How a Sandy Hook mother came to forgive the shooter

On December 14, 2012, Alissa Parker was finishing her Christmas shopping when her phone rang. On the other end was an automated voice telling her that there had been a shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Alissa's daughter Emilie was a first grader at Sandy Hook Elementary. That day in December, Emilie Parker was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook, along with 19 other children and six adults.

It was an act that shook the United States and was felt beyond its borders. At a news conference after the incident, then-President Barack Obama fought back tears. 

In the days and weeks that followed, Alissa was in shock.  She and her husband Robbie struggled to put on a brave face for their two younger daughters, Madeline and Samantha.

We looked at each other and we thought, "How are we going to tell her sisters? Her two younger sisters that idolized her, that fought over her. How do we explain to them in a way that they will understand that she is gone?" And that felt impossible.

How God feels 

Alissa began to think about forgiveness after a bedtime conversation between her husband, Robbie, and her daughter, Madeline, who was five years old at the time.

While Robbie was tucking Madeline into bed, she asked about Emilie.

How might they be able to see her sister again? 

Robbie explained that Emilie was in Heaven, and that if they made good choices in their lives, they would be able to join her there one day. 

Then Madeline asked, 'What about the young man who shot Emilie? What about him?'

Robbie said to his daughter, 'How do you think God feels about him?'

She replied, "I think God loves him, but he's really disappointed in his choices he made."

Madeline's response changed Alissa's perspective.

"It made me pause and look at him in a way that up to that point I had resisted seeing. To see him through eyes that saw compassion, and love, and empathy. Much like my daughter's life was like, and I remember thinking how uncomfortable that felt, how foreign."

Alissa had been determined to hang on to her anger.

"Somehow, holding on to the pain showed [Emilie] that I understood what she went through that day. And if I let that go, it was a disservice to her experience, and I felt that I owed it to her to be angry." 

'We should go to the Temple'

The beginning of her journey toward forgiveness was full of confusion. She went to the Mormon temple, praying with determination to feel Emilie's presence.

During that period of prayer, an idea came to her: To make contact with the father of Adam Lanza, the young man who committed the massacre.  Within a week, she and Robbie had arranged to meet him.

"When we sat down with Peter Lanza it just opened this floodgate within him," Alissa says.

"He began to tell us about his son, and my first instinct was to recoil and to react to him, but I let him talk and something very unexpected happened. I left with a new understanding about his son. There was so much more to him than the monster he had become that day."

Alissa still struggles with the notion of forgiving the man who killed Emilie. She's written An Unseen Angel, a book about her experience, and she and Robbie share their journey on their blog, The Parker Five. 

She's learned that deciding to forgive is the beginning of a process.

"You can't just forgive someone one time and it's over. There were thousands, if not millions of things to forgive for. Every time there's a birthday, every time there's a Christmas event that she's not at, every Mother's Day, every sunny, beautiful day where I see a butterfly, I have to forgive him." 

Click LISTEN above to hear about Alissa's struggle to forgive, and about how a meditation technique let her come face to face with her daughter's killer.  

I told him, "do you remember my daughter? Do you remember her? Do you remember her name? Do you remember what she looked like?"