Police officers comfort one another outside the funeral service for 6-year-old Noah Pozner today. (AP)
Students embrace while wearing Newtown school shirts outside the funeral for Jack Pinto, 6. (AP)
A woman and a child pray over candles outside Saint Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church a day after a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut Saturday. (REUTERS)
Six-year-old Jack Pinto loved the New York Giants so much, his heartbroken parents buried him this afternoon in the tyke’s favorite football jersey, No. 80, for his hero, star wide receiver Victor Cruz.
Tears and immeasurable sorrow filled the Honan Funeral Home as family and friends of the slain Sandy Hook Elementary School student said their final goodbyes to the little boy killed in Friday’s massacre, in which 19 of his classmates died along with six educators.
“The children had it together [in the service], it was the parents who were losing it,” a family friend said after the funeral.
“The children were pretty resilient, they really don’t understand what’s going on.’’
Pinto held stuffed whales and rosary beads in his open, pure-white casket.
“All of us were asking `Where was God when this happens?’ ” the Rev. Rob Morris, of Christ The King Lutheran Church said in his eulogy. “God was with Jack.”
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Wally, a family friend and dad of Jack’s best pal J.J., fondly remembered how the two boys ran around his house “like two wild animals.”
Jack could not be separated from J.J.
“When you’d ask Jack do you want a hot dog, it’d be `Is J.J. having a hot dog?’ Would you like to go swimming Jack would be , `Is J.J. going swimming?’ ” the friend’s dad said
“Jack is a model for all of us, young and old.”
Also buried yesterday was fellow 6-year-old Noah Pozner, whose twin was in another classroom at the time of the attack and survived.
His sobbing mother gave a eulogy for her beloved little boy, who she called, “my little man.”
His uncle, Alexis Haller, told mourners, “If Noah had not been taken from us, he would have become a great man. He would been a wonderful husband and a loving father.”
At both funeral homes, people wrestled with the same questions as the rest of the country — what steps could and should be taken to prevent anything like the massacre from happening again.
“If people want to go hunting, a single-shot rifle does the job, and that does the job to protect your home, too. If you need more than that, I don’t know what to say,” Ray DiStephan said outside Noah’s funeral.
He added: “I don’t want to see my kids go to schools that become maximum-security fortresses. That’s not the world I want to live in, and that’s not the world I want to raise them in.”
With more funerals planned this week, the road ahead for Newtown, which had already started purging itself of Christmas decorations in a joyful season turned mournful, was clouded.
“I feel like we have to get back to normal, but I don’t know if there is normal anymore,” said Kim Camputo, mother of two children, 5 and 10, who attend a different school. “I’ll definitely be dropping them off and picking them up myself for a while.”
With Sandy Creek Elementary still designated a crime scene, State police Lt. Paul Vance said that it could be months before police turn the school back over to the district. The people of Newtown, consumed by loss, were not ready to address its future.
“We’re just now getting ready to talk to our son about who was killed,” said Robert Licata, the father of a student who escaped harm during the shooting. “He’s not even there yet.”
Classes were canceled Monday, and Newtown’s other schools were to reopen Tuesday. The district made plans to send surviving Sandy Hook students to a former middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe.
Sandy Hook desks are being taken to the Chalk Hill school in Monroe, empty since town schools consolidated last year, and tradesmen are donating their services to get the school ready within a matter of days.
“These are innocent children that need to be put on the right path again,” Monroe police Lt. Brian McCauley said.
On Sunday, President Obama pledged to seek change in memory of the 20 children and six adults slain Friday by a gunman packing a high-powered rifle. The president slowly recited the first names of the children.
“What choice do we have?” he said. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”
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Authorities said Sunday that Lanza was carrying an arsenal of hundreds of rounds of especially deadly ammunition, enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time. Lanza decided to kill himself when he heard police closing in about 10 minutes into the attack, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Sunday on ABC.
Across the country Monday morning, vigilance was high. In an effort to ensure student safety and calm parents’ nerves, school systems asked police departments to increase patrols and sent messages to parents outlining safety plans they said are regularly reviewed and rehearsed.
Teachers girded themselves to be strong for their students and for questions and fears they would face in the classroom.
“It’s going to be a tough day,” said Richard Cantlupe, an American history teacher at Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Fla. “This was like our 9/11 for schoolteachers.”
Communities were on edge. In nearby Ridgefield, Conn., schools were locked down after a suspicious person was seen near a train station.
Authorities say the gunman shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, at their home and then took her car and several of her guns to the school, where he broke in and shot his victims to death, then himself. A Connecticut official said the mother — a gun enthusiast who practiced at shooting ranges — was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
Lanza was wearing all black, with an olive utility vest, during the attack.
Investigators have offered no motive, and police have found no letters or diaries that could shed light on it. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators were reviewing the contents of Lanza’s computer, as well as phone and credit card records. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the case.
Divorce paperwork released Monday showed that Nancy Lanza had the authority to make all decisions regarding Adam’s upbringing. The divorce was finalized in September 2009, when Adam Lanza was 17.
Federal agents have concluded that Lanza visited an area shooting range, but they do not know whether he practiced shooting there.
Lanza took classes at Western Connecticut State University when he was 16, and earned a B average, said Paul Steinmetz, spokesman for the school in Danbury. He said Monday that Lanza took his last class in the summer of 2009.
Lanza is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle in the school attack, a civilian version of the military’s M-16 and a model commonly seen at marksmanship competitions. It’s similar to the weapon used in a recent shopping mall shooting in Oregon.
Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the US under the 1994 assault weapons ban. That law expired in 2004, and Congress, in a nod to the political clout of the gun-rights lobby, did not renew it.
In some of the first regulatory proposals to rise out of the Newtown shooting, Democratic lawmakers and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday that military-style assault weapons should be banned and that a national commission should be established to examine mass shootings.
“Assault weapons were developed for the US military, not commercial gun manufacturers,” said Lieberman, of Connecticut, who is retiring next month. “This is a moment to start a very serious national conversation about violence in our society, particularly about these acts of mass violence.”
Gun rights activists remained largely quiet, all but one declining to appear on the Sunday talk shows. In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, defended the sale of assault weapons and said that the principal at Sandy Hook, who authorities say died trying to overpower the shooter, should herself have been armed.
With AP and additional reporting by David K. Li in New York