A mourner pays his respects at one of the makeshift memorials for the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn. Authorities say a gunman killed his mother at their home and then opened fire inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, killing 26 people, including 20 children, before taking his own life, on Friday.NEWTOWN, Conn. – Opening a long and almost unbearable procession of grief, Newtown began laying its dead to rest Monday, holding funerals for two 6-year-old boys – one a football fan who was buried in a New York Giants jersey and one whose twin sister survived the school shooting rampage.
Two funeral homes filled with mourners for Noah Pozner and Jack Pinto, the first of the 20 children killed in last week’s massacre to receive funerals. The gunman also killed six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary, and his mother in her home, before committing suicide.
A rabbi presided at Noah’s service, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, the boy was laid to rest in a simple brown wooden casket with a Star of David on it.
“If Noah had not been taken from us, he would have become a great man. He would been a wonderful husband and a loving father,” Noah’s uncle, Alexis Haller, told mourners, according to remarks he provided to The Associated Press. Both services were closed to the news media.
Noah’s twin, Arielle, who was assigned to a different classroom, survived the killing frenzy by 20-year-old Adam Lanza, an attack so horrifying that authorities could not say three days later whether the school would ever reopen.