When the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission meets for the first time Thursday it will hear from former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and University of Virginia School of Law Professor Richard Bonnie.
Ritter and Bonnie will speak separately to the group about the mass shootings in their respective states.
At the time of the Columbine massacre in 1999, Ritter was district attorney for Denver and became a member of the Columbine Review Commission, which conducted a review of the tragedy for then-Colorado Gov. Bill Owens. Ritter was elected governor of Colorado in 2007 and served until 2011.
Bonnie is director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and serves as chair of the Virginia Commission on Mental Health Law Reform. Following the Virginia Tech tragedy in 2007, he served as a consultant to then-Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s Virginia Tech Review Panel.
Each report offers a timeline of the events and how each occurred and was carried out by the gunmen, who took their own lives at the end of the shooting spree. Both reports also outline the police response and makes recommendations for how to improve on that response.
The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission created by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has until March 15 to draft a preliminary report about the shooting that claimed the lives of 20 children and six educators at a Newtown elementary school on Dec. 14.
Malloy and Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky III will review the status of the Sandy Hook investigation at the start of the meeting.
