Sarah Huckabee Sanders Tears Up Reading Letter From 9 Year Old Girl Asking for Prayers

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This was published 4 years agone

How Donald Trump replied to a seven-yr-old's anguished letter

Past John Woodrow Cox

Updated February 5, 2018 — 7.16pm

The manila envelope arrived on The states woman Mary Olsen's doorstep the twenty-four hour period after Christmas, and in its top left corner were three words that stopped her: "THE WHITE HOUSE."

Information technology was addressed to her daughter, Ava, only Olsen opened information technology and scanned the letter showtime to make sure the message didn't include anything that might trigger her second-grader's debilitating feet. Olsen then chosen her lilliputian girl into their living room, where they saturday together on the burrow. She gave Ava the notation, which, at the top, included the presidential seal.

Starr Henderson, 12, of Belton, cries afterward seeing her nephew Jacob Hall during a wake service in the U.s.a.. Credit:Ken Ruinard

"Beloved Ava," it read. "Thank you for your alphabetic character. It is very dauntless of you lot to share your story with me. Mrs. Trump and I are and then sorry to hear of the loss of your friend, Jacob."

Fifteen months before, on a fall afternoon in tiny Townville, Southward Carolina, Ava had only walked outside her schoolhouse for recess when, police say, a 14-year-onetime drove up to the playground in a Dodge Ram, jumped out of the pickup and pointed a gun.

"Thank you for your letter. Information technology is very brave of you to share your story with me. Mrs. Trump and I are and then sorry to hear of the loss of your friend, Jacob.": Donald Trump Credit:Evan Vucci

The accused teenager - who is expected to learn this month whether he'll be tried as an adult - continued firing for just 12 seconds before his pistol jammed. Past and so, three people at Townville Elementary Schoolhouse had been shot.

One bullet struck Ava's showtime-grade teacher in the shoulder, and another hit a classmate in the pes. A third struck 6-year-old Jacob Hall, who wore thick-lensed glasses and, at 106 centimetres tall, was the smallest kid in their class. Ava had decided to marry him when they grew upwards. He was the just boy she'd e'er kissed.

Iii days later, Jacob died.

Ava was then overwhelmed past the loss, and the terror of what she'd witnessed, that a doctor later on diagnosed the girl with mail-traumatic stress disorder and recommended that she be home-schooled. In the months that followed, the torment - described in a Washington Post story about the shooting - often consumed her. She yanked out her eyelashes and used stickers to encompass up scary words in "Fiddling House on the Prairie": gun, fire, blood, kill.

Although she didn't get to schoolhouse anymore, her younger brother, Cameron, who had likewise been outside that afternoon, did. Ava, her brownish eyes serious and her mind seldom at rest, worried about him and the millions of other children nevertheless spending their days in classrooms and cafeterias and playgrounds. And so, i morning concluding summertime, she sat at her kitchen table with a pencil and a sheet of notebook newspaper.

"Dear Mr. President," Ava printed in peachy cake letters, earlier explaining that she'd lived through a school shooting. "I heard and saw information technology all happen and I was very scared. My best friend, Jacob, was shot and died. That fabricated me very deplorable. I loved him and was going to marry him one day. I hate guns. One ruined my life and took my best friend."

She asked how the president would protect children from more schoolhouse shootings.

"Delight," she concluded, "keep kids prophylactic from guns."

Please, continue kids prophylactic from guns.

Ava Olsen

The male child defendant of firing the gun that ruined Ava'south life grew up in Townville and even attended the aforementioned uncomplicated school, where teachers remembered him as a model student. Only Jesse Osborne had found trouble when he left. In seventh grade, his family unit said in interviews concluding year, he was kicked out of middle schoolhouse afterwards bullies harassed him, and another student spotted a hatchet in his backpack.

That's why he was at domicile on that Wednesday in late September 2016. For reasons that remain unclear, his mother said, Jesse retrieved a gun from his father'due south nightstand, shot him in the back of the head and then, investigators allege, drove to the elementary schoolhouse and opened fire.

On that 24-hour interval, Townville's kids joined a group that now includes more than than 150,000 students, attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools, who have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, according to a Post analysis of online archives, state and federal enrolment figures and news stories. That doesn't count dozens of suicides, accidents and afterwards-school assaults that have also exposed children to gunfire.

Later months of psychological analyses and legal delays, a judge is expected to review testimony and evidence the week of February 12 before deciding whether Jesse should be tried equally a juvenile or an adult. If it'south the latter, he could face decades in prison.

The shooter is never far from Ava's mind. She remembers him as a towering and terrifying figure, and he often appears in her nightmares. She sometimes repeats what she heard him say on the playground - "I hate my life" - and once, later on Ava accidentally pushed her brother and he hit his head on a stone well, she blurted: "I'thousand just like Jesse."

Now, though, she was sitting on her burrow just afterwards Christmas, staring at a reassuring letter signed by the most powerful man in the world.

"Wow," said Ava, now 8.

Trump receives thousands of messages, including many from children, said a White Business firm spokeswoman who requested not to exist named. Some have fabricated news, including one from a 10-year-old who asked to mow the White House backyard (and did), and another, from a nine-year-old nicknamed "Pickle" who wanted the president to know he had a Trump-themed altogether party.

"The president gets lots of drawings," she said. "He loves those drawings."

Letters from ordinary Americans were fundamental to the daily life of former President Barack Obama, who read ten of them each nighttime and oft sent personal handwritten responses.

Trump's spokeswoman wouldn't say how many messages the president reads or whether he contributes to the typed replies that conduct his name, but she noted that "the president plays a role in correspondence that accept been elevated to his desk," every bit Ava's was.

Initially, for the girl, nothing was more than fascinating than Trump's massive, jagged signature, scrawled in black marker at the bottom of the page.

"Is that existent?" she asked her mum. It was.

"Schools are places where children learn and grow with their friends. Their halls should exist free of fear," the letter read. "It is my goal equally President to make sure that children in America grow upward in condom environments, giving them the best opportunity to realise their total potential. I will continue to focus on protecting Americans and improving the safe of our Nation.

"Mrs. Trump and I concur y'all shut in our hearts," it continued. "We promise you lot e'er call back that no matter what may happen, at that place are so many people in your life who love you lot, support yous, and desire to see you fulfil all your dreams."

The note fabricated her experience amend, at least for a few days, before she started to retrieve more about it.

"He didn't say how he could keep kids condom," Ava told her mum. So on January 8, she sabbatum down to write another letter.

Ava thanked him for the response and the promised prayers.

"I sometimes still recall about that day in my head thinking it will happen again," she wrote. "If you lot have the time, I have some ideas to aid go on kids and schools safe. Sometimes people who live through a school shooting have better ideas."

Ava told him what they were: move schools to safer places, give children a place they can run to if something bad happens, build schools in circles and put the playgrounds in the middle.

She stuffed the alphabetic character in an envelope, and her mother mailed it, and Ava hoped that everything would get stock-still earlier any more kids were hurt.

Then two weeks later, in Kentucky, police say another teenager at another school fired another gun, killing two students and wounding a dozen others.

At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that Trump believed all Americans deserved to exist prophylactic in their schools and communities.

"Students fearing for their lives while they're attempting to get an education is unacceptable," Sanders said, merely she offered no specific plans the administration had to stop school shootings.

In South Carolina, Ava heard naught virtually the carnage in Kentucky. Her mum didn't mention the news and kept the Boob tube turned off.

She didn't want her to daughter to know.

Washington Post

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Source: https://www.smh.com.au/world/how-donald-trump-replied-to-a-sevenyearolds-anguished-letter-20180205-h0u87g.html

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