Minute by minute, how death came to Sandy Hook
By TOM LEONARD
PUBLISHED: 00:37, 17 December 2012 | UPDATED: 11:59, 17 December 2012
The yellow school buses pulled into the Sandy Hook elementary school car park as normal just before 9am last Friday.
They were met by a dozen teachers on âbus dutyâ, and the pupilsâ names were called out and ticked off as they got off.
But as the carefree, chattering children filed in to their suburban school the fateful chain of events that would lead to 20 of them being slaughtered was already in train.
Massacre of a first grade class
Having shot dead the principal and psychologist, Lanza headed towards the first-grade classrooms, brushing past a poster on the wall that the six- and seven-year-old pupils had recently put up as an a Christmas joke. âWANTED,â it read. âMissing Gingerbread Man.â
Inside the first classroom he came to, teacher Kaitlin Roig had hidden her pupils in a bathroom and closed but not locked her classroom door.
For some reason, he passed on and instead chose to enter a classroom occupied by teacher Lauren Rousseau, her 14-strong class and a special education teacher.
Lanza put the Bushrangerâs maximum six-rounds-a-second rate of fire to devastating effect, killing them all. The children, police told the Hartford Courant newspaper, were huddled together and clutching each other in terror.
Miss Rousseau, 30, had started teaching full time only in September after years as a substitute. âThey were the best years of her life,â her mother said.
Courage amid the carnage
Lanza next came to the first-grade classroom of Victoria Soto, 27, who had hustled her charges into the classroom closet.
Bravely, she stood outside the closet and faced Lanza down, telling him the children were at the other end of the school.
But six of her young charges tried to escape and Lanza shot them, Miss Soto and a teaching assistant in the room. Miss Soto was found close to her desk from which she had hung drawings by the children which had such captions as âI love my teacher Miss Sotoâ.
Police later opened the closet and found the remaining seven members of her class staring at them.
Miss Soto was one of four teachers murdered while trying to defend their children. Also among the dead were teaching assistants Anne Marie Murphy, 52, and Rachel Davino, 29.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-Carefree-chatter--screams.html#ixzz2FKD0eQDz