CHOOSING LOVE
10 years after losing her son Jesse at Sandy Hook, Scarlett Lewis’ movement has reached 3 million students
For months after her son Jesse was gunned down in his first-grade classroom, Scarlett Lewis’ life was at a crossroads. The single mother of two boys, Lewis was living month to month, reliant on her full-time job as an executive assistant before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School brought total disruption to hers and the lives of 25 other families. Suddenly, her anguish and loss was being broadcast all over the world as new reports focused in particular on Jesse, who during a pause in the carnage had yelled at his classmates to “run,” before being killed.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Lewis, like many other family members, felt driven to make sense of the senseless crime and devote herself to a cause that could prevent such killings from taking place in the future. However, the most publicized effort — gun control — did not resonate with the Arkansas native, who lived on a small farm with her children, dogs and a couple of horses.
A stark moment in that divide appeared the following April, when Lewis took her eldest son, JT, to watch President Barack Obama give a speech in Hartford heaping praise on lawmakers for tightening background checks and the state’s assault weapons ban.
Afterward, as they mingled with a group of Sandy Hook families and the president, Lewis said that JT noticed they were among the only ones that had not brought packed suitcases to the event. The others, Lewis discovered, were slated to testify before Congress in favor of stricter gun laws and had been invited to fly down to Washington aboard Air Force One.
“There was so much pressure for me to join already-going movements, and organizations people telling me we need your voice and your energy,” Lewis recalled during an interview at her home in November. “But those organizations hadn’t helped my son. And so I wanted to do something different, that I believed could help.”
As Lewis and the other Sandy Hook families approach 10 years since the shooting on Dec. 14, the movement she began from the ground up, the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation, is also nearing the decade mark.
The Choose Love Foundation, a nonprofit, seeks to provide classrooms with free social-emotional learning and characterdevelopment programs to come to the aid of at-risk youths. Since Lewis started the movement in 2013, it has grown to reach more than 3 million students at thousands of schools around the globe.
While the inspiration for the movement came from a message Jesse had scrawled across the kitchen chalkboard just a few days before his death — “nurturing, healing, love” it said, spelled phonetically — Lewis said that nexus for spreading that message came from some of the thousands of letters she received from children, parents and other concerned adults in the weeks and months after the shooting.
One letter, in particular, that stood out came from a professor who explained what he learned over two decades of studying school shootings.
“I used to carry the letter around with me everywhere I went,” Lewis said. “It said that, after all these years of research, he had summed it up that if an individual or a child received 15 minutes of a caring adult being present with them, really present in the moment and really caring about that child, and that child felt it, that that child would be OK. I love that because I think that I’ve come to the same conclusion.”
Lewis eventually quit her fulltime job, devoting herself to the foundation’s work. Since the shooting, she has written three books, including “Choosing Love, A Pathway to Flourishing,” a children’s story incorporating aspects of the social-emotional learning curriculum that was published ahead of the tragedy’s 10 year mark.
Jesse’s chalkboard message remains etched in her kitchen, undisturbed under a pane of Plexiglass near where his mother charted his growth with a series of markings. The most recent one, about chest height, is dated two months before the shooting.
As she does every year on the anniversary of the shooting, Lewis’ plans involve a visit to the grave site with her family on Dec. 14. Her mother will prepare a few quotes or Bible verses that are passed around with a candle to be read, as well a “prayer of gratitude” for Jesse’s short life.
“It’s still hard for me to believe that it’s been 10 years, because in some aspects, it seems like it just happened yesterday,” Lewis said. “In others, it does seem like a lot of time has passed. But I think that it would be a positive thing for us all to take a moment on the 10-year anniversary to think about where we are, practice self-awareness for ourselves in our own lives, how we’re feeling, how our feelings are information, and how we are doing as a family.”
Jesse's words, all over the world
When she spoke to a reporter recently, Lewis had just returned from an overseas trip on behalf of the movement that had taken her from India to Hawaii and other far-flung places on behalf of her work with the foundation. In photos she shared from a stop in a class, Scarlett stands at the back of a classroom filled with nearly two dozen students, their hands stretched toward the camera with peace signs and fingers curled into the shapes of hearts.
Through her travels and evangelism for social-emotional learning, Lewis said she has encountered numerous youths who she said appeared to be struggling with the “pain, suffering [and] disconnection,” that had afflicted the 20-year-old perpetrator of the shooting at Sandy Hook.
“I knew that if the young man, the former student, who had probably sat in that classroom himself, if he had been able, or had learned the essential life skills to enable him to process the hurt and pain that he suffered, that the tragedy would never have happened if he had been able to love himself,” Lewis said. “In other words, the tragedy would never have happened.”
In order to spread those skills to families without access to the Choose Love programing in schools, the foundation has also created a series of at-home and work-based video seminars available through its website.
One school district that has not been receptive to her message is Newtown’s, Lewis said, which she attributed to the district possibly not wanting to spend more money on social emotional learning after failing to fully implement a program that existed prior to the shooting. “I think that they were going back to something that hadn’t worked.”
The superintendent of Newtown Public Schools, Christopher Melillo, offered praise for the Choose Love Foundation’s curriculum, which he said he used at a previous job in another district. However, he said Newtown currently offers social-emotional learning through three different programs that the district has operated since prior to his hiring in July.
“It’s kind of like choosing your favorite child, they’re all good,” Melillo said. “I do love her program, and it’s something that we’ll look at.”
Despite her distance from the gun control movement, Lewis said that the pressure to join other families in advocating for reforms never became “aggressive,” and she maintains several close friendships with other family members. In her living room, surrounded by paintings of her two sons, she keeps a framed letter from President Obama.
“We have a great mutual respect, I believe,” Lewis said. “I mean, we’re working toward the same goal. I love them for what they do, and I’m trying to do the same thing, and that’s create a safer, more peaceful and loving world.”
‘I'm being bullied.'
The alliance that has bound Lewis with more than a dozen other families and survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting began — for her — very early on after shooting, when Lewis had gathered with her three brothers at her mother’s house, and she noticed her family’s hushed whispers as they gathered around the computer.
Alex Jones, a far-right internet provocateur, had begun spreading bogus theories that the massacre was part of a staged “false flag” attack within hours of the shooting. Over the next several years, Jones’ rants to his audience of millions grew more conspiratorial, eventually claiming that the shooting was “completely fake with actors.”
At Jesse’s open-casket funeral a week after the shooting, Lewis recalled that her family was surprised to see a number of bikers among the mourners, only to later learn that they had come to “make sure that everything remained peaceful,” due to the presence of Sandy Hook deniers who were picketing the church.
Lewis, like other Sandy Hook families, began receiving messages from Jones’ followers and other deniers that ranged from the bizarre to downright threatening. She installed a security system at her farm and hoped that her three dogs — a mastiff, German shepherd and beagle — would be enough to ward off any daring troublemakers.
Then, several years after the shooting Lewis received a letter from a denier who offered $1 million to see Jesse’s birth certificate. Around the same time, Lewis said she had been preparing to fly to Texas to speak to students and a school where a bullied classmate had died by suicide.
“It just hit me, wow, I’m being bullied,” Lewis said. “So I hurried back home, and I responded, and I said, you know, ‘Jesse’s birth certificate is online. It’s available. It’s a non-issue. But you just helped me make a connection with a school district in Texas, who just had a student that has been bullied to death.’”
Lewis and Jesse’s father, Neil Heslin, eventually filed a lawsuit against Jones in 2018, seeking damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Together, they became one of 10 families of Sandy Hook victims, as well as a federal agent who investigated the shooting, to sue Jones in courts in Texas and Connecticut.
During a highly-publicized trial in Austin earlier this year, Lewis became the first family member to confront Jones directly in a courtroom. “I wanted you to know that I am a mother and my son existed,” Lewis said during her emotional testimony, which has been viewed millions of times since being published online.
Ultimately, Lewis and Heslin were together awarded nearly $50 million by the Texas jury, which the parents said they intend to put toward the work of the Choose Love Foundation.
“That trial was the hardest thing that I’ve had to do since Jesse’s murder. And I was very conflicted over it,” Lewis said. “One of the reasons was because it took two weeks away from my mission of spreading Jesse’s message of nurturing healing love, I didn’t realize the trial was going to be a way to spread it.”
After the trial, Lewis said she “hit the ground running” with a global tour with the Choose Love Movement, and has only had a few days to return home to her farm in Sandy Hook, just around the corner from where Jesse is buried.
During that time, she has also revealed publicly that Jones handed her a note on the final day of the trial apologizing for his actions and expressing an interest in working with the Choose Love Foundation. Since then, however, Lewis said she has yet to hear from the Infowars host even as he was hit with nearly $1 billion in additional damages toward several of the other families. Lewis said that she has no plans to reach out, though she remained open to speaking with him again.
“I’ve learned from mistakes early on in my life, I have,” Lewis said. “I have given the option of that and then tried to pull people through that door, kind of like, get in here, get in here. And they have their feet up against the door jamb on the other way, and they’re pushing against me. And so I’m not going to go into that battle. I’ve opened the door. And so it’s up to him to make that choice to walk through. I believe that he will.”
“I think that it would be a positive thing for us all to take a moment on the 10-year anniversary to think about where we are, practice self-awareness for ourselves in our own lives, how we're feeling, how our feelings are information, and how we are doing as a family.”
Scarlett Lewis, mother of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis