‘Broken hearts and empty chairs’
For sister of educator killed at Sandy Hook, 10 years have felt like the shortest eternity
Hannah Miranda was running errands when her family got the call from the father of her sister’s boyfriend. What he said shook the family to its core.
“He said there’d been a shooting at the school where Rachel was working,” said Miranda about her sister, Rachel D’Avino, who had started working as a behavioral therapist at Sandy Hook Elementary School, only a couple of weeks earlier.
Following the phone call, the D’Avinos went to the Sandy Hook site to look for Rachel, but Miranda stayed home. There, she sat next to the phone awaiting a call from her sister and watched the news coverage of the shooting, hoping for a glimpse of her sibling.
“I was convinced she was OK. I was like, ‘She is going to call, so someone needs to be here,’ ” said Miranda, who was 22 at the time.
As hours passed with no news of her sister, Miranda’s optimism began to wane.
Miranda later tried to meet her family at the school, but the traffic in the area was so bad that they ended up meeting at the Blue Colony Diner.
It was around this time the unsettling reality that Rachel D’Avino, 29, might not be coming home that day began to sink in.
Miranda recalls she and her family sitting through a somber dinner filled with tears at a Newtown diner as the sounds of Christmas music and cheerful family dinners surrounded them.
“It felt so surreal, it felt fake, like this couldn’t be real life. Then we went home and it wasn’t until about 1:30 a.m. that morning that police came to say that Rachel was one of the ones that was killed,” she said.
Losing her protector
Miranda said her life was forever changed on Dec. 14, 2012.
In the wake of the shooting, Miranda dropped out of Naugatuck Valley Community College because she no longer felt safe in a classroom. She has dealt with anxiety issues; she says she can’t stand waiting for things anymore, considering how her sister was stuck waiting for four minutes “knowing she was going to die.”
Though it’s been 10 years, Miranda said that this is the first year she “feels prepared” heading into December and the holiday season.
“It’s taken so long to get here, but it feels like it happened in the blink of an eye,” Miranda said.
The 10 years since the shooting, Miranda said, has felt like “the shortest eternity ever.” In that time, Miranda has gotten married and given birth to a daughter, Reya, who is now 2 years old. But, still, a piece of her has been missing since her sister’s death.
Miranda lost not only an older sister in the Sandy Hook tragedy, but a source of support and inspiration.
“She was always a fighter. She always stood up for people and stood up for what is right,” Miranda said.
Miranda said her oldest sister had been that way, a protector, her whole life. She said it started back in childhood, when D’Avino would protect her and her middle sibling, Sarah.
It was the role of protector that Rachel D’Avino played that final day in Sandy Hook, as she died trying to save children from the violence that unfolded around them. For her heroics, D’Avino was one of six staff members posthumously awarded the Citizen Honors Medal, the civilian equivalent of the highest military award, the Medal of Honor.
Miranda said one point of solace in the tragedy is that her daughter Reya knows her aunt died a hero. In fact, she said Reya has a Wonder Woman bow that, when she wears it, she says “Aunty Rachel, Aunty Rachel.”
“I know that Reya will know who Rachel was and will carry on that legacy,” Miranda said.
Despite little moments of “sunshine,” Miranda said there are still moments where her sister’s loss still weighs heavily on her.
For instance, after her daughter’s second birthday party, she said she was struck by that familiar thought: “Rachel should have been there.”
Affected by Uvalde shooting
Miranda said one of the hardest things to deal is watching similar school shootings continue across the country.
In particular, Miranda said she was affected by the Uvalde school shooting, in which 21 people were killed and 17 were injured.
“That one was the most challenging because it was in an elementary school as well and because they were waiting there for 77 minutes. And I thought the five minutes that it had taken at Sandy Hook was a long time,” Miranda said through tears.
As the number of school shootings continues to rise, Miranda said the tight-knit nationwide community of those who have lost loved ones has, sadly, also expanded. While Miranda said she’s made a lot of close friends in that community, it’s her hope that, one day, this community will stop growing.
“We have enough people here. There’s enough broken hearts and empty chairs,” Miranda said.