Source: USA TODAY

NEWTOWN, Conn. — A local task force of elected officials was unable to agree Friday night on the fate of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 children and six adults were killed by a gunman Dec. 14.

Town officials had said the task force might vote to decide the fate of the school, because the 28-member task force narrowed its options at previous meetings, according to Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra.

The task force was expected to decide whether to renovate the school, demolish it and build a new school on the existing property, or build a new school at a nearby site in Sandy Hook.

Some task force members, though, raised the idea of additional locations for a new school, while others asked whether it was possible to combine Sandy Hook Elementary School students with Newtown students who attend Reed School, now used by the town’s fifth- and sixth-graders.

Members of the task force were obviously emotionally affected by a prior 50-minute, closed-door executive meeting before their scheduled public meeting.

At the closed-door meeting, teachers and officials of Sandy Hook Elementary expressed concern about returning to a school at the site of the shootings.

Task force member Laura Roche said some staff members feel they “can’t go back” to that building and the task force hadn’t had “an emotional conversation” about the staff’s feelings.

“Certain people in the community might not be able to go back there,” she said.

The meeting was the task force’s fourth meeting, and it is scheduled to meet again May 10.

Roche and task force member John Vouros said the town should consider building a new school on town land called Fairfield Hills, which accommodates the Newtown Municipal Center, where the task force meeting was held.

The town bought Fairfield Hills, the site of a former state mental hospital many years ago, and much of the land is undeveloped.

Task force member Dan Wiedemann questioned whether a new school should be built or the existing school should be renovated.

He said Reed School is facing declining enrollment and might be able toaccommodate the Sandy Hook students.

As Reed School’s enrollment declines, Wiedemann said, spending ? $40 million to $60 million to build a new school or renovate the existing school “doesn’t make fiscal sense to me.”

Prior to the meeting, Llodra said the task force “is disappointed” that it does not “have better options.”

“It is hard to accept that our months of study and hard work has not provided us with greater flexibility,” Llodra said.

Once the task force makes its decision, it will pass it on to the Newtown Board of Education, according to Llodra.

The decision is not binding on the board, but board members serve on the task force, and local officials expect the board to adopt the decision.

According to an April study done by the town’s Sandy Hook Advisory Committee, renovation of the school would cost $48 million, and building a new school would cost between $56 million and $60 million.

Renovation could be completed in 17 months, and a new school could be constructed within 19 months, the study says.

Whatever the board’s final decision, it is unlikely to satisfy all of the town’s residents.

“We have that awful task of making a decision that will probably displease many,” Llorda says.

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

Alix Coletta graduated from nursing school less than a year ago. She had never seen the horrible sights she was about to see when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Coletta, 25, a volunteer at the race, was inside the big medical tent past the finish line at Boylston and Dartmouth streets when the first explosion sounded.

“I was kneeling down over a runner on a cot who was a little hypothermic when I heard the first bomb go off,” recalls Coletta, who grew up in Johnston, R.I., and now lives in Quincy, Mass. “It produced a rumble in my chest and shook my chest.”

Coletta says the blast “sounded like a bolt of lightning striking the ground.” She thought the sound might have been caused by a “huge car accident” or a loudspeaker that had blown.

When she heard the second bomb blast, “I knew something was wrong, and I ran to the front of the tent.”

Three people carried in a woman. One of her legs was blown off. Someone was holding it.

The woman was “dripping blood all over” and “wailing in pain,” Coletta says.

“I have never seen anything like that,” she says. “I will always remember that.”

Coletta says she was stunned and couldn’t move at first, “just looking around and trying to figure out what was going on.” She saw many people with blood on their faces and limbs.

Then she began tending to the injured.

“When people came in, we used coats, belts, anything we could to stop the bleeding,” she says.

One woman had a life-threatening injury to her heel, bleeding profusely from an artery, Coletta says.

“Debris from the blast must have also hit her in the mouth, because her lips were also bleeding.”

A man’s belt was used on the woman’s thigh to stop the bleeding, and Coletta dressed the heel wound.

She assisted another woman with a broken leg who had a tibia bone sticking through the skin. Coletta says she held the wounded leg while waiting for EMS personnel to come with a splint.

It was the first time she had ever seen a bone sticking out of someone’s skin, she says.

Coletta also tended to a young man with two broken legs who was “crying a bit and in shock.” He was shaking and blankets were put around him.

“It looked like he had lost a lot of blood and something had crushed his ribs,” she says. “He had indentations in his chest.’

Coletta says she tried to comfort him and held his hand.

She assisted at least two other people with less serious injuries — one bleeding from an arm injury and one with a facial injury.

Medical workers set up a morgue in the back of the tent where, two hours earlier, Coletta had a pleasant lunch with nursing colleagues.

She says an adult who died in the bombing was on a cot, covered by a sheet.

“It absolutely had an effect on me,” Coletta says. “It froze me. I didn’t know whether to go over to the person or get back to assisting others.”

She wonders whether the body was a person who had been in cardiac arrest, carried on a stretcher as EMS workers pounded on the chest.

Coletta doesn’t yet know how to put the traumatic day in perspective.

“What happened hasn’t quite settled in yet,” she says. “It’s the surrealness — that unbelievable, oh-my-God, was-I-really-there-helping-everyone feeling. There is disbelief, but you know it was real.”

Many have said first responders like Coletta are heroes.

“I don’t like calling myself a hero,” she says. “I was just doing what everyone else was doing there.”

Coletta works at the Bay Path Rehabilitation & Nursing Center in Duxbury, Mass. She disregarded her boss’s advice to take a day off Tuesday. She worked a full 7 a.m.-3 p.m. shift the day after the bombing.

“It was another way for me to keep coping,” she says.

In one sense, the traumatic events at the Boston Marathon have had a positive effect on Coletta.

“I absolutely feel now I am in the right profession,” she says. “As horrific as Monday’s experience was, it strengthened my resolve and compassion for being in the nursing profession. I realize it is the profession I want to be in.”

Coletta, who as a nursing student also volunteered at last year’s Boston Marathon, says she will offer her services again.

“I definitely will return to the marathon next year,” she says. “I am not going to live in fear.”

Copyright © 2013 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.