CONNECTICUT - Sandy Hook Post Traumatic Effects

Early responders at Sandy Hook Elementary included, from left:
Lt. Christopher Vanghele, Officer Jason Flynn, Officer Leonard Penna,
Detective Jason Frank and Officer William Chapman.

"Reliving Horror and Faint Hope at Massacre Site" by RAY RIVERA, New York Times 1/28/2013

Excerpt

The gunfire ended; it was so quiet they could hear the broken glass and bullet casings scraping under their boots.  The smell of gunpowder filled the air.  The officers turned down their radios; they did not want to give away their positions if there was still a gunman present.

They found the two women first, their bodies lying on the lobby floor.  Now they knew it was real.  But nothing, no amount of training, could prepare them for what they found next, inside those two classrooms.

“One look, and your life was absolutely changed,” said Michael McGowan, one of the first police officers to arrive at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, as a gunman, in the space of minutes, killed 20 first graders and 6 adults.

Officer McGowan was among seven Newtown officers who recently sat down to share their accounts of that day.  Some spoke for the first time, providing the fullest account yet of the scene as officers responded to one of the worst school massacres in United States history, one that has inflamed the national debate over gun control.

It is an account filled with ghastly moments and details, and a few faint instances of hope.  One child had a slight pulse, but did not survive.  Another was found bloody but unhurt, amid her dead classmates.  Teachers were so protective of their students that they had to be coaxed by officers before opening doors.  And the officers themselves, many of them fathers, instinctively used their most soothing Daddy voices to guide terrified children to safety.

The stories also reveal the deep stress that lingers for officers who, until Dec. 14, had focused their energies on maintaining order in a low-crime corner of suburbia.  Some can barely sleep.  Little things can set off tears: a television show, a child’s laughter, even the piles of gifts the Police Department received from across the country.

One detective, who was driving with his wife and two sons, passed a roadside memorial on Route 25 two weeks after the shooting, and began sobbing uncontrollably.  “I just lost it right there, I couldn’t even drive,” the detective, Jason Frank, said.

Officer William Chapman was in the Newtown police station along with Officer McGowan and others when the first reports of shots and breaking glass came in early on the day of the massacre.  The school was more than two miles away.  They traveled up Route 25, then right onto Church Hill Road.  “We drove as fast as we’ve ever driven,” Officer McGowan said.

They made it in under three minutes, arriving in the parking lot while gunfire could still be heard.

“I got out of the car and grabbed my rifle and it stopped for second,” Officer Chapman said.  “But then we heard more popping.  You could tell it was rifle fire. And it was up so close, it sounded like it was coming from outside.  So we were all looking around for someone to shoot back at.”

As the officers converged on the building, the gunfire stopped again.  Officers Chapman and Scott Smith made their way to the front entrance.  It was here, only minutes earlier, that a rail-thin 20-year-old named Adam Lanza, armed with a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic carbine, two semiautomatic pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, had blasted his way through the glass.

Much more in the full story.