They Saw the Horrific Aftermath of a Mass Shooting. Should We?

Sitting with Karoline was Sam DiPasquale. As a special-agent bomb tech for the F.B.I., stationed in New Haven, Sam first responded to the shooter’s home on Yogananda Street to check for explosives. After he finished there, after running the robot down the hallway to the mother’s bedroom, where she lay shot dead, he went to the school to see if there was anything he could do to help Jeff. They had known each other forever, having met at co-agency explosives and post-blast training sessions. Jeff’s team helped the New Haven office on several occasions. Sam even had them deputized at one point for a domestic-terrorism case. He would now assist them, making sure they had gas for their generators, making sure their team was fed every day, helping secure unusual equipment. He helped put plywood boards up over the windows in the two classrooms, mostly to protect patrol cops securing the perimeter from the impulse to look. In fact, most of his job was fending off all the captains, and majors, and state’s attorneys, and assistant attorneys general, from trying to see what he had to tell them over and over again they would not be able to unsee.

After 9/11, Sam was embedded with the Navy in Iraq, as part of the bureau’s largely unadvertised C.E.X.C. (Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell), deployed to suicide bombings to collect DNA for its database of bomb makers. He had picked limbs from trees. Defused homemade explosives. But the worst thing he’d ever seen was the inside of an elementary school in Connecticut.

Jeff decided that he and Sam would be the only two permitted to have phones inside, in order to limit photographs. They were the first ones there in the morning, and the last to leave at night. When Sam heard the attorney general was going to be visiting Newtown — a few days after President Obama spoke at a vigil at the local high school — he called an F.B.I. buddy he knew would be tasked with the security detail. He said that if possible, the school should be on his itinerary.

Jeff immediately seized on the idea. Sam had found him at one of the decon stations cleaning jewelry. It was something Jeff learned to do from the nurses at Bristol Hospital a million years ago when he was a paramedic. How to clean a piece of jewelry before returning it to the family. It was certainly nothing he learned at the police academy. But being able to perform such a task now, however much of it, was almost soothing after multiple days processing evidence in the tent that was set up initially as the temporary morgue.

Maintaining purpose did not come easily the last seven days and nights. But this was their chance to show the right person what they had seen. And so Sam set about securing everything Jeff said he’d need for the visit. Starting with a giant TV.

‘We’re going to do this the same way we always do it. We’re just going to do it 26 times.’

After the horrifying PowerPoint slide show, Karoline took Holder and his devastated chief of staff on a walk through the school, holding back the tarp that had concealed the aftermath of where Principal Hochsprung and the school psychologist were shot after running out from a meeting. In the conference room, across from Classroom 8, were 26 banker’s boxes containing each victim’s personal belongings. An old-timer from the van, Ray Insalaco, came in to help box up the desks. It had fallen to him to empty the 20 lunchboxes. His advice to the small crew he brought in: Don’t read the notes. He had already made the mistake when one fluttered out as he was dumping an uneaten lunch into the trash.

Thank God it’s Friday. Love, Mommy.

The A.G. and his chief of staff stood looking dumbly at the plain white boxes, each of the children’s bearing a purple-and-green butterfly name sticker that had come off their backpack hooks, until Karoline guided them into Classroom 10. A numbered evidence tag marked where each small body was removed from the defiled carpet. Larger stains divulged where the two teachers fell. This was the same room where Dan Sliby, on their initial walk-through, found himself raging near the body of the shooter. Decades earlier, he was a first-grader in this very room. Pacing around the corpse, he could barely refrain from kicking it in the chest.

By a cluster of desks was the Bushmaster. Its barrel and muzzle brake were coated in a film of white powder. A less experienced observer might have thought that it was concrete dust from bullets hitting the walls. But Dan was sure, from his time in the Marines, that the chalky residue was baked evaporated blood.

Karoline then steered the attorney general, his stride no longer so firm, into Classroom 8. The room where, days before, their resolve wavered. Where they momentarily lost and regained their sense of purpose. Where they all stood in silent disbelief, a light drizzle on the window ticking off each annihilating second, staring into the tiny bathroom. Where the children were packed in so tightly that the inward-hinged door could not be shut all the way. Where Art, who had seen what he had thought must have been every possible reconfiguration of the human body, did not even understand what he was looking at. And where Karoline found herself doing something that came naturally: holding up an imaginary rifle, pointing it into the bathroom, registering the casings on the carpet to her right where the ejection port would have sent them and noting automatically that this was obviously where the shooter would have been standing when he fired the Bushmaster. It was when she felt Jeff looking at her that she dropped the imaginary gun and left the room.

She went to the next classroom over, which had been spared. She needed a minute to collect herself. Steve Rupsis followed, struggling to keep his head focused on forensics. He kept asking her what he should do. How should I video this, KK? How should I get the overall shot? Should I sketch the lobby and the classrooms separately? Are we going to sketch? Do you want me to sketch? He was spiraling. She told him what she needed was a minute. He backed away.

That was when Jeff, his face tear-stained, gave them the purpose that they would desperately need to get through the next week.

“Look,” he said, “we’re going to do this the same way we always do it. We’re just going to do it 26 times.” Same thing as always, 26 times. It became like a mantra. We’re going to do what we always do. Same procedures. Same four overall photos of each room. Same medium shots. Same untold number of close-ups to memorialize every minuscule aspect of the work. They would set up staging tables in the tent for mass processing of the evidence, nothing they’d ever done at this scale. With eight tables it went like an assembly line. Each item photographed against a neutral backdrop. They had a 20-pound roll of butcher paper on the truck just for this purpose. One clean sheet, with a glove change in between, for each item, each piece of clothing. Each small shirt. Each elfin dress. Each backpack. Each barrette. Charm bracelet. Wedding ring. Each bloodied shoe. Same thing as always, 26 times.

Jeff reminded them that something like destiny, however grim and profoundly unwanted, had been laid at their feet. That the country, the world, would come looking for answers was not a question. And if anyone was going to provide the answers, at least to what had happened in these rooms, it would be up to them, but only if they kept their heads. This clarity of purpose was what allowed them to move ahead that day, and to continue on, working 12 and 16 hours, only stopping to get in their cars long enough to drive past the procession of garrisoned media trucks and excruciating makeshift memorials, cairns of teddy bears and stuffed hearts, to sleep a few hours before returning the next morning.

From the very first, they faced resistance. No sooner had they secured the crime scene than the chief medical examiner showed up, plopped down at one of the teacher’s desks and began telling Jeff’s team not to waste time taking photographs. They did not need to be so overzealous.

Because the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had jurisdiction over all bodies in the state of Connecticut, Jeff’s team was not permitted to move or touch a body until the M.E. first signed off. Normally the crime scene unit obtained permission over the phone, or from a representative on site. They knew the M.E. well enough, from various aspects of death investigations, but Karoline recalled only ever seeing him once at a crime scene in her 13 years on the van. Now here he was, barking unsolicited advice, sitting at the desk of a teacher who still lay on the floor near another teacher with a child’s body in her arms. They all knew what happened here, he said, everyone knew it wasn’t going to go to court, at least not criminal, so his own photographers could take all the necessary pictures once they got the bodies to autopsy. The main priority, he insisted, was getting the bodies back to the families. The governor needed to make a statement.

The need to return the bodies to the families as quickly as possible was obviously more than understandable. But not to conduct a full investigation, not to take photos, was unthinkable. And who the hell knew yet if there was even an accomplice? Who knew anything yet? To cut corners, to not document every centimeter of the scene while it was intact, would itself be criminal: a failure that would only leave the families with unanswerable questions. Their own work told a story that no longer existed on the medical examiner’s metal table.

At 8:35 p.m., the bodies were removed and taken to the O.C.M.E., and the governor informed the parents.

The crew worked on. They were interrupted again and again. One day it was the F.B.I. unit that worked on profiles of shooters and serial killers. Other times it was people they felt had no business being there, enough that they began referring to them as the dog and pony shows. A high-ranking official from the L.A.P.D. showed up out of nowhere wanting a special walk-through. Various brass with various justifications. The problem was that during these interruptions it was not as if they could just step outside for a break. The problem was being forced to stop, but never long enough to go through the tedious steps of decon, the process of changing out of their Tyvek, bootees, hairnets, gloves, having to completely re-suit, and so they ended up just standing around, noticing all the little things they had been trying not to notice. Pokémon cards and Little Mermaid this and that, stuff their own kids had at home. The Christmas projects the children had been working on for their parents. The drawings of stick-figure families huddled on the couch reading. The cups of milk still on the children’s desks along with crayons and scissors and sheets of stiff-bright construction paper: the last thing they would get to do in this life before the strange man with yellow plugs in his ears and a loud gun entered.