It took more than five years, but this afternoon I unpacked the last box of negatives and prints. In it was this folder, negatives from the 1994 murder trial of Wayne Lo who killed two people in a school shooting on December 14, 1992 – 20 years to the day before the Connecticut shooting.

I spent several weeks standing, quietly, in the corner of a Springfield, Mass., court room. The deal with the judge was I couldn’t move, I couldn’t change lenses and I couldn’t change film while the court was in session. Making 36 frames last for the three hour sessions, shooting with a 300 mm lens at 1/30 of a second, for days on end was nerve wracking. But nothing like the hell Lo’s victims, or the victims on Friday, had to go through.

After seeing every witness but one, I was convinced he did it and that it was a planned, pre-meditated event. I also think that he suffered, badly, from a mental illness that was either undiagnosed or untreated.

Lo legally obtained his weapon and the modifications for it that turned it into a brutal killing machine. What he couldn’t obtain was help.

We need to fix that.