Doctor Oz and the Majical Sandy Hook Bathroom

Video Transcript:

So let's take a look at this unbelievable Sandy Hook bathroom. Dr. Oz does his best to point out the impossibility of stuffing 15 kids in a teacher into a three foot by four foot bathroom, smaller than a janitor's closet. After all, Sandy Hook was a prestigious elementary school. Bathrooms would be expected to meet the highest construction code for personal hygiene to include a sink for hand washing. All parents of first graders certainly know their kids can have frequent accidents with snottie noses and bodily fluids. So where's the sink with the soap and the running water? Then you'll hear the teacher unbelievably claim that quote, the bathroom was too uncomfortably small for a grown adult to fit. Now in the real world here's the bathroom you would expect to see in a prestigious school like Sandy Hook. Now watch this. Show us out one of the most important things in life. Resilience. I recently read a post on Facebook that at least took a chord with me. Bad things happened to all of us, but it is not those moments that define us. That post was written by Caitlin Roy DeBellis. Now you may not know her by name, but during one of our country's most horrific tragedies, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Caitlin protected her 15 students from harm proving that in the midst of that horror there was incredible heroism. December 14, 2012. Newtown, Connecticut. The day the unthinkable became tragic reality. At 9.30 that morning, a former student shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School with an assault weapon. Before taking his own life, the gunman had brutally murdered six women and 20 children. All first graders between ages six and seven. But even in the depth of that day's unimaginable terror, heroes found the courage to make selfless rapid decisions to help others. Caitlin Roy DeBellis, a young first grade teacher, was one of them. Her quick thinking saved the lives of her 15 students. Caitlin has worked hard to overcome the tragedy and trauma of Newtown, forging her way past anger, despair and grief to choose and to share a powerful path of hope. So Caitlin piled 15 first graders into a bathroom in her classroom. Imagine 15 kids and an adult in the area this size. Unimaginable. So Caitlin's quick thinking and swift action saved her students' lives. So I'd love to introduce you all to Caitlin Roy DeBellis. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I have so much to ask you about, but I got to start with that closet. I mean, it is tiny. It's three by four feet maybe. How do you get 16 human beings into a space that small? Until that day, I had never set foot inside that bathroom. It was too uncomfortably small for a grown adult to fit. However, in that moment, the decision that I had made for us to survive far outweighed how unreasonable it seemed for us to fit. The impossible needed to become possible. And thankfully it did. Did you have the kids on your shoulders? Literally, I can't even physically imagine how it was doable. Yeah, I picked them up, put them behind the toilet on top of the toilet. I sat my tiny student on top of the toilet paper dispenser. It was our only option at survival. They were feet from where you saw the shooting. How did you keep all those kids calm? You know, kids are very aware of what's happening around them and what they heard. They might not have known exactly what it was, but it was so loud and it was so scary and it was in such imminent proximity to them that they knew that staying quiet meant that that was staying away. It's been three years. You replay those moments over and over again your head. It has been two years, nine months, fifteen days. It is constant, it is always, it is every second of every minute of every day. I don't know, I have ever recovered from that. When you first realized what had happened and you were finally saved, how did you process that? What happened over those first few weeks? Sure, great question. At first I was very much walking around in the days. My sense of safety of security were completely gone, taken from me. At the same time I was trying to answer why, why did this happen, why are school, why, those beautiful lives. Eventually I came to realize I was never going to answer those why. It's not then, not now, not ever. I had to shift my attention. I had to focus on questions that could be answered because there are so many questions that can. I think for so many of us, especially during the darkest times, we focused so much energy on questions we're never going to answer. We forget there are so many we can and that there's so much power in that. For myself there were two questions I had to answer. The first was, how do I make sure this day does not define my students and myself. The second was, how do we get our control back? And those two questions were my guiding light. When it comes to the control issue, the second part, I went to New Town, that evening. And I was almost there at Pudy for me. And I was with many others who felt calm as well. We were outside of a church. And you could sense the passion that people had for each other. The need just to be there to provide support and encouragement just because you needed something to do besides just more and some tragedy to do. That's the biggest possible. I'm sure you felt that for many who are coming to try to support you. You actually lived through it. I should point to you on the camera. A wonderful bucket set. Inspiring memoirs called Choosing Hope. Moving forward from your life's darkest moments. And you talk about that here. How difficult is it for you, whether in a book form or even talking about it on a show or on a revisit that day in December? I think for myself, as I said, it's constant. And it's always, so I mine as well, use my own darkest hour to empower others to know that they can overcome their own, because they can. Everyone has pain. Everyone has hard times. And to know that it's a choice, how you react to it. It's a choice every day. I think that what is so important is that the things that happen to us in our lives don't have to define us. We can define them. And we can make a conscious choice that what seems insurmountable does not have to be. I'm calling the police.