The coronavirus pandemic, which brought everyday life to a halt and tested everyone’s resiliency, was New Hampshire’s top story of 2020.
The state has been dealing with rising COVID-19 cases and deaths, overworked health care workers, job and business losses, changing education and sports plans, and countless cancellations.
To get back on track, lawmakers, business leaders and state officials listened to public testimony and advised Gov. Chris Sununu on reopening the state. The 400-member House convened at the University of New Hampshire’s ice arena. Cargo planes delivered thousands of pounds of personal protective equipment to the state and to Veterans Affairs hospitals nationwide.
A number of communities issued mask-wearing ordinances and Sununu followed with a statewide order in November requiring face coverings in public.
Many residents came to one another’s aid, whether they held drive-by birthday parades, hosted creative graduations — including one on a mountaintop — and gathered food and funds to help their neighbors survive the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.
Following the death of George Floyd, a black man killed in Minneapolis police custody, protests erupted across the Granite State – just as they did across the country – demanding police reform while insisting that authorities recognize a fundamental point: Black Lives Matter.
Sununu created Commission on Law Enforcement, Accountability, Community and Transparency in June following Floyd’s death, which issued a list of recommendations to improve community policing and rebuild trust.
This year, the state will overhaul its police training standards, require state troopers to wear body cameras and establish a public integrity unit as a result of an executive order issued by Sununu.
In what seems like another era, multiple Democratic presidential candidates descended upon New Hampshire leading up to its first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 11. Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders won; Joe Biden finished fifth. The pandemic affected campaigning and voting alike, with residents turning in droves of absentee ballots.
Biden ultimately won New Hampshire on Election Day and Democratic incumbents were reelected to Congress. Sununu won his third term and the GOP won control of the Legislature, but House Speaker Dick Hinch died from the coronavirus just a week after he was sworn in. He was 71.
Mink, a black bear that trekked thousands of miles to return to her home turf after she was relocated by order of the governor, died. One of her cubs was struck and killed by a bus. In 2017, Mink and three of her offspring were set to be euthanized after two cubs entered a Hanover home. Sununu, instead, ordered them to be moved far north, but Mink returned the following year with four new cubs. In 2018, she was fitted with a tracking collar and moved again, but returned.
Sununu signed into law a bill that sets some of the nation’s toughest drinking water standards for a group of toxic chemicals and provides tens of millions of dollars for cleanup cost. The bill includes standards put forth last year by the state Department of Environmental Services for potentially harmful chemicals called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known collectively as PFAS.
British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested at a wooded estate in Bradford on charges she helped lure at least three girls to be sexually abused by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein; tax protester Elaine Brown was released after 12 years in prison, but husband Edward Brown was resentenced to 25 years; self-proclaimed white nationalist Christopher Cantwell was convicted of making a rape threat; and prosecutors said a man, who discovered his wife was having an affair, kidnapped and killed the other man and forced his wife to decapitate him.
The New Hampshire attorney general’s office dropped 82 rape charges against two former youth counselors accused of abusing a teenage boy in the 1990s at the Youth Development Center. Attorney General Gordon MacDonald said court deadlines in those cases “are now negatively impacting the State’s ability to conduct the broader investigation unfettered.”
New Hampshire lost Tomie dePaola, the prolific children’s author and illustrator who delighted generations with tales of Strega Nona, the kindly old witch in Italy, and Steve Merrill, a Republican who served as governor for two terms in the 1990s were two of the notable people who died in 2020.