Newtown: An American Tragedy (15 page)

The SWAT team had now entered the school and begun searching
room by room for the shooter as frantic calls continued coming into dispatch from teachers in the school who believed there could be more shooters on the loose.

9:40:30
A.M.
:
“Shooter’s apparently still shooting in office area. Dickinson Drive.”

N
ot long after volunteer firefighter and EMT Kelly Burton read the chilling text message from her mom saying, “There’s a shooter in the school,” she received a call dispatching her to the scene. Her house was several miles away and her mother, Shari, was still trapped inside the school.

“We just got dispatched,” Kelly texted her mom.

The thought of her daughter being anywhere near Sandy Hook horrified Shari. She pleaded with her child not to come. “I don’t want you to come. Stay home. Too many shots, I don’t want you to come,” pleaded her mother.

“I’m coming. It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m going to find a way there,” Kelly fired back.

Kelly hitched a ride to the nearby firehouse and geared up. At the firehouse she spotted her father, Michael Burton, the department’s second assistant chief.

“Where do you want me to go?” she asked him.

“Are you okay?” he asked back.

“I’m fine. What do you want me to do?”

“Go out back and see what help they need with the triage,” he answered.

Kelly walked back to the school where the triage had already
been set up. She knew four patients had been transported to the hospital and that dozens remained inside. She waited outside, along with an army of first responders from neighboring areas ready to treat all the injured children.

Why aren’t they coming out?
she thought to herself.
Where are the children?

9
:40:55
A.M
.:
“Troop Eight personnel, take exit 10, left on 34, turn on Riverside Drive. Make sure you have your vests on.”

Officer Penna was the first cop to enter the second room. At first he couldn’t process the carnage that appeared in front of him. Huddled together in the corner of the room were teachers Lauren Rousseau and Rachel Marie D’Avino, along with students Catherine Hubbard, Ana Marquez-Greene, James Mattioli, Grace McDonnell, Josephine Gay, Noah Pozner, Jack Pinto, Chase Kowalski, Madeleine Hsu, Jessica Rekos, Daniel Barden, Charlotte Bacon, Benjamin Wheeler, Emilie Parker, and Caroline Previdi.

They were all found wrapped together, clutching each other for comfort during their final moments. Each had suffered multiple gunshot wounds. The scene was too horrific to be from this earth, he thought.

Officer Penna walked over and began checking for life amid the bodies and found a single girl standing alone, covered from head to toe in blood. She appeared to be in shock but had not been injured.

“Stay where you are,” the officer told the child, not knowing of possible threats still in the school. “I’ll be right back.”

He ran into the next classroom and saw the dead gunman, with Officers Chapman and Smith standing nearby. Officer Penna returned to the second classroom, his rifle slung around his chest, grabbed the uninjured girl by the arm and ran with her out to a triage area set up in the parking lot.

Sgt. William Cario and Trooper Patrick Dragon had rerouted to Sandy Hook from a narcotics task force meeting nearby after hearing the initial reports of a shooting on their police radio. After coming upon the Hellish scene inside of Rousseau’s room, the officers each grabbed an injured child and ran outside where a cruiser was waiting to rush the children to Danbury Hospital. Both would later die there.

Officers entered the conference room where the parent-teacher meeting had been about to take place and found Natalie Hammond. They made sure her coworkers were applying proper first aid to the bullet wound in her leg and moved on in their search for more survivors and another possible gunman.

9:46:20
A.M.
:
“We’ve got an injured person in room 9 with numerous gunshot wounds.”

Lieutenant Christopher Vanghele, the incident commander on the scene until Connecticut State Police assumed control, began relaying the unimaginable scope of the tragedy to his colleagues.

9:49:05
A.M.
:
“Negative on description. Shots were fired about three minutes ago.”

9:53:25
A.M.
:
“Newtown’s reporting one suspect down. The building has now been cleared.”

Adam Lanza’s body was slumped down against the floor. A large pool of blood had settled near what remained of his face.
The earplugs were still in his ears. Near his right hand rested the 10-millimeter Glock handgun that he had used to fire the final bullet into his own head.

Officers carefully checked Adam Lanza’s body for explosives. They found the cache of unspent clips for the Bushmaster, each capable of firing thirty rounds, along with the 9-millimeter SIG Sauer P226 handgun, fully loaded.

In his pockets they found a driver’s license—the name read “Ryan Lanza.”

W
ithin minutes, officers from the state police, the FBI, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals Service, and other agencies arrived on the scene. Of the forty-five police officers in the Newtown Police Department, fourteen went into Sandy Hook Elementary School. In addition to the triage area that responders had already set up outside the school doors others set up an area at a nearby fire station where parents were reunited with their children.

Dad Chris Manfredonia was handcuffed and walked to the front of the school where a group of parents had now gathered, waiting for their children. The worried moms and dads suspiciously eyed the handcuffed man, who was dressed in camouflage pants and wearing a dark jacket.

“I didn’t do it,” he told them as the police put him in the back of a squad car.

Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra arrived at the school. She found Newtown Chief of Police Michael Kehoe, who informed her of the scene inside the two classrooms. A feeling of horror and
shock ran through her. She took a brief moment to internalize the pain, then, knowing that the eyes of the community would look to her for strength, she searched deep for a place to wall off the rush of emotions.

This can’t be real. In a school that did everything right,
she thought. She took a deep breath, and then began to try to manage the chaos.

Llodra’s town hall coworker, Rob Sibley, a first responder and EMS volunteer at Sandy Hook Elementary, had also arrived at the school. He was gearing up by the truck to enter the school and look for victims to treat. He saw his wife, Barbara, and they embraced.

Barbara had driven over to the school to drop off their son Daniel’s copy of
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
that he’d left behind and needed for Library Day. As she pulled down the long driveway on Dickinson shortly after 9:35
A.M.
, she noticed a group of children running along the side of the road. They weren’t wearing jackets and were screaming.

That’s strange. I wonder where their teacher is?
she thought. Sibley assumed the children were part of the local running club.
That’s funny. I thought the running club was on Wednesday not Friday.

As she continued looking, one of the young boys had pulled away from the group and was screaming, “Don’t go to the school! Don’t go in!”

Sibley parked her car and opened the car door, then heard three loud bangs, followed by silence. Still baffled, she thought,
Someone must be working on the roof.

Outside the school Sibley noticed an eerie silence.
I can’t believe
how quiet it is,
she thought as she walked from her car to the school’s main entrance.
Where are all the kids?

As she approached the front door where visitors had to be buzzed in, she noticed a black car parked in the fire lane to her right. Its doors were all open and black sweatshirts were strewn around it.
That’s really odd,
she thought.
You usually don’t see that at a school.

As she got closer to the door, she spotted another mother, Karyn Holden. She was staring in confusion at the front entrance.

“Is something going on here?” Barbara asked.

“I don’t know, but look,” Karyn answered, pointing to the shattered glass and missing window to the right of the front door.

“Well, this is very strange,” replied Barbara. The entire front window panel next to the door was missing. Tiny shards of glass were sprinkled everywhere. She poked her head in a little farther, looking for a rock or something that could have shattered a hole that large but couldn’t find one.

“Do you think we should go in?” Karyn asked.

Barbara began to open her mouth, but before she could get the first syllable out, an eruption of sound came from inside the building. Gunshots. It was loud. And it sounded as if it was very close.

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

The two women ducked down and ran to take cover behind the nearby Dumpsters about twenty feet away. There was a pause. Then the popping sound continued. One shot after another in a methodical pattern.

That’s gunfire. My child,
thought Sibley.
Do I run into the path of the gunfire and try to save my son? Or do I stay alive for my two children at home?

Another pause, followed by more gunshots.

I wouldn’t be able to save anyone inside. I need to live for my children,
she answered herself.

She needed to call her husband. She searched for her phone but realized she had left it in her car. Karyn had her phone and had begun making calls. She handed it to Barbara who, not being able to remember her husband’s phone number, dialed her mother.

“Mom, I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m at the school and I think there has been a shooting. I have to go, but I’m hiding behind a Dumpster and I’m going to be all right.”

Her confused mother, at a loss for words, answered, “Okay.”

She then called her boss. “Hi, Chris, it’s Barb. How are you?”

Her superior returned the greeting.

“I’m okay but someone is shooting inside the school and I’m hiding behind a Dumpster and I’m going to be late to the meeting.”

Finally, she remembered her husband Rob’s number and called him.

He already knew and was on his way. She looked at Karyn, a stranger just a few minutes earlier who also had a child inside the school. They hugged each other tightly, each saying, “I love you.”

A
fter being led to safety, Barbara spotted her husband from behind, putting on his gear. After they embraced, Rob finished getting ready and walked into the building. Word had already spread of the
carnage that awaited him inside. He made a quick call to his father, Robert Sibley, a retired police officer.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he told his father.

“Rob, you have to. You’re a trained professional. You’re an EMT. You have to and you can. Trust me.”

Rob put his phone away and walked through the front entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary. In the hallway he saw Principal Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach. A week earlier he had been in a meeting with both of them to discuss his son Daniel. As he approached the classrooms, an officer guarding the room stopped him.

“Spare yourself,” the trooper told him.

Rob took the officer’s advice.

One veteran law enforcement official had walked into the classroom unprepared for the scene. The children were too much. He recognized one of them. Her family attended the same church. He had seen her just five days earlier. He took his hat off, turned away, and bent over, trying hard not to be sick and contaminate the crime scene.

“I can’t. My God,” he said, bent down to the ground with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Children.”

A colleague came over and helped him get back to his feet and escorted him out of the building.

Three officers, in full uniform, had collapsed on the ground outside of the classroom of Lauren Rousseau. They couldn’t catch their breath. They couldn’t move, paralyzed by the graphic scene inside. Two other state troopers who had looked inside the classrooms walked outside the school and stood for a minute before embracing
each other. Tears began to roll down their cheeks and their chests began rising and falling heavily as they openly sobbed.

N
earby dispatchers continued warning of more gunmen and flooded the area with local ambulances.

9:55:25
A.M.
:
“Be advised, we have multiple weapons. One rifle and a shotgun.”

9:57:25
A.M.
:
“Any plainclothes responding, make sure you have your raid gear on, your raid gear on.”

10:00:15
A.M.
:
“Ask the custodian, get a team up on the roof and clear the roof.”

10:00:40
A.M.
:
“We need
[
inaudible
]
up here right away. Call Danbury if you have to.”

The Newtown Police Department’s emergency operations center was quickly transformed from an emergency response center into an investigative operations center. Investigators from a number of agencies set up shop there, combing social media Websites for clues. A judge was on hand to sign off on search warrants. Privately, the police were telling each other to be prepared for up to sixty casualties.

10:03
A.M.
:
“What is the number of ambulances you will require?” “They don’t know, they’re not giving us a number.”

10:04:40
A.M.
:
“You might want to see if surrounding towns can send EMS personnel. We’re running out pretty quick.”

Eight minutes later, at 10:12
A.M.
, they had begun setting up another triage area near the firehouse.

10:28
A.M.
:
“Roger, closet in the kitchen, you have some victims. Let us know, we’ll call the number so you know they’re coming.”