We had finally made it into the twelve days of Christmas. By December 14, 2012, the news had slowed as usual and we were looking for Christmas themes for the CBS Evening News. Executive Producer Patricia Shevlin suggested a series of interviews on the subject of peace. That idea led my senior producer, Nicole Young, to the 5th Avenue office of Elie Wiesel. Wiesel, a Romanian American, had won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the author of the classic Holocaust memoir Night. Wiesel had been imprisoned as a child and orphaned. But to describe Wiesel only as a Holocaust survivor shortchanged his contribution to humanity. Wiesel was an irreplaceable Holocaust witness. And he continued to proclaim his witness on this winter day, at the age of eighty-four.
“Would you say that your humanity was broken, destroyed, as you came out of Buchenwald?” I asked.
“Probably, yes,” Wiesel told me. “Everything was broken. But the mystery in life is not only to begin but to begin again. What to do with what remains of broken faith, of broken principles, of broken ideals? There must be desire to rebuild and start again.”
Within minutes, I too would feel that “everything was broken.” And I would spend the next several years witnessing the heroic “desire to rebuild and start again.” My conversation with Wiesel moved into the next several questions until Nicole stepped in discreetly and whispered in my ear. “There’s been a shooting at a school in Connecticut. We may have to go.”
Wiesel continued, “In those times, the principles that we had about goodness, about faith, about hope, they were all reduced to ashes. What do we do? What did we do then? What could we do then except build on the ruins, hoping to teach a lesson? And that hope, in itself, was an act of faith.”
I ended the interview sooner than I wanted. Nicole briefed me on what she knew so far. The school was in Newtown, seventy-five miles from Manhattan. Several people had been shot. Their conditions were unknown. Pat Shevlin thought we should anchor the Evening News that night from Newtown. On the way to Connecticut, I stopped at the CBS News Broadcast Center to get the latest. I trotted into the glass-enclosed Evening News office called “The Fishbowl.” Pat looked shaken. I glanced at her deputy, senior broadcast producer Jim McGlinchy. “Jimmy, how many?” I asked.
“Twenty-six,” he said.
I wasn’t prepared. I could feel my heart break.
“Children?” I asked.
“Twenty,” McGlinchy said.
“Hospital?”
“They’re all dead.”
9/11 had been the largest loss of life I had ever witnessed—a cataclysm. But somehow this, this intimate horror, the targeted deaths of innocent children, triggered a grief in me that was just as deep. I made my way to Newtown with a sense of dread and the words of Elie Wiesel fresh in my thoughts. “For me,” he said, “the greatest sadness was, and remains, when I saw what was the fate of Jewish children during the war. I could forgive many things, but not what they have done to children.”
Newtown and its enclave village, Sandy Hook, were founded by the English at the turn of the eighteenth century. Three hundred years later, the inhabitants of this colonial postcard still numbered fewer than twenty-nine thousand. Sandy Hook Elementary had 489 students.1 On bright, cold mornings like this, school buses would turn at the Sandy Hook firehouse where the white wooden sign on Dickinson Drive greeted, “Sandy Hook School 1956 Visitors Welcome.”
Christmas decorations gilded the squat red-brick fire station, which was dominated by seven garage doors. Police cars and ambulances were jumbled in the parking lot, in neighbors’ yards, in the street, wherever they had been yanked into Park. Throughout town, stuttering thumbs fired text messages in every direction. Go to the firehouse. The children are in the firehouse. The fire company’s trucks had been pulled outside leaving the sprawling garage for parents who sprinted forward with palms pressed in prayer. Some mothers and fathers bolted out with their children bound in a greedy embrace. “There were just people everywhere,” Nicole Hockley told me. Hockley arrived at the firehouse in search of her six-year-old son, Dylan. “There were several rooms,” she said. “And you really had to push to get through. And we’re all just jostling. We’re trying to find our kids. And a woman asked me, ‘What classroom was your child in?’ And I said, ‘Miss Soto.’ And she said, ‘I heard she got shot.’ And I got really angry at her. And I remember very clearly saying, ‘Don’t you dare say that to me if you don’t know it’s true!’ And I just pushed by her, but I couldn’t find Dylan’s class or anyone from his class anywhere.”
Jimmy Greene scanned the firehouse for his son and daughter. “I saw my son’s teacher in a living room area of the firehouse and all of the kids in her class, seated on the floor. And I ran in the room and Isaiah popped up and I just went and grabbed him and held him and he was just crying, ‘Daddy, there were so many gunshots.’ So, I just took my son in my arms. He’s a big kid. I took him like he was two years old again and held him on my shoulder and just was running from room to room trying to locate Ana’s class.” Greene’s wife, Nelba Marquez-Greene read a text from her husband that said Isaiah was safe, but Ana was missing. “So, I was driving with my friend back to Sandy Hook,” she told me. “And I just kept texting Jimmy every ten or fifteen seconds: Ana? Question mark. And then, Ana! exclamation point, because we had Isaiah. I didn’t understand why we didn’t have Ana.”
With joyful reunions all around her, Nicole Hockley noticed how the firehouse was changing. “It just started to be fewer and fewer parents and kids in the room. And then they asked everyone who was left to come to one of the back rooms.”
Nelba Marquez-Greene told me, “I remember looking at Jimmy and saying I don’t want to go in that back room. I don’t want to go in that back room. Because I know what the back room meant. In my heart, as a mother, I know what the back room meant.”
“Eventually,” Hockley said, “they announced that there had been a shooting. And they told us that people had died. And the room just erupted with anguish. But even then, you still think, ‘Dylan’s okay, he’s got to be okay because this wouldn’t happen to Dylan.’ And then, it was several hours later that I believe it was Governor [Dannel] Malloy who had the duty to stand in front of a room and tell us that if we were in that room our child or adult wasn’t coming back to us.”
Three months after their unimaginable loss, several parents felt strong enough to sit down with us on 60 Minutes. Seven families responded to an invitation from producer Henry Schuster. They joined us at the old white clapboard town hall where Henry set up semicircles of chairs on risers. Mothers and fathers sat side by side holding 8x10 color portraits of their sons and daughters—forever six years old. They were joined by families of some of the six adult educators who were killed. I didn’t know how to face them. I’ve spoken to thousands of grieving people over these many years. But on this morning, as old window panes spilled early sun on more than twenty people who lost loved ones, the gravity of grief overwhelmed me. I did not feel worthy of being with them.
To start, I asked each parent to tell us about their murdered child. Jimmy Greene, a Grammy-nominated jazz saxophonist, introduced the portrait in his hands. “Our daughter, Ana, was six years old. And in those six years, I can look back and say it was an honor to know her. She taught me about how to love, how to give. She was beautiful and every day I cry.” Francine Wheeler spoke up, “This is Benjamin Andrew Wheeler. Ben was six years old. He has a brother named Nate. And Nate was hiding when he heard Ben and his classmates and educators get shot.” Our camera panned to Mark Barden. “We lost our sweet little Daniel Barden. He was known as the kid that would talk to somebody who was sitting alone. He was genuinely an old soul.” Nicole Hockley’s voice wrapped cold grief in a blanket of memory. “This is Dylan. I think the picture kind of sums him up perfectly. He was always smiling and always laughing. And he was very pure. Possibly because of his age—he was six—and possibly because he was autistic.” Bill Sherlach’s wife, Mary Sherlach, was fifty-six and had plans to retire. “Mary was the school psychologist at Sandy Hook for eighteen years,” Bill told us. “And truly believed that was the place she was meant to be, doing what she would call ‘God’s work.’” Thirty-year-old Lauren Rousseau had a fresh master’s degree in elementary education. She’d worked at Sandy Hook for a month. Her mother, Terri, told me, “Lauren grew up with this idea that she wanted to be a teacher and work with other children. She had a sort of innocence about her, a kind of denial of all the ugly things in the world. We had no idea that some ugly thing would come and take her from us.”
This chapter of the book is about what Elie Wiesel called “building on the ruins,” and so, I don’t want to dwell on the shooting. But to understand the path of the Sandy Hook parents, a few facts from the State of Connecticut investigation are essential. The “ugly thing” was profound mental illness.2 The twenty-year-old gunman had attended grade school at Sandy Hook.3 He lived nearby with his divorced mother. Friends I spoke to say she devoted every hour to him. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But Asperger’s and OCD are not predictors of violence. He suffered with afflictions that were much more troubling. His mother described him to others as intensely sensitive to light, noise and touch. His bedroom was blacked out with trash bags over the windows. Recently, he’d been communicating with his mother only by email. His computer stored tales of mass murder, a spreadsheet of mass killings and photos of himself holding guns to his head. His mother prepared the only foods he would eat—arranging them on the plate precisely to his preference. Most of his life she sought treatment for him. But he refused medications and therapy. Firearms were her hobby, which she passed to her son. The weapons used in the killings had been purchased legally in her name. In the few months before the shooting, she told her son of her plan to move them from his boyhood home. This was a home he refused to leave even when the power was knocked out for days by a storm. On December 10, 2012, she went to New Hampshire, a rare, perhaps unprecedented trip without him. She returned late on December 13.4 Perhaps he felt his tightly wrapped world unraveling. The next morning, he shot his mother to death in her bed and left for Sandy Hook School.
Dressed in black, from his sneakers to his polo shirt, he carried a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semiautomatic assault rifle and two semiautomatic pistols. As part of its routine, the school locked its doors at 9:30 a.m. The gunman fired eight rounds through a plate glass window to get in.5 The school principal, Dawn Hochsprung, and school psychologist Mary Sherlach went to investigate the noise. They were apparently the first to die. The Bushmaster was fed by six PMAG 30 magazines, each loaded with thirty rounds. At least two of the magazines were taped together inversely, so the pair could be flipped for near instantaneous reloading. In Classroom 8, investigators found eighty spent shell casings among the bodies of fifteen students and two teachers. In Classroom 10, forty-nine spent shell casings lay among the bodies of five students and two teachers. The shooter shot himself to death as police closed in. He had been inside the school only ten minutes.6 On his body, investigators found another 253 rounds of ammunition.7 The coroner noted he was six feet tall and weighed 112 pounds.
The parents who sat with me in April 2013 were lobbying for restrictions on weapons. Nelba Marquez-Greene told us they had come a long way in their education. “At first, my heart was, ‘Let’s have a big bonfire and burn everything. Let’s burn all these damn guns.’ I have since learned that it’s a more complex issue than just saying, ‘Let’s ban assault weapons.’ We’re looking for real change and commonsense solutions, not things that just sound good.” The week before our interview, they convinced the Connecticut legislature to limit the capacity of ammunition magazines to ten rounds, require background checks for all private firearm sales—including previously exempt gun shows—and expand the state’s assault weapon ban to include one hundred specific guns. The legislation was bipartisan and not an easy reach in Connecticut, which is home to some of the best-known firearm manufacturers. Fresh from their victory in Hartford, these parents were now walking the polished stone corridors of the US Congress. What Bill Sherlach wanted most was a restriction on the thirty-round ammunition magazines that allowed the shooter to fire 130 shots in the few minutes it took police to arrive. “It’s just simple arithmetic,” he said. “If you have to change magazines fifteen times instead of five times, you have three times as many incidents where something could jam. Something could be bobbled. You just increase the time for intervention. You increase the time frame where kids can get out.”
President Barack Obama was with them. Polls showed most Americans were too. But the personal lobbying by the parents, which had tightened gun laws in Connecticut, New York and Maryland, failed in Washington, DC. An assault weapons ban that included a magazine capacity limit and a bill to expand background checks failed in the Senate. Nicole Hockley told me, “It was like all the air went out of your body in one quick swoosh. That was a gut-wrenching defeat. How could this have happened?”
I asked her, “Was there a sense of, ‘Okay, we tried. I’m going home’?”
“Never,” she said. “Why would we do that? That’s not honoring our children. There is a saying, ‘Fall nine times, get up ten.’ We’ll just keep getting up.”
Five years after our interview in 2013, producer Henry Schuster, associate producer Rachael Morehouse, and I went back to Newtown to follow up with the families. It occurred to me that there is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child. We have orphans, widows and widowers, but no noun for a bereaved parent. Maybe it’s an abyss so deep that we don’t dare make it real by giving it a name.
I asked Nelba Marquez-Greene and Jimmy Greene about the passage of time. “Have you found people, after all these years, expecting you to get over what happened?”
Nelba’s eyes widened. “You just took my breath away because that happens a lot and it is so incredibly painful. It’s like losing her all over again.” Jimmy added, “There have been those that have said things like, ‘So you guys are good now?’ or, ‘I hope you’ve had some closure to your daughter’s murder.’ In my heart, and I know in Nelba’s as well, our family will never be intact again.” There was no moving on for any of the families, but they had found ways to move forward. Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden founded Sandy Hook Promise to train teachers and students to recognize those who are on a pathway to violence. Hockley got the idea after an FBI official explained to the families that the Sandy Hook gunman was showing signs that are common to many mass murderers. Hockley told me she said to the agent, “Well if you know these things about shooters, if you know that these signs and signals are given off, how come we don’t know?” She remembered his explanation this way, “We just don’t have the resources to train everyone in the country. We train law enforcement. But we can’t do it for the mass public.” Hockley continued, “For me, that was the moment I said, ‘Well if you can’t, we can.’” Now, Hockley spends six months a year on the road, in classrooms, teaching the warning signs of social isolation, sudden changes in dress, talk of suicide and violent posts on social media. One Sandy Hook Promise program called “Start with Hello” teaches students to reach out to peers who are ignored or bullied. Another, titled “Say Something,” trains teachers and students to speak up when they see warning signs. In 2015, Mark Barden trained students in Cincinnati. A short time later, a middle school student started writing in social media about building a bomb. Barden told me an eighth grader who attended their training saw the post and spoke up. Hockley told me, “Sandy Hook was preventable. Had someone been able to see those signs and signals that our shooter gave off throughout his life and connect those dots and make an intervention, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you today.”
A parent who has lost their child has one fear remaining—the end of memory. Many Sandy Hook parents started charities to keep their child alive in the thoughts of others. Five years after his death, Ben Wheeler was still being introduced to new people by his parents, Francine and David Wheeler. Their foundation, Ben’s Lighthouse, creates service projects for Newtown kids. Francine surprised me. “What a wonderful way to honor him and continue to be his parents,” she said.
“Continue to be his parents?” I asked.
“Yeah. I can’t live the rest of my life not talking about him. I mean, imagine you having a six-year-old and then you don’t anymore. Are you going to stop talking about them? The worst thing you can do to a grieving parent is not to mention the child. Then you’re not acknowledging his existence. And so, when people do acknowledge it, I’m so appreciative. I say, ‘Oh, thank you.’ And if I’m crying, they’re like, ‘I’m sorry I made you cry.’ I say, ‘No, you didn’t make me cry. You brought him back.’” David added, “It’s like having him back for a minute.”
Two years after Ben was killed, the Wheelers brought another boy into this world, Matthew Bennett Wheeler, a little brother for their surviving son. “You try to make the world into the place you want it to be,” David told me. “And many times, the only area you have control over is the square footage of your own house. And so, you do what you can.” David Wheeler, a former actor and a graphic artist, was often among the most eloquent of the parents. In our first interview, five years before, he threw down a challenge that I believe should be hand delivered to every home in America. Wheeler said:
I would like every parent in this country—that’s a 150 million people—I would like them to look in the mirror. And that’s not a figure of speech, Scott. I mean, literally, find a mirror in your house, and look in it, and look in your eyes and say, ‘This will never happen to me. This will never happen in my school. This will never happen in my community.’ And see if you actually believe that. And if there is a shadow, the slightest shadow, of doubt about what you’ve said, think about what you can do to change that in your house, in your community, in your school, in your country, because we have an obligation to our children to do this for them. It’s going to happen again. It is going to happen again. And every time, it’s somebody else’s school, it’s somebody else’s town. It’s somebody else’s community, until one day, you wake up and it’s not.
“I’m still trying to figure out who I am now,” Nicole Hockley told me. In the years since the murders, she had divorced and given herself completely to the work of Sandy Hook Promise. She explained, “I couldn’t be any more different from the confident, optimistic, happy-go-lucky type person I was beforehand.”
“Have you given yourself time to grieve?” I wondered.
“No. No. I’m working on that right now. This is kind of my year that I’m feeling it’s time to start finding myself again but also to accept that no matter what I do, I can’t get Dylan back.”
Jazz musician Jimmy Greene summoned his daughter with his saxophone. He recorded Beautiful Life, an album inspired by Ana Grace. The recording was nominated for two Grammy Awards. Ana’s mother, Nelba Marquez-Greene, is a behavioral therapist. She started The Ana Grace Project to educate teachers about mental health. In our conversations, she often spoke of her faith. I asked her, “I wonder how your faith may have changed in all of this?”
“One of the most compelling sermons I’ve ever heard was given at my daughter’s funeral,” she said. “It was just a beautiful sermon. It talks about Jesus being with us in every season of our lives, including the winter. And that Ana’s death would signify the beginning of a long and hard winter season and that winter would be made better with faith and family and friends. And I still feel that way. I really do.”
“Is it springtime yet?” I asked.
“I can’t imagine a day that it will be spring. The moment I’m reunited with her, I want to hear two things. I want to hear, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ And I want to hear, ‘Hi, Mom.’”
Without legislation from Congress, President Obama signed several orders to restrict gun sales to ineligible buyers. One of his presidential memorandums built on a law signed by President George W. Bush in 2008. That law required federal agencies to report ineligible persons to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.8 After Sandy Hook, President Obama ordered the Justice Department to make sure all agencies were following the Republican-passed law.9 In response, the Social Security Administration adopted a rule to report to the background check system certain people who were receiving disability benefits because of mental disorders. That covered an estimated seventy-five thousand mental patients. But in February 2017, the House and Senate passed bills to reverse the Social Security Administration’s rule.10 President Trump signed into law the restoration of firearm eligibility to those who are so mentally ill that they are considered by the government to be disabled.
For the record, my wife and I enjoy shooting sporting clays as a hobby. My father taught me how to handle firearms. But in my view, removing the names of thousands of mentally disabled persons from the background check system is the definition of insanity. Mass murders since Sandy Hook have become more frequent and deadlier. In October 2018, eleven worshippers were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue by a deranged gunman who told police he wanted to kill Jews. In 2017 and 2016, the FBI reported 50 active shooter incidents in 21 states. The worst of them were: Las Vegas, 58 killed, 489 wounded; Orlando, 49 killed, 53 wounded; and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, 26 killed, 20 wounded.11 FBI data show that the number of casualties in active shooter incidents varies year to year, but the trend line is only rising. In 2000, the FBI recorded 7 casualties, in 2017 there were 729.12
Perseverance changes the world. It is the only thing that ever has. The families of Sandy Hook rose from devastation, fought back to win early victories, suffered defeat in Congress and still pressed on with new ideas to save lives.
The day of Sandy Hook, my morning began with a man who had fully explored the path that was only beginning for Newtown. Sixty-eight years before, at the age of fifteen, Elie Wiesel was brought into the death camps. He concluded that God was dead. But with perseverance, he returned to his dialogue with God—armed with many pointed questions. That December day in 2012, as the inexplicable murders were underway, I asked Wiesel how peace could be possible given the faults of man. It is astounding how closely his answer mirrors David Wheeler’s challenge to take personal responsibility:
Oh, we speak so much about peace and aspirations for peace. I think it should begin with the individual. Nations can make peace by signing a peace accord, that’s not enough—it starts with the human entity, the single individual. Just as we teach mathematics, we should teach children the honor and happiness and the joy and the humanity of creating peace around us. Start at home, at the table, parents and friends. Peace is something that cannot remain an abstraction. It must be practiced, created and recreated. Only peace can be noble. We speak about heroism. Heroism usually is a result of war. No! I believe in simple heroism. If you go into the street and you see a woman who needs help, you help, a child who needs a smile, you smile, a beggar who opens his palm, you put something in that hand. Look, that’s already a gesture [of peace]. Start in your circle. No one person can make world peace. Even God cannot, otherwise there would be peace all the time. This is our endeavor; it’s our duty, it’s our obligation, it’s our fight.