The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Running for Dylan
Sandy Hook father Ian Hockley honors son, spreads hope
Powered by his legs and lungs, and to no lesser degree the memory of his son, Ian Hockley on Saturday will run through the darkness and sunlight of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut as part of a three-man team covering 95 miles over about 14 hours.
From the time Hockley’s group lines up at 4 a.m. for the start of the RiMaConn Relay at Blackstone River State Park in Lincoln, R.I., to the time his “Beer Witch Project” team finishes at Riverfront Plaza in Hartford around 6 p.m., he will pull the unique cooperation of physical and emotional extremes through seemingly endless treelined trails.
“It’s a very intense shared experience,” Hockley said. “We call it running for Dylan. There’s that emotional content, and just the exhaustion, the exhilaration — all rolled in.”
Hockley’s son, Dylan, was one of 26 victims, 20 of them first-grade students, killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting in Newtown. He was 6 years old, a little boy who struggled with speech development and was autistic, yet a charismatic force in discovering ways to express himself.
“When Dylan would get excited, really overstimulated, he would jump up and down and flap his hands,” Ian Hockley said.
“That’s how he got that out of his system. His mom asked him one day, ‘Dylan, why do you flap?’ And she wasn’t sure he was going to answer. But he said, ‘Mummy, I’m a beautiful butterfly.’ ”
The memory of that exchange, and Dylan’s general appreciation for simply joys that tend to leave the world in a better place one interaction at a time, inspired a powerful movement that took hold shortly after his death.
That movement has sustained through the actions of “Dylan’s Wings of Change,” a nonprofit foundation that promotes
positive relationships among peers.
The initial incentive for the foundation, established months after Dylan’s death as a way to harness and redirected monetary donations, was to assist students with special needs. It became something more expansive, touching the lives of young students with programs that promote empathy and positive, supportive relationships. More than 50 schools have been involved, many of them in Connecticut, and thousands of students.
The Hockleys, including Ian’s ex-wife Nicole, told the story of Dylan’s flapping during their son’s memorial and numerous times in various settings afterward. Someone responded with a story about the butterfly being a symbol of change, sparking a movement.
“The caterpillar goes through amazing transformation, comes out as this fragile, yet resilient, beautiful thing,” Ian Hockley said. “There’s also the butterfly effect. In chaos theory, small changes accumulate and have a massive impact. The butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. You only need to create small change. If there are other people that are with you, like-minded — What if we decided to pick each other up, not put each other down? Think of the ripples that spread out from those decisions.”
The Hockleys’ life was torn apart on Dec. 14, 2012. But if ever there was evidence of something so fragile becoming so resilient, so beautiful … it is the way they have spun unimaginable heartbreak into way to unlock powers of the human spirit.
Hockley’s job with IBM led to the family’s move to Connecticut from England in 2011. He later left the company to run Dylan’s Wings of Change full-time but went back to work in finance management during the pandemic, as the foundation’s events and fundraising were all but eliminated. He remains the foundation’s executive director.
Hockley, a motivational speaker who has teamed with high-profile groups and politicians, is one of the more visible members of the Sandy Hook community. Nicole Hockley has been equally active in leading conversation about gun violence, and she is on the Dylan’s Wings of Change advisory board. Nicole is the co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise, a violence prevention foundation.
Dylan’s Wings of Change stresses the importance of one child being the next child’s wingman — as Jake Hockley, now entering his senior year at Newtown High, was to his younger brother Dylan. Among the programs developed by the foundation are Wingman Youth Leadership, Wingman Educator and Camp Wings of Friendship.
“Everything we do celebrates his life,” Ian Hockley said of Dylan. “It’s very uplifting to speak about his life, although it was short, and to help people draw some inspiration from my journey and his memory, to take a moment and pause and think about those people around them and their connection, what they can do to make someone else’s life better. He was struggling with communication, but he could connect you with on an emotional level to make you happy. He loved to laugh. Just … that purity.”
That innocence. Taken. Jake Hockley was in third grade when his brother was killed. He is about to enter his senior year at Newtown High, a tennis player who decided to go out for the football team. He has begun looking at colleges.
“He’s becoming the young man that the years of the impact of the tragedy stole because the middle school years were tough,” Ian Hockley said. “Dylan adored Jake. For a little boy who was struggling — autism could make it difficult to relate to other people or just navigate the world — so Jake was Dylan’s wingman. He could look to him and know this was a safe situation, or a fun situation. We have a lot of photos of the two of them together. They have very similar laughs.”
Running events have become a major arm of the foundation’s fundraising and camaraderie, with the Beer Witch Project and its scores of members having raced all over New England, in Germany and in England.
The Beer Witch Project name stems from the group’s love for beer — and recognizes of that eerie feeling for a runner seeing no other headlamps in the woods, wondering if they’re lost. The team has four entries of three-runner teams in the RiMaConn Relay, which was canceled last year due to the pandemic.
The race is broken into 18 legs. The other runners with Hockley are Bob Burbank, of Newtown, and Mark Katz, of Milford. The driver, Jennifer Heitzke, is Ian’s girlfriend. She is responsible for transporting the two inactive runners to the next checkpoint.
“COVID was difficult,” Hockley said. “But we’re back.”
This is all about coming back, really, about seeing the country and the world, making and keeping friends, promoting a good cause — and honoring the memory of a little boy, making sure the positive impact he had on a family and a community can be felt each time his father runs or speaks. Just a week after Dylan’s death, when Hockley delivered his son’s eulogy, he wanted to spread hope, positivity.
“This terrible thing had happened — and who thought it would come to a sleepy Connecticut town?” Ian said. “But it can happen anywhere. So we didn’t want people to lose hope, especially in our community, that we’re still here and prepared to go on.”
Hockley and his family, and so many others, have lived through a uniquely horrifying experience. He still keeps in touch with several Sandy Hook families. The 2019 suicide of Jeremy Richman, the father of 6-year-old Sandy Hook victim, Avielle, “was a reminder that this tragedy will never go away and continues to have an impact,” Hockley said. Hockey and Richman were dear friends.
The nine-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting is Dec. 14.
“Every day is different,” Ian said. “I am doing well. Events like this, begin part of Dylan’s Wings of Change, it’s an honor. That gives me energy. And things that give you energy are so important now because of the things in life that are sapping our energy. The pandemic is sapping everyone’s energy. Life is just a little bit harder.
“We’ve all lost someone. That’s an empathetic connection that everybody can relate to. And it might have been — if there’s ever a good way to lose someone, like peacefully, and you get to say goodbye — or tragically and horrifically. But the loss is still the same.
I’ve heard grief described as love with nowhere to go. It just takes a lot of time to repurpose that love and to be able to do good with it, if you can. So I’m good. I’m blessed. I’m privileged.”