Avielle Richman almost didn’t go to school that day
Avielle Richman wasn’t supposed to go to school that day.
Her parents planned to take their first grader to see the Rockettes in Manhattan on Friday, Dec. 14, 2012.
But there was a special activity going on at Sandy Hook Elementary School that morning, her mother, Jennifer Hensel, testified this fall during a defamation trial. So the family decided to send her to school and pull her out before lunch to make the trip to New York.
They never got there. Avielle was one of 26 students and educators fatally shot at the school that morning in one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history.
Hensel’s last memory of her daughter was Avielle, 6, blowing kisses from the school bus, she said as she started to cry on the witness stand. She declined to speak further to Hearst Connecticut Media.
She described her daughter as a girl with “crazy, crazy curly hair” and a smile just like that of her father, Jeremy Richman, which took up half her face.
Also known as Avie, Avielle loved horses, “Harry Potter” and the color red, according to her obituary. She was often barefoot, a habit from the family’s beach days in San Diego, Calif., where she was born.
Avielle was the definition of extravert and was a little rambunctious at times, Hensel said in court. She had no fear of strangers, and when she was out in public with her parents, she had a habit of slipping away and engaging people in conversation.
Hensel said she and Richman would find her quickly, though, because “she would be surrounded by people who just wanted to be around her. We never lost her for maybe more than a minute. But a minute is terrifying.”
One of the conversations Avielle had with strangers revolved around her name. Inevitably, they’d ask her name and would ask followup questions because some never heard it before.
In fact, sometimes Hensel
and Richman would walk up and hear their daughter spelling her name for the strangers she met: “A-V-I-EL-L-E, Avielle.”
“She was gregarious and loud. She was so loud,” Hensel said with a chuckle.
She had a mischievous streak, too, she said.
Once, Hensel caught Avielle in her car, getting into Hensel’s stash of chewing gum. The girl’s eyes widened in fear that she was in big trouble, Hensel said.
“She had locked herself in my car. And I went outside, and she knew she had been caught —I saw the gum in her mouth. I think she got scared that I was going to be like ‘What are you doing in my car, eating all this gum?’ But all I could do is just laugh at her.”
It was hard for Avielle’s parents to ever be mad at their only child.
“She would turn around and just crawl into your
arms and snuggle…She was everything. It didn’t matter if she was naughty,” she said. “It really didn’t.”
Like other victims’ family members, Hensel and Richman set up a foundation in their daughter’s memory. Theirs, set up in 2013, was different than the others. It focuses on studies of the human brain and why some people become violent.
The couple went on to have two more children after the death of their daughter. Richman, however, died of suicide in 2019.
Discussing how she came to terms with the death of Avielle during the testimony, Hensel said “I don’t think you heal from something like this.”
“I think you forever hold grief. And you rebuild some joy back into your live and it balances,” she said.