The Connecticut town shattered by Friday’s school massacre has held its first funerals for the young victims of the tragedy.
Family, friends and townspeople streamed to two funeral homes to say goodbye to Jack Pinto and Noah Pozner.
At Noah’s service, well-wishers placed two teddy bears, a bouquet of white flowers and a red rose at the base of an old maple tree.
Noah’s twin sister, Arielle, who was assigned to a different classroom, survived.
Hymns rang out from inside the funeral home where Jack’s service was being held.
“The message was: You’re secure now. The worst is over,” one mourner, Gwendolyn Glover, said.
The boys were being buried a day after the small community of Newtown, already stripping itself of Christmas decorations, came together for a vigil where President Barack Obama said he will use “whatever power” he has to prevent similar massacres.
“What choice do we have?” he said. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”
Investigators have offered no motive for the shooting, and the Connecticut community struggled to comprehend what drove 20-year-old Adam Lanza to shoot dead his mother at home in bed on Friday morning, drive her car to the school and open fire on six adults and 20 children who were six and seven years old.
At both funeral homes, people wrestled with the same questions as the rest of the US what steps could and should be taken to prevent anything like the massacre from happening again.
“If people want to go hunting, a single-shot rifle does the job, and that does the job to protect your home, too. If you need more than that, I don’t know what to say,” Ray DiStephan said outside Noah’s funeral.
He added: “I don’t want to see my kids go to schools that become maximum-security fortresses. That’s not the world I want to live in, and that’s not the world I want to raise them in.”