Sandy Hook survivors’ message for those trying to support a small Texas town: listen to the grieving

NEWTOWN — If one thing needs be emphasized to authorities and anyone wishing to support the small Texas town devastated by Tuesday’s elementary school massacre, it’s to listen to the people who are grieving, Sandy Hook survivors said.

“A lot of people took a stand on behalf of us and our children and took liberties with using our children’s or loved one’s names, and it was very traumatic and hurtful — even if it wasn’t meant to be,” said Michele Gay, whose daughter Josephine was among the 20 first-graders and six educators slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. “It is important that people not make assumptions or jump to conclusions about anything and keep the focus on the families and the survivors and the first responders — and take the lead from them as to how to move forward.”

Gay, the executive director of the nonprofit Safe and Sound Schools she founded with Alissa Parker after their daughters were slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School, is referring to America’s latest massacre of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, outside San Antonio. The circumstances of the shooting are so close to those in Newtown that some survivors here are reliving their trauma 10 years ago.

“The families and educators and staff are reeling; they can’t eat, they can’t sleep,” said Abbey Clements, co-founder of the nonprofit Teachers Unify, and a fourth-grade teacher in Newtown who hid her students in a closet as rifle shots rang over the loudspeaker during the 2012 shooting. “What concerns me is (Uvalde schools) are ending the year early … where they would benefit from getting together and being invited to have conversations about how they are doing.”

The author of a pioneering peer-reviewed study based on interviews of Sandy Hook families that called for better trauma education and grief treatment agreed.

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“It is absolutely critical to learn from the real experts — not the people who study this in school but from the people who have lived through it,” said Joanne Cacciatore, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work and the author of the 2019 study “Primary Victims of the Sandy Hook Murders.” “It is incumbent on authorities to respond in ways that are appropriate for the primary victims that meet the needs of the primary victims.”

The most important of those needs at a time like this when the families are still frozen in shock and numb with pain is to listen to their grief, Newtown’s senior faith leader said.

“I would encourage them to be open, to sit down as loved ones and just listen to each other, because we don’t have time for each other anymore,” said Monsignor Robert Weiss, the veteran pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, where Weiss prepared eight funeral masses for slain Sandy Hook children in five days. “One failure of ours is we got so overloaded with love and generosity and diverting the kids’ attention with gifts and trips that we didn’t ask them the right questions.”

Weiss recalled sitting at a dinner when a Newtown high schooler affected by the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting turned to his father and said, “You never asked me how I was doing after the shooting.”

Tuesday in Newtown, the connection to Texas’ pain was so palpable that “you can hear it in the silence,” Weiss said.

“It hits too close to home; this has been a trigger for Sandy Hook, no doubt about it,” Weiss said. “Seeing all the police cars and ambulances lined up on T.V. brought me back to the moment I arrived at Sandy Hook School, not knowing what was going on. It was a war zone.”

By encouraging authorities to listen to the grieving in Texas, the hope is people will understand that traumatic grief is a long-term and intensely personal struggle.

“The (Texas) parents and the families right now are numb and frozen to what is happening; when I heard (news of her own daughter’s death) I had to catch my breath because I could feel my lungs contracting,” said Jenny Hubbard, president and executive director of the nonprofit Catherine Violet Animal Sanctuary, whose daughter was slain in the Sandy Hook shooting. “It’s time to stop and look each other in the eye and come alongside people for the simple reason they are grieving and hurt.”

The danger in making community decisions about recovery and grief resources without first deferring to families of loss and those impacted most by the tragedy is that it can fracture a town.

“That’s when things become divided,” said Nicole Hockley, co-founder of the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise whose son was slain in the 2012 massacre. “You have to listen to members of the community and respect the impacted families; you can’t assume that you know what they need or want.”

Newtown was opening its ears to Texas on Tuesday. Efforts were underway to translate a pastoral letter from Weiss into Spanish to send to Sacred Heart Church in Uvalde, and efforts were underway to reach out to teachers through representatives from Newtown schools to see what help Uvalde educators need.

A Newtown college student who was in 6th grade when the Sandy Hook shooting changed his life said the best help to offer people in grief is to respect their experience.

“For parents and directly-impacted family members it is about respecting the process they will go through individually and realizing it takes a long time to come to terms with it,” said Jackson Mittleman, a senior at Georgetown University and the federal affairs manager for the nonprofit Newtown Action Alliance. “However people (in grief) choose to respond is completely valid in its own right.”

A veteran former Newtown police officer who was one of the first officers to enter Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, said it was critical for authorities to listen to the needs of first responders as well.

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre then-police Chief Michael Kehoe was worried about the mental health of his officers, he told Hearst Connecticut Media after his retirement.

Former Newtown officer Aaron Bahamonde said authorities did well to offer trauma services to first-responders.

“Our officers had the ability to seek mental health therapy if they were touched by this — it was for the entire town, not just first-responders,” said Bahamonde, who was released from the police department last week after 32 years “based on a disability,” a police union lawyer said. “We were certainly at the forefront of it, but we were not the ones who were hurt the most. I was still able to go home to my family.”

For families in Newtown who put their children on the bus who never came back, what helped most was quiet acts of kindness, Gay said.

Some days, meals would show up at her house. Or a neighbor would come in quietly and do the dishes. Or a friend went Christmas shopping for her.

“Those things meant the world to us because all of those things you do normally every day we couldn’t do — we were broken,” Gay said. “People would come in to serve and help us and did it in a way that was so gentle and unobtrusive that it was exactly what we needed.”

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342