The crime scene investigators tasked with establishing the facts of the worst school shooting in American history have spoken out, nearly 11 years after the massacre took place.
Detectives Art Walkley and Karoline Keith and Sgt. Jeff Covello of the Connecticut State Police were all interviewed in a New York Times feature written by author Jay Kirk on Sandy Hook that was published Thursday.
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, 20, went to the elementary school in Newtown and killed 26 people. 20 of the victims were children between the ages of six and seven. The others were adult staff members. Earlier in the day, Lanza shot his mother dead at their home. He later committed suicide.
It was another member of their team who was charged with emptying the lunch boxes left behind by the deceased children. Described by the Times as ‘an old-timer,’ Ray Insalaco told the team not to read the notes that parents had written to their children. He mistakenly saw one. It read: ‘Thank God it’s Friday. Love, Mommy.’
One of his colleagues had to resist the urge to kick Lanza’s corpse, while a third who’d been hardened by years of horror looked like a ghost on seeing the carnage.
Walkley was the only one of the three who was part of the initial response team who stormed the school, gun drawn, prepared to kill the shooter as the other students fled for their lives.
This is the only unredacted photo of classroom eight at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where most of the bodies of those killed were found
Retired Connecticut State Police crime scene investigator Karoline Keith described the negative effects her job had on her mental health in the New York Times feature
Dan Sliby, a former US Marine sergeant, reportedly wanted to kick shooter Adam Lanza’s dead body after first entering the school after the shooting
Sergeant Jeff Covello is described in the piece as having spent time scrubbing victims’ jewelry of blood and debris before handing them over to family members
Covello said that Walkley, a former SWAT commando, looked ‘more of an apparition,’ adding that he’d never seen him look the way did after he left the school.
Covello is later described as spending time scrubbing victim’s jewelry of blood and debris before giving them back to the families. Something he was taught to do while working as a paramedic.
Another member of the team who was not interviewed, Dan Sliby, a former Marine Corps sergeant who was once a first grader in Sandy Hook, was barely being able to ‘refrain from kicking’ Adam Lanza’s corpse.
It was also Sliby who established that the white powder covering Lanza’s Bushmaster rifle was not chalk from where bullets had struck walls but rather ‘baked evaporated blood.’
In the piece, Karoline Keith, who retired from the state police in 2014, discussed the effect that her job as a crime scene investigator had on her mental health.
She had been struggling prior to the Sandy Hook massacre. At one point she said that even walking her dog in the woods was a task she would regularly mistake flesh colored rocks for dead bodies.
And there was further trauma to come after the Sandy Hook slaughter.
Keith discussed struggling when driving behind schools buses, especially when she could see children getting off.
Walkley had similar issues as he scoured through nearly 1,500 photos he took of the scene. On the Christmas Day following the shooting, he couldn’t be in the same room as his children as they opened their gifts.
‘He could not stop thinking about what the other parents had done with the presents they bought for their children,’ Kirk wrote in his feature.
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, 20, went to the elementary school in Newtown and killed 26 people. 20 of the victims were children between the ages of six and seven
The Bushmaster rifle used by Lanza in the massacre was encased with dried blood, investigators said
During the investigation, the team was told not to listen to the news because of the coverage of conspiracy theorists who said the shooting was a hoax
The team spoke being told not to read the notes that parents had left for the deceased children in their lunchboxes
Another haunting image of one of the classrooms at Sandy Hook. The school was demolished after the massacre to spare victims and their families the trauma of having to revisit it
Prior to the school massacre, Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother as she lay in her bed in their home
Weapons and ammunitions belonging to Lanza
Keith went on to describe a bizarre encounter in which she was introduced to a woman following a kick boxing class who claimed to be a veteran of the massacre.
The woman said she had been a trauma nurse at Connecticut’s Children’s Medical Center on the day of the shooting and that she had trouble getting the image of the children’s faces out of her head.
Keith immediately thought: ‘What faces?’
After contacting management at the hospital, she quickly learned that the woman was not a nurse. When confronted, she broke down in tears and confessed to working at a day care in addition to being a pathological liar.
Keith spoke about another encounter in which a detective asked her to retrieve one half of a heart pendant that a grandmother and given to her granddaughter.
The pendant was ‘only the size of a pinkie nail.’
Keith spent time scouring through photos for a sight of the necklace, then through the evidence room, then through the shrapnel of the bullet that killed the little girl, then through dried blood but heartbreakingly she was never able to locate it.
During the initial stages of the investigation, the CSI team was told by a superior office not to watch the news because of the prevalence of conspiracy theorists who were claiming that the shooting was a hoax.
The leader of that crusade, bombastic broadcaster Alex Jones, who at the time regularly ranted to his millions of followers that the shooting was a hoax, children weren’t killed and that parents were crisis actors in an elaborate ruse to force gun control.
In one bizarre incident, Keith, shown here, discussed being confronted by a woman who claimed to be a nurse who was haunted by the shooting, it was later revealed that the woman was a pathological liar
In August 2022, nearly 10 years after the massacre, Jones said under oath during a lawsuit that he now realized he was irresponsible and believes that what happened in the deadliest school shooting in American history was ‘100% real.’
Less than two months later, Jones was ordered to pay the victims’ families over $1 billion in damages by judges in Connecticut and Texas.
In February 2022, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle.
After Sandy Hook, there was frustration among many gun violence prevention advocates that nothing was being done to stop such massacres. The failure of a gun control bill in the months after Sandy Hook was another hard loss.
But U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said the shooting gave new energy to the movement, with numerous groups forming to demand action.
‘In the 10 years leading up to Sandy Hook, the gun lobby controlled Washington. Anything they wanted they got,’ said Murphy.
‘After Sandy Hook happened, we started building what I would describe as the modern anti-gun violence movement,’ he said.
‘During the next 10 years, there was essentially gridlock. The gun lobby no longer got what they wanted, but unfortunately in Washington we weren’t getting what we wanted either.’
DailyMail
