“If I can’t stay optimistic I need to quit and find something else to do. The effort was launched after the Newtown attack by Hensel and her husband, Jeremy Richman, who died by suicide in 2019.
It’s brutal because it triggers some of the darkest memories we have,” said Vogl, executive director at the National Mental Health Innovation Center in Colorado, where the program is based.
Like the Newtown gunman, the attacker in Texas was a young man who shot an older family member he lived with before opening fire with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle inside a nearby elementary school, slaughtering small and defenseless children.Īs details of Tuesday’s shooting emerged, Matt Vogl was texting with Jennifer Hensel, whose daughter Avielle was killed in Newtown, and others involved in an advocacy effort named in the girl’s honor, the Avielle Initiative, which promotes efforts to make mental health care more widely available through technology. The 18-year-old gunman who slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school barricaded himself inside a single classroom and “began shooting anyone that was in his way,” authorities said Wednesday in detailing the latest mass killing to rock the U.S. Police and members of the Brooke Army Medical Center Therapy Dogs unit gather outside of the Civic Center in Uvalde, Texas, Wednesday, May 25, 2022. The attack in Uvalde has tested their resolve like no other. In the decade since 20 children and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, some of their loved ones who channeled grief into advocacy have claimed success, gradually, in areas including gun safety, attitudes around gun violence, and mental health awareness. We’re just literally transported back in time,” said Gay, co-founder of the nonprofit Safe and Sound Schools. “This one has been particularly devastating for me, for my family, for our community, Sandy Hook. It was all the more saddening in light of the work she has invested in the years since to promote school safety. (AP) - As the mother of a girl killed at Sandy Hook, Michele Gay was devastated by the massacre at a Texas elementary school, with its aching parallels to the 2012 attack in Connecticut.