Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(74)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





REBEKAH


The shooting at the yeshiva becomes known as “The Playground Shooting” or “Toras David” or just “Roseville,” depending on the publication. Connie Hall killed seven people that day. Four students and three adults. Fewer casualties than Oklahoma City or Virginia Tech or Newtown or Aurora or Columbine, but more than Wade Michael Page slaughtered at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and the same number that One L. Goh gunned down at Oikos University in Oakland almost exactly a year before.

The children were, as Van initially told me, from one of the older classes. Their instructor was running late and they stayed on the playground while the other students were ushered inside for class. It was a nice morning, after all. Nearly fifty degrees and sunny. There were three acres of wooded land behind the school building, and that’s where Connie hid. He came out, dressed in a t-shirt that read GOD HATES FAGS beneath green Army fatigues, shooting an AR-15. He hit thirteen-year-old Mayer Klein first. Mayer, whose bar mitzvah was to be the next weekend, was hanging from the monkey bars trying to do a third pull-up when Connie shot him in the back. The tardy instructor, twenty-six-year-old father of three, Shimon Schwartz, who had just reached the school, ran to Mayer, and was killed for it. Shot once in the stomach, once in the neck. It wasn’t like Newtown, where Adam Lanza had the kids inside classrooms, like fish in a barrel. The boys of Toras David ran, and they ran fast. Four weren’t recovered for more than twelve hours; they were huddled together almost a mile away behind a self-storage warehouse, their clothing torn and mud-thick. Dovid Blau, twelve, and Aaron Siegel, thirteen, made it nearly fifty feet into the trees before Connie got them. Dovid died there, after a bullet pierced his spleen; Aaron fell with a shot to his spine, and will never walk again. Twelve-year-old Joel Silverman, the boy everyone called a hero afterward, pushed four fright-frozen friends from the playground’s mini suspension bridge as Connie came toward them. He paid for his selflessness with a shot to the side, which ripped through his liver and burst open his heart. Joel was an only child; his mother, Devorah, had suffered four miscarriages and a stillbirth before having him. When he was a year old, doctors discovered polyps on her ovaries and insisted on a hysterectomy. Three months after the shooting, she jumped in front of the M train at Marcy Avenue. Her husband never remarried.

Connie got just one of the boys Joel pushed before being shot: thirteen-year-old Zev Lowenstein. Zev took a bullet to the thigh and died at the hospital. He ran slower than his friends because of a birth defect that left one leg shorter than the other.

Instructor Abe Greenwald, forty, a father of six, originally thought the shooting was fireworks set off by a misbehaving boy. He came outside to investigate, and three bullets tore through his chest before he’d made four steps out the side door. The last person Connie killed was Abe’s brother-in-law, Yosef Schwartz, nineteen. Yosef ran out after Abe, who was married to his sister. He saw the carnage—boys splayed over the new blue and beige playground equipment, screams coming from every direction, and a man dressed like a soldier, walking among it all—and for whatever reason could not keep himself from trying to stop it. The boys watching from inside said he went running, arms waving, shouting for the man to stop. Connie shot him six times, like he was a paper practice target.

Nechemaya also took one of Connie Hall’s bullets. After getting my message the night before, he drove to the yeshiva, remembering that it had been the target of previous vandalism. He parked on the opposite side of the school from the playground, the side at the intersection of two roads. If anyone suspicious came driving up, he would see them. But Connie parked his truck a mile away and walked in through the trees. When the shooting started, Nechemaya ran toward the noise. Connie shot him in the shoulder, sending him to the ground. He hit his head on the concrete surrounding the sandbox and blacked out. The bullet missed any major arteries and when paramedics took his pulse they realized he was still alive.

It was acknowledged almost immediately that if Sam Kagan hadn’t shot Connie Hall while he reloaded his rifle, he would probably have killed a lot more people. Connie was wearing a bulletproof vest beneath his jacket. He was strapped with three hundred rounds of ammunition, and carrying two 9mm handguns in addition to the AR-15. Nechemaya called 911 as soon as he heard the shots, and three minutes later another call came in from inside the yeshiva, but it took six minutes for the first deputy to arrive—and the door to the school was unlocked.

Sam, who police found attempting to fashion a tourniquet around Zev Lowenstein’s leg, was handcuffed and interviewed. Witnesses say that he, too, came out of the woods, and that he fired three shots in quick succession. Physical evidence bore this out. Sam’s Smith & Wesson 9mm was originally purchased by a pharmacist at a Georgia gun store in 2004 and made its way to New York through a series of legal, and illegal, transfers. The gun had three bullets missing, and Connie had three bullets in him. Just as Aviva told me and Saul, Sam had surreptitiously installed a GPS tracking application on Connie’s phone, which led him to Roseville that morning. Connie left his phone in the truck, though, and Sam lost track of him in the predawn woods. When the shooting started, he ran toward the noise.

Hank and Nan told police that Sam knew about the plot against Roseville—although, they admitted, not the exact target—and was on board until Pessie died. Sam and Mellie denied this, however. Months later, when I finally interview her on the record, Mellie tells me that she knows she should have sounded the alarm sooner and that speaking up for Sam was her way of making up for it. Sam was arrested on gun and conspiracy charges, but with public opinion firmly on his side, in the end, prosecutors just didn’t think they could convince a jury that a Jew would plot to do such a thing to his fellow Jews.