On December 14, 2012, a seemingly average school day at Sandy Hook Elementary came to an abrupt and terrifying end. Adam Lanza entered the school and shot and killed 20 kids between the ages of 6-7 and 6 faculty members.

One of the survivors was a South High graduate, Liesl Fressola. She was a teacher during the tragedy in Connecticut and recently won a Presidential award from the National Science Foundation. Now she teaches 5th grade in at Hanna Woods Elementary.

Fressola said at first everyone didn’t know what was going on, but once the grim reality dawned on them it became very scary. “I had never heard gunshots before.”

“That’s when we had to make a decision of how we were going to protect ourselves.”

Fressola was not with her class or in her classroom when the shooting began. In fact, she was in the school’s conference room.  
“We ended up not being able to lock the doors,” she said. “We fled the building and ran to the middle of town.”

While waiting in town, she said she was frightened for her students, but she could not get back to them until the police came to get her.

I asked her what she thought after the shooting. “A lot of times I tell people that the word unbelievable never meant so much to me until this happened,” she said.

What is totally unbelievable to Fressola is that she is even alive. “It was truly hard to comprehend that so many kids and teachers were killed that day,” Fressola said.

“I was so close and it could have been me had I been in a different spot or had the person turned a different direction.”

Fressola continued about her feelings after the incident.  She said it was very difficult in the beginning to take in everything that happened. The word unbelievable sums up so much for Fressola.

Fressola went on to say the incident was difficult to believe because of the raw emotion and disorientation she felt after the fact.

“It can be hard to do everyday things because you just have this general sense of confusion. You don’t feel safe anymore. So you just feel very unsafe and confused all the time,” she said.

She said the most unimaginable part of the incident was not only the loss of the children but of her best friend and teaching partner, Victoria Soto.

Of Soto, Fressola said, “She loved teaching. She loved her kids. She was just a really funny person and very lighthearted.” Victoria Soto spent her last moments trying to save her first-grade students. When the attacker came she hid her kids in the closets and told him the kids were elsewhere, the gun was turned on her but the children were saved.

Vickie Soto, Fressola said, was “her best friend in the school.” She loved life and she enjoyed being a teacher.

“One of her favorite things was flamingos, so one way we keep her memory alive is to have lots of flamingo everywhere.”

Fressola’s classroom is decorated with those symbolic pink birds. Her parents have flamingoes in their yard also to honor Soto.

She said tells her students how safe they are and that adults know how to keep them safe and what to do in an unsafe situation.

She also said that since the incident she has purposefully not participated in lockdown drills.

“It’s really traumatic to imagine being in that situation again. There’s a lot of anxiety, so I make sure I know the intruder plan, but I don’t practice the drills,” she said.

This year, however, Fressola said she’d begin participating in lockdowns again. She said it had been important for her to take some time before being in another drill. Fressola said that even at Sandy Hook Elementary they had to wait awhile before they continued having drills.

“It was a slow process of bringing things like that back because you are kind of retraumatizing people if you’ve already been through the actual thing,” she said.