WHEN Sandy Hook elementary school became the scene of one of the deadliest mass shootings in America in December 2012, Natalia Gomes learned just how traumatic such a tragedy could be.
The Scots teacher was working at a school less than two hours away from the Connecticut incident, in which 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 people at the school, including 20 children, before taking his own life.
In response to events, Natalia’s school went into “active shooter drill”. Doors were closed and locked, windows covered, lights were put off and students and teachers hid under tables.
It is a routine which Natalia, from Ellon in Aberdeenshire, has unfortunately had to refine in her teaching career – and it also inspired her first novel, Dear Charlie.
The Young Adult book centres on the killing of 14 people at a school in England in 1996.
It is not so much the story of the shooter that the book centres on but the aftermath and the affect the atrocity has on his family, in particular 16-year-old younger brother, Sam. She said: “When the Sandy Hook primary school shooting happened, we all knew about it and we immediately went into active shooter drill.
“I knew it was a drill but it was also scary in that you are suddenly aware it can really happen anywhere. You can’t think, ‘It couldn’t happen at my school’.
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“I work with a younger population and I just made it like we were practising going under the table and just tried to make it fun because the lights are going off and the windows are getting covered up and then they have to be silent and not speak.
“The conversations which occurred as a result of the security measures implemented after that made me question whether we were doing enough to support students and their families before it happened, rather than just being reactive.
“I thought we should be putting more effort into predicting who these school shooters are because an FBI report that came out in 2014 says they are primarily students at that same school or just graduated from that same school.
“I think we should be reaching out to teenagers before it happens rather than learning how to lock our doors and hide under tables afterwards.
“When I researched it, I found it was often the same person you are reading about. Certainly, in media reports, all slightly geeky, withdrawn, depressed, loners, often video game or horror movie enthusiasts.
“Nobody really knows unless you actually know that person but at the time you have neighbours or people claim to be friends who come out saying, ‘There was always something odd about him, I knew he was going to do something’.
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“A lot of the time families of these teenagers are typically portrayed as enablers, they are very often vilified whereas in reality the truth is much more complex. People who have not been in the situation will say, ‘How could they not know?’
“They are very easy to blame but they are also victims and their lives will never be the same again.”
Natalia, 32, had help on hand to research Dear Charlie.
She added: “I was lucky enough my sister is a forensic child psychologist in Stirling so she recommended books to me.
“And my husband is a Federal Prosecutor with the FBI. I got to pick his brain about gun permit regulations in America and profile strategies and investigation processes.”
If Dear Charlie deals with an emotive subject, it is also one which is very much present in American school life.
Natalia, who stays just outside of Boston and teaches students with special needs, is reminded of that on a regular basis through the classroom drills.
She said: “I remember on that first one looking at my cupboards and thinking, ‘If I cleaned this out, could I potentially put a child in there? Two children maybe?’
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“Also in that particular room, a part of you is thinking, ‘My exit door is right there – if this was a real situation, would I be spending that much time squeezing children into shelves and bathrooms or running out the exit door?’
“We had training the other week and the police gave me the OK that if there is a shooter in the hallway, and you are not seeing anybody outside, you can take your children and run out of your exit door.”
Natalia is continuing her teaching career while hard at work on her second book, which she hopes will bring her back to Scotland.
She said: “It is going to be another dark young adult fiction but about crime. It’s the same in a sense that I am looking at a small community again but it is going to be about how crime impacts on that community.
“It is going to be set in more rural Scotland so it’s an excuse to come home for more research.”
Dear Charlie is out now published by HQ.
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