What we know about Adam Lanza

As Newtown moves from shock to despair and into the long process of recovery, one question continues to frustrate the community's search for answers: why a 20-year-old man should have set out last Friday morning on a mission to kill children. With every day that passes, a clear understanding of that central mystery appears to grow more elusive. 

Police investigators are also bumping up against hurdles in their struggle to piece together the shooter's inner world. Lieutenant Paul Vance, the official spokesman for Connecticut state police, has previously said that detectives had found "good evidence" that would help build up a complete picture, though he refused to specify the nature of the material.

It now transpires that Lanza left no note elucidating why he wanted first to kill his mother and then carry out a mass shooting that left 26 people, including 20 children, dead. Nor did he leave any suicide note. Furthermore, before setting out on his killing spree, Lanza appears to have destroyed the hard disc of his home computer, and in so doing probably closed investigators' best window into his intentions. It does point to planning and premeditation though as does amassing a large stock of ammunition. Shooting his mother in her sleep before setting off on his Sandy Hook rampage may also be an indication of premeditation. However without the main building blocks of any substantial understanding , investigators will have to fill in as best they can. To that effect, detectives have already begun a systematic round of interviews with relatives, friends and neighbours of the Lanza family.

What we do know is that Lanza was a very intelligent but withdrawn individual who had difficulty associating with others. As yet there has been no confirmation of any mental health diagnosis, and police have indicated he had no criminal track record. In 2002 he attended Sandy Hook public school for the fifth grade then moved on to a middle school. In 2007, he started at Newtown high school in the middle of the town, the same institution in whose auditorium President Obama delivered his impassioned speech on Sunday night. A former director of security at the school, Richard Novia, told the Wall Street Journal that Lanza had been assigned a psychologist early on in his time there, not out of fear that he might harm others but out of concern for the teenager.
"He was very withdrawn and meek; he was one of those freshmen coming in very much in need of watching. At that point in his life, he posed no threat to anyone else. We were worried about him being the victim, or that he could hurt himself," Novia said.

Around that time, Adam Diaz, another student at the high school who was in the year above, got to know him. Diaz told CNN that he was "a very intelligent person, he really was, though the way he acted around other people was a little withdrawn."
The two teenagers attended the school tech club together where they made videos. "Adam had this typical nerd look: belts, tucked-in shirt. He had a computer case instead of a backpack like everyone, and he even had a pocket protector to keep pens in," Diaz said.
"We had a feeling that there might have been something wrong with him, but we never asked. We thought it wasn't appropriate to do so."

 

 

After Newtown high school, Lanza attended, on a part-time basis, Western Connecticut State University in the adjacent town of Danbury, where his academic record was described as "medium to poor". He dropped out before completing his studies, and after that appears to have been relatively adrift, with no employment or further education and living at home with his mother.
The one thing that he did appear to excel at was computer sciences, in which he drew an A grade at university. There is some evidence that Lanza's interest in computers extended to gaming. He was an occasional customer of GameStop in Danbury, and Diaz said that at high school he would invite members of the tech club back to his house to play video games such as Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Starcraft.

The connection with gaming has sparked, perhaps inevitably, a debate about the influence of violent video games in US society. But the information dates back to 2007-08, and there is no confirmed evidence that Lanza was engaging in video gaming in the run-up to the attack. It was around the time that Lanza was studying at Western Connecticut that his parents, Nancy and Peter, divorced after 27 years of marriage, citing "irreconcilable differences". Again, precisely what impact that family rift had on Adam Lanza remains unclear, though there are hints.

It appears that after the divorce, Adam broke off relations both with his father, a senior executive of a tax planning firm, and his elder brother Ryan, a business consultant in New Jersey. The terms of the divorce indicated that Adam would "reside primarily with the mother". It also says that Nancy would be responsible for recouping insurance payments for "hospital, optical, psychiatric, psychological and nursing expenses". It seems fair to say that the divorce threw Adam into a position of increased dependency on his mother, with whom he spent virtually all his time in the mansion-style house in Newtown that she took over as part of the divorce settlement.

Nancy Lanza owned at least five guns, including the four that were found at Sandy Hook school. Among them was the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle that was used to carry out most of the killings, and two high-powered handguns, used routinely by police forces across the US, all of which were equipped with high-capacity magazines holding 30 rounds.
Nancy frequented firing ranges and is known to have taken her son on target practice at least a few times. To have done so was by no means out of the ordinary in Connecticut, a state that despite its New England air of tranquility is as wedded to  guns as any other in America. There are 36 gun shops and shooting ranges within a 10-mile radius of the Lanza's home, where his mother became the first of his victims, shot with one of her own weapons.