“He just had this blank look in his eyes, as if he didn’t know who I was or something. He didn’t say a word. It kind of scared me.”
With Adam safely back in his place, Nancy regained her composure and returned to watching the rest of the game, but her reaction that day resonated with Marvin years later.
“It hurt me terribly. I really felt like I let her down. I never saw that side of her before and never wanted to see it again,” he said.
That same year, Nancy enrolled Adam in kindergarten, already well aware that she needed to be a champion for her son’s challenges. She had the school district draw up an individual education plan, or IEP, in accordance with the students with disabilities act, to address his antisocial behavior, and hoped they could tailor his school day to better suit his needs.
When her husband, Peter, was named vice president of finances at General Electric soon after, the family decided to relocate to a small town in Connecticut called Newtown. Nancy Lanza saw the move as an opportunity for her struggling son to have a brighter and more stable future.
The people who live there often say Newtown in the fall resembles a Norman Rockwell painting. Branches with yellow and red leaves drape the Victorian homes of this quaint New England hamlet, and at the crossroads of its main thoroughfares—Main Street, Church Hill Road, and West Street—stands a single pole bearing the American flag. Legend has it that every road in Fairfield County leads to the pole, which has stood in the middle of Main Street since 1876.
Newtown is regarded as one of the safest towns in the country, so safe that families often leave their doors unlocked, but the town’s main attraction is the sterling reputation of its schools, especially that of Sandy Hook Elementary. Located at the end of Dickinson Drive, a one-way street off of Riverside Road, and surrounded by lush hemlock and evergreen trees, the school is renowned for its high academic standards, routinely exceeding the state scoring averages in reading, writing, and math. It had also earned a reputation as a progressive school that was well equipped to deal with special needs students, a strong selling point for Nancy.
When the Lanzas arrived in 1998, they purchased a four-bedroom, three-bath Colonial for $405,900. A swing set with a small slide and a wooden fort was built for six-year-old Adam. In the backyard they had an in-ground swimming pool accompanied by a white wooden pool house on the 2.19-acre property. The young family couldn’t have been more pleased with their first year in their new home.
“People are so nice here,” Nancy wrote to Marvin, back in New Hampshire. “I feel very lucky to have found a place where there is such a feeling of community. It is beautiful here, and there is SO much to do and see.”
Nancy loved the new house, and had plans to convert the basement into a room for her sons. “The game room is for the boys . . . it will actually be two rooms and a bathroom. In addition, I will have laundry room, exercise room for myself and perhaps a small shop area for my newest hobby (refurnishing antiques). There will also be a storage area that will not be finished off,” Nancy emailed Marvin. “The boys are very excited about having a game room.”
Another upside to the move was the “mild Connecticut winters,” which were an improvement over winters in New Hampshire. At first, Adam seemed to be adjusting well to the move. He excelled academically in every course. He was involved in other activities, too, including music, and especially drama. In emails to a friend during their first spring in Newtown, Nancy wrote glowingly of young Adam’s blossoming affinity for the stage.
“Adam started in his theater group last week and enjoys it,” she said in an email dated April 12, 1999. “It has been so cute to watch them rehearse. Adam has taken it very seriously, even practicing facial expressions in the mirror!
“Adam’s first play went well . . . his second one is this afternoon with a second showing this evening. Watch out Broadway!!! The first one was a Charlie Brown play . . . today’s is a smaller version of Oklahoma!”
Nancy was adjusting to her new surroundings as well. She had joined a local bunko group, where several of her neighbors rotated houses to play the popular dice game. She had also become a familiar face at Adam’s elementary school, where she tried to spend as much time as possible watching over her son. The faculty enjoyed her presence, even offering her a volunteer job.
“We had Field Day at the school on Tuesday . . . I was in charge of the Tug-of-War . . . the kids showed up in groups of 40!!! At the end of the day, the gym teacher came over and offered me a job! She said that I was a natural for organizing large groups of children. Too funny!!! Naturally, I declined . . . but I was flattered,” she wrote to a friend.
Spring in the Lanza household also meant birthdays for Ryan and Adam. Nancy planned a total of seven parties for her two sons in an effort to use the occasion to help her children better acclimate. “Ryan and Adam’s birthdays are coming up,” Nancy wrote to a friend on March 31, 1999. “It is making for a very busy month! Ryan is having an ‘Old Friend’ party and a ‘New Friend’ party . . . Adam is having only a ‘New Friend’ party . . . but he has 26 new friends!!! They will both have a family party and a school party.”
While outwardly brimming with confidence, privately Nancy had already begun voicing concerns to friends that Adam’s condition might be more serious than she had previously suspected. During Adam’s sixth birthday party at Danbury Duckpin Lanes, a bowling center in nearby Danbury, Nancy confided to Wendy Wipprecht, the mother of one of Adam’s classmates who also had special needs, that she worried about her son possibly suffering from a neurobiological condition.
“He’s getting worse, not better. He needs help,” she told friends. “He is remarkably intelligent but he struggles in so many ways.”
The long-suspected diagnoses of Asperger’s and sensory perception disorder (SPD) came soon after. Adam displayed all of the symptoms commonly associated with avoidant SPD; he flinched at sudden movements, recoiled from touch, sought seclusion, and preferred the dark.
The diagnoses made sense to Nancy, who for years had been struggling to identify what was wrong with her son. Adam was bright, with an uncanny ability to process information quickly, but the sound of running bathwater could drive him mad. Still, she told friends, Adam had been diagnosed with “borderline autism” and that it was “not severe.”
In many ways, Adam seemed to prosper during his first-grade year at Sandy Hook Elementary. He got great grades and attended normal classes with the rest of the children, but to fellow classmates Adam came across as an odd, aloof child who could never quite fit in. Adam stood alone at recess making animal noises, straining himself until his cheeks turned red. Others described him as someone who “scared the other kids.” Another classmate remembered simply that “he always seemed so angry.”
His second-grade teacher, Carole MacInnes, saw Adam as a quiet, intelligent child who did well academically and needed no special attention. “He was a frail little fellow and rarely spoke. There was a quiet depth to him that I couldn’t penetrate, but there were no problems,” she later recalled.
As a third-grader, Adam tried his hand at Little League baseball where his differences soon became apparent to his teammates. He would often stand at the plate with the bat on his shoulders as the pitcher threw strike after strike across the heart of the plate. Adam rarely swung, usually striking out and slumping back to the dugout where he sat off to the side by himself.
Nancy attended every game and practice, always keeping a close eye on her boy. To some of the other parents, her protective nature sometimes came off as extreme and overbearing. In one instance, as Adam was walking back to the dugout after striking out at the plate, another child passing by said, “Nice try.”
Hearing the compliment, Adam looked nervous and quickly scampered to the dugout. After the game Nancy confronted the coach and demanded to know what the boy had said to her son. “She was paranoid that the other kids were bullying him but that just wasn’t the case, at least in this instance,” one parent recalled. “M
ost of the kids just ignored Adam.”
One former teammate had a different recollection of Adam’s time in Little League, remembering him as “not a good player.”
“Some kids picked on him, making fun of him. He’d always get put in the outfield where he wouldn’t see a lot of action. I remember one time he was hit by a pitch that knocked him over. Someone said he couldn’t feel any pain so what’s it matter anyways and everyone kind of laughed. I felt kind of bad but he didn’t even try to fit in. He ignored all of us.”
If he struggled with sports, he appeared to persevere. On May 18, 2001, a short blurb appeared in the Newtown Bee, the town’s local weekly newspaper, after Adam’s Little League team, Taunton Press, defeated Bob Tendler Real Estate 11–4. It described Adam’s performance as “stellar in the field.”
As he grew up, Adam seemed uninterested in forging any human relationships outside his immediate family. And even within the family home, the only person he felt truly comfortable around was his mother. He always wanted her near him but still managed to keep her at arm’s length.
One night when Adam had a fever, Nancy slept on the floor all night outside his closed door. Periodically he would call out, “Are you there? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Nancy always responded.
The older Adam became, the more his unusual behavior made him a target for the class bullies, and as he approached middle school, Nancy told friends that Sandy Hook wasn’t doing enough to stop the taunting.
“They picked on his quietness; they knew he wouldn’t fight back,” Nancy told Marvin during a phone conversation. “The poor kid was an easy target.”
Adam sometimes came home from the third grade with bruises on his body, another sign his mother believed he was being picked on. When questioned, Adam withdrew.
“She once told me she was so upset that teachers weren’t protecting him against bullies that she went with him like a bodyguard,” Marvin said. “Nancy would do anything to protect her son. She spoke to the teachers and said, ‘I’m going to be sitting in the back of the school’ . . . I remember that Nancy went to his class and nothing would happen.”
Nancy had a zero-tolerance policy toward violence of any type, not just concerning her son. While she felt at ease with a high-powered rifle aimed at a target for sport, the country girl was by nature a pacifist. After being told in March 1999 of an incident in New Hampshire involving a student attacking another with a nail, an outraged Nancy hinted at her growing frustration over Adam’s troubles.
“I was shocked when I read about the nail incident. I agree . . . that kid [with the nail] should be expelled from school,” she wrote in an email that month. “[Schools] go on and on about their great ‘zero tolerance’ regarding drugs and alcohol . . . but go ahead and let a kid attack another with a weapon!
“They will spend THOUSANDS of dollars on that child to keep an aide sitting with him . . . and then they say they don’t have money for one hour a week of speech therapy for a smart, quiet child with a speech impairment. I am totally disgusted with that school!” she wrote, referring to Adam.
Adam’s need for space extended to the school bus, where he would often sit in the back, usually alone. “He didn’t sit with the other kids and didn’t seem to have any friends,” said Marsha Moskowitz, who drove Adam on the bus for three years. “He was quiet, a very shy and reserved kid,” she said, noting that Adam “did little to reach out and make friends. I never saw him try.”
Still, despite her many grievances, overall Nancy was pleased with her son’s progress during his first few years at Sandy Hook Elementary, and everything appeared to be looking up. He sat with the general student body in the classroom and did well academically. Parent-teacher conferences were always uneventful, with Adam’s teachers giving nothing but good reports, other than occasionally reversing letters.
At home she noticed that more time was passing between temper tantrums. His Aspergers and sensory perception disorder were being managed.
“It’s been frustrating and it’s been a battle,” Nancy emailed a friend as the fourth-grade year wound to an end. “But overall I have to admit that Adam has been making quite a bit of progress. I’m not sure we could have received this level of attention back home.”
Although awkward, socially backward, and occasionally picked on and bullied, his family would later remember Adam’s time at Sandy Hook Elementary as “the best times of his life.”
In January 2003, more changes came as Adam entered Newtown’s Reed Intermediate School for fifth and sixth grades. Lanza and his classmates were the first fifth-graders to attend the intermediate school, moving from Sandy Hook Elementary midyear in 2003.
Again, Adam’s odd behavior made the eleven-year-old stick out to classmates. “He was extremely introverted and didn’t talk to anyone,” recalled Dan Lynch, a former classmate. “He was really skittish, and anxious. He kept to himself and everyone left him alone.”
In the fall of 2004, Adam entered seventh grade at Newtown Middle School, and for the first three marking periods, his performance on paper academically was great. He achieved mostly A grades and his teacher described him as having a “positive attitude” and being “fully engaged and respectful.” He also earned an A in gym class and won the praise of his band teacher.
Middle school, however, would represent a turning point in his young life. While in elementary school, Adam rarely had to move from room to room, something he had always struggled with; now that he was entering middle school he was frequently required to change classes.
Classmates could see the terror on his face as he tried to navigate a hallway. “He always looked terrified as he walked down the hall. His shoulders would slump and he would cling to the wall,” one classmate said. “I remember thinking that he walks like he expects someone to hit him.”
That year, his inability to deal with sights, sounds, and textures started to become more acute. From the din of the lunch bell to the commotion of students rushing through the halls, everything around Adam had become a source of constant irritation. The struggles were spilling over to his home life, too, where the outbursts started to become more violent as Adam became increasingly resistant about going to school.
Nancy fought with the school to accommodate her son’s condition. “This is torture for my son,” she told one school official.
The school did little to appease the angry mother, at least as far as Nancy was concerned. In turn, Nancy had developed a reputation as “tightly wound,” “demanding,” and with a “flare for dramatics” among some of the staff.
In 2005, Nancy had become fed up with how the academic district was dealing, or not dealing, with her son’s difficulties. She pulled him out Newtown Middle School in April 2005 and enrolled him at St. Rose of Lima, the Catholic school in Newtown. Nancy wasn’t religious, but she thought the smaller class sizes would ensure that her son received the kind of personal attention he so desperately needed.
Still, Adam’s troubles continued to escalate. He just could not fit in. While most children were talking about Avril Lavigne or the latest Harry Potter book, on the rare occasions when he did speak, it was often about fifties rock music or aliens.
“Adam had a difficult time making the adjustment from public school to St. Rose,” said Monsignor Robert Weiss, the pastor of the parish. “He struggled.”
More bad news came the Lanza family’s way when a teacher discovered a collection of disturbing graphics Adam had drawn. The images depicted people in various states of death. The educator brought them to the attention of school officials, who felt the drawings warranted enough concern to bring Nancy in for a parent-teacher conference. She defensively told the faculty by way of explanation that Adam had Asperger’s syndrome and was struggling to fit in.
Adam’s time at his new Catholic school lasted just eight weeks. In June 2005, Nancy pulled him out of St. Rose of Lima. She was increasingly at a loss about what to do next and becoming more concerned. At home, s
he found more death-themed drawings by Adam and images of violence that he had printed out from his computer. Again, desperately searching for help for her troubled son, she consulted an expert in Hartford, Connecticut. Again, she didn’t feel that her concerns were being addressed.
“If one more person tells me that he is going to grow out of it, I think I’m going to lose my mind,” Nancy confided to a relative. “My son is sick, but no one seems to want to do anything about it.”
CHAPTER 4
THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS
As Adam Lanza was about to enter his first year of high school in the fall of 2006, Nancy felt encouraged. Finally, she believed, she had found an advocate at Newtown High School who would be responsive to her son’s needs and was willing to work with his Asperger’s syndrome and sensory perception disorder.
“Very encouraged with Newtown High,” Nancy wrote, sending a message to a friend. “Fingers crossed.”
Nancy had been looking forward to the beginning of the school year. Over the summer her worries about her son’s mental health were compounding. While the other children in Sandy Hook were busy swimming in the pool at Treadwell Memorial Park or cooling off with some homemade ice cream at the Ferris Acres Creamery, Adam continued to isolate himself, spending the vast majority of his summer vacation between the walls of 36 Yogananda Street on his computer or playing video games.
“It’s so hard to pull him out of his own little world,” Nancy told a friend that summer. “Still searching for that healthy balance of pushing him hard enough while not pushing him too hard.”
Nancy hoped that a new academic year and a new school environment might snap her son out of his self-imposed solitude. Working with the Newtown High School administration and Richard J. Novia, the head of security, as well as the school’s Tech Club adviser, they devised a program in which Adam would begin in a private classroom. This appealed to Nancy because it would mean Adam would be alone, where it would be quiet and he wouldn’t have to move from room to room, which could set him off. In time, if all went well, Adam would then be folded back into the main building with a mix of special education and honors classes.
Newtown: An American Tragedy Page 4