Newtown: An American Tragedy (13 page)

“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.

T
he 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.”

T
hird-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 secretary 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.

D
own 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.

I
n 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.

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

A
rt 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.

S
till 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.”

I
n 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.

S
hari 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.”

C
hris 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.

A
dam 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.

P
op, 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.

A
cross 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 custodian 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.