Letters to Newtown

Yolie Moreno, in front of her barn on June 28, 2014, talks about sorting through several hundred thousand pieces of mail from around the world sent to Newtown after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. Moreno took photos of many of the notes, drawings, gifts and other letters and compiled them on embracingnewtown.com. Morgan Spiehs

By Sarah Ferris

Newtown’s Yolie Moreno said she once could not have imagined what one million pieces of mail would look like.

But in the weeks following the December 2012 shooting, nearly every town building in Newtown, Conn. became a makeshift storage center for hundreds of thousands of letters and cards.

Moreno, whose daughter attended first grade at another school in town, remembers walking into a room at the Newtown Town Hall that was lined with banners, posters, photographs and paintings from floor to ceiling. Boxes were piled everywhere, full of letters from schoolchildren, church congregations and families whose lives had also been touched by gun violence.

– Cezanne, a student from New York City wrote: “I feel your pain every day in my bed, as I remember Olivia, a tiny girl who loved hip hop in my dance class, a victim of tragedy.”

– Lydia, a grandmother who lost two of her children at young ages, wrote: “My world had been turned upside down two times and I didn’t know how I could go on.”

– Brenda, a mother who recently lost her son, wrote: “I know that soul wrenching loss that you feel. If I can do one thing for you, I would like to offer you some hope.”

“I just couldn’t believe it,” Moreno said in an interview last month. “You walked in and it felt like it was a giant hug.”

Yolie Moreno holds up her necklace with a vial of sacred soil made out of incinerated letters, gifts and other mail sent by people around the world after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Before the items were incinerated, Moreno helped digitally document and compile them. The sacred soil will potentially be made into bricks and used to make a memorial. Morgan Spiehs

The town eventually burned all the mail, but first, Moreno decided to document it. For nearly a year, she photographed every letter and card that was sent to Newtown, creating a digital archive that she hoped would let people worldwide know that their mail mattered.

She crouched on her hands and knees at the town’s municipal center for months – sometimes crying as she read the letters. She eventually became close with several families who had lost children and began picking out the cards and letters she thought they would want to read.

Last spring, Moreno watched the contents of four tractor-trailers – piles of those opened letters, soggy teddy bears and burned out candles that were part of a memorial – go into an incinerator to be burned.  It came out in one small box of ashes, which the town has called “sacred soil.”

“This is the true nature of human beings, when something bad happens, all you want to do is help,” Moreno said.