Newtown: An American Tragedy (14 page)

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.”

I
n 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.”

S
ilence.

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.

A
t 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.

T
ed 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.”

T
wo 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.

T
he 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 shooter.

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.”

P
arent 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.

Leonard Penna, a school resource officer who had raced to the scene from his office at the Newtown Middle School, took his position with Sergeant Aaron Bahamonde and Lieutenant Christopher Vanghele near a side door that leads to the boiler room. Officer Michael McGowan and two other officers took their positions at a locked door in the rear of the building. One of them knocked out the glass with his rifle butt so the rest of the officers could get in; as soon as they heard that the second shooter had been found, they entered the school. Officer McGowan was familiar with the lay of the land. He had attended the school as a child.

Chief Michael Kehoe and another officer took their positions at a side entrance. The radios attached to their hips kept feeding them
information in an effort to get a handle on the situation they were confronting.

T
he Newtown Town Hall had gone into lockdown.

Minutes after First Selectman Patricia Llodra had received the phone call from her communications director notifying her of a shooting at Sandy Hook, she left her office and drove straight to the local police department. She walked into the back area where two dispatchers were struggling to keep up with the heavy volume of calls.

Llodra began fielding calls also. Most of them were from anxious parents wanting to know where their children were. She was handed a hastily made script to read from: “We don’t yet know the nature of the lockdown. Parents should stay put and wait for more information.”

A
t 9:41
A.M.
, with the perceived threat of the second gunman neutralized, the officers entered the school. Officers Chapman and Scott turned their radios down low as they slowly made their way to the front entrance, where the glass had been shot out. They entered the front lobby and were immediately confronted with the sight of the first dead, Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach.

After seeing their bodies they spotted Rick Thorne, the custodian, running down the hallway.

“Stop. Put your hands up,” they screamed at Thorne with guns drawn.

Thorne stopped fast in his tracks. “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot,” he answered, his arms raised high.

“Put your hands up! Hands up!” they again commanded.

“I am the custodian. I work here. I’m the custodian,” he pleaded.

They ordered Thorne to wait and, with their guns drawn, carefully went from room to room, urgently hunting down the killer or killers before he or they could do more harm.

As Officers Chapman and Smith approached the second classroom in the hallway on their left, they spotted a rifle on the floor. Inside, they found the gunman, Adam Lanza, dead by his own hand, along with the bodies of children Jesse Lewis, Allison Wyatt, Avielle Richman, Olivia Engel, and their teacher, Victoria Soto. They also found the body of teacher Anne Marie Murphy, her arms around her student, six-year-old Dylan Hockley.

Then came the grueling task of searching for signs of life among the children. Officer Chapman found a faint pulse on a little girl, Olivia Engel, who was still faintly breathing. The tall, muscular Chapman cradled the child in his arms and ran with her outside.

“We need a bus!” he screamed.

“You’re safe now; your parents love you,” he kept repeating to Olivia again and again, trying to comfort her. “The police are here to protect you.”

As he walked farther he again shouted for an ambulance. “Get the bus!” Chapman screamed, still trying to comfort the young girl, who lay limp in his arms. Officer Chapman walked a few feet toward the bus before his strength gave out. He collapsed to the ground.

9:40
A.M.
:
“You’ll need two ambulances.”