The heroes of Sandy Hook

last updated 8 January 2015

When Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle and two handguns, principal Dawn Hochsprung, 47, did not cower. The dedicated educator charged out of the school office, confronted Lanza in the hallway, and was gunned down as she lunged at him. “I’m not surprised she gave her life in this fashion, trying to protect her students,” said a friend, Gerald Stomski. As Lanza advanced toward classrooms, he was also confronted by vice principal Natalie Hammond and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, who planned to retire at the end of the year. Hammond was wounded in the leg; Sherlach was killed.

“Someone had flicked on the loudspeaker,” said the Los Angeles Times, “and the sounds staffers heard clearly were not part of a drill.” Teachers scrambled to save the children. Music teacher Maryrose Kristopik quickly put 20 kids in a large closet and blocked her classroom’s door with a xylophone. Kaitlin Roig ushered her first-graders into the class bathroom and implored them to be quiet. As she heard the gunman outside, she made a point of saying that she loved them. “I wanted that to be one of the last things they heard,” she told ABC News, “not the gunfire in the hallway.” He passed them by.

Rachel D’Avino, a behavioral therapist whose boyfriend planned to propose to her on Christmas Eve, was killed “shielding children from Adam Lanza’s bullets,” police told her family; so was teacher Lauren Gabrielle Rousseau. When teacher Victoria Soto heard the shooting, she ordered her kids into a closet, and “bravely placed herself between the young children and Lanza,” said TheDailyBeast.com. “She did what she was trained to do,” said her cousin, “but also what her heart told her to do.” Police said Soto and Anne Marie Murphy, an aide for a special needs child, were both found in the classroom, covering the bodies of the children they had loved, and died trying to protect.