Celebration of life planned for father of slain Sandy Hook girl
NEWTOWN — Family and friends will gather at the end of the month to honor the life of Jeremy Richman — the father of a first-grader slain in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Richman’s suicide on March 25 shocked Newtown and made national news, in part because it followed the suicides of two teenagers who attended the Florida high school where 17 students and staff were killed in 2018.
The May 26 event for Richman, planned at Newtown High School, is being organized independently of the brain health research foundation that Richman and his wife founded after the slaying of their daughter, Avielle, and 25 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School in 2012.
“He wasn’t a person of faith, so there is not a ritual we can turn to close the final chapter of his life,” said Nick Hoffman, the Avielle Foundation’s chief imagination officer. “So we’re having a celebration of his life, shaped by those who knew him best.”
The idea is to invite Richman’s friends from Arizona and Colorado, where he and his wife spent much of their lives, to gather with well-wishers here and across the state to mark his contributions and celebrate his visionary spirit, friends said.
Organizers are asking those interested in attending the noontime event to register.
Although the registration page is part of the Avielle Foundation website, the event is not connected to the nonprofit.
Richman, a 49-year-old neuropharmacologist, knew as much as anyone about the relationship between brain health and behavioral health, and yet he walked into the old Edmond Town Hall where his foundation has an office and killed himself.
His wife, Jennifer Hensel, said he “succumbed to a grief he could not escape.”
The May 26 event will be a chance for many of his friends to remember him at his best.
“Jeremy is a brother to me,” Hoffman said.