Lucy Gellman Photos.
To the gentle hum and beep of a crane, a heavy ring of Atlantic white cedar wood made its way into the air, gleaming against a smear of blue sky. On the ground below, gravel blanketed a circle of earth, surrounded by contiguous, delta-shaped stones. As it touched down, ropes steadying it from both sides, Bud Argel knelt down to help move it into place. His palms, open and upturned, touched the curved base of the work. For a moment, it looked as if he was praying.
Thursday morning, a memorial sculpture dedicated to educators Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, Anne Marie Murphy, Mary J. Sherlach, and Victoria Leigh Soto—all Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) alumni who were killed during the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School—returned to SCSU’s campus, after nearly a year of careful restoration with a team at Dutch Wharf Boatyard & Marina in Branford. It is a larger part of the SCSU Sandy Hook Alumnae Remembrance Garden, which was first inaugurated in 2018.
The sculpture has been achingly absent from campus since last June, when the university’s facilities team removed it after spotting water damage on its west side. Normally, it sits just beyond Jennings and Morrill Halls on the university’s main campus, overlooking a small hill and placid lake below. On a clear day, a person can see the skyline of downtown New Haven in the distance, including through a wide, perfect circle at the center of the sculpture.
“I’m really happy that it’s back here,” said Eric Lessne, associate vice president for capital budgeting and facilities operations at SCSU, as he supervised the reinstallation. “It belongs here. It’s just important—it’s the soul of the university.”
“A Gift That Deserves To Be Present”
The story of the memorial sculpture begins in the horrific aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which 20 children and six teachers and administrators were murdered by a person who should never have had access to a semiautomatic weapon. In Newtown, four of the educators who died had trained in SCSU’s College of Education, between the years of 1997 and 2012.
Hochsprung was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, and had rushed out of a meeting with Sherlach and a parent when she heard gunshots. Murphy, herself a mother of four, died while trying to shield a six-year-old boy from gunfire. Sherlach, whose husband Bill became a founding member of the group Sandy Hook Promise, was a school psychologist. Soto, who was still a graduate student at the time, hid many of her students in a closet to keep them safe. She received her degree posthumously in 2013.
“The Southern campus was reeling, as were people around the world,” said Dan Camenga, who ultimately co-chaired a Reflection Garden Council of 30 people while working as the associate vice president for institutional advancement from 2014 to 2018. At the time of the shooting, Camenga was not yet working at Southern, but he felt the loss acutely, as a dad to two young kids. “Southern recognized its unique proximity to this tragedy through the loss of four of its family members.”
On campus, students and faculty alike searched for a way to grieve and remember together. In 2013, Professor Roslyn Amenta proposed a design competition, in which students could contribute their own visions for a memorial garden that would one day find a home on campus. And somewhere on campus there was a graphic design major named Carlene Barnes, who had been pregnant at the time of the shooting, and who believed in the power of art as a way to honor and to heal.
Bud Argel and Akim Francois of Mariano Brothers fit the rigging on Thursday.
“It really hurt me to see there was a school shooting in Connecticut,” Barnes said in a phone call Thursday, crediting professor and designer Jeanne Criscola with encouraging her to submit a design to the competition. “I love children and I appreciate teachers, and I wanted to do something [to remember them].”
Barnes, who by summer 2013 had an infant daughter, started imagining what the remembrance garden could look like. At the center, she envisioned a circle that would rise toward the sky, in a symbol of continuity and peace that also became a portal to New Haven. Inside the sculpture, she could clearly see four braided strands of light, each of them representing a life taken too soon. In the initial piece, she imagined that the sculpture might be a weather-resistant material like metal: it was through later discussions with the victims’ families that wood emerged as a medium of choice.
Around the sculpture, Barnes pictured delta-shaped stones, in a nod to the use of the Greek letter (Δ) as an indicator of change. “I wanted to represent change because it's needed for gun laws,” she said. In the same spirit, she imagined the sculpture as facing out towards New Haven—an acknowledgment of the chaos and tragedy that gun violence leaves in its wake everywhere it happens.
“I was raised in New Haven, and I’m no stranger to gun violence,” she said. While it was important to foreground the four alumni who had died senselessly, Barnes also understood that what had happened was part of a nationwide epidemic that leaves no community untouched; that hundreds and sometimes thousands of people experience pain when a single life is taken. Other elements, from small pieces of gravel to the female inkberry plants that became part of the garden, came later.
“With this experience, I can say SCSU taught me everything,” Barnes said. She didn’t yet know that she would go on to work as a designer for nationally-recognized names like McDonald's, Whole Foods, and Roscoe Labs (she is currently a marketing specialist for SMT Corporation). “If you’re just starting out in art, if you don’t know what you want to do yet, try everything.”
Barnes’ design ultimately won the competition. And then, nothing happened. Nothing happened for years.
For whatever constellation of reasons, the project stalled, remembered Reflection Garden Council Co-Chair Bill Faraclas, who was then a professor of public health at Southern. That changed in 2016, when President Joe Bertilino arrived on campus, excited to hear new ideas and committed to making SCSU a “social justice” school. Camenga, who is himself something of an expert in gardens, brought the project back to his attention.
“Dan had a vision for enhancing Southern’s campus by creating an extensive network of gardens,” Faraclas remembered in a phone call Friday morning, with high praise for his colleague. “We thought about all of the important things that had happened,” and the need to create spaces for reflection around the campus. Of Bertilino’s five pillars of social justice—dignity, kindness, respect, compassion and civility—this project fit many, but especially compassion.
It was shortly after that that the council sprang to life, with input from not just faculty, students and staff, but also community members and families that had lost loved ones to gun violence, including in the Sandy Hook massacre and in New Haven. (Faraclas said the team worked closely with Marlene Miller-Pratt, who lost her son to gun violence in 1998, and led efforts to build and open the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing.)
Camenga noted that the families of the four fallen educators helped “shape the final design” immensely, working though their own grief as they advised him and Faraclas on what worked for them and what did not. The importance of wood, for instance, came from them—as did the fact that no metal or stone touches the sculpture itself. A circle of stones, each partitioned into a delta shape, surrounds the garden but does not ever touch the sculpture.
For him, that was and is part of the whole point of the space: he sees gardens as places to create community, center healing, and counter social isolation. “If you’re with other people even at a distance, you do go home and you feel more connected than you did before,” he said.
The sculpture mid-build at Brooklin Boatyard in Maine. Photos Contributed by Robert Lyons.
“We had a vision of creating a pathway from the community into our campus and from our campus out into the community,” Faraclas said. As the council built momentum, donors began to emerge from the woodwork, giving them a budget that was more generous than the zero dollars the university had proposed for the project. In addition to Barnes, whose preliminary design remained the foundation for the garden, partners including Julie Moir Messervy Design (JMMD) Studio, sculpture consultant Richard Duca, landscape design firm BrightView, and Maine-based Brooklin Boat Yard came onboard.
When they heard about the project, many of them donated their labor and supplies. “There were so many people,” remembered JMMD landscape architect Jana Bryan, who is based in Vermont, and worked on the project with Messervy. Some of them came from just down the road: carpentry students from Eli Whitney Technical High School, who were just in their freshman year, designed a bench that people could sit on as a space for reflection.
Faraclas stressed the significance of that last collaboration: students just on the cusp of their high school careers, making work to honor educators who were murdered while doing the essential work of teaching young people. That bench, now well-loved by students, sits in front of a row of bushes, just feet away from the sculpture, inviting people to come into the circle and stay for a while.
Once work on the project started, it moved quickly. In separate phone calls Friday morning, both Faraclas and Camenga remembered watching the Southern community come together to make it happen. Students and staff helped plant the garden, including the female inkberry and gallberry plants beside the reflection bench. They helped lay the pea gravel and watched the installation of stones, which a nearby quarry had donated. And in May of 2018, they watched as it officially opened to the public.
“Thornton Wilder offered, ‘There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning,’” Faraclas wrote in an email Friday, after a phone call. “Perhaps the garden is one such bridge.”
“The Soul of the University”
The sculpture returns to campus.
When the Alumnae Remembrance Garden opened officially in 2018, it became a beloved part of the campus, hailed by Bertilino as “an enduring motivation for us to find ways to break the cycle of violence and build a better society for all,” according to a 2018 article in the Newtown Bee. Camenga, who left Southern in 2018, called it one of the things he is most proud of from his time at the university.
From that moment, it welcomed anyone who came by, and wished to step into the garden, where the finished bench gave people time and space to reflect, and any movement on the pea gravel would instantly leave a mark. (It “symbolizes the constancy of change, reminding visitors that we leave footprints as we walk through the world, and we have a choice about what those impressions will be,” Faraclas wrote in an email Friday.)
But last year, members of the university’s facilities staff found that a “small defect in the finish” had allowed moisture to come in, said Bob Lyons, coordinator of university construction at SCSU. Water had gotten in, freezing in the winter and then melting in the warmer weather. In June, facilities staff removed the sculpture, leaving an empty space where the piece had been.
This time, they worked with Dutch Wharf Boat Yard & Marina, a family-owned boat repair business in Branford. Paul Jacques, who has run the space since his dad retired in 1986, said it was both an honor and a challenge to do the work.
To treat the damage, the team sanded the monument, replacing 24 strakes—that’s a ship-building term for a long strip—of cedar wood in the process. They carefully removed the strands of fiber-optic cable, lovingly cleaning the grooves in which they were nestled before fitting them back in. The team also applied several coats of varnish, which both add a glorious sheen and protect the wood from the elements to which it is exposed.
“The whole yard, the guys really put their whole heart and soul into this project,” Jacques said in a phone call Thursday afternoon, sitting beside his foreman, Sam Smith.
It was a labor of love, in part, because there wasn’t a person at the boat yard—as there is perhaps not a single person in Connecticut—who didn’t remember that day with unbelievable grief. Fourteen years after 2012, “it’s still something that’s imprinted on us,” Smith said. Most of his colleagues—and certainly Jacques—remember exactly where they were when they learned what had happened. There was no world in which it made sense; there still isn’t.
“It was a real challenge, but it was a thrill and an honor to be part of [the restoration],” Smith said.
Thursday, those months of meticulous work appeared in full, as a crane from Mariano Brothers drove into SCSU’s Crescent Drive parking lot, the monument loaded onto a separate truck. From the lot, driver Bill Montesi worked his way up the gentle slope that leads to Morrill Hall, excited to return the sculpture to its rightful home. Lessne, Lyons, and a few members of the facilities team stood at the ready.
Freshman Jacoby Dickerson.
For many of the team members—as well as students who walked by—it was a chance to reflect on both the legacy of four SCSU-trained educators, and the toll that gun violence takes on communities across the country every day. Lessne, who had not yet started working at SCSU, remembered driving into Newtown two days after the shooting, for a work assignment that he couldn’t delay or move. The first funerals were taking place, and the grief was overwhelming.
Nearby, sophomore Jadyn Westcott walked towards the installation, his skateboard in one hand. Westcott, who grew up in Norwalk, was just eight years old in December 2012. He didn’t understand exactly what had happened, and said he doesn’t remember talking about it with his parents at the time. But when he saw President Barack Obama speaking about Connecticut on national television, “I knew it had to be important.”
“I was just a little kid,” and still he could feel the ground shifting. In his elementary school, he and classmates started doing lockdown drills. As he got older, he carried the memory with him, in part because some of the children would have been the same age as many of his classmates. After watching the crane get into place, he took a seat on a nearby bench to watch the entire reinstallation from start to finish.
“Everyone really thought that everything was going to change after that, and it hasn’t,” he said. “It’s just a really ugly thing.”
Back in the garden, the reinstallation was well underway. As the piece touched down, members of the facilities team checked an electrical box behind the sculpture, making sure that it was ready for a nest of fiber optic cable that connects to the four distinct strands inside. At night, each strand of cable glows softly, a reminder of “the light they gave us and goodness that lives on in the world,” Faraclas wrote Friday.
Camenga noted that the SCSU Sandy Hook Alumnae Remembrance Garden is one of many in a five-mile radius that encourage people to stop and reflect on the toll that gun violence takes on a community. In addition, there is the Botanical Garden of Healing on Valley Street, a remembrance tree at Albertus Magnus College, and soon, Eli’s Garden of Healing in Hamden.
As he made his way past the sculpture, freshman Jacoby Dickerson soaked in the sight. While Dickerson grew up in New Haven, he had never seen the sculpture before: it was already gone for repairs by the time he arrived on campus last August.
“I always knew it looked empty there,” he said. “I think it’s really nice.”