{"id":1629,"date":"2014-03-23T19:55:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-23T19:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8000\/\/?p=1629"},"modified":"2026-01-06T13:27:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T13:27:08","slug":"the-father-of-the-sandy-hook-killer-speaks-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/?p=1629","title":{"rendered":"The Father of the Sandy Hook Killer speaks out"},"content":{"rendered":"

I often wondered how parents of mass murderers would cope with what their child did. The father of the Sandy Hook Killer tells his story so other parents with a mentally disturbed child might recognize the threat their child can pose. Read the fascinating story published recently in the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY: THE RECKONING
\nThe father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers.
\nby Andrew Solomon, New Yorker
\nMARCH 17, 2014<\/p>\n

\nIn Peter Lanza\u2019s new house, on a secluded private road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is an attic room overflowing with shipping crates of what he calls \u201cthe stuff.\u201d Since the day in December, 2012, when his son Adam killed his own mother, himself, and twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, strangers from across the world have sent thousands upon thousands of letters and other keepsakes: prayer shawls, Bibles, Teddy bears, homemade toys; stories with titles such as \u201cMy First Christmas in Heaven\u201d; crosses, including one made by prison inmates. People sent candy, too, and when I visited Peter, last fall, he showed me a bag of year-old caramels. He had not wanted to throw away anything that people sent. But he said, \u201cI was wary about eating anything,\u201d and he didn\u2019t let Shelley Lanza\u2014his second wife\u2014eat any of the candy, either. There was no way to be sure it wasn\u2019t poisoned. Downstairs, in Peter\u2019s home office, I spotted a box of family photographs. He used to display them, he told me, but now he couldn\u2019t look at Adam, and it seemed strange to put up photos of his older son, Ryan, without Adam\u2019s. \u201cI\u2019m not dealing with it,\u201d he said. Later, he added, \u201cYou can\u2019t mourn for the little boy he once was. You can\u2019t fool yourself.\u201d
\nSince the shootings, Peter has avoided the press, but in September, as the first anniversary of his son\u2019s rampage approached, he contacted me to say that he was ready to tell his story. We met six times, for interviews lasting as long as seven hours. Shelley, a librarian at the University of Connecticut, usually joined us and made soup or chili or salads for lunch. Sometimes we played with their German shepherd. When Peter speaks, you can still hear a strong trace of rural Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, where he and his first wife\u2014Nancy, Adam\u2019s mother\u2014grew up. He is an affable man with a poise that often hides his despair. An accountant who is a vice-president for taxes at a General Electric subsidiary, he maintains a nearly fanatical insistence on facts, and nothing annoyed him more in our conversations than speculation\u2014by me, the media, or anyone else. He is not by nature given to self-examination, and often it was Shelley who underlined the emotional ramifications of what he said.
\nPeter hadn\u2019t seen his son for two years at the time of the Sandy Hook killings, and, even with hindsight, he doesn\u2019t think that the catastrophe could have been predicted. But he constantly thinks about what he could have done differently and wishes he had pushed harder to see Adam. \u201cAny variation on what I did and how my relationship was had to be good, because no outcome could be worse,\u201d he said. Another time, he said, \u201cYou can\u2019t get any more evil,\u201d and added, \u201cHow much do I beat up on myself about the fact that he\u2019s my son? A lot.\u201d
\nDepending on whom you ask, there were twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight victims in Newtown. It\u2019s twenty-six if you count only those who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School; twenty-seven if you include Nancy Lanza; twenty-eight if you judge Adam\u2019s suicide a loss. There are twenty-six stars on the local firehouse roof. On the anniversary of the shootings, President Obama referred to \u201csix dedicated school workers and twenty beautiful children\u201d who had been killed, and the governor of Connecticut asked churches to ring their bells twenty-six times. Some churches in Newtown had previously commemorated the victims by ringing twenty-eight times, but a popular narrative had taken hold in which Nancy\u2014a gun enthusiast who had taught Adam to shoot\u2014was an accessory to the crime, rather than its victim. Emily Miller, an editor at the Washington Times, wrote, \u201cWe can\u2019t blame lax gun-control laws, access to mental health treatment, prescription drugs or video games for Lanza\u2019s terrible killing spree. We can point to a mother who should have been more aware of how sick her son had become and forced treatment.\u201d
\nInadequate gun control and poor mental-health care are problems that invariably define the debate after atrocities such as the one at Newtown. But, important as those issues are, our impulse to grasp for reasons comes, arguably, from a more basic need\u2014to make sense of what seems senseless. When the Connecticut state\u2019s attorney issued a report, in December, CNN announced, \u201cSandy Hook killer Adam Lanza took motive to his grave.\u201d A Times headline ran \u201cCHILLING LOOK AT NEWTOWN KILLER, BUT NO \u2018WHY.\u2019 \u201d Yet no \u201cmotive\u201d can mitigate the horror of a bloodbath involving children. Had we found out\u2014which we did not\u2014that Adam had schizophrenia, or had been a pedophile or a victim of childhood abuse, we still wouldn\u2019t know why he acted as he did.
\nInterview subjects usually have a story they want to tell, but Peter Lanza came to these conversations as much to ask questions as to answer them. It\u2019s strange to live in a state of sustained incomprehension about what has become the most important fact about you. \u201cI want people to be afraid of the fact that this could happen to them,\u201d he said. It took six months after the shootings for a sense of reality to settle on Peter. \u201cBut it\u2019s real,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be understood to be real.\u201d
\nAdam Lanza was never typical. Born in 1992, he didn\u2019t 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 smelled things that weren\u2019t 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. Teachers were told to watch for seizures.
\nStill, photos show him looking cheerful. \u201cAdam loved Sandy Hook school,\u201d Peter said. \u201cHe stated, as he was growing older, how much he had liked being a little kid.\u201d Adam\u2019s brother, Ryan, four years older and now a tax accountant in New York, used to joke about how close Peter and Adam were. They\u2019d spend hours playing at two Lego tables in the basement, making up stories for the little towns they built. Adam even invented his own board games. \u201cAlways thinking differently,\u201d Peter said. \u201cJust a normal little weird kid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

\"Street<\/div>\n

\nEven in an age when a child\u2019s every irregularity is attributed to a syndrome, the idea of a \u201cnormal weird kid\u201d seems reasonable enough, but there were early signs that Adam had significant problems. He struggled with basic emotions, and received coaching from 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, \u201cAdam has taken it very seriously, even practicing facial expressions in the mirror!\u201d According to the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report, when Adam was in fifth grade he said that he \u201cdid not think highly of himself and believed that everyone else in the world deserved more than he did.\u201d That year, Adam and another boy wrote a story called \u201cThe Big Book of Granny,\u201d in which an old woman with a gun in her cane kills wantonly. In the third chapter, Granny and her son want to taxidermy a boy for their mantelpiece. In another chapter, a character called Dora the Berserker says, \u201cI like hurting people. . . . Especially children.\u201d Adam tried to sell copies of the book at school and got in trouble. A couple of years later, according to the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report, a teacher noted \u201cdisturbing\u201d violence in his writing and described him as \u201cintelligent but not normal, with anti-social issues.\u201d
\nMeanwhile, Peter and Nancy\u2019s marriage was starting to unravel. Peter\u2019s own father had been relatively disengaged from his wife and buried himself in work, and Peter didn\u2019t have a strong model for family life. \u201cI\u2019d work ridiculous hours during the week and Nancy would take care of the kids,\u201d he told me. \u201cThen, on the weekends, she\u2019d do errands and I\u2019d spend time with the kids.\u201d 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.
\nPeter recalled, \u201cThe funny part is that the separation didn\u2019t really change things for the kids very much.\u201d He 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. \u201cAnd talk about talkative: man, that kid, you couldn\u2019t shut him up!\u201d Peter said. In the years that followed, they would talk about politics. Adam was a fan of Ron Paul, and liked to argue economic theory. He 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\u2019t 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. He loved reruns of \u201cThe Bob Newhart Show\u201d and \u201cGet Smart,\u201d which he would watch with his dad. 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.
\nWhen Adam began middle school, Peter and Nancy\u2019s 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 \u201cepisodes,\u201d panic attacks that necessitated his mother\u2019s coming to school; the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report says that on such occasions Adam \u201cwas more likely to be victimized than to act in violence against another.\u201d
\n\u201cIt was crystal clear something was wrong,\u201d Peter said. \u201cThe social awkwardness, the uncomfortable anxiety, unable to sleep, stress, unable to concentrate, having a hard time learning, the awkward walk, reduced eye contact. You could see the changes occurring.\u201d It is hard to be sure whether new problems were setting in or old ones were becoming more apparent. Michael Stone, a psychiatrist who studies mass murder, said that, as children grow up and tasks become more difficult, what seems like a minor impairment becomes major. \u201cThey\u2019re a little weird in school. They don\u2019t have friends. They do not get picked for the baseball team,\u201d he said. \u201cBut, as they get to the age when kids begin to date and find partners, they can\u2019t. So the sense of deficit, which was minor in grade school, and getting to be a little bit more in junior high, now becomes very acute.\u201d He added that, without the brain getting worse, \u201clife challenges nudge them in the direction of being sicker.\u201d
\nAll the symptoms that afflicted Adam are signs of autism that might be exacerbated by the hormonal shifts of adolescence. When Adam was thirteen, Peter and Nancy took him to Paul J. Fox, a psychiatrist, who gave a diagnosis of Asperger\u2019s syndrome (a category that the American Psychiatric Association has since subsumed into the broader diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder). Peter and Nancy finally knew what they were up against. \u201cIt was communicated as \u2018Adam, this is good news. This is why you feel this way, and now we can do something about it,\u2019 \u201d Peter recalled. But Adam would not accept the diagnosis.
\nPeter and Nancy, who remained amicable in dealing with their children\u2019s needs, looked into special schools, public and private. Peter went to a meeting of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP) to talk to adults on the spectrum and to try to imagine a life for his son. He hoped that \u201ceventually we could get him into GRASP and he would form relationships and maybe get married to somebody else with Asperger\u2019s.\u201d Nancy considered moving to a town fifty miles away, where the school system had strong programs for children with special needs, but concluded that the disruption involved would cancel out any benefits. She briefly enrolled Adam in a Catholic school that seemed to offer more structure, but that didn\u2019t go well, either. Fox recommended homeschooling, arguing that the disadvantages of sending Adam to a regular school were worse than those of isolating him from his peers. From eighth grade on, Nancy taught Adam the humanities and Peter met with Adam twice a week to handle the sciences.
\nNancy co\u00f6rdinated the home curriculum with Newtown High School to insure that Adam could graduate rather than simply get a G.E.D. She initiated all such major decisions. \u201cI took the back seat,\u201d Peter said. Even after beginning homeschooling, Adam continued to attend Newtown High\u2019s Tech Club meetings. \u201cHe fit in there,\u201d Peter said. \u201cThey\u2019re all weird and smart.\u201d Adam once held a Tech Club party at home; Nancy wrote to Peter, \u201cIt was nice to hear Adam talking to the other kids and everyone joking with him and treating him so well.\u201d But he didn\u2019t understand popularity, and once asked Peter, \u201cWhy do you need friends?\u201d
\nAdam displayed what his father described as \u201cthe arrogance that Aspies can have.\u201d He wrote that he was \u201cnot satisfied if information related to me is not profound enough. I could not learn anything from the ninth grade history textbook because it did not explain events to a sufficient extent and did not analyze the implementations of the events.\u201d He went on to discount his parents\u2019 teaching, asserting that he had taught himself chemistry.
\nWhen Adam was fourteen, shortly after Ryan had left for college, Peter and Nancy took him to Yale\u2019s Child Study Center for further diagnosis. The psychiatrist who assessed Adam, Robert King, recorded that he was a \u201cpale, gaunt, awkward young adolescent standing rigidly with downcast gaze and declining to shake hands.\u201d He also noted that Adam \u201chad relatively little spontaneous speech but responded in a flat tone with little inflection and almost mechanical prosody.\u201d Many people with autism speak in a flat tone, and avoiding eye contact is common, too, because trying to interpret sounds and faces at the same time is overwhelming. Open-ended questions can also be intolerable to people with autism, and, when King asked Adam to make three wishes, he wished \u201cthat whatever was granting the wishes would not exist.\u201d
\nKing noted evidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which often accompanies autism. Adam refused to touch metal objects such as doorknobs and didn\u2019t like his mother to touch them, either, because he feared contamination. \u201cAdam imposes many strictures, which are increasingly onerous for mother,\u201d King wrote. \u201cHe disapproves if mother leans on anything in the house because it is \u2018improper.\u2019 . . . He is also intolerant if mother brushes by his chair and objected to her new high heel boots, because they were \u2018too loud.\u2019 . . . If mother walks in front of him in the kitchen, he would insist she redo it.\u201d King was concerned that Adam\u2019s parents seemed to worry primarily about his schooling, and said that it was more urgent to address \u201chow to accommodate Adam\u2019s severe social disabilities in a way that would permit him to be around peers.\u201d King saw \u201csignificant risk to Adam in creating, even with the best of intentions, a prosthetic environment which spares him having to encounter other students or to work to overcome his social difficulties.\u201d And he concluded that Nancy was \u201calmost becoming a prisoner in her own house.\u201d
\nKathleen Koenig, a nurse specialist in psychiatry at Yale, gave some follow-up treatment. While seeing her, Adam tried Lexapro, which Fox had prescribed. Nancy reported, \u201cOn the third morning he complained of dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was disjointed, he couldn\u2019t even figure out how to open his cereal box. He was sweating profusely . . . it was actually dripping off his hands. He said he couldn\u2019t think. . . . He was practically vegetative.\u201d Later the same day, she wrote, \u201cHe did nothing but sit in his dark room staring at nothing.\u201d Adam stopped taking Lexapro and never took psychotropics again, which worried Koenig. She wrote, \u201cWhile Adam likes to believe that he\u2019s completely logical, in fact, he\u2019s not at all, and I\u2019ve called him on it.\u201d She said he had a biological disorder and needed medication. \u201cI told him he\u2019s living in a box right now, and the box will only get smaller over time if he doesn\u2019t get some treatment.\u201d
\nPaul Appelbaum, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia, points out that many young men are asocial and unhappy, spend too much time online, become video-game addicts\u2014but cause no harm. The few dangerous ones are impossible to identify. \u201cEven if we knew who they were or were likely to be, whether they\u2019d actually accept treatment is an open question. Among the hardest people to engage in treatment are young males who may be angry, suspicious, and socially isolated. Coming to a therapist\u2019s office for an hour a week just to pour their heart out doesn\u2019t seem like a particularly attractive opportunity, in general.\u201d
\n\u201cAdam was not open to therapy,\u201d Peter told me. \u201cHe did not want to talk about problems and didn\u2019t even admit he had Asperger\u2019s.\u201d Peter and Nancy were confident enough in the Asperger\u2019s diagnosis that they didn\u2019t look for other explanations for Adam\u2019s behavior. In that sense, Asperger\u2019s may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. \u201cIf he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,\u201d Peter told me. \u201cBut let\u2019s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.\u201d Still, Peter and Nancy sought professional support repeatedly, and none of the doctors they saw detected troubling violence in Adam\u2019s disposition. According to the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report, \u201cThose mental health professionals who saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future behavior.\u201d Peter said, \u201cHere we are near New York, one of the best locations for mental-health care, and nobody saw this.\u201d
\nPeter gets annoyed when people speculate that Asperger\u2019s was the cause of Adam\u2019s rampage. \u201cAsperger\u2019s makes people unusual, but it doesn\u2019t make people like this,\u201d he said, and expressed the view that the condition \u201cveiled a contaminant\u201d that was not Asperger\u2019s: \u201cI was thinking it could mask schizophrenia.\u201d Violence by autistic people is more commonly reactive than planned\u2014triggered, for example, by an invasion of personal space. Studies of people with autism who have committed crimes suggest that at least half also suffer from an additional condition\u2014from psychosis, in about twenty-five per cent of cases. Some researchers believe that a marked increase in the intensity of an autistic person\u2019s preoccupations can be a warning sign, especially if those preoccupations have a sinister aspect. Forensic records of Adam\u2019s online activity show that, in his late teens, he developed a preoccupation with mass murder. But there was never a warning sign; his obsession was discussed only pseudonymously with others online.
\nBoth autism and psychopathy entail a lack of empathy. Psychologists, though, distinguish between the \u201ccognitive empathy\u201d deficits of autism (difficulty understanding what emotions are, trouble interpreting other people\u2019s nonverbal signs) and the \u201cemotional empathy\u201d deficits of psychopathy (lack of concern about hurting other people, an inability to share their feelings). The subgroup of people with neither kind of empathy appears to be small, but such people may act out their malice in ways that can feel both guileless and brutal.
\nAutism is increasingly invoked in courtrooms as an argument for leniency, sometimes on the ground that the autistic person is confused about cause and effect\u2014a befuddlement defense, as it were. Adam Lanza, however, clearly understood what he was doing. He destroyed one of his hard drives, and left behind an electronic spreadsheet on mass murder, and photographs of himself with a gun to his head. A recent study suggests that a lack of empathy may be connected to insensitivity to physical pain. Despite Adam\u2019s hypersensitivity to more minor irritants, this seems to have been one of his symptoms; his mother warned the school that he might not stop doing something because it hurt.
\nWhen I visited Peter, he produced four binders of printouts of his e-mails with Nancy and Adam since 2007. By 2008, when Adam turned sixteen and was going to school only for occasional events, Nancy\u2019s e-mails describe his escalating misery. \u201cHe had a horrible night. . . . He cried in the bathroom for 45 minutes and missed his first class.\u201d Two weeks later, she wrote, \u201cI am hoping that he pulls together in time for school this afternoon, but it is doubtful. He has been sitting with his head to one side for over an hour doing nothing.\u201d Later that year: \u201cAdam had a rough night. He moved EVERYTHING out of his room last night. He only kept his bed and wardrobe cabinet.\u201d
\nIn the period that followed the decision to homeschool Adam, Nancy regularly asked Peter not to come when Adam was having a \u201cbad day,\u201d but her correspondence shows no sense of crisis commensurate with the Yale assessment. Peter had begun to feel distanced by the intensity of Adam\u2019s relationship with Nancy, although he did not feel that the intensity was \u201cby its nature problematic.\u201d His approach to parenting was as docile as Nancy\u2019s was obsessive. She indulged Adam\u2019s compulsions. \u201cShe would build the world around him and cushion it,\u201d Peter said. Adam had difficulties with co\u00f6rdination and, when he was seventeen, Peter told Nancy that he had had to pause to retie his shoes on a hike. Nancy responded in astonishment, \u201cHe tied his own shoes?\u201d
\nAdam\u2019s sense of humor endured. When he was sixteen, he found a picture of Karl Marx (huge beard), Lenin (small beard), Stalin (mustache), and Mao (clean-shaven), and sent it around with a caption, \u201cComrades, we must rectify the faltering facial hair standards.\u201d Peter thought it was hilarious and got T-shirts made with the image and Adam\u2019s words. Everyone tried to encourage Adam and looked for ways to engage with him. Nancy would take him on trips to the shooting range. Nancy and Peter thought that their son was nonviolent; the best way to build a connection to someone with Asperger\u2019s is often to participate in his fascinations.
\nAll parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the child must learn to eat vegetables). Nancy\u2019s error seems to have been that she always focussed on the day, in a ceaseless quest to keep peace in the home she shared with the hypersensitive, controlling, increasingly hostile stranger who was her son. She thought that she could keep the years at bay by making each day as good as possible, but her willingness to indulge his isolation may well have exacerbated the problems it was intended to ameliorate.
\nIn the fall of 2009, the Lanzas finally divorced. One provision of the divorce was that Peter buy Adam a car. Peter bought him a Honda Civic and taught him to drive, and he told me that his son was \u201cthe most cautious driver on the face of the earth.\u201d Peter never worried about Adam\u2019s breaking rules of any kind. He did feel that Adam was losing interest in him, but the estrangement didn\u2019t strike Peter as ominous; he, too, had become alienated from his parents in late adolescence. \u201cI had to give him space,\u201d Peter explained. \u201cHe\u2019ll get more mature; I\u2019ll just keep doing what I can, staying involved.\u201d
\nDuring that year, Adam developed his private obsession with killing. He started editing Wikipedia entries on various well-known mass murderers and seems to have been eerily well informed. But although there were still no outward signs of violent tendencies, he was becoming ever harder to deal with. Nancy wrote to Peter that Adam would sometimes close his door when she tried to talk to him.
\nSchoolwork often triggered a sense of hopelessness. \u201cHe was exhausted and lethargic all day, and said he was unable to concentrate and his homework isn\u2019t done,\u201d she wrote. \u201cHe is on the verge of tears over not having his journal entries ready to pass in. He said he tried to concentrate and couldn\u2019t and has been wondering why he is \u2018such a loser\u2019 and if there is anything he can do about it.\u201d He had been taking classes at Western Connecticut State University\u2014for high-school credit\u2014but he struggled there. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t speak on the way home and had his hood completely covering his face,\u201d Nancy wrote one day. \u201cHe went straight to his room and won\u2019t eat. I gave him time alone to compose and have tried to speak to him twice now, but he just keeps saying, \u2018It does not matter\u2019 and \u2018leave me\u2019 \u2018I don\u2019t want to speak of it.\u2019 \u201d Two months later, Nancy recorded his despair when faced with some coursework in German: \u201cHe finally and tearfully said that he can\u2019t complete the German. He can\u2019t understand it. He has spent hours on the worksheets and can\u2019t comprehend them.\u201d
\nNancy wanted to take him to a tutor, but, she wrote, \u201cEven ten minutes before we should leave he was getting ready to go, but then had a meltdown and began to cry and couldn\u2019t go. He said things like it\u2019s pointless, and he doesn\u2019t even know what he doesn\u2019t know.\u201d In early 2010, when Nancy told Peter that Adam had been crying hysterically on the bathroom floor, Peter responded with uncharacteristic vehemence: \u201cAdam needs to communicate the source of his sorrow. We have less than three months to help him before he is 18. I am convinced that when he turns 18 he will either try to enlist or just leave the house to become homeless.\u201d Nancy replied, \u201cI just spent 2 hours sitting outside his door, talking to him about why he is so upset. He failed every single test during that class, yet he thought he knew the material.\u201d Later that day, she wrote, \u201cI have the feeling when he said he would rather be homeless than to take any more tests, he really meant it.\u201d Nancy said that Adam had been pretending to go to classes and passing his time in the library.
\nAdam always had aspirations beyond his abilities. His list of colleges started with Cornell, for which he clearly didn\u2019t have the academic record. Then he announced that he was going to enlist in the military when he turned eighteen, in April, 2010; he wanted to join the Army Rangers, an \u00e9lite regiment. \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d Peter wondered. \u201cYou tell him, \u2018Adam, that\u2019s unrealistic\u2019?\u201d When the time came, Adam didn\u2019t sign up. Peter took Adam to visit Norwich University, which has a military program, but they concluded that Adam should take classes at Norwalk Community College, near Stamford, before attempting campus life anywhere. Adam wanted to take five classes, but Peter said it was more than he could cope with, and suggested two classes that they could work on together. Peter went to pick him up for a weekend visit, and Adam refused to go. Peter said, \u201cAdam, we\u2019ve got to figure out a system so I can work with you.\u201d Adam was angry. \u201cI hardly ever saw him pissed, but he was pissed,\u201d Peter recalled. \u201cAnd it was, like, \u2018I\u2019m taking the five classes. I\u2019m taking them.\u2019 \u201d It was September, 2010: the last time Peter saw his son.
\nEarlier that year, Nancy had written, \u201cHe does not want to see you. I have been trying to reason with him to no avail. I don\u2019t know what to do.\u201d An e-mail that Adam sent Peter to get out of another meeting sounded innocuous\u2014\u201cI apologize for not wanting to go today. I have not been feeling well for the last couple of days\u201d\u2014but Nancy\u2019s updates painted a more fraught picture. \u201cHe is despondent and crying a lot and just can\u2019t continue. . . . I have been trying to get him to see you and he refuses and every time I\u2019ve brought the subject up it just makes him worse,\u201d she wrote. Nancy surmised that Adam resented Peter\u2019s warning about the heavy course load.
\nPeter was frustrated but felt that he couldn\u2019t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. \u201cIt would have been a fight, the last thing I\u2019d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, \u2018I want to see Adam.\u2019 \u2018Why are you doing this?\u2019 Adam would be all bent about me.\u201d Later, Peter remarked, \u201cIf I said I\u2019m coming, she\u2019d say, \u2018No, there\u2019s no reason for that.\u2019 I mean, she controlled the situation.\u201d Peter tried to remain conciliatory, and never introduced Adam to Shelley, suspecting that it would be more than he could handle. (He did introduce her to Ryan, who had moved to New Jersey after graduating college.) He considered hiring a private investigator \u201cto try to figure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.\u201d If he had, he might have discovered that Adam went regularly to a local movie house to play a game called Dance Dance Revolution, spending up to ten hours at a stretch listening to music and trying to keep up with complex dance moves on an illuminated platform. He was still doing so a month before the shootings.
\nI wondered how Peter had felt through this period. \u201cSad,\u201d he said. \u201cI was hurt. I never expected that I would never talk to him again. I thought it was a matter of when.\u201d He asked, \u201cHow much do you accommodate the demands and how much do you not? Nancy tended to, as did I.\u201d Peter added, \u201cBut I think he saw that he could control her more than he could control me.\u201d Adam had also cut off communication with Ryan, whom he last saw two Christmases before the shootings. According to Peter, Ryan reached out several times, but Adam never responded. Peter and Shelley now suspect that Adam deliberately shut them out to hide his psychological decay. Peter said, \u201cI didn\u2019t understand that Adam was drifting away.\u201d
\nBy 2011, Nancy\u2019s messages had grown terse. Peter attributed this to his remarriage rather than to a change in Adam\u2019s condition. That October, a little more than a year before the shootings, she related that Adam \u201chas been doing very well and has become quite independent over the last year. He is starting to talk about going back to school which would be nice.\u201d But the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report notes that people who worked on the property couldn\u2019t enter the house and were warned never even to ring the doorbell.
\nIn early 2012, Nancy said that Adam had agreed to see Peter in the spring, but nothing came of it. Nine months later, Peter protested that Adam never even acknowledged his e-mails. Nancy wrote, \u201cI will talk to him about that but I don\u2019t want to harass him. He has had a bad summer and actually stopped going out.\u201d She said that his car had sat unused for so long that its battery was dead. She played down the significance of Adam\u2019s failure to answer his father\u2019s e-mails: \u201cHe stopped emailing me a year ago or so, but I assumed it was because he actually started talking to me more.\u201d However, the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report suggests that Nancy\u2019s account was misleading: Adam had stopped speaking to his mother and communicated only through e-mail. \u201cIt bothers me that she was telling me he doesn\u2019t use e-mail at the same time she was e-mailing him,\u201d Peter told me. He thinks Nancy\u2019s pride prevented her from asking for help. \u201cShe wanted everyone to think everything was O.K.\u201d
\nAs Adam\u2019s isolation deepened, Nancy\u2019s na\u00efvet\u00e9 began to blur into denial. She started making plans to move with Adam, possibly to Seattle, although she didn\u2019t mention those plans to Peter. She had also suggested to a friend that she\u2019d be living with Adam for a \u201cvery long time,\u201d a situation that could have been upsetting for a young man too set on independence to let his father help him with his coursework. Nancy\u2019s mixture of hovering appeasement and disregard for professional help now seems bewildering. Yet similar choices have worked well for others: some people with autism respond best to a mixture of laissez-faire and active indulgence.
\nPeter\u2019s final communication from Nancy, the month before the shootings, was about buying Adam a new computer. Peter wanted to give it to Adam personally. Nancy said she\u2019d discuss it with Adam after Thanksgiving. \u201cI was doing everything I could,\u201d Peter said. \u201cShe was doing way more. I just feel sad for her.\u201d Peter is convinced that Nancy had no idea how dangerous their son had become. \u201cShe never confided to her sister or best friend about being afraid of him. She slept with her bedroom door unlocked, and she kept guns in the house, which she would not have done if she were frightened.\u201d About a week before the shootings, Nancy reportedly told an acquaintance, \u201cI\u2019m worried I\u2019m losing him.\u201d But losing him seemed to be a matter of his withdrawal, not of violence. The cautiousness with which Nancy responded to her son\u2019s demands indicates anxiety rather than fear, and it must have made her as lonely as it did him.
\nMatricide is usually committed by overprotected boys\u2014by a son who wishes, as one study puts it, \u201cwith his desperate act, to free himself from his state of dependency on her, a dependency that he believes has not allowed him to grow up.\u201d Another study proposes that, in each case examined, \u201cthe mother-child relationship became unusually intense and conflict-laden,\u201d while the fathers \u201cwere uniformly passive and remained relatively uninvolved.\u201d The state\u2019s attorney\u2019s report says that when Nancy asked Adam whether he would feel sad if anything happened to her, he replied, \u201cNo.\u201d A Word document called \u201cSelfish,\u201d which was found on Adam\u2019s computer, gives an explanation of why females are inherently selfish, written while one of them was accommodating him in every possible way.
\nPeter does not think that Adam had any affection for him, either, by that point. He said, \u201cWith hindsight, I know Adam would have killed me in a heartbeat, if he\u2019d had the chance. I don\u2019t question that for a minute. The reason he shot Nancy four times was one for each of us: one for Nancy; one for him; one for Ryan; one for me.\u201d
\nOn the morning of December 14, 2012, Peter went to get lunch at work and found colleagues clustered around a television. Shocked by the developing news, Peter said, \u201cBoth my kids went to that school,\u201d and went back to his office. Then news reports mentioned that a twenty- and a twenty-four-year-old were involved (the ages of his two sons) and that the shooter had attended the school. Unable to get any work done, he drove home to watch the coverage. A reporter was waiting in his driveway, and told him that somebody at his house was involved in the shootings. Peter closed the door, turned on the TV, and saw that CNN was identifying Ryan as the shooter. But he knew better, and called Shelley at work. She told me, \u201cPeter said, \u2018It\u2019s Peter. I think it\u2019s Adam.\u2019 I didn\u2019t recognize his voice. And he just said it again: \u2018It\u2019s Peter, it\u2019s Peter, it\u2019s Adam.\u2019 And I still didn\u2019t understand him. And he said, \u2018I think it\u2019s Adam, it\u2019s Adam.\u2019 When it hit me, I screamed and started shaking violently.\u201d
\nAs soon as she got home, they called Ryan and began the two-hour drive to his place, in Hoboken. Ryan had also left his office early; by the time he got home, the police had taped off his apartment building. Adam had been carrying Ryan\u2019s I.D., which had led to the confusion. Ryan approached the police with his arms up and said, \u201cYou\u2019re looking for me, but I didn\u2019t do it.\u201d He was taken to a police station, so Peter and Shelley headed there, too. They were questioned for a couple of hours and were made to wait for two more before they were allowed to see Ryan. They went to the home of an aunt of Peter\u2019s to regroup; they were shuttled to a hotel, then to Shelley\u2019s family\u2019s house and other safe houses, with a canine unit supplied by the police for security; they were interviewed by the F.B.I., the state police, and various local authorities. \u201cWe didn\u2019t even have clothes,\u201d Peter said. \u201cI had to borrow my lawyer\u2019s pants.\u201d Eventually, they headed to New Hampshire to arrange Nancy\u2019s funeral, and had to evade a stakeout by news media, which wanted to cover it. I asked what they had done about a funeral for Adam. \u201cNo one knows that,\u201d Peter said. \u201cAnd no one ever will.\u201d
\nAdam Lanza was a terrorist for an unknowable cause who committed three distinct atrocities: he killed his mother; he killed himself; he killed children and adults he\u2019d never met before. Two of these acts are explicable; the third, incomprehensible. There are many crimes from which most people desist because we know right from wrong and are careful of the law. Most people would like to have things that belong to others; many people have felt murderous rage. But the reason that almost no one shoots twenty random children isn\u2019t self-restraint; it\u2019s that there is no level at which the idea is attractive. Since 2006, according to a USA Today study, there have been two hundred and thirty-two mass killings\u2014meaning, more than four deaths apiece, not including the killer\u2014in the United States. But fewer than fifteen per cent involved random, unknown victims.
\nThe problem with generalities about mass murderers is that the sample size is tiny, and most die before they can be examined. Almost half of all mass murderers commit suicide in the act, and many others are killed by police. Indeed, Paul Appelbaum, the forensic psychiatrist at Columbia, views such cases as \u201csuicides with murder as an epiphenomenon, rather than murders that happen to end in suicide.\u201d The opposite view is equally possible: Henry J. Friedman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard, has said that for these killers murderousness is \u201ca primary rather than a reactive state,\u201d and that their \u201cdesire to end life early surrounded by an aurora of apocalyptic destruction\u201d does not signal the \u201ctrue depressive despair\u201d typical of suicides. But, for Adam, killing others and suicide were both crucial. The link seems clear: the more Adam hated himself, the more he hated everyone else. \u00c9mile Durkheim, the great scholar of suicide, wrote that it can be \u201cnot an act of despair, but of abnegation.\u201d Adam abnegated humanity with his act.
\nScientists are sequencing Adam\u2019s DNA to see if they can find anomalies that might explain what was broken in him. And yet, if someone has committed heinous crimes and is then found to have bad genes or a neurological abnormality, should we presume that biology compelled him? It\u2019s a circular argument that conflates what describes a phenomenon and what causes it. Everything in our minds is encoded in neural architecture, and if scanning technologies advance far enough we\u2019ll see physiological evidence of a college education, a failed love affair, religious faith. Will such knowledge also bring deeper understanding?
\nLegal definitions of insanity still focus on psychosis, the delusions of which are held to diminish responsibility. Medical conceptions include many additional bizarre behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. The legal definition has historically encompassed both questions of agency (he didn\u2019t know what he was doing) and morality (he didn\u2019t know that what he was doing was wrong). The psychiatric profession doesn\u2019t consider mass killers to be necessarily insane, which distresses Peter. For him, the crime defines the illness\u2014as he said, soon after we met, you\u2019d have to be crazy to do such a thing. He found the idea of Adam\u2019s not being insane much more devastating than the thought of his being insane. Peter has searched the psychiatric literature on mass killers, trying to understand what happened to his son. He came across the work of Park Dietz, a psychiatrist who, in 1986, coined the term \u201cpseudocommando.\u201d Dietz says that for pseudocommandos a preoccupation with weapons and war regalia makes up for a sense of impotence and failure. He wrote that we insist that mass killers are insane only to reassure ourselves that normal people are incapable of such evil.
\nCrimes of passion are relational, whereas plotted crimes such as Adam\u2019s are unsocial. But the dichotomy isn\u2019t clear-cut; most crimes lie along a spectrum. So Sandy Hook was a culmination\u2014neither sudden nor entirely calculated, at least until the very end. James Knoll, a forensic psychiatrist at SUNY, has written that Adam\u2019s act conveyed a message: \u201cI carry profound hurt\u2014I\u2019ll go ballistic and transfer it onto you.\u201d That\u2019s as much motive as we\u2019re likely to find.
\nOn the anniversary of the massacre, Peter and Shelley finally went through \u201cthe stuff,\u201d reading letters of support they previously hadn\u2019t felt able to face. Peter wanted the writers to know how much their words helped him. \u201cThere was a woman whose brother shot up a church,\u201d Peter said. \u201cKilled a bunch of people and himself. Saying how sorry she is. There was a woman whose husband stabbed and killed a child. People having Masses said for Adam.\u201d Some included phone numbers and said to call if he needed anything. Other letters were peculiar: one suggested that Adam had been drugged by the C.I.A. and forced to his acts in order to foment support for gun-control legislation. The anniversary itself felt insignificant. \u201cIt\u2019s not like I ever go an hour when it doesn\u2019t cross my mind,\u201d Peter said when we met that day.
\nPeter has offered to meet with the victims\u2019 families, and two have taken up his offer. \u201cIt\u2019s gut-wrenching,\u201d he said. \u201cA victim\u2019s family member told me that they forgave Adam after we spent three hours talking. I didn\u2019t even know how to respond. A person that lost their son, their only son.\u201d The only reason Peter was talking to anyone, including me, was to share information that might help the families or prevent another such event. \u201cI need to get some good from this. And there\u2019s no place else to find any good. If I could generate something to help them, it doesn\u2019t replace, it doesn\u2019t\u2014\u201d He struggled to find the words. \u201cBut I would trade places with them in a heartbeat if that could help.\u201d
\nPeter told me, \u201cI get very defensive with my name. I do not like to even say it. I thought about changing it, but I feel like that would be distancing myself and I cannot distance myself. I don\u2019t let it define me, but I felt like changing the name is sort of pretending it didn\u2019t happen and that\u2019s not right.\u201d But Peter has found the visibility hard. Old friends have been unflagging in their support, but Peter said he thought that he might never make new friends again. \u201cThis defines who I am and I can\u2019t stand that, but you have to accept it.\u201d
\nThe last time I saw Peter, he had taken out a picture of himself at the beach with his two sons. \u201cOne thing that struck me about that picture is that it\u2019s clear that he\u2019s loved,\u201d he said. Peter has dreamed about Adam every night since the event, dreams of pervasive sadness rather than fear; he had told me that he could not be afraid of his fate as Adam\u2019s father, even of being murdered by his son. Recently, though, he had had the worst nightmare of his life. He was walking past a door; a figure in the door began shaking it violently. Peter could sense hatred, anger, \u201cthe worst possible evilness,\u201d and he could see upraised hands. He realized it was Adam. \u201cWhat surprised me is that I was scared as shit,\u201d he recounted. \u201cI couldn\u2019t understand what was happening to me. And then I realized that I was experiencing it from the perspective of his victims.\u201d
\nI wondered how Peter would feel if he could see his son again. \u201cQuite honestly, I think that I wouldn\u2019t recognize the person I saw,\u201d he said. \u201cAll I could picture is there\u2019d be nothing there, there\u2019d be nothing. Almost, like, \u2018Who are you, stranger?\u2019 \u201d Peter declared that he wished Adam had never been born, that there could be no remembering who he was outside of who he became. \u201cThat didn\u2019t come right away. That\u2019s not a natural thing, when you\u2019re thinking about your kid. But, God, there\u2019s no question. There can only be one conclusion, when you finally get there. That\u2019s fairly recent, too, but that\u2019s totally where I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nRead more: http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2014\/03\/17\/140317fa_fact_solomon?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz2wpkGvPJD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I often wondered how parents of mass murderers would cope with what their child did. The father of the Sandy Hook Killer tells his story [Read More]<\/a> \"Street<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diary"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/peter_Lanza.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3199,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/3199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}