U.S. and state flags across Connecticut are flying at half-staff today, Wednesday, Dec. 14, in memory of the twenty first graders and six educators who were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown ten years ago.
The report of the governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, issued in 2015, described the mass shooting of innocents as “one of the most vicious and incomprehensible domestic attacks in American history.”
Thousands of lives were forever altered by the actions of a largely homebound recluse who had a fascination with mass murder and unrestricted access to his mother’s arsenal of guns and ammunition.
The 20-year-old Newtown man shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, before using an AR-15-style assault rifle to blast his way into the elementary school he once attended, where he killed 26 more victims and himself.
Many victim's relatives and survivors have channeled their grief into activism, with some believing they're making progress towards making schools safe from violence.
Grieving relatives turn to activism
Through a decade of grief, many of those with connections to the shocking act have turned to activism. Some cite progress towards their goals.
Mark Barden’s son Daniel was one of the first graders who died in the attack. As co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise, Barden has dedicated his life to keeping other families from suffering the same fate.
He says that Sandy Hook Promise programs, offered to schools nationwide at no charge, have helped to prevent violence. Say Something trains students, teachers and parents to recognize warning signs from a student who may be a threat to themselves or others. It also provides an anonymous reporting system, available 24/7.
Anonymous tips are processed by trained crisis counselors, “who can then triage that tip, depending on the nature of the tip, and can follow up with whatever next steps need to be taken,” according to Barden.
The nonprofit says Say Something can be credited with stopping about a dozen school shootings and more than 300 suicides.
Another program, Start with Hello, encourages social inclusiveness—to steer students away from the kind of intense isolation experienced by the Sandy Hook shooter.
The programs have been picked up by school systems nationwide, and Barden says students take them quite seriously:
“It works… Students understand that they need to look out for one another, and be more connected to one another. And, they’re empowered by that.”
His work, with an organization that now counts about 100 employees, is one way Barden deals with his grief, which he says is constant, regardless of notable milestones such as the ten-year anniversary of his son’s death.
“Daniel’s absence is apparent, and it’s because he was murdered violently because of someone else’s choice,” says Barden. “That’s something we have to live with consistently, so a lot of these dates along the way certainly kind of spike the emotions, but so does everything.”
Surviving the shooting, then the aftermath
Jackie Hegarty has also found her way to activism. She was a 7-year-old student at Sandy Hook Elementary when gunfire erupted across the hall from her second grade classroom. As she was escorted out of the building by police, she witnessed the unimaginable scene. She has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since.
“A lot of people assume that x years after the shooting or the tragedy that people will move on,” says Hegarty, now a senior at Newtown High School. “That’s simply not true. At the end of the day I’m still living with trauma, PTSD and families and friends of victims are still grieving.”
As a young girl, Hegarty was also forced to tackle survivor’s guilt.
“For a couple of years, I was very suicidal, because I wondered why I deserved to walk out of the school and they didn’t.”
Through years of therapy, she worked that out. She believes she may have survived because she has a purpose: helping people.
She volunteers her time as co-chair of the Junior Newtown Action Alliance, a group of high school students, many of whom also survived the shooting. One of their goals is to get assault weapons, like the one used by the shooter to kill so many so quickly, out of American homes.
“I completely believe in the right to bear arms,” says Hegarty. “But at the same time, your rights end when they infringe upon the rights of others. Mass shootings, especially our mass shooting at Sandy Hook, was an assault weapon. So, we’ve seen that having these dangerous weapons in the hands of regular people in our communities isn’t a good idea. These are military weapons.”
Connecticut banned assault weapons in the months after the shooting. The junior alliance members and the parent Newtown Action Alliance are lobbying lawmakers for a renewed federal ban. Last week, Hegarty introduced President Biden at the alliance’s annual National Vigil for All Victims of Gun Violence.
The shooter and the stressed mental health system
The investigation by Connecticut State Police and the State’s Attorney’s office was unable to pinpoint a motive for the crimes. The gunman was not diagnosed with a major mental illness, such as psychosis. He did, according to the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, “appear to suffer from severe anxiety with obsessive-compulsive features and possibly from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, as well as from depression.”
Dr. Hank Schwartz, member of the commission and now Psychiatrist-in-Chief Emeritus at Hartford Healthcare’s Institute of Living, says the Sandy Hook shooter also demonstrated cognitive challenges as a very young student.
“We learned, I think, that the school system tried to focus on the cognitive issues,” says Schwartz, who lectures on The Mind of the Mass School Shooter, “but perhaps did not touch sufficiently on social/emotional learning, connectedness and empathy development that are really critical to addressing the social disconnectedness that we see in so many shooters.”
The commission cited some of the shortfalls of the state’s mental health system, including how schools nurture the psychological development of children, and suggested ways to improve it.
Schwartz says some strides have been made, but the mental health system can’t handle the sheer volume of those who need it. “The rates of anxiety and depression in all age groups,” says Schwartz, “but especially in the young and adolescents and young adults, have just skyrocketed.”
“We’re struggling, everywhere. Mental health professionals are overwhelmed, mental health services are overwhelmed despite efforts to spend money on mental health, to establish mental health clinics in schools and to focus on these issues.”
Schwartz says society needs to come to terms with the scope of the problem, then provide the services to send more children on the path to sound mental health.
That’s a path the Sandy Hook shooter never found. It’s one factor among many, according to Schwartz, that led to catastrophic results:
“The shooter… was connected online to a community of I think what can only be called ‘mass murder enthusiasts.’ The shooter’s isolation, connection to the wrong people, fascination with violence and with mass murder, untreated issues of mental health, these were all a toxic cocktail that led to the shooting.”
