Newtown: An American Tragedy (5 page)

“She came from a culture of guns. That’s how she was raised in New Hampshire. Live free or die, that was the kind of woman Nancy Lanza was. She was an independent kind of woman,” said Russell Ford, a friend of Nancy’s. Dan Holmes, her landscaper, remembered, “Whenever I finished work she would invite me in for a drink; she spoke often about her fascination with firearms. She had an extensive gun collection, and she was really quite proud of it.

“One day I was over and she asked me to wait, then brought this really nice case out, and when she opened it up, she pulled out this old rifle. It looked beautiful and old. She would just smile when she looked at it.”

Although Nancy loved to hunt and target-shoot, as a young girl she couldn’t stand to see an animal in pain. When she was a kid, she told anyone who would listen that one day she was going to be a veterinarian. Once when her kittens looked unhappy, she was concerned and tasted the cat food to make sure it was okay for them to
eat. Another time she took in a baby bird that was injured and tried to nurse it back to health. Then cried for a day before giving the small bird a funeral next to the tree it had fallen out of.

Nancy joined the 4-H Club when she was old enough, which was where she learned how to ride horses. And every year when the agricultural fair and circus came to town, she would furiously plot with her older brother Donnie on how they were going to free the elephants. When that didn’t work, they would sneak them extra hay. (Interestingly, by the age of thirteen, Adam had adopted a vegan, organic lifestyle out of a moral concern, Nancy told friends. “He did not want to be the cause of animals suffering,” she had explained.)

Nancy was known by her friends as a brazen child who had an adventurous streak. She would always speak her mind and was assertive about what she wanted. As a mother, she tried to project a confident and calm demeanor on the outside but, if she ever sensed her younger boy might be in danger, another side to her personality was quick to surface. While her oldest son, Ryan, was allowed to run and play by himself in the forest on Marvin’s New Hampshire property for hours at a time without supervision, if Adam was out of her sight for even a moment a “switch could flip.”

“Nancy was an intense personality; she could go from being mellow and soft-spoken to very upset, very quickly. Adam was associated with that side of her,” Marvin recalled. “Some part of her became active if he was in distress.”

Marvin experienced the darker side of Nancy’s personality just once but it was a memory that forever stayed with him. On April 15, 1998, they had traveled together to Boston with the Boy Scouts’ pack to see the Celtics in action at the FleetCenter. The group had
a relaxed, enjoyable time during the first half. Nancy and Marvin were sitting together in the tenth row of the balcony, while Adam, who was days away from his sixth birthday, sat in the row directly in front beside his brother and Marvin’s son, Jordan.

At the halftime intermission, with the Celtics trailing 57–48, Nancy asked Marvin to keep an eye on Adam while she went to use the restroom. Marvin turned his head momentarily and when he looked back, he realized that the boy had slipped away. When Nancy returned ten minutes later, she saw Adam’s seat empty, and erupted.

“She was hysterical and screaming, ‘My God, where is Adam?’ ” Marvin recalled. “I had no idea where he had gone, but I knew he couldn’t have gone far and that there was no reason to panic.”

Marvin looked at Nancy. She was hyperventilating; her face was beet red. She was so distressed it flashed through his mind that he might need to seek medical attention for her.

“It wasn’t just a meltdown. It was an enormous panic attack,” Marvin said. “I was tremendously worried. I didn’t know what was happening. I had never seen her like that.”

A few moments later, Marvin spotted Adam’s scruffy red hair several feet away in the tunnel near the concession stands. “Little Adam was touching the walls with his fingers. I walked up to him and said, ‘What’s up, dude? You know you weren’t supposed to leave your seat. Do you know what you just did to your mother?’ ” Marvin said.

But Adam was unmoved by the chaos he had caused and barely acknowledged Marvin’s presence. He calmly turned around and returned to his seat as if nothing had happened.

“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. “Most 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.