#title The Reckoning
#subtitle Searching for Meaning with the Father of the Sandy Hook Killer
#author Andrew Solomon
#date May 26, 2014
#source <[[https://andrewsolomon.com/books/the-reckoning/][andrewsolomon.com/books/the-reckoning]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-03-12T01:30:58
#topics
#cover a-s-andrew-solomon-the-reckoning-1.jpg
#notes First published in The New Yorker: <[[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/17/the-reckoning][newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/17/the-reckoning]]>
** [Front Matter]
*** Extraordinary media coverage for *The Reckoning*
*WNYC’s* The Leonard Lopate Show
NPR’s *Fresh Air* with Terry Gross
ABC’s *Katie*
NBC’s *Today* Show
NBC Evening News
CBS Evening News
CNN
*BBC* Newshour
WSHU
Salon
*** Praise for *The Reckoning*
“Stunning ... Emotionally wrenching.”
—The New York Times
“Solomon tells, for the first time, the story of Peter Lanza, the father
of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter. Read it—it’s moving,
brave, and just profoundly human and sad.... There aren’t any
answers. And that’s what makes this all so impossible, and Solomon’s
journalism so essential.”
—Salon.com
“Powerful and affecting.”
—The New Yorker
“Both parents loved Adam. Neither parent imagined or wanted their
child’s horrific end. This is why what Peter Lanza did by sharing his
story with Andrew Solomon is so important. Lanza’s story fills important
gaps in our understanding of how a beloved child became a killer—and
reminds us as a society that we have an obligation to help families and
children before they find themselves on irreversible paths of violence.”
—Time
“By talking to Lanza, [Solomon] brings some light and empathy to a
difficult topic, about which we are still reckoning with the
reverberations and aftermath.”
—Flavorwire
“The lesson of Peter Lanza isn’t simply that we never know what calamity
awaits our families, so we dare not tempt fate with complacency.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Solomon ... brings both compassion and clear-eyed reporting.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
*** [Title Page]
[[a-s-andrew-solomon-the-reckoning-2.jpg]]
** The Reckoning
In Peter Lanza’s new house, on a secluded private road in Fairfield
County, Connecticut, is an attic room overflowing with shipping crates
of what he calls “the stuff.” 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 “My
First Christmas in Heaven”; 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, “I was wary about eating
anything,” and he didn’t let Shelley Lanza—his second wife—eat any of
the candy, either. There was no way to be sure it wasn’t poisoned.
Downstairs, in Peter’s home office, I spotted a box of family
photographs. He used to display them, he told me, but now he couldn’t
look at Adam, and it seemed strange to put up photos of his older son,
Ryan, without Adam’s. “I’m not dealing with it,” he said. Later, he
added, “You can’t mourn for the little boy he once was. You can’t fool
yourself.”
Since the shootings, Peter has avoided the press, but in September, as
the first anniversary of his son’s 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—Nancy, Adam’s
mother—grew 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—by 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.
Peter hadn’t seen his son for two years at the time of the Sandy Hook
killings, and, even with hindsight, he doesn’t 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. “Any variation on what I did and how my relationship was had
to be good, because no outcome could be worse,” he said. Another time,
he said, “You can’t get any more evil,” and added, “How much do I beat
up on myself about the fact that he’s my son? A lot.”
Depending on whom you ask, there were twenty-six, twenty-seven, or
twenty-eight victims in Newtown. It’s 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’s suicide a loss.
There are twenty-six stars on the local firehouse roof. On the
anniversary of the shootings, President Obama referred to “six dedicated
school workers and twenty beautiful children” 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—a gun enthusiast who had taught Adam to
shoot—was an accessory to the crime, rather than its victim. Emily
Miller, an editor at the *Washington Times,* wrote, “We can’t blame lax
gun-control laws, access to mental-health treatment, prescription drugs
or video games for Lanza’s 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.”
Inadequate 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—to make sense of what
seems senseless. When the Connecticut state’s attorney issued a report,
in December, CNN announced, “Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza took motive to
his grave.” A *New York Times* headline ran “CHILLING LOOK AT NEWTOWN
KILLER, BUT NO ‘WHY.’” Yet no “motive” can mitigate the horror of a
bloodbath involving children. Had we found out—which we did not—that
Adam had schizophrenia, or had been a pedophile or a victim of childhood
abuse, we still wouldn’t know *why* he acted as he did.
Interview 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’s strange to live in a state of sustained incomprehension about
what has become the most important fact about you. “I want people to be
afraid of the fact that this could happen to them,” he said. It took six
months after the shootings for a sense of reality to settle on Peter.
“But it’s real,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be understood to be real.”
* * *
Adam Lanza was never typical. Born in 1992, he didn’t 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’t 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.
Still, photos show him looking cheerful. “Adam loved Sandy Hook school,”
Peter said. “He stated, as he was growing older, how much he had liked
being a little kid.” Adam’s brother, Ryan, four years older and now a
tax accountant in New York, used to joke about how close Peter and Adam
were. They’d 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. “Always thinking differently,” Peter said. “Just a
normal little weird kid.”
Even in an age when a child’s every irregularity is attributed to a
syndrome, the idea of a “normal weird kid” 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, “Adam has taken it very
seriously, even practicing facial expressions in the mirror!” According
to the state’s attorney’s report, when Adam was in fifth grade he said
that he “did not think highly of himself and believed that everyone else
in the world deserved more than he did.” That year, Adam and another boy
wrote a story called “The Big Book of Granny,” 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 and place him on their mantelpiece. In
another chapter, a character called Dora the Berserker says, “I like
hurting people.... Especially children.” Adam tried to sell copies of
the book at school and got in trouble. A couple of years later,
according to the state’s attorney’s report, a teacher noted “disturbing”
violence in his writing and described him as “intelligent but not
normal, with anti-social issues.”
Meanwhile, Peter and Nancy’s marriage was starting to unravel. Peter’s
own father had been relatively disengaged from his wife and buried
himself in work, and Peter didn’t have a strong model for family life.
“I’d work ridiculous hours during the week and Nancy would take care of
the kids,” he told me. “Then, on the weekends, she’d do errands and I’d
spend time with the kids.” 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.
Peter recalled, “The funny part is that the separation didn’t really
change things for the kids very much.” 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. “And talk about
talkative: man, that kid, you couldn’t shut him up!” 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’t
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 *The Bob Newhart Show* and *Get
Smart,* 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.
* * *
When Adam began middle school, Peter and Nancy’s 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 “episodes,” panic attacks that necessitated his
mother’s coming to school; the state’s attorney’s report says that on
such occasions Adam “was more likely to be victimized than to act in
violence against another.”
“It was crystal clear something was wrong,” Peter said. “The 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.” 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. “They’re a little weird in
school. They don’t have friends. They do not get picked for the baseball
team,” he said. “But, as they get to the age when kids begin to date and
find partners, they can’t. 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.” He added that, without the brain getting worse,
“life challenges nudge them in the direction of being sicker.”
All 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’s 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. “It was communicated as ‘Adam, this is good news. This is
why you feel this way, and now we can do something about it,’” Peter
recalled. But Adam would not accept the diagnosis.
Peter and Nancy, who remained amicable in dealing with their children’s
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 “eventually we could get him into GRASP and he would
form relationships and maybe get married to somebody else with
Asperger’s.” 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’t 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.
Nancy coordinated the home curriculum with Newtown High School to ensure
that Adam could graduate rather than simply get a GED. She initiated all
such major decisions. “I took the backseat,” Peter said. Even after
beginning homeschooling, Adam continued to attend Newtown High’s Tech
Club meetings. “He fit in there,” Peter said. “They’re all weird and
smart.” Adam once held a Tech Club party at home; Nancy wrote to Peter,
“It was nice to hear Adam talking to the other kids and everyone joking
with him and treating him so well.” But he didn’t understand popularity,
and once asked Peter, “Why do you need friends?”
Adam displayed what his father described as “the arrogance that Aspies
can have.” He wrote that he was “not 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.” He went
on to discount his parents’ teaching, asserting that he had taught
himself chemistry.
When Adam was fourteen, shortly after Ryan had left for college, Peter
and Nancy took him to Yale’s Child Study Center for further diagnosis.
The psychiatrist who assessed Adam, Robert King, recorded that he was a
“pale, gaunt, awkward young adolescent standing rigidly with downcast
gaze and declining to shake hands.” He also noted that Adam “had
relatively little spontaneous speech but responded in a flat tone with
little inflection and almost mechanical prosody.” 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
“that whatever was granting the wishes *would not exist.*”
King noted evidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which often
accompanies autism. Adam refused to touch metal objects such as
doorknobs and didn’t like his mother to touch them, either, because he
feared contamination. “Adam imposes many strictures, which are
increasingly onerous for mother,” King wrote. “He disapproves if mother
leans on anything in the house because it is ‘improper.’ ... He is
also intolerant if mother brushes by his chair and objected to her new
high heel boots, because they were ‘too loud.’ ... If mother walks in
front of him in the kitchen, he would insist she redo it.” King was
concerned that Adam’s parents seemed to worry primarily about his
schooling, and said that it was more urgent to address “how to
accommodate Adam’s severe social disabilities in a way that would permit
him to be around peers.” King saw “significant 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.” And he concluded that Nancy was “almost becoming a
prisoner in her own house.”
Kathleen 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, “On the third morning he complained of
dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was
disjointed, he couldn’t even figure out how to open his cereal box. He
was sweating profusely ... it was actually dripping off his hands. He
said he couldn’t think.... He was practically vegetative.” Later the
same day, she wrote, “He did nothing but sit in his dark room staring at
nothing.” Adam stopped taking Lexapro and never took psychotropics
again, which worried Koenig. She wrote, “While Adam likes to believe
that he’s completely logical, in fact, he’s not at all, and I’ve called
him on it.” She said he had a biological disorder and needed medication.
“I told him he’s living in a box right now, and the box will only get
smaller over time if he doesn’t get some treatment.”
* * *
Paul 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—but cause no harm. The few dangerous ones are
impossible to identify. “Even if we knew who they were or were likely to
be, whether they’d 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’s office
for an hour a week just to pour their heart out doesn’t seem like a
particularly attractive opportunity, in general.”
“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk
about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.” Peter and Nancy
were confident enough in the Asperger’s diagnosis that they didn’t look
for other explanations for Adam’s behavior. In that sense, Asperger’s
may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. “If 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,” Peter told me. “But
let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.” Still, Peter and
Nancy sought professional support repeatedly, and none of the doctors
they saw detected troubling violence in Adam’s disposition. According to
the state’s attorney’s report, “Those mental health professionals who
saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future
behavior.” Peter said, “Here we are near New York, one of the best
locations for mental-health care, and nobody saw this.”
Peter gets annoyed when people speculate that Asperger’s was the cause
of Adam’s rampage. “Asperger’s makes people unusual, but it doesn’t make
people like this,” he said, and expressed the view that the condition
“veiled a contaminant” that was not Asperger’s: “I was thinking it could
mask schizophrenia.” Violence by autistic people is more commonly
reactive than planned—triggered, 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—from
psychosis, in about twenty-five percent of cases. Some researchers
believe that a marked increase in the intensity of an autistic person’s
preoccupations can be a warning sign, especially if those preoccupations
have a sinister aspect. Forensic records of Adam’s 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.
Both autism and psychopathy entail a lack of empathy. Psychologists,
though, distinguish between the “cognitive empathy” deficits of autism
(difficulty understanding what emotions are, trouble interpreting other
people’s nonverbal signs) and the “emotional empathy” 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.
Autism is increasingly invoked in courtrooms as an argument for
leniency, sometimes on the ground that the autistic person is confused
about cause and effect—a 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’s 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.
* * *
When I visited Peter, he produced four binders of printouts of his
emails with Nancy and Adam since 2007. By 2008, when Adam turned sixteen
and was going to school only for occasional events, Nancy’s emails
describe his escalating misery. “He had a horrible night.... He cried
in the bathroom for 45 minutes and missed his first class.” Two weeks
later, she wrote, “I 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.” Later that year: “Adam had a
rough night. He moved EVERYTHING out of his room last night. He only
kept his bed and wardrobe cabinet.”
In the period that followed the decision to homeschool Adam, Nancy
regularly asked Peter not to come when Adam was having a “bad day,” but
her correspondence shows no sense of crisis commensurate with the Yale
assessment. Peter had begun to feel distanced by the intensity of Adam’s
relationship with Nancy, although he did not feel that the intensity was
“by its nature problematic.” His approach to parenting was as docile as
Nancy’s was obsessive. She indulged Adam’s compulsions. “She would build
the world around him and cushion it,” Peter said. Adam had difficulties
with coordination 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, “He tied his own shoes?”
Adam’s 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, “Comrades, we
must rectify the faltering facial hair standards.” Peter thought it was
hilarious and got T-shirts made with the image and Adam’s 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’s is often to participate in his
fascinations.
All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another
argument at dinner?) and the years (the child must learn to eat
vegetables). Nancy’s error seems to have been that she always focused 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.
* * *
In 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 “the most
cautious driver on the face of the earth.” Peter never worried about
Adam’s breaking rules of any kind. He did feel that Adam was losing
interest in him, but the estrangement didn’t strike Peter as ominous;
he, too, had become alienated from his parents in late adolescence. “I
had to give him space,” Peter explained. “He’ll get more mature; I’ll
just keep doing what I can, staying involved.”
During 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.
Schoolwork often triggered a sense of hopelessness. “He was exhausted
and lethargic all day, and said he was unable to concentrate and his
homework isn’t done,” she wrote. “He is on the verge of tears over not
having his journal entries ready to pass in. He said he tried to
concentrate and couldn’t and has been wondering why he is ‘such a loser’
and if there is anything he can do about it.” He had been taking classes
at Western Connecticut State University—for high school credit—but he
struggled there. “He wouldn’t speak on the way home and had his hood
completely covering his face,” Nancy wrote one day. “He went straight to
his room and won’t eat. I gave him time alone to compose and have tried
to speak to him twice now, but he just keeps saying, ‘It does not
matter’ and ‘leave me’ ‘I don’t want to speak of it.’” Two months later,
Nancy recorded his despair when faced with some coursework in German:
“He finally and tearfully said that he can’t complete the German. He
can’t understand it. He has spent hours on the worksheets and can’t
comprehend them.”
Nancy wanted to take him to a tutor, but, she wrote, “Even ten minutes
before we should leave he was getting ready to go, but then had a
meltdown and began to cry and couldn’t go. He said things like it’s
pointless, and he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know.” In early
2010, when Nancy told Peter that Adam had been crying hysterically on
the bathroom floor, Peter responded with uncharacteristic vehemence:
“Adam 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.” Nancy replied, “I 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.” Later that
day, she wrote, “I have the feeling when he said he would rather be
homeless than to take any more tests, he really meant it.” Nancy said
that Adam had been pretending to go to classes and passing his time in
the library.
Adam always had aspirations beyond his abilities. His list of colleges
started with Cornell, for which he clearly didn’t 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 elite regiment. “What do you do?” Peter wondered. “You tell
him, ‘Adam, that’s unrealistic’?” When the time came, Adam didn’t 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, “Adam, we’ve got to figure out a system so I
can work with you.” Adam was angry. “I hardly ever saw him pissed, but
he was pissed,” Peter recalled. “And it was, like, ‘I’m taking the five
classes. I’m taking them.’” It was September 2010: the last time Peter
saw his son.
Earlier that year, Nancy had written, “He does not want to see you. I
have been trying to reason with him to no avail. I don’t know what to
do.” An email that Adam sent Peter to get out of another meeting sounded
innocuous—“I apologize for not wanting to go today. I have not been
feeling well for the last couple of days”—but Nancy’s updates painted a
more fraught picture. “He is despondent and crying a lot and just can’t
continue.... I have been trying to get him to see you and he refuses
and every time I’ve brought the subject up it just makes him worse,” she
wrote. Nancy surmised that Adam resented Peter’s warning about the heavy
course load.
Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in
Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last
thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus.... If I had gone there unannounced
and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be
all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d
say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the
situation.” 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 “to try
to figure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.” 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.
I wondered how Peter had felt through this period. “Sad,” he said. “I
was hurt. I never expected that I would never talk to him again. I
thought it was a matter of when.” He asked, “How much do you accommodate
the demands and how much do you not? Nancy tended to, as did I.” Peter
added, “But I think he saw that he could control her more than he could
control me.” 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, “I didn’t understand that Adam was
drifting away.”
* * *
By 2011, Nancy’s messages had grown terse. Peter attributed this to his
remarriage rather than to a change in Adam’s condition. That October, a
little more than a year before the shootings, she related that Adam “has
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.” But the state’s attorney’s report notes that people who worked on
the property couldn’t enter the house and were warned never even to ring
the doorbell.
In 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 emails. Nancy wrote, “I will talk to
him about that but I don’t want to harass him. He has had a bad summer
and actually stopped going out.” She said that his car had sat unused
for so long that its battery was dead. She played down the significance
of Adam’s failure to answer his father’s emails: “He stopped emailing me
a year ago or so, but I assumed it was because he actually started
talking to me more.” However, the state’s attorney’s report suggests
that Nancy’s account was misleading: Adam had stopped speaking to his
mother and communicated *only* through email. “It bothers me that she
was telling me he doesn’t use email at the same time she was emailing
him,” Peter told me. He thinks Nancy’s pride prevented her from asking
for help. “She wanted everyone to think everything was OK.”
As Adam’s isolation deepened, Nancy’s naïveté began to blur into denial.
She started making plans to move with Adam, possibly to Seattle,
although she didn’t mention those plans to Peter. She had also suggested
to a friend that she’d be living with Adam for a “very long time,” 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’s
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.
Peter’s 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’d discuss it with Adam after Thanksgiving. “I
was doing everything I could,” Peter said. “She was doing way more. I
just feel sad for her.” Peter is convinced that Nancy had no idea how
dangerous their son had become. “She 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.” About a week before the shootings, Nancy
reportedly told an acquaintance, “I’m worried I’m losing him.” But
losing him seemed to be a matter of his withdrawal, not of violence. The
cautiousness with which Nancy responded to her son’s demands indicates
anxiety rather than fear, and it must have made her as lonely as it did
him.
Matricide is usually committed by overprotected boys—by a son who
wishes, as one study puts it, “with 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.” Another study proposes that, in each case
examined, “the mother-child relationship became unusually intense and
conflict-laden,” while the fathers “were uniformly passive and remained
relatively uninvolved.” The state’s attorney’s report says that when
Nancy asked Adam whether he would feel sad if anything happened to her,
he replied, “No.” A Word document called “Selfish,” which was found on
Adam’s computer, gives an explanation of why females are inherently
selfish, written while one of them was accommodating him in every
possible way.
Peter does not think that Adam had any affection for him, either, by
that point. He said, “With hindsight, I know Adam would have killed me
in a heartbeat, if he’d had the chance. I don’t 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.”
* * *
On 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, “Both my kids went to that school,” 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, “Peter said, ‘It’s Peter. I think it’s Adam.’ I
didn’t recognize his voice. And he just said it again: ‘It’s Peter, it’s
Peter, it’s Adam.’ And I still didn’t understand him. And he said, ‘I
think it’s Adam, it’s Adam.’ When it hit me, I screamed and started
shaking violently.”
As 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’s ID, which had led to the confusion. Ryan
approached the police with his arms up and said, “You’re looking for me,
but I didn’t do it.” 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’s to regroup; they were
shuttled to a hotel, then to Shelley’s family’s house and other safe
houses, with a canine unit supplied by the police for security; they
were interviewed by the FBI, the state police, and various local
authorities. “We didn’t even have clothes,” Peter said. “I had to borrow
my lawyer’s pants.” Eventually, they headed to New Hampshire to arrange
Nancy’s 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. “No
one knows that,” Peter said. “And no one ever will.”
Adam 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’d 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’t self-restraint; it’s 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—meaning, more than four deaths apiece, not including the
killer—in the United States. But fewer than fifteen percent involved
random, unknown victims.
The 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 “suicides with murder as an epiphenomenon,
rather than murders that happen to end in suicide.” The opposite view is
equally possible: Henry J. Friedman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard,
has said that for these killers murderousness is “a primary rather than
a reactive state,” and that their “desire to end life early surrounded
by an aurora of apocalyptic destruction” does not signal the “true
depressive despair” 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. Émile Durkheim, the great
scholar of suicide, wrote that it can be “not an act of despair, but of
abnegation.” Adam abnegated humanity with his act.
Scientists are sequencing Adam’s 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’s 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’ll see
physiological evidence of a college education, a failed love affair,
religious faith. Will such knowledge also bring deeper understanding?
Legal 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’t know what he was doing) and morality (he didn’t know that what he
was doing was wrong). The psychiatric profession doesn’t consider mass
killers to be necessarily insane, which distresses Peter. For him, the
crime defines the illness—as he said, soon after we met, you’d have to
be crazy to do such a thing. He found the idea of Adam’s 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 “pseudocommando.”
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.
Crimes of passion are relational, whereas plotted crimes such as Adam’s
are unsocial. But the dichotomy isn’t clear-cut; most crimes lie along a
spectrum. So Sandy Hook was a culmination—neither sudden nor entirely
calculated, at least until the very end. James Knoll, a forensic
psychiatrist at SUNY, has written that Adam’s act conveyed a message: “I
carry profound hurt—I’ll go ballistic and transfer it onto you.” That’s
as much motive as we’re likely to find.
* * *
On the anniversary of the massacre, Peter and Shelley finally went
through “the stuff,” reading letters of support they previously hadn’t
felt able to face. Peter wanted the writers to know how much their words
helped him. “There was a woman whose brother shot up a church,” Peter
said. “Killed 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.” 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 CIA and forced to his acts in order to
foment support for gun-control legislation. The anniversary itself felt
insignificant. “It’s not like I ever go an hour when it doesn’t cross my
mind,” Peter said when we met that day.
Peter has offered to meet with the victims’ families, and two have taken
up his offer. “It’s gut-wrenching,” he said. “A victim’s family member
told me that they forgave Adam after we spent three hours talking. I
didn’t even know how to respond. A person that lost their son, their
only son.” The only reason Peter was talking to anyone, including me,
was to share information that might help the families or prevent another
such event. “I need to get some good from this. And there’s no place
else to find any good. If I could generate something to help them, it
doesn’t replace, it doesn’t—” He struggled to find the words. “But I
would trade places with them in a heartbeat if that could help.”
Peter told me, “I 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’t let it define
me, but I felt like changing the name is sort of pretending it didn’t
happen and that’s not right.” 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. “This defines who I
am and I can’t stand that, but you have to accept it.”
The last time I saw Peter, he had taken out a picture of himself at the
beach with his two sons. “One thing that struck me about that picture is
that it’s clear that he’s loved,” 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’s
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,
“the worst possible evilness,” and he could see upraised hands. He
realized it was Adam. “What surprised me is that I was scared as shit,”
he recounted. “I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. And then
I realized that I was experiencing it from the perspective of his
victims.”
I wondered how Peter would feel if he could see his son again. “Quite
honestly, I think that I wouldn’t recognize the person I saw,” he said.
“All I could picture is there’d be nothing there, there’d be nothing.
Almost, like, ‘Who are you, stranger?’” Peter declared that he wished
Adam had never been born, that there could be no remembering who he was
outside of who he became. “That didn’t come right away. That’s not a
natural thing, when you’re thinking about your kid. But, God, there’s no
question. There can only be one conclusion, when you finally get there.
That’s fairly recent, too, but that’s totally where I am.”
** [Back Matter]
*** About the Author
[[a-s-andrew-solomon-the-reckoning-3.jpg]]
Andrew Solomon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Far From
the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, winner of the
National Book Critics Circle Award; The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of
Depression, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the 2001 National
Book Award; and of the critically acclaimed novel A Stone Boat. He is a
lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University and Special Advisor on LGBT
affairs to the Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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*** Also by Andrew Solomon
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
A Stone Boat
The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost
*** [Copyright]
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