Court: Release Lanza papers
NEWTOWN — Police will have to make public 35 documents belonging to the disturbed 20-year-old who killed 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School in 2012, the state’s highest court has ruled.
The documents include a spreadsheet ranking mass murders and a notebook entitled “The Big Book of Granny.” The notebook contains a story school shooter Adam Lanza wrote in fifth grade about a woman who uses her “rifle cane” to kill people.
The ruling Tuesday by state Supreme Court did not say when police must release Lanza’s writings and other evidence.
Nor is it clear the release of documents will shed light on a question that has never been answered: Why Lanza acted with such barbarity against the closest person in his life — his mother — and defenseless children.
Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, and then drove to Sandy Hook School with an AR-15-style rifle that he took from an unlocked closet. He shot his way into a locked Sandy Hook School, killing the children and educators before turning a handgun on himself.
A 2014 report by the Connecticut Child Advocate said Lanza’s severe and deteriorating mental health, his obsession with mass murder, and his access to his mother’s firearms “proved a recipe for mass murder.”
The Child Advocate’s report said Newtown schools and Lanza’s parents missed chances to treat his autism, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but found only Adam Lanza was to blame for the worst crime in modern Connecticut history.
Last week, two former Sandy Hook School administrators challenged that report, saying the school district did everything it could to meet Lanza’s needs.
Tuesday’s ruling is a victory for Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission and The Hartford Courant, which argued the documents seized by police from Lanza’s Newtown home were public under state open records law.
The court ruled unanimously for the newspaper and the commission, whose order to police to release Lanza’s belongings was overturned by a lower court judge.
State police had seized guns, ammunition and Lanza’s belongings, including personal journals.
State police already have released some of Lanza’s writings, along with thousands of pages of interviews, documents and other evidence from the investigation.
But the full contents of the spreadsheet and the “Granny” notebook have not been released.
The “Granny” book contains several chapters with the adventures of “Dora the Beserker.” When Granny asks Dora to assassinate a soldier, she replies: “I like hurting people . ... Especially children.” In the same story, Dora sends “Swiper the Raccoon” into a day care center to distract the children, then enters and says, “Let’s hurt children.”
The Courant asked to see 35 items seized from the Lanza house, but state police rejected the request, citing privacy rights under the state’s search and seizure law.
The newspaper appealed to the Freedom of Information Commission, which ruled the belongings must be made public because the law doesn’t specifically bar documents seized from people’s homes — and not used in prosecutions — from being released.
State police appealed to Superior Court, which agreed with state police and overturned the commission’s ruling.
The state attorney general’s office, which represented state police, declined to comment Tuesday. The office could ask the state Supreme Court to reconsider its decision or possibly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
State police declined to comment.
In the ruling, Justice Raheem Mullins wrote the court must “narrowly construe” language in state law that allows exceptions to public disclosure, “otherwise any statute governing an agency’s general treatment of records becomes a possible restriction on disclosure.”