Adam Lanza: Difference between revisions

Peter moved to Stamford, nearly an hour from Newtown, but still saw the boys every weekend. When Adam entered middle school, he proudly took Peter to see it. ‘And talk about talkative: man, that kid, you couldn't shut him up!’ Peter said. In the years that followed, they would talk about politics. Adam became fascinated with guns and with the [http://real-life-villains.wikia.com/wiki/World_War_II Second World War], and showed an interest in joining the military. But he never talked about mass murder, and he wasn’t violent at school. He seldom revealed his emotions, but had a sharp sense of humor. When Peter took him to see Bill Cosby live, Adam laughed for an hour straight. One Christmas, Adam told his parents that he wanted to use his savings to buy toys for needy children, and Peter took him shopping for them. He also hated drugs and alcoholic drinks, was a strict vegetarian as he hated animal cruelty.

When Adam began middle school at age 12, Peter and Nancy's worries increased. The structure of the school day changed; instead of sitting in one classroom, he had to move from room to room, and he found the disruption punishing. Sensory overload affected his ability to concentrate; his mother xeroxed his textbooks in black and white, because he found color graphics unbearable. He quit playing the saxophone, stopped climbing trees, avoided eye contact and developed a stiff, lumbering gait. He said that he hated birthdays and holidays, which he had previously loved; special occasions unsettled his increasingly sclerotic orderliness. He had ‘episodes’, panic attacks that necessitated his mother's coming to school; the state attorney’s report says that on such occasions Adam ‘was more likely to be victimized than to act in violence against another’.

Some time before 9:30 a.m. EST on Friday December 14, 2012, Lanza shot and killed his mother Nancy Lanza, aged 52, at their Newtown home with a .22-caliber Savage MK II-F bolt action rifle. Investigators later found her body clad in pajamas, in her bed, with four gunshot wounds to her head. Lanza then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 26 people with a XM-15 rifle before he committed suicide with a Glock 20SF.