60 Minutes (1968) s45e12 Episode Script

It is a Sunday of sorrow for Newtown, Conn.
, and for the nation.
This afternoon, hundreds of residents walked the road to Sandy Hook Elementary School where, on Friday, 26 people were murdered, Obama has been in Newtown tonight for a memorial service.
First reports of this tragedy have turned out to be inaccurate.
We were told that the gunman's mother was a teacher at the school, that he was allowed in because he was recognized, and that he targeted his mother's classroom with two handguns.
Well tonight, we know that all of that is wrong.
Here's what we do know as told by people who knew the gunman and by one woman at the school that he approached, but did not kill.
That woman is Sally Cox, the school nurse.
This picture was taken shortly after she left Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday.
She's been the school nurse there 15 years.
And she told us that Friday morning began with comforting routine; 9:10 Pledge of Allegiance, 9:15 outside doors locked.
Then came 9:30.
Sally Cox: All of a sudden I heard a very loud popping noise.
I mean a noise that I've never, ever heard before.
And my first thought was, was this something with the heating-- something-- or did something fall? And, I called out to the secretary, "Barb, what is that?" And then she called out to me by name.
She said, "Sally.
" And I could just hear, like, fear in her voice.
Scott Pelley: It was something about the way Barb called out your name? Sally Cox: Yes.
Yeah.
She just had this horrible sound of fear in her voice.
That's what made me just-- 'cause I think I was about ready to go to see what was going on.
The popping kept going off.
And I just dove underneath my computer desk.
The back of the desk has a small opening for, like, wires to come out.
And I just peeked.
I could see his feet and his legs from the knees down.
And he-- his feet were facing in my direction.
And I just froze with fear.
And then he just-- it was just seconds and then he turned around and I could hear him walk out.
I heard the door close and then I just heard popping starting all over again.
And then the secretary, she was down behind my desk and we pulled the phone off the desk and she called 911.
Scott Pelley: And she said what? Sally Cox: She said-- I-- she said, "We have a shoo-- please send help right away.
We have a shooter in the building.
" And then we just wanted to get out of there.
And then we just ran into my big supply closet and we ran into the closet.
We pulled that door closed.
So we were behind two locked doors.
And we could just hear the popping continue.
And we heard screams.
There's nothing we could do.
You know? It was just a helpless, horrible feeling.
You know? And just like a nightmare that-- couldn't believe that-- you know, you just think it's a bad dream.
After some time, I think it was about 11:15, so we had been in that closet for about an hour and a half, I opened the door and I peeked out, 'cause my office has a lot of windows and looks into the courtyard.
And I just saw what looked like maybe SWAT people but I didn't know, you know, who they were.
I didn't know if there were other shooters.
And it wasn't until 1:15 when I-- somebody was jiggling the door.
And-- but nobody called out.
So I decided to be brave enough and open that door into the office and a lot of state police officers were there at that point.
And they were very surprised to see me.
Scott Pelley; You were in the closet for about four hours? Sally Cox: Close to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just fearful.
Scott Pelley: I wonder what the standard security at the school is in terms of allowing visitors into the building and that sort of thing.
How is it supposed to work? Sally Cox: We do our Pledge of Allegiance at 9:10.
And then five minutes later the doors are locked.
All the doors and all-- going around the whole building.
And then when be--when people come they have to buzz.
There's a camera.
They push a button.
It buzzes in the office and we buzz them in.
Scott Pelley: How long has that been true? Sally Cox: Four or five years.
The gunman had shot out a window to get past the locked door.
From the start, Sally Cox told us, the teachers and the kids, went immediately into the lockdown that they had practiced and practiced.
Scott Pelley: Children were trained to go under their desks in events like these? Sally Cox: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we have different kinds of drills, you know? I mean-- in addition to fire drills and high wind drills and lock down drills and evacuation drills.
So we've-- we've done it.
We've been doing it, you know, each month it's something different, you know? Scott Pelley: So you'd done those kind of things fairly recently? Sally Cox: Just recently, yep.
Yes.
Yeah.
Scott Pelley: At some point, you left the school.
And I wonder in that journey from your office through the door, what did you see? Sally Cox: They told me to close my eyes.
They-- they got-- they took my arm.
And they guided me out.
They said, "We'll guide you out.
We want you to close your eyes until we get to the parking lot.
" I don't know what was there that they didn't want me to see, but they told me to close my eyes.
Scott Pelley: And that's what you did.
Sally Cox: That's what I did.
Yeah.
The officers spared her the sight of the bodies of 20 first graders, four teachers, the school psychologist, the principal, and the killer.
Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza lived in town nearly all his life but he left few impressions.
Olivia Devivo sat behind Lanza in 10th grade honors English.
Olivia Devivo: Yeah.
He carried a briefcase, briefcase to every class.
And that stood out to me because in high school everyone has backpacks and you know messenger bags.
And that stood out to a lot of kids.
It also stood out that Lanza was uncomfortable when asked to speak in class.
Olivia Devivo: He just would just get very nervous.
And you know, his face would turn bright red and he would get very fidgety.
And you could just tell that it wasn't that he didn't know the answer.
It's just that it was very difficult for him to say what he wanted to say.
Scott Pelley: Did he have a reputation for being a smart kid? Olivia Devivo: Yeah, definitely.
I mean you can just tell by the way he was in class.
He was always-- appeared to be very attentive and focused.
Scott Pelley: How would you describe him socially? Olivia Devivo: He must have really felt uncomfortable in any kind of social situation because he never really put himself out there.
And I just don't really remember him ever, you know, stepping forward or really saying anything.
It was just he wanted to be left alone and we left him alone.
She doesn't remember Lanza after that, maybe because he wasn't going to the high school full-time.
Family friends told us that he was being home schooled by his mother Nancy Lanza.
Nancy Lanza told her friends Mark and Louise Tambascio that Adam was brilliant but disabled.
Scott Pelley: Did Nancy Lanza ever tell you specifically what her son's medical condition was? And she put a name to it? Mark Tambascio: Asperger's.
Scott Pelley: That's what she said? Mark and Louise Tambascio: Yeah.
Yes.
Scott Pelley: That it was Asperger's syndrome? Mark Tambascio: Absolutely.
There's no question.
Scott Pelley: And for her it was a full time job taking care of him? Mark Tambascio: Absolutely.
Oh my goodness, yes.
Asperger syndrome is a disorder within the spectrum of autism.
It's characterized by social impairment, communication difficulty and repetitive patterns of behavior.
An Asperger's support group told us today that patients are more prone to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence.
And we don't know whether Asperger's played any role in the shootings, but friends told us that the condition did dominate the Lanza's lives.
Louise Tambascio: I mean, I know he was on medication and everything, but she homeschooled him at home cause he couldn't deal with the school classes sometimes.
So she just homeschooled Adam at home.
And that that was her life.
Scott Pelley: She wasn't working.
She devoted her time to Adam? Louise Tambascio: Yeah, she didn't have to work, so that's what she did.
She homeschooled him and you know and she did a lot of charitable work and everything.
Nancy Lanza appeared well off, living with her son in an upscale home.
She was 52, divorced in 2009, with another, older son.
In town, they say she was friendly and generous, donating time and money to charities.
Nancy Lanza also made a hobby of shooting sports.
She owned several guns.
A friend said that she'd grown up that way on a farm in New Hampshire.
Mark Tambascio: Yeah, she was.
She liked to target shoot.
You know, she got into it I think in you know, the last few years or so.
She really enjoyed it.
But yes she was an advocate she really got into it and loved it.
The guns Adam Lanza carried into the school, a rifle, and two pistols like these, were all legal, registered to his mother, under Connecticut laws which are among the strictest in the nation.
The murder weapon was a semi-automatic variation on the M-16 assault rifle.
It fires one round with each pull of the trigger.
The first victim Friday was Nancy Lanza.
Police say they found her lying in bed, shot in the face.
They also discovered the computers in the home had been smashed to bits.
An FBI lab is trying to recover documents from the hard drives now.
And investigators will subpoena the Lanza's emails and text messages from service providers.
Motive is still a mystery.
But if anyone can begin to understand an attack like this, its Robert Fein and Bryan Vossekuil.
In 1999 they went into prisons to interview and study assassins and would-be assassins for the U.
S.
Secret Service.
Then in 2002, the Secret Service published their follow-up study on 37 school shooters.
Scott Pelley: Robert, you've been speaking to people who are involved in the investigation at the highest levels.
And I wonder what they're telling you about these early days.
Robert Fein: Fundamentally, what I hear is that this is a very complicated case.
A very difficult, painful case that's going to take a long time to really unravel and understand.
Scott Pelley: What are they saying about precedents and how this compares? Robert Fein: On the continuum of lone-offender attacks, this case is described as way out there on the continuum in terms of awfulness.
They discovered that most attackers followed a discernible pattern of behavior for weeks or even months before the attack.
They call it "the pathway to violence.
" Scott Pelley: How does this pathway to violence manifest itself? What is it that people can look for in-- in a person who is on this pathway, as you describe it? Robert Fein: People who engaged in these attacks took a series of actions as in often selecting a particular weapon, sometimes practicing with a weapon.
They thought, "I'm desperate.
" They accepted the idea that violence might be an acceptable way to solve their problems.
Scott Pelley: In how many cases did the shooter tell someone essentially what he was planning on doing before he did it? Bryan Vossekuil: In almost all of them, the student who committed the attack, the school shooter, communicated, in many instances, the-- his intent to commit the attack.
Scott Pelley: The events of Friday struck fear into the heart of every parent who sends a child to school all across this country.
I wonder what you would tell the folks at home who worry, "Can I send my kid to school on Monday?" Bryan Vossekuil: It is important to remember that these are extremely, extremely rare events.
Robert Fein: Any event as horrible as the attack of last Friday scares everybody.
But the reality in this country is that schools have been and are safer and have become much safer over the last several years.
Yesterday in Newtown, they released the names of the lost.
We were surprised when school nurse Sally Cox told us that she was making a point of not hearing them -- not all at once anyway.
Better to take 26 blows one at a time.
Ever since the wreck of the Costa Concordia has been sitting, semi-submerged, off the coast of Tuscany, looking like a big, beached whale.
It's the largest passenger ship ever capsized, easily surpassing the Titanic.
And removing the ship has turned out to be the most complicated, the most expensive, the most daunting and the riskiest salvage operation ever.
The Costa Concordia is a rusting carcass, sitting precariously on two underwater mountain peaks.
The swimming pools and jacuzzis where passengers sunbathed and sipped cocktails, now empty and askew.
A clock remains frozen in time, marking the hour and minute when the ship lost power.
And below, ghostly vestiges of the ship's contents litter the ocean floor in what the Italian authorities have designated an official crime scene.
Thirty people died; two are still missing.
Nick Sloane: Welcome on board.
Lesley Stahl: Thank you.
Nick Sloane from South Africa is the senior salvage master.
He took us out to the wreck site.
Lesley Stahl: How big is that ship? Nick Sloane: She's huge and what you see at the moment is only 35 percent of her.
So 65 percent underneath is like an iceberg underneath there.
Now the plan is to roll the 60,000-ton ship in one piece onto an underwater platform, raise it and then float it away so it can be cut up for scrap.
Lesley Stahl: So, you're planning to rotate a ship that weighs 60,000 tons.
Nick Sloane: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: So, let me see.
You're going to-- this is the ship.
You have to do it like-- Nick Sloane: We'll roll it upright-- Lesley Stahl: --the whole thing together at once, creaking.
Nick Sloane: All the way along the three football fields long.
Lesley Stahl: Three football fields long? Nick Sloane: Yeah.
And we're going to rotate it all at the same time.
It sounds like an experiment in defying the laws of physics.
The actual work is being shared by Nick Sloane's Titan Salvage, an American wreck removal company, and Micoperi, an Italian engineering firm.
Sergio Girotto is the company's project director - in charge of re-floating a 60,000-ton ship filled with seawater.
Lesley Stahl: So, you have to create much more buoyancy than even the original weight of the ship, because of all the water? Sergio Girotto: Absolutely.
Absolutely.
A team of engineers came up with something ingenious: to in effect, weld a new ship onto the shipwreck.
It starts here with the construction of towering steel boxes called "sponsons".
They're gigantic: the largest ones weigh 500 tons each and stand 11 stories high - and they'll be outfitted with hoses and sophisticated air pumps to create buoyancy.
Here's what's supposed to happen: one by one, nine of them will be welded across the exposed side of the ship.
Sergio Girotto: They will be joined together like a big Lego, outside in the open.
Lesley Stahl: And they have to be precisely welded, correct? Sergio Girotto: The space from one sponson to the other, it is less than two inches.
So they must be fabricated with a very strict tolerance.
This row of hydraulic pulleys will tighten a string of 36 cables attached to the sponsons, slowly rolling the ship upright.
Then other steel boxes will be welded to the other side of the vessel and eventually, the hollow, air-filled sponsons will act like waterwings so the Costa Concordia can be floated and towed away.
Lesley Stahl: Has this ever been done before? Sergio Girotto: No, no.
Lesley Stahl: This is brand new? Sergio Girotto: The-- brand new technology, brand new methodology.
To lift a vessel in this way, it is the first time ever.
And no one's 100 percent sure lifting a vessel this gigantic in one piece is going to work.
It's the biggest passenger ship ever wrecked -- twice the size of the Titanic.
Just a year ago it was a 15-story floating palace - big enough to house a small town of 4,000 people.
As this promotional video shows, it had 1,500 luxury cabins.
Eighteen restaurants and bars, four swimming pools, five jacuzzis, and a casino.
The accident occurred this past January - ominously on the night of Friday the 13th.
Nervous passengers crowded together as water gushed in.
Sailing too close to shore, the ship had struck a huge boulder hidden just beneath the surface.
Lesley Stahl: You can see that it just tore the pipes apart.
Nick Sloane: Yeah the momentum of a large ship like this hitting that rock.
She had no chance.
Lesley Stahl: Almost like a shark eating the belly of a whale or something, it just ate into that.
Nick Sloane: Yeah, it was a big rock, about The wreck's an eyesore right off the beaches of tiny Giglio Island that has been overrun by an armada of support vessels and an army of welders, crane operators and marine engineers.
Because of the angle of the ship, the workers have to take a four-day course in mountain climbing.
Here they're working on the strong cables that are keeping the ship in place.
Much of the work is being done underwater by specially-trained salvage divers - 111 in all.
Ebano who's from Brazil is being geared up and safety checked by other divers on his team.
Nick Sloane: He's got communication for talking.
He's got the air.
He's got back-up air.
He's got a camera and a light.
Everyone who goes in has a support team of at least five up on deck.
Once suited up, Ebano is lowered down in a cage.
The day we were there the divers were ratcheting, tightening - measuring those massive steel cables that run under and around the ship to tie it down so it doesn't slide of the mountain peaks and sink.
It's an exacting and dangerous job.
So teammates stand by on deck in case of an emergency and a dive supervisor monitors and directs the action.
[Duane Morsner: Do you want to move back on your - on your camera and give us a wide shot of exactly what's going on down there.
.]
Duane "Monster" Morsner oversees a dive team.
Lesley Stahl: So you're just watching everything he does, listening to him? Duane Morsner: And explaining to him exactly where to go because sometimes when you go past 30 meters you can get narcosis and it sort of affects your-- your thinking.
And obviously if he's in trouble, I can see what the problems are, and help him out and check his depth, that sort of thing.
There's a salvage divers' camaraderie.
They live in close quarters in floating barracks next to the ship.
And while they come from eight different countries - speaking different languages - they're like soldiers in combat.
They have each others' back.
[Duane Morsner: Move towards the bow of the Costa Concordia, please.
.]
Though these divers are in the water round the clock, each one can stay under no longer than 45 minutes at a time.
They have five minutes to get from a depth of 40-feet into a decompression chamber.
When a diver surfaces, it's a race to strip off his gear and get into the chamber.
The divers and everyone else work round the clock -- seven days and nights a week -- in a race against time.
They have to remove the ship before storms like this one last month break it apart.
Nick Sloane: Every storm weakens the structure.
And there will be a certain point where the structure and she will just say, "I've had enough.
" Lesley Stahl: So is that what has you worried the most, the weather? Nick Sloane: Yeah, yeah.
When you have bad weather, you don't sleep.
Neither do the insurance companies that are footing the bill.
Lesley Stahl: So how much is this operation costing? Nick Sloane: Well, basically it's going to be around about 400 million, plus or minus, and that's a lot of money.
Lesley Stahl: Did your company ever consider proposing just blowing it up? Cause I know a lot of salvage operations - they just dynamite-- Nick Sloane: Yeah, some places in the world, that would be a solution.
In this scenario, I don't think it would ever be allowed.
Lesley Stahl: Is the reason because this is such a tourist area? Nick Sloane: Oh, the environment is the number one priority.
Lesley Stahl: Number one.
That's because the ship settled in a nationally-protected marine park and coral reef that's home to dolphins, exotic fish, these huge rare mussels and more than 700 other botanical and animal species.
[Lesley Stahl: Sergio.
Sergio Girotto: Hi, Lesley.
.]
Sergio Girotto took us to one of six shipyards in Italy that have been pressed into action.
At this one, north of Venice, they're building this huge steel platform.
It's one of six platforms that'll be lowered into the water, its legs anchored into the hard granite sea floor.
When the ship is rolled upright, it will roll onto them.
Lesley Stahl: So the ship is over there? And what, it's going to roll-- Sergio Girotto: Yeah, it's going to rotate and rotate slowly to rest on this platform -- exactly the same area where we are standing.
The platforms are necessary to keep the 60,000-ton ship from sliding off its mountain peaks, down into the abyss.
But getting the platforms to the wreck site is an operation in and of itself.
Sergio Girotto: And we make the tour of Italy.
They will be floated by barge from the shipyard to the shipwreck, off Giglio Island.
Lesley Stahl: Around the heel, around the toe, and up to Giglio.
Sergio Girotto: Up to Giglio.
It is a long trip.
Lesley Stahl: How long? Sergio Girotto: It's going to take 15 days.
I tell you, it is a gigantic project.
If you simply think of the quantity of steel is three times the weight of the Tour Eiffel.
Lesley Stahl: Of the Eiffel Tower? Sergio Girotto: Exactly.
Three times the weight of the tower.
Out at the wreck site, they're lowering giant pipes that are used to drill holes in the seabed for the legs of those massive platforms.
Lesley Stahl: So these are these big pipes that you're putting down To protect the environment, the drill bit will be enclosed in the pipe in order to contain any debris from the digging.
Lesley Stahl: Wow, look how huge! Nick Sloane: As you can see, this is about eight feet.
Eight feet is the diameter of the legs of those platforms.
And the holes for the legs have to line up almost perfectly.
Lesley Stahl: When you put the platforms down, what's your margin of error? Nick Sloane: The error that we can allow is less than six inches between them.
So if we are more than six inches out, the platforms aren't going to fit.
Lesley Stahl: Has there ever been a salvage project this big? Nick Sloane: No.
This is, with the complexities and the amount of engineering - the scale of the equipment that we're bringing in, the size of the teams, this is by far the largest that's ever been done.
Lesley Stahl: In the history of salvage? Nick Sloane: In the history of salvage.
Lesley Stahl: Let's talk about the day that you are going to rotate the ship onto the platforms.
If something's not going right, can you stop it? Nick Sloane: No, you can't stop it.
You have one chance.
Lesley Stahl: One chance? Nick Sloane: Once you start, you have to finish.
Lesley Stahl: We've spoken to engineers, marine engineers.
They think you have a 50/50 chance.
Nick Sloane: No, it's more than 50/50 for sure.
Lesley Stahl: It is? Nick Sloane: Basically, we've got a large engineering team.
We have over 200 engineering documents and everything proves that it can be done.
So-- Lesley Stahl: On a computer? Nick Sloane: Yeah, we-- on a computer.
Some parts of the ship will collapse internally.
It's gonna be very noisy.
There's going to be a lot of creaking, groaning, steel snapping.
But we-- she'll come upright.
Lesley Stahl: Steel snapping? Nick Sloane: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: That doesn't sound good.
Nick Sloane: Yeah, well, there'll be smaller bits of steel.
But the larger structure will take it.
Lesley Stahl: Is there a plan B? Nick Sloane: We have plan B and C.
But we don't want to get there.
"There" is cutting up the ship in place which would be an environmental catastrophe.
If all goes according to plan A, the ship will be rotated next summer, towed to a dry dock in Sicily and cut up for scrap.
There is so much ship, that process will take two years.