McAden and her staff had tried to think through every detail of the aftermath, but there were simply too many. “When Khalil’s school bus rolled past the crime scene there was a lot of pointing at his house and the detectives,” McAden said. “I wish we had factored that in. I wish I had personally been on that bus.”  children were killed in July.  children were killed in August.  children were killed in September.  children were killed so far this year.  In October, three more children died, including Jorge Duran, a 3-year-old from Toledo who was shot by his father.  On the night of the killing, Paula Murray, a neighbor, heard yelling through her apartment’s wall. She listened as a woman screamed, “What are you doing? Oh my God!” Five blasts followed.  “Did you hear that?” Murray remembers asking her 27-year-old son.  “It sounded like gunshots,” he said.  It was a little after 9 p.m. and dark outside. Murray’s cellphone was dead. It wasn’t unusual to hear fighting next door. She tried to put it out of her mind.  On the other side of the wall, Jorge’s mother was dying. The toddler’s father grabbed him and ran to a nearby townhouse, where he fired more shots, including one that killed the boy. Police then killed the father.  Months later, Murray says, she received a letter from the boy’s grandmother, blaming her for the deaths of her daughter and grandson. She read it over and over. She started seeing a psychiatrist, who took the letter from her and destroyed it. “I wish to God I wasn’t home that night,” Murray says. “I want to apologize. I want to say that I could have done better even though I didn’t kill her little boy. I didn’t pull the trigger.”  She passes the cemetery where Jorge is buried almost every day on her way around town. Recently she drove through it. “I was tempted to ask, where is the little boy’s plot?” she says. “I want to pay my respects, but I feel too guilty.”  In November, five children were killed, including 10-year-old Julia Schuster and her 6-year-old brother Luke in remote New Town, N.D. They died along with their grandmother and 13-year-old brother when a man kicked in the door of their clapboard home and opened fire. The 21-year-old shooter had a history of getting into trouble and was high on methamphetamine.  Word of the killings spread quickly through the tiny town. Almost everyone knew the Schusters as well as the family of Kalcie Eagle, the shooter, who killed himself later that day. “There was a lot of under-the-table talk,” said Marilyn Levine, a pastor who lived in the parsonage next to the home where the shootings occurred.
The ripples of anger and grief caused by the massacre of 20 students at Sandy Hook Elementary School continue a year later. In smaller ways, so do the ripples from the 71 other murders of young children by gunfire in 2012.