Sandy Hook victims mourned for lives cut short
USA TODAY
Published 6:24 p.m. ET Dec.16, 2012 - Updated 1:01 a.m. ET Dec. 18, 2012

Noah Pozner, 6

Noah was "smart as a whip," gentle but with a rambunctious streak, said his uncle, Alexis Haller of Woodinville, Wash. Noah's twin sister Arielle, assigned to a different classroom, survived the shooting. He called her his best friend, and with their 8-year-old sister, Sophia, they were inseparable.

"They were always playing together, they loved to do things together," Haller said. When his mother, a nurse, would tell him she loved him, he would answer, "Not as much as I love you, Mom."

Haller said Noah loved to read and liked to figure out how things worked mechanically. For his birthday two weeks ago, he got a new Wii.

"He was just a really lively, smart kid," Haller said. "He would have become a great man, I think. He would have grown up to be a great dad."

Veronique Pozner was at work at Grove Hill Medical Center in New Britain, 38 miles from the Sandy Hook school, administering chemotherapy to cancer patients when a patient got an alert about the Sandy Hook shootings, said Doreen Berube, the office administrator. Pozner, an oncology nurse, came to Berube and said simply, "I've got to go.''

Throughout the day, Berube and the other nurses at the oncology office received periodic heartbreaking texts from Pozner, who went to the firehouse to find her children: Noah, his twin sister and an older daughter. The girls were reunited with their mother, but Pozner could not find Noah. At about 4 p.m., Pozner texted the office that she was with a state trooper, waiting for Gov. Dannel Malloy. Then, Berube said, "we knew he was gone.''

Pozner, a single mom, has five children, including a daughter in college and a son in high school, a daughter at Sandy Hook and Noah's twin sister. "They were everything. They are everything to her," Berube said.

Noah's funeral is Monday at Green's Funeral Home in Fairfield. The Jet Blue airline is helping his relatives in Seattle get notes to the family in Newtown so the notes can be buried with the boy, according to a tweet by the company.