In gunfire’s flash, innocence became infamy
The news came to Dr. Michelle Humm on that Friday morning through a Connecticut fog as distant as childhood.
Her brother, Bryan Shanahan, woke her with a long-distance call to her family's Las Vegas home. The television news was reporting a shooting at her old elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
The first account seemed absurd given the idyllic setting: Someone shot in the foot at Sandy Hook Elementary?
During the six years she attended classes there, Sandy Hook's playful mascot was the Jolly Green Giant. School staff painted large feet leading up to the entrance. It was a place of learning and laughter in a community carved out of the Connecticut woods and lined with rolling green lawns.
Shot in the foot? That wasn't so bad by America's violent standards. In a society where the words "Columbine," "Virginia Tech" and "Aurora" hold nightmarish double meaning, it wasn't so bad at all.
"Of course, just seeing my school on the news was shocking given that it's such a small town," said Humm, a neuropsychologist at Harmony Healthcare.
But then the fog of misinformation began to lift.
The news reports quickly degraded from bad to horrific. A single person heavily armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle and high-caliber pistols shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary, killing 20 children and six adults who were teachers or administrators before taking his own life. He'd murdered his mother earlier in the day. Statistically, it was the second worst mass shooting in modern American history.
Humm, now 35, moved to Newtown as a toddler, attended Sandy Hook from kindergarten to fifth grade. Her mother, Denise Shanahan, still lives not far from the school and has watched out her window as waves of violence and grief have washed over the town and across the nation. In a matter of seconds that Friday morning, the name Sandy Hook went from innocence to infamy.
As Humm reminisced, those childhood images emerged brightly colored and full of life.
"The school itself was smaller then," she recalled. "It's gone through renovations since the time I was there. Our mascot was the Jolly Green Giants. We were surrounded by woods. In this town, you usually can't see another building because everything is surrounded by trees. It does feel more rural, certainly, than most other places I've lived since. You know everyone in town."
Or so it seems. As the identities of the victims became known, Humm cringed at the sight. Those weren't statistics. They were the children of old schoolmates. Her mother's neighbors' kids were on that awful list.
That's the thing about an idyllic small town. Many residents never want to leave. They want to raise their children where they were raised, on the edge of the woods and close to nature.
"My mom's next-door neighbor lost a child," she said. "An acquaintance from middle and high school lost a daughter. It hits home in a very real way.
"Every time I see a picture of my school, my church, the place I grew up in and where I went to high school, it hits home. I see President Obama standing on the same high school stage I stood on many times. It's surreal, and hard to accept that it's actually happened. My brother said just driving around the streets, seeing at least one state trooper on every street, it's unbelievable that it's happening in my town. This town was such a wonderful, comfortable place where nothing exciting happened either way."
On that Friday morning, Humm had little time to process the mounting enormity of the loss. She kissed her young son, Zachary, and hugged her husband, Joe.
Then she went to work at the busy facility that specializes in outpatient mental health and addiction treatment. She works with patients who suffer from a variety of developmental disorders, including forms of autism.
There, too, she was reminded of the essential but so often unappreciated role of mental health treatment in our society. The shooter hadn't begun life as a killer; he'd once been an innocent child, too.
"I work in the mental health field," she said. "It's heartbreaking to think this person should have gotten help somewhere along the line that he didn't get. Someone should have been there to help him."
And someone in high authority should step up to stop the proliferation of semi-automatic assault weapons in a country with the most gun-related violence in the industrialized world.
"There's just no reason they should be legally available to anyone," Humm said. " There were so many unused rounds at the school. Think of what the tragedy might have been if people hadn't reacted quickly.
" To see of all the parents who rushed to the firehouse to find their children. My brother had karate lessons at that firehouse. I picture all those families waiting for their children to come back, the joyous feeling of seeing their reunion, and the families that never get to see their children again. It's just heartbreaking. I reacted like every parent in the country does."
And then she went to work on that terrible Friday morning knowing that no one would ever be able to think of Newtown and Sandy Hook Elementary in the same way again.
From innocence to infamy in the time it takes to pull a trigger.
John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295.
He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/Smith.
