Sandy Hook is still frozen in grief one year on

A YEAR on, dolls fill the shelves of a living room and flowers and rainbows decorate a kitchen window next to a little girl’s name: Avielle.

Outside, all around town, Christmas lights shimmer again. But so, too, do the 26 bronze stars that sit atop the local firehouse, one for each adult and child gunned down at a school one unimaginable day.

In so many ways, this is a place frozen in time. Ribbons of green — the Sandy Hook Elementary School colour — stay tied to mailboxes and storefronts, just as a curly-haired girl smiles from a framed photograph that remains atop a mantel inside Jeremy Richman’s home.