Grief remains, but hope grows
NEWTOWN, Conn. — They would have been 16 or 17 this year. High school juniors.
The children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, should have spent this year thinking about college, taking their SATs and getting their driver’s licenses. Maybe attending their first prom.
Instead, the families of the 20 students and six educators slain in the mass shooting will mark a decade without them Wednesday.
December is a difficult month for many in Newtown, the Connecticut suburb where holiday season joy is tempered by heartbreak around the anniversary of the nation’s worst grade school shooting.
For former Sandy Hook students who survived the massacre, guilt and anxiety can intensify. For the parents, it can mean renewed grief, even as they continue to fight on their lost children’s behalf.
In February, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $1.4 billion for promoting lies that the massacre was a hoax.
In mid-November, a memorial to the 26 victims opened near the new elementary school built to replace the one torn down after the shooting. Ten years on, some victims’ relatives and survivors aren’t without hope for a brighter future.
After the massacre, Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden were among many victims’ relatives who turned to activism. They helped form Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit group that works to prevent suicides and mass shootings.
Hockley, who lost her 6-yearold son, Dylan, and Barden, who lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, both find it difficult to believe their children have been gone for a decade.
“For me, Dylan is still this 6-year-old boy, forever frozen in time,” Hockley said. “This journey that we’ve been on the last 10 years, it doesn’t feel like a decade and it doesn’t feel like 10 years since I last held my son, either.”
Sandy Hook Promise’s programs have been taught in more than 23,000 schools to more than 18 million children and adults. Key components include education about the warning signs of potential school violence or self-harm and an anonymous tip system to report a classmate at risk for hurting others or themselves.
Hockley and Barden say they believe the educational programs and reporting system have prevented many suicides and stopped some school shootings.
“It’s a tremendous satisfaction and it’s a serious responsibility,” Barden said of the group’s work. “And it’s a gift in a way that we have built something that allows us this mechanism with which to honor our children by saving other children and by protecting other families from having to endure this pain.”