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Police Search Gunman's Home; Family of Killed Teacher Speakers Out; Obama Calls on Republicans to Compromise on Debt Deal; Obama Named 2012 "Time" Person of the Year; Officials Resign Over Benghazi; Mass Shooting Survivors Offer Advice.
Aired December 19, 2012 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We're sort of here waiting for any sort of word, any sort of movement of what's going on inside.
We also do know that once they're done with this home -- a man was sent out here and tells us they plan on boarding up all the windows once the investigation and once the analysis of everything inside is complete -- Suzanne?
SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN ANCHOR: Do we know if it was just the mother and the son who lived in that house? Did anyone else live there with them?
FEYERICK: Those are the only two on record as having lived in the home. Again, it's just so unclear as to what he was doing in the home, how he was spending his time. That's one of the frustrating things about this. There's so little information about how he spent the last three years after he left school.
MALVEAUX: All right. Deborah Feyerick.
The family of a teacher killed in the rampage is now speaking out about her life as well as her death. 30-year-old Lauren Rousseau was a substitute teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary. Her father says, because she was a sub, she didn't have keys to lock her classroom from the inside. He said the gunman killed his daughter immediately and then opened fire on her students.
Rousseau's boyfriend told us the reality of what happened still is hard to accept.
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TONY LUSARDI III, BOYFRIEND OF LAUREN ROUSSEAU: It doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem permanent and finite.
UNIDENTIFIED CNN CORRESPONDENT: Do you think you might see her again?
LUSARDI: I'm convinced I'll see her again. I have like a little squish pillow, a little pillow for your head that she had that smells like her. It smells like her perfumes and stuff.
UNIDENTIFIED CNN CORRESPONDENT: It still does?
LUSARDI: Yes. When I wake up in the morning, I can smell my girlfriend's perfume and it makes me cry.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: More of that interview tonight on "Anderson Cooper 360."
To help those affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, visit CNN.com/impact. There is much you can do.
Up next, we look at mental health concerns and gun violence in our culture.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Stop the guns. Get them off your streets. Protect your kids. Love them. Do something. It's sad.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Remember what I said during the campaign. I thought that it was important for us it to reduce our deficit in a balanced and responsible way. I said it was important for us to make sure that millionaires and billionaires paid their fair share. I said that we would have to make some tough cuts and tough decisions on the spending side. But what I wouldn't do was hurt vulnerable families only to pay for a tax cut for somebody like me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: President Obama calling on Republicans to compromise on tax hikes to get this debt deal nailed down. He spoke at length about the debt standoff at a news conference about an hour ago. The main sticking point, still between the president and House Speaker John Boehner, who will get a tax increase and who is not? The president wants a rate hike on the income of more than $400,000 a year. Boehner supports a tax boost on income of more than a million dollars a year.
Mark Zandi is joining us from Westchester, Pennsylvania, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.
Mark, thanks for being here.
Break it down for us, the two plans, and how it would impact the American people. We have a different threshold, $400,000 and above for the president and $1 million and above for Boehner.
MARK ZANDI, CHIEF ECONOMIST, MOODY'S ANALYTICS: Obviously, a lot fewer people would be affected by the Boehner plan. It's only those who make over a million dollars and there's very few of those and very few who make over 400K.
My sense is there's middle ground here, and the middle ground is about $500,000 in income. When we get a deal, my guess is people that make over 500K, will see a tax increase. If you make less, you won't see a tax increase. About 1 percent to 2 percent makes over 500K, so the vast majority of Americans won't feel the impact of the increase in marginal tax rates.
MALVEAUX: What about small businesses? Because that's the case Republicans make all the time, is that if you tax people more, it hurts small businesses, who end up employing folks.
ZANDI: Yes. I don't think that's a strong argument. Yes, there are small business owners that are in that top tax bracket and they will be affected, but most small businesses, at least the most that people think about, the folks that run the corner grocery store or the dry- cleaning or the local hardware store, they're not in the income group and aren't affected by that. Most small business owners aren't affected by the tax increases discussed here.
MALVEAUX: Mark, you said you don't believe we'll go over the fiscal cliff and deal with big, big tax increases and severe spending cuts, because it would have such a broad impact, negative impact on our economy. Are you still confident that that is the case?
ZANDI: Well, Suzanne, it's hard to be confident about anything when it comes to politics in Washington. But yes, I think, odds are, we'll get a deal because it's in the interest of both the Democrats and Republicans. Most fundamentally, it's in the interest of American people and our economy that we get a deal. If it's not exactly by December 31st, it's by Inauguration Day. Much beyond that, it will do significant damage, and I don't think policymakers, Republican or Democrat, want to go down the path.
MALVEAUX: Mark, we hope you're optimistic and confident. We're trying to be here on this end as well.
Thank you.
President Obama has a new title, "Time" magazine's "Person of the Year." We'll look at why he was chosen and who he was up against.
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MALVEAUX: President Obama is "Time" magazine's 2012 Person of the Year. In explaining the choice, "Time" notes his popularity among young people, minorities, Hispanics and college-educated women, and calls the president, quote, "both the symbol and, in some ways, the architect of this new America."
"Time's" editor spoke to CNN this morning.
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RADHIKA JONES, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, TIME MAGAZINE: We think about the news of the year, and the year ahead. We also are thinking about the legacy of the Person of the Year archive. And we want a choice that will stand up to the test of time, and we felt strongly that President Obama would do that. (END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: "Time" also recognized Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban. She survived. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi as the runners-up on the list.
Blistering report blames systemic failures at the State Department for that deadly terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Now, is the fallout. Three department officials have resigned. The attack killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. An independent review board concluded that security at the facility was grossly inadequate.
We're hearing from Senator John Kerry, who is widely expected to lead the State Department when Secretary Clinton steps down. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JOHN KERRY, (D), MASSACHUSETTS: But I think the department has taken a huge step forward to address lessons learned from Benghazi, which are important to everybody. There are 70,000 employees over there. There are 275 different posts. People are at risk. It's a dangerous world we're in. I think that this report is going to significantly advance the security interests of those personnel and of our country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: Elise Labott, you have this review board that says nobody violated his or her duties specifically. They didn't recommend disciplinary action against any one person. So why the resignations?
ELISE LABOTT, CNN FOREIGN AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, why they didn't say anybody willfully was in dereliction of duty, Suzanne. They said there was a deficit a real inadequate leadership at senior levels of the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Near East Affairs Bureau. That's why the diplomatic secretary for diplomatic security, Eric Boswell, resigned. His deputy, Charlene Lamb, who testified at this hearing of the Oversight Committee several months ago, she was the one that denied all of those requests.
What they're saying, what the board is saying is that, at this level the assistant secretary and the kind of bureau level, this is where the rubber meets the road. These are the bureaus that are supposed to implement security for the State Department. And there were a lot of questions at this briefing we just had by Tom Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, who led the ARB, the advisory review board, and they said secretary Clinton really is not to blame here because the staff, if there were problems in security, they should have brought it up the chain of command to her attention.
MALVEAUX: So they're saying she didn't know about it and she didn't know they didn't have adequate security there?
LABOTT: Exactly. MALVEAUX: What about this issue of money? Obviously, security comes at a cost. Is there some responsibility Congress bears in not having that kind of adequate security there?
LABOTT: Very much so, Suzanne. There were several recommendations, 29, in fact, that the panel asked the State Department to implement such as tighter security, looking better at the intelligence threats because they really didn't -- they missed the security deteriorating situation on the ground. But they also said that Congress bears a lot of responsibility here. The climate of no when officials would ask for additional security really came from shrinking budgets, and they say that Congress really has to expand the resources for the State Department to make sure that these posts get the security that they need -- Suzanne?
MALVEAUX: All right. Elise Labott, thank you.
After a lengthy discussion from the president today about the looming fiscal cliff, now House Speaker John Boehner has announced he'll have a press conference of his own at 2:15 p.m. eastern to respond to all of that. We're going to take that live as soon as it starts.
We're also following the other story, the tragedy in Newtown and the aftermath. It's brought up a lot of tough, tough questions and issues. We're talking about gun control, violence in the media. There's one fact that we can't get around, the children that survived the massacre, they have seen so much, too much.
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UNIDENTIFIED BOY: I was in the gym at the time, and so the teacher -- we heard lots of bangs. We thought it was the custodian.
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MALVEAUX: Those who survived the Sandy Hook school shooting have to live with the memory of that horrifying event, the loss of friends and even siblings.
Elizabeth Cohen talked with two young men coping.
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UNIDENTIFIED BOY: I saw some of the bullets going past the hall.
UNIDENTIFIED BOY: We heard yelling and put your hands up, don't shoot. We heard lots of scary stuff.
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These innocent eyes have witnessed unspeakable horrors.
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: Everybody was like crying.
COHEN: Images that could haunt them forever. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She walked past the body. She saw the principal and the blood.
COHEN: Physically, they escaped, but how will they do mentally.
UNIDENTIFIED CNN CORRESPONDENT: A very serious situation at the North Valley Jewish Community Center.
COHEN: Ben Cadish and Josh Stepakoff know what it's like to face the nightmare. 13 years ago, the boys were at summer camp in Los Angeles when a gunman stormed and shot them. Ben was five.
(on camera): What do you remember happening around you?
BEN CADISH, WITNESSED SHOOTING: Screaming, tons of screaming.
COHEN (voice-over): Josh was 6.
JOSH STEPAKOFF, WITNESSED SHOOTING: He came in, and he shot all the way around, and the next thing I remember, I was just getting up and running as fast as I could that way.
COHEN: The boys survived but were never the same emotionally.
STEPAKOFF: I didn't live a normal childhood. In no means did I have a normal childhood.
COHEN: The shooter, Buford Furrow, had robbed them of their security.
(on camera): When you were dropped off at school, you wondered, am I safe?
CADISH: Yes.
COHEN: For how long?
CADISH: Probably through middle school.
STEPAKOFF: If we heard helicopters, sirens, loud noises, anything that would startle me, the house was on lockdown.
COHEN: You would go around and lock the doors.
STEPAKOFF: Every door, every window.
COHEN: Why did you lock every door and window?
STEPAKOFF: That was the closest thing I could feel to safe.
COHEN (voice-over): Now 19, these two young men are among the few people who experienced what the Connecticut children have experienced.
STEPAKOFF: The pictures of the kids being taken out and all standing in this line, and I could accidentally mistake the pictures from when I got shot.
COHEN: They worry for the Newtown children.
CADISH: I think they're going to feel, you know, afraid of the dark, afraid of loud noises.
COHEN: What advice would you give to these parents in Connecticut?
STEPAKOFF: Listen to your kids, you know? They're a lot smarter than we take them for. And so you really have to just listen to them and be understanding to them and know that there will be times when they really do want to talk about it and there will be times when they don't. And if they don't want to talk about it, don't push them.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MALVEAUX: Elizabeth Cohen is joining us now.
Ben and Josh, wow, that is extraordinary what they went through. How are they today? How do they cope with those memories now as young adults?
COHEN: They would say they are traumatized. It's better than when they were younger, but they have moments where they don't feel safe. In fact, both decided to stay in Los Angeles for college. They had other options. But they stayed in Los Angeles because they said, when we have those moments, we want to be near home. We want to be near our family.
MALVEAUX: What is the most important thing, you talk about what the little kids -- the memories and so many of them, like 600 people in that school, a lot of kids affected by this, what is the most important thing for them during this time? Even moving forward?
COHEN: Just to be there. I asked the young men that, they said just to know that the parents are always there. And they're going to need them sitting next to them at school. One of them said their parents were right there with him for a period of time after school. But later, as things got better, their parents would say, you're really strong. You survived something amazing. And Ben said that his parents taught him this mantra, "Ben Cadish can do anything." Because he had been -- if you've been through that, you can get through anything.
MALVEAUX: Is there a way of knowing if your child is OK, or if your child is really having a difficult time coping?
COHEN: It is interesting. Both of them, and the third boy I talked to involved in that shooting, they got professional help immediately. Their parents didn't wait to see what might develop. They got professional help immediately because sometimes a professional is going to be better at assessing if your child is in danger of becoming, you know, severely traumatized and in danger of things getting worse.
MALVEAUX: Is there any circumstance where it is better actually not to go back to school, where it is better to just stay home, to be with friends, to be with family as long as you need to be and you don't actually continue to live a normal life?
COHEN: It is interesting. Each of these two young men had different experiences in that way. So Josh went right back to the Jewish Community Center day camp, as soon as he was physically able and he loved it. And he loved remembering it as a happy place. Ben has not gone back. And, in fact, when we asked him to go back with us now 13 years ago, he declined. It was too hard for him. For Josh, it was important to go back and reclaim that territory. But for Ben, it was too much.
MALVEAUX: Is it more difficult for very young kids to deal with this kind of trauma and tragedy if they don't understand what they have seen or it is a very basic simple understanding of what they have seen?
COHEN: You know, it is interesting. This age, 5 or 6, which is how old these men were and how old the Connecticut kids are, is a particularly vulnerable age. They're old enough to understand what happened. Josh was lying in his hospital bed when an image of the shooter came on and he said to his dad, that's the man who shot me, right? He knew what was going on. But he wasn't completely old enough to understand that he was safe. So he felt unsafe in his own home. So this is a particularly tough age.
MALVEAUX: All right. Elizabeth Cohen, thanks so much.
COHEN: Thanks.
MALVEAUX: So many people, so many unanswered questions. Thank you.
To help those affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, visit CNN.com/impact. You can make a difference.
A former Newtown resident putting her heart on her sleeve, how she's raising money for the victims.
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MALVEAUX: A father and a boat owner felt they had to do something to pay tribute to the children killed in the Connecticut school shooting. Take a listen.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is a tribute to the schools because I have two kindergartners in school now. So there is just no words you can say for it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MALVEAUX: This was just one of 100 boats taking part in the annual San Diego Parade of Lights. Normally, a showcase for vessels decorated with holiday displays. But what happened in Newtown, touching people everywhere, especially those who used to live there. One woman has decided to raise money for the shooting victims' families by reviving an idea she had in high school.
Here is Christie Woolski.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KERIN SOVERN, GREW UP IN NEWTOWN: This is that carnival at St. Rose of Lima. Me and my sister's baby.
CHRISTIE WOOLSKI, CORRESPONDENT, FOX 5 NEWS (voice-over): San Diego resident, Kerin Sovern, remembers a simpler time, her childhood in Newtown, Connecticut.
SOVERN: Just great town, filled with wonderful things and wonderful people: general store, 99 cent bacon cheese, ice cream shop, everything that you could imagine out of a town that you would want to raise your kids in.
WOOLSKI: In high school, a love of Newtown inspired Kerin and her friends to make these t-shirts.
SOVERN: We all loved Newtown and we thought it would be funny, let's make a fun T-shirt to express our love for our town.
WOOLSKI: After last Friday's tragedy, Kerin posted this old photo to Facebook and soon a fund-raising idea became reality.
SOVERN: The heart is green and inside the heart will be the date 12/14/12.
WOOLSKI: The redesigned T-shirts are being sold for $25 on the web site Newtownpride.com. Printing companies are donating the materials so all the proceeds can go to the victims' families.
SOVERN: There is not going to be any costs except for the shipping. So it is pretty phenomenal. It was just a snowball effect of greatness out of a tragic situation.
WOOLSKI: So far, the majority of orders are coming from Newtown residents and San Diegans wanting to make a difference.
SOVERN: San Diego cares and San Diego reminds me a lot of Newtown, as far as the community and camaraderie that they show. And it has been, you know, a blessing to live here with such wonderful people as well. And San Diego is my home now, but Newtown will be forever my home.
WOOLSKI: Already close to 300 T-shirts have sold, meaning more than $5,000 for the cause.
In San Diego, Christie Woolski, FOX 5 News.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MALVEAUX: Great for her. What a great cause.
CNN NEWSROOM continues right now with Brooke Baldwin.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Suzanne, thank you.
Good to see you'll of you here on this Wednesday. I'm Brooke Baldwin.
A bit of a surprise. Moments ago, in the White House briefing room today, the president speaking before reporters, answering several questions about the fiscal cliff and blasting Republicans in the process. Well, here's what we've learned since.
