Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, was a normal day for Natalie Hammond. She was planning for her daughter’s birthday party that evening after work.
At about 9:30 a.m., her plans and her life changed forever.
Natalie was in a planning session in a room just inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when they heard a crash. Hammond said she thought it might have been a glass display case containing students’ art that had fallen over.
Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach led the way into the hallway followed by Hammond.
Lanza killed both Hochsprung and Sherlach. Hammond was hit first in the leg and then sustained another gunshot wound.
“I was only a second behind them,” she said Thursday at the second Clarion University Safe School Summit.
She said she “played dead” until Lanza moved past her. She said she lay in the hallway until she realized she was a target. She crawled back to the conference room and pressed her body against the door to keep it closed.
The eight other teachers in the conference room had taken shelter behind desks. That was when Hammond realized a flaw in their safe haven. The doors in the school could only be locked from the outside and the doors had large windows in them.
Hammond said she lay in the room for what seemed like hours but was only a few minutes.
She said a friend who was a police officer found her but could not help because the building had not been cleared. “He told me later that leaving me was the hardest thing he had ever done,” she said. “To me his words, “I’ll be right back” was the best thing I had ever heard. “You need to be aware o other people’s perspective,” she said.
Hammond said many of the school staff didn’t know the police officers.
“They were men with guns going down our hallways,” she said. She suggested the school meet with law enforcement and government officials on a regular basis to form a plan.
Hammond showed a slide of the exterior of the school with a blue chair sitting next to the curb. “That is my chair. The police officers rolled me out on it,” she said.
She said that no ambulance was available so she was loaded into the front seat of a police car. “I brushed his computer with my left arm and apologized to the officer for getting it dirty,” she said.
She saw the driveway to the school choked with vehicles. “These were parents who had heard about the shooting and had come to the school to get their children,” she said. “We had an evacuation plan but not a reunification plan.”
“We had made plans but two of our leaders were out of action and I was the third,” she said. “When you make your plans you need to make different people in charge and alter your drill because no two emergencies are the same.”
She said she was placed in the front of an ambulance with a young boy in the back. “I kept telling him I was there for him,” she said. “He didn’t make it.”
Hammond said the hospital had heightened security. “There were snipers on the roof and armed security at the entrance,” she said. “They didn’t know what was happening.”
What had happened was one of the worst school shootings in the nation’s history. School began at Sandy Hook at 9:30 a.m. and the first call to the Newtown police arrived at 9:35 a.m. The police arrived at 9:39 a.m. and five minutes later in was all over. Lanza committed suicide but before he took his own life he had murdered 20 children and six adults.
“I am a member of a club no one wants to belong to,” she said. The club is composed of survivors from other mass shootings or the families of the victims.
Hammond said she had to find a purpose in her life. Her purpose was “Safe and Sound Schools.”
“We need to re-think school safety,” she said. “It is not just hardening the building.”
She said the elements that need to be considered include mental and behavioral health, health and wellness, the physical environment, the culture and climate of the community, school law policy and operations and emergency management.
She urged the school officials not to just development a plan A and B but a plan C, D and E.
“You need to be certain everyone knows the plan,” she said. “The substitute teachers, the janitors, everyone needs to know the plan,” she said.
“You also need to have regular conversations with your community resources,” she said.
“You need to find out what works for you,” said Hammond.
Hammond taught third grade at Sandy Hook for 13 years before becoming the lead teacher in the building. She now serves as principal in a preK-4 elementary school in Connecticut.