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sandy hook

Education

60 Sandy Hook survivors graduate high school, sharing complex feelings about the milestone

"A chunk of our class is missing."

Image by Stacey Kennedy from Pixabay

Graduation is a big milestone that can come with grief for some communities.

It's been nearly 12 years since a young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with an AR-15. rifle and two handguns and opened fire, killing 20 first graders and six faculty members before turning the gun on himself.

Survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting—kids who watched their friends and teachers being murdered in their classrooms—are now graduating from high school, and they have complicated feelings about the milestone and the 20 classmates who aren't joining them.

A private graduation ceremony was held at Newtown High School on June 12, 2024, with 335 graduates including around 60 Sandy Hook survivors. Some of them shared their thoughts with journalists in the days leading up to graduation.

“I think we’re all super excited for the day,” Lilly Wasilnak, 17, shared with the AP. "But I think we can’t forget ... that there is a whole chunk of our class missing. And so going into graduation, we all have very mixed emotions — trying to be excited for ourselves and this accomplishment that we’ve worked so hard for, but also those who aren’t able to share it with us, who should have been able to.”

"The shooter actually came into my classroom," Emma Ehrens, 17, told CBS News. "So I had to, like, watch all my friends and teachers get killed, and I had to run for my life at six years old."

According to the AP, Ehrens was one of 11 kids who survived from Classroom 10. She was able to escape with a group of students when the shooter paused to reload his gun. Five students and both teachers in the room were killed.

“I am definitely going be feeling a lot of mixed emotions,” Ehrens said. “I’m super excited to be, like, done with high school and moving on to the next chapter of my life. But I’m also so ... mournful, I guess, to have to be walking across that stage alone. … I like to think that they’ll be there with us and walking across that stage with us.”

The survivors who are graduating this year are dealing with both the exciting what ifs of their futures and the tragic what ifs of their past as they remember their slain classmates.

"Just growing up with having the fear, and the what ifs of what could have happened if I stayed? Because I was, like, I was going to be next," Ehrens told CBS News.

"So even going to prom, you think, well, what if they were my prom date? Or, you know, what if they were my significant other? What if they were able to walk the stage with me," survivor Ella Seaver added.

“As much as we’ve tried to have that normal, like, childhood and normal high school experience, it wasn’t totally normal,” Grace Fischer, 18, told CBS. “But even though we are missing ... such a big chunk of our class, like Lilly said, we are still graduating. ... We want to be those regular teenagers who walk across the stage that day and feel that, like, celebratory feeling in ourselves, knowing that we’ve come this far.”

That desire for normalcy conflicting with their not normal childhood is part of what makes graduation such a bittersweet experience for these young people. They had so much taken from them at such a young age, and that trauma doesn't just disappear. Some of the students expressed that they are looking forward to moving away from Newtown and building a life in which the school shooting doesn't define them.

Sandy Hook was unique in that the victims were so young and there were so many of them, but the survivors aren't alone in their experience. In the years since the Sandy Hook massacre, the U.S. has seen dozens more school shootings, and there are thousands of school shooting survivors dealing with related traumas. Many of those survivors have become outspoken anti-gun-violence advocates, pressuring officials to enact stronger laws to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

But for now, the Sandy Hook graduates are celebrating a big life milestone, just as they—and their 20 missing classmates—should be.

Watch six of the Sandy Hook survivors share their stories on Good Morning America:


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Obama responded to the Atlanta shooting with a renewed call for 'common sense' gun control laws

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a grim time in American life, with death and illness dominating the national consciousness. But there has been one thing notably absent from the nightly news: stories of public mass shootings.

A database compiled by USA Today, The Associated Press, and Northeastern University found there were only two public mass shootings in 2020 and both occurred before the lockdown. That's a steep drop off from 2019 and 2018 when there were nine and 10 such shootings, respectively.

Public mass killings are defined by the database as events where four or more deaths occur, not including the shooter, and are not instances of domestic violence or associated with gang conflict, drug trade, or other criminal activity.

According to researchers, there were two major reasons for the decline. First, people have been leery about going out in public for the most part of 2020, creating fewer opportunities for slayings at schools, workplaces, or movie theaters.

Second, Americans were so focused on other tragedies that shooters were less likely to consider vicious acts.

"The thing about mass shooters is they tend to be people who feel that they are the victims of injustice. Well, lots of people now are suffering, not just them," James Alan Fox, a criminologist, and professor at Northeastern University, told AP.

"It's hard to say right now that your own plight is unique or unfair. It may not feel good, but there's certainly reason for it. And it's not because of something someone's doing to you. It's really the pandemic, which is a thing not a person," Fox continued.

The murder of eight people at Atlanta massage spas on Tuesday was a grim reminder of the type of violence that was rampant in pre-pandemic America. It felt like a wake-up call to the country saying that a return to public life may mean a resurgence in these senseless acts of violence.

Former President Barack Obama, a staunch supporter of gun control measures, used the Atlanta tragedy to call on Americans to renew their commitment to gun-control policy.

"Even as we've battled the pandemic, we've continued to neglect the longer-lasting epidemic of gun violence in America," Obama said on Twitter Wednesday.

"Although the shooter's motive is not yet clear, the identity of the victims underscores an alarming rise in anti-Asian violence that must end," he continued.

"Yesterday's shootings are another tragic reminder that we have far more work to do to put in place common sense gun safety laws and root out the pervasive patterns of hatred and violence in our society," he said.

Obama's call for the country to enact sensible gun laws is a policy priority that reaches back to his days in the oval office. The 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newton, Connecticut caused him incredible anguish.

The failure of Congress to address the gun violence problem with gun control measures caused him further frustration.

"I will say that was not only maybe the saddest day of my presidency, but when Congress failed to do anything in the aftermath of Sandy Hook was probably the angriest I ever was during my presidency," Obama said.

"I was disgusted and appalled by the inaction because you had parents who had just lost their children sitting in front of senators and asking for very modest, reasonable approaches," he continued.

Obama has an ally in the White House with his former Vice-President, President Joe Biden. Currently, a bipartisan group is pushing measures that would require background checks for all gun purchases.

Biden has also called for "universal background check legislation, requiring a background check for all gun sales with very limited exceptions, such as gifts between close family members."

The president also wants to "keep guns out of dangerous hands" through background checks and by closing "other loopholes that allow people who should be prohibited from purchasing firearms from making those purchases."

As the country prepares to get back to normal, let's hope that one far-too-common aspect of American life, public mass shootings, is something we leave in the pre-pandemic past.

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Alex Jones gets sued for his relentless campaign to torment Sandy Hook parents.

On Monday, April 16, parents of two students who died during the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting sued conspiracy theorist and media personality Alex Jones.

Jones, who runs the far-right conspiracy site Infowars.com, is no stranger to lawsuits. To say he plays fast and loose with facts would be an understatement, as he's pushed a number of absurd conspiracy theories over the years, including the idea that the government can control the weather and summon tornadoes at will, that Hillary Clinton has personally murdered people and runs a child sex trafficking operation out of a Washington, D.C.-area pizza place, and of course, his belief that the government is putting chemicals in our water supply that is making frogs gay.

None of his ridiculous conspiracy theories have had as lasting and as painful an effect as what he did to the Sandy Hook parents. More than five years after the tragedy, Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son died in the shooting, and Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, whose 5-year-old son also died, filed suit against Jones, Infowars, and a company called Free Speech Systems LLC.

Neil Heslin testified before congress in February 2013. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

His lies have turned these parents' lives into a living hell.

With an intense fanbase conditioned to not believe anything the mainstream media says, Jones should know better than to share baseless and dubious accusations about these families, lumping them into bizarre conspiracy theories.

Jones' YouTube page is riddled with videos related to the shooting, many pushing the idea that the whole thing was a "false flag" (in this case, the argument seems to be that the shooting was ordered and carried out by members of the government or some other shadowy organization to pressure Congress into taking away everyone's guns ... or something like that), that the entire thing was a hoax where no one died, that victims or their families were "crisis actors," and so on. A lot of this is pushed out there under the guise of "just asking questions" or some larger quest for truth that's being hidden.

Days after the shooting, community members grieve at a makeshift memorial for the Sandy Hook victims. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Here's just a small sampling of some of the videos still live on his page: Is Connecticut Shooting a False Flag?, Connecticut School Massacre Looks Like False Flag Says Witnesses, Sandy Hook, False Narratives Vs. The Reality, Sandy Hook: The Lies Keep Growing, New Sandy Hook Questions Arise from FOIA Hearing, Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed, Were Crisis Actors Used in Sandy Hook Massacre?, Creepy Illuminati Message in Batman Movie Hints at Sandy Hook School, Crisis Actors Used at Sandy Hook! Special Report, Dr. Steve Pieczenik: Sandy Hook Was a Total False Flag!, Retired FBI Agent Investigates Sandy Hook: Mega Massive Cover Up, Revealed: Sandy Hook Truth Exposed, Sandy Hook "Officials" Caught In Coverup And Running Scared, Bombshell: Sandy Hook Massacre Was a DHS Illusion Says School Safety Expert, and Why People Think Sandy Hook Is a Hoax.

A headline on Jones' website pushing a false claim about an FBI report. Image from Infowars.

In 2016, one fan of Jones' Sandy Hook commentary was arrested for sending death threats to Pozner. The woman, Lucy Richards, allegedly sent Pozner messages like "you gonna die, death is coming to you real soon" and "LOOK BEHIND YOU IT IS DEATH."

These families just want to be left alone, but Jones and other conspiracy theorists won't let up.

Pozner founded the Sandy Hook Honor Network in hopes of fighting back against the conspiracies about his son and the others gunned down. Still, the attacks continue from Jones and others. The internet makes spreading misinformation easier than ever, and conspiracy theorists like Jones have thrived as a result.

This lawsuit is about more than just Sandy Hook. This lawsuit is about fighting back against conspiracy theories and no longer allowing people to profit off disinformation. How many more people need to be tormented by Jones and others before we say enough?

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Sen. Chris Murphy's sobering mass shooting reality check will have you calling for action.

It's time we did something about gun violence.

"The paralysis you feel right now — the impotent helplessness that washes over you as news of another mass slaughter scrolls across the television screen — isn’t real," wrote Sen. Chris Murphy.

"It's a fiction created and methodically cultivated by the gun lobby, designed to assure that no laws are passed to make America safer, because those laws would cut into their profits," the Connecticut Democrat continued.

As many other politicians followed the standard routine of blaming gun violence on mental illness and offering "thoughts and prayers" in the wake of yet another mass shooting — this one in a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church — Murphy issued a statement urging immediate and tangible action.

Murphy speaks out following the Pulse night club shooting in 2016. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

The reaction to this most recent shooting in Texas, which killed at least 26 churchgoers and injured 20 others, has become disturbingly routine.

The attack, reportedly carried out by 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, came less than five weeks after the Las Vegas massacre (58 dead), 16 months after the Pulse night club shooting in Orlando (49 dead), and five years after the Sandy Hook shooting (27 dead). CNN's Brian Stelter called the Texas shooting "unfathomable," but a look at the regularity with which these massacres happen suggests otherwise.

Murphy, who was the congressman for the city of Newtown, Connecticut, during the Sandy Hook shooting, is urging us to take a look at these horrors for what they are: a part of American life that we can put an end to if we want to.

"None of this is inevitable," Murphy wrote. "I know this because no other country endures this pace of mass carnage like America. It is uniquely and tragically American. As long as our nation chooses to flood the country with dangerous weapons and consciously let those weapons fall into the hands of dangerous people, these killings will not abate."

The First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, following a shooting on Nov. 5, 2017. Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images.

Too many members of Congress are bought and paid for by the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association. Murphy wants to change that.

In recent years, the NRA has gotten increasingly extremist in its positions and messaging. They count on people being too shocked to act, and they count on that to defer any sort of legislative solution to some undefined future time when it's no longer "disrespectful" to the victims to want to do something that will prevent there being future victims.

Murphy is calling on his colleagues to reconsider whether it's worth it to pander to the gun lobby at the cost of American lives. If they can't or won't do that — which you can find out by contacting your representative and senators to find out where they stand on the issue — it's up to everyday citizens to vote them out of office.

"The terrifying fact is that no one is safe so long as Congress chooses to do absolutely nothing in the face of this epidemic," Murphy concluded. "The time is now for Congress to shed its cowardly cover and do something."

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