NASHUA – Every detail of Friday’s unfathomable school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., is staggering.
For Bailey Carroll, 8, of Nashua, who attends third grade more than 150 miles away from the scene of the shooting, it was the numbers.
Though Bailey’s father, William Carroll, tried to shield her from the horrific news Friday, she discovered what happened when she logged on to the family’s computer when she got home from Presentation of Mary Academy that afternoon, he said.
What struck her was the more than two dozen people ripped away from Newtown’s quiet school community – 20 of them children between the ages of 5 and 10 – he said.
“It goes right to MSN.com – it has the breaking news stories,” Carroll said of the family computer. “It said ‘20 kids dead.’ It was hard to explain to her. It’s hard to explain to any 8-year-old.”
Carroll is one of hundreds of parents around the country who face the impossible task this weekend of communicating that sometimes, nightmares can happen in real life.
“I explained that the kids were 5-10 years old, so these were kids your age,” Carroll said. “She was a little taken back by that.
But it was another detail Bailey noticed that opened up an opportunity to begin healing, William Carroll said.
“I think she saw people holding candles up, some presentations of candles lined up,” Carroll said.![]()
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