“Newtown”: The truth about Sandy Hook

[DonViejo]

“Newtown”: The truth about Sandy Hook

A new book on the school shooting last year offers a clearer picture of one of America's darkest hours

LAURA MILLER

To the fog of war, add the fog of breaking news, that period in the aftermath of a disaster when mistake, rumor and other forms of misinformation cloud our understanding of what’s happened. Accounts of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on the 50th anniversary of that event have reminded us that this form of confusion predated the Internet and cable news. But today the news cycle has sped up, ravenously seeking new fodder in a matter of days rather than weeks. By the time more responsible investigators have nailed down the facts, the public is often no longer paying attention.

For this reason, there’s more call than ever for books like Matthew Lysiak’s “Newtown: An American Tragedy.” Lysiak, a reporter for the New York Daily News, covered the story of the mass shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a year ago on Saturday. At the time, the press misidentified the murderer, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, as his older brother, Ryan. (Adam was carrying Ryan’s ID when he shot himself at the end of his rampage.) There were reports that Lanza’s mother, Nancy, worked at the school and was killed during the shooting. (Her son shot her three times in the head that morning as she lay in bed, then left the house for Sandy Hook.) And there was talk of a second shooter — actually a parent, apprehended then cleared by law enforcement officials when they arrived at the scene. Depending on when you checked out of the coverage, you might be harboring all sorts of erroneous ideas about the tragedy.

“Newtown” is a just-the-facts narrative, and Lysiak is no prose stylist; he has an unfortunate propensity for clichés and dangling participles. But this book shows a deeper grasp of how to assemble those facts into a meaningful picture of events, and it is tremendously moving in the simplicity of its presentation. Lysiak balances perfectly the ordinarily wondrous lives of the 20 children and six women who were murdered against their killer’s depravity. Lysiak is a master of texture, at selecting precise, individualizing details: the first-grader who asked her mother for extra tissue paper to wrap the gingerbread house she planned to make at school that day, the way Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung sometimes snuck her paperwork with her into the stands when attending school athletic events, the “plush blue shark” slipped into one small coffin.

Lysiak’s account of the shooting itself, which lasted about five minutes, and the events leading up to and following it are tersely horrific. The slaughter of so many innocents makes Sandy Hook one of the darkest nightmares in the ever-growing list of America’s lone-gunman sprees, but it does have a heartening counterpoint in the selfless courage of the women who died that December morning trying to protect their charges. Hochsprung gave her life to warn her colleagues of the danger, first-grade teacher Victoria Soto stepped between Lanza and her students, and when teacher’s aide Anne Marie Murphy could not hide 6-year-old Dylan Hockley from the murderer, she wrapped her body around his in an attempt to shield him.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/08/newtown_the_truth_about_sandy_hook/