New England Public Radio

Nicole Hockley says she used to be the kind of person who knew where she was going in life. Then, last Dec. 14, her 6-year-old son, Dylan, was one of the 26 victims killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary.

“Every plan I had went out the window, and I just kind of lost my way in terms of where do you go from here, how do you pick yourself up and move forward and find a new path,” Hockley says.

The phone kept ringing at home, and media outlets sent flowers with cards asking for interviews.

“In those early days and weeks, everyone wanted a piece of us like they wanted a piece of a lot of the families, and it was hard to know who to trust,” she says.

A friend told her about some people from the community who wanted to help. Rob Cox was one member of the group, which later became known as Sandy Hook Promise.

“About eight of the 17 co-founders from the first couple of weeks in January last year were folks who play Frisbee together,” Cox says.

Ultimate Frisbee has been happening Tuesday nights in Newtown, Conn., for years. None of the Frisbee players were parents of victims, but several of them had kids in the school at the time. And it’s a small town. The school was close to everyone.

“The day after, that Saturday morning, a whole group of us, family, friends, dogs, everyone, we went for a hike, and we cried, we hugged each other and we tried to answer the unanswerable,” Cox says.

People said they felt like they needed to do something. As they started meeting, figuring out what to do was the challenge.

“Some people wanted like a local munitions ordinance; I mean, it was all over the place,” Cox says. “But what was actually quite apparent, particularly when you look in hindsight on this, is just that everybody was kind of right in a way. There is no one solution.”

And that became the idea behind Sandy Hook Promise. The goal wasn’t to focus on a single answer, but to approach the issues surrounding what happened more broadly.

Hockley says gun violence is a public safety issue.

“Thirty-two thousand deaths a year, 500,000 acts of violence that include a gun. That’s unacceptable,” Hockley says. “You have that level of death or injury from any other area of life, you do something about it.”

Hockley is now Sandy Hook Promise’s paid communications director. After the new year, as part of a campaign organizers are calling Parent Together, they plan to launch online tools to address some of the mental health issues believed to be related to what happened in Sandy Hook, like reaching out to isolated kids and working with children with emotional detachments. One program will focus on getting pediatricians to focus on children’s mental wellness. Sandy Hook Promise raised about $3 million from donors this year to fund its operations.

Each victim family is dealing with what happened in its own way. Some have worked behind the scenes with Sandy Hook Promise. About seven families are publicly involved. Mark Barden lost his son Daniel and also now works for the group.

“We’re in the middle of the most profoundly deep sorrow we’ve ever known,” Barden says. “And so this is hard work anyway. But to do it under those circumstances, it’s just exponentially harder.”

And yet, he says, he feels driven to do it. He says Sandy Hook Promise is not an anti-gun group.

“We like to think of it as gun responsibility, gun safety, because most gun owners are responsible gun owners,” Barden says.

He says the group can get more done if gun owners are part of the conversation. For Hockley, fostering that kind of conversation has been therapeutic.

“Every once in a while I say, ‘Why on earth am I doing this? I could just be home.’ But then, what would I be doing at home? This is my way of honoring Dylan, and in some respects keeping him alive,” she says.

Barden says because the group’s goal is long term and not really about passing laws, the last year wasn’t as disappointing as it’s been for other groups with specific legislative agendas. He says despite all the members’ work, he knows they’ll never stop all gun violence in the country.

“But if you look at campaigns like designated driver or some of the smoking campaigns that reduced those numbers by 80 percent over a 10-year period or a 20-year period — if we could achieve something like that, I would say, that would be success to me,” Barden says.

It’s a success he says has to happen, to keep more families from experiencing the pain he and his family have had to endure for the last year.

Copyright 2013 WSHU Public Radio Group. To see more, visit http://www.wshu.org/.

As much as Dec. 14 will forever be a day of unfathomable grief for Nelba Márquez-Greene, Dec. 13 will be one of unending gratitude.

“I will never forget that day,” she says.

On that day, Márquez-Greene stopped the usual frantic drill: rushing to activities and errands, worrying about the dishes and laundry, even cleaning up the mess on the floor.

That morning, her 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace, had knocked down the entire nativity set off the piano. Baby Jesus was still in little pieces on the floor when she came home from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Márquez-Greene can’t explain it, but something compelled her that evening to just ignore it all and instead corral Ana, her son Isaiah and her husband Jimmy into the car.

“And off we went to the Cheesecake Factory,” she says, “where we had our final time as a family of four.”

It was, she says, the greatest gift.

“We were sitting there taking goofy pictures, Ana was making faces,” she says. “We had second dessert. We had, like, three pasta dishes. I’m so grateful we had that.”

After the shooting the next morning, where Ana and 25 others were killed, her parents wondered how they’d ever feel whole again.

Most days still bring unbearable pain. But as Márquez-Greene puts it, she’s “made it her business” to stay focused on the good days with Ana.

“It is what brings me great comfort and great joy,” she says. “And that is what gives us strength.”

‘Our Greatest Victory’

Márquez-Greene is a therapist who’s spent a career counseling mentally ill and troubled young people. But she says she’ll never understand what drove a young man to take the life of her little girl and 25 others.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know why this happened,” she says. “I didn’t get to choose it. But I get to choose my response now. I do get to choose now.”

After the shooting, Márquez-Greene put her therapy practice on hold to work instead on a more macro scale — to prevent violence and promote healing.

On Dec. 2, 500 people packed a conference for the Ana Grace Project, aimed at building community, connections and compassion. As Márquez-Greene sees it, these qualities are the antidote is to the kind of isolation that always seems to be the story of deranged mass shooters.

“People say to me, ‘I can’t believe what that monster did to your baby!’ Well, you know, it’s true something terrible happened to Ana, and that was a terrible day,” Márquez-Greene says. “But if we even use that language, ‘monster,’ if we talk like that, we already make a separation between us and them. And it doesn’t work that way.”

Márquez-Greene says her own compassion continues to be tested — like at her conference, when she was setting up a candle for each of the lives lost on Dec. 14. She thought of the shooter, who killed himself, and his mother, who he also killed.

“Do we have a table with 26 candles, or do we have a table with 28?” she says. “We put 28, because at the end of the day, it’s a gesture of the compassion that we need to move forward.”

Ana’s brother Isaiah opened the conference with a solo performance.

“To see Isaiah sitting at that piano by himself was both majestic and heartbreaking,” Márquez-Greene says, “because he should not be at that piano by himself.”

After the trauma of Dec. 14, Márquez-Greene knows all too well that her son now counts among those at-risk youth in need of the stronger connections she’s trying to build.

“That is my job on the planet. If I do nothing else but raise a son who is able to survive this tragedy and still come out able to love and receive love from others, that will be our greatest victory,” she says.

Music And Love

But it’s hard. Most days, she says, she feels like she’s hanging off the edge of a cliff.

Her husband Jimmy, a jazz musician, just recently managed to get back on stage again. He’s written a song for Ana named “Last Summer.”

Music, Márquez-Greene says, brings back the highs and buoys them through the lows — like that awful day they laid their daughter to rest.

“That day was — I still have hard time talking about,” she says. “But when they were lowering her casket into ground, and the weeping was just so loud, my husband began to sing.

Last summer, Jimmy Greene and his old friend, Harry Connick Jr., recorded a song for Ana, based on what became the family’s motto after the shooting: Love wins.

“I don’t even remember how it all got started; I just remember it just became a chant in our house shortly after the shooting. We just needed to keep Ana alive. We needed to keep her spirit with us,” Márquez-Greene says. “Love wins. This is what we taught her: to honor, to praise, to be loving. And I am raising two loving, connected, compassionate children.

“And I just realized I just said, ‘I am raising.’ It’s hard, I still vacillate between present and past tense.”

Perhaps, she says, because it’s only been a year. But it must also be because of the way she keeps the good memories of those days like Dec. 13.

As she likes to say, they want to remember Ana’s life twice as loudly as her death.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

As Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy sped from Hartford to Newtown nearly a year ago, the death toll kept rising. When he arrived on the scene, he found himself in charge — and it fell to him to answer the question: How long should family members have to wait to learn that their loved ones were gone?

Malloy decided that he was going to do what he thought was right. Still, standing in front of more than two dozen families gathered in a firehouse, he doubted that it was.

“I tried to explain, in words less obvious, that everyone who was going to be united with their loved one had been united with their loved one, and that what we had at the school was a crime scene,” he says.

Saturday marks the anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 children and six educators dead. And a year later, questions still remain about gunman Adam Lanza, who committed suicide that day and worked hard to obscure his motives.

Malloy says now that he may never know why Lanza did what he did. The prosecutor investigating the case has released his report, and it doesn’t answer the “why” question. But it does include details about a young man obsessed with guns, mass shootings and violent video games — someone who had, by the end of his life, isolated himself entirely.

Here’s how Malloy understands Lanza: “A deeply disturbed human being who should never have been around guns and clearly did not receive the type of attention that he required.”

Much of the governor’s past year has been consumed by Newtown and the aftermath. He has delved deeply in the gun debate, as well as discussions on school security and mental health.

Throughout, he and others have sought to learn more about Lanza. But it turns out there may not be much more to know. There may be no surprises.

“There’s no one coming forward that says … ‘This is really surprising because he was getting so much better,’ ” Malloy says.

But at least one person was hoping for Lanza to get better: His mother, Nancy Lanza. Adam killed her while she slept.

“She was a wonderful friend, a kind woman, loving, very gentle,” says John Bergquist, a friend of Nancy Lanza. “Whatever monster Adam turned out to be was the exact opposite of what Nancy was.”

Bergquist lives a few blocks away from My Place, the restaurant and bar where he and Nancy would meet up a few times a week for dinner. He said his friend never spoke of fearing her son. Mostly, she feared for him and for his future.

“He would probably never live a life that you and I might think of as normal,” Bergquist says. “But I think she always had hope — he was a whiz with computers — that he would do something with that and get into that and always live with her.”

Bergquist loathes guns. But Nancy Lanza grew up with them, and he understands why she bought them — Adam was isolating himself, and it was something they could do together.

As Bergquist sees it, Nancy was yet another victim of a crime that he doesn’t understand. “A why — if it’s there — it might be nice to know,” he says. “But I’m not sure that there is even a why.”

Hank Schwartz, a psychiatrist and a member of Malloy’s advisory commission on Sandy Hook, has thought a lot about that. Schwartz has looked at Lanza’s history of mental illness and has not found much that’s useful.

But Schwartz says that won’t stop people from trying to understand what drove Lanza.

“Our fates seem just a little bit less random and a little bit more within our own grasp if we can at least understand why something has happened,” Schwartz says.

Malloy says people may just have to be satisfied with what they’ve known from the beginning — that on Dec. 14, 2012, a horrible thing happened “in a fabulous, beautiful, bucolic community where no one would have ever imagined it was possible.”

Malloy has asked that church bells across the state be rung at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday. The town’s leaders have made a plea for privacy.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Two months after the massacre at an elementary school in Connecticut, letters, cards and gifts continue to arrive in Newtown each day, but the town is not sure what to do with it all.

The outpouring of grief started arriving just days after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School — poetry, stories, banners and posters. Soon the halls of Newtown’s Municipal Center and buildings all over town were packed with messages from children and parents, from a soldier in Afghanistan and an inmate at a California prison.

“I was put in charge of all the logistics for this warehouse. I’ve got about 20,000 square feet full of donations here,” says Chris Kelsey, the town’s tax assessor. These days he spends a lot of time at a nondescript warehouse in Newtown. Boxes are piled high and shrink-wrapped. There are 500 labeled as toys and 2,000 marked as school supplies.

“We’re up to over 63,000 teddy bears right now. We’ve seen bicycles, sleds. It runs the gamut of anything you could send,” says Kelsey.

A few miles away in his studio/barn in Newtown, illustrator Ross MacDonald reads from a letter written by an 11-year-old:

“Dear Families: I am sorry for your loss. My grandpa died three weeks ago. I’m in foster care. When my grandpa died I was heartbroken, so I might know what you’re going through. I go to First Baptist Church.”

MacDonald is photographing the letters and artwork, documenting reaction to an event that hit the world hard. He wants the cards, letters and art to be archived and preserved.

“This is a drawing from I believe a very young child on a piece of pink construction paper. There’s a small red heart with arms and legs and two little eyes. And there’s a word balloon that says ‘I’m sorry,’ ” says MacDonald. “It’s both profoundly moving and just a beautiful piece of folk art.”

Virtually all the mail is first delivered to the Newtown Municipal Center. Public Works Director Fred Hurley says seeing daily reminders of the tragedy has taken a toll on town workers.

“Many of the government staff has been intricately involved in this for the last two months every day. But we still have a town to run. So that’s one of the big challenges we have is to take care of the day-to-day business and also to move the needs of the town emotionally along with what has happened,” says Hurley.

Victims’ families and town residents were invited to take anything they wanted to keep. Now MacDonald and a local preservation group are talking with Newtown officials and professional archivists about ways to save the written messages and art.

Kathleen Craughwell-Varda is director of Conservation Connection, a conservation planning project at the Connecticut State Library. She says Newtown is the latest in a series of American tragedies that have provoked an outpouring of response.

“Virginia Tech has created an online exhibition and archive. And we have all the development of the [Sept. 11] museum and memorial. And there’s also the Vietnam War Memorial, where people are leaving things still, more than 25 years later,” says Craughwell-Varda.

Town officials have been planning to photograph the materials, then incinerate them, incorporating the ash into a future public memorial. But no decision has been made. Connecticut State Librarian Ken Wiggin says that’s not surprising.

“It’s still very raw, I mean, two months out, and so I think people are sensitive about wanting to do the right thing, but they’re overwhelmed,” says Wiggin. “This is a huge volume of material.”

The state has offered to house many of the items in a climate-controlled space. The town has agreed not to destroy anything right away. And illustrator MacDonald says he’ll continue to advocate for preserving the response to a tragedy he hopes will never happen again.

Copyright 2013 Connecticut Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.wnpr.org.

The days leading up to Christmas are typically bustling in Newtown, Conn. But given the depth of grief in this community since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, preparations for the holiday began very late.

Local shopkeepers say Saturday was the first day many people came out for holiday shopping since the tragedy. Tamara Doherty, owner of the Wishing Well — a shop, filled with local crafts, Christmas ornaments, pottery and potpourri — says her business is finally picking up.

She’s offering shoppers free cookies in the shape of angels, which have become a symbol of the Newtown tragedy. All the people who wander in seem warm and open.

‘Everything Is Magnified Now’

“It’s been a friendlier atmosphere,” Doherty says. “People … just reaching out and hugging. It’s not something that you would normally do.”

Doherty says the shooting has brought people closer — but that it’s still very difficult. “Everything is magnified now, because everybody is just so devastated still,” she says.

Doherty’s daughter, 13, and son, 10, are helping out in the shop, but the tragedy has been hard on them too. Their emotions — like those of so many others — are right on the surface. Doherty has to take a short break to comfort her daughter in the crowded shop, but soon the family is back to ringing up purchases and wrapping presents.

Down the road at the Newtown Youth Academy, it’s a day just for kids. There are candy canes, teddy bears, hot dogs and a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Claus to help brighten spirits.

Volunteer Dan Puza heard about the Newtown shooting while he was in Singapore. He’s come home this Christmas to be with relatives and to lend a hand.

“It’s a tragedy,” he says, “but it makes it kind of sweet to see everybody pull together and kind of act as a community during the holiday season.”

A Flood Of Holiday Wishes

One need only visit the Newtown post office to grasp how the attack at Sandy Hook has affected people across the country and the world. The postal service has established a special P.O. box specifically for the greetings of support that have been flooding in since the shooting.

“People need to send something,” says postmaster Cathy Zieff. “They need to know that they did something [and] the simplest way to do something is to send a card.”

Zieff says four of the post office’s wire containers, holding about 260 packages each, are filled in a single day. Letters and cards have poured in by the thousands. “It’s tremendous, and it’s from all over the country, all over the world,” she says. “[From] Sicily, Italy. From England. From Hawaii [and] from every state in between.”

Zieff says the callers who phone in to ask where they can send things are often crying. She has to comfort them, she says, and then she begins crying, too.

And then there’s the toll on her colleagues, she notes.

“My employees, my staff, have watched these kids grow up,” Zieff says. “They have pictures of them that the parents have given them. They’re part of this community.”

Of course, there’s always more mail during this season, she says, and the packages are heavier. But that word, “heavier,” reverberates with a very different meaning here this year.

Outside a local deli in Sandy Hook, Tim Byrn, originally from Dublin, says he plans to celebrate the holiday, despite the sadness.

“We have a fifth-grader, so yeah, we’re going to celebrate it as best we can,” Byrn says, wiping a tear from his eye. “Just hold our family close. We just go on.”

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The Monday after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., toys and stuffed animals began arriving by the truckload. Ten days later, the gymnasium at Edmond Town Hall in the center of Newtown is full of them.

“When I realized that it was getting so large, I thought that we should get this to the children before the holidays,” says Ann Benore, a caseworker for Newtown Social Services.

Benore has organized this toy giveaway for all Newtown children and families. There’s a special collection for students of Sandy Hook Elementary School who survived the massacre. She says they’ve received more than 60,000 stuffed animals and thousands more toys.

The community was turned upside down after the 20 first-graders and six adults were killed. Now, residents are struggling to find a way to still enjoy the spirit of the season.

All toys were first examined by local police; there’s a group of officers standing at the back of the gym. Children ooh and ahh as they enter — and are handed bags. They walk through and choose cuddly bears or games, or both.

In one area, volunteers show youngsters how to make Christmas ornaments. Brittany Noonan, 17, traveled here from the other end of the state to help out.

“I see a lot of toys and lot of happy little kids,” she says.

In another area, teacher Christina Morse Scala helps residents draw, paint and create sculpture with donated art supplies.

“It allows them to express without having to use words. It gives them an opportunity to reflect, bring them to a safe place,” she says.

Parents in Newtown say they’re having a hard time figuring out how to handle the holidays. At a shop down the road called Everything Newtown, co-owner Teri Brunlli says her family will find a way to celebrate this year.

“I have four kids at home. I think it’s important to celebrate. The kids need to feel safe, and I think the only way to do that is to give them something that’s normal again,” she says. “We can’t just stop. We have to take the next step forward.”

Copyright 2012 Connecticut Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.wnpr.org.