Neighbor took 6 young survivors into his home
By Associated Press – 3 hrs ago
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Sandy Hook eyewitness: Kids were "so sweet" and "brave"CBSTV Videos 4:14Gene Rosen, a longtime Newtown resident, took in six children fleeing the Sandy Hook elementary school …
NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — Gene Rosen had just finished feeding his cats and was heading from his home near Sandy Hook Elementary school to a diner Friday morning when he saw six small children sitting in a neat semicircle at the end of his driveway.
A school bus driver was standing over them, telling them things would be all right. It was about 9:30 a.m., and the children, he discovered, had just run from the school to escape a gunman.
"I had no idea what had happened," Rosen said. "I couldn't take that in."
He walked the children past his small goldfish pond with its running waterfall, and the garden he made with his two grandchildren, into the small yellow house he shares with his wife.
"They said he had a big gun and a little gun," said Rosen, who didn't want to discuss other details the children shared.
Rosen called the children's parents, using cellphone numbers obtained from the school bus company, and they came and retrieved their children.
One little girl, he said, spent the entire ordeal clutching a small stuffed Dalmatian to her chest and staring out the window looking for her mommy.
And one little boy brought them all a moment of levity.
"This little boy turns around, and composes himself, and he looks at me like he had just removed himself from the carnage and he says, 'Just saying, your house is very small,'" Rosen said. "I wanted to tell him, 'I love you. I love you.'"
"I thought today how life has changed, how that ground has been marred, how that school has been desecrated," he said.
He said it wasn't his training as a psychologist that helped him that day — it was being a grandparent.
A couple of hours after the last child left, a knock came on his door. It was a frantic mother who had heard that some children had taken refuge there. She was looking for her little boy.
"Her face looked frozen in terror," Rosen said, breaking down in tears.
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