Newtown’s year: Grief, tough choices

Associated Press

NEWTOWN, Conn.

A year later, inside the big house on Berkshire Road, dolls fill the shelves of a living room and flowers and rainbows decorate a kitchen window, next to a little girl’s name: Avielle.

Outside, all around town, Christmas lights shimmer again. But so, too, do the 26 bronze stars that sit atop the local firehouse, one for each adult and child gunned down at a school one unimaginable day.

In so many ways, this is a place frozen in time. Ribbons of green — the Sandy Hook Elementary School color — stay tied to mailboxes and storefronts, just as a curly-haired girl smiles from a framed photograph that remains atop a mantel inside Jeremy Richman’s century-old home.

People might assume the hurt that accompanies tragedy fades with time. But, says Richman, who last Dec. 14 lost his only child, “I miss Avielle more every day.”

It’s been a painful and frenetic year, for the Richmans and for all of Newtown. From horror came despair and, soon, attempts at moving beyond one of the nation’s deadliest shootings. There were the logistics of recovery to tend to and decisions about whether to raze the school where so many perished.

The Labor Day parade marched on, and as foliage turned red and yellow, small survivors filed back into school with their parents’ shaky assurances they would be safe.

Now, with winter on their doorstep once again, the people of Newtown are bracing for the day everyone here simply calls 12/14.

“For us, it’s not an event. It’s something we live with every single day of our lives,” says Newtown First Selectman E. Patricia Llodra, who called together a panel of community leaders, mental- health experts, clergy members and residents to consider what to do about the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting. To avoid drawing more media attention, they decided not to have any formal remembrances.

“We can’t change what happened to us,” Llodra says, “but we have a choice in how we respond.”

And so they will do what they’ve done for a year: balance trying to remember with wanting to forget, and help one another cope with seasons’ worth of grief few outsiders can fathom.

Among the clergy members who counseled families that night in the Sandy Hook firehouse was Monsignor Robert Weiss, pastor of St. Rose of Lima church, who tears up as he remembers the brother of a young victim asking whom he would play with since his sister had been killed.

Father Bob, as he is known in town, presided over the funerals for eight of the children. But his lowest moment came two days after the shooting, when he had to ask worshippers to leave halfway through a Mass because of a call from someone threatening to finish the job Lanza started.

“That’s the moment that changed me,” he says. “I mean, what is safe for us anymore?”

Richman and his wife, Jennifer, were barely functional. And yet as they gathered with friends who offered support, an idea emerged on the day of 6-year-old Avielle’s funeral for a way to channel their grief and try to prevent other such tragedies — a foundation to support research into the brain pathologies behind violence.

Other victims’ families began pursuing their own advocacy projects, trying to create a legacy other than loss. Some immersed themselves in the push for new gun laws. Another group worked to find ways to make the country’s schools safer. Still others tried to occupy themselves with charity work in memory of their loved ones.

Spring brought some of the first steps toward reimagined lives, including a meeting to decide what to do with the school building.

About 25 chairs had been set out for the public at the May gathering, but more than three times that number of parents, teachers and others crowded in. While some argued that knocking down the school would be giving up too much to the gunman, teachers pleaded to not have to return to the site. A father said he wouldn’t want his son going to school where his sister was slain.

A week later, a task force decided the building would be razed. Says Llodra, whose own three children attended the school in the 1970s, “It always was a school that was a happy place.”

Work settled into more familiar routines for officials such as Newtown Police Chief Michael Kehoe, who worked seven days a week for months as his department helped watch over a town on edge. But his officers were still recovering, too. Those who responded to the shooting were shattered by what they saw and needed time off.

For Richman, the spring brought bittersweet progress as he announced an advisory board for his foundation. An invitation to a White House event on mental health led to a meeting with President Barack Obama. Then the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April set him back by bringing up memories of the massacre.

In October, as the leaves turned, fences with no-trespassing signs went up and work began on tearing Sandy Hook down. Within weeks, the school was rubble.

Some victims’ parents joined a commission to begin considering ideas for a permanent memorial as the town focused more on trying to move forward.

Three days before Thanksgiving, investigators released their final report about what happened inside Sandy Hook. It shed no new light on the gunman’s motives but dredged up the horrors of that awful December day. And a little more than a week before the one-year anniversary, the 911 calls made that morning were released.

Many victims’ families are planning to be out of town on 12/14. Richman says he and his wife will be somewhere with friends.

“We just want to be thinking of Avielle and where she would have been at 7 instead of at 6,” he says, “and hopefully what we can do to prevent somebody else from feeling that sadness.”