A decade later, grief remains, hope grows
NEWTOWN, CONN. >> They would have been 16 or 17 this year. High school juniors.
The children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012 should have spent this year thinking about college, taking their SATs and getting their driver’s licenses. Maybe attending their first prom.
Instead, the families of the 20 students and six educators slain in the mass shooting will mark a decade without them Wednesday.
December is a difficult month for many in Newtown, the Connecticut suburb where holiday season joy is tempered by heartbreak around the anniversary of the nation’s worst grade school shooting.
For former Sandy Hook students who survived the massacre, guilt and anxiety can intensify. For the parents, it can mean renewed grief, even as they continue to fight on their lost children’s behalf.
In February, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $1.4 billion for promoting lies that the massacre was a hoax.
In mid-November, a memorial to the 26 victims opened near the new elementary school built to replace the one torn down after the shooting.
Activism
After the massacre, Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden were among many victims’ relatives who turned to activism. They helped form Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit group that works to prevent suicides and mass shootings.
Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, and Barden, who lost his 7-yearold son, Daniel, both find it difficult to believe their children have been gone for a decade.
“For me, Dylan is still this 6-year-old boy, forever frozen in time,” Hockley said.”
A decade hasn’t diminished the disbelief Barden and his wife feel over Daniel’s death.
“Jackie and I still have moments where we just kind of look at each other, still wrapping our heads around the fact that our little 7-year-old boy was shot to death in his first grade classroom,” he said.
Sandy Hook Promise’s programs have been taught in more than 23,000 schools to over 18 million children and adults. Key components include education about the warning signs of potential school violence or self-harm and an anonymous tip system to report a classmate at risk for hurting others or themselves.
A survivor moves on
Ashley Hubner was in her second grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary when the shooting happened. She and her classmates ran to the cubby area to hide. The school intercom system clicked on. Everyone could hear gunshots, screaming and crying.
When police arrived, she and her classmates didn’t want to open the door. The officers had to convince them they were actually police.
Ashley, now a 17-yearold senior at Newtown High School, developed post-traumatic stress disorder and has struggled with anxiety and depression, like other students who were there that day. Ashley said she always gets more emotional and irritable around the shooting anniversary.