ADAM LANZA’S MANIA
OVER 1,000 PAGES OF DOCUMENTS DETAIL NEWTOWN KILLER’S GROWING ISOLATION DURING TORMENTED YOUTH
SPECIAL TO THE DAILY
NEWS – Editor’s Note: The Hartford Courant, a sister paper to the Daily News, for years fought for the release of the content of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza’s writings. They are disturbing, but the Courant and The News believe the documents presented here help tell a complete story of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Understanding what a mass killer was thinking not only paints a clearer picture of the individual, it helps us identify and understand red flags that could be part of a prevention formula for future mass shootings. The writings will appear in three installments in The News. This is Part One:
The extent of Adam Lanza’s abject loneliness, the intensity of his scorn for the world, his interest in pedophilia, his astounding list of daily grievances, the reach of his obsession with mass murder — some of the granular details of the Sandy Hook shooter’s last years have been elusive. Until now. More than 1,000 pages of documents obtained by the Hartford Courant from the Connecticut State Police, including hundreds of pages of Lanza’s own writings and a spreadsheet detailing the gruesome work of 400 perpetrators of mass violence, bring into sharper focus the dark worldview of a 20-year-old who shot his mother four times as she slept and then killed 20 firstgraders and six educators before killing himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.
Diagnosed as a child with a sensory disorder and delays in speech, he would exhibit a quick mind for science, computers, math and language. The few acquaintances he had as a teenager came from videogame arcades and online gaming chat rooms. The newly released writings express a wide range of emotions and rigid doctrine, from a crippling aversion to the dropped towel, food mixing on his plate and the feel of a metal door handle, to a deep disdain for relationships, an intolerance of his peers, a chilling contempt for anyone carrying a few extra pounds, and a conviction that certain aspects of living are worse than death.
At the same time, he also predicted that he would make a good father, because he would treat children as independent little people who just didn’t know a lot yet. In a memo-style letter to his mother, Nancy, who lived in the same house, he encouraged her not to be dejected about her life.
These documents, which had been kept from the public until now, were part of the mass of writings, records and computer files seized by detectives from the Lanzas’ home after the murders. The Courant mounted a five-year quest to obtain the unreleased documents, eventually winning an appeal before the state Supreme Court.
From the journal entries, school assignments, an erstwhile screenplay involving pedophilia, education records, and psychiatrists’ reports spanning about 15 years of Lanza’s life, several parallel themes emerge, each moving inexorably toward the day when the emaciated loner, crippled by obsession, scornful of most other people, and fascinated by the human capacity for murder, committed his unspeakable act of violence. Some of the writings and psychoanalysis are dated. Many are not.
The documents released by the state police aren’t in chronological order and it’s unclear when Lanza wrote many of them. A number of them are unsigned, though several were downloaded from his computer where they had been stored on his desktop. Lanza removed the hard drives from his computer and smashed them to pieces. The FBI was tasked with trying to retrieve data.
One thing becomes clear as the additional records are examined — Adam Lanza, from the age of about 3 until he was 18, was never off the radar of people who orbited around him — his parents, the teachers and counselors in the schools he attended, the psychiatrists who later tried to figure out what was happening with him. It is evident now that no single person grasped the full picture of what he was becoming.
Lanza would spend most of his life on the margins of society. He played Little League baseball, and the sheaf of photos among the newly released documents include pictures of him posing in his uniform, bat poised. But he later disowned the experience and said he never liked it.
By 14, a psychiatrist at Yale worried that he was already becoming a “homebound recluse.” And from that point on, through his teens, the records suggest that his paralyzing obsessions, his raging germophobia, which prevented him from touching door handles and other fixtures with a bare hand, his rigid set of beliefs, not to mention the blacked-out windows of his bedroom and the countless hours he spent playing combat video games, would guarantee his place on the fringe.
His isolation had its roots in his developmental speech delays as a child, the first of a string of diagnoses that included obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory integration deficit and autism spectrum disorder.
The boy was not yet 3, living with his family in New Hampshire, when he began to experience what it was like to be different, to have other preschoolers draw back from him, to be isolated, to be alone.
“Adam’s parents said Adam’s speech attempts were not easily understood, and that Adam became quickly frustrated when others asked him to repeat himself . . . Recently Adam reportedly began hitting, spitting and crying when he could not make his needs known,” began a speech evaluation of the 2-year-10-month-old boy by
the Sanborn (New Hampshire) Regional Preschool Program in February 1995. The speech pathologist noted that “most of his speech attempts were unintelligible . . . When not understood, Adam raised his voice volume and repeated the same utterance in a frustrated way. He did not attempt to supplement his speech with facial expressions, gestures or body movements to help his listeners understand him better.”
Another report a short time later noted that Nancy Lanza “was very concerned” about her boy’s continued speech delays, in part because he had stopped trying to talk in groups and was realizing that other children couldn’t understand him.
Lanza’s parents separated when the boy was 9, and a mutual dependence developed between mother and son. Nancy Lanza maintained her busy social life, later supported by $289,000 annual alimony payment, while Adam, six years younger than his brother, Ryan, spent much of his time in his bedroom or the basement of the large house on Yogananda St. in Newtown, largely unseen.
As a teenager, his sensory condition made him exceedingly sensitive to textures, sound, light and movement. He shunned his classmates, bothered by their choice of clothes and the noises they made. He cultivated a set of ground rules that fed his separateness.
In one revealing new document, an eight-page communication written in Word and titled “Me,” Lanza wrote, “Relationships have absolutely no physical aspect to me; all that matters is communication.”
He had barred his mother from his room and his basement lair and likely shared little of what he was writing on his computer.
His only points of reference seemed to be his own thoughts and his impersonal online relationships with those who shared similar ideations, said former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, who reviewed some of the documents for the Courant.
In this way, “you could see how you slip further and further away from a balancing of what’s normal,” said O’Toole.
Tutored at home for a portion of his career at Newtown High, his mother thought the Homebound program, usually reserved for students who were physically unable to attend school for a period of time, was good for her son.
But a Yale University expert, upon meeting Lanza for the first time, thought the isolation could be catastrophic.
“Are there kids you enjoy spending time with?” Yale psychiatrist Robert King asked the 14-year-old Lanza during an initial evaluation at the Yale Child Study Center in 2006.
“Why would that be significant?” young Lanza answered, appearing to King as “pale, gaunt, awkward . . . and standing rigidly with his eyes downcast and declining to shake hands, tremulous with discomfort and looking miserable.”
“What is a friend?” King asked Lanza.
“It is difficult to define — in whose culture do you refer?’’ the boy answered, robotically.
Noting that his obsessions and germophobia were sealing Lanza off from mainstream activities, the psychiatrist said Lanza was faced with “increasing social withdrawal and reclusiveness.”
King reported that the teen’s homebound instruction created a harmful “prosthetic environment with no student encounters.” This was a recipe for Lanza to become a “homebound recluse,” said King, adding that it was a mistake to adapt the world to Lanza, rather than the other way around.
Lanza defended his homebound status, saying that he had determined by the seventh grade that he “did not approve with the way I was being educated . . . it progressed very slowly,” King wrote.
King wrote that it was “difficult to interpret what this increasing social withdrawal and reclusiveness represents.” He said it could be that as other children matured and became more sophisticated, “the demands of social engagement (for Lanza) changed dramatically, leaving Adam feeling more inadequate and ostracized, setting off a cycle of withdrawal and avoidance.”
In other writings, Nancy Lanza laments that her son’s isolation will likely get worse over time.
“One on one he is extraordinary. In a classroom setting he is performing well below age level,” she wrote. “Other children will tease him and undermine his confidence. He will learn to talk less, not more. Already some children are saying he’s weird when they don’t understand him. At this point he thinks it’s funny when they say that. As he gets older, he will realize that it isn’t.”
After high school, Nancy Lanza worked on a plan for getting him into college, perhaps out of state. She predicted a “nightmare” experience for her son in the dorms if he didn’t get a handle on his social paralysis, and said that he would need “scripts” to talk with girls and relate to the people around him.
Notes about looking ahead to college, which appear to have been written by Nancy Lanza, recommended that her son have an Individual Education Plan in place until age 21. She describes Adam as vulnerable to victimization. “He’ll need extra time for classes and pacing of major exams,” she wrote. “Stress management is key including the identification of calming methods.”
A number of records obtained by the Courant indicate doctors had prescribed or suggested Adam Lanza take medication over the years but that he would often refuse to take them.
The college preparation notes also refer to concerns over suicide and warnings for Lanza to stay off social media such as Facebook and to “be careful of porn.”
Part Two of the Courant’s series on Adam Lanza will be published in The News on Tuesday.