SALON

Sunday, Dec 23, 2012 4:06 AM UTC

Nancy Lanza let Adam use guns to “teach him responsibility”

Newtown gunman reportedly hadn't talked to brother or father in two years, relationship with mom was deteriorating

By

Topics: Adam Lanza, Nancy Lanza, Gun Control, Newtown shooting, Sandy Hook,

Nancy Lanza let Adam use guns to (Credit: AP)

Adam Lanza’s days leading up to the Newtown massacre remain shrouded in mystery because he was so cut off from the rest of the world. And according to a new Wall Street Journal report, that very isolation is a frustration to investigators trying to determine why he killed his mother, Nancy, and then murdered 26 more people last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary.

The Journal, in what may be the deepest account yet of the inner workings of the Lanza family reports that:

* Adam Lanza stopped talking with his father, Peter, during summer 2010, which coincided with the time a relationship with Peter Lanza’s now-wife turned serious.

* That Christmas, Lanza stopped communicating with his older brother Ryan.

* Nancy Lanza let Adam use her guns at a local shooting range in order to bond with him and “teach him responsibility.”

The story suggests Adam Lanza’s problems started in first grade, at Sandy Hook (where he attended classes through fourth grade). After a stint of home schooling, he was back in the Newtown system for middle school, but remained shy, socially awkward and isolated from classmates.

As the paper tells it:

As a freshman at Newtown High School, Mr. Lanza’s socially maladroit behavior attracted attention from school officials but he managed to make friends in the Tech Club and through videogames. Mr. Lanza didn’t keep those connections. Later, Gloria Milas asked her son, Josh, why he hadn’t returned a videogame console that belonged to Mr. Lanza. “No one knows where he is,” Ms. Milas said her son told her.

Mr. Lanza’s mother had again taken him out of public schools. He enrolled in classes at Western Connecticut State University. She “wanted him to have college classes,” Marsha Lanza said. In Nancy’s view, “he was brilliant.”

But as one of the youngest people there, he was an outsider. “We tried to say hi to him every so often, and he just seemed nervous,” said Dot Stasny, a classmate in an introductory German course in spring 2009.

The Journal suggests that Nancy Lanza may have been ready to leave Newtown. Friends told the paper she was worried about him, and knew their relationship was “deteriorating.”

In her final days, Ms. Lanza told friends she was preparing to move across the country, to Washington, where there was a school she believed would be the right fit for her son. She told her friend Mark Tambascio she would be selling her beloved Red Sox season tickets. “She was ready to move,” he said.

Continue Reading Close

David Daley is the executive editor of Salon. More David Daley.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 46 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations