Mike Segar/Reuters
A couple embraced at a memorial for the victims near the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Sunday.
NEWTOWN, Conn. — Seeking solace amid overwhelming grief, residents of Newtown flocked to church services and vigils on Sunday, struggling to comprehend a tragedy that left so many children dead.
“How do we rejoice in the face of so much sorrow?” the Rev. Peter Cameron asked from the pulpit of the Saint Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, which was filled with parishioners, including the husband of a teacher killed in the shooting.
It is a question that has been asked repeatedly in the two days since a gunman forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and then sprayed classrooms with bullets, hitting some children as many as 11 times.
All the children killed in the massacre — 12 girls and 8 boys — were first graders. One girl had just turned 7 on Tuesday. The seven adults killed, including the mother of the shooter, were all women.
The state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, said all of the 20 children and 6 adults killed at the school had been struck more than once.
He said their wounds were “all over, all over.”
“This is a very devastating set of injuries,” Dr. Carver said at a news briefing on Saturday. When he was asked if they had suffered after being hit, he said, “Not for very long.”
President Obama is expected to arrive in Newtown later on Sunday to meet with the families of victims and to join in the mourning at an evening vigil, the White House announced.
Condolences have been pouring in from around the world. In Moscow, Russians piled flowers outside the American Embassy. And on a beach in Rio de Janeiro, crosses were placed in the sand to honor the dead. At the Vatican on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his sorrow and said he was praying for the families of victims.
As families have begun to claim the bodies of lost loved ones, some have sought privacy. Others have spoken out. Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was among the dead, choked back tears as he described her as “bright, creative and very loving.”
But, he added, “as we move on from what happened here, what happened to so many people, let us not let it turn into something that defines us.”
Amid the anguish and mourning, other details have begun to emerge about how, but not why, the devastating attack had happened, turning a place where children were supposed to be safe into a national symbol of heartbreak and horror.
The Newtown school superintendent said on Saturday that the principal and the school psychologist had been shot as they tried to tackle the gunman in order to protect their students.
That was just one act of bravery during the maelstrom. There were others, said the superintendent, Janet Robinson. She said one teacher had helped children escape through a window. Another shoved students into a room with a kiln and held them there until the danger had passed.
It was not enough: First responders described a scene of carnage in the two classrooms where the children were killed, with no movement and no one left to save, everything perfectly still.
The gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, 20, had grown up in Newtown and had an uncle who had been a police officer in New Hampshire. The uncle, James M. Champion, issued a statement expressing “heartfelt sorrow,” adding that the family was struggling “to comprehend the tremendous loss we all share.”
A spokesman for the Connecticut State Police, Lt. J. Paul Vance, said investigators continued to press for information about Mr. Lanza, and had collected “some very good evidence.” He also said that the one survivor of the shootings, a woman who was wounded at the school, would be “instrumental” in piecing together what had happened.
But it was unclear why Mr. Lanza had gone on the attack. A law enforcement official said investigators had not found a suicide note or messages that spoke to the planning of such a deadly attack. And Ms. Robinson, the school superintendent, said they had found no connection between Mr. Lanza’s mother and the school, in contrast to accounts from the authorities on Friday that said she had worked there.
A Sunday of Sorrow in Newtown
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A Sunday of Sorrow in Newtown
