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One of the boys looked up, wild eyed, and said, “ ‘We can’t go back to that school. Our teacher is dead,’ ” he told Rosen. “I could not take that in. I could not accept that,” Rosen told Erin Burnett of CNN.[10] “And then I just kept listening to them, and they talked more, and the boy said, ‘Oh no, it was a big gun and a small gun’—and then I knew.”
One of the boys said they saw blood come from their teacher’s mouth. And that she fell. “Then they said her name,” Rosen said, weeping. “It was that very pretty twenty-seven-year-old teacher.”
Victoria “Vicki” Soto, age twenty-seven, was Jesse’s teacher.
Neil called, and Scarlett told him to check the daycare. She hurried toward Dickinson Drive, hoping she’d find Jesse amid the pandemonium at the barriers now across it, where family members confronted law enforcement officers. Men in army fatigues with rifles and flash grenades on their belts drove past in jeeps, and Scarlett thought how impressed Jesse would be to see so many soldiers in real life.
The police directed Scarlett back to the firehouse. She obeyed. She could not think of anywhere else to look, but she still held out hope that Jesse was hiding in the woods, as some of the police had suggested. She crossed the firehouse floor, the place of reunions, to the room at the back, the place of fading hope. On a sheet of notebook paper laid out for the purpose, she added Jesse’s name to a list of the missing.[11] A state trooper asked Scarlett for a recent photo of Jesse, and she chose one from among hundreds of him on her phone.
J.T., a seventh grader at Newtown Middle School, texted his mom. He was on lockdown in Spanish class but wanted to join her. Scarlett’s mother, Maureen, and Maureen’s partner, Bob, picked him up.
Scarlett and J.T. fled the firehouse when a parent broke down and screamed, making J.T. recoil. They returned to the parking lot and gathered with Maureen, Bob, two of Scarlett’s three brothers and their spouses. Somebody brought lawn chairs, and the group arranged them in a tight circle, where they huddled as if around a campfire on a trip from hell. They kept moving their chairs, trying to escape the sounds of grief from despairing families. Scarlett cupped J.T.’s face in her palms, their knees touching. “Even if the worst has happened, and we’ve lost Jesse, we know exactly where he is”—in heaven and fine. J.T. shook his head violently, refusing to accept her words.
After another hour, maybe two, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as a psychologist came and knelt beside Scarlett. “There’s no easy way to tell you this,” he said. “Your son is dead.” She thought that over the preceding hours she had prepared herself for these words, but Scarlett couldn’t absorb them. She stared at the man, unable to move or think, and then he abruptly stood up and walked away. Scarlett remained motionless until J.T. erupted in tears, propelling her forward. She enveloped her son, kissing and reassuring him. Her family crowded in, encircling them both. They clung together like that for a long time, standing on a yellow-striped asphalt lot transformed into a wasteland of human suffering.
Neil, standing twenty feet or so across the parking lot, saw Scarlett’s stricken face and her family’s reaction. Neil intercepted the man as he walked away, to ask what he had said. Confused, the man told Neil that he had just informed Jesse’s parents that he was dead. “I’m Jesse’s father!” Neil roared. He lunged forward, and a state trooper stepped between the two men.
Scarlett never learned where the man had gotten the information about Jesse, but as a police officer told her that day, no one had authorized him to deliver it. Social workers, counselors, and clergy had poured onto the scene since the morning, summoned by family members and first responders. But some arrived unbidden, proselytizing, handing out business cards, inserting themselves. The man who notified Scarlett of her son’s death was among them, Scarlett told me. “I can forgive Adam Lanza, but it’s hard for me to forgive someone who would intentionally try to take advantage of our misery,” she said.
In the mayhem of that day, there was no way to vet such people or to prevent them from sharing the terrible information circulating among first responders but not yet communicated to the families.
Police who responded and had seen the bodies inside the school were restrained from sharing what they knew. State protocol requires that victims be officially identified before notifying their next of kin. But that policy was unworkable in this situation. It would involve hours, maybe days of waiting, which would leave twenty-six families relying on secondhand reports and hearsay.
“It was like knowing someone was about to be hit by a bus, and you couldn’t warn them,” one trooper who was there told me. “We would be destroying their lives.”
That role fell to the Connecticut governor.
* * *
—
When Governor Dannel Malloy heard the first reports in his Hartford office that morning, he thought, like many of the families did, that the event was an isolated domestic incident. But within an hour he was in a car speeding south on I-84 to Newtown.
I visited Malloy in Orono, Maine, where in 2019 he had taken a job as chancellor of the University of Maine System, leaving politics. It had been eight years since the shooting when we spoke, but Malloy slipped into the present tense, the scenes playing out in his mind.
As a four-term mayor of Stamford, Malloy had stood with families whose loved ones had commuted by train to Wall Street on September 11, 2001, and never come home. He had attended the funerals of warfighters killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those cases, protocol afforded safety and comfort. But this was different. These people had waited agonizing hours for news that was already leaking and in danger of being badly mishandled.
Arriving at the firehouse, Malloy conferred with First Selectman Pat Llodra, respecting boundaries, making sure she wanted the state’s help. She did. The governor, hands jammed in the pockets of his black overcoat, met with Colonel Danny Stebbins, the Connecticut State Police commander. Speaking in low tones inside a trapezoid of yellow police tape in the firehouse parking lot, Malloy posed a series of questions to the police commander. Was anyone unaccounted for, perhaps hiding in the woods or elsewhere in the school? How many were injured?
Stebbins told him that, of the three people taken to the hospital, one had survived. Two, both children, had died. Everyone on the list of missing, six female educators and twenty children, lay dead inside the school.
“The policy is we never tell someone that their loved one has expired until we can identify the body,” Malloy told me. “So, I start to think about, ‘Well, how are we gonna do that?’ ”
The teachers who knew the children best were also dead. “It’s related to me that some of the injuries are pretty horrific,” Malloy recalled, too horrific to ask other teachers to identify them. Janet Robinson, the school superintendent, asked[12] whether the children’s new school pictures had arrived.
“They’d just got there the day before or two days before,” Malloy recalled, and were somewhere in the principal’s office. They summoned the school secretary, who had been out sick. Police guided her to the office, shielding her from the carnage, and she found the photographs.
At about noon Malloy entered the chaotic firehouse, introduced himself to the distraught families, and told them he would brief them regularly. Outside, he instructed his staff and the police to set up some chairs, while knowing what a futile gesture that was—imposing order while the families’ lives crumbled.
He pressed Stebbins: “When are we gonna know?”
Stebbins told him he thought they had to transport the bodies up to the state morgue in Farmington, nearly an hour away, where medical examiner H. Wayne Carver and his team would make the identification before notifying family members. They didn’t have enough vehicles to transport them all, so the whole process could take until 2:00 a.m.
Malloy knew then, “I’m going to have to tell these folks.”
They thought about bringing each family,
individually, to a small social service center several hundred feet from the firehouse. “I thought that would be far more humane,” Malloy told me. But the walk to the building led through a gantlet of media, and once the first family knew their loved one’s fate, all of them would.
Malloy paused. His chest heaved as a sob escaped him. “So I make the decision. The next time we get together with them, I’m going to find a way.”
He entered the firehouse. At first he spoke so haltingly that few could hear. “Just tell us!” a woman, her voice jagged, demanded. Others in the room shushed her, but Neil joined her in demanding, “Give an answer! Is anyone in that school still alive?”
The governor searched for the least scarring words. He couldn’t bring himself to use the word “dead.”
“Two children were brought to Danbury Hospital, and expired,” he said as a guttural wailing lifted and reverberated.
“The parents just were hysterical,” Donna Soto, the mother of Vicki, Jesse’s teacher, recalled later. “They were on the floor.”[13]
Malloy paused, then plunged. “Nobody else was taken to a hospital,” he said.
“I told the folks in the best way that I could. Obviously, I said, ‘I’m sorry’—I don’t know exactly what I said,” Malloy told me. “What I was trying to say is, ‘If you haven’t been’—I used those words—‘If you haven’t been reunited with your loved one by now, you’re not going to be united with your loved one.’ And they knew.”
Despair turned to fury. “What are you telling us?” a parent shouted. “They’re all dead?”
Yes, Malloy replied. There were no more survivors in the school. He repeated the words more than once, to be heard over howls of grief, and to pierce the disbelief of those who stood staring at him.
Some families found him cold and clinical, a criticism that still sears him.
“I didn’t do it callously, I just—” he told me, losing his composure. “I did it out of desperation. Because there was no other way to do it.”
* * *
—
Scarlett found Neil in the parking lot, tears streaking his face. They hugged tightly, then parted.
Scarlett could not return to her farmhouse, with its reminders of Jesse. She and J.T. retreated to her mother’s home in Newtown.
Neil returned to the firehouse, where he remained after the other parents had gone. He also couldn’t go home yet. Not to an empty house where the Christmas tree he and Jesse had erected stood in the living room, still awaiting its decorations.
He needed to see his son to believe he was dead.
It was about one in the morning when Neil quietly picked his way past the barricades and down Dickinson Drive. Police wheeled gurneys from the school into its klieg-lit parking lot, where inside the tent Dr. Carver’s team and medical examiners from New York attended to their work.
Neil has never revealed who helped him to see Jesse that night, nor exactly where he was when given that opportunity. Neil cradled his boy in his arms. Jesse’s rugby jersey was untucked as always. His carpenter pants were too short; he’d had a growth spurt that year. His face was composed and clean. It looked almost unharmed, except for the dime-sized gunshot wound near his hairline that had ended his life.
“When he was born, I was the first one to see him, and I was the last one to hold him and hug him when he went out,” Neil said. “It meant a lot to be able to see him. It helps with anyone when you lose them, to put a closure to the death when they’re gone, an understanding.”
Scarlett and Neil soon learned that as the gunman began shooting in classroom 10, Jesse had shouted “Run!” during a pause in the carnage, when the gunman’s rifle jammed or he changed magazines. Nine children obeyed him, and lived.
* * *
—
After President Barack Obama visited for the prayer vigil at Newtown High School on December 16, Scarlett returned to the farm to fetch Jesse’s burial clothes. “I wanted him to be warm,” she told me. She chose “flannel-lined jeans, a soft turtleneck, a flannel shirt, a polo sweater. Thick warm socks and his rubber boots he wore everywhere, even in the summer.”
She stopped in the bathroom and scooped up his rubber ducks and plastic army men, still lined up along the sides of the bathtub. She took Jesse’s favorite plastic camo helmet, part of a soldier playset a friend had given him.
Neil did not have anything to wear to Jesse’s funeral. He was in the construction business and had no need for suits, and because business was bad, he didn’t have much cash. He doesn’t recall telling anyone about this or how it made him feel, but two days before Jesse’s wake, an FBI agent pulled up at his house in Shelton. He drove Neil to Men’s Wearhouse in Danbury and stood silently near the front of the big store while Neil chose a dark tweed suit and white shirt, a green-striped tie, shoes, and a belt. He refused Neil’s offer to pay the bill and drove him home.
On December 19, Scarlett’s mother and siblings accompanied her to Honan Funeral Home on Main Street. Jesse lay in a white casket, wearing his rugged warm clothes. Scarlett sat down, reached in, and held Jesse’s hands in hers, trying to warm them. He still had dirt from the farm under his fingernails. He was a tough and sturdy boy. He weighed eleven pounds when he was born, and more than seventy when he died. He rode Scarlett’s biggest horses. But alone with her, he liked her to carry him and to snuggle with him in bed, still her baby.
Jesse was one of five children buried in Newtown on December 20, 2012. Word of Jesse’s selfless act had spread, and police from several states arrived to give him a fallen hero’s funeral. Thousands of people attended his wake that clear, sunlit day, waiting in a line that stretched down Main Street and around the corner.
The viewing lasted several hours. When it was over, Scarlett and Neil approached Jesse’s bier. They placed his rubber ducks, army men, and camo helmet inside the casket beside him. Scarlett took up a thick woolen Pendleton blanket with a colorful Native American design, a gift to Jesse from her mother. Scarlett had draped it around herself all that day, so it would carry her scent. She covered him with it, tucking the edges beneath him, bundling him up to go. Police officers approached Jesse’s casket in pairs and saluted before they closed the lid.
At Jesse’s funeral service at Beacon Hill Church on Old Zoar Road in Monroe, Jesse’s uncle recalled his rule for living: “Have a lot of fun.” J.T. spoke about the battles and secrets they shared. Scarlett came forward.
“People have been asking me what they can do to help,” she said. “Do something that will help all of us, by turning an angry thought into a loving one. This whole tragedy began with an angry thought, and that thought could have been turned into a loving one. If it had been, none of us would be here today to bury a child we all loved so much.
“If you want to help, then please choose love.”
Solemn police officers on motorcycles guided the hearse to Zoar Cemetery. First responders lined the route, saluting or placing hands on their hearts as the cortege passed. By the time they reached the cemetery it was nearly dusk. Mounted police officers from Bridgeport awaited them at the gates.
Neil remained in the background during the funeral, by nature not one to take center stage. His parents had died years before, and he lacked the warm bubble of family and friends that buoyed Scarlett. After everyone had gone, Neil remained behind. He watched the crew cover Jesse’s grave. Then he sat down on the mound of raw earth, keeping company with his son in the dark.
These days Neil does not like to visit Jesse’s grave alone, so he seemed almost relieved for the company on the windy and gray January day in 2019 when he guided me down aging roads to Zoar Cemetery. Town elders established Zoar, one of Newtown’s original burial grounds, in 1767 on what had been a hilltop farm. Most of the children are buried in Newtown Village Cemetery and at St. Rose of Lima. Neil had found the clusters of small graves unsettling.
“I wonder if one h
undred years from now, people will look at the gravestones for all these children who died on the same day and wonder—” Neil had said to me once, but then broke off, realizing that no one would ever wonder.
Jesse lies beneath a tree in a corner plot near the wooded back border of the cemetery, a short walk from Scarlett’s farm. Some days, the braying of Jesse’s burro, Turquoise, floats up on the wind. Neil pointed through bare trees to the Misty Vale Deli, where they’d eaten breakfast that day. He’d told me that Jesse ordered hot chocolate and a breakfast sandwich with sausage. “He used to order bacon,” Neil recalled, “but he choked on it once, and it scared him.”
Jesse’s grave is flanked by a stone bench and a bath for the birds he loved. I laid a white rose among teddy bears, rubber ducks, and a platoon of his plastic army men scattered by the raw gusts.
Neil paced, grousing that the roots of the tree might be growing too close to the grave, that visitors’ feet had chewed the earth into frozen ridges of mud. “These stuffed animals,” he snapped, “they look like shit.”
I lifted a matted bear, his frozen smile flecked with grime, and propped him gently against the cold granite.
“Let’s go,” Neil said. His eyes rested on the stone’s oval portrait of Jesse, smiling in his first-grade photo, taken two months before his death. Neil kissed his first two fingers and touched them to the porcelain image. His boy, afraid of bacon, who confronted a gunman.
* * *
—
We continued on our driving tour of Newtown, from the old to a newer, upscale section of town. Neil directed me onto Yogananda Street, named for a peace-loving yogi, now a locus of Newtown’s pain. In 1998 the Lanza family moved into a new house at 36 Yogananda, buying a four-bedroom colonial with green shutters on a sweeping two-acre lot. Peter and Nancy Lanza found Newtown a comforting reminder of rural Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where both of them had grown up. Peter was an executive in the tax department at General Electric, and Nancy a stay-at-home mom since their two sons were born, Ryan in 1988 and Adam in 1992.