10 Years After Sandy Hook, This Hero Student’s Mother Is Still Fighting for Change
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On the 10th anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we are left with an elemental lesson in how to live taught by 6-year-old Jesse Lewis in his final moments.
The gunman had murdered the principal and a guidance counselor in the hallway of the Newtown, Connecticut, school before bursting into Jesse’s classroom, firing an assault rifle. Jesse’s teacher, Virginia Soto, had just been gunned down in front of him when the gunman paused to reload.
Jesse could have used the ensuing few seconds to dash to safety and save himself. He instead called to some classmates who were standing off to the side, holding hands.
“Run!” he told them.
In the next instant, Jesse was killed. But nine other youngsters escaped the classroom alive. Six of them, four boys and two girls, ended up outside a yellow frame house nearby that had been built in 1746—30 years before the Declaration of Independence and 45 years before the ratification of the Second Amendment. The house was now home to a retired psychologist named Gene Rosen.
“We can’t go back to school,” one of the boys told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.”
Rosen brought them inside and took out some stuffed animals he kept for his grandchildren and began calling parents. One little girl sat clutching a toy dog, silently staring out a window until her mother came.
Another woman appeared at the front door with a face that Rosen would later describe as frozen in terror. She was Scarlett Lewis and she had been told that her son, Jesse, was there. The six who had shown up at Rosen’s driveway had all been claimed. Rosen told her that her son may have been among the children who had gone to a daycare center across the street. She hurried there.
“I initially thought Jesse was alive,” she told the Daily Beast Tuesday.
Scarlett Lewis and her son Jesse. After he was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting Jesse's story was featured on the front page of the NY Daily News.
Jesse was also not at the daycare center. Scarlett returned to the volunteer firehouse-turned-family center, where she had been told that Jesse was at the yellow house. She then could do nothing but wait with Jesse’s father, Neil Heslin, along with the families of 19 other missing children and six adults.
“We were there until about 4:00 p.m. and that’s when we were told that Jesse had died,” she recalled.
Over the next few days, Scarlett stayed away from the small farmhouse where she had been raising Jesse and his older brother JT.
“I thought I could never go back home again because I didn’t want to walk in the door and see Jessie’s boots or his toothbrush or his little PJs that he’d thrown off as he was getting ready for school that morning,” she recalled. “But I did want to pick his clothes for the casket.”
Only at the approach of the funeral did she return home and enter Jesse’s room. She was emerging with his final outfit—a sweater, a turtleneck and flannel lined jeans—when she saw for the first time something he had written with white chalk on a green blackboard affixed to the end of the stove. The lettering had the exuberance of a child who was just learning how to write. The spelling was phonetic.
“NORTURTING HELINN LOVE.”
The mother had no trouble deciphering a message that has stayed with her through a decade that could have been ruled by anger and despair.
“NURTURING HEALING LOVE,” she recalled. “It was just like the solution was downloaded to me right then and there. My breath was taken away. This is it.”
She understood that her tiny hero’s monumental courage in those final instants could only have sprung from LOVE for others. And when joined with NURTURING, it could be HEALING.
“Jesse’s message of nurturing, healing love, it really guided me on how I responded,” she recalled. “I did not want to be fighting against something… I just don’t wanna live my life that way. I want to be for the most important element in the universe that connects us all. I want to be for love.”
She added, “It was so simple, from a 6-year-old. It’s the message that I spread every day. I realized I had to get it into schools and parents and communities.”
Scarlett found this chalkboard message her son wrote that says Nurturing, Healing, Love before he was killed. She started the Choose Love movement in his honor.
Three years after the shooting she launched the Choose Love Movement, a nonprofit, all-volunteer effort to foster character, emotional and social development for those of all ages. She has now taken Jesse’s message in person and online to 3 million children at 10,500 schools in 120 countries.
“Our mission is to create awareness in our children and our communities that we can choose love over anger, gratitude over entitlement, and forgiveness and compassion over bitterness,” the Choose Love website explains. “Our goal is to create a more peaceful and loving world through planting these seeds of wisdom. We are currently developing a compassion- and wisdom-based curriculum to introduce into our schools and communities – inspirational and educational programs that will incorporate this empowering message and also highlight unforgettable stories of young people (including genocide survivors) who have overcome extreme hardship through choosing love over anger.”
The essential formula is simple enough to chalk on a grammar school blackboard.
“Courage + Gratitude + Forgiveness + Compassion in Action = Choosing Love”
The first thing the program teaches is the importance of courage.
“It’s modeled after Jesse’s courage because we all have the capacity for the courage that Jesse showed,” she said. ‘But courage is like a muscle. We can practice it to get stronger.”
She noted that it comes in many forms.
“The courage to be with someone who’s grieving,” she said. “The courage to be kind when someone’s not being kind to you. The courage to do the right thing, not just the easy thing. The courage to expand your friend group. The courage to tell the truth. The courage to forgive when the person who hurts you isn't sorry. The courage to step outside of your own busyness and pain to help other people. So many ways every single day that we need to have courage, but we need to be aware of it. And we need a great example, which is Jesse.”
As one mass shooting followed another, it has seemed to many of us as if nothing can stop the violence.
“I think that we just think that there’s nothing that we can do, so we feel helpless, which leads to hopelessness.,” she said. “And I want people to know that there is a solution, but that it’s gonna require positive action from them.”
She is all for making the schools safer—but believes that billions of dollars in physical security will not make them truly secure until we address the root causes of violence, including mental illness and substance abuse. She wonders if the Sandy Hook shooter might never have taken up a gun if he had received love and nurturing such as Jesse described in his message.
"Choosing Love—A Pathway to Flourishing" is a children’s book written by Scarlett Lewis.
She sees cause for hope when she asks kids who participate in the program to name their favorite element of the formula. The great majority give an answer she would not have expected.
“Forgiveness,” she reports. “When I ask them why, they say, ‘Because it feels so good to let it go… It feels like it’s a ‘superpower.’”
As we come to the 10th anniversary of the murder of 20 elementary school kids at Sandy Hook, Scarlett knows when she speaks in front to an audience that cynics scoff at her talk of love and nurturing and forgiveness and in a world fresh off the murder of 19 elementary school kids in Uvalde.
“Hey, I know we all wanna keep our kids safe and safeguard their mental health and well-being,” she will tell them. “If anybody else has a better idea, raise their hand.”
She will then add, “I’m not married to this idea. My 6-year-old son is the one that gave me this idea.”
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