Kaitlin Roig-Debellis: witness to an indelible massacre

The former teacher who saved 15 little lives in a Connecticut school can’t forget the 26 that were lost.

Kaitlin Roig-Debellis

It happened almost three years ago but Kaitlin Roig-Debellis’s voice breaks as she is asked, yet again, to relive the morning, 10 days before Christmas, that ended 26 lives and marked her own ­forever.

“We were the first class in the school, so when the initial blast of gunfire began, as he shot his way into the school, that was feet from where we were sitting,’’ she says by phone from her home in Connecticut. “I’m not sure if my students had the awareness that it was a gun but they knew what they were hearing was bad.’’

“Bad” probably was the word that came to the frightened first graders, but it was much worse than that. “He” was 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who on December 14, 2012, went on a shooting spree at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He killed six staff members and 20 children aged six and seven before shooting himself.

He is not named by Roig-Debellis, who was a teacher at the school — not in our interview and not in her memoir, Choosing Hope, which she will discuss during an Australian tour that starts this weekend. Indeed, it seems the pain is so great that Roig-Debellis, 32 and no longer classroom teaching full-time, can refer to the gunman only indirectly.

“The decision that was made that day to take innocent lives for absolutely no reason … I no longer care about your story, I no longer care where you came from, what happened to you or why,’’ she says. “You should no longer be dis­cussed. The only names and faces and stories of lives that should ever be remembered are those lives that were taken. Period. End of story.’’

She says when the shooting started her first thought was “Columbine”. That it was says a lot about the US’s shocking history of school shootings. But even so, Columbine here? In this Connecticut town she thought of as Pleasantville?

As the gunman shot up the school, Roig-Debellis realised running was not an option. “Evil is coming for us and there’s nowhere to go,’’ she writes. “Where can we hide? Where can we hide?” What she did next saved the lives of her 15 first grade students.

There’s only one place — a tiny, tiny first-grade-sized lavatory with only a toilet and a toilet-paper dispenser inside … Maybe three feet by four feet. There is so little space that the sink is on the outside, in the classroom. I have never even been inside of the bathroom before. An adult wouldn’t fit comfortably. How in God’s name will I get 16 of us in there?

Somehow she did, and the descriptions of the terrified little girls and boys cowering in that toilet, “too crammed together to move their arms”, trying to be quiet as gunfire rages outside, are heart-rending to read. “I don’t want to die before Christmas,” one whimpers. As for their teacher, who had just become engaged, she was sure she was living her last moments.

But they didn’t die. After 45 minutes of unbearable waiting, they were freed by a SWAT team. The gunman lay dead in an adjoining classroom, 253 rounds of live ammunition still on his body. “Six of my colleagues and 20 first graders — six and seven-year olds who were still learning to tell time, and count to 120, and spell 100 words — were murdered that morning,” Roig-Debellis writes.

Despite her ordeal, Roig-Debellis has not become a public advocate for US gun law reform, though she believes change must happen. Her focus remains on children, especially as founder of non-profit organisation Classes 4 Classes, which facilitates benevolent interaction between kids in schools across the US.

Choosing Hope is a survivor’s memoir in more than one sense. After Roig-Debellis survived the massacre came the battle to survive being a survivor.

“I was terrified of everything,” she says in our interview. “I couldn’t be with anyone except immediate family and close friends, I couldn’t be alone, I couldn’t go out in my car, I couldn’t go to into a grocery store … I mean, truly nowhere.”

Her despair was connected to the question of why this had happened to her, to her students, her school. She eventually realised she had to stop asking a question that had no answer and focus instead on the possibilities life offered. Hence the title of her memoir.

Roig-Debellis makes a firm distinction between moving forward and “moving on”. She fell out with school authorities over what she saw as an overenthusiasm for putting the incident in the past.

“I am asked a lot about the anniversaries,” she says when I mention it has been almost three years since the shooting. “For me, every second is the anniversary. I need to live every second — there is such an awareness that things could have been very different — to move forward … but I will never move on from that day.”

As for the children who survived, who knows? As Roig-Debellis writes, “How do you reassure a first grader that the monster under their bed isn’t real when they’ve met the monster?”

For all the harrowing moments in Roig-Debellis’s book, the most distressing comes on the final two pages, where the 26 victims are listed by name and age, a desolate rollcall. The stark sight of all those 6s and 7s is hard to take.

I mention this, and I can hear the anguish in Roig-Debellis’s response. She recently read the book for the audio version, she says, and “it was one of the hardest things I have ever done”.

“I knew so many of them so closely, I knew their names, saw them every day … but to actually read their names and to read their ages … those names should never, ever, ever have been taken.”

Choosing Hope, by Kaitlin Roig-Debellis with Robin Gaby Fisher (Allen & Unwin, $29.99). Roig-Debellis will speak in Sydney on Saturday (Dymocks George Street, 2pm) and Sunday (Five Dock Library, 1.30pm); Brisbane on Tuesday (Ashgrove School 3.15pm; Queensland University of Technology, 6pm) and Wednesday (Avid Reader, 6.30pm); and Melbourne on Thursday (Wheeler Centre, 12.30pm).