Tales of heroism emerge after Connecticut elementary school shootings

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Elementary school library clerk Mary Ann Jacob heard gunshots and shouted, “Lockdown!” to a class of fourth-graders. Then she discovered the classroom door would not lock.

Quickly and quietly, she and other library staffers got the 18 children down on the floor and crawled with them to a classroom storage closet. Hiding from the gunman who killed 20 children and six adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, they barricaded themselves inside by shoving a file cabinet against the door.

“We settled them down with paper and crayons,” Jacob said on Saturday.

The gunfire suddenly ended, and police came pounding at the door. The library staffers refused to open it until the officers slipped a badge under the door, Jacob said.

Emerging a day after the carnage were tales of heroism by school staff members, including the six who died.

There was first-grade teacher Victoria Soto, 27, who police said, “put herself between the kids and the gunman's bullets” and whose body was found huddled with the students in a classroom closet, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And there were selfless survivors like first-grade teacher Kaitlin Roig, who said she scrambled her class into a cramped bathroom, locked the door and “told the kids I love them” in case those were the last words they ever heard.

A school custodian reportedly raced through the hallways echoing with gunfire to check that classroom doors were locked from the inside, the Newtown Bee newspaper reported.