- Renee Berger/AP Photos
Shannon Hicks, a reporter and photographer for the weekly Bee of Newtown, Connecticut, was perhaps the first journalist to arrive at the Sandy Hook Elementary School last December 14 to cover what turned out to be the massacre of 20 children and six adults. She took a picture of children leaving the school that showed up the next day on the front page of the New York Times, and a couple of weeks ago she served as the entree into Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker story on the Bee‘s response to the massacre.
In typically understated New Yorker style, Aviv brought her report into focus with the following paragraph:
“After the second class had been evacuated, the education reporter came to retrieve the memory card from Hicks’s camera, and Hicks went over to the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company, which had just arrived. She bunched up her knee-length skirt and pulled bunker pants over it, and put on boots, a turnout coat, and a helmet. With three other firefighters, she set up a triage area near the school’s baseball field, laying out medical bags, collars, backboards, and stretchers.”
