Newtown: An American Tragedy

by Matthew Lysiak

  Adam joined the Tech Club, a group of forty students who created robots, built computers, and even ran their own TV show that filmed local sporting events. The instructor, Novia, agreed to take special precautions while Adam was around the equipment. Since Adam didn’t feel physical pain like a normal person because of his sensory perception disorder, whenever Adam was using soldering tools and other potentially dangerous equipment he had to be closely watched.

  From the beginning it was apparent to the class that Adam was a natural in the world of computers. As a sophomore in a class filled with juniors and seniors, he immediately stood out as the only one who could build a computer from scratch. His eyes grew wide and he seemed to go off into his own world as his hands and mind worked fluidly to wire complex circuitry onto the motherboard.

  Novia, who started the Tech Club, saw Adam’s potential and fragility and immediately took the fourteen-year-old under his wing. He worked with him patiently, trying to get him to join the rest of the group.

  “I wanted to help him,” said Novia. “There was this glimmer in his eye and I believed that if we just tapped into that we could bring him out. He was brilliant. Most kids needed manuals and instructions to work the video editing. Adam didn’t need any of that. He had a natural gift.”

  Novia met several times with Nancy Lanza to discuss Adam’s problems. She told Novia that Adam suffered from Asperger’s and sensory perception disorder. Adam had also been the victim of bullying, Nancy told Novia, and that faculty and administrators at his previous schools hadn’t done enough to protect him.

  “I promised her that Adam would be protected and that no one would lay a hand on Adam so long as I was at the school,” said Novia.

  It was clear right away that Adam would need close supervision.

  “He fit the profile that suggested future problems, so we all kept an eye on him, right down to the custodians,” said Novia.

  Like his years in middle school, ninth grade proved to be a struggle for Adam. He remained introverted and continued to seek out isolation.

  “He would withdraw and sit in the corner, or stand off by himself and wobble back and forth,” said Novia. “He was constantly looking around. I never saw Adam laugh or smile. It was as if he was afraid of the world.”

  But after a few months Novia began to see modest signs of progress in his student. When instructed as to which camera to stand behind, Adam wouldn’t verbally respond but, after he became familiar with the process, would comply.

  “That was major progress,” said Novia.

  But as much as the instructor worked to bring him out of his shell, the awkward teen spent the majority of his time sitting alone inside the control room for video productions of the Tech Club’s channel 17. He would stay inside for hours with the door closed. The only light in the room came from the glow of the computer screens and monitors.

  If there had been some signs of a brief respite from his disorders, it wouldn’t be long before Adam’s struggle with mental illness started to cripple him again. Almost on a weekly basis, he began having episodes that sent him into complete withdrawal. Loud noises, bright lights, or any sudden change or excitement could send him into a nonresponsive state. These episodes seemed to come on at random. If the other students began to organize a game of capture the flag, Adam saw the excitement building and sought out a quiet spot in a corner to sit down by himself.

  “It was like he would go into a trance,” one student remembered. “It was a little scary. No one picked on him or anything. He just seemed vacant. Like he wasn’t there.”

  The instructor sometimes sat next to him, patiently coaxing him back to reality. Adam rarely responded. The episodes sometimes ended with a call to Nancy, who immediately came to the school and soothingly touched her son’s arm and rubbed his back before carefully escorting him to the car.

  His special needs were also obvious to Latin teacher Jennifer Huettner. The nervous thirteen-year-old arrived each morning in Huettner’s private classroom wearing the same loose-fitting khaki pants and baggy blue polo shirt buttoned tightly at his neck. He carried a small pocket protector that contained pens, along with a black briefcase that he carried with him everywhere as his security blanket.

  The briefcase was nearly empty, containing only a few personal notes and drawings.

  “It was strange. This large briefcase filled with nothing but a few papers,” said one person who was familiar with its contents. “He wrote a lot about his parents’ separation. It bothered him greatly.”

  Before sitting down, the first thing Adam did was to make sure his desk was sanitary. He would take out a small bottle of Purell and carefully wipe every spot to make sure it was germ-free. It had been a habit Adam had picked up several years earlier when he first became fixated on germs, especially when it came to food. If he thought someone might have touched his meal, he refused to eat, no matter how hungry he may have been. Once Adam was convinced that every spot had been sanitized, he would deliberately pull his seat out, put his bag down, and sit.

  Over time, Adam seemed to adapt to his new teacher and was a quick study with Latin. However, he was still uncomfortable and needed the assurance that his mother was nearby. Nancy obliged. She would wait in an empty room next door, reading a book while Adam had his lesson.

  That was typical of Nancy, who continued to keep a close eye on Adam.

  “It’s hard to imagine a more devoted mother,” said Novia. “She was so involved in her son’s life. Sometimes I would say, ‘Nancy, you need to go home. Leave him,’ but it was hard for her to let him out of her sight.”

  At the beginning of his sophomore year, the decision was made to try to move Adam from the private classroom into the main high school building. At first Nancy was hesitant. The nightmarish experience of eighth grade only two years earlier was still fresh in her mind. She wasn’t so sure her son was ready for all the noise and commotion that comes with joining a group of four hundred teenagers but, after receiving several assurances from the school staff that her son’s needs would be accommodated, she decided to give it a try.

  For the faculty, who always kept an eye out for incoming students requiring special attention, Adam’s problems appeared more severe than most and they made sure they had protocols in place to handle his challenges. Among the fears now that Adam would be integrated into the main school was the reality that Adam could be an easy target for bullies. The school’s three security staffers were told to monitor him carefully and to report where he was, who he was with, and what he was doing at all times to their higher-ups. Adam was also assigned a high school psychologist who would check in with him and Nancy periodically, while teachers and counselors were also informed of his heightened sensitivities. An escort was assigned to walk him through the hallways when needed, and many of the faculty had Nancy’s number at their disposal if anything went wrong.

  Nancy remained cynical, but was also encouraged. “The school couldn’t be more helpful,” Nancy wrote a friend. “There might still be hope yet.”

  On the first day of his sophomore year at Newtown High School, Adam made a fashion change, switching from the blue polo shirt he wore every day as a freshman to a green polo shirt. He would go on to wear it for the rest of the school year. In the classroom Adam’s odd behavior caused him to stick out to classmates. Unlike most teen boys his age, Adam did everything he could to avoid drawing attention to himself. His anxiety became apparent whenever the teacher called on him to answer a question. Feeling the eyes of the class looking in his direction, he squirmed and struggled to get the words out, but when he finally did utter his response, the answer was always right.

  Adam followed a careful routine when having to navigate the hallway. He always sat near the door so he could readily slip out after the bell rang or he waited in his seat until the crowds had cleared. Then, slightly hunched over and walking with his shoulder against the wall and holding his briefcase out to protect himself, he moved swiftly through the corridors toward the
exit. He always took the same route, and never deviated from it. At Excel Tutoring in Newtown, where Adam sometimes went for extra classes, it was also obvious that he had trouble sitting still and couldn’t stop fidgeting.

  Adam did make one rare social connection during his sophomore year, with classmate Alan Diaz, a freshman. The two played video games together, but Adam remained withdrawn and rarely spoke. Nancy invited Diaz and the Tech Club over to her house on one occasion in the hope that it might help her son engage with his peers. Adam appeared to enjoy himself as the group played Star-Craft, a war game set in space, and Warcraft III.

  Despite Adam’s continued troubles in adjusting, Novia continued to see small signs of progress. Adam began participating in an after-school program, helping to tape basketball games. He even let go of his briefcase, switching to a bag that carried his laptop.

  “He felt safe. He started to come out of his shell,” said Novia. “Nancy saw the progress, too. It was exciting to see.”

  As Adam finished his sophomore year he became increasingly interested in target shooting. Nancy, who continued to be concerned about his isolation, had been looking for any opportunity to connect with her son, especially in a way that would get him out of the house. The shooting range provided the perfect outlet.

  “She’d take him to the range a lot. It was a way they could bond with each other,” her former landscaper Dan Holmes said. “Nancy was an enthusiast and she wanted to pass her passion along to her kids.”

  The choice of this mother-son bonding pastime struck some as strange. When his old classmate Alan Diaz, who by then had lost touch with Adam, ran into Nancy and asked her how his friend was doing, he was surprised by the response.

  “He’s good. He started going to the shooting range with me,” Nancy explained.

  Adam? At the shooting range? Diaz thought. That’s weird. I never really imagined Adam as the type to hold a gun.

  On March 29, 2010, Nancy Lanza went into Riverview Gun Sales in East Windsor, Connecticut, and purchased a Bushmaster XM15 rifle. A year later she purchased the SIG Sauer 9-millimeter pistol on March 16, 2011, at the same store. On the ATF 4473s, the firearms transaction forms that she was required by law to fill out, she checked the box yes on both forms to the question, “Are you the actual transferee/buyer of the firearm(s) listed on this form?”

  The forms warn that if you are buying the firearm on behalf of another person, “the dealer cannot transfer the firearm(s) to you,” and that it is a federal crime to give a false answer. She checked the box for no on both forms to the question, “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective (which includes a determination by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority that you are a danger to yourself or to others or are incompetent to manage your own affairs) OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?”

  Some of the weapons Nancy bought she kept. Others she gave to Adam.

  Besides the gun range, the only other place Adam traveled to was the local video game store, GameStop, where he would enter, get what he needed, and leave. But it was within the safe confines of his home that Nancy could see her son’s behavior really changing. Adam’s frequent bouts of panic and tantrums kept getting worse. He was acting oddly, making more strange drawings, and had begun muttering to himself.

  Overall, Adam’s struggles in social interactions continued to be apparent to everyone who crossed his path. Even a haircut proved a harrowing experience. Every few months the routine played out. Nancy walked in, with Adam following closely behind, and instructed Adam as to where exactly to sit. As he was cutting his hair, Bob Skuba, the stylist, tried every trick in his book to get the teenager to laugh or acknowledge him, but always failed.

  “I’d always make jokes and try to talk to him but he looked at me like I was invisible. He just wouldn’t say a word,” Skuba recalled. “Adam would stare down at the tiles. He would never make eye contact.”

  At the end of the haircut, Skuba would say, “You’re all set, Adam.” But he wouldn’t get out of his chair—not “until the mother came over and grabbed him by the arm and would say, ‘All right, you are done. You can go now, Adam.’ The only time he moved or made any kind of response in any way was when his mother told him to,” Skuba said.

  Without saying a word, Adam would walk straight out the door with his mother in close pursuit. “It was obvious that he was different. Something was wrong with him.”

  Adam’s older brother, Ryan, obviously noticed the severity of his brother’s differences but dismissed them more nonchalantly. “My brother has always been a nerd,” he explained when he was once asked what was wrong with his younger brother.

  But just as it appeared Adam was beginning to slowly adjust to the routine at Newtown High School, right before beginning his junior year, Nancy learned that Richard Novia would be leaving the school. Wary of the rest of the Newtown administration and faculty, Nancy knew the only person she could trust to look out for her troubled son was leaving and decided to take Adam out of the school.

  Novia heard the news and pleaded with Nancy to keep Adam in school, believing that removing him could “send him in a tailspin.”

  “I told her that Adam was making progress and that taking him out of school could send him in reverse. He had a support network. Without the school, he would fall back into isolation. He would lose all of his interactions. Everything would be stripped from him. He would get worse.”

  Nancy wouldn’t budge. “If you are not going to be there, I’m taking him out,” Nancy told Novia in a phone call. “I don’t trust anyone else.” Her intense anger at and distrust of the school overwhelmed any arguments to the contrary and she insisted that Adam be taken out.

  “She didn’t trust anyone else. She had a lot of anger at the school administration. She was very unhappy with the entire district,” said Novia. “Nancy didn’t believe Adam would get the attention he needed without me there.”

  Novia also noted: “There was just no pleasing Nancy. She wanted Adam watched one hundred percent of the time. She wanted every faculty member to be just as dedicated to her son as she was. She directed her anger at the special ed teacher, the guidance counselor, the administration.”

  The school had failed her son, Nancy believed. Adam was angry with the school, too. With no social life or friends, school was all he had and now that was gone.

  Nancy pulled her son out of Newtown High School after his junior year and enrolled him at Western Connecticut State University, hoping that Adam would thrive in a more adult environment where there would be less chaos. After passing his GED test in the summer of 2008, he took a total of seven classes and earned a 3.26 GPA his first year. He took Website Production, Visual Basic, Data Modeling, American History since 1877, and Introduction to Ethical Theory, a course in which he got a C.

  But signs of his mental instability were always present. When asked on his college application to indicate a gender, Adam wrote: “I choose not to answer,” followed by the question, “How do you describe yourself?” Even his university ID photo—his brown eyes bulging, his face seemingly devoid of emotion—suggested to some that something about him was off.

  Adam always sat alone, toward the back of the class, often wearing a hooded sweatshirt. He never spoke. At Western Connecticut State University, Adam, who was several years younger than his classmates, again didn’t fit in. If a classmate greeted him, Adam acted nervous and avoided eye contact. After an Introduction to German class in spring 2009, two girls asked Adam if he wanted to join them for a drink.

  “No, I can’t. I’m seventeen,” he responded.

  Still, Nancy had hopes that her son would excel in a more adult environment and didn’t entertain the possibility of enrolling him back at Newtown High School. “Newtown [school] is dead to me,” she told a friend.

  Dealing with her son’s condition wasn’t the only issue Nancy had to deal with domestically. Her marriage, which had been acrimonious for years, was finally over. On September 23, 20
09, she and Peter finalized their divorce. Whatever their marital problems, the divorce was by all accounts amicable, the main concern of both being the welfare of Adam. The couple agreed that Adam, then sixteen, would live primarily with his mother, but that his father would have “liberal visitation and vacations.” True to his word, Peter continued to see his sons weekly, taking them skiing, hiking, rock climbing, to coin shows, and on overnight stays at his Stamford apartment until 2010, when Adam broke off contact with his father after Peter began seriously dating again. He also severed ties with his brother, Ryan, and his uncle James, whom he had been close to as a child.

  The agreement also meant that Nancy would be financially taken care of for the rest of her life, which worked to the family’s advantage—both Nancy and Peter knew that she could never take on a full-time job and still care for their son. At the time of their divorce, Peter earned $8,556 a week. In 2010, he agreed to pay an annual alimony of $240,000, with increases each year. By 2012, he was paying $289,000, and after 2016, Nancy would receive an annual cost-of-living increase based on the 2015 alimony payment of $298,000 per year until he retired.

  Peter and Nancy were also required to attend a parenting-education program, a standard practice in Connecticut. Both parents successfully completed the required sessions. In working through the terms of their divorce, they spent a considerable amount of time talking about how to provide for Adam’s well-being, said Paula Levy, a mediator who worked with the couple. During their meetings, Paula said they appeared to be on the same page regarding how to best address his needs.

  “The mom, Nancy, pretty much said she was going to take care of him and be there as much as he needed her, even long term. She was very concerned about Adam, [but] both parents were very attentive to his needs. The [one] thing I remember them saying is that they really don’t like leaving him alone,” Paula said.