UPDATE (Thursday, September 23, 2023): This story has been updated to remove reference to a photo of children being led away from Sandy Hook Elementary School on 12/14. We erroneously reported that Ashley was part of the group of children in that photo.

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A Newtown youth named Ashley who was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School on 12/14 is lending her voice and presence to an advocacy organization seeking to reduce gun violence.

On February 5, the teen was interviewed in a Now This News interview providing an emotional recollection of what she experienced that fateful day. The video was shared through a Twitter account maintained by Guns Down America (GDA).

GDA’s website states the organization, which was founded in 2016, is “building a future with fewer guns by straining the gun industry and its lobby and building political and cultural support for policies that will keep us safe from gun violence. GDA is a community powered organization that brings together Americans from across the country to solve our national gun crisis in strategic and creative ways.”

In the video, Ashley reveals that she, like so many others who witness events like 12/14, is suffering with survivor’s guilt as well as clinically diagnosed PTSD, which has grown progressively worse as she has aged.

“You don’t really grow away from it, you kind of grow around it. As you grow up, it moves with you,” she said.

The 7 minute, 14 second video, with captions, contains the teen’s in-person account interlaced with images gathered from media and investigation files that have since been made public. By 5 pm on February 10, the video had been viewed more than 102,000 times. Within 24 hours, that number had more than doubled, reaching more than 280,000 views.

It opens with an image of Ashley today and flashes to an image of her at age 7 when she attended the school. Her narrative begins describing how she was looking forward to the day.

“I had picked out my own clothes, and for someone who was 7, that’s a big deal,” Ashley relates. She was also excited to have been chosen to hold a teacher’s walkie-talkie during a recess break later in the day.

She described sitting in a circle getting ready for the morning meeting when gunshots were broadcast over the school public address system.

‘She Got Shot’

She said the reason the loudspeaker was on and the students and those throughout the building could hear everything happening was because Principal Dawn Hochsprung “was trying to warn us. But then she got shot.”

“I remember us all being really quiet but really loud at the same time, like, because we were all sobbing, and it was just, like, so loud but we were trying so hard to be quiet,” she said. “I remember we could hear the footsteps of firemen on the roof and it freaked us out so badly.”

Ashley recalled how all the students ran to conceal themselves in cubbies in her classroom, and she was pushed up next to one of the two doors in the room.

“I just remember being so afraid of that door, that, maybe, like, he would come in through that other classroom and go into our room,” she related. Ashley recalled the bravery of her teacher, Mrs Clements, who tried to read to the children although her hands “were just shaking a lot, so it was, like, really hard to stay calm.”

“I remember her calling 911, and I remember her going out into the hallway and pulling two first graders from the hallway,” she added.

When the police finally knocked on the door, the children were screaming to not open the door. That’s when the officers had the children line up with their hands on the shoulders of the student in front of them, which was depicted in The Newtown Bee photo that was taken by Associate Editor Shannon Hicks.

“They told us to ... close our eyes, and they led us out of the building,” she said. “And I know a few of my friends didn’t close their eyes and, like, they are still so scarred because they saw, like, their classmates I guess.”

Ashley described the panic she was experiencing while looking for her sister, who was also in the school’s kindergarten class, and eventually being reunited with her sibling as well as her mom, who had arrived at the scene.

Recalling the incident, Ashley said, “It was just a whole lot of anxiety that I had never felt as a 7-year-old — I had hardly ever felt sadness.”

‘Sad And Scary’

“Everything was just different now. Like, everything was just sad, and scary, and it kind of made us realize, like, the world’s not, like, all sunshine and rainbows, I guess. Like, it’s not everything our childhood had been up to that far,” she said.

Noting that the event happened eight years ago, Ashley observed that “still very little has changed,” in regard to gun safety, and to her, that “is so unacceptable.”

As she began maturing through middle school, Ashley began to feel that even though she could have done nothing to change the outcome of that terrible day, “I felt like I should have been able to, or maybe I didn’t deserve some of the pity given to me because I didn’t lose anyone myself or I wasn’t shot myself.”

The video then notes that Ashley’s trauma has been exacerbated by Sandy Hook deniers and hoaxers who claim the event was staged as a ploy to hasten gun control legislation at the federal level.

“For them to say, like, that this just didn’t happen, for it to be a hoax, for them to be paid actors or something, it’s so invalidating,” she said. “It is incredibly invalidating to everything our community has gone through — to everything other communities have gone through.

“I can’t give you proof except for my trauma, except for the letters people wrote to us, except for the fact that I actually went to that school, you know? I can’t... I can’t even express how... how angry, how emotional it makes me,” she said, noting that newly elected President Joe Biden knows what losing a child is like, and his connection to that emotional feeling of loss is “powerful, because he can make a difference.

“I think a big thing I would tell him,” Ashley concluded, “is to just not give up on us — not give up on the idea... if he pushes hard enough, and if we continue to fight long enough and hard enough, things will change.”

See the video by CLICKING HERE.