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.

Lanza used guns that were legally bought by his mother Nancy Lanza. He killed her in her bed, then drove to the school he had once attended, shooting his way in just as the school day was getting started. After the rampage, he shot himself.

As the nation marks the first anniversary, Newtown has asked the public to stay away. The offices of Sandy Hook Promise, a parents’ group founded in the weeks after the shootings, are located in downtown Newtown.

Scattered on tables are pamphlets on foundations set up by the families. Seated at one, Mark Barden, who lost his son, Daniel.

Like many other Sandy Hook parents, he has kept up a punishing schedule over the last year, travelling to Washington to meet with lawmakers to support a gun law that stalled in the US Senate, and promoting the work of the group.

“The way that Daniel lived his short life, I know that he would have done a whole lot of good. We take it very seriously now that it’s our responsibility to do that good work,” he said.

When the shooting began, Ms Roig-DeBellis’s class was seated in a circle. “I got up, I closed the door, I turned the lights off and I turned to my students and I said: ‘We need to get into the bathroom — right now’.”

Some 45 minutes later, when the police arrived, Ms Roig-DeBellis would not let them in. For days after, she was in a daze. She ended up taking more than a year off from teaching, and has devoted that time to charity. She plans to return to teaching this summer.

— Reuters