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Connecticut school massacre: A living hell

Posted at 6:00 PM, Dec 14, 2012
and last updated 2012-12-14 19:53:31-05

(CNN) — This morning, a group of people gathered around a table in a meeting room at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The topic was a struggling second-grader. Attendees included the mother of the child, the principal, the vice principal and the school psychologist.

It was about 9:30.

“Pop. Pop. Pop.”

That’s what the mother of the second-grader said it sounded like.

The sound was coming from the hall.

The principal, the vice principal and the school psychologist left the room, and went into the hall.

The mother ducked under the table and called 911.

“I cowered,” she said.

“He must have shot a hundred rounds,” she said. Asked if literally, unbelievably, it was 100 rounds, she said, “At least.”

“Just shooting and shooting and shooting.”

The vice principal came back into the room with an injured foot, the mother said.

She never saw the shooter.

She saw bodies, though. She said two adults were dead in the hallway, in a pool of blood.

“They marched us out, right past them,” she said.

“They had to walk these children past a pool of blood.”

How would this happen? She wondered aloud. “It’s a locked school; you have to be buzzed in.”

“It was a living hell,” she said.