‘It was just mass chaos’
Parents race to answer ‘code red’ and hold their children
As the 600 students of Sandy Hook filed into lessons on a bright, chilly morning in Newtown, Conn. on Friday, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, the school’s principal, sat down for a meeting in her office with six colleagues.
“You really couldn’t ask for a better principal,” Lisa Procaccini, the mother of an eightyear-old pupil at the school, told reporters.
“A beautiful person — so warm and personable.”
Suddenly, at about 9.30 a.m., those in the meeting heard a loud “pop, pop, pop” from the hall. Hochsprung, 47, rushed outside with one of her vice-principals and the school psychologist. Only one of them came back.
Bloodied by a gunshot wound in the leg, the viceprincipal crawled back inside the office, frantically urging colleagues to call 911. The recurring nightmare for parents and teachers across the United States was a reality.
Dressed in black, armed with multiple weapons and apparently wearing a bulletproof vest, the gunman had begun opening fire in a “concentrated area” of the school, believed to be a kindergarten classroom.
Confused and screaming children and staff were soon moving, panicked, through the hallway, witnesses said. Police in Newtown — a picturesque and prosperous town about an hour’s drive outside New York City — were dispatched to the scene, quickly joined by state troopers and authorities from surrounding towns.
“I was in the gym,” one young student recounted to reporters outside later.
“We heard lots of bangs and we just thought it was the custodian knocking things down. But then we heard screaming.
“And so,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion, “we moved to the wall, and sat down. Police ran in and said, ‘Is he in here?’
“Teachers said to get to a safe place, so we went into the closet.”
Frantically checking what Lieut. Paul Vance called “every door, every crack and every crevice” for potential victims, police and teachers huddled children into the backs of classrooms around the school as they scoured the scene for the shooter.
In one classroom, Alexis Wasik and her friends were terrified. “There were all these people,” she told reporters. “We saw police officers, and heard them on the roof and on the building.”
Many of the children were in tears. “Some people started saying they felt like they had a stomach ache. Police officers were running out of the door trying to find the guy,” she said.
Parents across the area were soon receiving an automated “code red” phone message from the local school superintendent, alerting them to a shooting at the school. They rushed to the scene.
One, Stephen Delguidice, told reporters how a quickthinking teacher may have saved lives by hitting the button on the school public address system, alerting students and teachers to the intruder.
“My daughter said she heard cursing come over the loudspeaker and that cursing wasn’t the right thing; so the teacher, Martin, looked at the kids and she said, ‘Get in corner’,” said Delguidice. “She did a very good job. She locked the door and that basically saved their lives, I think.”
Delguidice said he rushed to the school after receiving an alert on his mobile phone. “I just wanted to see her face,” Delguidice told CBS News, recalling his desperation to see his eight-year-old, who is in Grade 3.
“People were running for their kids. I couldn’t get there fast enough. It was just mass chaos. I finally got to my daughter,” he said. “A friend of mine led me to her. I just wanted to hold her. There was a sense of such relief.”
With tears streaming down their faces, dozens of other parents gathered outside the school, clutching their children to their chests after similar reunions.
By 10:30 a.m., President Barack Obama was being briefed on the crisis by John Brennan, his homeland security adviser. All Newtown schools were locked down to ensure the safety of students and staff.
Inside Sandy Hook, however, it was too late. The gunman killed 27 people, including 20 children and himself, after killing his mother, a teacher at the school. A nation was left struggling to put some kind of context to its latest school massacre.
Few of those gathered at the scene Friday night could believe what had happened.
“This is a nice town, this is a good school — things like this don’t happen here,” one witness told reporters.
“Sandy Hook is a very, very good school in Newtown — and we’ve become nationally recognized for our schools,” said another bystander, a resident of a town with an average household income of more than $100,000.
“It’s a very good suburb, a lot of people work in New York and Hartford. It’s very safe, never any major issues.”
Lisa Procaccini, the mother of an eight-year-old student, said she did not know how she would explain to her child what had happened.
“As my daughter was walking out she saw blood and glass,” Procaccini said. “She did tell me about a little boy that was in a police officer’s arms, bleeding. I don’t think she really gets it right now. I don’t think she knows how serious things are. Time will tell.”
Other parents, meanwhile, continued to endure an anxious wait, fearing that a far worse task awaited them. “Unfortunately not everyone got to see their kids’ faces today,” said Delguidice.