- .Shattered school windows, bullet marks in the walls and blood stains in the hallway seen in police images
- .Terrified 911 calls from teachers calling for help during attack are released
- .Discarded handgun seen in doorway of classroom where Lanza's rampage ended
- .Evidence made public as police release full report into massacre
By DANIEL BATES
A discarded handgun lays in the doorway of classroom 10, where Adam Lanza's deadly rampage in Sandy Hook elementary school finally came to an end.
The photo was part of several images and heartbreaking 911 calls made public today as Newtown Police released their full report into the massacre.
The police file, which runs to 7,000 pages, vividly illustrates the terror that came to the Connecticut community a year ago this month and includes the heartbreaking interviews with the children who survived the horrific attack which left 20 children and six teachers dead.
A handgun is left in the doorway of room 10, where Lanza's rampage came to an end
Police photos show shattered glass covering a seating area at Sandy Hook elementary school
Evidence markers are laid out in front of the school doors
Police were careful when interviewing the children, only meeting them if their parents requested it. At the end of the interviews they were given a copy of the children's book A Terrible Thing Happened to help them process what they had seen.
In one of the interview, a boy sits down with his parents and a police officer at the Newtown Police station and says that he saw 'everything'.
The child says that a 'bad man' suddenly came into their class wearing 'army clothes' and firing a ‘bazooka’. He saw his teacher get shot and knew she was dead.
Lanza fired at the boy multiple times but missed by inches and hit something the child was holding in his hand.
The boy dropped the stuffed animal he was holding in his other hand and ‘ran, and ran, and ran’ out of the school, past the bloodied body of principal Dawn Hochsprung.
A T-shirt, above, and black trousers, below, worn by Lanza as he carried out the horrific shooting are included in the evidence files
Fingerless gloves that were worn by Lanza are also included in the photographic evidence
A second pupil recounted to police how he heard loud noises outside his classroom that he thought were a hammer.
The door ‘banged open’ and Lanza, who the boy described as tall and skinny, shot somebody in the classroom dead and she ‘fell down’.
Everyone was screaming and ran out of the classroom after Lanza apparently moved on to kill others.
In the first grade classroom of teacher Lauren Rousseau only one girl survived out of 15 pupils, plus Miss Rousseau.
When police came into the room the six-year-old told them: ‘I’m scared and I want to go home.'
The released evidence included the emergency calls made by teachers as they called for help during the 11-minute rampage.
Photos from inside the school, taken as part of the investigation, have been released
The window of a front window at the school entrance is pictured shattered after the shooting
Spent shells are discarded on the sidewalk outside the elementary school
What appears to be blood can be seen in one of the school's hallways
An unnamed woman called 911 with a group of five-year-old children around her, who did not make a sound as she talked under her breath.
She says: 'I at Sandy Hook school, there’s somebody shooting guns. I’m bleeding, my foot’s bleeding. I’m in the Kindergarten room.'
The woman was told by the 911 dispatcher to lie on the floor, as she said she was unable to lock her door.
She says: 'He's out in the hallway, whomever it is ... He keeps firing. Oh gosh I hear shooting!
'Oh my God, just shooting, whoever it is is just shooting.'
A large section is beeped out in which it is thought gunfire is clearly audible.
In another recording another woman anxiously told police that she had a classroom full of 16 pupils and had locked the door.
An undated picture of Adam Lanza, who shot 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook before taking his own life
An evidence marker is laid next to a rifle after the shooting
Sounding on the edge of panic, she says: 'I need assistance urgently, I’m in a classroom with kids. I can’t see anyone. The door is locked. The sound is still going on.'
Another woman at Sandy Hook called 911 and said: 'There’s something going on at our school. We hear something over the loudspeaking, it sounds like a loud popping noise.'
Asked if it sounds like a gun, she says: 'Yes, I think so.'
The Newtown police file also shows up moments of heroism and chaos. A police officer found one of the teacher's bodies slumped over pupils in an attempt to protect them.
Teachers insisted that police put their badges under the door before they opened it up because so they were so scared the gunman was still out there.
One officer described how there as a ‘massive pile of bodies’ in the bathroom of one of the classrooms which he counted as a total of 15 pupils and teachers.
What appears to be blood stains can be seen by the door to room 9, where an injured staff member hid to call 911
An evidence box for teacher Victoria Soto, who lost her life in the shooting
A bullet hole can be seen in the frame of this poster for a children's book
He said one girl had been jammed between the toilet seat and the back of the room. Even though she was at the bottom of the pile, she was dead.
The officer wrote: 'As the pile got higher, it appeared that there was a mad scramble to get into the bathroom, with people stepping on top of one another and climbing on top of one another…
'The teachers appeared to be have been shepherding the children into the room and were probably going to shut the door ... and were interrupted by the shooter as they attempted to fill the bathroom.
‘The shooter then opened fire on the mass of adults and children’.
As the officer pulled the bodies out one by one it became clear that ‘no one has survived’.
Other 911 calls in the file detail how throughout the school whimpering could be heard on the loudspeaker which had been left on by accident.
A parent who was with teacher Natalie Hammond, who has been shot in the foot and the hand, kept repeating ‘please Jesus’ over and over again.
A display cabinet of the children's work is pictured with the glass shattered by gunfire
A gaping hole is pictured at the school, showing where Lanza opened fire on the building
A 911 dispatcher tried to reassure her by telling her to ‘stay calm...and think of your kids’.
Referring to Lanza, the woman said: 'God he's ... he's shot a hundred times … he must have some big artillery.'
Asked to describe Ms Hammond’s condition, the woman said she was ‘breathing...but...just barely’.
The dispatcher asked her to put pressure on her wounds to stop them bleeding but the woman replied: ‘He’s right outside the ... door. I don’t want to move ... There must have been 100 shots, I’m telling you.'
Another mother who was outside of the school called 911 in a state of panic.
She said: ‘There are a bunch of kids running down Churchill Ave [a street in Sandy Hook] and some of them are in different houses but mine is still missing, I don’t know where he is!'
The dispatcher says calmly: 'Ma’am, I need you to go to the scene and speak to a detective.'
Parents were told to meet at the firehouse over the road from the school to await news of their children.
Hours later 20 mothers and fathers were told their children were never coming home again.
Lanza had shot his way into the school through the plate glass doors that had been locked, as was usual, because classes had started.
Chief medical examiner H Wayne Carver talks to the press after the shooting
Police tape cordons off a car in the school parking lot
Rick Thorne, the school’s janitor, was heard telling the dispatcher in a panicked voice: 'I keep hearing shooting - I keep hearing popping.'
He also said: 'There’s still shooting going on! Please!'
The first call, which lasted 24 seconds, was from school secretary Barbara Halstead who said: 'I think there's somebody shooting in here in Sandy Hook School.'
Asked why she thought that, she said: 'Somebody's got a gun I saw a glimpse of somebody running down the hallway, they're still around me there's still shooting. Sandy Hook please.'
Descriptions from the first officers to arrive at the school revealed harrowing details, including the sight of a teacher's body covering the children they had tried to shied.
A witness told police they had seen Lanza, wearing a hat and sunglasses, enter the school hallway and begin shooting.
When police arrived at the school and found Lanza's body, they tried to get a response and asked who had shot him, according to the Hartford Courant.
Officers who saw the 20-year-old's body said: 'He appeared to have the body size of a 12-year-old.'
Evidence stickers can be seen on a shoe belonging to Lanza
Bullet holes can be seen alongside children's drawings on a classroom window, pictured above and below
Bullet holes can clearly be seen from the outside of the classroom
Evidence markers are taped under a bullet mark on a wall in the school
An officer who helped bring surviving children to safety told them 'to cover their eyes' and one of the first officers to arrive on the scene feared being ambushed.
The release of the tapes was met with controversy, with some parents asking for them not to be made public.
Among those who had campaigned for them to stay private was Nicole Hockley, who son Dylan, six, died.
She said they were 'not in anybody’s interest' and not how she wants to remember her son.
The prosecutor in charge of the Newtown investigation, State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky, also argued that releasing the tapes could prove painful to the victims' families, hurt the investigation, subject witnesses to harassment and violate the rights of survivors who deserve special protection as victims of child abuse.
Despite their efforts, six 911 tapes had already been released by the Danbury State Attorney General in a summary of the police report that was released today.
In them Lanza can clearly be heard opening fire as he walked through the classrooms, shooting the pupils along with six of their teachers.
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