More than 1,000 pages of documents reveal Sandy Hook shooter dark descent into depravity
Courant exclusive: More than 1,000 pages of documents reveal Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's dark descent into depravityUntil now.
More than 1,000 pages of documents obtained by the Hartford Courant from the Connecticut State Police, including hundreds of pages of Lanzas 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 first-graders 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 video game arcades and online gaming chatrooms. 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 didnt 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 Lanzas 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 arent in chronological order and its 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.
Laffy Kat
(16,386 posts)More_Cowbell
(2,191 posts)I know that people will blame his mother, and I do, a little, too. And his absent father.
My cousin has an autistic son and she moved mountains to care for him. She certainly didn't have $289k a year or any kind of a social life. She had a husband who refused to interact with their son. In his early stages, her son was incapable of feeling clothes on his skin, walking on most surfaces, eating almost anything. Doctors told her that she'd have to have him committed by the time he was 10, because of his violent outbursts. She devoted her life to him. Her one goal was for him to be able to live on his own someday. She sent him away to college (her by-that-time ex-husband wanted him to live at home and go to a community college) with the sole aim of seeing if he could get himself dressed and out the door each day.
She told me that only 5% of college graduates with autism are employed full time. She didn't care whether her son graduated. She spent 19 years (he started school late) getting him ready to just go and live among strangers and be self-sufficient.
Now her son is a junior at a small state college, living with roommates in an apartment, preparing his own meals, making friends, going to work at a part-time job. He'll actually graduate, which is more than she ever hoped for.
I believe that her son had fewer issues than Adam. But I also believe that Adam didn't have anyone who was willing to spend 100% of their time working with him.
Liberty Belle
(9,535 posts)I've had two assistants who are autistic. Both are excellent workers -- always precise, punctual and thorough. Neither have ever shown the slightest tendency toward violence or any temper issues. They are simply people with issues connecting emotionally to others. But give them detail-oriented tasks and they do great.
My first assistant lost his mother to cancer suddenly and had to support himself beyond what our part-time position could pay, but fortunately he was able to go to paralegal school and got a job with the district attorney and later a law firm.
My current assistant is a college graduate, and has a second part time job besides ours, though she's had trouble finding a position worthy of her degree and talents, probably because she also has a facial deformity in addition to autism. But she's an amazing person who's overcome a lot in life, too, recently also losing her mom to cancer.
In both of these cases the fathers failed to provide any nurturing for these young people after their mothers died. I wonder if the fathers, too, had some form of autism or were simply too emotionally immature to handle the needs of their autistic children.
The shooter's father being absent from his life no doubt played a role in him feeling isolated and unwanted, but we'll never know if things would have turned out differently had the family been intact.
More_Cowbell
(2,191 posts)Doctors told my cousin that they'd have to have her son committed because of his violent outbursts, but he was never violent toward anyone but her (out of frustration)
And she never had him committed and he's never been violent toward anyone else.
I was thinking of this viral video:
Nitram
(22,892 posts)Not just "many."