Associated Press - 2 hrs ago
NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — First, he killed his
mother.
Nancy Lanza's body was found later at their home
on Yogananda Street in Newtown — after the
carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School; after
a quiet New England town was scarred forever by
unthinkable tragedy; after a nation seemingly
inured to violence found itself stunned by the
slaughter of innocents.
Nobody knows why 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot
his mother, why he then took her guns to the
school and murdered 20 children and six adults.
But on Friday he drove his mother's car through
this 300-year-old town with its fine old churches
and towering trees and arrived at a school full of
the season's joy. Somehow, he got past a security
door to a place where children should have been
safe from harm.
Theodore Varga and other fourth-grade teachers
were meeting; the glow remained from the
previous night's fourth-grade concert.
"It was a lovely day," Varga said. "Everybody was
joyful and cheerful. We were ending the week on
a high note."
And then, suddenly and unfathomably, gunshots
rang out. "I can't even remember how many," he
said.
The fourth-graders, the oldest children in the
school, were in specialty classes like gym and
music. There was no lock on the meeting room
door, so the teachers had to think about how to
escape, knowing that their students were with
other teachers.
Someone turned the loudspeaker on, so everyone
could hear what was happening in the office.
"You could hear the hysteria that was going on,"
Varga said. "Whoever did that saved a lot of
people. Everyone in the school was listening to
the terror that was transpiring."
Gathered in another room for a 9:30 a.m.
meeting were principal Dawn Hochsprung and
school therapist Diane Day along with a school
psychologist, other staff members and a parent.
They were meeting to discuss a second-grader.
"We were there for about five minutes chatting,
and we heard Pop! Pop!, Pop!" Day told The Wall
Street Journal. "I went under the table."
But Hochsprung and the psychologist leaped out
of their seats and ran out of the room, Day
recalled. "They didn't think twice about
confronting or seeing what was going on," she
said. Hochsprung was killed, and the psychologist
was believed to have been killed as well.
A custodian ran around, warning people there
was a gunman, Varga said.
"He said, 'Guys! Get down! Hide!'" Varga said. "So
he was actually a hero."
Did he survive? The teacher did not know.
___
Police radios crackled with first word of the
shooting at 9:36, according to the New York Post.
"Sandy Hook School. Caller is indicating she
thinks there's someone shooting in the building,"
a Newtown dispatcher radioed, according to a
tape posted on the paper's website.
___
In a first-grade classroom, teacher Kaitlin Roig
heard the shots. She immediately barricaded her
15 students into a tiny bathroom, sitting one of
them on top of the toilet. She pulled a bookshelf
across the door and locked it. She told the kids to
be "absolutely quiet."
"I said, 'There are bad guys out there now. We
need to wait for the good guys,'" she told ABC
News.
"The kids were being so good," she said. "They
asked, 'Can we go see if anyone is out there?' 'I
just want Christmas. I don't want to die, I just
want to have Christmas.' I said, 'You're going to
have Christmas and Hanukkah.'"
One student claimed to know karate. "It's OK. I'll
lead the way out," the student said.
In the gym, crying fourth-graders huddled in a
corner. One of them was 10-year-old Philip Makris.
"He said he heard a lot of loud noises and then
screaming," said his mother, Melissa Makris.
"Then the gym teachers immediately gathered
the children in a corner and kept them safe."
Another girl who was in the gym recalled hearing
"like, seven loud booms."
"The gym teacher told us to go in a corner, so we
all huddled and I kept hearing these booming
noises," the girl, who was not identified by name,
told NBC News. "We all started — well, we didn't
scream; we started crying, so all the gym
teachers told us to go into the office where no
one could find us."
An 8-year-old boy described how a teacher saved
him.
"I saw some of the bullets going past the hall that
I was right next to, and then a teacher pulled me
into her classroom," said the boy, who was not
identified by CBSNews.com.
Robert Licata said his 6-year-old son was in class
when the gunman burst in and shot the teacher.
"That's when my son grabbed a bunch of his
friends and ran out the door," he said. "He was
very brave. He waited for his friends."
He said the shooter didn't utter a word.
___
"The shooting appears to have stopped," the
dispatcher radioed at 9:38 a.m., according to the
Post. "There is silence at this time. The school is in
lockdown."
And at 9:46 a.m., an anguished voice from the
school: "I've got bodies here. Need ambulances."
___
Carefully, police searched room to room,
removing children and staff from harm's way.
They found Adam Lanza, dead by his own hand
after shooting up two classrooms; no officer fired
a gun.
Student Brendan Murray told WABC-TV it was
chaos in his classroom at first after he heard loud
bangs and screaming. A police officer came in
and asked, "Is he in here?" and then ran out.
"Then our teacher, somebody, yelled, 'Get to a
safe place.' Then we went to a closet in the gym
and we sat there for a little while, and then the
police were, like, knocking on the door and they
were, like, 'We're evacuating people, we're
evacuating people,' so we ran out."
Children, warned to close their eyes so they could
not see the product of his labors, were led away
from their school.
Parents rushed to the scene. Family members
walked away from a firehouse that was being
used as a staging area, some of them weeping.
One man, wearing a T-shirt without a jacket, put
his arms around a woman as they walked down
the middle of the street, oblivious to everything
around them.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and other public officials
came to the firehouse. So did clergymen like
Monsignor Robert Weiss of Newtown's St. Rose
Roman Catholic Church. He watched as parents
came to realize that they would never see their
children alive again.
"All of them were hoping their child would be
found OK. But when they gave out the actual
death toll, they realized their child was gone,"
Weiss said.
He recalled the reaction of the brother of one of
the victims.
"They told a little boy it was his sister who passed
on," Weiss said. "The boy's response was, 'I'm not
going to have anyone to play with.'"
___
Jocelyn Noveck reported from New York. Jim
Fitzgerald and Pat Eaton-Robb in Newtown and
Bridget Murphy in Boston contributed to this
report.

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