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Final Farewells For Newtown Shooting Victims

By: CBS/AP Email
Updated: Sat 11:23 PM, Dec 22, 2012

After a wrenching week of emotional farewells, Newtown held the last funerals for victims of last Friday's elementary school shooting.

A horse-drawn carriage brought the miniature coffin of Ana Marquez-Greene to the church in Bloomfield, Conn., where a thousand mourners gathered to bid goodbye.

The service for the 6-year-old at The First Cathedral church included a performance by Harry Connick Jr., who has played with the girl's jazz saxophonist father, Jimmy Greene, the Connecticut Post reported.
Family members remembered her as wild-haired child with her own love of music.

"Ana had a song," said the Rev. Paul Echtenkamp of Glory Chapel International Cathedral in Hartford. "It just came out of her."

Monsignor Robert Weiss said at the funeral for 7-year-old Josephine Gay that she liked Barbie, her iPad and the color purple.

"Purple is the color of passion," Weiss said, according to the New Haven Register.

Josephine's parents, Michele and Bob, remembered how much she liked peanut butter, and how she would request a new spoon for each mouthful. They would find spoons covered with peanut butter in locations throughout the house.

Dozens of emergency responders paid their respects at the start of the service at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Newtown, walking through the church and up to the altar.

Emilie Parker, 6, was laid to rest in the northern Utah city of Ogden, where people had tied pink ribbons around trees and utility poles in her memory.

Her father, Robbie Parker, was one of the first parents to publicly talk about his loss and he expressed no animosity for the gunman. He's sustained by the fact that the world is better for having had Emilie in it.
"I'm so blessed to be her dad," he said.

Twenty children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14. The lone gunman also killed his mother before going on the rampage and then committing suicide.

Five funerals were held on Friday for Rachel D'Avino, a behavioral therapist who had just recently begun work at Sandy Hook Elementary; Mary Sherlach, the school psychologist who was killed while rushing the gunman; six-year-old Olivia Engel; six-year-old Dylan Hockley; and seven-year-old Grace McDonnell.

Authorities said Adam Lanza, 20, used a military-style assault rifle and carried handguns during the rampage at the school.

They still have no clear reason why Lanza would lash out at defenseless first-graders and their caretakers.

State police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said a final report on the investigation could be months away.


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