Run You Down (28 page)

“Come with me, Aviva,” says Saul. He takes her hand and we run together. People are coming from all directions, it seems, running out of apartment doors, galloping through stands of trees, their faces like masks in a horror film; too long, too wide, too red, too pale, too set, too expressive. Women’s cries rise above the sirens. What do they know? What did they hear?

“I don’t hear shooting,” says Saul, breathing hard.

The closer we get to the school, the more people we encounter. People standing along the road, weeping, holding each other. People with cell phones pressed to their ears. They are all wearing the Haredi uniform: all in black or dark blue. I pass an hysterical middle-aged woman, waving her arms, collapsed on the concrete curb. Other women bend over her, trying to pull her up. I pass a man holding a baby, two little girls clutching his legs; one is no higher than his knees, barely able to walk. He screams into a cell phone. Saul leads us past them until we get to the place where the State Police are trying to hold a perimeter, trying to keep these panicked, desperate people from doing what nature and instinct and common sense dictate they do: find their babies.

Somehow, the chaos serves to focus my mind. I have a role here, and I know how to play it.

“Officer!” I shout, my arm up, badge in hand. “I’m from the
Tribune
. Can you tell me if any children were hurt?”

One of the four officers standing at the yellow tape looks at me for a moment, then turns his eyes back to the faces of the crowd he is trying to keep from stampeding past him.

We are being held about two hundred feet from the school entrance in a side parking lot. I move to the very edge of the yellow police tape, which allows a view of the side of the school. I see a small playground, and on the playground, bodies. I count four from where I am standing. Two have people kneeling over them. Behind us, the pop and cry of an ambulance siren and the officers shouting,
Move aside! Move aside!
The medics inch forward and the officers lift the tape. First is an ambulance with Hebrew lettering on the side; the next is marked R
OCKLAND
C
OUNTY
. And the next. And the next. They move through the crowd and park in front of the playground, blocking the bodies from view. Saul and Aviva are still behind me; Saul on the telephone, Aviva allowing herself to be buoyed by the crowd. People press into her and she sways. The officers become more aggressive.
We need room!
They shout.
Clear out. We need to make room for emergency vehicles! Everybody back!
I stand my ground at the front of the pack as they use the tape to move us back farther, creating a path in and out.

“Is the shooter still alive?” I ask the officer in front of me.

“I don’t have any information. You better get back.”

“Can you tell me if any children were shot?”

“What did I say? I don’t have anything. Now get back.”

A woman beside me screams. She has just been given some kind of news on the telephone. She begins speaking rapidly in Yiddish, telling everyone around her what she knows. A man interrupts her, they argue; everyone seems to be speaking at once, their voices getting louder and louder.

I turn to Saul and Aviva. “What are they saying?”

“The woman said her brother is inside the school and said the shooter is dead,” says Saul. “She said he came out of the trees behind the building and fired on the children in the playground. She said at least five are dead. And a teacher.”

“The man said ten dead,” says Aviva. “And he said there were two men with guns. But he did not say any names. Did he?”

“I didn’t hear one,” says Saul.

The group starts arguing again and Saul and Aviva turn to listen. A younger woman appears beside me. Everyone around is talking to other people, or talking on their phones, but she is silent, clutching a pillow with a raccoon face on it.

“Do you have a child here?” I ask.

She nods. “You?”

“No,” I say. “My name’s Rebekah, I’m from the newspaper.”

“My Avi is there.”

“How old is he?” I ask.

“He is six.”

Her wool coat is buttoned improperly. One side juts against her chin and the other reveals the shirt beneath.

“Why do they not let the children go?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. And then I think: maybe that is something I can find out. I look over her head for Saul. He is on the phone, Aviva still beside him. I catch his attention and he motions me toward him.

“What’s your name?” I ask the woman.

“Henna,” she says.

“Stay here, Henna. I’ll be back.”

I push through the crowd toward Saul and Aviva, dialing Van Keller. No answer. I try again and this time he picks up. We speak over each other: “You’re okay?” I ask. “Where are you?” he asks.

“I’m here,” I say. He knows what I mean. “Has the shooting stopped?”

“Yes,” he says. “Connie Hall is dead. Sam is in custody. It looks like he might have shot Connie. But there’s a lot to sort out.”

I lower my voice “Is anyone else…?”

“Dead? At least three kids, Rebekah. And two teachers. So far. There are a lot of other people shot.”

The first thing I think is,
This will be on the front page tomorrow
. I don’t think of it with any kind of pleasure or excitement; it is simply a fact. They’ll use the word “Massacre,” I imagine. And “Madman.” By dinnertime, there will be hundreds of reporters in this little town. Goyim from across the globe will fill every hotel and motel room within twenty miles tomorrow night.

“Why don’t they let the kids that are okay go? People are freaking out.”

“They’re sweeping the school. I think they’re worried about timed explosives.”

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, I remember reading, set bombs all over Columbine High—they just failed to detonate. And James Holmes—
The Dark Knight Rises
shooter—booby-trapped his apartment before he opened fire in a movie theater. What did Connie do?

“These people out here need some information,” I say.

“The shooter’s dead,” he says. “And the kids that that got shot were the older ones. You can tell them that.”

“Do you have any idea when they’ll let them out?”

“No,” he says.

“Can I tell my paper what you said?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t use my name. Just…”

“A police source?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” I say. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“You know what scares me, Rebekah? I can. I really fucking can.”

He promises to call me if he gets more news. I elbow back to Henna and tell her what he told me. She nods, but my news about the older boys does little to comfort her. Her face has a strange expression on it, one I don’t know if I’ve ever seen before. It’s as if her features have shifted, been knocked sideways by a punch, and she’s trying to recover without actually moving. She does not seem to be able to focus her eyes as she speaks. The terror, I think, has altered her appearance, perhaps forever.

Saul and Aviva have stepped back from the crowd. They are standing together, his arms around her, his head on hers. Both of them have their eyes are closed. After a moment, Saul opens his. I wave and he lifts one hand, calling me over. I tell them what Van said and Aviva grabs my hand.

“Sammy did not do this,” she says. She’s not pleading this time, she is telling. “I know you do not know him. I know you do not know us. But I am telling you, he did not do this.”

I decide to believe her. At least for now. I will call in what Van gave me, but I will not call in what I know about Sam’s role. They’ll get it eventually, of course, but they won’t get it from me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

REBEKAH

The shooting at the yeshiva becomes known as “The Playground Shooting” or “Toras David” or just “Roseville,” depending on the publication. Connie Hall killed seven people that day. Four students and three adults. Fewer casualties than Oklahoma City or Virginia Tech or Newtown or Aurora or Columbine, but more than Wade Michael Page slaughtered at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and the same number that One L. Goh gunned down at Oikos University in Oakland almost exactly a year before.

The children were, as Van initially told me, from one of the older classes. Their instructor was running late and they stayed on the playground while the other students were ushered inside for class. It was a nice morning, after all. Nearly fifty degrees and sunny. There were three acres of wooded land behind the school building, and that’s where Connie hid. He came out, dressed in a t-shirt that read G
OD
H
ATES
F
AGS
beneath green Army fatigues, shooting an AR-15. He hit thirteen-year-old Mayer Klein first. Mayer, whose bar mitzvah was to be the next weekend, was hanging from the monkey bars trying to do a third pull-up when Connie shot him in the back. The tardy instructor, twenty-six-year-old father of three, Shimon Schwartz, who had just reached the school, ran to Mayer, and was killed for it. Shot once in the stomach, once in the neck. It wasn’t like Newtown, where Adam Lanza had the kids inside classrooms, like fish in a barrel. The boys of Toras David ran, and they ran fast. Four weren’t recovered for more than twelve hours; they were huddled together almost a mile away behind a self-storage warehouse, their clothing torn and mud-thick. Dovid Blau, twelve, and Aaron Siegel, thirteen, made it nearly fifty feet into the trees before Connie got them. Dovid died there, after a bullet pierced his spleen; Aaron fell with a shot to his spine, and will never walk again. Twelve-year-old Joel Silverman, the boy everyone called a hero afterward, pushed four fright-frozen friends from the playground’s mini suspension bridge as Connie came toward them. He paid for his selflessness with a shot to the side, which ripped through his liver and burst open his heart. Joel was an only child; his mother, Devorah, had suffered four miscarriages and a stillbirth before having him. When he was a year old, doctors discovered polyps on her ovaries and insisted on a hysterectomy. Three months after the shooting, she jumped in front of the M train at Marcy Avenue. Her husband never remarried.

Connie got just one of the boys Joel pushed before being shot: thirteen-year-old Zev Lowenstein. Zev took a bullet to the thigh and died at the hospital. He ran slower than his friends because of a birth defect that left one leg shorter than the other.

Instructor Abe Greenwald, forty, a father of six, originally thought the shooting was fireworks set off by a misbehaving boy. He came outside to investigate, and three bullets tore through his chest before he’d made four steps out the side door. The last person Connie killed was Abe’s brother-in-law, Yosef Schwartz, nineteen. Yosef ran out after Abe, who was married to his sister. He saw the carnage—boys splayed over the new blue and beige playground equipment, screams coming from every direction, and a man dressed like a soldier, walking among it all—and for whatever reason could not keep himself from trying to stop it. The boys watching from inside said he went running, arms waving, shouting for the man to stop. Connie shot him six times, like he was a paper practice target.

Nechemaya also took one of Connie Hall’s bullets. After getting my message the night before, he drove to the yeshiva, remembering that it had been the target of previous vandalism. He parked on the opposite side of the school from the playground, the side at the intersection of two roads. If anyone suspicious came driving up, he would see them. But Connie parked his truck a mile away and walked in through the trees. When the shooting started, Nechemaya ran toward the noise. Connie shot him in the shoulder, sending him to the ground. He hit his head on the concrete surrounding the sandbox and blacked out. The bullet missed any major arteries and when paramedics took his pulse they realized he was still alive.

It was acknowledged almost immediately that if Sam Kagan hadn’t shot Connie Hall while he reloaded his rifle, he would probably have killed a lot more people. Connie was wearing a bulletproof vest beneath his jacket. He was strapped with three hundred rounds of ammunition, and carrying two 9mm handguns in addition to the AR-15. Nechemaya called 911 as soon as he heard the shots, and three minutes later another call came in from inside the yeshiva, but it took six minutes for the first deputy to arrive—and the door to the school was unlocked.

Sam, who police found attempting to fashion a tourniquet around Zev Lowenstein’s leg, was handcuffed and interviewed. Witnesses say that he, too, came out of the woods, and that he fired three shots in quick succession. Physical evidence bore this out. Sam’s Smith & Wesson 9mm was originally purchased by a pharmacist at a Georgia gun store in 2004 and made its way to New York through a series of legal, and illegal, transfers. The gun had three bullets missing, and Connie had three bullets in him. Just as Aviva told me and Saul, Sam had surreptitiously installed a GPS tracking application on Connie’s phone, which led him to Roseville that morning. Connie left his phone in the truck, though, and Sam lost track of him in the predawn woods. When the shooting started, he ran toward the noise.

Hank and Nan told police that Sam knew about the plot against Roseville—although, they admitted, not the exact target—and was on board until Pessie died. Sam and Mellie denied this, however. Months later, when I finally interview her on the record, Mellie tells me that she knows she should have sounded the alarm sooner and that speaking up for Sam was her way of making up for it. Sam was arrested on gun and conspiracy charges, but with public opinion firmly on his side, in the end, prosecutors just didn’t think they could convince a jury that a Jew would plot to do such a thing to his fellow Jews.

Nechemaya recovered quickly and immediately became a spokesperson for Roseville. He told Anderson Cooper and Dr. Phil and Charlie Rose and anyone who would listen—and, until the Tsarnaev brothers blew up the finish line of the Boston Marathon two weeks later, the world was listening—that the community supported Sam entirely. He said that they had hired an attorney to represent him and that the rumors he was connected to the Halls were overblown. Whenever he could, Nechemaya said Pessie’s name.
Pessie Goldin was the first victim in Roseville,
he said on CNN and Fox and the BBC.
If corrupt, anti-Semitic local authorities had not ignored her death, this tragedy may never have happened.