The morning of December 14, 2012 was clear, with a temperature in the mid 30’s. Gene left his home shortly after 9:30am, to feed his cats and then planned to head off to a local diner for breakfast. While walking to his separate garage/loft, he heard the sound of gunshots in the area. The area, being semi-rural, Gene wrote off the shots, which he described as staccato, as being attributed to an obnoxious hunter.
About the same time, less than an eighth of a mile from Gene’s house, Barbara Sibley, a mother of an 8 year old third grade student at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, was turning her car onto Dickenson Drive from Riverside Road. Her child had forgotten something that morning, and she was delivering it to them. After getting on to Dickenson Drive, Barbara observed a group of eight to ten children running down the drive from the school which was a few hundred feet further up the road. It was actually nine. But we will get to that later.
Gene Rosen had just finished feeding his cats about this time and was exiting his second story loft over the garage. It was then he observed a group of six children, four girls and 2 boys sitting on the grass in a semi-circle at the foot of his driveway. An adult female was standing over them. Gene also reported hearing a harsh sounding man in the roadway nearby shouting that everything was going to be alright.
As the story goes, Rosen learned from the female school bus driver that there had been an incident at the school. He invited the group into his home, where he offered them juice and snacks. He also brought down stuffed animals, that belonged to his eight year old grandson, from the attic, to entertain the children. Gene and the bus driver spent about 30 minutes trying to ascertain the telephone numbers of the parents. One child told Gene that they could not go back to school as their teacher, Ms. Soto was dead. It has never be fully determined if some of the parents did pick up the children at Gene’s house, or if he and the bus driver brought them all to the firehouse next door. Anyway, it has been found, via News 12 helicopter video footage, that Gene was indeed at the firehouse, at least from about 10:40am on, that day. So the statement that the children were at Gene’s home for about 30 minutes is more or less true. Not hours, as reported in the media. However, by lunchtime, Gene must have been back home, as he received a visit from Scarlett Lewis, mother of Jesse Lewis, looking for her son, and telling Gene she heard he had taken some children in. He told Ms. Lewis that he had brought the children to the firehouse next door, but her boy was not among them.
In the days that followed, Gene appeared in dozens of television interviews as the elderly emotional man, weeping openly, as he described how he took the terrified children into his home. He will forever be remembered around the world, for the part he played that day in the Sandy Hook school shooting.
In the weeks that followed, Gene among others began to get targeted by a group known as the Sandy Hook Truthers. Theories abounded as to Gene being an actor, working for FEMA, to outlandish stories about dead children being found in Gene’s basement, that went viral on the internet. Gene, fearing for his safety, finally contacted the FBI and refuses to this day to give anymore interviews.
So what really happened at Gene’s house that December morning? No one has ever come forward to back Gene up. No word of his actions were ever mentioned in the Newtown Bee, the local town newspaper. Not a parent of one of those children ever thanked him, at least not in a public interview. Was any part of his story true? Or was it all made up because Gene loved the publicity? At this time, no one knows for sure, at least until the official version by the Connecticut State Police is released in the summer of 2013.
Here is what I have been able to gather about the Gene Rosen affair, by different sources in the past two months. Whether it is true or not is unknown, but I am passing it along. There were sixteen students in Ms. Victoria Soto’s class. Not 15 as been reported in the media. Along with Ms. Soto, and teacher, Ann Marie Murphy, five children were also killed in that classroom. They were, Allison Wyatt, Jesse Lewis, Dylan Hockley, Olivia Engel, and Avielle Richman. Apparently midway through the shooting, Adam Lanza’s AR15 rifle jammed. Not unusual with 30 round clips, especially if the weapon was dirty. Nine children were able to escape while he was clearing the weapon, by running past their dead teacher, Ms. Soto. Two more children stayed hidden in the classroom’s bathroom and survived. There were no cupboards or closets in the classroom for seven children to hide, as widely reported in the media.
The nine children who escaped, were the ones seen running down Dickenson Drive as reported by Barbara Sibley earlier. Upon arriving at the firehouse, they found it locked up. The group split up about this time, and were on the run. Remember this was before the police even arrived at the scene. Five of the children, (the Bryce Maksel group), turned west and ran up Riverside Road almost a mile to get to the home of one of their nannies, before they were picked up by a woman in a van, identified as Tricia Gogliettino, a sister of Ct. Rep. John Frey, who just happened to be headed to the school to deliver a gingerbread house. She transported the five children to Newtown Police HQ, after she called the school on her phone and got no answer. The police later transported some of the five back to the firehouse in PD units for the parents to pick up. It should be noted that when Gogliettino asked the group what was going on, they told her, "Someone is trying to kill us, and we were told to run."
The other group, (the Aiden Licata group), of four were met by a mailman near the firehouse This was probably the man with the harsh voice as related by Gene Rosen. At this point, All Star transport, school bus ,number 23, was parked in front of the firehouse. This was confirmed later via news helicopter video. The mailman turned the four children over to the female bus driver. As the firehouse was still locked, the bus driver led the four children to Gene Rosen’s house and the rest is history. But wait, Gene has always maintained that there were six children, four girls and two boys at his house. He is correct. Four were from Ms. Soto’s class, the other two were the bus driver’s own girls. Perhaps that explains somewhat, why she never came forward to back up Gene Rosen!
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