NEWTOWN SHOOTING
On December
14, 2012, Adam Lanza, age 20, fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff
members and wounded two at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the village of Sandy
Hook in the town of Newtown, Connecticut. Before driving to the school, Lanza
had shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their Newtown home. After
killing students and staff members, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself
in the head as first responders arrived.
The
massacre was the second-deadliest school shooting in United States history,
after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.
This is a picture of the shooter, Lanza :
Here we have an article which will describe us what really happened there:
At 9.30am on a crisp and
sun-filled Friday morning, seven employees of Sandy Hook elementary school in
Newtown, Connecticut, gathered for a weekly meeting. At that
minute, 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 the principal Dawn Hochsprung, her vice-principal 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
right outside the meeting room. The two principals 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 talked to CNN.com, only the
vice-principal came back, bleeding from a gunshot wound in her foot. The
principal and psychologist were later seen lying in the bloody hallway.
Within seconds, 911 calls
flooded into the police dispatchers in Newtown, a serene New England community
of about 25,000 located 60 miles north-east 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 10-year-olds.
The community instantly
went into the kind of emergency response now familiar from similar tragedies
that have become etched in America's 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.
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 might have been involved,
and armed 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, reportedly wearing a bullet-proof vest and dressed in black, was
busily at work. One witness said they heard "at least a hundred
rounds" being fired from the weapons he wielded, including Glock and Sig
Sauer handguns recovered later at the scene.
Amid the carnage that was
enfolding, there was yelling in the corridors as children ran in all
directions. Brenda Lebinski, the 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.
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 bathroom. The teacher tried to comfort the child by
telling her the noise was nothing to worry about; that 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 entered the building and began an "active
shooter search", checking every door and every crack of the school in the
race against the clock to stop the gunman and contain the body count.
Police began ushering
pupils out of the school, long lines 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 hundreds of anxious parents began to arrive, having been by
alerted by automatic robocall. 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.
Within the hour, it was
announced that the gunman was dead, his corpse left inside the school awaiting
forensic investigations. The public was no longer in danger, said Lt Paul Vance
of the state police. But though the gunman's business was over, the pain and
the terror he left behind had only just begun to be felt across America. A dawning
awareness rippled out from Sandy Hook elementary that a catastrophe of
unimaginable brutality and on an historic scale had taken place there.
At first it was thought
just the gunman had died, then details emerged that there had been injuries,
then reports of a couple of adults had died, then the first heartrending
mention of children who had perished, then the chilling citing of statistics
that in turn rose in spluttering bursts to a numbing 27 dead including 20
children.
If you want to know more about the people who were killed you can find more information here:
This is a picture of the shooter, Lanza :
Here we have an article which will describe us what really happened there:
At 9.30am on a crisp and
sun-filled Friday morning, seven employees of Sandy Hook elementary school in
Newtown, Connecticut, gathered for a weekly meeting. At that
minute, 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 the principal Dawn Hochsprung, her vice-principal 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
right outside the meeting room. The two principals 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 talked to CNN.com, only the
vice-principal came back, bleeding from a gunshot wound in her foot. The
principal and psychologist were later seen lying in the bloody hallway.
Within seconds, 911 calls
flooded into the police dispatchers in Newtown, a serene New England community
of about 25,000 located 60 miles north-east 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 10-year-olds.
The community instantly
went into the kind of emergency response now familiar from similar tragedies
that have become etched in America's 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.
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 might have been involved,
and armed 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, reportedly wearing a bullet-proof vest and dressed in black, was
busily at work. One witness said they heard "at least a hundred
rounds" being fired from the weapons he wielded, including Glock and Sig
Sauer handguns recovered later at the scene.
Amid the carnage that was
enfolding, there was yelling in the corridors as children ran in all
directions. Brenda Lebinski, the 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.
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 bathroom. The teacher tried to comfort the child by
telling her the noise was nothing to worry about; that 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 entered the building and began an "active
shooter search", checking every door and every crack of the school in the
race against the clock to stop the gunman and contain the body count.
Police began ushering
pupils out of the school, long lines 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 hundreds of anxious parents began to arrive, having been by
alerted by automatic robocall. 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.
Within the hour, it was
announced that the gunman was dead, his corpse left inside the school awaiting
forensic investigations. The public was no longer in danger, said Lt Paul Vance
of the state police. But though the gunman's business was over, the pain and
the terror he left behind had only just begun to be felt across America. A dawning
awareness rippled out from Sandy Hook elementary that a catastrophe of
unimaginable brutality and on an historic scale had taken place there.
At first it was thought
just the gunman had died, then details emerged that there had been injuries,
then reports of a couple of adults had died, then the first heartrending
mention of children who had perished, then the chilling citing of statistics
that in turn rose in spluttering bursts to a numbing 27 dead including 20
children.
If you want to know more about the people who were killed you can find more information here:
