SHOOTINGS STUN QUIET CONNECTICUT TOWN
Regina expat tells of trauma
It is, as one of Peter Gebert’s friends observed Monday, “Currier & Ives Country”, which will ring a bell with fans of those 19th century artists’ prints of rural Connecticut: Covered bridges, rolling countryside and, especially, small towns.
The kind of place were Gebert, an expat Reginan working there in senior management at a biotech firm, would see cops only when they gave out speeding tickets or directed traffic at the local triathalon.
The kind of place where, as Gebert said in an interview Monday after a sleepless weekend, everybody knows everybody, and generally get along.
All of which made what happened Friday in nearby Newtown — which Gebert drives past twice a day on the interstate — all the more shocking. Violent crimes just don’t happen in the friendly upper-middle class suburbs of southwest Connecticut, a network of comfortable small towns, one after another. Until Friday, that is. Realization of what happened in an elementary school in Newtown arrived slowly. Gebert, who came to his job after stops in Edmonton and California’s Silicon Valley, was in a meeting when its chair — sitting beside him — got a text that something had happened at a school.
A little later came a text message from Gebert’s girlfriend, who works in oncology at a local hospital — they were in lockdown and grim-faced cops were all over the place. Then communication ceased: Either too many texters or planned jamming.
Initial reports were that two gunmen had shot it out in a high school and a third person, a teacher perhaps, had been killed. Bad, but ... At a pre-Christmas lunch, another colleague was called to go to the school. In all, six staff members from Gebert’s firm, which has about 200 employees, had headed for it.
It was only when Gebert was in an afternoon teleconference with associates in California and noticed a news headline on the bottom of his computer screen, that the enormity of the hell only eight miles east dawned on him: 28 were dead, 27 at the Newtown elementary school (including the gunman) and, in a house, his mother. So they waited. One bit of good news from a horrible day: The company’s human resources department was able to report than all the staff members’ children “as far as being physically harmed” were OK.
But their parents returned with horrific stories that were told Monday — like the man who found his own children OK, but noticed a neighbour’s child frantically running around the school area, unsure of where to go and what to do. He scooped her up and took her to her parents’ home — only to learn later that her younger sibling had been killed.
The wife of one of Gebert’s colleagues teaches, though at a different school. But she knew many of the doomed elementary school’s teachers “and was devastated”. Stories circulating in the Newtown-Danbury area indicate one of her friends died while running toward the gunman — and away from a room where she had hidden some of her students.
Alas, the children decided to break cover and run; they too were gunned down — though Gebert was told Monday that one child survived by playing dead and was rescued, “frantic” and covered in her friends’ blood.
Gebert, whose father still lives in Regina and visited his hometown only this summer, said the last three days have, predictably, seen advocates of gun owners pointing out that the issue here is mental health; that millions of gun owners have never gone berserk, and won’t.
Other Americans are calling more loudly than ever for tighter gun-control laws.
“Maybe something like this will give impetus to that — maybe,” says Gebert, a little sadly. “I’m not too optimistic.”
Meanwhile, a roadside American flag suddenly had 26 little flags around it, plus candles and teddy bears. Police are everywhere.
Friday night saw Gebert — a grad of Regina’s St. Augustine School and Miller High School — unable to sleep and instead writing emails encouraging family and friends, “to count your blessings (as I am) and give your family members an extra hug this Christmas season and overlook some of the petty arguments that may come up.
“Most important of all, please say some extra prayers for some of the people around here.”