Adam Lanza

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Adam Lanza (April 22, 1992 - December 14, 2012) was the perpetrator of the December 14, 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which he killed 26 people and injured at least 11 more. After killing students and administrators, he commited suicide. His brother, Ryan Lanza was taken into custody for questioning. Lanza's mother, Nancy Lanza, was shot by Lanza at his house in Newtown, CT. The school's principal, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung and the school's psychologist, Mary Sherlach were also killed. 20 children were murdered in the shooting.  A 7 foot spreadsheet was found in his home detailing virtually every single mass murder and attempted mass murder in history. Like most mass murderers, he was frustrated with his life, and he wanted to take as many people with him as he could. Lanza hoped to outdo everyone on this list, particularly Anders Behring Breivik

Early life

Photo of Lanza with his father.

Adam Lanza was never typical. Born in 1992, he didn’t speak until he was three, and he always understood many more words than he could muster. He showed such hypersensitivity to physical touch that tags had to be removed from his clothing. In preschool and at Sandy Hook, where he was a pupil till the beginning of sixth grade, he sometimes smelt things that weren’t there and washed his hands excessively. A doctor diagnosed sensory-integration disorder, and Adam underwent speech therapy and occupational therapy in kindergarten and first grade.

Still, photos show him looking cheerful. ‘Adam loved Sandy Hook school,’ his father Peter said. ‘He stated, as he was growing older, how much he had liked being a little kid.’ Adam’s brother, Ryan, four years older and now a tax accountant in New York, used to joke about how close Peter and Adam were. They’d spend hours playing with Lego in the basement, making up stories for the towns they built. Adam even invented his own board games. ‘Always thinking differently,’ Peter said. ‘Just a normal little weird kid.'

Even in an age when a child’s every irregularity is attributed to a syndrome, the idea of a ‘normal weird kid’ seems reasonable enough, but there were early signs that Adam had significant problems. He struggled with basic emotions, and received coaching from his mother Nancy, who became a stay-at-home mother after Adam was born. When he had to show feelings in a school play, Nancy wrote to a friend, ‘Adam has taken it very seriously, even practising facial expressions in the mirror!’ According to the state’s attorney’s report, when Adam was in fifth grade he said that he ‘did not think highly of himself and believed that everyone else in the world deserved more than he did’. That year, Adam and another boy wrote a story called The Big Book of Granny in which an old woman with a gun in her cane kills wantonly. Adam tried to sell copies of the book at school and got in trouble. A couple of years later, according to the state’s attorney’s report, a teacher noted ‘disturbing’ violence in his writing and described him as being ‘intelligent but not normal, with anti-social issues’.

Meanwhile, Peter and Nancy’s marriage was starting to unravel. ‘I’d work ridiculous hours during the week and Nancy would take care of the kids,’ he told me. ‘Then, on the weekends, she’d do errands and I’d spend time with the kids.’ Peter frequently took the boys on weekend hiking trips. In 2001 Peter and Nancy separated. Adam was nine; when a psychiatrist later asked him about it, he said that his parents were as irritating to each other as they were to him.

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 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.

At some point in his young life, Adam was raped by a catholic priest, then suffering in silence for years, seemingly acting like he was normal, but was bent on vengeance against catholics.

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’s attorney’s report says that on such occasions Adam ‘was more likely to be victimized than to act in violence against another’.

List of Victims

Teachers

1. Rachel Davino
2. Dawn Hochsprung
3. Anne Marie Murphy
4. Lauren Rousseau
5. Mary Sherlach
6. Victoria Soto

Students

1. Charlotte Bacon
2. Daniel Barden
3. Rachel Davino
4. Olivia Engel
5. Josephine Gay
6. Ana M. Marquez-Greene
7. Dylan Hockley
8. Madeline F. Hsu
9. Catherine V. Hubbard
10. Chase Kowolski
11. Jesse Lewis
12. James Mattioli
13. Grace McDonnell
14. Emilie Parker
15. Jack Pinto
16. Noah Pozner
17. Caroline Previdi
18. Jessica Rekos
19. Avielle Richman
20. Benjamin Wheeler
21. Allison N. Wyatt