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle was one of the several weapons police found in the school. The other guns were semiautomatic pistols, including a 10-millimeter Glock and a 9-millimeter Sig Sauer.
The bullets Mr. Lanza used were “designed in such a fashion the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in,” resulting in deep damage, Dr. Carver said. As to how many bullets Mr. Lanza had fired, Dr. Carver said he did not have an exact count. “There were lots of them,” he said. Lieutenant Vance, of the Connecticut State Police, said investigators were attempting to trace the weapons’ history “all the way back to when they were on the workbench being assembled.”
Dr. Carver said parents had identified their children from photographs to spare them from seeing the gruesome results of the rampage. He said that 4 doctors and 10 technicians had done the autopsies and that he had personally performed seven, all on first graders.
“This is probably the worst I have seen or the worst that I know of any of my colleagues having seen,” said Dr. Carver, who is 60 and has been Connecticut’s chief medical examiner since 1989.
He said that only Mr. Lanza and his first victim — his mother, Nancy Lanza — remained to be autopsied. He said he would do those post-mortems on Sunday.
Officials said the killing rampage began early on Friday at the house where the Lanzas lived. There, Mr. Lanza shot his mother in the face, making her his first victim, the authorities said. Then, after taking three guns that belonged to her, they said, he climbed into her car for the short drive to the school.
Outfitted in combat gear, Mr. Lanza shot his way in, defeating a security system requiring visitors to be buzzed in. This contradicted earlier reports that he had been recognized and allowed to enter the one-story building. “He was not voluntarily let into the school at all,” Lieutenant Vance said. “He forced his way in.”
The lieutenant’s account was consistent with recordings of police dispatchers who answered call after call from adults at the school. “The front glass has been broken,” one dispatcher cautioned officers who were rushing there, repeating on the police radio what a 911 caller had said on the phone. “They are unsure why.”
The dispatchers kept up a running account of the drama at the school. “The individual I have on the phone indicates continuing to hear what he believes to be gunfire,” one dispatcher said.
Soon, another dispatcher reported that the “shooting appears to have stopped,” and the conversation on the official radios turned to making sure that help was available — enough help.
“What is the number of ambulances you will require?” a dispatcher asked.
The answer hinted at the unthinkable scope of the tragedy: “They are not giving us a number.”
Another radio transmission, apparently from someone at the school, underlined the desperation: “You might want to see if the surrounding towns can send E.M.S. personnel. We’re running out real quick, real fast.”
Inside the school, teachers and school staff members had scrambled to move children to safety as the massacre began. Maryann Jacob, a library clerk, said she initially herded students behind a bookcase against a wall “where they can’t be seen.” She said that spot had been chosen in practice drills for school lockdowns, but on Friday, she had to move the pupils to a storage room “because we discovered one of our doors didn’t lock.”
Ms. Jacob said the storage room had crayons and paper that they tore up for the children to color while they waited. “They were asking what was going on,” she said. “We said: ‘We don’t know. Our job is just to be quiet.’ “ But she said that she did know, because she had called the school office and learned that the school was under siege.
It was eerily silent in the school when police officers rushed in with their rifles drawn. There were the dead or dying in one section of the building, while elsewhere, those who had eluded the bullets were under orders from their teachers to remain quiet in their hiding places.
The officers discovered still more carnage: After gunning down the children and the school employees, the authorities said, Mr. Lanza had killed himself.
The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, 47, and the psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56, were among the dead, as were the teachers Rachel Davino, 29; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; and Victoria Soto, 27. Lauren Rousseau, 30, had started as a full-time teacher in September after years of working as a substitute. “It was the best year of her life,” The News-Times quoted her mother, Teresa, a copy editor at the newspaper, as saying.
Ms. Soto reportedly shooed her first graders into closets and cabinets when she heard the first shots, and then, by some accounts, told the gunman the youngsters were in the gym. Her cousin, James Willsie, told ABC News that she had “put herself between the gunman and the kids.”
“She lost her life protecting those little ones,” he said.
School officials have said there are no immediate plans to reopen Sandy Hook Elementary. Staff members will gather at the high school on Monday to discuss what happened, and students will be assigned to attend other schools by Wednesday.
Dorothy Werden, 49, lives across the street from Christopher and Lynn McDonnell, who lost their daughter Grace, 7, in the rampage. Ms. Werden remembered seeing Grace get on a bus Friday, as she did every morning at 8:45. Shortly afterward, she received a call that there had been a lockdown at the school — something that happens periodically, she said, because there is a prison nearby. It was only when she saw police cars from out of town speed past her that she knew something was seriously wrong.
Like the rest of the nation, she said, local residents were struggling with a single question: Why?
“Why did he have to go to the elementary school and kill all of those defenseless children?” Ms. Werden asked.
Randy Leonard reported from Newtown, Conn., and James Barron from New York. Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from New York.
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