WTIC Fox 61, citing law-enforcement sources, now confirms that former state trooper Victor Diaz shot and killed a Newington police officer in West Hartford tonight, and that the slain cop was indeed, as I speculated below, the officer who regularly patrols Newington High School. He She had been the “school resource officer” at NHS for five years, according to WTIC’s report. The report did not name the slain officer.

[UPDATE, 10:27 PM: The slain officer’s name is Ciara McDermott, according to Kim Stone (NHS Class of ‘05) and this website; see also here. Kim says the local news is reporting that Diaz was McDermott’s boyfriend, and that it was a murder-suicide: “He shot her then himself.”]

Adding trauma to tragedy, all of this happened while NHS students were holding a vigil for senior Brendan Horan, who died Friday in an ATV accident. The vigil for Horan was apparently interrupted by fears that the gunman might be en route to the high school, according to WTIC. There were apparently officers with machine guns guarding the area. “The school was in some sort of lockdown because of concerns that the shooter might be coming here,” a reporter stated on-air. [UPDATE: Obviously, those fears were unfounded, since it was a murder-suicide. But the police did not initially realize that, according to WTIC (via my dad). They did not find the second body immediately, and were initially operating under the assumption that the shooter was at large.] [ANOTHER UPDATE: The school-in-lockdown report may have been erroneous, if this comment is accurate. The police station was definitely in lockdown, however.]

All of this is strikingly reminisicent of an equally tragic week at Newington High School exactly eight years ago, when junior Bob Aniello committed suicide, freshman Jen Patridge was hit and killed by a car the next day, and several serious non-fatal car accidents and other incidents and rumors spurred a general sense that NHS had somehow descended into the pits of Hell. I imagine that the current batch of students must be feeling much the same way that we did back then. That Horan’s death occurred on November 18, the eighth anniversary of Bob’s death, only makes the parallel more eerie.

P.S. NHS students aren’t the only ones experiencing a double tragedy. The Newington police department must also be reeling. Just last December, Officer Peter Lavery was killed on New Year’s Eve. Now, three days before Thanksgiving, Officer Ciara McDermott joins him in the pantheon of fallen heroes.

UPDATE: NHS senior Katrina writes in comments, “She is the strongest woman most of us know and if something like that can happen to her, its hard to fathom anything. Most people are still in a daze.”