HARTFORD, Conn. — Mark Barden said that all week he’s been keeping track of the timeline the families in Uvalde, Texas, are on.
“My wife Jackie and I have been kind of tracking along, moment to moment, what these families have been going through,” he said.
On Tuesday night, the couple went for a drive to clear their heads. They wound their way out of their neighborhood in Sandy Hook to distance themselves from the pain, from the memories that were pushing even closer to the surface than they have been every day for 9 1/2 years.
In the silence of the solemn drive, Jackie Barden turned to her husband.
“Out of the blue she said to me, ‘It’s their Friday night.’”
He knew exactly what she meant.
“She was referring to the night of Dec. 14, 2012, when we were trying to wrap our heads around the fact that our sweet little 7-year-old son Daniel had been shot to death in his first-grade classroom.”
Their home was full that night, Barden said, with loved ones there to console them. But it was also empty. Empty of their children, normally so tight-knit that they shared a bed most nights. Natalie and James Barden, then 10 and 11, were still at a neighbor’s house where they’d been ushered to safety when their own school went into lockdown. By nightfall, they’d be brought home and led to an upstairs bedroom where their parents would deliver the news: Their baby brother Daniel, with his long red hair and toothless smile, wasn’t coming home.
“No one should ever have to go through that. That was just unspeakable,” said Barden.
Another mass shooting at another elementary school makes Barden’s pain harder to bear than it already is and makes the pain fresh again.
“This particular latest (school shooting) with all the similarities, it certainly does exacerbate all of those intense emotions that are already there,” he said.
The mass shooting that killed 21 children and teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday closely mirrored the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook that has scarred Connecticut, as home to one of the most harrowing school shootings in United States history.
In 2012, Adam Lanza killed his mother at her home and then headed to Sandy Hook, where he fatally shot six educators and 20 children, ages 6 and 7, with an AR-15. He fatally shot himself inside the school.
This past Tuesday, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos shot his grandmother and then took two AR-15′s he had just legally purchased after turning 18 to Robb Elementary School, killing 21 people, 19 of them children ages 9, 10 and 11. He was killed by police inside the school.
For both young men, there were warning signs.
Ramos sent social media warnings. He posted photos of weapons. He showed signs of anger, isolation, bullying and suicidal ideation, said Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Nicole Hockley.
His behavior “echoed” Lanza’s, added Hockley, whose own son, Dylan, died in his teacher’s arms in Sandy Hook.
Hockley learned the news of the Uvalde shooting in a meeting with Barden for Sandy Hook Promise, their national non-profit aimed at providing the type of intervention they believe could have saved lives in Uvalde. One that teaches people, especially children, to recognize the warning signs of potential school shooters.
From her home in Delaware, Michele Gay learned about the shooting while she was sitting on her couch catching up on emails between meetings. Gay’s daughter, Josephine “Joey” Gay, was also killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, just a day before her 7th birthday party.
She started to get messages like, “Did you see this?” Gay, now the executive director and co-founder of Safe and Sound Schools, turned to the comfort of her family, her husband and her two other daughters — now ages 18 and 20 — who have grown up without their little sister.
“One of my daughters was just completely numb. She asked me, ‘Is something wrong with me that I’m not crying? I don’t feel anything, I’m just like, frozen,’” Gay recalled.
“My other daughter was just emotional right away seeing those pictures (from Uvalde) and really reliving her own experiences as well,” she said.
She told her daughters however they felt, whatever trauma was resurfacing, it was OK.
“It was really important to have a conversation about how we’re all going to process this differently. Your body, your mind and your heart, they’re all going to respond the way they’re going to respond. The way you’re feeling right now may be very different tomorrow or the next day as this kind of works through you,” she said.
For Hockley, the trauma first returned as a numbness, too.
“I was in shock, plain and simple. Shock and maybe PTSD. That reliving, that re-traumatizing,” she said.
She threw herself into work even though she was on “an emotional rollercoaster of anger, sadness, fear, of wanting to find my surviving son Jake and just hold him and not let him go.”
Hockley said the tragedy at Sandy Hook feels like just yesterday most days. It’s only when she looks at Jake, who is about to graduate high school, that she realizes how long it’s been.
As she relived the trauma of Dylan’s death again this week, she checked in with everyone in her familyand her team, that works to prevent these shootings from happening.
“My first thought Wednesday morning was, I remember that Saturday, waking up and thinking that had to have been a nightmare, that couldn’t have really happened. And think that’s what 19 families, 21 families, are going through right now,” she said.
Barden was thinking the same thing.
“For us, it was waking up Saturday morning and having to relive that all over again and come to terms with the fact that this is real.”
He still has to come to terms with the reality sometimes.
“To this day, coming up on 10 years, I still have days that in my dreams this wasn’t real. The whole thing wasn’t real. Daniel is with us as a happy vibrant 16-year-old.”
They know all too well what the parents in Uvalde are going to experience.
Gay said that in those first few days after the Sandy Hook massacre, she remembers being “very busy just figuring out how to breathe.”
“It feels so wrong when someone who is so much a part of your being and your life and your every minute is suddenly not there,” she said. “It’s just not right. It’s traumatic.”
And it still is.
“Sometimes it sneaks up on you, you think you’re doing great and then you get sidelined,” she said. “And certainly a week like this one, watching those families walk through this, practically to the same timeline of everything that we experienced almost 10 years ago. It’s definitely one of those times.”
Over the past decade, there have been so many mass shootings that brought back those memories. In just the first four months of 2022, organizations that track shooting data have recorded more than 212 mass shootings.
“There have been so many tragedies that have happened since our tragedy, and each one of them has been painful to watch from afar,” said Gay. “Those feelings, those memories they don’t leave you. And so to see somebody else having to walk through that is another level of heartbreak.”
This one hit harder, she said. It was combined with discouragement and frustration that, despite the work they’ve poured themselves into since their children’s murders, other families were still feeling the same pain.
Dr. Javeed Sukhera, chair of Psychiatry at the Institute of Living, said also that it’s only natural for it to hurt a bit more for people here in Connecticut because it hits so close to home.
“A lot of people in Connecticut are both directly and indirectly traumatized by what happened in Newtown and are still healing, and that’s why this is that much more painful,” he said.
“It feels like its pain upon pain. It’s compounded by not just what happened in Buffalo, that so many people are so traumatized by, but every time this happens. In the state of Connecticut it’s so particularly traumatizing for people in this community that it’s hard to find words.”
When trauma like this happens, Sukhera said, it reopens old wounds and hurts more because it is that trauma plus this trauma.
“For everyone who remembers what that moment was like when those children didn’t come home, watching the same thing happen in Texas brings all those memories back, amplified and magnified in terms of pain.”
Sukhera said that anyone feeling traumatized should know that that feeling is valid.
“I would tell them to not be ashamed of it, to not pretend like it’s an ordinary day but to honor your emotions however complex and messy they might feel,” he said. “We need to give ourselves the space and grace to not pretend like we should just move on and go through the motions like it’s any other day.”
Kristin Song, whose 15-year-old son, Ethan, killed when he was accidentally shot by an unsecured gun in a friend’s house in Guilford, said that on Tuesday when news started to filter in about the shooting in Uvalde, she turned her phone off for most of the day. Her other son had just graduated from high school, and although the occasion was one to celebrate, it was also marred by her son’s death.
When Song finally picked up her phone Tuesday evening, the alerts were countless. Another child killed in a shooting, another mass shooting.
Song has advocated for safer gun laws for years, often standing side by side with parents, educators and community members from Sandy Hook.
On Wednesday, she wiped tears from her eyes as she stood on the Capitol steps in Hartford, yet again.
“They are now sitting, living the unimaginable, probably with cops asking a million questions. Then they are going to move into a meeting with a funeral director who is going to, very uncomfortably, ask them ‘Would you rather have your child cremated or buried?’ and then further ask them, ‘Would you like me to cut a lock of your child’s hair, because that’s all that I can give you.’
“And that’s just the first two days,” she said. “These are things that they’re just at the very beginning of, walking an unimaginable journey.”
Dr. Hank Schwartz, Psychiatrist in Chief Emeritus at Institute of Living/Hartford HealthCare who was appointed to serve on the Sandy Hook Advisory Board, broke down in tears on Wednesday talking about the pain that is reexperienced by an event like this.
“Sometimes even the slightest reminders of horrible things that have happened can set us off again,” he said.
“Being re-traumatized means having to endure, to some level, to some degree, the anxiety, the pain, the fear and the suffering of the original event‚” he said.
“If that’s happening to somebody, if they’re being re-triggered, they’ve got to talk about it,” he said. “We have to recognize that we have to allow it, they can’t be stifled, they should be shared.”
Uvalde families are taking their first steps on a path that 26 families, and many more, in Connecticut have.
At yet another vigil in Newtown this week, Rev. Matthew Crebbin said that the town grieved because wounds which never quite healed were torn open once again.
“We grieve with families who weep, with loved ones who will not be consoled. And with grief still tearing at our hearts, we come on this day all too aware of everything that has been lost,” he said.
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