NEWTOWN, Conn. — President Obama made his fourth sorrowful trip to a shocked and grieving community on Sunday, two days after a gunman stormed into an elementary school here and gunned down 20 first-graders and six adults.
He spent part of the afternoon watching his own young daughter Sasha in a dance rehearsal, and then arrived a few hours later here to meet privately with the parents who won’t see their children sing and dance again.
He was to speak as part of an interfaith vigil at Newtown High School. A long line of families waiting to get in snaked around the building, many huddled under white Red Cross blankets.
Volunteers handed out stuffed puppy dogs to the many children, some in strollers and others carried in their parents’ arms.
The auditorium of the school, which was locked down for hours on Friday because of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, was full. A presidential seal had been put on the lectern of the blue-draped stage. Many of the children chattered happily with their friends, while adults huddled in small groups and hugged one another.
Kristen Rosengrant came with her sons, 5 and 9, who expressed dismay about the length of the line.
“The president’s an important dude,” she told the boys.
“As a mom, I’ve been so upset,” she told a reporter. “I felt we had to come show our support.”
She said she appreciated the president coming to her town, adding, “To be honest, I don’t think anything is going to help the families, but it’s nice to show concern.”
Dozens of church services had been held in the morning, and impromptu teary gatherings as people laid flowers and stuffed animals near the town’s flagpole, and the first scheduling of the many funerals to come this week. The evening event marked the first time this tight-knit and shattered community gathered as one to grieve and speak of the unspeakable.
The details about the carnage continued to mount on Sunday. The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, carried “numerous” high-capacity ammunition magazines for his semiautomatic rifle, as well as multiple magazines for two other guns, police said Sunday afternoon. In all, he had hundreds of bullets with him when he shot out a pane of glass and entered Sandy Hook Elementary at 9:30 a.m. Friday. Police said Lanza used one gun — a “Bushmaster” brand rifle, whose design can be traced the M-16 weapon developed for U.S. troops in Vietnam — to kill 20 children and six adults inside.
They said that Lanza had a number of 30-round magazines for this rifle. He also brought magazines for two other guns, pistols made by Sig Sauer and Glock, police said. But he apparently fired just one of those guns at the school, shooting himself in the head. Police found him dead.
Police did not say which weapon Lanza used to kill the first victim of his rampage, his mother. Nancy Lanza, 52, was killed in the home she and her son shared, before Lanza went to Sandy Hook. Autopsy results released Sunday listed multiple gunshot wounds to her head.
The details about Adam Lanza’s weaponry, released by Connecticut State Police on Sunday afternoon, raised new questions about how he had obtained so many magazines. They signaled that Lanza’s massacre might have been much worse: Even when he died, police said, Lanza was still carrying large amounts of unused ammunition. He had left a fourth gun, a shotgun, in a car outside the school.
Still, police said Lanza was able to unleash unbelievable devastation with one weapon, and in just a few minutes. A reporter asked how many bullets had been fired during the rampage.
“That’s impossible to say,” state police Lt. J. Paul Vance said. There were so many.
For the fourth time in his four years as president, Obama returned to lead the awful rituals of mass death and national grief. He made similar visits to Fort Hood, Tex., in 2009, Tucson in 2011 and Aurora, Colo., this past July — each time, in the aftermath of a gunman’s spree. He has tended to focus on emotion and healing in these moments, touching only lightly on the subject of guns and gun control.
Now, however, Obama will face a new and higher level of pressure from advocates of gun control, saying that this time, he must do more than simply grieve.
They want him to make a strong push for new laws to restrict weapons like the semiautomatic rifle used in Friday’s massacre.
On Sunday morning, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) said this is the time to bring back an assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) — perhaps the country’s best-known advocate for gun control — said Obama should act while the country’s attention is focused on the damage that an assault weapon can do. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) vowed Sunday to introduce legislation to ban assault weapons at the start of the next Congress.
And Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D) told CBS News’s Bob Schieffer that this rampage seemed to prove that his state’s tough gun laws are not tough enough.
“When someone can use an assault weapon to enter a building, actually shoot out that which was preventing him getting in the building, have clips of up to 30 rounds on a weapon that can almost instantaneously fire those, you have to start to question whether assault weapons should be allowed to be distributed the way they are in the United States. You’re right, Connecticut has pretty tough regulations,” Malloy said on “Face the Nation.”
“But obviously they didn’t prevent this woman [Nancy Lanza] from acquiring that weapon and obviously allowed the son to come into possession of those and use them in a most disastrous way,” Malloy said.
In the meantime, it appeared that Capitol Hill opponents of gun control had decided this was a time for silence. Betsy Fischer Martin, executive producer of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” tweeted Sunday morning that the show “reached out to ALL 31 pro-gun rights Sens in the new Congress to invite them to share their views on @meetthepress — NO takers.”
In Connecticut on Sunday, state police issued a warning about a proliferation of Internet hoaxes related to the case, which have included purported postings from Lanza himself before the crime, or notes supposedly written by children before they were killed.
“There has been misinformation from people posing as the shooter in this case [or] mimicking this crime scene,” Vance said. He said that federal and state officials are seeking to find the source of these hoaxes. “It is important to know that we have discussed with federal authorities, that these issues are crimes.”
In Newtown on Sunday, the first funerals were being scheduled. The first was set for 1 p.m. Monday, the Connecticut Post said, for Noah Pozner, 6. Elsewhere, at Newtown’s St. Rose of Lima Catholic church, they were planning eight. In all, 10 of the 20 child victims belonged to the parish.
But even in that epicenter of the town’s grief, new ugliness intruded on Sunday. An apparent hoax caused an evacuation of parishioners at St. Rose of Lima. Around noon, someone called the church phone, and said, “I’m going to kill everyone there. My friend didn’t finish the job.” Church officials tried to keep the caller on the line, asking him to repeat himself. He did, making the same threat in the same words.
Ten minutes later, a Connecticut state trooper interrupted Msgr. Robert Weiss during an interview with a Washington Post reporter. “Father, we’re taking this as a credible threat. We need to evacuate the church,” the trooper said.
Weiss helped lead the evacuation, and the church emptied without incident. Afterward, SWAT officers in military-style clothing entered to search the church. They found nothing. But after the threat, St. Rose — which had been open 24 hours a day since the shootings — remained closed and locked, and evening mass was canceled.
This was not the first time a threat had been made at the church: On Saturday, St. Rose had put up posters for parishioners to express their grief. But one person wrote, “This is just round one,” Weiss said.
Also Sunday, news reports said that students at Sandy Hook Elementary would be shifted to a different campus in the neighboring town of Monroe, Conn. It was unclear when school will resume.
As the town prepared for Obama’s visit, police restricted access to Newtown High School shortly before noon as set-up crews and Secret Service agents worked.
Dan Mallozzi, who owns property across from the school, placed 27 small American flags in the ground next to the Newtown High School sign. One for each of Lanza’s victims.
Tears flowed down his cheeks when he had finished.
“You have to do something,” he said, standing in a cold drizzle. “What you can do, you should do.”
Someone else had placed little cut-out angels on sticks in the ground.
“Little angels up above, bless our town with all your love,” a sign read.
On Saturday, authorities said that Lanza had no apparent connection to Sandy Hook.
It was still a mystery, then, why Lanza — after dressing in black, killing his mother and taking at least three guns from her collection — drove five miles to a school where he was a stranger.
The part of the story that remained grimly, awfully unchanged was what Lanza did when he got there.
Authorities released the names of those Lanza killed at the school, who ranged in age from 6 to 56. And the state’s medical examiner — speaking in sanitized, clinical terms — described the results of something deeply obscene: a semiautomatic fired inside an elementary classroom.
“I’ve been at this for a third of a century. And my sensibilities may not be the average man’s. But this probably is the worst I have seen,” said H. Wayne Carver II. He described the children’s injuries, which he said ranged from at least two to 11 bullet wounds apiece.
He had performed seven of the autopsies. A reporter asked what the children had been wearing.
“They’re wearing cute kid stuff,” Carver said. “I mean, they’re first-graders.”
On Saturday, this small New England town and the country played out what is now a familiar ritual: the dumbstruck aftermath of a young gunman’s massacre.
In Connecticut, people who had known Adam Lanza described him as odd, nervous and withdrawn, and they searched their memories for signs they had missed. Memorials went up. Politicians talked — a little more forcefully this time — about how someone needed to be brave enough to talk about guns and gun control.
And, in Newtown, as they started funeral preparations, the ritual was for lives so new that it seemed impossible to speak of them in the past tense.
“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Rabbi Shaul Praver of Adath Israel, who said that his congregation lost a first-grade boy. “His little body could not endure so many bullets like that.”
Sandy Hook’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the attack, had recently installed a new security system in which the school doors were kept locked all day starting at 9:30. But Lanza had apparently shattered the glass in a window or door.
He was carrying at least three guns from a collection maintained by his mother, who friends said enjoyed target shooting. Lanza had two pistols, a Glock and a Sig Sauer.
But he apparently chose a larger weapon, the .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, for much of the killing. This rifle fires one bullet for every pull of the trigger, and the unusually high speed of its round is designed to produce significant internal damage. Authorities said Lanza fired dozens and dozens of times in a spree that lasted minutes.
“All the wounds that I know of at this point were caused by the long weapon,” said Carver, the medical examiner.
He said he saw multiple wounds on the bodies of those he examined, and based on his conversations with colleagues, “I believe everybody was hit more than once.” None of the victims probably survived very long after being hit, Carver said.
When police arrived, Lanza was dead. So were Hochsprung and five other adults. So were 18 children. Two more were pronounced dead later at a hospital.
Sixteen of the 20 children were 6 years old. The four others were 7.
Later, investigators went to the home that Lanza shared with his mother. Nancy Lanza was found dead there — the first victim of the killings and the last discovered.
On Saturday, authorities said they had “very good evidence” regarding Adam Lanza’s motives. But they didn’t say what that evidence was, and law enforcement officials said they had not found anything like a suicide note.
“No words can truly express how heartbroken we are,” Adam Lanza’s father, Peter Lanza, said in a statement released Saturday. “We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why.”
