Newtown asks for privacy on first anniversary

It’s a year to the day since Kaitlin Roig barricaded herself and 15 first-graders in a bathroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hiding from a gunman who would go on to kill 26 in an 11-minute rampage.

Ms Roig doesn’t know if the 20-year-old shooter, Adam Lanza, ever entered her classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, although she could hear gunfire and pleas from the hallway and a nearby classroom.

Coming just five months after a gunman opened fire in a Colorado cinema, killing 12, the Dec 14 murder of 20 six-and seven- year-olds forced a national reckoning about gun crime.