Summary Funerals were held for boys, as America began to say farewell to school massacre dead.
Heart-rending funerals were held Monday for two six-year-old boys, as America began to say farewell to the 20 children slain in a school shooting that sparked calls for new gun laws.
The first burials, held under raw, wet skies, were of a pair of boys among those shot in Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. On Tuesday, the first of the girls, also aged six, is to be laid to rest.
In all, on Friday, the gunman slaughtered 20 children aged between six and seven, six adults working at the school and his own mother, before turning one of his arsenal of high-powered firearms on himself.
The family of one boy, Jack Pinto, gathered at a funeral home in a century-old building in the center of the Connecticut town. Some 20 children of different ages came, along with about two dozen adults.
Jack Wellman, an eighth-grader who helped coach wrestling at the school, said fellow school wrestlers placed their sports medals in the coffin of Jack, a keen wrestler.
"He was an excellent kid," Wellman said at a nearby deli afterwards.
Another participant came out in shock. "I just cannot describe it, it was sad. The message was just comforting," she said.
"Our hearts are heavy."
All the schools in this prosperous and picturesque dormitory town were shut until at least Tuesday and the blood-spattered elementary school itself was to remain a closed crime scene indefinitely, authorities said.
"Healing is still going on," Newtown police Lieutenant George Sinko said.
In the nearby town of Ridgefield, reports of a suspicious person prompted the brief lockdown and deployment of police Monday at all schools, indicating the jitters in the United States in the wake of the killings.
For Newtown, a quiet suburban community where the 20-year-old killer lived with his well-off mother, the start of funerals was hardly likely to settle the nightmare of what happened last Friday.
But the crime, in which the murderer carried a high-powered, military style rifle and two handguns, may have spurred change in the political landscape regarding rules on weapons ownership.
In an indication of how widely the shock has been felt, the Senate held a moment s silence in Washington.
Late Sunday, President Barack Obama joined a vigil in Newtown and pledged to work for an end to mass shootings, which have now become a regular event in the United States -- with half-a-dozen massacres since Obama took office.
"These tragedies must end," Obama said, appearing to commit himself to a push for reform in his second White House term, possibly by urging the restoration of a federal ban on assault weapons like the one used in Newtown.
