As a Sandy Hook resident, ‘enough has been enough’ for four years

It was nearing 9.30am on an unusually warm Friday morning in mid-December at Newtown High School – I was a senior, shuffling my notecards as I tried to prepare myself for my economics presentation. I had just finished putting them in order when an announcement came over the loudspeaker, our assistant principal, telling us calmly: “Initiate emergency lockdown.” I exchanged glances with my classmates – most of us grateful, now that we probably wouldn’t have the class time to fit in the rest of our presentations.

Time passed slowly at first in the lockdown. The 20 of us were pressed against a wall, our teacher reminding us every few minutes to keep quiet. Then cell phones started to buzz intermittently with parents texting to tell us that there was news of shots fired somewhere in town and all the schools were in lockdown as a precaution. Slowly though, more news started to trickle in – that it was a school where shots had been fired, that there could be a teacher dead, that there could even have been a student shot. Our teacher turned the news on the projector, and we watched in disbelief as the familiar U-shape of Sandy Hook Elementary, the alma mater of over half my class, myself included, came into aerial view. We sat speechless as the banner at the bottom of the screen ran with half-formed updates – “two reported fatalities, gunmen still on the loose, police say potential mass fatality, six confirmed dead…”

An hour later we were let out of lockdown and told to go to our next class. The hallways were a maelstrom of wide-eyed nervousness – no one had any idea of what was going on, and we were collectively on edge. I sent a text to my younger sister, a sophomore in the high school with me, to make sure she was all right. I had several friends come up to ask about my little brother, who they thought was still at Sandy Hook, but thankfully I was able to reassure them that he was at another school.

I arrived at my AP literature class to find the news playing on the projector and my class watching numbly. We sat watching as my teacher moved in and out, speaking to other members of the faculty between wiping away tears. The banner on the bottom of the screen blinked suddenly, and the message changed with a report from the Associated Press. “TWENTY SIX CONFIRMED FATALITIES, POLICE REPORT MAJORITY DEATHS CHILDREN”.

The aerial footage of my old school continued as the news scrolled, and I felt tears start to pool in my eyes. At this point I was shocked and angry that the Associated Press could have the audacity to report something like this – how could they be so low as to sensationalize a tragedy to rack up more views for themselves?

One of the boys in my class got up from his desk and passed out tissues to those of us crying. My teacher stood in the doorway, immobile with shock. Eventually the final bell rang. My mom texted me saying she was there to pick me and my sister up. I slid in the car and my mom met my eyes in the mirror. “Are you OK?” she asked. All I could do was shake my head as I cried and felt a cold fear start to settle in my chest. My mom took a deep breath and told us that we were headed to a family friend’s house, as our neighborhood was currently cordoned off by the police. Supposedly the shooter lived around the corner from us, and the police were investigating the house.

When we arrived at our friends’ we were met with a chaotic scene. A news crew was already on hand to interview the family friends’ first grader, who had survived the shooting. Friends and family members were everywhere; phones were ringing, news people were shouting. Everywhere I turned I heard names – names of families and children I had known, taught, babysat. I was in the kitchen, entertaining the little girl, when I heard someone say “Jack? Jack Pinto? He’s one of our wrestlers…” And then I felt the world drop around me.

I had been a classroom assistant in a kindergarten classroom the year prior, and Jack had been one of my students. His older brother played football with my brother, and our families had come to know each other well. Jack asked me every day if I really was Jack Kuligowski’s older sister, and answered with an ear-to-ear grin every time I told him I was.

I heard Jack’s name and felt as if the air had been punched out of me, and finally felt the weight of everything that was happening press down. I moved blindly to another room and sat on the couch and sobbed, thinking of Jack, his smile, of how there could be so many other kids that we didn’t even know about at this point. It was crushing, all-consuming, the kind of grief that comes with shock and is too big to even comprehend.

The rest of the day was a blur. I cried myself to sleep that night, waking up blearily to an alarm at midnight telling me that the decision of my admission to my dream school was in. Robotically, I logged into the site and registered the first word of “Congratulations!” through a fog of bone-crushing sadness.

The next days brought a second wave of unexpected traumas. I sat in my living room all day Saturday watching the news as the State police, stationed at our town park, and read the names of the 20 first graders and six educators. My friends texted me warning not to answer the door or go walking around the neighborhood, as it was crawling with reporters looking for comments. We were told that traffic in town was unbearable, that it was impossible to go anywhere with all the news vans clogging the streets. There were reporters who could hardly speak English coming down my driveway to get comments from my father as he washed the cars. When we drove the Pintos’ house that day to pay our respects we passed signs – spray-painted plywood propped against trees, hand-lettered poster board taped to mailboxes – begging for “No media past this point” or “No reporters please”.

Sunday brought Jack’s funeral. I arrived to a wall of news cameras, their cold black plastic faces following me as I climbed the steps. After the service, my family was walking away when we were mobbed by reporters. I remember being incredibly upset and turning aside, and having a camera follow me away.

Newtown students returned to school on Tuesday, and every student who drove to school had reporters knocking on their car windows as they waited to pull into the school parking lot.

Our community was traumatized, and most of us are still dealing with that trauma. Several of my classmates were diagnosed in the ensuing weeks of the tragedy with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I struggled with panic attacks my entire freshman year of college and still have difficulty sometimes with certain situations. I cannot hear sirens or fireworks without panicking, and cannot enter any building or small space without identifying hiding places and exits. I would not wish what my town went through on anyone. No one deserves this pain.

But Newtown, sadly, has not been the turning point that we’d all thought it would be.

It has been nearly four years since that day, since there was national outrage and calls for gun reforms. But since that day, there has been at least one recorded mass shooting in every US state except three. At least 1,065 people have been recorded dead as a result of a mass shooting. There has been San Bernardino. There has been Aurora. And now there has been Orlando. The United States has been sitting by and allowing these tragedies to occur over and over again, to the point that we are numbed to them. We have had four years of prayers and reflections. We have had four years of frustrations. We have had four years of battling logic against tradition. We have had four years of people speaking up, and four years of nothing coming to fruition.

We as a nation have been saying “enough is enough” for almost four years. At what point does that begin to ring true?