It was a year ago Saturday when a madman slaughtered 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School — but for the grieving families it feels like no time has passed.
“We still have the loss, the emptiness,” heartbroken dad, Neil Heslin, told The Post of his son Jessie Lewis, 6, who was gunned down by Adam Lanza last Dec. 14.
A year has healed nothing, Heslin and other parents say.
“I don’t think next week is going to be any easier. Every day is a struggle,” Heslin, a 52-year-old construction worker, said.
“I miss him as much today as I did the day after it happened — but missing him hurts more now,” said the divorced dad, who still can’t bring himself to take down the artificial Christmas tree his adorable first-grader had helped him set up in his Newtown living room that Thanksgiving.
“It seems more real that he’s not coming back,” the dad said. “That physically, he’s not here. And he never will be.”
The trauma has been so hard on Sandy Hook teacher Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, that she has yet to return to teaching — instead devoting time to Classes4Classes, a schools charity.
“I remember, in the days after, it was so hard to get out of bed,” said Roig-DeBellis, who barricaded herself and 15 first-graders in a 3-by-4-foot bathroom to hide from the deafening gunfire.
Children climbed atop the toilet, or cowered behind it. One perched on the toilet paper dispenser, she remembered.
“They were hearing exactly what I was hearing. It was extremely loud,” Roig-DeBellis recalled. “It was extremely scary.”
All of her children survived, and the brave woman is contemplating returning to teaching this summer. But for those whose children are gone, the anniversary marks little progress.
“It’s another passage of time; it doesn’t change anything,” Nicole Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, said of today’s anniversary.
“It feels so many times like he’s still just there around the corner,” Hockley told NBC’s “Today” show of her adorable boy.
“You know, and I can see him where he should be in the house. And so to think that it’s almost a year since I’ve held him, it’s no time at all.”
For the town at large, Dec. 14 brings an unwelcome flood of attention, residents say. Gun control and gun rights groups have referenced the anniversary; the streets are again trolled by news trucks.
Earlier this week, the town posted signs reading, “No Media — Police Take Notice.”
Town officials have promised that police will make good on that warning, and will stop satellite trucks from jamming the streets, camping in store parking lots or cluttering town property.
“Respect our need to be alone,” Newtown First Selectman Patricia Llodra said Thursday, promising news vehicles will be asked to move along.
No large public commemorations are planned in the town today. Instead, residents are launching a commemorative campaign called “A Year of Service,” in which they will strive to commit acts of kindness for each other and beyond.
“We committed ourselves to not allow this terrible event and subsequent fear, anger and bitterness to define us,” local psychiatrist Dr. John Woodall wrote in a column in the Newtown Bee.
“We committed ourselves,” he wrote, “to let compassion and kindness rule our lives.”