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Newtown school shooting 911 calls to be released Wednesday

Posted at 5:50 AM, Dec 04, 2013
and last updated 2013-12-04 07:50:55-05

From CNN Staff

(CNN) — Some audio recordings of 911 calls from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting will be released Wednesday afternoon.

The calls, made to Newtown, Connecticut, police, are scheduled to be made available to the media on CDs at 2 p.m. ET.

The release of the recordings will be administered by the attorneys for the Town of Newtown at their offices in Danbury.

Calls to the state police in Litchfield are not a part of this group of recordings.

The Associated Press had challenged authorities’ refusal to release the 911 tapes.

Last week, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Eliot Prescott upheld the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission’s ruling to release calls related to the December 14, 2012 shooting. A state attorney had tried to block the release to shield the victims’ families.

The massacre at Sandy Hook left 26 people dead, including 20 children, making it the second-deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

The gunman, Adam Lanza, shot himself at the end of his 11-minute rampage.

The killings in Newtown, about 60 miles outside New York, happened less than five months after a similar bloodbath at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver.

Those mass slayings triggered a nationwide debate over gun violence, school safety and mental health, a debate that produced some new restrictions on firearms in several states.

Backlash by gun-rights advocates followed.

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