Chilling Newtown massacre report out
NEW YORK—American schoolchildren were slaughtered in a hail of bullets after packing like sardines into a bathroom in a doomed bid to escape the murderous rampage of Newtown gunman Adam Lanza.
Harrowing details about last year’s mass shooting were revealed on Friday when US police released thousands of pages of documents, photographs and recordings from their investigation.
Lanza murdered 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, using a rifle taken from his suburban mother’s legally acquired home defense arsenal.
The troubled 20-year-old killer wore yellow ear plugs that muffled the screams of his victims. After committing one of the country’s worst school massacres—in less than 11 minutes—he shot himself in the mouth.
One of the first police officers who arrived at the scene on December 14, 2012, said he discovered a “massive pile up” of corpses in the bathroom of one classroom in the small Connecticut town.
“There appeared to be about 15 bodies in the small room and several bodies, including, two adults near the entrance to the room,” said the officer, Christopher Vanghele.
An adult victim lay across the dead children, who were stacked “two or three high” and packed in “like sardines,” probably by the teachers when they heard gunshots.
“As the pile got higher it appeared that there was a mad scramble to get into the bathroom, with people stepping on one another and climbing on top of each other,” he said.
There was no longer any space for the teachers to get in, but in the panic they failed to lock the outer classroom door.
The shooter interrupted them and “opened fire on the mass of children and adults... it was clear that no one had survived.” Other files said Lanza was dressed almost entirely in black, his clothes—shirts, trousers, boxer shorts, socks, sneakers, fingerless gloves and a belt—stained with blood and gunpowder.
According to a Federal Bureau of Investigation incident report, he ducked into a classroom and turned a weapon on himself after two law enforcement officers arrived, shattering his brain and skull, according to the attached forensics analysis.