Report Details Adam Lanza's Life Before Sandy Hook Shootings

Adam Lanza is etched in in the nation's collective memory as the gunman in a December 2012 shooting spree in Connecticut that left 20 young children, six school staffers and his mother dead before the 20-year-old took his own life.

Connecticut's Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) released a 114-page report Friday that examined the two decades of Lanza's life that preceded the December 14 shootings. The authors, mental health and education professionals and members of the OCA, drew on medical, mental health and school records along with interviews and law enforcement documents to track Lanza's educational, developmental and mental health profile and assess his condition leading up to the shootings.

"While we describe the predisposing factors and compounding stresses in [Adam Lanza's] life, we do not conclude that they add up to an inevitable arc leading to mass murder," they write, explaining that even a thorough investigation such as theirs could not answer the ultimate question: Why would someone to commit such a brutal act?

The authors sought to "identify missed opportunities in the life of AL," as they referred to Lanza throughout the report, looking for "any warning signs, red flags, or other lessons that could be learned."

The committee dedicated the report to the 20 first-graders who went to school that day at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, but never came home.

Early trouble

From an early age, Lanza experienced significant developmental challenges, particularly with language, communication and sensory integration, the report said. He also exhibited repetitive behaviors and motor difficulties. Though his early elementary school years seemed relatively happy, he began avoiding eye contact and became increasingly fearful by the time he reached fifth grade.

In later medical and education records, the authors saw repeated references to diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Lanza's anxiety and social-emotional problems worsened as he got older. When he was in eighth grade, his mother, Nancy Lanza, withdrew him from school, and he was placed on "homebound" status for the next year. The designation goes beyond homeschooling and applies to children who are too disabled to attend school, even with extra supports in place.

When Lanza was 14, he was evaluated by the New Haven-based Yale Child Study Center, which "offered prescient observations that withdrawal from school and a strategy of accommodating AL, rather than addressing his underlying needs, would lead to a deteriorating life of dysfunction and isolation," the report's authors write.

Lanza returned to school for a short time during 10th grade, but after some initial progress, he was described as withdrawing again. He finished high school outside of the traditional classroom setting, through independent study, tutoring and classes at a local college.

Matters only got worse after he graduated in 2009. He went out less and less and eventually refused to come out of his room, covering his windows with black garbage bags and communicating with his mother via email. He stopped replying to his father's emails between 2010 and 2012.

"He has had a bad summer and actually stopped going out," Nancy Lanza wrote in an email to Peter Lanza, Adam's father, in November 2012, the month before the shootings. The couple had separated in 2002 and divorced in 2009. "He wouldn't even go to the grocery store, so it's been pretty stressful."

At the time of Lanza's death, the chief medical examiner deemed him anorexic, "to the point of malnutrition and resultant brain damage." He was 6 feet tall but weighed only 112 pounds.

Getting help

The authors write that the Lanzas had a hard time getting their son the help he needed over the years. Lanza's mother seemed to try to appease and accommodate her son rather than challenge him and push him out of his comfort zone to address his underlying needs. As the Yale Child Study Center predicted in its 2006 report, such a reaction could foster a downward spiral into a worsening state of mental health and isolation.

At the same time, parents who recognize their children are struggling are often at a loss in how to help them, the report says.

"Parents are very dependent and necessarily reliant on the recommendations and strategies offered by professionals, from their local pediatrician to specialists and service providers," they write. "Parents look to the professionals, including teachers, to know what should be done for their child."

The authors believe that only one provider throughout the years, the Yale Child Study Center, seemed to recognize the gravity of Lanza's situation and his extensive treatment needs.

The ultimate outcome was that "in the course of AL's entire life, minimal mental health evaluation and treatment (in relation to his apparent need) was ever obtained," the authors wrote.

Preoccupied with mass murder

In addition to Lanza's developmental and mental health problems, he exhibited a preoccupation with mass murder, in particular toward the end of his life.

As a fifth-grader, Lanza and a classmate turned in a story called "The Big Book of Granny" for a comic book creative-writing assignment. The authors of the report called it an "extremely disturbing" story about the murder of children, cannibalism and taxidermy.

"While many children, and especially boys, of this age contend with anger and violent impulses in their play and creative productions," they wrote, "The Big Book of Granny stands out, to mental health professionals, as a text marked by extreme thoughts of violence that should have signified a need for intervention and evaluation."

But there was no evidence that the story spurred an intervention or was discussed at length, either by the school or by the parents.

Later in life, when he was spending most of his time isolated in his room, Lanza connected online with a community of people interested in mass murder.

"The inexplicable mystery to me isn't how there are massacres," he wrote in an email to one cyber-acquaintance just three days before he opened fire on students and staff at his former school, "but rather how there aren't 100,000 of them every year."

Lanza's attack on the school was premeditated, the authors write. He had visited the school's website many times and reviewed its security procedures.

"The attack on Sandy Hook Elementary appears to have been a purposefully thought-out and planned attack—AL did not just 'snap,'" the report's authors write.

Guns

The report focuses on Lanza's mental and physical health and education rather than his involvement with guns, but the authors "recognize the significant role that assault weapons and high capacity ammunition clips play in mass murder," they wrote. "That AL had ready access to them cannot be ignored as a critical factor in this tragedy."

Lanza grew up around guns used for recreational activity. He went to the shooting range with his father, who told the authors that he had never given his son his own gun but that his mother might have. It's unclear, the authors write, whether she "took measures to curtail his access to guns" as he became increasingly despondent or "whether she considered his potential for suicide or other acts of violence."

The Newtown shootings sparked a nationwide debate about gun control. Supporters of reform were convinced the heart-wrenching deaths of such young children would finally bring about change. In April 2013, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy signed a law that banned the sale of high-capacity magazines like the ones Lanza used and required background checks for all gun purchases, among other measures, in one of the most comprehensive gun laws in the nation, according to CNN. But only some other states followed suit, and federal efforts at reform were not successful.

Parents of the Sandy Hook children and the families of staffers also killed in the shooting have been advocates of gun control, as well as for tools to help parents in the aftermath of such tragic events. Speaking last Friday, Nelba Marquez-Greene told the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission she found out her daughter Ana was dead not from a police officer but from the expression on a case worker's face when she asked about her child. The confused responses continued, as families have not found the support they need in the short and long term.

"The world had this perception that the families were 'all set,'" Marquez-Greene told The Hartford Courant. "Well, a, there's no such thing, and b, it's not true."