Classroom key missing on the day of Sandy Hook massacre, lawyer says 
 
 Donald Papcsy Donald Papcsy Photo: / Photo: / Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Classroom key missing on the day of Sandy Hook massacre, lawyer says 1 / 3 Back to Gallery 
 
 NEWTOWN - A key allowing a teacher to lock her classroom was missing from its folder the day of the Sandy Hook massacre, said an attorney for two families who have filed a lawsuit. 
 
 “If you have a lockdown procedure and you are not provided the key, how are you supposed to lock down?” said Donald Papcsy, the attorney for the families who are suing Newtown for negligence. “This is going to be a big part of our case moving forward.” 
 
 Papcsy received a judge’s permission in mid-August to inspect the emergency folders taken by police from two classrooms where teachers and students were slain during the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. 
 
 School district officials had maintained in court documents that every classroom had an emergency folder with a key to lock the door against an intruder. But Papcsy on Friday inspected the folder taken from the classroom of Lauren Rousseau, a substitute teacher who died in the massacre, and said it was empty. 
 
 “This has been a mission to find out the truth, because that is what the victims of this tragedy deserve,” Papcsy said on Tuesday. “We deserve to have a safe environment where our kids can go to school.” 
 
 Monte Frank, one of the attorneys defending Newtown and its school district against the lawsuit, was present on Friday in Ridgefield during the inspection of the classroom folder. He declined to say anything about the contents. 
 
 “I am not going to comment on pending litigation,” he said on Tuesday. 
 
 Newtown asked a state Superior Court judge in July to throw out the lawsuit, arguing it was the 20-year-old shooter Adam Lanza - and not the town or the schools - who was responsible for the worst crime in Connecticut history. 
 
 The families are preparing a response. The case is scheduled for trial in March. 
 
 The case is separate from a higher-profile lawsuit brought by 10 families against the maker of the rifle used in the attack. That lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2016 and is being appealed in state Supreme Court. 
 
 The parents of two slain first-graders who are suing Newtown are also part of the higher-profile case against the gunmaker Remington. 
 
 Parents Neil Heslin, Scarlett Lewis and Leonard Pozner offered to settle their lawsuit against Newtown for $5.5 million each in 2016. 
 
 “The town’s defense is a bunch of language saying they are not responsible,” Papcsy said on Tuesday. 
 
 “They are saying ‘Yes, we wrote this lockdown policy but everything is discretionary and nobody is responsible for anything,’” he said. “Obviously we don’t believe that could ever be true.” 
 
 rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342 ||||| Lawyers for the parents of two children killed in their Sandy Hook Elementary School classrooms are asking a judge for access to state police evidence to determine whether a substitute teacher, also killed during the massacre, had access to a key that could have locked her classroom door. 
 
 Newtown schools officials and teachers who were in the Newtown school on Dec. 14, 2012 when Adam Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 first-graders, have testified in depositions that each classroom had an emergency kit including a card that contained a spare key to lock the classroom door. 
 
 One of the main issues in the lawsuit filed by the parents of Jesse Lewis and Noah Pozner against the town and school district is that substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau did not have a key to the door of classroom 8 and therefore was unable to keep Lanza from entering the room. 
 
 Rousseau tried to get the children into a bathroom in the back of the room but Lanza shot and killed her, 14 of the 15 children in her classroom and teacher's aide Rachel D'Avino. 
 
 One child, who was hiding inside the bathroom behind the door, survived. Noah Pozner was one of the children killed in that room. Rousseau was assigned to the class shortly before school was set to open when the regular teacher called in sick. 
 
 The lawsuit alleges that Rousseau "had neither a key to lock the door nor any knowledge of the ... safety and security protocols rehearsed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in case an intruder or other dangerous individual gained access to the school." 
 
 The lawsuit also alleges the town was negligent in not having a more secure entrance to the school because it did not have bulletproof glass on the front windows and for having classroom doors that couldn't be locked from the inside. 
 
 Then-Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson and at least two teachers in the school on the day of the massacre have testified in depositions that each classroom had an emergency kit in it and that Rousseau would have known that. 
 
 They have also testified that the school had a lockdown plan in place and that a drill had been held the previous March. 
 
 In his motion seeking access to the state police evidence, attorney Devin W. Janosov notes that even though evidence logs show that police did recover plastic red emergency response folders from the back of Rousseau's and Victoria Soto's classrooms they don't indicate any keys were found in them. Lanza also entered Soto's room and killed her, an aide and five students, including Jesse Lewis. Lanza then killed himself. 
 
 Janosov argues that it is necessary to physically inspect the evidence to see if keys are in the folders. 
 
 The town's attorneys haven't responded to the motion to review evidence. Janosov said in his motion, filed this week, that state police have acknowledged that they still have the evidence but that a court order would be needed in order to allow anyone to review it. 
 
 The town has filed a motion for summary judgment, asking the court to dismiss the case. Attorney Thomas Lambert argues that the "unprecedented criminal acts of Adam Lanza necessarily supersede any alleged negligence on the part of the defendants." 
 
 "It cannot be argued that it was reasonably foreseeable that an unidentified shooter, armed with an assault rifle would shoot his way into an elementary school and commit atrocities therein," Lambert wrote. 
 
 "The law does not require anyone to anticipate all manner of criminal conduct of third persons, only those within a certain scope of risk. No concept of proximate cause can be stretched to suggest that the defendants should have foreseen the potential of an attack like that perpetrated on December 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook School." ||||| Newtown agrees to inspection of Sandy Hook emergency key folders 
 
 NEWTOWN — The town and school district have agreed to allow two families who filed a wrongful death lawsuit over the Sandy Hook massacre to inspect emergency folders from classrooms where victims were slain to see if keys to lock the doors are in those folders. 
 
 “[T]he defendants do not have any objection to an inspection of them pursuant to proper procedures,” Newtown said in a response filed Friday in Superior Court in Danbury. 
 
 The two families asked a judge for permission this week to inspect the folders, which are being held by State Police and cannot be seen without a court order. The judge in turn asked attorneys for the town and the school district for their input. 
 
 In Newtown’s response, attorneys said they would allow the families to inspect folders from two classrooms where teachers and students were slain under two conditions: 
 
 The families may not reproduce or distribute what they find in the folders. 
 
 The families may only inspect the folders while defense attorneys are present. 
 
 The families’ request to search the folders for a classroom key relates to a claim in the lawsuit that teachers did not follow the district’s safety protocol of locking doors during a shooting the day a gunman forced his way into Sandy Hook School and murdered 20 first-graders and six educators. 
 
 That accusation has been refuted by the school district, which claims in court documents that a key to lock the class door was in a red folder in every classroom. 
 
 The lawsuit brought by the two families against the town and school district is separate from a wrongful death lawsuit brought by 10 families against Remington — the maker of the rifle used in the massacre. That case is being appealed in state Supreme Court. 
 
 rryser@newstimes.com; 203-731-3342
– A missing key "is going to be a big part of our case moving forward," says a lawyer for two families who are suing Newtown, Conn., over the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. The Danbury News Times reports that the school district had said in court documents that each classroom was equipped with a red emergency folder; in a lockdown situation, a key found in that folder would lock the classroom door. The News Times previously reported the folders have been in the possession of state police, and attorney Donald Papcsy last month got the green light to review the folders from the two classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary School where teachers and students died. He inspected them on Friday and says one of them was empty. An attorney for Newtown was present when that folder—which had been in substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau's classroom—was inspected, but he had no comment on what he saw. The Hartford Courant reported that Rousseau tried to shepherd the kids into the room's bathroom, but she, aide Rachel D'Avino, and 14 of the 15 children were killed by Adam Lanza. Noah Pozner was among the dead; his family, along with that of Jesse Lewis, are the ones suing the town for negligence. Though the Courant notes the superintendent and two teachers testified that Rousseau would have been aware of the emergency folder, the families' suit alleges in part that Rousseau "had neither a key to lock the door nor any knowledge of the ... safety and security protocols" that were in place.