At 9.30am on a crisp and sunny morning yesterday, seven employees of Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, gathered for a weekly meeting. The outside doors of the school had been locked as part of a new security system that had just been introduced to “ensure student safety”.
The staff meeting that included headteacher Dawn Hochsprung, her deputy head and the school psychologist began.
There was plenty to talk about, judging from Hochsprung’s Twitter feed. Fourth graders were in final rehearsals for their winter concert; teachers were introducing a range of education apps for classroom iPads; there were new non-fiction books to be chosen.
Then five minutes into the discussions a loud “pop, pop, pop” noise was heard in the hallway outside the meeting room. The headteacher and her deputy immediately stood up and rushed out into the hall to find out what was happening, accompanied by the psychologist.
According to one of the other participants in that meeting, who spoke to CNN.com, only the deputy head came back, bleeding from a gunshot wound in her foot. The headteacher and psychologist were later seen lying in the hallway.
Masked gunman
Within seconds, 911 calls flooded into the police dispatchers in Newtown, a New England community of about 25,000 located 97km (60 miles) northeast of New York city. A masked gunman was inside, the police were told, brandishing a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol targeted at some of the school’s 600 four- to nine-year-olds.
The community instantly went into the kind of emergency response now familiar from similar tragedies that have become etched in US national memory – Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, the list grows. But this kind of thing was never meant to happen here, not in sleepy Newtown.
“We always thought this was the safest place in America,” said Stephen Delgiadice, whose eight-year-old daughter was in class when the shooting started but got out unharmed.
He had raced to the school as soon as he heard the breaking news to find out if his child was safe. He described the moment he was reunited with her. “I saw her, and it was the happiest moment of my life,” he said.
Sandy Hook school was put into lockdown, as were all other schools in the region, and Swat teams rushed to the scene. Initial reports suggested two gunmen were involved, and police were sent to scour through the woods at the back of the school, though the idea of a second gunman faded as the day progressed.
Inside the school, the masked gunman, later identified as Adam Lanza (20), reportedly wearing a bulletproof vest and dressed in black, was on the attack.
One witness said they heard “at least a hundred rounds” being fired from the four weapons he wielded including a Glock semi-automatic rifle and Sig Sauer handgun recovered later at the scene.
Amid the carnage that was unfolding, there was shouting in the corridors and children running in all directions.
Hiding in closet
Brenda Lebinski, mother of an eight-year-old girl at the school, said that when the shooting started her daughter’s teacher marshalled all her class into a closet.
“My daughter’s teacher is my hero, she locked all the kids in a closet and that saved their lives,” Ms Lebinski told the Newtown Patch news website.
A nine-year-old boy told local reporters how he had been in the school gym when the horror began. “We heard lots of bangs, and we thought it was the custodian knocking things down,” the boy said. “We heard screaming, then the police came in and said: ‘Is he here?’ The teachers yelled at us, ‘Get into the closet’, and we sat in there for a little while. Then the police knocked on the door and said: ‘We’re evacuating, we’re evacuating, this way, this way.’”
Another girl, aged eight, hid with her teacher in a toilet. The teacher tried to comfort the child by telling her the noise was nothing to worry about, it was just the sound of builders hammering.
Alexis Wasik described the fear that engulfed her in terms that only an eight-year-old could: “It was really frightening. Some people felt they had a stomach ache,” she said.
When Swat teams arrived at the school by 9.45am they immediately entered the building and began an “active shooter search”, checking every door, every crack of the school in the race against the clock to stop the gunman and contain the body count of his actions.
Police began ushering pupils out of the school, long queues of children snaking into the daylight, their brightly coloured jeans and T-shirts looking far too cheery for the circumstances. They were taken to the voluntary fire station adjacent to the school, where soon hundreds of anxious parents began to descend, having been alerted by automatic alarm.
They filed into the fire house, some to experience the ecstatic relief of reunion, others to have their lives forever shattered in a moment by the worst news a parent can be told.
As the world’s media began to congregate in this previously news-less town, reporters could see parents running down the lane that leads away from the school, clutching their children in their arms. One mother screamed out as she ran the words everyone was thinking: “Why? Why? Why?” – (Guardian service)