Sitting with Karoline was Sam DiPasquale. As the FBI Special Agent Bomb Technician, stationed in New Haven, Sam first responded to the shooter’s home on Yogananda Street to search for explosives. After he was done there, after taking the robot down the hall to her mother’s bedroom, where she lay shot to death, he went to the school to see if there was anything he could do to help Jeff. They had known each other forever, having met at agency bombings and in training sessions after the explosion. Jeff’s team assisted the New Haven office on several occasions. Sam even made them delegates at one point for a domestic terrorism case. He would help them now, making sure they had gas for their generators, making sure his equipment was powered up every day, helping to secure unusual equipment. He helped put plywood boards over the windows of the two classrooms, mainly to protect patrol officers securing the perimeter from peeking. In fact, most of his job was to keep all the captains, majors, state attorneys, and deputy attorneys general from trying to see what he had to tell them over and over again that they couldn’t unsee.
After 9/11, Sam joined the Navy in Iraq, as part of the bureau’s largely unannounced CEXC (Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell), deployed in suicide bombings to collect DNA for its database of bomb manufacturers. She had collected branches from the trees. Deactivated homemade explosives. But the worst thing she had ever seen in her life was the inside of an elementary school in Connecticut.
Jeff decided that he and Sam would be the only ones allowed to have phones inside, to limit photography. They were the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. When Sam heard that the attorney general was going to visit Newtown a few days later President Obama spoke at a vigil at the local high school, he called a friend from the FBI who he knew would take over the security team. He said that if possible, the school should be on his itinerary.
Jeff immediately jumped on the idea. Sam had found him at one of the decontamination stations cleaning jewelry. It was something Jeff learned to do from the nurses at Bristol Hospital a million years ago when he was a paramedic. How to clean a jewel before returning it to the family. It certainly wasn’t anything he learned at the police academy. But being able to perform that task now, as much as it was, was almost a relief after several days processing evidence in the tent that had initially been set up as a temporary mortuary.
Keeping purpose was not easy during the last seven days and nights. But this was their chance to show the right person what they had seen. So Sam set out to secure everything Jeff said he would need for the visit. Starting with a giant TV.
‘We’re going to do this the same way we always do it. We’ll only do it 26 times.’
After the gruesome PowerPoint slideshow, Karoline took Holder and his devastated chief of staff for a tour of the school, holding back the tarp that had hidden the aftermath of the location where Principal Hochsprung and the school psychologist were shot afterward. to run out of a meeting. In the conference room, in front of Classroom 8, there were 26 bank boxes containing the personal belongings of each victim. A truck veteran, Ray Insalaco, came in to help pack up the desks. It had been his turn to empty the 20 lunch boxes. His advice to the small team he brought along: don’t read the notes. He had already made the mistake when one went flying while throwing an uneaten lunch in the trash.
Thank God is friday. I love my mommy.
The attorney general and his chief of staff stared dumbfounded at the plain white boxes, each of the children bearing a name sticker of a purple and green butterfly that had come loose from the hooks of their backpacks, until Karoline led them to Room 10. A numbered evidence tag marked where each small body was removed from the desecrated carpet. Larger spots were reported where the two teachers fell. This was the same room where Dan Sliby, on his initial tour, was found raging near the body of the shooter. Decades earlier, he was in the first grade in this very room. Pacing around the corpse, he could barely keep from kicking it in the chest.
Next to a group of desks was the bushmaster. The barrel and muzzle brake were coated with a film of white powder. A less experienced observer might have thought it was concrete dust from the bullets hitting the walls. But Dan was sure, from his time in the Marine Corps, that the chalky residue was baked evaporated blood.
Karoline then led the attorney general, her step not so steady anymore, toward Classroom 8. The room where, days before, her resolve had wavered. Where they momentarily lost and regained their sense of purpose. Where everyone stood in silent disbelief, a light drizzle at the window marking every second kill, staring into the small bathroom. Where the children were so packed in that the inward-hinged door couldn’t close all the way. Where Art, who had seen what he thought must be every possible reconfiguration of the human body, didn’t even understand what he was looking at. And where Karoline found herself doing something that came naturally to her: holding an imaginary rifle, pointing it toward the bathroom, registering the casings on the carpet to her right where the ejection window would have sent them, and automatically noting that this was obviously where the shooter was. . he would have been on his feet when he fired the Bushmaster. It was when she felt Jeff looking at her that he dropped her imaginary weapon and left the room.
He went to the next classroom, which had been saved. She needed a minute to recover. Steve Rupsis followed, struggling to keep his head focused on the forensics. He kept asking her what he should do. How should I record this, KK? How should I get the overall shot? Should I draw the hall and classrooms separately? Let’s draw? Do you want me to draw? He was spiraling. She told him that what she needed was a minute. He backed off.
That’s when Jeff, his face streaming with tears, gave them the purpose they would desperately need to get through the next week.
“Look,” he said, “we’re going to do this the same way we always do it. We will only do it 26 times.” The same as always, 26 times. It became a mantra. Let’s do what we always do. Same procedures. The same four general photos of each room. Same medium planes. The same incalculable number of close-ups to remember every minuscule aspect of the work. They would set up prep tables in the store for mass processing of evidence, nothing they had ever done on this scale. With eight tables it was like an assembly line. Each item photographed against a neutral background. They had a 20 pound roll of brown paper in the truck just for this purpose. A clean sheet, with a change of gloves in the middle, for each garment, each garment. Every little shirt. Every leprechaun dress. Every backpack. each pin. enchanted bracelet Wedding ring. Every bloody shoe. The same as always, 26 times.
Jeff reminded them that something akin to fate, however grim and deeply undesirable, had been laid at their feet. That the country, the world, would come looking for answers was not a question. And if anyone was going to provide the answers, at least to what had happened in these rooms, it would be up to them, but only if they kept their heads. It was this clarity of purpose that allowed them to push on that day and continue, working 12 and 16 hours, pausing only to get into their cars long enough to pass the procession of garnished media trucks and excruciating makeshift memorials, mounds of teddy bears and stuffed hearts, to sleep for a few hours before returning the next morning.
from the same First, they faced resistance. As soon as they secured the crime scene, the chief medical examiner showed up, plopped down at one of the teachers’ desks, and began telling Jeff’s team not to waste time taking pictures. They didn’t have to be like this overzealous.
Because the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had jurisdiction over all bodies in the state of Connecticut, Jeff’s team was not allowed to move or touch a body until first cleared by the ME. Typically, the crime scene unit obtained permission over the phone or from an on-site representative. They knew the coroner well enough, from various aspects of death investigations, but Karoline herself remembered seeing him only once at a crime scene in her 13 years in the van. Now here he was, barking unsolicited advice, sitting at a teacher’s desk who was still lying on the floor near another teacher with the body of a child in her arms. Everyone knew what happened here, he said, everyone knew that he would not go to trial, at least not in criminal proceedings, so his own photographers could take all the necessary pictures once the bodies were brought in for autopsy. The top priority, he insisted, was to return the bodies to the families. The governor needed to make a statement.
The need to return the bodies to the families as soon as possible was evidently more than understandable. But not to do a full investigation, not to take photos, it was unthinkable. And who the hell even knew if there was even an accomplice? Who knew anything yet? Taking shortcuts, not documenting every inch of the scene while it was intact, would itself be criminal: a failure that would only leave families with unanswered questions. His own work told a story that no longer existed on the coroner’s metal table.
At 8:35 pm the bodies were removed and taken to the OCME, and the governor informed the parents.
The crew kept working. They were interrupted over and over again. One day it was the FBI unit that worked on profiles of serial shooters and murderers. Other times it was people who felt they didn’t have a business being there, enough to start referring to them as the dog and pony shows. A high ranking LAPD officer appeared out of nowhere wanting a special tour. Various brasses with various justifications. The problem was that during these interruptions it wasn’t like they could just go out and take a break. The problem was being forced to stop, but never enough to go through the tedious steps of decontamination, the process of removing Tyvek, booties, hairnets, gloves, having to get fully dressed again, of course. what they ended up standing. around, noticing all the little things they had been trying not to notice. Pokemon cards and Little Mermaid this and that, things her own kids had at home. The Christmas projects the children had been working on for their parents. The drawings of families with stick figures curled up on the sofa reading. The milk cups still on the children’s desks along with crayons and scissors and sheets of stiff, shiny construction paper: the last thing they would do in this life before the strange man walked in with yellow earplugs and a loud gun.
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