The Sheltered

Storm
The True Story of the Man-Made Disaster That
Struck the Village of Sandy Hook, Connecticut on
December 14, 2012

Matthew Nolan
File version: v1.2, gen 11/2/2020
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Copyright © 2020 Matthew Nolan

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Cover image: Adapted from Connecticut State Police o cial report, photographer TFC Vincent
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 The Sheltered Storm
The True Story of the Man-Made Disaster That Struck the Village
of Sandy Hook, Connecticut on December 14, 2012

CONTENTS

Preface 1
Epigraph 3
Prologue: Friday 4
Early on a Friday morning, in a pale yellow house at the top of a hill, a
young man with a gun opens the door to h mother’s bedroom, and puts
h plan into action.

Part I: Over the Horizon

Chapter 1: The Shooter 9
Stockton, California: In January 1989, a disturbed wannabe-soldier
attacks h old elementary school, using a rifle that soon becom the foc
of controversy.
Chapter 2: Nancy 18
Nancy Champion’s upbringing in rural Kingston, New Hampshire,
inspir her plans to start a family of her own with her high-school
sweetheart.
Chapter 3: Assault Ri e 23
California responds emphatically in the a ermath of the Stockton
shooting. Shockwav are felt in DC, and in the gun industry, the
NRA mobiliz . President George HW Bush looks for a compromise.

iii
Chapter 4: Human Animal 40
A deranged gunman attacks a Luby’s Cafeteria in Tex , setting a dark
new record. Meanwhile, in DC, Congress reacts to the news in mid-
session — while debating a gun bill.
Chapter 5: Earth Day 45
Nancy’s troubled second pregnancy leads to setbacks for her career. But
soon, all concerns are secondary to the health of her young son: the boy
who never wants to speak.
Chapter 6: Frontier 52
Nancy finds a friend in Marvin Lafontaine, and the Lanza boys join
h scout troop. Nancy soon grows concerned, her best efforts to
socialize her son fail to bring him out of h shell.
Chapter 7: Dawn 58
Connecticut wrestl with banning guns, against its own economic
interests. President Clinton tak office, and promptly signs the Brady
Bill and Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law. In response, the NRA’s
Wayne LaPierre shar h visions of a “final war.”
Chapter 8: Shangri-La 72
The school-shooting phenomenon suddenly returns in the mid-1990's,
an apocalyptic meme that picks up dark, new traits each time it pass
from one alienated teenage boy to the next.
Chapter 9: Grand Adventure 83
Nancy h doubts about her marriage, but when her husband lands a
dream job, it brings the opportunity of moving to Sandy Hook,
Connecticut, where her son can attend a school with a golden reputation.
Chapter 10: Snowdrop 89
A demented former boy scout leader attacks an elementary school in
Dunblane, Scotland in 1996. The people of the United Kingdom
respond, and gun culture in the UK never the same.

iv
 Part II: Tide & Season
Chapter 11: The Village (a brief history of Newtown) 117
The settlement of Newtown appears in Connecticut in 1705, and grows
throughout revolutions of faith, government, and industry, into the town
that would greet the Lanza family.
Chapter 12: Yogananda 135
The Lanza family begins their new life in Sandy Hook, and Nancy’s 6-
year-old son begins h public school experience, at Sandy Hook
Elementary School.
Chapter 13: The Ghost in the Cabin 142
The authoriti finally identify Ted Kaczynski the mysterio
“Unabomber,” and lock him away in Supermax — but not before
spreading h “manifesto” far and wide.
Chapter 14: Promised Land 147
Mayors across the US declare war on the gun industry, and in response,
the country’s “other” gun lobby joins the fight: the National Shooting
Sports Foundation (NSSF), from Newtown, Connecticut.
Chapter 15: Eagles Circle 155
Nancy sets down roots in Newtown, and reconnects with Marvin by
email. One night, a passing comment about President Clinton sets her
off.
Chapter 16: Revolution 164
In April 1999, two teenagers from Littleton, Colorado bring “Judgment
Day” to Columbine High School.
Chapter 17: Cascade 177
As Newtown reacts to the Columbine attack, the facts of the event
already start to blur with myth. Meanwhile, Nancy Lanza shar a
shocking secret about her health.

v
Chapter 18: Wave of Evil 193
A month a er Columbine, the nation’s political machinery stru l to
close the “Gun Show Loophole.” But the copycat shootings have already
begun.
Chapter 19: Radar 203
The FBI’s profilers take on a seemingly impossible task: the “profile” for
a school shooter. When the Secret Service looks into the phenomenon,
their agents sense something familiar.
Chapter 20: Distortion 212
The real secret about Nancy Lanza’s health turns out to be darker than
anything she’s told even her closest friends.
Chapter 21: Basement Tapes 215
In late 1999, the Columbine shooters' messag from beyond the grave are
revealed, and their contents shatter myths about "NBK." Meanwhile,
Nancy's son's development continu to falter at Sandy Hook
Elementary.
Chapter 22: Smart Guns 222
The “Million Mom March” mak gun rights a major foc of the 2000
election. When the vot are finally counted in the controversial contest,
the NRA and NSSF celebrate their candidate’s victory.
Chapter 23: The Ghost in the Cage 228
Inside Supermax, the Unabomber shar philosophy with Tim McVeigh.
In Newtown, Nancy’s son stru l through 4th grade. On 9/11, the
world chang , just before the Lanz fall apart.

Part III: Thin Air

Chapter 24: The Hospital (a brief history of Fair eld State Hospital) 240
From the 1930's to the 1990's, the rise and fall of the nation's state-run
mental health care system seen through the history of Fairfield State
Hospital, in Newtown.

vi
Chapter 25: Treegap 271
In the 5th grade at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Nancy’s son keeps a
reading journal, and records some of h reactions to the existentially-
themed children’s novel Tuck Everlasting.
Chapter 26: Bushmaster 277
A mysterio sniper brings terror to the nation’s capital in the fall of
2002. When they are finally brought to justice, the murder weapon
brings a whole new batch of problems for America’s gun industry.
Chapter 27: The Big Book of Granny 280
Nancy’s son produc a homemade book, which doctors later su est
shows the ten-year-old w already “deeply troubled by feelings of rage,
hate, and (at least unconscio ) murdero impuls .”
Chapter 28: Shield 290
In 2003, the NSSF unveils their grand plan to stop gun lawsuits: the
Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). But in the
wake of the DC Sniper shootings, the legislation fac a difficult path.
Chapter 29: On Time, On Budget 295
Nancy's son mov to a new school for grad 5 and 6, while Homeland
Security bulletins send Newtown scrambling to buy duct tape and plastic
sheeting, the 2nd Iraq war begins.
Chapter 30: Dusk 306
In 2004, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expir , but CT still h its
state law. In Newtown, Nancy’s son starts grade 7 at the middle school,
and fac an intimidating environment.
Chapter 31: Nightmare 311
In 2005, the worst school shooting since Columbine strik a native
community in Minnesota, and shows that lockdown drills and active-
shooter protocols won’t be enough to stop the phenomenon.
Chapter 32: Fantasy 323
Overwhelmed in the halls of Newtown’s huge public middle school,
Nancy’s son experienc “issu .” To soothe h anxieti , she mov him to
a small Catholic school. But nothing seems to work.
Chapter 33: Greater Love 334
In Tyler, Tex , a courageo “good guy with a gun” named Mark
Wilson happens to be on the scene when a mass shooter attacks. Mark
shoots back.

vii
Chapter 34: Emergency 338
Nancy sends her son back to Newtown Middle School, for the start of
the 8th grade. But h anxiety there so overwhelming, she soon finds
herself rushing him to the Emergency Room instead.
Chapter 35: Protection 350
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act far better on its 2nd
attempt, and President Bush signs the NSSF"s “shield” into law,
bringing an end to the legal war over gun liability.
Chapter 36: Shelter in Place 356
With the help of Dr. Fox, Nancy finally achiev “homebound” stat
for her anxio son, who then disappears from the outside world.
Chapter 37: Existences 366
In 2006, the Jefferson County Sheriff releas the journals le behind by
the Columbine shooters. The grim documents are received by an online
culture that h evolved dramatically since 1999.

Part IV: The Gathering Eye

Chapter 38: The Prison (a brief history of Garner Correctional
Institution) 375
The prison in Newtown experienc a violent and controversial first few
years, but prov invaluable when Connecticut overwhelmed with
mentally-ill offenders. Over time, Garner evolv into the state's largest
mental asylum.
Chapter 39: Role Playing Game 394
On the first day of the 2006-2007 school year, a 19-year-old in North
Carolina launch an attack on h old high school. But h actions
portend something beyond just another generation of Columbine
“copycats,” and more like a cult.

viii
Chapter 40: Emergence 397
Nancy's son emerg from 36 Yogananda a er nearly a year of seclusion,
for h first day of high school. H father, unsat fied with Dr. Fox’s care,
seeks a second opinion.
Chapter 41: Solstice 401
In the fall of 2006, another dark wave ris , with attacks at a college in
Montreal, a high school in Colorado, and even an Amish schoolhouse in
Pennsylvania. Newtown double-checks its security procedur , vigilant
against the threat.
Chapter 42: Prosthetic Environment 411
Nancy brings her son to the Yale Child Study Center for an evaluation,
but resistant when their recommendations include medication. At
home, the teenager finds a new website — and a new obsession.
Chapter 43: Contagion 427
In 2006, the House of Representativ tri to repeal the “Dickey
Amendment,” and fix a peculiarly American problem: that a nation so
dedicated to protecting its access to guns had also banned itself from
studying the consequenc of gun ownership.
Chapter 44: The Fear That Paralyzes 5434
Peter notic that h son’s emotional state finally seems to be improving,
a er visits with a nurse from Yale. But when the nurse convinc the
Lanza parents to medicate their child, the situation chang .
Chapter 45: Blacksburg 446
Virginia Tech becom the site of the worst mass shooting in American
history, in April 2007.
Chapter 46: Caves 453
In the days a er the Virginia Tech shooting, the gunman
posthumously unveiled just the latest Columbine disciple, while h
message broadcast nationwide. From h computer, Nancy’s son absorbs
the spectacle.
Chapter 47: Lost in the Wild 463
For the 10th grade, Nancy’s son demands to be in “mainstream” class ,
with no special treatment. Nancy and her team hatch a plan of their
own: to trick him into thinking that’s what he got.

ix
Chapter 48: The Ghost in the Machine 472
A Columbine follower strik in Finland, and leav behind a
Unabomber-like "manifesto." In Sandy Hook, Nancy’s son hosts a LAN
party, but h trouble keeping up with h mainstream class .
Chapter 49: Static 483
The mental health history of the Virginia Tech shooter brought to
light, the federal government tri to patch the hol in its background-
check system for gun buyers.
Chapter 50: Trinity 488
Another wave of attacks hits in the wake of Virginia Tech, striking at a
shopping mall in Nebraska, a church in Colorado, and a college in
Illino .
Chapter 51: Pressure Drop 495
An incident at the high school suddenly puts Mr. Novia, the only staff
member Nancy trusts, in peril of losing h job. At the same time, her
son’s condition worsens — and h obsession deepens.
Chapter 52: Law of the Land 504
The US Supreme Court finally settl the issue of gun ownership for self-
defense, in their DC vs Heller ruling. Then, with the election of Barack
Obama, gun manufacturers see a spike in sal unlike anything the
industry h ever seen.
Chapter 53: Pale Yellow House 511
A bad night at 36 Yogananda finds Nancy dwelling on the past, and
exchanging tense e-mails with her teenage son — even though he's right
upstairs.
Chapter 54: Travis 520
A woman in Stamford conflicted over what to do about her
domesticated pet chimp, who grows bi er and stronger every year. One
day in February 2009, the situation com to a violent resolution.
Chapter 55: Undertow 527
The Lanz fret their son breaks down once again, right h high
school graduation in sight. Online, a new identity emerg from 36
Yogananda, with a dark foc .

x
 Part V: Landfall
Chapter 56: The Void 538
A middle-aged man in Pennsylvania go online to document h
frustrations in trying to date young women over the last year of h life
— and h plan to get even.
Chapter 57: Black Plastic 544
From h cave at the top of the stairs, Nancy’s son monitors the
a ermath of the LA Fitness shooting, and absorbs the shooter’s online
journal. In another window, he starts making a list.
Chapter 58: Modern Sporting Ri e 551
With gun sal finally returning to normal a er the “Barack boom,” the
NSSF invests in a bold new PR campaign for the industry: a re-
branding of the AR15.
Chapter 59: Catalog 557
Over the winter of 2009, while h parents delicately try to explain to
him that he never going to be an elite soldier, the internet user at 36
Yogananda complet h secret research project.
Chapter 60: L534858 567
Nancy brings home a brand new Bushmaster AR-15 rifle for her son, for
h 18th birthday. Online, he communicat anonymously with strangers,
while carefully avoiding forging any bonds.
Chapter 61: The Patient 586
A young woman with an eating disorder, and a history of suffering
abuse, starts to worry that she developing a crush on her therapist...
but Dr. Paul Fox promis not to hurt her.
Chapter 62: Anarchy 590
The user at 36 Yogananda shar one of h most fringe beliefs, with a
select few online acquaintanc : that society’s rul for protecting children
are actually causing them harm... and that pedophilia should not be seen
wrong.

xi
Chapter 63: Of Rulers 599
When an assassination attempt turns into a mass shooting in Tucson, it
becom fuel for debate around the country. At a video arcade in
Connecticut, one particularly dedicated player becoming a local
fixture: “DDR Guy.”
Chapter 64: In the Abyss 611
A politically-motivated attack in Norway in 2011 sets a shocking new
record, and enough to draw “Smi l ” back to the Columbine forum,
where he demonstrat mastery over h field of study.
Chapter 65: Legacy 623
The phenomenon of school shooting attacks in America traced back to
its origins, showing the wav that have passed over half of a century,
and gathering clu toward solving the looming mystery: "Why?"
Chapter 66: Savage 631
Wandering the internet and obsessing over mass shootings, Nancy’s son
latch onto the case of Trav the Chimp. At the arcade, h marathon
DDR sessions lead to h making a real-life friend.
Chapter 67: Emerald Dream 645
One night in late 2011, the recluse at 36 Yogananda picks up the phone
and calls a radio show, to broadcast h theory about Trav the Chimp,
and what he believ the animal's fate reveals about human society.
Chapter 68: Fading 652
In the summer of 2012, Nancy’s son severs the few, tenuo social bonds
he h in life, and withdraws further into h cave.
Chapter 69: Aurora 666
A brain researcher in Colorado documents what he claims were h
efforts to cure h own violent impuls , before launching an attack on a
midnight movie premier in July 2012.
Chapter 70: Calm 674
Adopting a new online identity, the internet user at 36 Yogananda
navigat the mass-murderer fandom community on Tumblr, while
downstairs, h mother catch up with old friends on Facebook.
Chapter 71: Vortex 681
A powerful Superstorm Sandy mak landfall in late-October 2012, and
plung Newtown into darkness.

xii
Chapter 72: High Ground 685
When the lights turn back on at 36 Yogananda, Nancy seems to realize
that a change long overdue, and starts making plans for her and her
son to move away from Newtown.
"The End" 692
Nancy leav for a three-day retreat at a resort in New Hampshire, on
December 11, 2012. Her son stays behind at 36 Yogananda, and awaits
her return.

***
December 14, 2012 699
Sandy Hook, Connecticut: In December 2012, a disturbed wannabe-
soldier attacks h old elementary school, using a rifle that soon becom
the foc of controversy.

Part VI: Still Waters

Chapter 73: Af er 706
In the a ermath of the shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary School
searched, secured, and evacuated, the scope of the man-made tragedy
starts to sink in.
Chapter 74: Darkness 711
Police raid 36 Yogananda, and discover the environment that spawned
the Sandy Hook shooter, along with a second crime scene.
Chapter 75: Strangers 719
The shooter’s surviving family members learn of the attack on Sandy
Hook Elementary School — and who h been named the suspect.

xiii
Chapter 76: Specimen 726
Investigators dissect the Sandy Hook shooter’s life, and trace h digital
footprints, in search of a motive for the man-made disaster.
Chapter 77: Winter 737
The shockwav from Sandy Hook register throughout American society,
eliciting diverse reactions. President Obama promis bold action on gun
reform, while the NSSF and NRA set about moving that goal even
further from h reach.
Chapter 78: Homecoming 751
Family and friends gather in New Hampshire, to lay Nancy Champion
to rest.
Chapter 79: Fall 753
Another wave of mass shootings hits, Newtown tri to move on a er
the Sandy Hook attack, and battle lin are drawn for the next fight over
gun rights in America.
Chapter 80: Light 762
The village com to a decision on what will be the final fate of the pale
yellow house at 36 Yogananda Street.

***
Epilogue: New Horizon 765
From 2015 to 2019, the phenomenon of mass violence in America
continu to grow in strength, and change in form, it spreads across the
globe.
Acknowledgements 787
Notes & Sources 788

xiv
 Preface

This story is about a woman named Nancy Lanza. Mostly, it will be about the last
fourteen years of Nancy’s life: the time during which she shepherded her youngest
son through the school system of Newtown, Connecticut.

It is no secret that Nancy’s e forts end in tragedy. The Sandy Hook shooting was a
nightmare come to life, and its impact is still reverberating in American society.
And yet, part of what made the event so tragic was that if it seemed
unprecedented, that was only for lack of memory: there was another disturbed
young man who came before, who got his hands on a big gun, and brought it to
his old elementary school. It was in 1989, in Stockton, California, and much like
Sandy Hook, the Stockton shooting truly shocked the country.

There were 21 years, 2 months, and 12 days that passed between that moment in
Stockton, and the moment Nancy Lanza brought home an AR-15 for her
youngest son, in March of 2010. During that span of time, our society made
concerted e forts to prevent the violent spectacle from repeating: four presidents
passed through the Oval O ce, and each of their administrations confronted the
threat of mass violence in di ferent ways. Congress, and the courts, oversaw a
continued, gradual collapse of the national mental health care system, and the
emergence of prisons as our modern-day asylums. All the while, huge leaps in
technology were changing society in fundamental ways, and ultimately
connecting individuals, and information, that likely would never have intersected
in any other age.

All of these were factors in how the phenomenon of the mass shooting continued
to evolve and spread during this time, through American society and beyond. For
that reason, this story will also pause in a handful of places: once each for the story
of a town, a hospital, and a prison. And, early in the telling, we will spend some
time in a small village in Scotland, to see how another society responded when
faced with the same deadly phenomenon.

1
By following the events in this manner, one can see the Sandy Hook shooting for
what it truly was: a man-made disaster.

This is a true story. Some names have been changed, and a few locations of scenes
are presumed. In one instance, some witnesses that cover the same territory have
been condensed into one semi- ctionalized character. And, as is true of any non-
ction story, some artistic license has been sparingly employed throughout, in an
attempt to simplify and/or dramatize events that might otherwise fail to muster
attention. But nothing you are about to read is made up; it all really happened.

Where available evidence con icts, or where gaps exist in o cial records, I have
taken care to point this out in the narrative, and to present reasonable scenarios
for explaining these imperfections, as well as to clearly announce when I am doing
so. However, I know that I will surely not please everyone in this regard. (For
more information on sources, and the researching and writing of this book, refer
to the Notes & Sources section.)

One last thing: although this is a story primarily about mass shootings, I have
taken e forts to avoid some of the familiar conventions that have developed for
narratives of such events: there are no tallies of victims here, and unless necessary
to explain a sequence of events, no detailed depictions of innocent people being
harmed. I also do not use the names of any of the shooters — with just one
exception. And that single one, purely out of fairness to Nancy Lanza. Because
this story is an e fort, as much as possible, to see the situation through her eyes.

It all comes back to Nancy in the end.

2
“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard
him as important, and that she feels she would not
maim the universe by disposing of him, he at rst
wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates
deeply the fact that there are no bricks, and no
temples.”

-Stephen Crane
The Open Boat (1897)

3
 Prologue: Friday

There was a young man who never wanted to leave his room. In the room, with
him, were two things: a computer, and a safe full of guns.

The side panel of the computer was open. He had taken the hard drive out,
removed its tray cover, smashed the disc inside with a 5lb dumbbell, and gouged
its surface with a set of keys. The drive’s data would be impossible to access, even
for the FBI.

The safe was unlocked. He chose a gun.

With a movement of his hand, the ri e’s ejection port opened, and a single bullet
arced through the air, un red, its lead tip still attached as it tumbled to a rest on
room’s white-carpet oor. A wasted round; that was okay. Ammunition was not
going to be a problem for him. Certainty was what he really needed; the round
ejecting eliminated any doubt that the magazine was inserted properly, which in
turn meant that when he pulled the trigger, the gun would do what he needed it
to do. He had to be sure this ri e wouldn’t jam. If it did, all of his plans would be
ruined.

He lef the computer room carrying the ri e, and crept down the hall to his
mother’s bedroom.

The door was unlocked.

Nancy was asleep in her bed, the covers pulled up to her chest. Her head was
resting on a striped bath towel, which she had lef draped over her pillow af er her
shower the night before. Her reading glasses were on the nightstand, and on the
oor next to her were her black satin slippers, and her bedtime reading: a worn
copy of the self-help book Train Your Brain to Get Happy.

4
Nancy kept childhood photos of him all around her bedroom, perched on the
luxury furniture that lined the walls: on the dresser, framed in porcelain, there was
a portrait of him as toddler. She had dressed him in a red “choo-choo” train
sweater that day. Then, further down, a photo taken sometime in her son’s
elementary school years: he stands next to a canoe on a rocky shore, wearing
trunks and a life preserver, and holding an oar like a walking stick that is twice his
own height. He grins wide, and squints up into the summer sun.

Standing over his mother now, his own eyes looked back at him from these
moments, anchored in happier times. Before the fear came.

If Nancy woke up just then, she would have seen him standing there, next to the
beach photo: the same boy, now fully grown, but gaunt, dressed in black, and
pointing a ri e at her face.

He pulled the trigger. One.

The sound of the explosion echoed through the house and beyond, out into the
neighborhood’s quiet morning air. He had planned for that: the ri e in his hands
was not the most powerful gun in the safe, but it was the quietest, the most
inconspicuous. It sounded just like the shots the neighbors heard coming from
the surrounding woods every year, during hunting season.

He grasped the bolt handle and wrenched it back, ejecting a single, empty brass
cylinder onto the bedroom oor. Pushing the bolt back into position, the next
round chambered. He took aim. Two.

Later that day, Nancy’s DNA would be found in droplets on the nightstand, and
on the headboard, and on the wall, and soaked into the towel over her pillow, and
stuck to the ceiling high overhead. She felt no pain.

He grasped the bolt handle again, chambered another round, and aimed into the
open wound. Three.

If a person knew nothing about Nancy, and they were to look just at the photos
arranged around her bedroom, they would probably come away with the
impression that her son was much younger than he really was. The same was true
all over the house: the pictures showed an age progression that stopped abruptly
just af er elementary school, as if the boy in the picture frame never grew up, or
had simply disappeared.

Four.

5
He was now certain that his mother was dead, and so the rst phase of his plan
was complete. A success.

He lef the ri e on the oor, with the fourth empty cartridge still in the chamber,
next to Nancy’s black slippers and her carefully bookmarked copy of Train Your
Brain to Get Happy. He returned to his end of the upstairs hall — to the
computer room, and the unlocked safe within.

A few minutes later, he went down the stairs, carrying the rest of what he would
need. There was the sound of a car starting, and then the automatic garage door
closing af er it. He turned lef out of the driveway, onto Yogananda Street, and
then headed west. He never came back.

***
Thirty minutes later, a fuel truck was backing up the driveway. The delivery driver
was making his regular rounds, and Nancy’s house was one of the stops on his
route, so — totally oblivious to the scene upstairs — he got out and connected the
truck’s hose to the intake nozzle next to the garage, and began pumping heating
oil into the 275-gallon tank in the home’s basement. He would recall that on this
frigid morning, the garage doors at 36 Yogananda were closed, the lights in the
house were turned o f, and he hadn’t noticed any activity at all inside. Then again,
he had been making deliveries to that big yellow house with the forest-green
shutters for the last ve years, and never once had he seen anyone inside.

Most of the neighbors knew there was a middle-aged woman who lived there, up
in the yellow house. A few had faint memories of another resident: a young man,
thin and pale, who never spoke. It seemed like no one had seen him in years.

The driver completed his delivery, and headed back the way he came, pausing to
leave an invoice in the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway. He signed it, and
scribbled the date: 12-14-12

***
For the next two hours, Nancy’s body lay undisturbed — still tucked under the
covers, as if sleeping in her bed. All was still in the house, and all was quiet.
Periodically, the silence was broken by the sound of police sirens passing by in the
distance, in the town at the bottom of the hill. Once, a helicopter passed low
overhead, traveling west.

At 11:47am, the phone in the downstairs study rang. The machine picked up, and
Nancy’s friendly voice answered: “Hi, you’ve reached the Lanza residence. Please
leave a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.” *BEEP*

6
Through the answering machine’s speaker, a man’s voice lled the empty house.
He identi ed himself as a Lieutenant Brown with the Newtown Police
Department, and advised that if there were anyone inside, they should pick up the
phone.

The house went silent again. Then the SWAT team broke through the front door
with a battering ram.

7
 Part I

Over the Horizon

8
 1. The Shooter

January 17, 1989

Cleveland Elementary School — Stockton, California
The young man parked his car behind the elementary school, next to the
playground. As he got out, the sound of 300+ children running and playing rose
over the chain-link fence, classes having just been let out for af ernoon recess.
Teachers were watching over them from the chalked sidelines, alert for any
skinned knees or hurt feelings. The sort of hazards they were prepared to deal
with. None of them noticed the thin, white man approaching from the south.

He was dressed as if he was in the army, but he hadn’t been a soldier a day in his
life. And the ri e in his hands looked like something taken from a battle eld, but
it wasn’t. Not exactly.

The thin man emerged from behind a set of portable classrooms, stepped to the
tree-line facing the playground, aimed the ri e, and opened re. The targets he
saw in his crosshairs were the same age he had been, when he himself had attended
the same school, seventeen years before. He squeezed the trigger as fast as he
could.

The wannabe-soldier’s ri e had an abnormally generous ammunition magazine

attached to it: a cylindrical “drum mag” that held 75 rounds. He kept up his
assault until that ran dry, and then he ducked back behind the portables to reload,
switching to a more common 30-round “box” mag. Over his shoulder, his parked
station wagon exploded into ames, the detonation of a pipe bomb that he had
lef burning on the passenger seat, certain that he would never drive the car again.
Then he resumed his assault on the playground, emptying the second clip.

He went to reload again — but this time, during the lull of gun re, he heard it:
the sound of police sirens, approaching fast. It was time for the next phase of his
plan.

9
The shooter dropped the ri e, drew a 9mm pistol from the waistband of his jeans,
and took his own life. The Cleveland Elementary School shooting was over.

***
The police said the assault lasted only two minutes. Maybe less. But during that
time, the thin man had red 106 rounds, including the one that he used on
himself. And then there was the black cloth pouch they found tied to his belt:
inside, there were three more 30-round magazines for his ri e, each fully loaded.
The attack would likely have continued for some time longer, if not for their
arrival. It could have been worse.

The rst o cers on the scene found the gunman sprawled out on the pavement,
twitching, and kicked his weapon away from his reach. Doing so, they noticed
that the ri e skidding across the pavement had a wooden stock, and a distinctive
pro le; soon, it would become an object of debate all over the nation. The gun
looked just like an AK-47 — and was widely reported to be one — but a real
Kalashnikov was a military weapon, capable of fully-automatic re: bullets would
rapidly spew from its barrel for as long as the shooter held the trigger down, and
there was ammo in the magazine. Weapons like that had been tightly regulated in
the United States since the prohibition era — and then in 1986, all but outlawed
entirely. They were quite di cult to obtain, even for someone already willing to
break the law.

In truth, the gun that rained terror down on the playground in Stockton was just
a Norinco 56S: a cheap knocko f of the AK, manufactured in China. And it was
semi-automatic: for each round that the shooter red at the schoolyard, he had to
pull and the release the trigger.

The Norinco was perfectly legal for civilians to own. And when the Trading Post
Store in Sandy, Oregon put it on display with a price tag of $349.95, they were in
full compliance with the law. They sold it to a thin white man, who walked in and
bought it over-the-counter, four months before he would turn it on the
playground; they couldn’t have known what he was planning, just as they
couldn’t have known about his criminal record, or that he was on probation. All
of his crimes — of which there were many, from drug possession, to prostitution,
to vandalism — happened in California. They would never have shown up on
Oregon’s radar.

The shooter had drif ed south af er picking up his Norinco, back home to
California, and even there his probation status did not prevent him from
obtaining a 9mm pistol: he bought it from Hunter Loan & Jewelry in Stockton, a
store just across the county line from where he had earned his probation. “As the
California criminal justice system now works,” the state Attorney General’s o ce

10
would write in their report on the Stockton shooting, “there was no way that any
person outside of El Dorado County could have known that the shooter was
prohibited from acquiring or possessing rearms.”

Still, for the pistol, the shooter knew that California had a 15-day waiting period.
And there was no going around that. So he waited.

During the next two weeks, the shooter was spotted near the Cleveland
Elementary School playground at least once: sitting in his car, parked in the same
spot where he would soon torch it. Watching the playground. Employees at the
local middle school and high school would swear they saw him lurking around
their campuses, too.

On January 3rd, with ten days to go on his waiting period, witnesses had seen the
shooter drinking beers at a tavern in Stockton. The bartender there would tell
police that the thin man came in wearing a camo-green army jacket, and (af er a
few drinks) had gotten to bragging about an AK-47 ri e he owned. One with a
huge magazine.

The bartender had tried to burst the shooter’s bubble, explaining that the AK
would be no good for hunting deer, but the shooter brushed that o f. He had no
intention of going deer hunting. And he could spray bullets with that thing fast.
Paying his bill, he told the bartender mysteriously, “You’re going to read about me
in the papers.”

As the strange, thin man spun from his bar stool and headed for the exit, the
bartender caught a clearer view of his army jacket: there was black lettering written
all over it, words that seemed to have crossed over from a di ferent version of
reality. One in which the man wearing the jacket was actually some sort of elite
commando, pitted against forces that were vague and ever-shif ing: “Libya,”
“PLO,” “Death to the Great Satan” (misspelled “satin”) and “Earthman.” Down
the front of his ak vest he wrote a single word, repeating:

Evil

Evil

Evil

Evil

11
The waiting period ended on a Friday. The shooter immediately came to pick up
his brand new semi-auto 9mm, a Taurus. He had purchased it to re one shot,
and one shot only. Then he drove it back to his hotel room, and carved
“VICTORY” into the new pistol’s wooden grip. He would spend that weekend
cleaning, oiling, and loading his weapons. He launched his attack on the
playground the very next school day.

Af er it was all over, the police would trace the shooter’s path, from the burning
station wagon back to his rented room. Inside, he had lef behind even more
ammunition, and more guns. Then, they noticed the army men; in every section
of the shooter’s hotel room, on just about every surface, including perches atop
the shower rod and inside the freezer, he had arranged his collection of little,
green, plastic army men toys.

***
The California authorities started piecing together a history of the shooter’s life;
what he had done was inexplicable to them, and forever unjusti able… but if it
had happened once, it could happen again. So if there had been any speci c event
in the shooter’s life that could have predicted the oncoming tragedy, or any set of
circumstances that had set him on this path, they had a responsibility to nd what
it was, and bring it to light.

The shooter was a 25-year-old man. He had been a transient for most of his adult
life, never holding down a job longer than a month or two. When homeless, he
resorted to petty crime. Sometimes, prostitution.

His father had been a diagnosed schizophrenic, and frequently beat the shooter’s
mother. His parents separated by the time he was in his early teens, and af er that
he ping-ponged back and forth between their custodies for a few years. That came
to an end one night, when his father had apparently been walking barefoot on the
side of the road, disoriented, and a passing car struck and killed him.

The shooter’s mother controlled her ex-husbands death bene ts, a fact that her
son would resent with extreme intensity. He grew more and more disobedient,
and soon the woman was informing the local authorities that she could not
control her son at all anymore. She kicked him out on the street.

At age twenty, the shooter quali ed for state bene ts of his own, in the form of
disability; the Social Security Administration determined that he had a
“substance-induced personality disorder,” and that he would have “di culty
relating to employers and employees, di culty in following even simple, routine
tasks, and di culty in handling the stresses of any ordinary job.”

12
SSA bene ts meant that he had to check in periodically with the state; the records
from his visits over the years document a troubled mind, collapsing in slow-
motion. In 1984, he told California that he “never t in with everyone else,” and
that he “does not feel comfortable around people.” Three years later, he reported
he “can’t handle people at all,” and “doesn’t have any friends.” He con rmed,
voluntarily, that he was “getting worse as time goes by.”

One night in 1986 — two years and three months before his assault on the
schoolyard — the shooter sought treatment at Sacramento Mental Health Center.
He told the sta f there, “I’m not thinking the way I should be thinking,” and he
made reference to a high-pro le incident that had unfolded in Oklahoma that
year, where a postal employee had shot a number of co-workers before taking his
own life. The Stockton patient said that he “strongly identi ed” with this
gunman, and revealed that he had been hearing voices telling him “to do things.”
He admitted to experiencing both homicidal and suicidal thoughts in the past.

Documenting the shooter’s visit, the Sacramento sta f wrote that he was
“struggling to resist actions on thoughts which are destructive in nature,” and
they diagnosed him as having “an antisocial personality.” Then they turned him
away; beds at the mental hospital were quite scarce, and his condition didn’t
warrant in-patient care.

That visit had been just one of eight instances in the shooter’s life when his mental
state was assessed. Each time was a new doctor, with a new diagnosis: from “Drug
Dependency Disorder, borderline intellectual functioning and a Mixed
Personality Disorder” in 1984, to “emotionally and sexually immature and
su fering from depression” in 1988. He had been prescribed tranquilizers
(Thorazine) and antidepressants (Amitriptyline), neither of which he took for
very long — his toxicology report would show that at the time of the shooting,
the only active substances in his bloodstream were small amounts of ca feine and
nicotine.

***
The shooter had crossed paths with law enforcement just as of en as with the
mental health system, but only one of his arrests had ever involved a gun. And it
was the same one that was supposed to prevent him from getting his hands on any
more guns: he had been arrested for ring a pistol in a prohibited area — El
Dorado National Forest, near Lake Tahoe — in what seems to have amounted to
a drunken session of target practice. When the sheri ’s deputy arrived on scene,
they treated it as a misdemeanor rather than a felony — “There was no indication
that his actions were directly endangering anybody” — but the shooter was visibly
intoxicated. And when the deputy handcu fed the thin man and tried to place
him in the back seat of his cruiser, his prisoner suddenly stopped cooperating. He

13
started kicking and biting, declared his “duty as a citizen to resist.” And during the
ride to the jail, the shooter thrashed and ranted that he would “kill anyone who
pushed him around.” He even kicked out the side window of the moving car.

Beyond the prisoner’s obvious intoxication, there was concern for his mental state:
as they arrived at the jail, he was whimpering that he was “hearing his mother’s
voice yelling his name.” Once they got him in his cell, he cut his wrists with his
ngernails, wrote on the walls with his blood, and was found trying to hang
himself with his t-shirt.

They took the shooter to Placerville Psychiatric Facility on a 72-hour detention

hold, where his intake form recorded that he was “suicidal and homicidal,” and
had “thoughts of killing himself and others with a gun/bomb.” Another
counselor interviewed him, and wrote that they “would consider him a risk, albeit
ambiguous, to harm himself,” then adding, “He does however appear to be a
greater risk to others. That is, he would probably hurt someone else before he
hurt himself.”

But their patient had not done any real harm, and so the charges were not enough
to keep him in jail for long; sheri ’s deputies in California brought in “drunk and
disorderlies” all the time, and it wasn’t rare for the arrestee to make threats, or to
struggle ineptly like the thin man had. The jails were not big enough to hold all of
them. He was deemed competent to stand trial, accepted a reduced sentence, paid
a $84.88 ne for the broken window, and was released af er serving 45 days in jail.

None of these events — not the misdemeanor arrests, the mental diagnoses, the
history of drug abuse, nor the explicit desire to harm himself or others — would
have ever turned up on a background check when he tried to buy a gun. But there
are signs that he may have believed otherwise; ve days before he was arrested in
the national park, he had placed a call to the community mental health center in
Stockton. The representative who answered the phone wrote that the caller was
“concerned about the content of his previous records,” especially those stored at
the center in Sacramento — the place where he had spoken of the connection he
felt with the shooter from the post o ce. Not long af er his phone call, the thin
man came to the center in Sacramento for a scheduled appointment, when he
suddenly snatched away the folder that contained his patient records, and ran out
to the parking lot, tearing the pages to shreds as the sta f followed and begged him
to stop.

Af er he ed, they tried to piece the fragments back together; one scrap
documented an interview in which he said he “preferred living under bridges,
eating o f of garbage dumpsters, and prostituting myself to living with the slave
driver mother dearest,” whom he described as a “bitch, liar, thief, asshole, witch,

14
cruel, torturer,” and on, and on. None of it made any real sense. And as far as
anyone could tell from the damaged le, he had never spoken a word about what
he was planning.

***
Af er the shooting, as the police wrapped up their search of the gunman’s hotel
room, they were disappointed to nd that he had not lef a note. There was
nothing to explain what he had done, beyond the non-sequitur mantras he
scribbled on his jacket, and carved into his guns. The closest anyone could come
up with for a motive was derived from a comment he made to another hotel
patron on the morning of the shooting, as they were both turning in their room
keys. The other man was complaining of the early check-out time, when the
shooter, referring to the motel owner’s Indian heritage, replied, “The damn
Hindus and boat people own everything.” Those were probably his last words;
the witness noticed that the thin man was loading several cloth-wrapped bundles
into his station wagon as they talked. Then, the thin man got in his car, and drove
o f, toward Cleveland Elementary School.

It didn’t seem like much. So the California Department of Justice appointed a

doctor (specializing in forensic psychiatry) to put together a “best guess” as to why
the shooter had done what he did, and what factors contributed to the event.

The doctor observed that the city of Stockton had one of the highest proportions
of immigrants from Southeast Asia of any city in California, and that (due to the
school district’s need to concentrate bilingual resources) the Cleveland School that
the shooter had attended as a child in the early 1970’s had since shif ed
demographically to an enrollment that was over 70 percent Southeast Asian;
witnesses said that as an adult, the shooter had frequently complained that all
non-white races — and especially Southeast Asians — had an unfair advantage in
the unskilled labor market, and that they “took” an unfair proportion of
government assistance. In both instances, they were drawing from the same
streams of support that he counted on to survive. Furthermore, one former friend
of the shooter recalled what he had told him over the years: “The rich kids in
school used to tease him; the Asian kids had good clothes and he didn’t.”

The state’s doctor theorized that these facts, combined with the shooter’s racist
comment about “boat people” just before his attack, indicated that he chose his
old school because it was, from his perspective, more territory that he had since
lost to immigrants. “It is likely that some nal straw acted as a triggering
mechanism for an event which had already been planned,” the psychiatrist wrote,
adding, “Perhaps, and this is only speculation, seeing a group of happy children at
play in the schoolyard of a school he had attended during a di cult period in his
life may have provided such a trigger.”

15
Turning to the capacity for violence, the doctor wrote that the shooter had been
“a man isolated by mental and social disabilities from his own society,” and being
both warped by this isolation and resentful of it, he coped by becoming
“preoccupied with fantasies that promoted a powerful, vengeful, and self
important image, and then played these out against an identi able target.”
However, the doctor stressed, these were ultimately just theories, due to the “less
than optimal” documentation of the shooter’s life, and because he was not alive to
be interviewed.

The Attorney General of California had a simpler explanation: the shooter

targeted children because he was weak, and they were the most vulnerable targets
he could attack. He was an evil person that had done an evil thing. That was all.

The local cops had even fewer answers. “Obviously, he had a military hangup,”
the Captain of the Stockton Police Department said at a press conference. Spread
out on the table in front of him were the shooter’s make-believe army men,
alongside his very real guns; the pieces of the puzzle, unsolved, and unveiled for all
to see. Pausing for ashbulbs, the captain held alof a scrap of the shooter’s
camou age jacket, upon which “FREEDOM” was scrawled in black. He tried to
temper expectations. “We’ll never know everything because he didn’t leave us a
message or a note. In a way, he beat us, because we’ll never know why.”

As the initial shock faded, California turned to prevention — but the shooter had
lef them with precious little to work with. The forensic psychiatrist lamented in
his report that budget cuts had gutted the state’s preventative mental health care
system twenty years before, and he also expressed frustration at the restrictions
blocking involuntary commitment, noting that while the infamous “bedlam”
abuses of the national mental health care system seen in the 1940s and 50s were
something no one wanted to repeat, “The pendulum may have swung too far in a
direction that has lef society beref of su cient means to protect both itself and
patients who are out of control.”

Finally, the doctor suggested that the Kalashnikov-inspired murder weapon, itself,
could have played a role in the shooter’s decision. “Such weapons a ford their users
a sense of power and, in fact, enhance the dangerousness of such persons,” he
wrote. “Providing him with access to such weapons was totally inappropriate.”

The Stockton police would agree with both conclusions, arguing, “It appears
certain that once [the shooter] had decided to die and to take as many others as
possible with him, only major restrictions on the repower he could bring to bear
on his intended victims would have made a di ference in the outcome.” The
o cers endorsed gun control measures that were then already pending in the
California legislature — but they were careful to point out that the Norinco had

16
been purchased out-of-state, beyond their grasp. Soberly, they concluded,
“National bans should be enacted on assault weapons and high-capacity
magazines.”

***
The magnitude of the Stockton tragedy caused a shockwave — its ripples
expanding outward from the playground of Cleveland Elementary School, and
soon to be felt all over the country. Af er all, what had occurred was a purely man-
made disaster — the sort of thing that just wasn’t supposed to happen — and so it
was inescapable that somehow, somewhere, some fundamental piece of
civilization had fallen loose. The grotesque spectacle gave rise to questions about
the society in which it had occurred: how could anyone reach a point in their lives
where they would choose to do something like this? Why didn’t anyone stop
them? And most urgent of all: how on earth could they have let someone so
dangero get their hands on that gun?

17
 2. Nancy

Spring 1978
Sanborn Regional High School — Kingston, New Hampshire
She stood outside, looking up into the bright New Hampshire sky, and she
smiled.

The whole graduating class was out there with her in the parking lot that
af ernoon: several dozen teenagers, dressed in their bell bottoms and denim
jackets, on a patch of asphalt boxed in by rows of parked Volkswagen beetles.
They were all trying to stand perfectly still, in their places. High up on the roof of
the school, there was a man with a camera, capturing a bird’s-eye-view for their
yearbook: the graduates, pausing just as they crossed their last milestone before
o cial adulthood, all carefully arranged in the shape of a giant “78.”

When the yearbooks came out, Nancy found she also appeared in a few close-ups,
printed in the “Class Favorites” section: a snapshot of her taking a big bite from a
slice of cheese pizza, and another where she’s ipping through an old paperback.
In her senior portrait, she grins warmly, her face distinguished by high smile lines,
and dark-brown eyes, her hair parted in the middle and coming down in long,
honey-blonde waves. She carries an aura of serenity, and con dence.

Nancy’s classmates knew her as “Beanie,” and when each student was asked for a
quote for the yearbook — in the form of a tongue-in-cheek prediction of what
they were “leaving” Sanborn High for — Beanie’s entry read: “Nancy Champion
leaves to join the Hobbits in Rivendell.”

She liked fantasy, but her real plans were practical, and they wouldn’t take her far
from home; she had already met the man she was going to marry, and one day,
they were going to start a family, right there in Kingston.

***

18
Nancy Jean Champion had spent her whole life in that town. She was born on
September 6th, 1960, to Donald Champion, a pilot for TWA, and Dorothy, a
nurse at DJ Bakie Elementary School. When Nancy was a little girl, she attended
that same school herself, just a mile up from the Champion family farmhouse on
Depot Road.

The homestead had been in the family for decades. But the farmhouse on Depot
Road went back much further, to the colonial days in the 1740s. Older than
independence. It had even been recognized as a historical site by the town, to be
preserved as “a ne example of a center-chimney vernacular Federal style
farmhouse.” Nancy was raised under its gabled roof along with her older brother,
Donald Jr., and sister Carol. A few years af er Nancy was born, their parents
brought them home a new baby brother, James.

The Champion upbringing was typical of a rural New England town in the 1960’s:
they were taught to always address adults as Mr. and Mrs., and they attended
services every Sunday at the town’s First Congregational Church. Donald taught
the children how to safely use rearms, and — like practically everyone in
Kingston — Nancy grew up shooting at varmints that strayed onto the family
land. Of en, she joined her father and siblings on hunting trips. “She was
comfortable with raising livestock and then butchering them,” an old friend of
Nancy’s explains. “That’s what they ate. It wasn’t for sport, it wasn’t fun; it was
their food.”

As a little girl, Nancy loved to tend to the animals on the farm, and she was
known in the family for giving the best nicknames to the dozens of sheep,
chickens, cows and barn cats that lived with the Champions on their six acres. The
kittens, in particular, she was protective of: once, Carol went to their mom to
report that Nancy was about to “taste-test” the kittens’ food. Dorothy, a savvy
mom and a school nurse, assured Nancy’s sister that she’d be ne.

Nancy joined the town’s 4-H youth club as soon as she was old enough, and never
missed the annual circus and agricultural fair: it was the only event that could
bring a live elephant to their little town. The Champion kids liked to sneak extra
hay to feed the captive animal when its handlers weren’t looking — but Nancy
took the rebellion a step further, at least in fantasy: “She would plot these
extravagant plans,” her sister remembers. Year af er year, Nancy would relate to
her siblings her scheme to break the domesticated elephant from of the circus’s
chains, and to let the gentle beast roam the New Hampshire countryside, wild and
free.

***

19
Peter Lanza was older than Nancy by two years. He came from a few towns over,
just across the state border with Massachusetts, and he had already graduated
from Haverhill High School with the Class of ‘76. Peter had thin features, wore
large spectacles, and carried a reputation as a shy young man who was blessed
academically, especially in math and the sciences. This was enough to earn him the
nickname “Mousey” around the halls, but he nonetheless t in at Haverhill High;
one of his classmates remembers, “He was just one of us, a regular kid.”

Nancy saw more in Peter. She saw potential. They dated for another two years
af er her graduation, and then on June 6th, 1981, the high school sweethearts were
married. Nancy sewed her own wedding dress, and the reception was held at the
old Champion home on Depot Road, where the newlywed Lanza couple were
delivered by horse-drawn carriage. A scene straight from a postcard.

The Lanzas got their rst apartment together in Peter’s hometown of Haverhill.
He was accepted into the University of Massachusetts Lowell as an
undergraduate, majoring in accounting, while Nancy attended the University of
New Hampshire for a time — but the pragmatic couple knew that they couldn’t
a ford both, and it soon came time to make a choice.

The Lanzas ultimately decided to place their long-term bets on Peter’s career,
while Nancy paid the bills in the meantime. She dropped out of college without
completing a degree, never to return; of the few regrets she would carry with her
throughout her life, this would be one of Nancy’s biggest.

***
Nancy started her own business in 1982, in Exeter; town records show her
signature on leases for commercial washing machines, billed to “Front Street
Laundry.” Family would remember her as a hard worker during these years, one
who also took shif s as a hostess at a ne restaurant back in Kingston to make ends
meet.

***
Sometime in the mid-1980s, Nancy sold the laundromat, and got an o ce job
with John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, in Boston. She had an edge in the
hiring process: her father-in-law, Peter S. Lanza, was already a legendary salesman
and investment broker with the company, having won many prestigious
achievement awards over his several decades in the o ce. His word carried weight.

Starting her new job, Nancy had a 50-mile commute to-and-from Boston’s
nancial district, where the company’s 60-story glass-and-steel headquarters
loomed, the tallest skyscraper in New England. She would soon nd that she

20
actually enjoyed the long, solitary drives back and forth from Kingston. It gave her
time to herself.

A vivacious and t blonde in her 20’s, Nancy attracted no shortage of attention

from men during her trips to the big city. Sometimes, they couldn’t take a hint.
She told her friends about a period when she had to be escorted to her car by
security at the end of every work day, af er a New England Telephone executive
(the company rented o ce space in the same building) began “stalking” her. She
had only exchanged small talk with the middle-aged man while sharing an elevator
a few times, and was taken aback at the level of obsession that grew from those
few, innocent social pleasantries. “What was I wearing?” she asked herself years
later, when writing an email. “VERY conservative business suit…I worked in a
nancial department of a mutual fund company. As far as I am concerned, some
men are just egocentric idiot pigs, and those kind need no encouragement.”

Law enforcement o cials in Kingston recall Nancy telling them of an even more
serious incident: one that unfolded in the shadow of Hancock tower, on the
Boston Common. Details are hazy, but apparently Nancy had been “assaulted,” in
a manner described only as “a daytime attack in front of onlookers.” The
Kingston Police Department were made aware of it when Nancy came to tell them
that she was afraid that the attacker would come for her where she lived.
Apparently, no charges arose from the incident, and it is unclear if she ever
identi ed her assailant.

By this time, Nancy’s little brother, Jimmy, had grown up and joined the United
States Army. He taught his big sister some self-defense moves, and though Nancy
never had occasion to use them, from then on, she remained con dent that she
could actually take a man’s life if she needed to; Jim Champion had joined an elite
special forces unit while in the Army, the Green Berets. Their exploits were the
stu f of battle eld legend, having acted with deadly precision in con icts from
Vietnam to Panama. “I don’t know if there is a name for the kind of training the
Green Berets get,” Nancy would explain, “they are simply trained to kill.”

***
In June of 1986, Nancy’s father Donald passed away. His widow, Dorothy, stayed
on at the farm, now its sole owner.

Then, one day in 1987, Nancy found out she was going to be a mother. And she
knew that there was still only one place where she would want to start a family:
the old homestead, on Depot Road.

Nancy’s mother sectioned o f the westernmost 2.5 acres of the Depot Road lot,
dividing the heirloom territory in two. Dorothy granted that portion to the

21
Lanzas, and the soon-to-be parents quickly began construction on what would be
their family home: a 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath Cape Cod-style house, with a steeply-
slanted roof, and an expansive front deck that wrapped around to face the now-
reduced Champion homestead to the east, and the rolling hills of New Hampshire
wilderness to the north. The house would be nished early in 1988, in time for the
arrival, that April, of the Lanza family’s rst-born son.

22
 3. Assault Ri e

January 20, 1989

Los Angeles International Airport
The crowd on the tarmac had been waiting for some time. Their excitement
spiked when they nally saw the nose of the plane dip down through the clouds,
on approach for landing. More than 700 Californians were gathered there that
day, ready to welcome their hero back home af er an eight-year quest. Some
brought signs: one read “Happy Trails Again.” Another: “The King and ueen
Return.” As their cheering peaked, the plane taxied closer, and came to a stop.
This was the moment they had been waiting for.

The door to the jet swung open, and Ronald Reagan appeared, waving to his
supporters and ashing his enduring Hollywood smile. The crowd roared as he
descended the staircase, his wife Nancy at his side, over the brass tones of the
Salvation Army’s “Tournament of Roses” Band performing “California, Here I
Come.”

Reagan was used to thinking of the aircraf behind him as Air Force One, but this
had been his rst time aboard it when that designation would no longer apply;
earlier that morning, he had passed the reigns of power to his successor, George
HW Bush. Ronald Reagan had been a movie star, the governor of California, and
the President of the United States — but now, he would be just a citizen.

Stepping to a waiting microphone, he thanked his fellow Californians, and told

them that his eight years away had lef him “in a perpetual state of homesickness.”
Acknowledging that a great many people were wondering what his next plans
were, he joked that he might have a new movie deal in the works — a sequel to
Bedtime for Bonzo, the 1951 lm in which he had played a psychology professor
trying to teach morals to a chimpanzee; “Only this time, they wanted me to play
Bonzo.”

23
A few weeks later, the University of Southern California hosted Reagan’s 78th
birthday celebration, and it was at this black-tie a fair where he gave his rst public
comments on the tragedy that had unfolded in Stockton, just three days before he
lef the Oval O ce. His immediate focus was on the murder weapon: “I do not
believe in taking away the right of the citizen to own guns for sport — hunting
and so forth — or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine
gun, is not a sporting weapon.”

The former president’s remarks were met with applause — but in using the term
“machine gun,” Reagan seemed to have drif ed from the facts of the Stockton
case, since the Norinco ri e that the thin man had red at the Cleveland school’s
playground was not, technically, a machine gun. This was a very common point of
confusion (and may have been the result of the many journalists who got the same
detail wrong in their early reports), but it lef open the question of what, exactly,
the former president’s stance was on ownership of civilian, semi-automatic
versions of military ri es. Ultimately, it would be a problem for the next president
to deal with.

February 16, 1989

The White House — Oval O ce
President Bush was wrapping up a Q&A session with reporters. Most of their
inquiries had focused on how the new administration would respond to the
ongoing Soviet withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan, and he was just thanking
the press for coming, when a persistent reporter snuck in one nal question:
What w the White House w going to do about Stockton?

Bush’s position on the matter was as confused as his predecessor’s:

The President: You already had laws that prohibit the import of fully
automated AK-47’s. That law on the books. So, are we talking about
law enforcement? Are we talking about—

Reporter: We’re talking about semiautomatic AK-47’s, sir. We’re talking

about semiautomatic guns.

The President: What do you mean by semi?

Reporter: I mean no cocking, pull the tri er, the gun fir each time I
pull the tri er.

24
 The President: Look, if you’re su esting that every pistol that can do
that or every rifle should be banned, I would strongly oppose that. I
would strongly go a er the criminals who use these guns. I’m not about
to su est that a semi-automated hunting rifle be banned. Absolutely
not. […] I’m not about to propose a ban on service .45’s or something like
that.

Reporter: On semiautomatics — right?

The President: No, I’m not about to do that. And I think the answer
the criminal. Do more with the criminal. Look, the Stat have a lot of
laws on these things. Let them enforce them. It’s hard, very hard, to do.
But that’s my position, and I’m not going to change it.

January 1989
Traders Sporting Goods — San Leandro, California
Return customers knew the place by its tacky faux-stonework exterior, and its
convenient location, just south of Oakland. But most citizens of the Bay Area
recognized “Traders” from the ads in their daily newspaper — the ones
shamelessly hawking cut-rate AK-47 knocko fs, and deals like “1,000 rounds of
ammunition for $120.” It was the most notorious gun store on the west coast, and
with good reason: they sold thousands and thousands of guns every year. So
many, that whenever there was a shot heard on the streets of Oakland, the police
knew there was a very good chance that the gun that red it came from Traders.

The bell over the door jingled. A customer walked in with a few hundred dollars,
and minutes later, he walked back out with a brand new Uzi carbine. Traders
collected another healthy pro t.

The sales clerk turned and marked the now-empty shelf space behind the counter:
SOLD OUT. He stopped again at the slot for semi-automatic AK-47s. Only a few
lef . The price tag read $399. He marked it up to $895. “The guns are moving very,
very good because of the current publicity,” said the store’s proprietor, Tony
Cucchiara, in an interview with the Los Angel Tim . “People are buying
anything that’s ugly, anything that looks like a military weapon.”

It was all because of Stockton; just the year before, California had failed to pass an
assault weapons ban. It hadn't even come close. But everyone could tell that this
time, things were going to be di ferent. Before Stockton, Traders sold maybe a
half-dozen AK-47s a week; now that the panic-buyers were mobilized, those sales
had increased ve-fold.

25
 ***
Despite all the cash he was bringing in, Tony sometimes missed the old days.
When he rst opened Traders Sporting Goods, in 1958, the only real gun laws he
had to worry about were passed back in the 1930’s, and they pertained to the sale
of fully-automatic machine guns — not a problem for Traders, which at that time
sold mostly shotguns and hunting ri es.

American society seemed to change, sometime in the mid-1960’s. Violent crime

rates, steady for years, began to rise, and handgun sales increased alongside them.
So did the size of the Oakland Police Department.

Soon, black residents of the city were getting fed up. Housing laws e fectively
forced them to live in ghettos, where they bore the brunt of the crime surge. And
while the police did increase patrols through their neighborhoods, the force they
employed rarely seemed to align with the law, or even justice. As one activist put
it, “You just had to be black, and moving, to be shot by the police.”

In response to these conditions, in late 1966, two black men in North Oakland
formed the rst chapter of the Black Panther Party — or, as the group rst called
themselves, the Black Panthers for Self Defense. Because although the o cial
Panthers platform was a broad ten-point campaign for black liberation, their most
urgent purpose upon forming was to provide the oppressed black residents in
Oakland with armed self-defense against police brutality.

The party’s founders had carefully studied how the “right to bear arms” was
interpreted under California’s laws, and found that, “You could carry a loaded gun
out on the street so long as it was registered, not concealed, and not pointing in a
threatening manner.” Another of their conclusions of law was nearly as
signi cant: that all Californians had the right to observe the police in the course of
their duties in public, provided they maintain a “reasonable distance” from the
o cers.

Combining these two freedoms, the Panthers had their solution: armed patrols of
their own. “Policing the police.”

Beginning in 1967, a black citizen of Oakland could nd themselves in the familiar

situation of being stopped by white police o cers, when suddenly, things would
take an unfamiliar turn: a car full of armed Black Panthers, having just heard
about the encounter on their police scanners, would arrive on the scene. The men
would stand as little as ten feet away, sometimes shouting out legal advice as they
kept watch over the o cers — and each of them would have a gun out. Not
pointed at anyone, just ready, in case the police stepped out of line.

26
The Panthers bucked the system, and the system responded. The California
assembly introduced a bill that would make “any person who carries a loaded
rearm on his person or in a vehicle,” while they are in “any public place or on any
public street,” guilty of a crime. Open-carry would thus be banned statewide, for
every Californian, but the real target of the legislation was obvious; the press even
called it the “Panther Bill.”

To this, the Black Panthers had a response of their own: on May 2, 1967, thirty of
them loaded into cars, and drove to Sacramento. The open-carry ban was up for
debate that day, and upon their arrival at the State Assembly building, the
Panthers announced to reporters, “The time has come for black people to arm
themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Then the rows of armed black
men, in black leather jackets and black berets, marched in and took up posts along
the halls of the legislative building, to the shock of onlookers. Six of the Panthers
decided to go even further, and advanced into the Assembly chamber itself while
it was in session — looming over the machinations of the state, just like they had
at the tra c stops down in Oakland. “The membership became very frightened
and started scrambling, going for cover,” one assemblyman would remember.

The presiding o cer ordered the Capitol Police to remove the Panthers. Af er a
tense stand-o f, the activists peacefully complied. But before they headed back
down to Oakland, they stopped on the Capitol steps to read a statement for the
press:

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American
people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note
of the racist California Legislature which considering legislation
aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very
same time that racist police agenci throughout the country are
intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.

By chance, Governor Reagan happened to be standing right there on the capitol

lawn at that moment, visiting with students who were there on a eld trip. He
was aghast at the sight of the Panthers and their guns, and later — af er police
whisked him back to the Governor’s mansion — said he saw “no reason why on
the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

True to his word, when the California legislature returned to order, and passed the
ban on open-carry, Reagan didn’t hesitate to sign it into law. Suddenly, the
signature tactic of the Black Panthers was an illegal act.

But guns sales, at least at Traders, ten miles outside of Oakland, remained steady;
revolutionaries were never the backbone of the American gun industry, af er all.

27
Instead, for guys like Tony, the stando f in the Assembly was scary more in
retrospect; that day marked the beginning of a new era of American gun
legislation, and it was the laws that followed the open-carry ban that would be the
real burden for anyone who made their living selling guns.

The controversy over the Black Panthers had barely faded before the “Long, Hot
Summer” of 1967 hit, bringing with it more than 150 race riots, all over the
country. And when law enforcement (or even the National Guard) arrived to
restore order to the burning cities, they were of en greeted with sniper re. The
pressure for gun control built nationwide. An assassin’s bullet struck down
Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, in 1968. Another wave of riots followed.
Before the year was out, another assassin struck, and presidential nominee Senator
Robert Kennedy was dead in Los Angeles.

The very next day, Congress took action to contain the chaos, and passed the Gun
Control Act of 1968, which imposed stricter record-keeping standards on gun
dealers, and prohibited selling guns to felons. The Act also banned all interstate
rearms transfers, except between dealers who had valid Federal Firearms Licenses
(FFL).

Then nally, in 1972, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was o cially
created, tasked with enforcing all of the new rules on guns.

***
It didn’t take long for the ATF to become Tony’s worst enemy.

They started with “auditing” his les; Tony would send in everything he had, and
a few weeks later, the ATF would send him “irregularities statements,” saying
there were hundreds of guns shipped to his store that his records couldn’t account
for — and many documented sales that they determined were made to “ineligible
purchasers,” including obvious “straw sales” (customers purchasing a gun for
someone who, for whatever legal reason, could not make the purchase for
themselves). Tony insisted the violations were minor, but the feds just kept
nding more of them. The back-and-forth went on and on, until nally, in 1974,
when Tony went to renew his gun-dealing license, the ATF rejected his
application, citing his “gross disregard of, or indi ference to, legal requirements.”

They were putting Traders out of business.

Tony fought back. He sued the ATF for ve million dollars, claiming that the
bureau was violating his civil rights, and engaging in a conspiracy “to vex, annoy
and harass [him] in his sporting goods business.” He put up a vigorous defense,
and the ATF eventually caved, agreeing to renew Tony’s license — provided he

28
sign an agreement stating that, from then-on, Traders would “fully comply with
all record-keeping requirements imposed by law and regulation.”

Traders was in the clear for a time, and some normalcy returned to Tony’s life af er
that. But society continued to change around him; on July 18, 1984, California
experienced a terrifying new phenomenon, when a man in San Ysidro walked into
a McDonald’s restaurant, in broad daylight, carrying an arsenal — a long-barreled
Uzi, a 12-gauge shotgun, and a 9mm pistol — and started shooting. The human
beings in the restaurant were just random people, nobody the gunman had ever
even met before. The oldest was 74 years. The youngest was an infant. The
gunman didn’t care. He kept on shooting for over an hour, until nally a police
sniper caught the gunman in his crosshairs, and ended his life.

The McDonald’s attack was a shock to the system for many Californians, but
politically, it passed with little consequence.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House by then, and in 1986, he sign the Firearms
Owners Protection Act into law, which signi cantly weakened the ATF’s legal
authority. The act also made it harder for the bureau to prove that someone like
Tony had broken the rules. It gave him more breathing room.

So three years later, as far as Tony was concerned, Stockton was a mixed blessing;
his pro ts were soaring for the moment — but if the panic buyers were right, and
the gun laws that were now up for consideration ever actually passed, there would
be yet another set of rules for him to tiptoe around, and inevitably, trip over: the
California legislature was talking about banning some entire categories of guns, or
adding a 15-day waiting period, or making customers report their purchases to a
gun registry. “I don’t know why they should have to register them,” Tony said of
his customers, and their rearms. “They bought them legally. They’re law abiding
citizens. The criminals won’t register them.”

Once, someone asked Tony who was to blame when a criminal got their hands on
a gun that came from Traders. He responded, “It’s the mother and father, or
people on welfare that aren’t keeping their guns locked.”

February 13, 1989

California State Capitol Building
The Attorney General entered the Assembly chamber carrying an AK-47. He
stepped to the podium, and gestured with the weapon, showing it to the crowd —
all 120 members of both of California’s houses, in a rare “Assembly of the Whole”
— and tried to make each of them feel just a fraction of what the teachers and
schoolchildren in Stockton had felt.

29
The weapon was unloaded, of course. The Panther laws were still on the books.
“You are lucky that I am the attorney general and not a nut,” he said to the rows
of lawmakers before him. “Because, if I had the ammunition, I could shoot every
member of the Assembly by the time I nish this sentence — about 20 seconds.”

It was a rather stunning about-face for the AG’s o ce; California had already
convened a Task Force on Assault Weapons, months prior to Stockton, to try and
come up with a list of military-style guns to ban, in case they were going to give
the failed gun-ban another try. But the Attorney General had looked at the
numbers, and saw that cheap handguns — “Saturday night specials” — were the
real scourge of the streets, along with similarly-priced shotguns, and knew that
neither type of rearm would have their supply constrained at all by banning
“assault weapons.” As recently as a month before Stockton, he had made it clear
to the task force that the ban they sought was going nowhere.

But, like Tony at Traders, the Attorney General recognized a sea-change coming.
The outrage could be felt on the streets, and in the newspaper’s editorial sections.
“A R A C S ” read one headline, while the
Sacramento Bee ran a political cartoon depicting a politician scratching his chin,
pondering a scroll with the gun bill printed on it, while the faces of the child
victims of Stockton were projected in the air over him, each counted as a “good
reason to outlaw assault weapons.”

Now, the AG ordered the Task Force on Assault Weapons back to work. Law
enforcement representatives and legislative sta fers met again in Los Angeles, and
returned to the task of nalizing the language on their assault-guns bill — but
immediately, they found themselves faced with a familiar problem. It was a riddle,
almost: if an “assault ri e” had always referred to a fully-automatic ri e — like
Reagan and Bush had interpreted the situation — then what did a term like
“semi-automatic assault ri e” even mean? What exactly was it that they were
trying to stop?

To get around this problem, the task force took a “name ban” approach: rather
than rede ne what an “assault ri e” was, they would simply make a list of all the
gun models they wanted to make illegal. They started with the obvious “military-
style” ri es: semi-automatic versions of guns used in major foreign armies, such as
the Soviet AK-47, or Israel’s Uzi carbine. But even this short list proved far more
complicated than they had anticipated: guns like the Norinco that the Stockton
shooter carried were variations on an existing design, made in di ferent countries
and with di ferent model names — and of en, slightly di ferent features.
Furthermore, even if they somehow managed to name all of the variants of the
guns they didn't like, there were plenty of other gun models on the market that
were genuinely di ferent from those on the list, but that still red the same bullets,

30
just as fast. And since they weren't on the list, these guns would all still be legal if
the name-ban made it into law.

The state's task force started to recognize that they weren’t going to be able to
solve this riddle by themselves.

***
When the big Gun Control Act of 1968 rst became law, it assigned the Secretary
of the Treasury with the task of approving imports of rearms, mandating that
the o ce only allow guns into the country that were of a “type” that is “generally
recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.”

As was explained in Congress at the time, the language was meant to “curb the
ow of surplus military weapons and other rearms being brought into the
United States which are not particularly suitable for target shooting or hunting.”
The wording intentionally lef a great deal of room for Treasury to interpret just
what “type” of gun was supposed to be let through, and when the ATF split o f
into its own agency in 1972, it took up much the same charge. The ATF had been
making the call between “good guns” and “bad guns” ever since; when they got a
query from California in the spring of 1989, asking for guidance on completing
their list, the bureau didn’t hesitate to lend a hand. Besides: if California passed
the right law, the state just might do the ATF a favor, and put Tony in San
Leandro out of business for good.

California Senate Judiciary Committee — Sacramento

The state Senate announced there would be a series of public hearings on the
proposed assault weapons ban later that spring. By the time the rst hearing came
to order, opposing voices had grown louder: one citizen came to testify to his
belief about the Stockton shooter: “He has a smile on his face right now… from
the grave, he has the ability to rob us all of our Second Amendment rights.”

This was lockstep with the National Ri e Association’s talking points; in fact, the
NRA had invited the man there to say it.

As one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in American politics, the

NRA was the one group everyone expected would ght the California Assault
Weapons Ban. They were stalwart defenders of the 2nd Amendment — the only
exception had been their support for the ban on open-carrying, directed at the
Black Panthers twenty years before (a law they in fact helped write). And the
NRA had only grown more entrenched in their positions since then; the gun
lobby had, just a few years before, demonstrated their power by playing an
instrumental role in getting the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 passed.

31
Their proudest legislative victory to date. Now, they were preparing to ght back
against the wave of post-Stockton reforms — even if they had to do it alone.

At rst, the NRA tried to shif the public focus away from guns, and more to the
shooter; particularly, California’s failure to stop him. NRA-funded ads started
appearing on television, displaying each of the Stockton shooter’s many mugshots,
fading in succession over a lengthy, scrolling criminal record. “Seven times, he
faced serious criminal charges, and the courts dropped or plea-bargained away
federal charges,” a narrator intoned. “Honest Americans didn’t let this maniac
roam free. The criminal justice system did.”

When polls showed this approach to be ine fective, the lobbyists instead seized on
the ambiguity of the ban’s language — and especially its recently-attached
provision to add more guns to the prohibited list on a regular basis going forward
— in their mailings to association members, writing unequivocally that the bill’s
supporters “want to create an unelected, uncontrolled, and unimpeachable
commission [with] the power to ban all semi-auto hunting rearms.”

The riddle of the semi-auto assault ri e was never going to be solved, in other
words, and so the new law could be exploited to restrict far more guns than the
voters intended — or even to disarm Californians completely. Stoking such fears
was a common NRA strategy, because most times, it worked. But this wasn’t like
most times.

Task Force on Assault Weapons — Los Angeles

There was a new face in the room at the state task force’s next meeting: a senior
o cial from the ATF. And the man appeared concerned by what he saw: sta fers
from each of the task force’s various invitees were feverishly adding guns to the
draf bill’s “banned” list — and taking names o f just as freely. The Oakland Police
Department, in particular, was aggressively changing the list to suit their needs,
trying to tailor the law (one that would apply to the entire state) to speci cally
target the inventory at Traders Sporting Goods. “As it became clear that the NRA
was in retreat,” the ATF o cial wrote back to headquarters, “we experienced what
I would describe as a feeding frenzy.”

Meanwhile, the task force was asking him to help draf a second list — of “good”
guns, which they believed “probably had too large constituency to ever be worth
the risk of including [in the ban,] i.e., Ruger Mini 14, M1 Carbine, M1 Garand,
etc.” All three examples were semi-automatic military ri es (or in the Ruger’s case,
a “mini” version of the U.S. military’s M-14 ri e).

32
Everyone was dancing around the riddle. As the session dragged on, the ATF
o cial couldn’t help but notice that, “Most if not all of the principal players in
craf ing the legislation had absolutely no knowledge of rearms.”

Late in the proceedings, the task force turned to him again, and asked what he
thought of their progress. He didn’t hold back: he said their ban had serious
problems. There were simply way too many versions of the “bad” guns out there
for them to name every single one, and even if they could, there was practically no
di ference between the guns they wanted to ban and the ones they were declaring
o f-limits. With a “name ban” approach, they were putting themselves in a
position to identify every single “semi-automatic assault ri e” in existence, and
going forward, to continue naming each new one that came out, inde nitely. And
yet, they still couldn’t even de ne that mysterious term.

By the time the California gun ban made it to the Senate oor, it was not a pretty
sight. The state’s response to Stockton ultimately amounted to a list of some sixty
banned guns, and their corresponding “types.” And some of the guns were so
random, barely any Californian had even heard of them, let alone wanted to
purchase one. “As no speci cally de ned problem drove our e forts,” the ATF
o cial wrote, “such an odd collection should not be surprising. How the average
cop on the beat or Joe ‘Six Pack’ who owns one of the weapons will ever gure it
all out escapes me.”

***
The California Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989 passed with a single vote to
spare, and the Golden State o cially became the rst in the union to ban assault
ri es. “January 17th was a day that nobody counted on,” an NRA representative
lamented to the Los Angel Tim . “You have the media barraging the American
public on a daily basis that this is a solution to the Stockton tragedy,” another rep
told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. At the same time, many of the bill’s supporters
expressed hope that its passage would set a precedent, stirring change on a broader
scale. “As it was on tax reform and insurance regulation, California will be
watched as a trend-setting state,” read a Tim editorial. “What we do here will
help chart the course of life — and death — for Americans far beyond these
violent times.”

March 14, 1989

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — Washington, D.C.
Nobody knew why the Director of the Treasury Department had called the
morning press conference, but as he stepped to the ATF podium with a long,
black ri e in his hands, they could have guessed: the gun was a Galil, recently

33
imported from a factory in Israel, and he brought it along to serve as a perfect
example of the kind of gun that importers, e fectively immediately, would be
suspended from bringing into the United States, “because of the dramatic increase
in the number of these weapons being imported, and police reports of their use in
violent crimes.”

The “import ban,” as it came to be known, was just the start of the federal
government’s response to Stockton. But they wanted to get it right. Learning
from California’s frustrations, the ATF were determined to avoid a purely “name
ban,” and so they explained that each of the 43 guns on their list had “military”
features. The purpose of each of these features stood out as having nothing to do
with hunting or sport: telescoping stocks could be collapsed to make a long gun
easier to conceal; a detachable magazine enabled much faster reloading, and — if
one obtained a high-capacity magazine — longer ring intervals between reloads; a
pistol grip helped the shooter keep their weapon under control during rapid re;
flash suppressors helped to “conceal the shooter’s position, especially at night,”
(hunting is generally illegal at night) and also suppressed the “muzzle climb”
caused by recoil during rapid re; and a barrel shroud protected the shooter’s non-
trigger hand while steadying the hot gun barrel — again, a need produced only by
rapid, sustained re.

***
The ATF announced the import ban as “temporary” at rst — to last ninety days,
giving them time to attempt their own solution to the “semi-auto assault ri e”
riddle. But when their working group met to discuss assault weapons that spring
of 1989, the rst thing they did was acknowledge the fractured etymology of the
term: “True assault ri es are selective re weapons that will re in a fully
automatic mode. […] Since we are only concerned with semiautomatic ri es, it is
somewhat of a misnomer to refer to these weapons as ‘assault ri es.’” They cited a
weapons manual from 1967 that stated as much; then they turned to the task still
before them.

Gun lobbyists frequently said that the term “assault ri e” was meaningless when
applied to semi-autos — just an invention by the anti-gun forces, so that they
could ban more weapons. However, this was only partly true; while the “assault”
category had at one time correlated to “select re,” and while the anti-gun lobbies
did indeed want to ban more semi-automatic ri es, they were not the ones who
had blurred the distinction between the two. That had been accomplished by the
gun industry itself — trying to sell more guns, to more people.

As far back as 1982, advertisers of semi-auto versions of military ri es were using

the term “assault ri e” to cultivate a new strain of consumer. Removing full-auto

34
 re in adapting their weapons of war for civilian use, the manufacturers had
removed the illegal feature — the very trait that supposedly quali ed the weapon
as an assault ri e — but they continued to market the legal-version guns using the
words “assault ri e,” thus blurring a technical term into a marketing buzzword.

The contradiction was plainly visible in various gun-industry publications

throughout the 1980s: the mass-market magazine Guns & Ammo published a
book in 1982, entitled Assault Rifl , which it promoted as having “Complete Data
On The Best Semi-Automatics.” Further down on the newsstand, more base
advertisements summoned a vague specter of deadliness, hyper-masculine and
pseudo-militarized: “In a survival situation, you want the most uncompromising
weapon that money can buy. The HK-91 Semi-Automatic Assault Ri e.” The
words were superimposed above a photo of a grease-painted and camou aged
man, wading across a dark river with a sleek, black ri e in his hands. Selling a
commando identity, the messages appeared like commercial interpretations of the
same visions experienced more vividly by the Stockton shooter in his hotel room,
as he carved “FREEDOM” into the buttstock of his neutered AK-47.

The “semi-auto assault ri e” had been nothing more than gun-industry hype all
along. In this sense, it actually wasn’t any type of gun at all, so much as a re ection
of a type of gun shopper: one who was not a hunter, nor a sportsman, and from
whom the existing catalog of self-defense weapons had, for whatever reason, not
yet compelled a purchase. The very words “assault ri e” were what appealed to
them, and so the de nition — the answer to the riddle — was “whatever made the
gun look like it t the lifestyle that the customer was really trying to buy.” As a
result, anyone trying to “ban” this porous category of weapons would usually nd
themselves wandering in the dark.

And there was another, more simple limitation that the ATF working group had
to confront: even if they somehow managed to name every “bad” imported gun,
the next shooter could simply buy a gun made in the USA, one that was every bit
as dangerous. “This is just a bonus to domestic companies because obviously they
can raise their prices now,” a congressman from California complained. “They
won’t be faced with cheaper imports, and their demand should go up.”

The White House press secretary pushed back: “Unfortunately, it is not

something that we can do anything about. To do anything about domestically
manufactured weapons would require a change in the [federal] law.” In other
words, if the legislature wanted a law enforced, they needed to pass it rst.

35
March 15, 1989
Colt Industries — West Hartford, Connecticut
Some domestic rearms manufacturers, sensing the rumblings in the distance,
began taking proactive measures. The very next day af er the import ban was put
in place, Colt Industries announced that it would be voluntarily halting the
manufacture of its AR-15 ri e for civilian markets. The gun-maker explained that
it was taking this step “to comply with the spirit” of the import ban, even though,
as a domestic manufacturer, Colt was not subject to those rules. This was their
acknowledgment that their agship product was simply a semi-auto version of the
U.S. military’s M-16 — and thus, by the ATF’s logic, was an assault ri e. This
conclusion had already been foreshadowed on a smaller scale when California
speci cally listed Colt’s AR-15 on its name-ban list; now, the writing was on the
wall.

The federal government was elated with Colt’s announcement. Bush’s drug czar
called it “an act of civic responsibility,” and in a session of the ATF working
group, many speakers expressed the same; as Baltimore’s Chief of Police put it,
“Given today’s ‘make a buck’ mentality, their decision was wonderfully
refreshing.”

March 28, 1989

Sturm, uger & Company, Inc. — Southport, Connecticut
Just sixty miles away, at another Connecticut company’s headquarters in “Gun
Valley,” Bill Ruger was planning his own response to the import ban. Sturm,
Ruger & Co didn’t make any military-issue weapons, and so they had no semi-
auto versions of them to worry about, as Colt did. But the list of “military
features” the ATF was circulating had him worried; if those standards were to ever
apply for domestic manufacturers, Ruger’s popular Mini-14 ri e would be in peril.

The danger crystallized in Bill Ruger’s mind when he got a letter, sent by a U.S.
senator from Ohio, that referred to the popular gun as a “Mini-14 assault
weapon.” The senator then publicly challenged Bill Ruger — the company’s co-
founder, president, and chairman — to live up to the example that Colt had just
set, “while the Bush Administration and Congress work on a more comprehensive
solution.”

Bill decided to send his response to each member of the U.S. House of
Representatives Subcommittee on Trade, knowing they would be conducting
hearings on the import ban in the coming weeks. He turned to his senior legal
counsel, attorney Steve Sanetti, to write it.

36
Under the gun maker’s phoenix-logo-emblazoned corporate masthead, Sanetti
laid out Ruger’s counter-argument: that if rearms regulations were to ever be
e fective, lawmakers should not be targeting guns at all — instead, they should be
focusing their attention on high-capacity magazines. “The concern today as it
relates to illegal misuse of rearms should be viewed as one of firepower,” he
emphasized, “rather than trying to de ne the type of rearm from which the
bullets emanate.” Further, he warned, “To do otherwise is to risk confusion and
ensnaring many legitimate rearms in an attempt to separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ in
a most arcane area.” The letter’s conclusion read:

By a simple, complete and unequivocal ban on large capacity magazin ,

all the difficulty in defining “assault rifl ” and “semi-automatic rifl ”
eliminated. The large capacity magazine itself, separate or attached to
the firearm, becom the prohibited item. A single amendment to
Federal firearms laws could prohibit their possession or sale and would
effectively implement these objectiv .

Meanwhile, Sanetti told reporters that the company would “absolutely not” be
following Colt’s example. “We’re proud of these weapons. We have no plans to
pull them from the market.”

Some gures within the industry interpreted the Sanetti letter more cynically —
observing that Ruger did not make any high-capacity magazines for their guns,
and so would have little to lose if their recommendations were adopted into law.
In response to the critics, Sanetti insisted that the letters were actually sent because
many in the industry “felt that a substitute had to be o fered which respected the
right of all law abiding citizens to own all rearms of their choice,” but that also
“responded to the public outcry concerning the highly visible shootings involving
dozens of shots being red from so-called ‘assault weapons.’”

April 10, 1989

Rayburn House O ce Building — Washington, D.C.
The subcommittee chairman called the meeting to order. He began by explaining
how the import ban had all started with one gun store: Traders, in San Leandro.
People like Tony were “obviously not the kind of small businessman you want to
keep going within the community,” the chairman acknowledged, “but he was
operating within the law.” So the law had to change.

Another congressman, representing Oakland’s district, argued, “Banning

importation is important, but it does not address the problem of domestic
manufacture of assault weapons.” He called for a national ban on the same guns

37
that California had named, as well as any other ri es “designed to handle clips
with more than ten rounds.”

The limitations of California’s name-ban approach had already become apparent;

as the law was being implemented, the NRA, still stinging from their defeat,
pointed out that the Norinco 56S — the very gun that the Stockton shooter had
used, and which had symbolically been the target of the entire banning e fort —
was still legal under the new law. California’s task force practically sco fed in
response, explaining that the Norinco was “clearly” covered under the list’s entry
for “Avtomat Kalashnikovs (AK) series.” A lawyer for the state legislature settled
the dispute — and sided with the NRA. (California hurried to amend their list,
and speci cally named the Norinco 56S in the 1991 update.)

The U.S. House, eager to avoid such embarrassments, chose a combination of

name-ban and features-ban for their bill.

Another congressman from California spoke next, and he had clearly read Bill
Ruger’s letter; he argued that banning guns based on the size of the magazine they
came packaged with would never work, because, “The [af ermarket] magazine is
identical in its insertion point. It is simply an extension.” Furthermore, a ten-
round clip might be too much to a ford an attacker anyway, as a simple roll of
duct tape could be used to bind two magazines together, for even faster reloading:
“If you tape two magazines together and you allow 10, that’s 20. That begins to be
a fairly high number.” He even observed that the higher ammo capacity made for
a sturdier attachment, as a ten-round mag created “a decent handle,” whereas with
half that length, “it is a little more di cult in terms of taping them together.”

One law enforcement representative at the hearing, a sheri f from Littleton,

Colorado, also urged a federal ban on weapons with military features. He cited the
logic of a 1939 Supreme Court decision, which had ruled that sawed-o f shotguns
were not protected by the Second Amendment, because they did not have “some
reasonable relationship to the preservation or e ciency of a well regulated
militia.”

May 15, 1989

United States Capitol Building — Washington, D.C.
The rain came down in sheets, onto an audience of law enforcement o cers and
members of congress, gathered on the capitol’s western steps under a canopy of
black umbrellas, for a ceremony in observation of Police O cers’ Memorial Day.
President Bush chose the occasion to introduce his rst crime bill, one which
would contain the sum of the federal government’s response to the Stockton
shooting.

38
He acknowledged that coming up with a clear de nition of “assault weapon” was
proving di cult, and in searching for common ground, echoed the sentiments of
Bill Ruger:

One thing that we do know about these assault weapons that they are
invariably equipped with unjustifiably large magazin . The notorio
AK-47, for example, com with a magazine that pumps off 30 explosive
bullets without reloading. And that why [we] stand here in front of
the Capitol and ask its support for legislation prohibiting the
importation, manufacture, sale, or transfer of these insidio gun
magazin of more than 15 rounds.

As a lifelong NRA member, Bush knew he was about to navigate some rocky
political waters. He foresaw that his crime bill would be interpreted as an attack
on the 2nd Amendment, so he cited words that preceded the passage of the Bill of
Rights, and urged the country, “Our sworn duty to ‘insure domestic Tranquility’
is as old as the Republic, placed in the Constitution’s preamble even before the
common defense and the general welfare.” He hoped that would be enough.

On that same rainy day, the president announced that the import ban on assault
weapons would indeed be made permanent; in all, 43 weapons would stay on the
list, now o cially identi ed as “semi-automatic assault ri es,” and never to be
allowed legally into the country again. The Norinco 56S topped the list.

***
The year 1989 had started with a shockwave, emanating from a scarred playground
in Stockton. But then, as summer gave way to fall, the waves began to slow. Several
states — who until then had been considering gun bans — quietly dropped the
issue. America’s domestic focus shif ed to an alarming federal budget de cit, while
across the world, the Berlin Wall fell, and the next summer, Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait. The ripples from Stockton nally fell quiet.

The gun-related provisions of the 1990 crime bill did not make it far inside the
House chamber. Unable to reach a consensus, and with time running out for the
broader piece of legislation, Congress stripped out all of the provisions that had
anything signi cant to do with rearms, and moved on.

The president had failed. The act that would have limited the capacity of all gun
ammunition magazines to 15 rounds — the sum of his response to the Stockton
attack — did not become law.

39
 4. Human Animal

October 16, 1991

Luby’s Cafeteria — Killeen, Texas
Patrons at Luby’s Cafeteria were just sitting down for lunch on a Wednesday
af ernoon, to plates heaped high with fried chicken and mashed potatoes, when
they heard the roar of a truck engine approaching outside. Looking up from their
trays, they saw it come into view through the restaurant’s big oor-to-ceiling
windows: a bright-blue Ford Ranger pickup, speeding across the restaurant’s front
parking lot.

Suddenly, the driver made a hard turn, straight toward them, and hit the gas. In
an instant, the sparkling blue pickup truck came crashing through the glass.

A wave of splintered wood and broken dishes crested into Luby’s dining area, and
then scattered. The resulting silence was lled only with the pleasant melodies of
the restaurant’s muzak station, and a few hesitant voices — did the driver have a
heart attack? W the g pedal stuck? — as the diners crowded cautiously around
the truck that was somehow, despite all reason, now parked fully inside the
restaurant, its shock absorbers lurching back and forth to a halt. Of those
customers who peered through the truck’s windshield, the ones who would
survive the day all remember the same thing: the driver’s eyes were wide, wide
open.

One patron stepped from the crowd, and as he approached the driver’s door,
suddenly, two gunshots rang out; he stopped, and fell backward. The truck’s door
opened, and a white man in jeans and a annel shirt, his eyeballs bright and
bulging, hopped from the truck’s cab, with a gun in each hand. He announced to
the crowd, “This is for the women of Belton!” Then he opened re.

The crowd scattered, in a mad rush for the rear of the restaurant as gunshots
thundered behind them. The rest of the diners hid under tables, or ipped theirs
over for cover; for the next ve minutes, the gunman traveled in a circuit around

40
the dining area, attacking customers where they hid. There was no path to escape;
his truck and his position blocked access to the only exits. Confusion clouded the
scenario again: was this a robbery? A terrorist attack? What the hell w going on?

Pausing in between bursts of gun re, the shooter ranted to his captive audience,
forceful, though not quite with anger in his voice — “Wait ‘til those fucking
women in Belton see this! I wonder if they’ll think it was worth it!” — except that
nothing the shooter said made any sense. And he just kept on like that, pacing
around the dining area, shooting, and demanding of his victims, “Was it worth it?
Was it worth it?”

One woman, hiding behind an upturned table as the gunman passed by, thought
to herself, “It’s a McDonald’s...” — remembering the news stories that came from
California back in ‘84. She was even more right that she could have known.

Some of the captives did make a run for the side exit, when the shooter’s attention
was diverted. Not all of them made it. Then, as the shooter came by on his second
loop around the dining hall, a man in his seventies, Al Gratia, who had been
eating lunch with his family that af ernoon, suddenly stood from cover and
charged at the gunman, unarmed. The shooter, a physically healthy 35-year-old
man, saw Al coming, and shot him.

The police arrived soon af er that, about ve minutes from when the glass rst
shattered, but as they approached the jagged hole in the window that the shooter’s
truck had lef behind, they struggled to make out exactly who inside the restaurant
was the one doing the shooting. Then, in a single moment, they saw the silhouette
of a man turn, raise a gun to Al Gratia’s wife as she sat cradling her husband, and
pull the trigger. Then, they knew.

The police immediately opened re on the shooter’s position, and a seven-minute

gun battle ensued. Outnumbered, the shooter retreated to an alcove where the
entrances to the restrooms were. He started shooting “blind” around the corner,
at the cops, unconcerned that he might run out of ammunition before they did.

During a pause in the gunplay, an attempt was made to end it peacefully: “Police!
Drop your weapon and come out with your hands up!”

“Fuck you!” the shooter barked from around the corner.

“Fuck us? Fuck you!”

Another long exchange of gun re. Shards of porcelain and clouds of drywall dust
lled the air. Then, another lull as everyone reloaded, the cheerful muzak audible

41
again. The shooter remained de ant, but his voice was wavering now, whining
like an injured animal. “I’m going to kill more fucking people!”

“You’re not going to shoot anybody else!”

Af er a few more maneuvers and advances, the shooter had sustained four gunshot
wounds over his body, and was crawling for a dropped clip. As the police closed in
on his position, the shooter rolled onto his back, put the barrel of his pistol to his
right temple, and pulled the trigger. His eyes stayed wide open.

***
Clearing the building, police searched the gunman’s body, and found that he been
armed with a Glock 17 and a Ruger P-89 — both 9mm semi-automatic pistols. He
came to Luby’s with extra magazines for each gun, separated into his shirt pockets:
the Glock magazines held 17 rounds, and the Ruger held 15, allowing him to re a
total of 32 times before having to reload.

He had purchased both guns legally, from a gun dealer in Nevada, six months
before. The Glock was $420, and the Ruger $345. He had lled out the required
paperwork for each: a registration sheet with the Las Vegas PD (who asked only
for contact info and a description of the weapon) and then a Firearms Transaction
Record for the ATF. This form asked the buyer if they had ever been convicted of
a crime punishable by up to one year in prison (he answered no, which was true),
and if he was a drug user, including marijuana, and he wrote no (which was a lie;
he had lost his job with the merchant marines when they found him with weed in
his bunk, and he had been arrested with a joint before), as well as if he was a
fugitive, an illegal alien, or if he had ever been dishonorably discharged from the
armed forces (no, no, and no; all answered truthfully). Then, he lef with his guns
— there was no waiting period in Nevada, and there was no way to verify his
answers anyway.

Part of what made the Luby’s shooter’s mid-massacre tirades so bizarre was that he
kept damning “the women of Belton” — a place three towns away from Killeen.
Once the police identi ed him, though, they discovered that he had a Belton
address; he lived alone, in a majestic brick home that belonged to his mother.
Neighbors called the local landmark “the mansion,” and inside, it was just as neat
and well-maintained as the shooter’s sparkling blue truck. But a closer look yielded
signs of disorder, clues to the doomed trajectory of the life that had lived there: in
a bedroom closet, there was a collection of VHS tapes, crime documentaries that
the shooter had recorded o f television. They featured famous serial killers, the
attempted assassination of President Reagan, and most prominently of all, the
1984 mass shooting at the McDonald’s in San Ysidro; according to his

42
acquaintances, the shooter was obsessed with the incident, and had memorized
every detail.

In the bedroom, still in the stereo, there was a well-worn copy of the Steely Dan
album The Royal Scam, cued to the shooter’s favorite song, its lyrics depicting an
outlaw gunman going out in a blaze of glory: “Don’t Take Me Alive.”

On a wall calendar, the shooter had circled his birthday, and inside the circle he
wrote, “I am not an animal nor am I a number. I am a human being with feelings
and emotions.” The next day — the day he would attack Luby’s — he had drawn
another circle, and inside it wrote, “Life has become a stalemate. There is simply
no hope and not a prayer.”

Hall of the House of Representatives — Washington D.C.

All while the shooting was unfolding at Luby’s, Congress was debating another
crime bill in Washington. This time, it included a provision that would outlaw 13
speci c “assault ri es,” identi ed with much the same criteria that the ATF had
used for their import ban two years before. The bill also would have determined
any ammunition magazine that holds more than 15 rounds — for any gun,
including pistols — to be considered “large capacity,” a category that would then
be outlawed, if the bill passed.

News of the Luby’s shooting broke in mid-session, and a grim statistic became
clear: the bloodshed in Killeen was unprecedented. It was worse than in Stockton,
worse than any of the shootings that had occurred in the two years since, and even
worse than the horror that had unfolded at the McDonald’s in 1984. Never before
in American history had there been so many victims claimed by a single mass
shooting.

The man who represented Texas’s 17th district (home to both Killeen and the
nation’s largest military base, Fort Hood) stood solemnly to put the loss in
perspective: “In this one incident — less than a half an hour — more citizens lost
their lives than in the month the 25,000 soldiers from Killeen fought for their
country in Desert Storm.”

Another representative, from New York: “This House will decide today whether
they died in vain.”

But during the next day’s sessions, a representative from Missouri o fered an
amendment that would completely gut all of the proposed rearms restrictions
from the crime bill: no magazine cap, no assault weapons ban. “Everyone in this
House wants to stop what occurred in Killeen yesterday,” the congressman began:

43
 That not the question, but rather how do we stop it? In th specific
case, I simply have no answer. When someone los their mind, the
man who caused th tragedy yesterday obviously did, I do not believe it
can be stopped. It w not the pistol that caused those deaths. If it w
not a pistol, it could easily have been a rifle, if not a rifle a shotgun. If
not a gun, a can of gasoline thrown into the restaurant would have
caused much or more tragedy. If the truck had been loaded with
dynamite and the man willing to die, in th case he w , how do
you stop it?

As it had been af er Stockton, the weak point in the crime bill that year was the
ambiguity of the term “assault weapon.” The Missouri representative warned the
chamber, “Make no mistake about it, failure to support my amendments will
result in millions of semiautomatic rearms, owned by millions of law-abiding
citizens, [being] lef to the whim of the ATF for possible inclusion in the list to be
banned.”

A congressman from New Mexico then rose, and framed the tragedy at Luby’s —
and the handguns utilized by the shooter, as compared to “assault” guns — as
reason not to ban the 13 ri es. “These are not assault weapons,” he emphasized.
“They are semiautomatic weapons. They are the same all over. That was proven in
Texas. The Glock is not on the list to be banned.” On this point, he was certainly
correct.

A representative from California, where the memory of Stockton was still most
acute, directed attention back to magazine size as the key issue. “It is that huge
capacity ammunition clip that allows an insane person to shoot and shoot and
keep shooting,” he explained. “It is when the person has to stop to change the clip
that a police o cer or someone sane has the chance to stop them.” At the end of
his minute at the podium, the Californian concluded: “When I rst came to
Congress, Stockton happened. I have complained in the well of this oor af er
every event of mass killing. Please, I do not wish to come here again.”

The Californian didn’t get what he wanted. The amendment passed, and the ban
on the 13 ri es, and all high-capacity magazines, was stricken from the crime bill.

Later, President Bush granted a radio interview to NBC, and a reporter asked him
if he could comment on the Luby’s shooting. Surrender was palpable in his voice.
“Obviously, when you see somebody go berserk and get a weapon and go in and
murder people it troubles me,” the president said. “But what I don’t happen to
have the answer to is, can you legislate that behavior away?”

44
 5. Earth Day

October 1991
John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance — Boston, Massachusetts
There was something wrong in Nancy Lanza’s womb.

She knew how it was supposed to go; two years before, when she was pregnant
with her rst son, she had kept working, commuting down to her o ce in Boston
right up to her third trimester. She had gotten morning sickness, and mood
swings; nothing she couldn’t handle. But now, af er only three months carrying
her second child, she could tell something was de nitely wrong. She was starting
to worry.

Every day it got worse. Without warning, Nancy’s blood sugar would plummet,
throwing her o f-balance — then the waves of nausea came, increasing in
frequency and intensity the more she tried to power through. It was as if the force
growing inside her belly wanted something that its mother could not provide, and
so it just took, and took, and took from her, sapping her strength.

The complications lingered, their drain even surfacing in Nancy’s work

performance — and as she told friends, any dip her stats would be something that
her supervisors at John Hancock would not hesitate to bring to her attention.
Even when she was with child. Her fears compounded her stress.

She could feel the baby growing in her, and yet, as the due date approached, she
noticed it actually moving less and less. By November, her own symptoms would
spiral into a list that included “episodes of physical pain, distress, headaches,
insomnia, crying spells, nausea and increased nervousness.” That month, she took
a medical leave of absence from John Hancock, seeking refuge at home, in
Kingston, for the remaining ve months of her term.

45
April 22, 1992
Exeter Hospital — Exeter, New Hampshire
When the day came, Peter drove Nancy to the hospital for a planned cesarean
section, and she gave birth to her second son: Adam Peter Lanza.

A local paper, the Exeter News-Letter, would run a photo of the newborn boy
along with a birth announcement, one among a collection that recorded all of the
children brought into the world at Exeter Hospital that year. Adam’s birth weight
was listed at precisely eight pounds, and he appeared no di ferent from the other
babies in the maternity ward that day. His mother, relieved that the troubled
pregnancy was nally over, brought him home to Kingston, a “healthy baby boy.”

Soon, Nancy was rushing Adam back to the hospital in a panic, telling the sta f
that her baby had stopped breathing.

It turned out to be a false alarm; Adam woke back up, his breath returned, and
the doctors recorded that it had likely been nothing more than a simple episode of
apnea. But this marked the rst instance in available records when Adam Lanza’s
parents were concerned for his health; he was eight days old.

Kingston, New Hampshire

With the hardship nally gone from her belly, Nancy regained her strength. The
Lanzas were seeing the returns from Peter’s years of hard work by then; he had
nished his masters in taxation at Bentley University, and then accepted a position
as Vice President of Tax for PaineWebber, an asset management rm. It was a
respected, and well-compensated role. The family’s nancial concerns began to
fade.

Nancy had been at John Hancock for more than six years by then, and she was
planning on returning to the o ce once she recovered, dropping Adam o f at
daycare on her way to Hancock Tower as she had been doing with her rst son,
Ryan. At the time she led for her medical leave, late in 1991, she knew that the
rm was already planning to restructure her department; that meant cutting costs,
which meant cutting jobs, but Nancy told family that her bosses had promised her
they would still have her spot waiting for her when she was ready to come back.

Then, one day, there was a letter in the mailbox on Depot Road, from John
Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, bearing the bad news: Nancy had been laid o f,
af er all.

46
She was deeply o fended, taking it as both a personal betrayal and a professional
slight. But then again, the Lanzas had been overdue to shif to the long-term phase
of their plans. As Nancy would later write of this juncture in her family’s history,
“It was a decision that I made to take more responsibility for the house and the
children, and to allow [Peter] to concentrate on his career.” But the knife twisted
all the same; her bosses had cited her sinking job performance in the dismissal, and
so Nancy felt that in a way, she was being faulted for the su fering she had endured
while bearing Adam into the world. She made up her mind not to let the ring go
unanswered... but her response would have to wait. She had more immediate
concerns, at home.

***
For the rst three years of Adam Lanza’s life, he did not speak. He would babble,
making noises that sounded like words, but not words that anyone else could
understand. Within the family, it became accepted that he was “making up his
own language.”

Nancy would pick up some of her son’s unique vocabulary by the time he was a
toddler — enough to interpret what he wanted, and what he wanted to say. So, as
long as his mother was around, Adam was normal enough to get by.

It wasn’t quite that he was failing to learn English, either — it was evident that he
was able to understand what adults were saying, most of the time. And he would
follow commands, if somewhat clumsily. But the total absence of any intelligible
speech at all could not be ignored.

New Hampshire’s “early intervention” system — intended to spot any

developmental issues in young children — provides for “transition planning”
when a child is between 27 and 32 months, to determine if preschool special
education is needed to prepare them for entering the public school system. In late
1994, as this window of time was about to close for Nancy’s young son, someone
contacted the state, and an evaluation was scheduled.

Most likely, it was a pediatrician that wrote the referral; he or she was the rst
doctor to regularly evaluate Adam, and they recorded that the toddler presented
with “several developmental challenges,” the foremost being his signi cant speech
and language delays. The doctor had concerns about Adam’s physical movements
as well, noting repetitive behaviors as well as both ne and gross “motor
di culties.” The good news was, all of these things were treatable.

47
Late 1994
O ce of Child Health Services — Manchester, New Hampshire
Nancy brought Adam in for the state’s “birth to three” assessment, which would
determine the level of supports the state would approve toward his development.
During the testing session, the state’s evaluators made note that they could not
understand any of Adam’s speech at all; they needed his mother to act as
interpreter. However, they noted positive signs as well, observing that two-year-
old Adam demonstrated “a good attention span,” coupled with “creative play
skills.”

The conclusions the doctors drew from this evaluation would echo those from
Adam’s pediatrician, and expand on them — that Nancy’s child, as he was
entering preschool, “fell well below expectations in social-personal development,”
and presented with “signi cantly delayed development of articulation and
expressive language skills.”

Adam was going to need help, and that meant an IEP: Individualized Education
Plan. Per federal law, every incoming student with a disability would need one to
plot out their special education needs. And in each child’s plan, a doctor was
required to specify the student’s primary learning disability; on his very rst IEP,
Adam was listed as having “Oral Expression Disability.”

It is not always easy for a parent to accept that their child has a learning disability.
To the family or student impacted, the stigma can make it feel as though a
weakness has been exposed. In fact, the very New Hampshire government
organization that managed Adam’s transition to public schooling in 1995 also
underwent a name change that same year; they switched from “Family Centered
Early Intervention” to “Family-Centered Early Supports and Services,” with the
state explaining in a statement that the change “came about as a result of a group
of parents talking to their legislators about the negative connotation associated
with the term ‘Early Intervention,’ as the term implied that they and their
children needed to have their lives intervened with simply because the children
had developmental issues.”

Indeed, as would have been explained to Nancy at the time, Adam’s having
quali ed for special education supports merely meant that her son’s development
was atypical. He had di ferent needs than other children, and it was best that his
learning curriculum be tailored accordingly: Adam’s evaluators prescribed him
regular speech supports, and occupational therapy sessions. Beyond this, their
only recommendation was for Adam to begin regular preschool attendance, in
order to “stimulate development in all domains.”

48
February 1995
Kingston School District Children’s Center — Unit No. 17
Nancy took Adam to a preschool in Kingston for the next two years. Initially, his
speech therapy was geared almost exclusively toward improving articulation:
strengthening his mechanics in forming recognizable words. As his Planning and
Placement Team (PPT) saw it, Adam was sending out scrambled messages. Their
task was to unscramble them.

At the same time, the preschool reported that Adam “appeared to be beginning to
understand that others could not understand him.” Until this point, the child
apparently thought that the words he was using were not just his own. One
document from the time shows Nancy and Peter recording that their almost-
three-year-old son’s speech attempts “were not easily understood, and that [he]
became quickly frustrated when others asked him to repeat himself … Recently
Adam reportedly began hitting, spitting and crying when he could not make his
needs known.”

In another document, Adam’s assigned speech therapist con rmed that “most of
his speech attempts were unintelligible… When not understood, Adam raised his
voice volume and repeated the same utterance in a frustrated way. He did not
attempt to supplement his speech [with] facial expressions, gestures or body
movements to help his listeners understand him better.”

Shortly af er this, another scrap records that Nancy “was very concerned” about
her young son’s speech delays.

As a result of this shortfall in Adam’s expression, part of his therapy was meant to
teach him “strategies” to help “compensate for the limited intelligibility of his
speech when talking with unfamiliar listeners,” with the hope that he would start
communicating with someone, anyone, beyond his mother. But reports from his
preschool over the months that followed indicate that Adam instead fell back on a
more simple strategy: when he realized that he was talking di ferently than
everyone else, he stopped talking altogether. The signals from his interior world,
scrambled before, suddenly went silent.

According to doctors who would review Adam’s pediatric records in later years,
his retreat into muteness should have been recognized as a delay in the
development of his expressive language — a facet which is distinct from
articulation. It is the ability to demonstrate “communicative intent,” i.e. the will
to communicate. Yet, despite this branching in his development, it appears that
Adam’s education plan continued unchanged, still focusing on improving his
articulation. The underlying problem was lef largely unaddressed: that whatever
was inside, it no longer wanted to come out.

49
Texas State Capitol Building — Austin, Texas
The doors to the State Senate chambers opened, and a woman named Suzanna
entered. Texas legislators were seated at a long, rectangular table, listening to
witnesses they had invited that day to comment a proposed gun bill.

Suzanna was there to tell her story. When her turn came at the microphone, she
spoke about the day she had gone for lunch at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, a few
years before — when the blue truck had come crashing through the front
window. Recounting the events for the state’s subcommittee, she described the
initial fear and confusion she felt, as she took cover with her family and listened to
the seemingly endless gun re coming from the man with the giant eyes. She
described how it had dawned on her, exactly what the gunman was there to do.
And what she had to do.

“I got him!” she thought in that moment, her mind’s eye jumping to the pistol she
kept in her purse. “I had a perfect place to prop my hand. Everyone else in the
restaurant was down, he was up, perhaps f een feet from me, and I have hit
much smaller targets at much greater distances.” She reached for her purse, and
then, just as suddenly as her hopes were raised, they came crashing back down: she
remembered a seemingly-minor decision she had made a month or two before,
when she had taken the .38 revolver from her purse, and lef it in her car. “In the
State of Texas,” she reminded the committee, “it is a felony o fense to carry a
concealed rearm anywhere where wine or beer or any alcohol is served.” She had
been worried it could cost her her chiropractor’s license if she was caught. So
there, in her car, the .38 pistol sat, “a hundred yards away, completely useless to
me.” There was nothing she could do but hide, and wait for the police. Or the
end.

Suddenly, the circumstances changed. A customer at the far end of the restaurant
from the blue truck had been throwing himself against a window, and when the
glass nally gave way, Suzanna was among the terri ed survivors that came
pouring through the gap, into the alley behind Luby’s. She thought that her
mother was following her through the makeshif exit, but Suzanna later found out
that her mother had stayed behind — to be with her husband of 47 years, Al
Gratia, who lay mortally wounded af er trying to rush the shooter. Suzanna’s
mother had been the last victim at Luby’s, shot in a moment that signaled to
police who the bad guy with the gun was. Her sacri ce marked the end of the
bloodshed.

Midway through telling her story, Suzanna Gratia asked for permission to stand,
and then she gave a demonstration of what it was like to be in the cafeteria that
day: she placed her hands together, forming a “gun” sign, and narrated the scene
as she paced down the row of lawmakers, miming “shooting” each of them. She

50
came to a stop when one senator — a vocal opponent of the bill they were
discussing that day — snapped at her, “Get that nger out of my face!”

Suzanna obliged, but then she posed a question, nodding to the next man seated
at the table: “Tell me, Senator: would you like him to have a concealed weapon at
this point, or not?”

The subcommittee’s hearings that day were for a bill that would establish a
“license to carry” system for Texans, and their handguns. As Suzanna expected,
footage of her tense confrontation in the chamber made every evening news
broadcast in the state that night. It was just the boost that the bill needed.

The Concealed-Carry Law passed; within the year, any Texan over age 21 who did
not have a criminal record, and who was not “chemically dependent” or “of
unsound mind,” could get a permit. They would just have to pay a $140 fee, and
complete a ten-hour class on gun safety and the use of force. The bill Suzanna
championed was signed into law by Governor George W. Bush, the son of the
president, and he proclaimed that the new legislation would make his state “a
better and safer place to live.”

51
 6. Frontier

Late 1995
Depot Road — Kingston, New Hampshire
Marvin Lafontaine was driving back to Kingston af er the work day ended at his
job in Boston, and was just a few miles from home when his cell phone rang; it
was his wife, asking him if he could pick up their son from a play-date on the way.
She gave him directions.

Minutes later, Marvin was making the turn o f Depot Road, down a long and
shaded dirt driveway, to the house with the wrap-around deck, next to the old
Champion farm. As he approached the home, the front door opened — and then
Marvin met Nancy Lanza.

Marvin still remembers the way she smiled, as they shook hands: “Right from
there it was a friendship. I felt it. She felt it, and we were close friends.” The two
got to chatting as he rounded up his son from playing with Nancy’s oldest.
Marvin found her easy to talk to. He told her a bit about himself: he was a sta f
scientist for a company in Boston, but he didn’t want to leave small-town
Kingston behind, so he made the long drive back and forth every day. Nancy
could relate, and she told him about her years holding down an o ce job at John
Hancock. It wasn't that long ago, but it was like a di ferent life; she was still
getting used to the 24/7-mom role.

They discovered more common ground: both parents had another kid, four years
younger. And another child of Marvin’s was “coded” in the state’s special
education system, like Adam. Nancy was relieved; nally, she had someone who
understood, and with whom she could compare IEP notes, and trade tips on the
early-education resources available in the area. Someone she could really talk to.

Marvin listened, and as the months went by, he learned that Nancy liked wine,
and lm, just like he did. And even though they were both married, he knew there
was no use trying to ignore it: Nancy was beautiful.

52
Lafontaine Home — Kingston, New Hampshire
The Lafontaines were in charge of the town’s boy scout troop: Marvin’s wife
managed the administration, and he was the Den Leader. They held the weekly
meetings at their house in West Kingston; Marvin’s home had a striking cathedral-
style living room with a vaulted ceiling, where the boys would work toward their
merit badges, assembling craf s or racing pinewood derby cars. In the backyard,
Marvin had set up his own target range. The scouts loved it.

Nancy signed up Ryan to join Marvin’s scout troop, and the Lanzas were a xture
from then on, never skipping a meeting. Marvin noticed that Peter was never with
them, which Nancy attributed to her husband’s unbreakable work ethic: he had
recently lef PaineWebber, to start as a Senior Tax Manager at the accounting rm
Ernst & Young, and he was also teaching advanced tax courses at a university in
Boston. Marvin would eventually cross paths with Peter a few times — but he got
the distinct impression that Nancy was taking care of the boys almost entirely by
herself.

***
As the months went by, the two friends grew closer still. One day, Nancy let
Marvin in on a family secret: she was ling a lawsuit against her former employer,
John Hancock Life Insurance. Something about a betrayal, and a troubled
pregnancy; sure enough, in May of 1995, Lanza et al v John Hancock Distributors
Inc was led in the Su folk County Civil Court, with Nancy seeking damages for
discrimination. The fact that her father-in-law still worked for John Hancock was
apparently no obstacle to Nancy; and, if Peter S. Lanza felt any con icting
loyalties at her suing his longtime employer, that was kept within the family.

Marvin could already tell that anyone who went up against Nancy Lanza in a
contest would have their work cut out for them; she was quick, and she seemed to
know something about everything. He had to be careful when telling her a story,
because she was a smart listener, too: the kind who was constantly bringing up
one’s past statements to contradict them. “She has a memory like a steel trap, and
she gets you,” Marvin recalls, and though she went about it playfully with him, he
could tell that Nancy was an aggressive, capable person under her disarming
exterior. “She was pretty. She was attractive and very well spoken, and she didn’t
take any crap from anybody.”

***
Nancy brought young Adam along with her to the scout meeting one week.
Marvin got to meet the shy kid he had heard so much about — the one who,
supposedly, didn’t talk. Sure enough, when Marvin said “Hi,” Adam said
nothing.

53
Nancy continued bringing the shy boy to the scout meetings. A few times, Marvin
observed Adam making an odd “chit-chat” noise; he thought that was cute, but
knew it was also a sign that the boy was continuing to speak in his own, secret
language. Nancy had mentioned that. They were trying to get him to come out of
his shell, but so far, it just wasn’t working.

Adam wasn’t actually old enough to o cially be a scout at rst, but Nancy let him
orbit around his older brother, tagging along, and Nancy herself was never far
away, either. The preschool had told her that Adam was not participating in
groups, and Nancy thought that bringing him to the scout meetings would
present a safe environment, where he could experience a structured social setting,
while still not leaving her sight. As anyone who met them knew, Nancy was always
very protective of Adam.

***
One day, Nancy took Marvin aside. She had to warn him about something. “I
know you wouldn’t do this, but just so you know, don’t touch Adam.”

Marvin, familiar with the old stereotype of the creepy scoutmaster, was taken
aback. “Well, I wouldn’t touch him.”

“No, no. Not like that.” Nancy explained that even a normal handshake was out
of the question when it came to her younger son, just as it was a bad idea go up
and pat him on the back, the way any scout leader normally might. “He just can’t
stand that.”

Marvin thanked her for the advance warning, and he honored her request, leaving
a bu fer around Adam — but the other scouts were a di ferent story. They were
too young to have any restraint, and they touched Adam anyway. When they
found out he didn’t like it, they did it more; every once in awhile, Marvin would
hear Adam yell at the other boys, angry and with tears in his eyes as he ran over to
Nancy for safety.

But usually, the scouts just worked on craf s, and Marvin and the other adults
would circulate around their tables, o fering a helping hand. Adam never asked
for help, and if any of them approached him to see if he wanted any, he would not
respond. He would just stare down at the table. The only exception was with his
mom; Marvin would glimpse Nancy whispering something in Adam’s ear as he
worked, and kissing him on the top of his head. “He didn’t seem to mind that. He
didn’t consider that being touched or mothered.”

54
November 23, 1996
The two friends started exchanging emails every day, and talking on the phone at
least once a week. Marvin mentioned that he was looking for activities that would
be fun for the scout meetings, and one day, Nancy had a suggestion: why not call
her little brother, Jimmy?

Marvin had never met Jim Champion before — but, like most everyone in
Kingston, he knew the name well. Af er returning from the Green Berets in 1983,
Nancy’s kid brother had come back to his small hometown, and taken a job as one
of the local police o cers. There were never more than two or three o cers on the
whole force, and so, if you ever had an emergency in Kingston, there was a good
chance you were about to meet O cer Champion.

Nancy suggested that her brother — Uncle Jimmy, as her boys always knew him
— could bring his various police gear over to Marvin’s for a demonstration at one
of the scout meetings. He could tell the boys about life as a cop, and as a soldier.

***
It happened the weekend before Thanksgiving. Marvin had his video camera
rolling as the police Suburban came down his driveway. Lt. Champion hopped
out, mustached and in uniform, exuding masculinity and strength. In the footage,
a small den of cub scouts can be seen milling around, excited to take a gander at
the inside of a police vehicle. Nancy is there, too, in jeans and a dark jacket, her
hair cut to neck-length. She has Adam close by her side; he is still dwarfed by the
older boys, and he inches as they shove past him to crowd around the SUV.

Later in the footage, a K-9 o cer removes the leash from a German Shepherd who
was pawing at a discarded bottle in Marvin’s driveway. The freed animal runs o f
into the woods, and the camera swings over to catch the gleam of Uncle Jimmy’s
police badge, re ecting from further back in the wilderness as he waves at the boys
to follow him.

The boys run af er the dog. Adam follows last, wobbly and losing ground.
Nancy’s voice shouts from o f-screen: “Adam, do your doggie bark!”

He doesn’t make a sound. Nancy swears to someone that he sounds just like a dog
when he does it.

Heading o f into the woods, Adam slows to a stop. He nally turns away from the
informal hunting party, and goes back toward his mother.

55
 ***
“It wasn’t just the kids that enjoyed it, I was thrilled,” Marvin remembers of James
Champion’s visit to his home. And Nancy liked bringing her little brother
around. That was another of the things that would linger in the memories of
everyone who knew her during her years in her hometown: she loved and admired
her baby brother, and especially, she praised his military service. He was a strong,
respected, male gure, both within the family and around town. Adam was just
four-and-a-half years old as he stumbled through the woods that morning, and
like surely many boys in Kingston, he wanted to be just like James Champion.
Nancy knew that, and she encouraged it. “She allowed him to believe that yeah,
you’re gonna be like your uncle,” Marvin would recall to journalists from the
Hartford Courant — adding carefully, “…depending on how he turned out.” That
was a caveat that Nancy did not share with Adam then, hopeful for her son and
his dreams.

April 1997
Sanborn Regional School District — Kingston, New Hampshire
By the end of preschool, Adam was drif ing further o f-track in his development.
His teachers observed that he was still engaging in several di ferent “repetitive
behaviors,” was sensitive to smells — or “sometimes smelled things that weren’t
there,” according to his father — and he would not tolerate certain textures, to the
degree where Nancy had to cut the tags o f of his clothes before he would wear
anything. While his articulation had improved, he was still very quiet, and in fact
had started relying on a classmate to speak for him. Like his mother always had.

Some teachers would document that they saw Adam “sit and hit his head
repeatedly.” But like his expression delays, his repetitive behaviors went
unaddressed in his IEP (or at least, there is no record of any change to account for
them). Instead, the next time Adam’s plan shows a change, it is when the school
district suddenly cancels all of his speech and language services, late in preschool,
“due to a perception that his challenges were not impeding his ability to learn.”

His parents didn’t see it that way. Nancy sent a letter to the school district,
beginning, “As I stated at the Team Meeting on April 11, 1997, I strongly disagree
with the results of Adam’s assessment as well as the decision to release him from
the Special Education Program.” Her concerns were that her son’s “speech is
below age appropriate level,” despite a “strong ability to mimic most sounds and
words.” She cited New Hampshire’s laws on Special Education, and argued that
Adam’s “inability to participate puts him at at disadvantage,” which would legally
qualify him for state-mandated support.

56
But at the heart of the issue was a simple scarcity of funds: the federal government
would only reimburse the district for a portion of the cost associated with Adam’s
“free and public” education, which was mandated by the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). When this act originally passed, in 1990, it was
with the recommendation that the federal government cover 40% of the
program’s cost. But the real federal contribution never came even close to that; to
direct what little funding there was, the government relied on the school districts
to identify each student’s primary disability, speci cally looking at how it
impacted their ability to learn. In Adam’s case, the problem had been identi ed —
delayed speech articulation — and by the end of preschool it appeared to have
been resolved. It is not surprising that the school district would look to shu e
him out of special education once he passed such a milestone: New Hampshire
was not a wealthy state, and so there was certain to be another kid that needed
help, waiting in line right af er Adam. They couldn’t wait forever.

Years later, the State of Connecticut’s O ce of the Child Advocate would sif
through New Hampshire’s records — with the bene t of hindsight on their side,
and with a team of doctors supporting them — and they would reach di ferent
conclusions. The Child Advocate would determine that the district’s
identi cation of Adam’s (relatively minor) speech problems had actually “masked
the fact that expressive language was extremely delayed in his early education
years,” and “particularly delayed compared to his ability to understand language.”

Nancy saw it, too: her son, slipping through the cracks. It stirred a change in her.
She had already been a mother for four years before Adam came, but it was his
arrival in her life, and the challenges they faced together, that gave her new
purpose. She would do whatever was necessary to protect him, the most
vulnerable of her tribe.

57
 7. Dawn

March 1991
Colt Industries — West Hartford, Connecticut
Connecticut had a problem, and its name was Colt.

The “Constitution State” had long been the heart of America’s gun industry —
home not just to Colt, but to Winchester, Sturm & Ruger, Marlin, Mossberg, and
dozens more. Still, Colt was special to Connecticut, because over the years, the
state’s interests, and the fate of the company, had become intertwined. And now,
Colt needed help.

The iconic gun maker had been in trouble ever since 1,000 of their workers had
walked o f their jobs at the plant in West Hartford in 1986; for decades, they had
built Colt’s M-16s for the military, and the AR-15s for the civilians. The factory
continued operating throughout the strike — but with cheaper, non-union labor,
and at reduced capacity — until 1988, when the United States Army announced
that they were dropping Colt as their supplier of M-16s. Colt had relied on
revenue from that contract since 1964, and now, it was all gone. (The Pentagon
said that their M16s were as good as ever — but a Belgian company, Fabrique
Nationale, had simply given the lower bid.)

Then, Stockton happened. When California passed its gun ban, they singled out
Colt’s AR-15 by name, and so Colt had opted to surrender the model to the ATF,
and stop making the guns entirely.

The strike was in its fourth year by that point, the longest labor dispute in state
history; nally, Colt’s parent company decided to call it quits, and put their
rearms unit up for sale.

That was when Connecticut placed its bet: the state’s treasurer assembled a group
of investors to purchase Colt Firearms, and invested $25 million of Connecticut’s
pension fund along with them. “The state’s participation is not a bailout, not a

58
handout and not a subsidy,” the Treasurer told the New York Tim . “Let me
emphasize that this is a carefully thought out, carefully structured, potentially
very pro table business venture.” The state legislature was soon on board, though
a few members expressed uneasiness about the wave of gun legislation that seemed
to be imminent af er Stockton. A colleague reassured them: “The state treasurer
has made very clear his opposition to the manufacture of assault ri es by
companies in which the state has invested, [and] I think the treasurer has in fact
been shown to be extremely prudent.”

The state approved the investment, and Colt’s rearms division was reborn as an
independent entity, Colt Manufacturing Company Inc.

The new ownership agreed to the union’s demands; the strike ended, and the
UAW workers nally came back to the plant, where all the machine tools had been
updated and recon gured to produce Colt’s brand-new product, the one they all
now needed to be a success: the Colt Sporter.

It was a name meant to evoke “sporting purposes.” But the Sporter was a familiar-
looking black ri e, one that red the exact same ammunition as Colt’s now-retired
AR-15. In fact, when the nished Sporters came down the end of the assembly
line, even the workers who had been making AR-15s for decades were hard-pressed
to tell the di ference.

The name w the di ference — the only one that mattered. In California, it had
been enough to get the gun past the post-Stockton ban, lling the empty shelves
where Colt’s now-outlawed AR-15s had sat. That state’s lawmakers, who had just
been praising Colt’s benevolence, now were furious; they sued to get the Sporter
added to the name-ban at the last minute — “The Colt Sporter ri e is a
redesigned, renamed and renumbered version of the banned Colt AR-15 assault
ri e,” they said — but it didn’t matter. Di ferent name, di ferent gun. It would
take them years to get the Sporter added to their list.

June 8, 1993
Connecticut General Assembly — Hartford
Given its heritage, few were surprised when Connecticut was one of the states that
resisted the initial shockwaves from Stockton, and voted down an assault weapons
ban that year. It had marked an important victory for the NRA, in their e forts to
contain the damage to as few states as possible.

So now, four years later, it seemed unlikely that the same bill would fare any
better. But those four years had not been peaceful; violent crime was at its peak
across the nation, and like every other state, Connecticut’s cities were seeing more

59
and more gang-related shootings. There was an increasing sentiment that
something had to be done.

In 1993, supporters of a ban on assault weapons in Connecticut decided the time

was right to try again. And they were determined to learn from California’s
mistakes: their legislation would have a “name ban,” but they'd combine it with a
“military features” ban, like the ATF did with imports. And one of the features
they’d ban would be any detachable magazine carrying over 15 rounds, like Bill
Ruger suggested (though this only applied to the magazine that came with the
gun, from the factory. Af er-market magazines would not be a fected.)

Colt’s AR-15 was on Connecticut’s name-ban list, just like it had been in
California. But then another of that state’s lessons reared its head: what about the
Sporter?

The Sporter would make it through the “features” ban, the Colt loyalists said.
And it wasn’t on the list of named guns. But a lawmaker who supported the ban
headed them o f: “There’s a funny thing about the Colt Sporter. You take out the
clip for ve bullets and you stick in a new one, readily available on the market for
30, for 50, for 70 bullets. It’s an assault weapon. Make no doubt about it.”

An o cer from the state police provided a demonstration for the legislators, with
a Sporter in one hand and an empty 30-round magazine from an AR-15 in the
other: “It snapped right in. This is basically the same gun.”

Soon the Sporter came to symbolize the “assault weapon” debate, and the
opponents of the ban decided to use the controversy to take a risky maneuver:
they added the Sporter to the proposed list of name-banned guns — a “poison
amendment.” Dare the state to shoot themselves in the foot. One of the
undecided representatives begged everyone to reconsider: “Why in God’s name
would you invest in a company, whether you agree with it or not, and then try to
restrict their operation by limiting the use of the weapon that they produce? I
think we have our priorities a little mixed up here.”

His fears were well-founded; the ban’s advocates called their opponents’ blu f, and
agreed to add the Sporter to the list.

As the now-poisoned ban continued on the path toward becoming law, the
exchanges on the assembly oor grew more heated; at one point, a representative
challenged a colleague to list his “credentials” when it came to rearms, and the
man answered back that he owned a piece of Colt, just like everybody else. “I guess
all of the taxpayers in the State of Connecticut are now part-owner of a gun
factory.”

60
As time was running out on the legislative session, and the nal vote approached,
one of the opponents of the ban called attention to the gallery overlooking the
Assembly chamber, where a throng of men and women in signature yellow Colt
caps — the employees who so recently, nally, returned to the factory in Hartford
— were watching, as their jobs once again hung in the balance:

Do they look like gun-toting maniacs to you? They’re here for one
reason. You look in their ey . When they lose their job if the assault rifle
not made at Colt — and you maybe say one percent [of the workforce]
isn’t much — one percent of 1,000 100 people. It may be everybody up
in that balcony up there.... Those are not gun-toting maniacs. Those are
people that are wondering if it’s going to be worth shooting themselv in
the head with an assault rifle or a pistol if they could lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, the ban’s advocates insisted that Connecticut needed to do something

about assault weapons before it was too late; a new and even deadlier epidemic of
gun violence seemed just around the corner. One assemblyman described visiting
the Bridgeport Police Department’s gun locker, and seeing the seized rearms,
grouped by year, unfolding across time like a military preparing for war. “There’s
a box — one box — for 1978. It’s not even a very big box. And you look for 1979.
That box is not a very big box either.” But suddenly, something changes in the
1980’s, and the same trend seen in LA and Oakland takes hold; instead of just one
box, two or three are needed to hold all the guns seized in Bridgeport in a year.
And, “not only is the number of boxes growing larger and larger, but the guns in
them are changing. They’re bigger. They’re stronger and more and more
frequently they are assault weapons.” With the trajectory going the way it was, the
senator said, it was “only a matter of time” before tragedy struck.

His vote put it over the top; when the governor signed Connecticut’s assault
weapons ban into law in June of 1993, he remarked proudly, “This is a vote for our
children and against the NRA. This New-England state very much has its head
screwed on straight, and its priorities in order.”

In the af ermath, one disappointed legislator openly struggled to comprehend

what had just unfolded: that af er Connecticut “invested $25 million in Colt on a
pledge by the former State Treasurer that Colt did not make assault weapons, the
legislature has now concluded that that is exactly what the company does.”
Indeed, the Colt Sporter had been banned in its home state; but it would still be
produced there, for interstate sales. As a consequence, not only was every
Connecticut citizen “part owner of a gun factory,” they were now part owners,
o cially, of an assault rifle factory.

61
November 30, 1993
The White House — East Room
James Brady watched from across the stage, as the bill named in his honor was
signed into law by the president. It was a milestone for him, the end of a long
journey. As President Reagan’s rst White House Press Secretary, he had been
walking next to Reagan on the morning of March 30, 1981, exiting the Washington
Hilton hotel in D.C., when an attempted assassin shot them both. Jim Brady
never walked again.

It turned out the shooter that day had purchased his .22 revolver from a pawn
shop in Dallas; he had lied on the paperwork, so it was an illegal sale, but there was
no way for anyone to know that. Not until it was too late. The Brady Handgun
Violence Prevention Act was a rst step toward xing all that. The “Brady Bill”
would create a permanent 7-day waiting period, and a background check
requirement for all handgun purchases (later expanded to include long-guns). To
process the background checks, the bill also created the National Instant Criminal
Background Check system. “NICS” is what the country would rely on going
forward, to tell if a person was allowed to have a handgun or not.

In the immediate af ermath of the ‘81 assassination attempt, both Reagan and
Brady had been rushed to the hospital at nearby George Washington University.
On the tenth anniversary of that day, President Reagan returned to GWU, to
accept an honorary doctorate. In his acceptance speech, he thanked the sta f for
healing him, and saving his friend:

Speaking of Jim Brady, I want to tell all of you here today something
that I’m not sure you know. You do know that I’m a member of the
NRA, and my position on the right to bear arms well known. But I
want you to know something else, and I’m going to say it in clear,
unmistakable language: I support the Brady bill, and I urge the
Congress to enact it without delay...

[Paus for cheering, applause]

...It’s just common sense to have a waiting period, to allow local law
enforcement officials to conduct background checks on those who wish to
buy a handgun.

Reagan reminded everyone that the .22 he and Jim Brady were shot with was yet
another “Saturday night special” — a gun practically anyone could get — and that
“with the right to bear arms comes a great responsibility to use caution and
common sense on handgun purchases.”

62
Congress didn’t meet his challenge, not then. It took two more years.

Jim said a few words himself at the White House signing ceremony: “Twelve years
ago, my life was changed forever by a disturbed young man with a gun. Until that
time, I hadn’t thought much about gun control or the need for gun control.” He
tapped his wheelchair with his cane. “Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be stuck with
these damn wheels.”

Turning the ceremony back over to the president, Brady promised, “What we are
witnessing today is more than a bill signing, it is the end of unchecked madness
and the commencement of a heartfelt crusade for a safer and saner country.”

This wasn’t hyperbole. There really was a crusade underway in Washington.

The man signing the bill next to Mr. Brady was not the secretary’s fellow Reagan-
administration veteran, President Bush; instead, the pen was held by a former
Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who had dethroned Bush in an upset in 1992.
And there was no question as to the new president’s allegiances to the NRA: he
had none. “We all know there is more to be done,” Clinton said to the audience.
“I ask you to think about what this means, and what we can all do to keep this
going. We cannot stop here.”

***
Earlier that month, the latest attempt at a federal Assault Weapons Ban passed the
Senate. With the bill now halfway to becoming law, and facing a erce battle in
the House, President Clinton released an “Open Letter to Hunters and
Sportsmen” — he wanted the classical gun owners to know that he was on their
side. In fact, he needed their help: “I have been a hunter since I was 12. Where I
come from, it’s a way of life. And I will not allow the rights of hunters and
sportsmen to be infringed upon,” he promised, in language that is — at rst —
jarringly reminiscent of a gun-lobby mailing. “But I know the di ference between
a rearm used for hunting and target shooting, and a weapon designed to kill
people.” He said that the guns on the ban list “have no place on a deer hunt, in a
duck blind, or on a target range — and they certainly don’t belong on our streets,
in our neighborhoods, or on our schoolyards.” The president urged these gun
owners to call their representatives, and voice their support for the federal ban on
assault weapons.

National Ri e Association Headquarters — Fairfax, Virginia

From the top oor of a glass-and-steel o ce tower near Washington, D.C., a man
named Wayne R. LaPierre Jr. watched the crusaders charge, with growing anxiety.
Clearly, there was no longer an ally of the NRA in the White House. And as

63
hostile as the political environment had been af er Stockton, af er Clinton’s win, it
was even worse.

As the NRA’s Executive Vice-President, Wayne knew how to rally his

organization's base. Accordingly, NRA mailings around this time started to sound
like the notorious gun advertisements of the 1980s, when “assault weapons” were
rst marketed: in 1993, af er the FBI (who would be in charge of the NICS system)
endorsed the Brady Bill, the NRA paid for multi-page ads in Field & Stream and
other mainstream gun magazines, asking readers in huge type, “WHAT’S THE
FIRST STEP TO A POLICE STATE?”

The dot on the ad’s question mark was made from a scrap of a black-and-white
photo, showing the boots of an army formation in mid-goose-step. The answer
came on the next page: “WHEN THE FBI STATES THE RULES.”

The rest of the ad was a letter from Wayne, signed next to his icy portrait. He
implored readers to donate to the NRA, and ght the FBI: “Such abuse of broad
investigative powers is the rst step toward our Founding Fathers’ worst fear; a
federal police force disarming the law-abiding populace.”

Later, af er the Brady Bill passed, rhetoric from the NRA became downright
apocalyptic. In the January 1994 issue of American Rifleman (a monthly magazine
published by the NRA) they wrote, “When Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill on
November 30, a drop of blood dripped from the nger of the sovereign American
citizen.” Six months af er that, the magazine contained a “special report” from
Wayne LaPierre himself, titled plainly “The Final War Has Begun.”

***
Wayne’s “war” was Clinton’s “crusade,” seen through another lens. The rst shots
had been red at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho, two years before; the ATF had been
trying to recruit a man named Randy Weaver (who had illegally sawed o f some
shotguns) as an informant against the Aryan Nations — but Randy turned them
down, and went back to his cabin up on the ridge with his family, to wait for his
court date. Except, when the court notice came, it was misprinted, and the feds
thought Randy had skipped out. They surrounded his cabin, starting a stando f
that lasted for 12 days — and which ended only af er a federal marshal was shot
dead, followed by Randy’s wife, and son. (Af er Randy surrendered, the U.S.
Government paid him a substantial settlement.)

Around the same time that Randy was coming down the mountain, there was a
UPS driver in Texas who was loading packages into the back of his delivery van.
One box snagged, and tore; what fell out looked like a hand grenade.

64
The grenade was inert, as were the dozens more that were boxed the same
shipment, but then the driver remembered the other packages he had delivered to
the same recipient, out in Waco: several had been stamped with warnings.
Something about being careful when handling volatile chemicals. Other purchase
records would show that the same folks had been buying up AR-15s, as well as tool
kits that could convert the ri es to allow automatic re. That was very, very illegal
to do.

Soon the ATF were on the case, and everything that happened at Ruby Ridge
happened again, at Waco, on a grander scale. An attempted arrest turned into the
biggest gun ght in American law enforcement history. When the feds retreated, a
stando f commenced that stretched for 51 days. And while the cabin in Idaho held
only Randy and his family, in Texas there was a sprawling compound, containing
one hundred human beings who were members of another kind of family: all
united in faith that the man leading them was god. And god would not surrender.

On April 19, 1993, the ATF raided the Mount Carmel compound, their agents clad
in black body armor and backed up by tanks and helicopters. The cultists fought
back. There was a spark — neither side would ever claim responsibility for it —
and the Branch Davidians perished on live television, a giant orange reball
enveloping their church. The scene looked like a war crime.

May 3, 1994
Senate Chamber — United States Capitol Building
One week af er Clinton’s letter to hunters, a group of his predecessors from the
Oval O ce sent their own message, addressed to every member of the U.S. House
of Representatives:

We are writing to urge your support for a ban on the domestic

manufacture of military-style assault weapons. Th a matter of vital
importance to the public safety. Although assault weapons account for
less than 1% of the guns in circulation, they account for nearly 10% of the
guns traced to crime.

Every major law enforcement organization in America and dozens of

leading labor, medical, religio , civil rights and civic groups support
such a ban. Most importantly, poll a er poll shows that the American
public overwhelmingly support a ban on assault weapons. A 1993
CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 77% of Americans support a
ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of semi-automatic assault
guns, such the AK-47.

65
 The 1989 import ban resulted in an impressive 40% drop in imported
assault weapons traced to crime between 1989 and 1991, but the killing
continu . Last year, a killer armed with two TEC9s killed a large
number of people at a San Francisco law firm and wounded several
others. During the past five years, more than 40 law enforcement officers
have been killed or wounded in the line of duty by an assault weapon.

While we recognize that assault weapon legislation will not stop all
assault weapon crime, statistics prove that we can dry up the supply of
these guns, making them less accessible to criminals. We urge you to
listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community
and support a ban on the further manufacture of these weapons.

Sincerely,

Gerald R. Ford

Jimmy Carter

Ronald Reagan

With Reagan’s signature, and the letter’s reference to banning “semi-automatic

assault guns, such as the AK-47,” the former president nally con rmed his stance
on guns like the Norinco used at Stockton: he wanted them banned.

***
Clinton’s assault weapons ban was essentially the same as Connecticut’s: a name-
ban of 19 ri es (including the AK-47 and Colt’s AR-15, but not the Sporter) on
top of a features-ban. There was one major di ference from Connecticut: it would
also outlaw any ammunition magazine holding more than ten rounds, and not
just the ones the manufacturer included standard. The bill had been put together
by a freshman senator from California, who reminded the chamber about her
state’s tragic history: the McDonald’s shooting, then Stockton, and most recently,
a massacre at an o ce building in San Francisco, the same that the former-
presidents had invoked. She shared a lesson California was learning the hard way:
that, “Local and state initiatives are meaningless, because gun buyers can simply
cross state lines and purchase their weapons of choice.”

In another session on the federal ban, Suzanna Gratia made an appearance. She
told her story from Luby’s — by now, well-polished — before urging the
representatives to reject the new ban. “I hear all this talk about how many bullets

66
can go in a clip,” she said: “I’ve been there. I can tell you, it doesn’t matter. It takes
one second to switch out a clip. You can have one bullet, or a hundred bullets. It
doesn’t matter, guys. He goes—” and Suzanna then demonstrated the motion,
ejecting the magazine from her pantomime-pistol, and with the other hand,
almost immediately, inserting another — “that’s not enough time to rush a man, I
promise you.” She knew. She saw her father die trying.

***
The senator from California could see that her bill was going to fail. So she set
about cutting provisions from it, narrowing its scope, desperate just to keep it
alive. She agreed to add a ten-year “sunset provision” that would automatically
cause the bill to expire when the time was up, if it was not renewed. Another
compromise: current owners of banned assault weapons would be allowed to
keep them, and sell them. Same for high-capacity magazines. The changes hurt the
bill, the Californian thought, but at least its fate now appeared more hopeful. “I
was amazed to see the degree to which the National Ri e Association controls this
body,” she told reporters. “If this cannot pass the Senate of the United States, I
fear for the streets of America.”

It passed, just barely, and on September 13, 1994, President Clinton signed the
Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law. To America's voters, he cast the moment as
their latest victory over chaos: “My fellow Americans, this is about freedom.
Without responsibility, without order, without lawfulness, there is no freedom.
Today the will of the American people has triumphed over a generation of
division and paralysis. We’ve won a chance to work together.”

Finally, the lingering shockwaves from Stockton came to a rest.

April 13, 1995

For the NRA, it was the most crushing loss yet. There were only two gun laws in
American history that could even compare; back in 1934, when the National
Firearms Act sought to take the gangsters’ Tommy guns away, the NRA’s
president at the time openly supported that law, even saying that he “did not
believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns,” and, “I think it should be
sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The executive Vice President —
holding the same o ce that Wayne would assume sixty years later — said that the
NRA was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.”

In 1968, when the big Gun Control Act was passed, creating the ATF, Wayne’s
predecessor in o ce gave a measured response; that while some of that bill’s
provisions “appear unduly restrictive and unjusti ed in their application to law-

67
abiding citizens,” the executive wrote to members, “the measure as a whole
appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

He was wrong; the hard-line gun rights advocates in the NRA grew angry af er
1968, sensing that their rights were not being defended. They established the
“NRA Institute for Legislative Action” (NRA ILA) in 1975 to focus exclusively
on political strategy, and preventing another gun bill like ‘68’s. This faction
represented not the hunters and sportsmen that were traditionally associated with
the NRA, but the subsection of members who were opposed to any restrictions
on handguns, and who were more concerned with self-defense, and their right to
bear arms, than going hunting.

The NRA's old-guard leadership recognized the NRA ILA as a threat, and denied
the hard-liners the funding they needed. NRA management even announced that
they would be selling the old NRA headquarters near D.C., and relocating all the
way to Colorado Springs; this physical move would mirror a shif of priorities,
back to traditional “sportsman” shooters, and away from ghting against gun
laws. It would make the NRA ILA all but obsolete.

Things quickly came to a head, and the NRA brass ultimately decided not even to
wait for the relocation; in 1976, they simply sacked all eighty employees that
worked on the NRA ILA program, or who were allied with its management.

The dismissed hard-liners regrouped, calling themselves the “Federation,” and

hatched a plan to dethrone their enemies in the NRA. They would exploit a
vulnerability in the NRA’s by-laws, which required an immediate hearing of any
concern raised by a lifetime member, from the oor, during the organization’s
annual meeting. The Federation began direct-mailing as many of these members
as they could nd (of which there were more than 200,000) seeking common
cause, so that when the 1977 meeting opened in Cincinnati, the board of directors’
vote on the move to Colorado would be derailed. Coordinated by Federation
members roaming the oor with walkie-talkies, the lifetime members called for a
series of their own votes: casting out the current leadership en masse, installing the
Federation in their place, rewriting the by-laws to protect their power, and
rededicating the NRA to a ght against gun control — mainly, by rebuilding the
Institute for Legislative Action.

Deliberations went on well into the next morning, but by the time it was all over,
the Federation hard-liners got everything they wanted. Not long af er, they hired
Wayne LaPierre to man the NRA ILA, and in 1991, they put him in charge of the
whole organization, calling him “our champion and ercest warrior.”

***
68
The coup in Cincinnati was what launched the NRA on its modern trajectory.
Now, almost twenty years later, the Federation regime was still in power, but
Wayne feared that their momentum may have nally stalled. The losses were
mounting. Member donations were down. He worried that if he didn’t ght back
now, the NRA might even die.

Wayne began saying things he would regret.

On April 13, 1995, he sent a fundraising letter to all NRA members. It began, “I’m
not looking for a ght, but when you consider the facts of our current situation,
you too, will see we have no other choice.” He went on, “The semi-auto ban gives
jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional
rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or
kill us.” He then named the senator from California, who wrote the bill, as one
among a group that would “stop at nothing until they’ve forced you to turn over
your guns to the government.”

Plunging deeper into apocalyptic imagery, Wayne painted the current reality as
freedom’s struggle against a tyrannical force, and cast the orange reball that rose
from Mount Carmel as a consequence of government oppression:

In Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the

government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding
citizens. Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge… Waco and the Branch
Davidians… Not too long ago, it w unthinkable for Federal agents
wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack
law-abiding citizens. Not today, not with Clinton.

When he invoked Waco, Wayne didn’t know that the provocative language he was
using was remarkably similar to that of another gun rights activist, of sorts — a
man who had been seen near the ATF checkpoint on the perimeter of Mount
Carmel during the fateful 51-day stando f. The man’s name was Tim, and he was a
veteran of the Persian Gulf war. He was there selling homemade bumper stickers
that he had spread out on the hood of his car; they were starkly lettered with
patriot-movement slogans: “Fear the Government that Fears Your Gun” and “A
Man With a Gun is a Citizen, A Man Without a Gun is a Subject.”

A journalism student, visiting the Waco perimeter one day during the siege,
happened across Tim, and asked him a few questions about his beliefs. Articulate
and polite, Tim told the aspiring reporter that he urged gun ownership, because,
“The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful, and the
people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control.”

69
Tim sounded a lot like Wayne’s letter; but then, he sounded like a lot of pissed-o f
gun owners at the time. Probably no one would have even noticed the similarity
— except that just a week af er Wayne had mentioned Waco in his fundraising
later, on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the morning Mount Carmel
burned, Tim blew up a federal building in Oklahoma.

Timothy McVeigh wasn’t inspired by the letter from the NRA — he had been
lling barrels with racing fuel and fertilizer weeks before that — but his rationale
came from a familiar place, and Wayne’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Still,
despite a wave of public pressure in the wake of the bombing, Wayne held rm,
and refused to apologize. That was war.

May 10, 1995

Park Laureate O ce Building — Houston, TX
Former President Bush had retired to a small town in Texas shortly af er Clinton
was sworn in. But he still kept up his work, revising a manuscript for a book on
foreign policy, and draf ing correspondence. However, his name had been
conspicuously absent from the letter his three predecessors had sent, in support of
the assault weapons ban.

Being a lifetime NRA member, President Bush received a copy of Wayne’s

message; Bush had been in o ce when Ruby Ridge happened, and his feelings
about the ATF and other federal agencies were informed by his years as the head
of the CIA. He took out a pen, and started a letter of his own, addressed directly
to the NRA. He did not mince words:

...Your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense

of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country. It
indirectly slanders a wide array of government law enforcement officials,
who are out there, day and night, laying their liv on the line for all of
.

You have not repudiated Mr. LaPierre’s unwarranted attack.

Therefore, I resign a Life Member of NRA, said resignation to be
effective upon your receipt of th letter.

Sincerely,

George Bush

***
70
The next day, Wayne had a change of heart. He told reporters “I really feel bad
about the fact that the words in that letter have been interpreted to apply to all
federal law-enforcement o cers.” He went on Larry King Live, looked into the
camera, and assured the country that he “never meant [to] broad-brush all of
federal law enforcement, all of [the] ATF, or all of law enforcement in general.”
He had lost another battle, but held out hope for the war.

71
 8. Shangri-La

February 2, 1996
Frontier Junior High School — Moses Lake, Washington
The trench coat was black. A woman purchased it for $240 from Skeen’s Western
Wear, an army surplus store in the small town of Moses Lake, out in the eastern
deserts of Washington State. She said she was buying it for her teenage son.

It wasn’t even a “trench coat,” really: it was a duster, a long jacket like the cowboys
used to wear. But for some reason, everyone would call it a trench coat.

Her son was fourteen years old. Two days af er she gave him the trench coat, he
went to his father’s gun safe (which was unlocked) and retrieved a .30-30 lever-
action ri e — a hunting ri e, by any modern standards — and carried it back to
his bedroom. He put on a movie: A Fistful of Dollars. It was a Clint Eastwood
classic, featuring the “Man With No Name” — the iconic wandering badass of the
Old West. Fearless, self-su cient, and always quick on the draw.

The 14-year-old cut out one of the pockets from his new duster, and passed the
ri e through the resulting hole, so that he could have his nger on the trigger of
the long gun while still keeping the weapon hidden within his new jacket. He then
stepped into some black cowboy boots, topped o f his costume with a black
cowboy hat, and moseyed on down to Frontier Junior High School, where he was
late for his 5th-period Algebra class.

Kids saw him in the hall, pausing at the doorway of Classroom 15. He looked silly
in his getup, “like a mix between the Lone Ranger and Zorro.” Nobody took him
seriously; really, that was the whole point.

He took a deep breath, and made his entrance.

The teacher’s lesson on binomials stopped, and everyone turned to look at the
class nerd in his stupid costume. There wasn’t even time to laugh before he took

72
two steps forward, turned to face the jock in the front row who had called him a
“dork” and a “faggot” all semester, raised the ri e’s barrel, and red.

Later, the shooter would say that he only intended to hit the one target, but, “I
guess re ex took over sort of…” because he just kept on shooting, working the
lever and pulling the trigger. He even turned the gun on his teacher (a woman
who had given him an A on his report card that term, and wrote that the teen was
“a pleasure to have in class”).

The ri e ran empty, and the shooter reloaded. Act II of his plan had arrived: the
hostage crisis.

The terri ed students in Classroom 15 would all remember the same thing about
the way the shooter acted that af ernoon, as he ordered them around at gunpoint:
his movements and words seemed “rehearsed,” like he was calmly acting out a
script from his head. Mirroring this, the shooter would later say of his having
seized control of the classroom, “It’s like I pictured myself doing it or something.”

In fact, there was a script inside the gunman that he was working from, a real-life
power fantasy assembled from bits of ctional ones. From A Fistful of Dollars he
borrowed the aura of the gunslinger, but some of his actual behavior at the school
appeared straight from a 1977 psychological horror novel, Rage. The book was
written by “Richard Bachman” (a name Stephen King would use when he didn’t
want to be seen publishing too many books in a given year), and tells the story of a
teenage boy, Charlie, who brings a gun to school, shoots his math teacher, and
holds his classmates hostage. “His twisted mind turned a quiet classroom into a
dangerous world of terror,” the cover reads. “The sly voices in his mind whispered
their terrible warnings, telling Charlie exactly what he had to do…”

In Rage, when the school’s principal asks the gunman “Why? Why are you doing
this?” Charlie responds, “I don’t know,” but “it sure beats panty raids.”

In Moses Lake, the shooter joked as he was corralling his classmates, “This sure
beats algebra, doesn’t it?” He had a copy of Rage on his nightstand at home, right
next to the cut-out pocket from his trench coat.

Act III would be the escape.

The Frontier High School shooter had once told a friend that it would be “cool”
to kill someone, and that he’d like to travel the country killing people at random,
getting away with it like the characters in his favorite lm, Natural Born Killers.
The bloody, R-rated Oliver Stone movie had barely been out on VHS for six
months, but a video store in Moses Lake showed that someone in the shooter’s

73
home had rented the video seven times. “It was the only movie he ever talked
about,” his friend said, remembering how the aspiring gunman would quote the
movie’s heroes: “Murder is pure. People make it unpure.”

Presented as satire, Natural Born Killers depicts a world in which two

psychopaths, Mickey and Mallory, are able to capture the American public’s
attention through indiscriminate murder, like Bonnie and Clyde on steroids.
When they are eventually caught, Mickey (played by Woody Harrelson) is granted
a televised interview, broadcast from his jail cell — a sort of nal address to his fans
before execution — and based on what the friends of the Frontier shooter
remember him quoting, this scene was what captured his attention; in the lm,
Mickey has told his interviewer about the supposed “purity” of murder. The
tabloid journalist is incredulous, and asks Mickey to explain how he can justify
taking another life, but the killer tells him he’ll never understand: “You and me,
we’re not even the same species. I used to be you, then I evolved. From where
you’re standing you’re a man. From where I’m standing? You’re an ape.”

When his interviewer is still unsatis ed, the mass-murderer concludes the chat
with a more focused answer:

Q: “Why th ‘purity’ that you feel about killing?”

A: “I guess, Wayne, you gotta hold that ‘ol shotgun in your hand, and it
just becom clear, like it did for me the first time. That’s when I
realized my true calling in life.”

Q: “What’s that, Mickey?”

A:[grinning] “Shit, man... I’m a natural born killer.”

In the lm, this appeal to savagery is broadcast live all over the prison, and it soon
incites a full-scale riot, setting the stage for the heroes to escape: outnumbered and
surrounded, they duct-tape the barrels of their shotguns to a guard’s head —
creating a hostage that would be nigh impossible to rescue — and make him lead
the way out.

The shooter in Moses Lake had his ending: when a P.E. teacher stormed into
Classroom 15 to investigate the shots, the shooter held him at gunpoint, and
produced a plastic bag from his trench coat. Wrapping it around the barrel of his
ri e, he said to the man “I’m going to put this gun in your mouth, and you’re the
hostage.”

74
Then, in a ash, the bizarre scene came to an end; the P.E. teacher yanked the gun
from the shooter’s hands, and wrestled him to the ground. Police stormed in, and
arrested the gunman.

One of the o cers, noticing how the boy in the black trench coat was “shockingly
calm” as they handcu fed him, grumbled, “Look at what you’ve done.”

The shooter responded simply, “I know.”

***
That night, a handwritten message was raised on the agpole at Frontier Junior
High school, a single word rippling in a dark desert wind: WHY?

February 19, 1997

Bethel Regional High School — Bethel, Alaska
The next school year, it happened again. A 16-year-old boy took a shotgun from
the unlocked cabinet of his foster home, and hid it under his black parka, tucking
the barrel down the leg of some baggy black pants he had borrowed. He walked
sti f-legged to the school bus that morning, and then into the commons of his
high school. Strangely, several witnesses described his all-black getup as a “trench
coat”; maybe that’s what they were expecting to see, as they watched from the
mezzanine overlooking the commons. He had told them to go up there, for a view
of what he promised would be an “evil day.” One of them even brought a camera
along, to snap a picture of the shooter in action.

They watched as the boy with the sti f leg approached his nemesis — a classmate
with whom he had gotten in a st- ght with two years before — and saw him pull
out the stolen shotgun, and re. He wasn’t trying to hit anyone else at the table,
but it was buckshot, so they got hit anyway. The shooter didn’t care. He then
turned to stalk the halls, hunting the principal who was next on his list. He found
him.

The police showed up just then, and the gunman surrendered; up on the
mezzanine, the kid with the camera was so amazed by all of what he had seen, he
had forgotten to even take the photo.

For some parents and teachers, the fact there was a willing audience was even more
troubling than what the lone criminal had done in the commons. It raised
disturbing questions about the generation they were raising: if these kids were
tipped o f to an imminent tragedy, would they be too concerned about missing
the show to tell an adult?

75
October 1, 1997
Pearl High School — Pearl, Mississippi
The next school year came, and the violence returned with it, this time before the
tree branches were even bare: another white boy in a black trench coat, shooting
up the commons of his high school with a gun he had stolen from a family
member.

He rst targeted a girl, one who had dumped him recently, but it was about more
than her, if it was about anything at all: he just kept shooting, and shooting, into
the crowd of his classmates as they scrambled from their lunch tables. Then the
shooter tried to make a getaway, but he didn’t get far; he drove his mother’s car
into a tree, and then was subdued at gunpoint by the school’s Vice Principal, who
had rushed out to the parking lot to retrieve his own .45 pistol from his car.

The power fantasy that had rst been launched into reality from Classroom 15 in
Moses Lake was building on its own momentum now, incorporating new parts
into itself as it passed through each angry, alienated teenage boy. And as the
phenomenon passed over Pearl, a particularly dark layer was absorbed: when the
authorities searched the shooter’s home, they found that on the morning of the
attack, his rst victim had been his own mother. The boy had stabbed her to
death, in her bed. He would tell police he had no memory of doing it; he had
closed his eyes, and obeyed a demon.

The next day, at a memorial in Pearl, another teenage boy in a black trench coat
appeared, speaking to the grieving townspeople there like he was the shooter’s
apostle. “He did it because society as a whole put down the thinkers and the true
geniuses of the world,” he proselytized, while handing out photocopies of a note
the shooter had given him on the morning of the attack:

I am not insane, I am angry. I killed because people like me are

mistreated every day. I did th to show society, push and we will
push back. ...All throughout my life, I w ridiculed, always beaten,
always hated. [...] It w not a cry for attention, it w not a cry for help.
It w a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can’t pry your ey
open, if I can’t do it through pacifism, if I can’t show you through the
displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.

His note borrowed some of its language from Friedrich Nietzsche, speci cally
from the his 1887 book The Gay Science, containing the philosopher’s famous
declaration: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

Curiously, the shooter’s note ended with shout-out to a third cohort: “See you in
the holding cell!”; as it turned out, the shooting at Pearl High School was

76
originally to be part of a larger “occult ritual,” intended to “cast a reign of terror”
over the community in Pearl. It was never quite clear just how much of the plan
was serious (obviously at least some of it was), but consistent details involved
cutting the phone lines to the school, setting o f a napalm bomb in the commons,
and an escape route to Mexico. The shooter’s attack on Pearl High School was a
precursor to all this, meant to increase the cult’s powers through fear — and so
what the note really represented was not so much his motive, but part of the act
itself: propaganda.

While the Pearl High School shooting did make front-page headlines, it did not
linger there long. For some reason — maybe just chance, or maybe it was that the
copycat plots inspired by Moses Lake all took about a year to hatch — the school
year of 1997-1998 was when the school-shooter phenomenon seemed to spiral out
of control.

December 1, 1997
Heath High School — West Paducah, Kentucky
Every morning, thirty or so of Heath High School’s most devout Christian
students would meet in the school’s front lobby and join hands, forming a prayer
circle. At the same time, at the far end of the lobby, another group of teenagers
would be meeting, also to start the school day together: the goths. They all wore
black, and some of them wore trench coats. They didn't like the christian kids.

But the kid carrying the cloth bundle that Monday was from neither clique. He
was just a nerd. He had been bullied frequently — and publicly; in eighth grade,
the middle-school newspaper’s “Rumor Has It” column had openly speculated
that he might be gay, and in a relationship with another male student (neither
were true, for however much it mattered.) He and his classmates weren't middle
schoolers anymore, but the rumor and the stigma followed him to high school.
Everyone at Heath High had heard him being called a “faggot” in the halls, and
saw him getting pushed around.

Most of the guns he had brought were for the goths to use. He gured the cooler
kids would just join in, once he got it started.

He had acquired everything the week before, on Thanksgiving evening. He snuck

into the house of a boy who was out of town with his family, and whose parents
owned a pistol and several ri es, and he brought the arsenal home and hid it
under his bed, behind some Legos. He needed the guns for a Monday morning
that he hoped would change everything: a “day of reckoning.”

77
Just as the prayer circle at Heath was saying “amen,” the boy made his approach.
He put in earplugs, reached into his backpack, retrieved a .22 Ruger pistol, and
opened re.

The goths ran, just like nearly everyone else. But the leader of the school’s prayer
group stood his ground: he confronted the shooter, demanding an explanation.
Instead the shooter dropped the gun, and begged, “Please, just shoot me!” The
Christian took him to the principal’s o ce instead, and waited for the police to
arrive.

***
Just down the hall from the crime scene, detectives found a copy of Rage in the
shooter’s locker. That was enough for Stephen King; he called his publisher, and
asked that they let the story go out of print.

March 24, 1998

Westside Middle School — Jonesboro, Arkansas
The sixth-grade boy was seen in the school hallway, smashing the glass cover of the
re alarm box, and pulling the switch. He ran out the re exit, across the
playground, and up the hill overlooking the school, where his partner, a seventh
grader, was watching through a ri e’s scope.

When their classmates and teachers came ling out the doors for roll call, the two
boys opened re from the hillside, raining bullets down onto the playground.
They even shot at some construction workers who happened to be laying shingles
on a nearby roof op. A few minutes later, the police arrested the shooters as they
emerged from the back of the woods, ri es in hand, trying to make their getaway.

Both boys had been taught how to use guns by their parents, and had even been
given .22’s of their own, but the guns they used in the attack were all stolen earlier
that morning, from the younger boy’s grandfather.

***
President Clinton was on a trip through South Africa when he learned that the
tragedy of the season had struck in his home state. From Johannesburg, he
recorded a video address, to be played at the memorial in Jonesboro, in which he
acknowledged that, “Like all of you, I do not understand what dark force could
have driven young people to do this terrible thing.” He urged prayers for the
people of Arkansas, including the families of the perpetrators — “for their
su fering, too, must be grievous” — and he shared the comfort he found in
scripture: “Saint Paul reminds us that we all see things in this life through a dark

78
glass, that we only partly understand what is happening to us. But one day, face to
face with God, we will see all things, even as He sees us.”

May 20, 1998

Thurston High School— Spring eld, Oregon
The freshman boy lived in a house way out in the woods, a sub-development so
peaceful and remote they called it “Shangri-La.” He was 15 years old, and he had
just been expelled from Thurston High School. He was pacing in his bedroom,
trying to gure out what he was going to do. He had a gun in his hand.

On the wall, he had printed out and framed the lyrics to his favorite Marilyn
Manson song, “The Re ecting God”:

...I went to god just to see,

and I w looking at me

Saw heaven and hell were li

When I’m god everyone di ...

His parents had been concerned about him. The year before, he and his friends
were busted trying to order copies of The Anarchist Cookbook through the
school’s computer lab, and his parents took him to a counselor, telling them about
their son’s “extreme interest in explosives and knives,” as well as his gloomy
mindset, and violent temper. The counselor diagnosed the teenager with Major
Depressive Disorder, and along with regular visits, prescribed him some Prozac.

Over the months that followed, everyone thought the freshman was getting better
— so much better, that they let him stop taking the pills, and bought him the gun
he was always begging for: a 9mm Glock 19. He continued to improve af er that,
and so they bought him another, a Ruger 10/22 semiautomatic ri e. (Its name
came from its standard magazine, holding 10 rounds of .22 ammo; at some point,
the freshman had switched it out for one that held 50.)

He bought a third gun himself, just the day before; a pistol, from a friend at
school. But the gun was stolen, and the cops found out. That was how he got
expelled. Just that evening, his father had picked him up from the police station,
and taken him for the long, silent ride back to Shangri-La. The freshman’s world,
suddenly, was shit.

79
His parents had been following the news. They knew about the “zero-tolerance”
policies that had become commonplace lately, in the season of the school shooter.
This arrest was going to completely alter the course of their son’s life, and
probably their reputation along with it.

He had been watching the news himself. A friend remembers being in his
company when they heard about the Jonesboro shooting, and how they both
agreed that it was “pretty cool”…. except, the boy from Shangri-La had some ideas
on how to “improve” on it. He wanted to make the formula more lethal: just two
weeks before being caught with the gun, he had told another friend that he
“wanted to lock [all] the doors except for one, put a bomb in the cafeteria, and
then pick people o f one-by-one af er the bomb exploded and they tried to
escape.” He had a surprise exit strategy, too: he would save the last bullet for
himself.

***
Pacing in his bedroom, the freshman could hear his dad downstairs, in the
kitchen, talking on the phone about his “out of control” delinquent son. Possibly
sending him to military school.

Back upstairs, the freshman made a choice.

Coming down to the kitchen, he saw his father had nished his phone call, and
was reading the newspaper, facing away. The freshman shot him in the back of the
head, then dragged his body to the bathroom, covered it with a bed sheet, and
shut the door.

The phone rang. It was the high school’s English teacher, a man who was also
friends with the freshman’s dad. He started to ask questions about the expulsion.
The boy mumbled something about how having the gun at school was a mistake,
and that his dad wasn’t home at the moment. He hung up.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the shooter’s friend from school,
also wanting to know what happened, if he was able to talk. The shooter said the
coast was clear; his dad had gone “out to a bar.”

They conference-called another friend, and the three talked about the stolen gun,
and the shooter’s expulsion. The boy from Shangri-La didn’t mention anything
that had happened since then, he just kept worrying out loud over what everyone
would think, and how much of an embarrassment he was, repeating, “It’s over,
everything’s over.” He was watching the driveway from his upstairs window, and
toward the end of the conversation, his friends heard him wondering aloud,
“When is my mom getting home?”

80
 ***
As her car pulled into the garage, her son was waiting in the shadows. When she
reached to take a bag of groceries from the trunk, the freshman said “I love you,
mom,” and shot her in the back of the head. She fell to the ground, and he shot
her some more, then dragged her to a corner of the basement, and covered her
with a bed sheet.

The shooter wiped his tears, and loaded his weapons. He waited for the sun to
rise, and for the last day of his life to begin.

***
The school’s security cameras captured him crossing the parking lot: a trench-
coated gure walking with purpose, a “Nine Inch Nails” hat on his head.

When he got to the commons, the trench coat swung open, the ri e came out, and
he charged the crowd, emptying his 50-round magazine. Panic erupted, with high
schoolers running and screaming every which way. In the mayhem, Jacob Ryker, a
varsity wrestler already hit with a chest wound, suddenly tackled the shooter. The
ri e fell.

The shooter reached for the Glock in his belt, but so did Jacob, swatting the pistol
out of his grasp. It discharged a single shot, through the wrestler’s nger. That
would be the last bullet of the day. A half-dozen more students jumped into the
fray, and as police and teachers arrived, they could hear the shooter screaming
from the bottom of the pile, “I just want to die!” One classmate took the
opportunity to punch him in the face.

For the second day in a row, the shooter was taken from Thurston High School in
handcu fs, and brought to the police station. In the interview room the day
before, he had acted frightened, but the detectives now saw him transformed, like
a captive animal. He sobbed hysterically and screamed about how he had “no
other choice” but to do it; when they tried to calm him down, the boy (whose
hands were cu fed in front) reached down and drew a knife he had taped to his
ankle that morning, one the police had missed searching him, and he charged at
them with the blade pointed out, screaming, “Kill me, shoot me!”

Stunned, the cops lunged back, out of the room. They got the door between
themselves and the rampaging freshman, and held him back.

So he gave up, and started to turn the knife on himself. The police charged back
in, spraying mace, and subdued the shooter once again. They tore o f his trench
coat, looking for any more surprise weapons, and found he had taped two “X”

81
shapes onto his chest: each held in place a single round for one of his guns. He
hadn’t planned on leaving the commons alive.

The detectives were still trying to get their prisoner to calm down, so they changed
the subject: “How’s your dad?”

***
Colored lights illuminated the forest as the police raced toward Shangri-La. They
could hear classical music as they approached the address: Wagner’s Liebestod
from the opera Tristan und Isolde, recorded for the Romeo + Juliet lm
soundtrack, which the shooter had lef on repeat in the stereo, turned up to full-
blast.

The house was dark. One o cer peered in the front window, and clicked on her
ashlight: the living room carpet was covered with loose .22 rounds the shooter
had lef behind, glittering in the passing beam. On the co fee table, the search
team would nd a note, written by the shooter shortly af er he ambushed his
parents:

I destroy everything I touch. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I didn’t deserve

them. They were wonderful people. It’s not their fault or the fault of any
person, organization, or television show. My head just doesn’t work
right. God damn these VOICES inside my head. I want to die. I want
to be gone. But I have to kill people. I don’t know why. I am so sorry!

It was an apology for an act not yet done, as if the writer were caught up in the
terrible gravity of some passing force. But to most observers, his plotting would
suggest will — not fate.

***
In the days af er the shooting, the movie theater down the street from Shangri-La
arranged the letters on their marquee to illuminate a message of comfort for their
community:

WE HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG

The New York Tim ran a photo of the message, next to a gallery of portraits
showing each of the school shooters since Moses Lake, all of them smiling white
boys. Seen around the country, the marquee’s message was to be interpreted
di ferently:

THIS COULD HAPPEN IN YOUR TOWN

82
 9. Grand Adventure

April 1997
Depot Road — Kingston, New Hampshire
Just as her younger son was about to turn ve years old, Nancy brought him to a
doctor’s o ce. She was hoping for a second opinion.

The new doctor reported that Adam had a good sense of humor, was “friendly
[and] bright,” and even showed “good social language ability.” However, he also
con rmed, as the last doctor had had, that the boy displayed “many rituals” in his
behavior.

When the doctor was done running his tests, he gave Nancy the new diagnosis:
her son actually had “Sensory Integration Disorder.” Children with this condition
experience input through their senses at heightened levels, making even
moderately loud noises, or bright lights, intolerable. This sensitivity leaves them
fearful of their environment, and as a result, they can appear hard to engage in
conversation, or play.

It sounded like Adam. But even the existence of Sensory Integration Disorder was
somewhat controversial, in 1997. (It has since drif ed further from widespread
acceptance; as the Child Advocate would note in 2014, the disorder’s associated
symptoms “are [now] thought by many to be secondary to other conditions such
as autism, anxiety disorder, or attention-de cit disorder.”)

The clinician who suggested it to Nancy in 1997 was very con dent, though. And
Nancy herself was sold. Perhaps more importantly, Kingston was willing to go
along with it; Adam’s IEP was updated, and “signi cant” speech and language
supports were added back onto his special education plan. It was also
recommended that he work with an occupational therapist who was “certi ed in
sensory integration therapy.”

83
Lahey Clinic — Burlington, MA
Nancy brought Adam to a pediatric neurologist later that month, for a
developmental evaluation. This clinician’s notes record that her son was an
“extremely active young child,” who rarely slept through the night. He was “very
quiet in groups” during his preschool years, and did not like to be held, kissed, or
hugged.

Sanborn Regional School District

A month later, it was the school district’s turn again. They put Nancy’s son
through a pair of 100-point tests, separately measuring his “receptive” and
“expressive” language abilities: the resulting gap — between how much
communication Adam was able to understand, and what he was able to reproduce
spontaneously — was measured by a score di ference of 42 points. This shortfall
was so dramatic that it triggered a clinical concern that “his ability to make his
needs known in a variety of settings was extremely limited or delayed.”

Here, the Child Advocate investigators identify a signi cant missed opportunity:
the information from this language evaluation should have been compared with
the results of the neurological evaluation from the month before, as the
combination would have been “strongly suggestive of autism.” But instead, when
Adam’s 1997 IEP was restructured, it was only to focus on his diagnosed Sensory
Integration Disorder.

***
Records from Adam’s occupational therapy begin with a consultation in the fall
of 1997, when he would have started kindergarten. His evaluators were looking
out for ways in which his disability may have been preventing him from
completing everyday tasks; however, there is no indication that an expert in
sensory integration issues was ever involved in this process. (A fact which, likely,
indicates that none were available in the area).

The assigned (non-specialist) clinician further noted that Adam “displayed

inconsistent eye contact and scattered motor skills,” and that there had been
“reports of seizures in early childhood” — though any such reports themselves are
missing from the le. The Child Advocate would determine that it was unclear “if
the seizures would have been actual epileptic episodes or simply vasovagal
(fainting) episodes, or whether they were ever resolved through an in-depth
neurological assessment.”

Another gap appears just at the beginning of Adam’s K-12 public schooling: it is
not known which kindergarten he attended in Kingston that year — if any.
(When Kingston Police Chief Donald Briggs, Jr. was interviewed by Connecticut

84
authorities, he speculated that Adam may have gone to DJ Bakie Elementary, the
same school Nancy had attended as a little girl. But he couldn’t be sure.)

Over the course of these meetings with the school district in Kingston, at no point
was Adam subjected to a comprehensive evaluation of his educational abilities.
The sta f only ran speci c, diagnostic tests to measure against certain concerns,
particularly in his language development. And even outside the school system, in
all his visits with doctors in New Hampshire, there was never any comprehensive
clinical evaluation performed; once again, medical professionals were only called
upon to address isolated concerns, as they arose. Nancy had become very selective
about who she would allow to see her fragile, young son.

Kingston, New Hampshire

Once in awhile, Marvin would take the scouts out on trips together, what they
called COW — “Cub Overnight Weekends.” Ryan would go, and of en that
meant Adam would come along.

When Nancy rst heard about COW, she blurted “I want to volunteer!”, just like
she always did with the weekly meetings. But Marvin had bad news: the overnight
weekends were di ferent, a more traditional scouting event. They only accepted
male chaperones.

Nancy was stunned, and o fended. “What? I can’t believe that. That’s sexist!”

She pleaded her case, but there was nothing Marvin could do. Rules were rules,
and the cub scouts were a traditionally male institution. She eventually let it go,
but Marvin knew Nancy didn’t like to lose. And she didn’t like to be away from
Adam.

During one of the weekend trips, the scouts held a marksmanship competition.
Nancy visited that day — strictly as a parent supporting her boys — and Marvin
saw her watching closely, as the rearms instructor introduced Adam to a ri e for
the rst time. The man patiently coached the scouts through some safety drills,
and, “It was very, very, very, very detailed that way, very careful,” as Marvin recalls.
He remembers that Nancy was impressed with the responsibility on display; She
surely remembered how her own father had done the same for her, when she was
a little girl on the farm. “She had no fear of guns,” Marvin con rms, speaking with
Frontline. “She knew how to use them and she was extremely responsible and
safe.”

And so Adam Lanza red a gun, likely for the rst time in his life, at the age of
ve: a .22 ri e. Nancy brought Adam and his older brother over to Marvin’s
regularly af er that, on o f-days when the other scouts weren’t around, and the

85
boys practiced their aim on the makeshif range in the backyard. Marvin had a .22
they could use, and a high-powered air ri e (the kind commonly used to snu f out
snakes and rodents in rural New England). In Marvin’s memories of these days,
little Adam rarely even hit his target — let alone the center of it — his shots arcing
wide and plunking harmlessly into the sand-pit backstop. “None of the kids could
shoot very well,” Marvin explains, and he considered that normal for their age,
when even a .22 would feel heavy in their small hands.

The Lanzas also had a .45 pistol at home, and a .223 Ruger Mini-14 “ranch ri e.”
Adam grew up around guns, just like his mother had. Just like half of Kingston.

***
Adam dressed up for Halloween in 1997. A photo captures him that evening,
participating in a “kindergarten costume contest” (as the tabloid New York Daily
News would caption the image). The photo’s staging, at one end of an
auditorium, suggests that there is a crowd of parents watching from the other side
of the camera’s lens. Standing astride his classmates, Adam forces a closed smile,
staring at something o f to the side, out-of-frame. He is dressed in a costume-
military uniform, camou aged, with a mock “US ARMY” patch on his breast,
and a green plastic army helmet strapped onto his head.

Late 1997
Boston, Massachusetts
The Lanzas and the Lafontaines got to know each other, and even went on a few
double-dates, in the city. Nancy liked to show o f her capacity for remembering
trivia — never more so than when discussing wine. She relished the opportunity
to school the table on the di ferent vintages and their characteristics. And she liked
that Marvin had grown up in France, a culture that loved wine as much as she did.

Marvin noticed that, like Nancy, Peter was smart, and well-read. Good at
conversation. He didn't seem to be much of a drinker, though.

The Lanzas had an update on their lawsuit: John Hancock had o fered a
settlement, and they had accepted, receiving a substantial payout for Nancy’s pain
and su fering. (Marvin’s memory is hazy, but Nancy characterized the outcome to
him as “comfortably well-o f, or something like that.”)

The depositions had been ongoing while Adam was in preschool, resulting in
Nancy arguing in court that her pregnancy had been di cult, but her son
“healthy,” while at the same time exhausting herself in searching for an answer for
Adam’s problems. Her life had changed so much since losing her job, Nancy

86
didn’t think she would ever be returning to the workforce. And that was ne. She
could sacri ce anything for him.

***
Nancy and Marvin went to see the lm Titanic when it hit theaters. Af er the
credits rolled, Nancy turned to him and shared her take on the lm’s ending,
observing that the hero Jack would have survived the shipwreck if his true love,
Rose, had just stayed aboard the lifeboat that was o fered to her earlier in the lm,
rather than jumping back onto the sinking ship to stay with him. In the long run,
her romantic gesture had cost her true love his life. (The conversation was
reminiscent of how Nancy talked about one of her favorite lms, Casablanca; she
was always toying with the di ferent possible outcomes — if only a few scenes had
gone di ferently.)

***
Marvin and Nancy started meeting for dinner alone once a month, in Boston. The
talk got serious, sometimes, and Nancy would share some of her most private fears
with Marvin: of en, they were about Adam’s development. He was so fragile, and
she had been trying desperately to gure out what she needed to do to make him
stronger. Though there had been moments of hope over the past three years, he
remained a timid, almost silent child. Nancy seemed to be getting desperate. “It
was hard on her,” Marvin recalls. “I could see it was bringing her down. She didn’t
know what to do.”

There had been those rare times, however, when her son actually seemed in
harmony with his environment. Usually, it happened outdoors — family would
spot him picking up litter, and he liked to climb rocks, once telling a relative that
he “wanted to climb every mountain in New Hampshire.” These were mostly
solitary activities, though, and his unease around strangers and crowds wasn’t
improving. In fact, as far as Marvin could tell, it seemed like Adam was actually
getting worse.

Early 1998
Depot Road — Kingston, New Hampshire
One day, Peter had some big news for Nancy. The corporation General Electric
had just o fered him a lucrative new job: a Tax Leader, in charge of some of the
company’s most complex transactions and partnerships, areas in which he had
worked hard to specialize. The pay would be unbelievable; it was just the sort of
opportunity Nancy and Peter had hoped for as newlyweds, back when they placed
their bets on him as their breadwinner. Now they had, with little exaggeration,
just hit the jackpot.

87
But the news wasn’t all good: GE’s headquarters were almost 200 miles away, in
Stamford, Connecticut. In order to accept the prize, the Lanza family would have
to uproot, and leave their life in Kingston behind.

When Nancy told Marvin, he was stunned. He didn’t want her to go. And Nancy
confessed that she really didn’t want to leave Kingston, either; by this point, she
had already shared concerns with Marvin that her marriage was in trouble. With
Peter working all the time, and Nancy consumed with taking care of their disabled
son, they had been drif ing further and further apart.

Still, the GE salary was not an opportunity to be ignored. For the Lanzas, it would
mean nancial security, and even luxury. How could they say no?

Soon, the Lanza house, built on the slice of land that used to be part of the
Champion homestead, was on the market. Nancy’s family were especially
saddened by the news; her mother had given them the land in order to keep the
extended family together, and it was no small thing to be walking away from that
now. It was going to be a scary transition for Nancy, too. She had never really
known a life detached from the farm on Depot Road, and nor had her boys; they
would be starting all over, with new friends, a new house, and new schools, the
family setting out together into the great unknown.

Ultimately, she decided to do it for Adam. She knew her son needed help, and she
felt that the school systems in Connecticut would be better equipped to provide it
for him. She researched school districts near Stamford that sounded the most
promising for special-needs students, and she also heard that many GE executives
were building homes in a town in Fair eld County, called Newtown. It turned
out that there was a small public school there, Sandy Hook Elementary, that had
excellent ratings. It sounded like just what she was looking for.

***
Soon, construction began on what would be the Lanza family’s new home, in
Sandy Hook. When it was nished, in the summer of 1998, they packed up their
life, and lef the old family plot behind — headed south, toward what Nancy
called their “grand adventure.”

Later, re ecting on the departure of the family he had grown so close to, Marvin
Lafontaine had a realization: that in all the time that he knew Adam Lanza, he
never heard the boy speak a single word.

88
 10. Snowdrop
(a seri of events taking place mainly in Scotland)

13th August, 1974

Falkirk Royal In rmary — Falkirk, Scotland
A surgeon was pacing back and forth in his o ce, troubled about his next
meeting. It wasn’t going to be with a patient; in fact, it wasn’t even o cial
hospital business. In his free time, he was an Area Commissioner for the Scottish
Boy Scouts, and today, the organization was calling on him to address a serious
matter within its ranks: it seemed there were several parents of scouts out in the
village of Dunblane, who no longer trusted one of the local scoutmasters around
their boys.

It had all started with an overnight hiking trip: the parents had paid for the scouts,
ages 7 to 10, to stay at a youth hostel near the trail head, a few towns over, and for
the scoutmaster to rent a van for the trip. Pretty normal stu f. But as soon as the
boys got back to Dunblane, the complaints started coming in: the scouts revealed
to their parents that they had not stayed at the youth hostel af er all. Instead, the
scoutmaster had made them all sleep in the van. With him.

The scoutmaster hadn’t touched them, they all said. But it was still an
inappropriate situation, and a far cry from the accommodations the parents had
paid for: while the scoutmaster had slept comfortably in the cushioned front seat,
their boys had to sleep on the van’s bare oor, with frigid winds raging outside. It
got so cold, the van froze up, and they had to get it towed back into town the next
morning.

The local troop in Dunblane investigated the matter rst. They knew the young
scoutmaster well; he was 22, and it was only his second year in Scouts leadership
— but before that, he had been a scout himself, growing up through the ranks
until he was nally ready for a troop of his own. And, as was routine, before
granting him his leadership badge (the symbol that he was worthy of protecting a
troop of scouts) the Dunblane o cials had gone about vetting the aspiring
scoutmaster’s personal life: they found that he was a bachelor, aged 22, with no
kids of his own; he lived at home, with his parents. He owned a woodcraf shop in

89
Dunblane, and he was a bit of an odd one, perhaps — “nervous” was a common
descriptor — but many people in the village were quite fond of him. He had no
criminal record, and as far as anyone could tell, had never been in trouble in his
whole life.

Af er the complaints came in, the Dunblane scouts asked the young man: what
happened with the van?

He had apologized, very embarrassed, and explained that the whole ordeal was
nothing more than a simple mix-up with the reservations: when they got to the
hostel that night, all the rooms were taken, and it was getting too late to head all
the way back to Dunblane. He never planned for them to sleep in the van, but it
was all he could think of.

The scouts decided to let him o f with a warning. And that should have been the
end of it.

Instead, three weeks later, the exact same thing happened: another hiking trip,
another group of boys spending another cold night in the scoutmaster’s van, and
another batch of angry parents. This time, the local commissioner called the
youth hostel, to check out the story; the proprietor there sounded confused, and
could only answer that they had never spoken to the scoutmaster from Dunblane.
Never even heard of the man.

That was when the case crossed the surgeon’s desk. Along with it in the folder, the
troop from Dunblane had attached their recommendation: withdraw the
scoutmaster’s leadership badge, and kick him out of the scouts. The surgeon had
decided to hold o f, and meet the young man face-to-face before he made any nal
ruling.

There was a knock at the o ce door, and in walked the scoutmaster. He was a
balding, chubby, white man, with an aura of discomfort about him. Almost
before the surgeon could even introduce himself, the young man began feverishly
trying to explain away what had happened, “rambling on in di ferent directions”
as the surgeon would recall. “It actually gave me more and more cause for concern,
because I didn’t think he was a particularly stable person, and I was very glad that
we were taking the step to have him removed from the scout movement.”

The surgeon told the scoutmaster to make a choice: either resign, and turn over
your leadership badge, or be kicked out. Crestfallen, the young man agreed to step
down.

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But then a week went by. And then another, and another, and the scouts were still
waiting to get their badge back. Headquarters sent the young man several stern
letters, demanding he return their badge, but they went ignored. Finally, the
surgeon led paperwork to have the young man blacklisted from the scouts,
secretly communicating to every troop in the land that his name was never to be
trusted again. The doctor explained why in his letter to headquarters:

While unable to give concrete evidence against th man I feel that too
many “incidents” relate to him such that I am far from happy about h
having any association with Scouts. [...] H personality displays evidence
of a persecution complex, coupled with rather grandiose delusions of h
own abiliti . As a doctor, and with my clinical acumen only, I am
suspicio of h moral intentions towards boys.

The surgeon emphasized that he was not a psychiatrist, but had simply developed
a certain conversational method af er practicing medicine for decades; over the
course of their meeting, he had spoken with the scoutmaster “like I would assess a
patient [to] come to a diagnosis,” and of their conversation that day, he would
later say (though the term was not yet known to him in the 1970s) that it led him
to believe the scoutmaster was “a paedophile.”

The blacklisting worked. Word went out about the fallen scoutmaster, and soon,
scout troops in neighboring towns reported that a man who t the scoutmaster’s
description was already trying to set up a scout troop there, wearing the badge
they knew, now, was no-good. They duly turned him away.

Finally, months af er it was due, a parcel arrived at Scottish Scouts headquarters,

containing the missing leadership badge — along with a complaint about the
surgeon. “He is almost unapproachable and completely unreasonable,” the
scoutmaster wrote. “I will now discontinue the thought of holding [the badge] as
I do not want my good name to be part of this so-called organization...”

14th February, 1977

Central Scotland Police Department — Dunblane Station
The Deputy Chief Constable received a new application for a Firearms Certi cate:
there was a young man from Stirling, near Dunblane, who wanted to own a
handgun.

In the United Kingdom, licensed rearms owners were required to supply a “good
reason” for owning a handgun — typically, their membership with a local gun
club. The man from Stirling (who apparently was, or had been, a scoutmaster)

91
listed just such a club. He had no criminal record, and had paid the application
fee. The Deputy Constable stamped his application “APPROVED.”

***
The man had shown a keen interest in rearms since he was at least sixteen. He
had even set up a makeshif ring range in the back of his wood shop, where he
shot air ri es. But now, he could get the real thing: his certi cate allowed him to
purchase a .22 revolver pistol, and up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Two years later, he was approved for an upgraded certi cate. He went out and
bought a .357 Smith & Wesson — another revolver, but a signi cant step-up in
repower. He sold the .22 soon af er, deciding it was “for sissies.”

15th November, 1984

Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s O ce — Edinburgh
A lengthy complaint arrived at Central Scotland’s government o ces. It was
submitted by a 32-year-old man in Stirling, who said that his civil rights were
being violated: for years, he had been organizing “boys’ clubs” — the same
concept as the o cial scouts, but with no a liation — for the youths in the
Dunblane area, until suddenly, the local council had informed him that he was
not permitted to rent the gyms at their high schools anymore. And without access
to the gyms, he couldn’t run his boys’ clubs; it was like losing his leadership badge,
all over again.

He went on in his letter, writing that the local council wouldn’t even give him a
reason for cutting him o f, though he believed they were acting on “malicious
gossip and unfounded allegations without investigation.” He begged the
government to investigate. He attached 70 letters of support, signed by parents in
the community.

As the scouts had done, the Ombudsman’s o ce opened a formal investigation.

The village of Dunblane con rmed that they had banned the man from renting
the gyms, and that they had kept him in the dark as to why they had done so: out
of concern that too many townspeople were getting the false impression that the
man running the clubs was somehow a liated with the mainstream Scottish Boy
Scouts. The man even seemed to be encouraging such confusion, giving his boys’
clubs names that were nearly identical to names that the mainstream scouts had
just retired, and obscuring the independence of his operation wherever possible.

When the Ombudsman's o ce contacted Scouts headquarters to clear up the

matter, they were then put in touch with a senior o cial with the scouts: a

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surgeon, from Falkirk. This man con rmed that no, the scouts absolutely did not
sanction anything the man in Stirling was doing. He was blacklisted seven years
ago, and now he was going around setting up his own knocko f boys’ clubs
around Dunblane, trying to regain the aura of his old leadership badge. It was was
if, somewhere in his mind, he still saw himself as a scoutmaster.

To this, the Dunblane o cials added their own concern about the scoutmaster:
that despite all the letters of support, even more parents had registered complaints.

One father in Dunblane had an experience that was typical: he had enrolled his
son in a boys’ club — one that sounded o cial, but turned out to be one of the
scoutmaster’s renegade operations — and then, a few weeks in, his son skipped a
meeting. The next thing the father knew, there was a letter in his mailbox from the
scoutmaster, addressed to his ten-year-old son. The letter stressed “how important
regular attendance was,” and demanded an explanation for the boy’s absence. It
almost seemed like some kind of “reprimand,” the father thought. And, oddly, the
envelope had no postage; a neighbor told them he had seen a man in a raincoat
deliver it by hand, in the middle of the night.

The boy’s mother was furious. She got the scoutmaster on the phone. “How dare
you write to my son? He is in the Cubs, he goes to school, he goes to a swimming
club. If he is absent from there, they don’t write to him, they write to me as the
parent!”

On the other end of the line, the scoutmaster remained calm. He pronounced his
words very clearly. He said he wanted to come over and talk to their son face-to-
face, and hear his explanation for himself. Startled, the boy’s mother hung up.

The parents waited until the next week’s meeting. They dropped o f their son at a
friend’s house, and then went to Dunblane High School, to see what the
scoutmaster’s clubs were really like.

As the adults stepped into the high school gymnasium, already something seemed
o f: “There were a large number of small boys in shorts stripped to the waist being
bossed around by two or three middle-aged men, swaggering around in a very
military-type way.” And the scoutmaster was visibly aggressive about the
gymnastics routines, with the boys hurrying through the stations “looking like the
Hitler Youth.”

Meanwhile, the scoutmaster was plainly aware of the parents’ presence on the
sidelines. But the strange thing was, he never broke from shouting his instructions
at the boys. He never acknowledged the parents at all. There was a palpably
“sinister” aura that the mother from Dunblane could feel, and before she could

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say so, her husband was asking if she could feel it, too. “We decided on the spot
that our son was not going to stay in the club.”

***
The following night, during a heavy rain, there was a knock at their front door.
The father answered — and found the scoutmaster standing on his doorstep, in
his raincoat. The expressionless gure stepped over the threshold, and asked to
speak to the boy.

“Absolutely not,” the father said.

The scoutmaster said he deserved an explanation.

The father got angry. “I don’t have to give you reasons why a ten year old boy is
not coming back!” It was his decision as the boy’s father, he explained, and that
was all that mattered.

“What are you implying about my club?” the scoutmaster demanded, his nerves
beginning to show.

The father said he was not implying anything, he just did not feel the club was
right for his son, and that there would be nothing further to discuss about it.

The scoutmaster turned on his heel, ipped up the hood of his raincoat, and lef .
“There was a fairly restrained hostility about him,” the father would recall of the
scoutmaster. “He was more con dent with children than with adults.”

The two parents decided to spread the word around Dunblane, that the rogue
scoutmaster was not to be trusted. Soon, attendance at his clubs dwindled — and
then the scoutmaster was showing up on more doorsteps, demanding
explanations from more families. Some told him they were uncomfortable with
how he always insisted that the boys do their exercises while wearing black trunks,
with no shirt. And that he always videotaped them. The scoutmaster protested
that he was only bringing the videos back to his at so that he could study the
boys’ gymnastics mobility, for coaching purposes. If anyone was concerned about
a video’s content, he would gladly screen it for them.

17th August, 1986

Private Residence — Falkirk
The Ombudsman’s O ce nally issued its decision, and the surgeon obtained a
copy. Scotland had determined that the local council in Dunblane had been
“unjust” in withdrawing the scoutmaster’s gym access, and that the town’s

94
treatment of him was “an injustice.” Further, the Ombudsman found that, “The
evidence that [his club] was well-run and was supported by parents was ignored,
in favour of complaints which proved to be little better than gossip.”

The surgeon from Falkirk was taken aback. It was as if they had completely
ignored his warnings: the man was blacklisted by the Scouts. What more evidence
did you need that the was un t to run a boys’ club?

And then he saw: there was a surprising document in the report — a letter
addressed to him, written by the scoutmaster, and dated from 1974. It was a “letter
of resignation,” accusing the surgeon of purchasing wine and beer for his scouts,
and claiming that the scoutmaster was returning his leadership badge in protest.

The letter was a fraud, and it had worked.

There was a knock at the surgeon’s front door. It was the scoutmaster, in his
raincoat.

Staring into the middle distance with glazed eyes, the nervous man told the
surgeon that, years ago, thanks to the blacklisting, “His life had been ruined by
malicious rumors about his behaviors and his views.” The rumors were indeed all
over Dunblane, but it appeared that the scoutmaster's recent public vindication
had now emboldened him. He was more determined than ever: he said he wanted
back into the Scouts.

Again, the surgeon turned him down at.

The scoutmaster demanded to see the blacklist. He had to know, once and for all,
if his name was on it. The uncertainty was consuming him.

The surgeon denied that any such list even existed — standard procedure — and
throughout their ensuing back-and-forth, he mostly just felt sad for the fallen
scoutmaster; the man had only gotten worse in the years since their meeting at the
in rmary. The scoutmaster was “even more obsessional” now, and from the look
in his eyes, the doctor “wouldn’t have been surprised if he was currently on
psychiatric drugs.”

He wasn’t.

19th August, 1987

Hungerford, England
Across the kingdom from Dunblane, on a clear af ernoon, a 25-year-old man who
lived with his mother stepped out the front door of his home wearing military

95
fatigues, and carrying an arsenal. He proceeded to stroll back and forth around his
neighborhood, shooting at everyone he saw; when a policeman happened to drive
by, he shot at him. And when his mother came home from work, desperate to try
to talk some sense into her rampaging son, he shot her too. With law enforcement
closing in, he fell back to a nearby college where he had once been a student,
barricaded himself in one of the classrooms, and eventually took his own life.

Once the dust settled, Hungerford was one of the worst peacetime massacres in
UK history. The police determined that the primary weapon the shooter had used
in the attack was what looked like an AK-47, but was actually a semi-automatic
knock-o f imported from China: the Norinco 56S. The shooter had purchased it
legally, as he had all his other guns. His rearms license was perfectly valid, and he
held membership in several of the requisite gun clubs.

The system had worked as designed. And the UK was outraged.

Britain’s gun lobbies tried to get ahead of the shockwave, with the British
Shooting Sports Council announcing a $160,000 publicity campaign to “ ght any
change in gun laws” that came about as a result of attacks from “nut cases” — but
it was to no avail. The Firearms Amendment Act of 1988 mandated that every
citizen of the Crown turn over their ri es — all but the “small bore” .22’s.

Gun owners said it was an injustice. But it wasn’t a total ban, just a ban on ri es:
everyone could keep their handguns.

Central Scotland Police Department — Dunblane Station

The scoutmaster already knew many of the local police, both through his visits to
their gun ranges and through his long feud with the local council. And they knew
him back; af er the station announced that everyone would have to come in and
surrender their large-bore ri es, they recognized him standing in line: the pudgy,
nervous, balding man, holding a bag. He had been steadily upgrading his gun
license over the years, and only recently unlocked permission to obtain his .223
Browning ri e — a center re ri e using the same .223 Remington round as
weapons like the Colt Sporter — and already here he was, having to surrender it.
They didn’t even pay him its full value (as he was careful to note in a written
complaint).

The scoutmaster comforted himself with the purchase of a new, still-legal rearm:
a Browning handgun, this one a 9mm semi-automatic, with a 13-shot magazine.
He purchased over a thousand rounds for it.

96
20th July, 1988
Island of Inchmoan — Loch Lomond
This time, the complaints came straight to the police switchboard: there was a
summer camp for boys, held on an island out on the lake, and something was
wrong out there. The camp was just a one-man operation — and had actually
been quite popular when it rst opened — but gradually, more and more boys
were taking rowboats back to the mainland, and calling their parents for a ride
home.

Many of the reports mentioned that the man on the island was videotaping the
boys, and insisting that they all wear the same ill- tting black trunks. “Nothing
sexual took place,” the reports all agreed, but the man “ran a very authoritarian
regime and assaulted the boys by punching and slapping them for misdemeanors.
He seemed to enjoy pushing the boys about.”

The Police Constable — the same who regularly renewed the scoutmaster’s
rearms license — decided to send out a few o cers from the Child Protection
Unit to check out the camp.

The o cers reported back that the place was “in dirty and untidy condition,” and
that it appeared that the scoutmaster had been sharing a tent with his scouts —
but neither was unusual, nor illegal. They interviewed the scoutmaster, and asked
if he had struck any of the boys; he explained that he had only hit one child, and
he was a boy who was bullying the others, and misbehaving. It was disciplinary.

The o cers interviewed every boy on the island. Mostly, their stories backed up
the scoutmaster’s: the child he had hit was indeed acting out, and the boys all
con rmed that they felt safe there. Presented with an o fer of a ride home, the
boys each said no.

But one boy told a story that was di ferent from all the rest: the ten-year-old
claimed that the scoutmaster had taken him aside, alone, and given him a pair red
trunks to put on. The scoutmaster had the boy pose wearing the red shorts, while
he snapped photos. When he was done, the scoutmaster made him change back
into black trunks, and then they both went back to the group’s activities, not
saying a word to anyone.

The o cers immediately asked the scoutmaster about the red trunks. He denied
the story. The police didn’t have any evidence to the contrary, but they made a
note: subpoena all of the man’s photos from that summer camp. Look for a boy
in red shorts.

97
 ***
Later in the investigation, several boys reported another disturbing incident: the
scoutmaster had taken them to a smaller island on the lake, bringing along his
video camera. When they got there, he made them act in a sort of homemade lm,
during which one of the boys was “forced to lie in cold water against his wishes.”
When the boys asked if they could put on warmer clothes, the scoutmaster angrily
refused.

The investigators found the video camera, and seized the tape. They brought it
back to the station to see what it contained: it turned out that the scoutmaster’s
amateur movie was similar to Lord of the Fli , with a group of boys shipwrecked
alone on a deserted island. The scouts — supposed-actors in the video — were all
cold, shivering in the rain, and visibly afraid. Each of them were wearing a pair of
black trunks.

The police then turned to the boxes of photos the scoutmaster had taken on the
island. There were 279 undeveloped slides and 72 photographs, and they all
showed the boys in groups, doing their exercises in the familiar black trunks. One
boy was clearly a favorite; the camera lingered on him. It was the same boy who
had reported the red trunks incident — but in all of the photos, he was wearing
black trunks, the same as all of his friends.

Then, at the bottom of the last box, the police found an invoice from the photo
processor; it showed that the scoutmaster had paid for two more boxes,
containing 36 photos that he had apparently not turned over. The police asked
him where the missing photos were; the scoutmaster said there were none. It was
just an error in the count. He had given them everything.

***
The police couldn’t get a search warrant unless a crime was alleged to have taken
place; so, they got to work on a list of proposed charges for the prosecutor. They
came up with ten: from breach of the peace (for yelling at the kids), to
endangering children (by lack of supervision), all the way to obstruction (for not
turning over all the photos). They faxed the list to the prosecutor’s o ce, and
crossed their ngers.

It all came to nothing. There just wasn’t any evidence of a clear crime. And it
wasn’t in the public’s interest for the prosecutor’s o ce to bring a case they
couldn’t win. Their o ce stamped the document “no pro” — not prosecuting —
and the charges were dropped. The scoutmaster had won again.

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16th May, 1989
Linlithgow Academy Secondary School
It was evening. A mother from Dunblane was waiting in the shadows in the
school’s parking lot, ready for the scoutmaster to appear. She believed all the
rumors about him; her son had been one of the boys on the island last summer,
and when he returned home, he told her about one day on the beach there: how
the scoutmaster made the boys apply suntan oil to him, all over his chest and
stomach. So, waiting in the shadows, she had ready in her hands a whole bucket of
suntan oil — plus some other substances mixed in: “oil, liquid manure, vinegar,
our and sh manure... any rubbish stinking stu f I could put my hands on.”

When she saw the scoutmaster exiting the gymnasium, locking up af er one of his
weekly club meetings, she pounced from the shadows, and poured the bucket
over the man’s head.

She knew how ercely the scoutmaster protected his reputation, and she had
arranged for a photographer from the local newspaper to be there, to capture the
pudgy man’s reaction. Her goal was to provoke the scoutmaster into suing her —
so that as part of the lawsuit, there might nally be a thorough investigation into
his activities. But, to her surprise, the scoutmaster just stood there, calmly
dripping with lth as the cameraman’s shutter clicked away. The scoutmaster
didn’t even raise his voice; whatever he was feeling during this moment of
humiliation, he kept it all inside. And he did not sue.

***
The police never did nd the missing 36 photos that the scoutmaster took.
Meanwhile, his neighbors didn’t even know about the investigation; but around
the same time as it was going on, they were complaining to each other about the
odd man’s late-night backyard res — the smoke waf ing up through their cracked
windows that summer was black and acrid, like burning plastic.

11th November, 1991

Central Scotland Police Department — Dunblane Station
An o cer from the Child Protection Unit came to his chie ’s o ce, with a memo
in his hand. He had seen the scoutmaster’s camp, and he had interviewed the boys
there. Maybe there wasn’t enough to arrest the scoutmaster, but he wanted their
institution to do what they could:

I firmly believe that he h an extremely unhealthy interest in young

boys which to a degree appears to have been controlled to date… I would
contend that [he] will be a risk to children whenever he h access to

99
 them... I respectfully request that serio consideration given to
withdrawing th man’s firearms certificate a precautionary measure
it my opinion that he a scheming, devio and deceitful
individual who not to be trusted.

This o cer had felt suspicions about the scoutmaster from the beginning. When
he had submitted his report of what he saw out on the island, he even included his
own o anded observation: that, “If a child of my own had been at this camp, I
would have no hesitation in taking him away.”

As such reports were public documents, the scoutmaster, looking through his
own case le, eventually read the o cer’s comment. And it enraged him like
nothing else before. Thereaf er, his unending stream of complaint letters took a
noticeable turn, and started to incorporate paranoia over a supposed
“Brotherhood Conspiracy,” in which the police and the scouts were collaborating
to deny him access to the town’s boys.

But the local chief didn’t nd the o cer’s warnings then, or his memo now, quite
so compelling. He passed the memo along to the Deputy Constable, and noted
that while he “appreciated the concern” expressed in it, he “could not
recommend” revoking the scoutmaster’s certi cate, because the local prosecutor
had already said there was no case — how, af er all, could they penalize the
scoutmaster for a crime he was never even charged with?

The DCC stamped the policeman’s memo “no action,” and once again, signed a
renewal of the scoutmaster’s rearms license.

29th June, 1992

Intersection at Old Doune Road — Dunblane
The scoutmaster changed strategies. He called o f his summer camps, and started
hosting “residential sports training courses” instead — shorter, weekend events —
back at the school buildings.

Late one night, a policeman was on patrol in Dunblane, when in his headlights he
saw three young boys in their pajamas, walking unattended along the side of the
road. He slowed, and rolled down his window; the boys told him they had been
“at a boys’ camp at Dunblane High School” when they had grown homesick, but
the man in charge of the club would not allow them to telephone their parents.
So, they had snuck out.

The scoutmaster explained the incident away, like he always did. But one
representative from the Child Protection O ce wasn't buying it. She submitted a

100
memorandum to the Regional Council, urging them to once again terminate the
man’s access to the schools:

I feel that the events of 29 June 1992 in Dunblane in a sense serve a

warning. If the kind of circumstanc described are allowed to
continue without some kind of intervention, I consider that other
children may be placed at risk. In like situations arising unchecked, I
fear that a tragedy to a child or children almost waiting to happen.

The council agreed. Once again, revoked scoutmaster’s gym privileges.

This time, as much as the man protested, there was no reprieve. The
Ombudsman’s o ce was not listening. And there was no groundswell of support
from trusting parents; the years of rumors, coupled with the scoutmaster’s
disturbing behavior, had taken their toll.

***
A copy of the Child Protection memo found its way to the prosecutor’s o ce in
Dunblane. Again, the prosecutor marked it “no pro: not a crime.”

13th February, 1995

Private Residence — Kent Road, Stirling
Four years had passed since the concerned o cer’s memo to the DCC, and the
scoutmaster’s rearms license was again up for renewal. But the requirements had
changed in that time; a Constable would have to come out to the scoutmaster’s
home, interview him face-to-face, and inspect his guns.

The scoutmaster’s mother had passed away back in 1987, around the time of all
the trouble out on the island, and his father, now elderly, had since moved into
assisted living. The at in Stirling was now his undisputed domain.

Meanwhile, the Constable that the police sent there was new in town.

The scoutmaster seemed nervous when he answered the door, like he was hiding
something inside, just out of her view. But even if he was, she had no authority to
search; she was only there to verify that he was in compliance with the certi cate.

As the Constable was copying down the membership info from the scoutmaster’s
gun club card, the man took out a large .357 revolver; she saw a peculiar look in his
eye, “sort of like he was gloating,” and she got the distinct impression he was
trying to intimidate her — stroking the gun as if to convey, “Look what I’ve got.”

101
She quickly nished lling out the inspection form, and lef , glad to be away from
there. Something about the man just made her uncomfortable.

She signed the renewal, one that was actually an expansion of the certi cate. It
authorized him to purchase a second 9mm pistol.

9th September, 1995

York Guns — North Yorkshire, England
The shop’s owner was on duty, when the phone rang. It was a man from
Dunblane, asking what handguns they sold. The gunsmith described his stock,
and suggested a 9mm semi-automatic — a Browning, similar to the one that this
customer already owned. But fancier. The scoutmaster said it sounded like a deal,
and he sent his cheque for £304 by post, along with a copy of his rearms license.
A few days later, he got his newest handgun.

He bought some expanded magazines for it, so he could re 20 rounds of 9mm

before having to reload, rather than the standard 13. And, af er ve years without
any ammunition purchases on record, by the end of that fall, the scoutmaster’s
certi cate would show he purchased nearly 2,500 rounds.

26th January, 1996

Dunblane Primary School
The school’s head teacher was getting ready for the day, when the mail clerk
dropped a letter on his desk. It was another dispatch from the strange man who
sometimes ran boys’ clubs in the area; he was sending copies to every school in
town. As always, he complained about rumors being spread about him:

At Dunblane Primary School, where teachers have contaminated all of

the older boys with th poison, even former cleaners and dinner ladi
have been told by teachers at school that I am a pervert. There have
been reports at many schools of our boys being rounded up by staff and
even warnings given to entire schools by head teachers during
Assembly.... All of th h been extremely damaging over the years, not
only to my clubs but to my public standing, and h resulted in a
complete loss of my ability to earn a living.

The head teacher had gotten used to ignoring inane missives such as these. Af er
all, even if he took them seriously, what was he supposed to do?

102
4th February, 1996
Private Residence — Kent Rd, Stirling
A longtime friend of the scoutmaster’s, a young man who had assisted with some
of his boys’ clubs in the early years, stopped by his at one day to check on him.

The man who greeted him seemed depressed, but invited him in. The scoutmaster
was cleaning his guns as they talked, and had his new 9mm in his hand when he
suddenly asked his old friend a surprising question: “If you had any sons, would
you let them go to my clubs?”

His friend didn’t even have to think it over. “No.”

The scoutmaster suddenly pointed the gun at him, and pulled the trigger.

It wasn’t loaded, and produced only a click, but it gave the scoutmaster’s guest —
who was in the middle of sipping his co fee — an awful fright. The friend cursed
the scoutmaster, threw the co fee in his face, called him a “stupid bastard,” and
stormed out. He resolved never to contact the awful man ever again — but he
didn’t report the incident to police, certain that, “He would just have denied it.”

2nd March, 1996

Inverclyde Shooting Range
The scoutmaster was becoming a distraction to the other members of the gun
club. They were trying to run through careful, timed drills, shooting at a series of
silhouette-shaped targets — but the moment the range o cer blew the whistle,
the scoutmaster would just blast away with his 9mm handgun, “as fast as he could
pull the trigger, basically.” It really irritated the range o cer... but following the
practice drills wasn’t mandatory, and the scoutmaster wasn’t breaking any rules.
So he let him continue.

11th March, 1996

Buckingham Palace — London
The ueen’s private secretaries received a letter from a man in Dunblane; it was
the scoutmaster, begging for Her Majesty’s help as a patron of the Scottish Scouts.

It was much the same complaint he had been writing for the last 20 years, but this
time, with an air of nality. “The rumours circulated by o cials of the Scout
Association have now reached epidemic proportions across Central Region,” he
wrote. “As well as my personal distress and loss of public standing, this situation
has also resulted in loss of my business and ability to earn a living. Indeed, I

103
cannot even walk the streets for fear of embarrassing ridicule...I turn to you as a
last resort, and am appealing for some kind of intervention in the hope that I may
be able to regain my self-esteem in society.”

12th March, 1996

Findlay Guy Van Hire — Stirling
Shortly before 3pm, a pudgy, balding fellow from Dunblane came in to the rental
shop. He said he wanted to rent a van, just for a day. The clerk had never met the
man before, but, “He unnerved me quite a bit,” she would recall; a vague
uneasiness settled over her from the moment they started talking, and lingered
well af er. It was “the way he spoke, mainly,” because, “He spoke very slowly, very
clearly, precisely, but with no emotion or expression. [There] was just nothing,
nothing in there. You couldn’t have held a conversation with him.”

***
When the scoutmaster got back to his at, he returned a call that was on his
message machine: an old client, from his wood shop days. They chatted about
kitchen xtures for a while, but then the other party noticed the scoutmaster had
grown quiet; suddenly, and unrelated to anything they were talking about, the
scoutmaster said “that he was quite a lonely person, and that it wasn’t good to be
alone for all your life.”

13th March, 1996

Dunblane Primary School
The white van was seen at 9:30am, creeping slowly into the parking lot of the
primary school. The driver parked near a telephone pole, and stepped out: a
pudgy man wearing black trousers, a black knit cap, and a dark jacket.

He spread out a tool wrap on the pavement, took out a pair of wire snippers, and
cut the phone line at the base of the pole.

At approximately 9:38am, he was seen again, standing just inside the open
doorway of the school’s gymnasium. A group of teachers were about to begin
instruction of a Primary 1 gymnastics class, when they looked up and saw a “dark
gure,” with a gun in his hand. He had put black ear protectors on over his knit
cap, and there was a black camera bag strapped over one of his shoulders — but
there was no camera in it. The compartments held 25 extended magazines for a
Browning pistol. He had three handguns holstered around his waist: two .357
magnum revolvers, and one of his Browning 9mm semi-automatics. The other
Browning, the fancier one, was in his hand.

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The scoutmaster shot the teachers, and then he shot the students.

***
Viewed from the sky above Dunblane, the primary school was laid out in a giant,
capital “H” shape, with the school’s gymnasium part of the middle span; at the
south end of east pillar was one of the art rooms. From across the gap, the art
teacher there heard the gun re, and looked across the playground to the gym, the
two windows by chance aligning; the teacher saw the shooter, from the waist up: a
man dressed in black, and pointing what looked like a handgun, calmly pacing
around and ring it at something down low, below the teacher’s cropped frame of
view.

Just as suddenly as the teacher could comprehend what he was seeing, the gunman
in the gym abruptly stopped in tracks, and drew a revolver from his hip. He raised
the gun to his own head, jolted for a moment — and then he fell, backward, out
of view.

***
29th May, 1996
The Albert Halls, Stirling, UK
Two and a half months af er the attack, the town’s great concert hall took on the
atmosphere of a courtroom, with members of the national press crowding in
alongside the townspeople, to see the Honorable Lord William Cullen conduct
the proceedings.

At the far end of the hall, a forum of advocates looked on: one of them would
speak on behalf of the teachers’ association, another for the victims’ families,
another for the town, another for the school, and nally, the police. Lord Cullen’s
charge would be simple: “To inquire into the circumstances leading up to and
surrounding the events at Dunblane Primary School on Wednesday 13 March
1996, to consider the issues arising therefrom; and to make such interim and nal
recommendations as may seem appropriate.”

To begin, the police gave a summary of the evidence they’d found so far: the rst
responders had identi ed the scoutmaster immediately that morning — right
where they found him, twitching on the oor of the gymnasium — based on their
many run-ins with him over the years. A unit was thus dispatched to search the
scoutmaster’s at (something they were never quite able to do while he was alive),
and there they found what looked like a life abandoned, just as it was collapsing in
on itself: on a counter top, bundles of the shooter’s unsent letters, desperately

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defending his reputation; along the wall, hundreds of rounds of ammunition in
stacked boxes; on the kitchen table, a phone book, opened to the page with the
address for Dunblane Primary School.

Police eventually found the videos he’d taken. Scanning through them, the o cers
found that there were no obscene sequences — just an obscene amount of them.
Always of boys, always in the same black trunks.

Then, in a box, they found 63 pairs of boys’ swim trunks. Nearly all of them were
black; but two pairs were red.

A detective then took the stand at Albert Hall, and summarized what the Scottish
Police had learned from canvassing Dunblane and Stirling: practically everyone in
the area knew of him, the nervous guy in the raincoat, but he had no close friends,
and common opinion was that he was boring, and “overly well-mannered” — he
never swore, and he never smoked, or drank. Some acquaintances said he
“wouldn’t engage in social conversation with anybody,” but others complained of
his long, one-sided diatribes — always about one of two subjects, the only
dimensions to his life: guns, and boys. He was, in a word, “empty.”

***
The Cullen Inquiry tried to nd an explanation for the shooter’s actions in his
medical records, but they found that the only time the man had been to a doctor
in his adult life was for a sprained ankle. And he had never once crossed paths
with any mental health professional.

Thwarted, Lord Cullen draf ed a team of forensic psychiatrists to study the

shooter’s life. They would struggle to nd a consensus on the exact pro le, but
they all agreed on one thing: “There really can be no doubt that he was a
paedophile, [and] though the nature of his sexual fantasies can only be a matter of
speculation, his boys’ club activities were not innocent, had sinister
undercurrents, and were unhealthy.” Still, there were no credible reports that the
scoutmaster had done anything to act on his urges, beyond what was already
publicly known. And these were the same facts that had already failed to meet the
level of criminal charges against the man, before it was too late.

Besides, Lord Cullen was not satis ed that pedophilia alone could explain the
Dunblane tragedy. He illustrated the problem through a question to the
psychiatric team: if the police had somehow been certain the scoutmaster was a
pedophile, could this have been enough to revoke his rearms certi cate? “I think
it would be di cult,” one doctor answered: “It is di cult to see the link between
paedophiliac interest and violence. In fact, paedophiles as a whole tend to be non-

106
violent. The fact that he had these other interests would not necessarily be any
indication of a propensity to be violent with rearms.”

Another doctor put it more simply: “The fact that he owned guns and was a
paedophile were coincidence.”

Lord Cullen agreed. There had to be other factors at work: “It does not appear to
me to follow from the evidence that [he] would have sought in any event to
perpetrate a mass shooting. It seems to me to be at least as likely that the
availability of his own rearms and ammunition in uenced him in the way in
which he proceeded.”

This was a sentiment shared by many in Scotland: that there just had to be more
to it. A mutation as rare as the scoutmaster had to have been birthed by
something more profound than a simple medical diagnosis, no matter how exotic;
pedophiles were rare, but not unprecedented. And Dunblane felt like something
new.

That month’s issue of The Spectator argued that the very culture from which the
phenomenon appeared was the explanation: “Murder and mayhem are
ineradicably part of what some rather grandiosely call ‘the human condition’,” the
editorial read. “But that surely does not mean that Dunblane was in any sense
inevitable, or can tell us nothing about the present. [...] Our belief in a constantly
expanding number of rights, and that everyone except for a tiny gilded minority is
a victim of circumstance, favours a frame of mind in which revenge upon the
world is justi ed.”

***
The expert testimony at Albert Hall dragged on for days, and eventually, the
consensus that Lord Cullen gleaned was that the shooter was “su fering from
some form of personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy.” Cullen saw
con rmation of this in testimony about the scoutmaster’s summer camps — as
much for what the scoutmaster did there, as what he did not do: that despite the
fact that most of the labor of his life had been spent setting up boys’ clubs, the
man had displayed “no normal kindness or a fection towards the boys,” as Cullen
put it, “even if they were homesick or upset, whereas you or I might comfort a
child in a perfectly normal way.”

The Cullen Inquiry ultimately determined that there was not enough
information to know precisely what was broken in the shooter’s mind. “Someone
who has got low self-esteem, is a loner, lacks empathy, is probably someone who is
not easy about disclosing his innermost thoughts of violence,” said the inquiry’s

107
lead psychiatrist. “The data which is most interesting is missing really, which
would be data about his thoughts and fantasies.”

***
The shooter was never a student in Dunblane, growing up. Nobody could explain
why he chose that school, or that day. But late in the inquiry, a major piece of the
puzzle fell into place: it was in the form of a written statement from a man whose
9-year-old son attended Dunblane Primary School, and who had also had been a
member of one of the scoutmaster’s boys’ clubs — the very last club, as it turned
out.

The boy had been extremely quiet in the weeks af er the attack on his school, not
believing that the scoutmaster could have done it. But nally, he told his father
about a strange series of conversations the man had initiated with him at his
weekly club meetings, including as recently as six days before his attack. It was
always the same routine: the scoutmaster would take him aside, and ask him to
con rm where the entrances were located at his school, and where and when the
morning assemblies were conducted. Each time, the boy told him the same thing:
that the assemblies at Dunblane Primary were held on Wednesday mornings.
They started around 9:30am, and lasted for a half-hour. Everyone met in the
assembly hall, directly across from the gymnasium.

Just as the investigators were following up on this lead, the forensic team was at
the scene of the crime, trying to determine the sequence of gunshots. Their search
led them into the hallway, where they found the shooter had red once into the
wall for some reason, on his way into the gym. They found another bullet hole in
the assembly hall — the rst shot red. A timeline of the morning’s events began
to take shape.

***
First, the shooter got out of his van in the parking lot, and snipped the wires at the
base of the telephone pole. These wires provided phone service to the neighboring
homes in the area, but the shooter apparently believed they serviced the school;
obviously, an attempt to prevent outgoing emergency calls. Then, at 9:30am, the
morning assembly adjourned, and 250 students briskly led out of the assembly
hall, anked by 10 teachers — the boy the shooter had talked to said that the
assembly would start at 9:30am, but he was confused; that was when it ended.

Sometime between 9:31 and 9:37, the shooter entered the school via a side door,
and made his way to the assembly hall. As he swung open the double doors, he
apparently expected to see a packed assembly, with benches full of students along
each wall, and the sta f on stage “contaminating” their minds: the scene as

108
rendered in his letter to the school, two months before. (Among the students in
attendance would have been the child of a police o cer — the same o cer who
had so infuriated the shooter by writing his personal comment years before: that
he would have “no hesitation” in taking his child away from the scoutmaster’s
reach.)

When the shooter instead made his grand entrance into an empty auditorium, his
vivid fantasy must have dissipated rather abruptly; he red the rst shot (either by
accident or out of frustration) into the oor of the empty stage, and then lef the
auditorium. He red another shot into the hallway wall in the brief second as he
crossed the corridor, and then he stepped into the gymnasium. His Plan B.

The shooter did not know that the school's phone lines were still operational, and
that an emergency call had thus been placed from the principal’s o ce within one
minute of the rst shots. But it didn’t seem to make a di ference; the timeline
revealed that the police were still on their way to the scene when the shooting
stopped. The shooter had plenty of time lef , and 18 more magazines, fully-loaded,
in his bag. It could have been even worse.

***
Finally, Lord Cullen turned toward the most controversial aspect of the case: the
licensing of rearms to the public. He would focus on a speci c provision in the
existing UK law, one which entrusted the local Deputy Constables to determine
who was “un tted” to possess guns.

When the DCC for Dunblane came to the stand, it was the advocate for the
victims and their families that pursued this institutional failure most aggressively:
Why on earth did you keep renewing the shooter’s gun license?

The DCC explained that they had wanted to disarm the scoutmaster years ago —
but at the same time, they were certain that he would appeal their decision, and
that their evidence would amount to just more “gut feeling” and rumor, as the
Ombudsman's o ce had already put it once. The man in question had never been
charged with a crime. So how could they disarm him? On what grounds?

Lord Cullen nally asked each of the doctors, directly: if they had, for arguments
sake, the opportunity to examine the scoutmaster in person when he was alive,
would they have been able to de nitively state that he was “un tted” to own a
gun, as the law required?

They all said no. No one could have seen Dunblane coming.

109
The Snowdrop Campaign
High above, in the balcony overlooking Albert Hall, a father from Dunblane was
listening to the proceedings. He would never forget 13 March, 1996; he had
dropped o f his daughter at school that morning. He never got to pick her back
up.

As he absorbed the testimony, with the doctors going back and forth about the
shooter’s unknowable, “innermost” feelings, the father from Dunblane found
that he agreed more and more with what an editorial from Scotland on Sunday
said about the shooter:

He did not live in a void. He lived among all. To write him off an

exception miss the point: exceptions are not born. They are made, by
circumstance and experience, by the slow drip of alienation, isolation,
and paranoia... We must see beyond the convenient labels that describe
[him] a sick pervert, and an evil psychopath.

The way this father saw it, if the doctors couldn’t say who was safe and who
wasn’t, what did any of it really matter when it came to gun ownership? And even
if society could somehow identify every “nutcase” before they got their rearms
license, that still wouldn’t be enough, as the father soon wrote in his own editorial
for the Sunday Tim :

Given the incidence of mental illness and behavioural disorders among

the general public we have to assume that a significant number of
handgun users will at some stage have problems which would make them
unfit for gun ownership and th put the general public at risk. If we
can’t guarantee the behavior of handgun users there only one course of
action and that to ban their weapons, and to ban them completely.

The father from Dunblane knew this would be a tough sell. There were plenty of
rearms enthusiasts in the UK, even af er the post-Hungerford restrictions were
put in place. These people were not the problem, so much as another symptom;
he saw it in the testimony from the gun club members, who had shot right
alongside the scoutmaster for years. Their views seemed unreal, like they didn’t
even comprehend the incident that brought them to the stand; they would get
excited talking about their guns, and did not seem con icted as they recounted
watching the nervous man who red o f hundreds of rounds in a sitting. They
evinced the same disapproval of “sissy” .22’s, and the same awe for heavier
repower. Please, the father from Dunblane was thinking from the balcony, no
more guns, and certainly no more worship of guns.

110
Meanwhile, at Dunblane Primary School, classes were back in session, just a week
and half af er the shooting. And when the students returned, they saw that the
gymnasium had been sealed o f, with brown-painted boards xed over its
windows; a month later, the gym was torn down entirely. In its place, the school
installed a simple garden.

Soon af er this last photo opportunity, the press all packed up their vans and went
back to the big city, something many of the village folk welcomed. They were
ready to move on.

Watching this, as the Cullen Inquiry approaching its conclusion, the father from
Dunblane felt a growing fear: that this great tragedy might simply pass, without
anything meaningful being done about the guns in his country. His fear only grew
when a government report leaked, in which an MP argued to his colleagues,
“What would be the point of a total ban on the lawful holding of handguns, if
there remained easy access to unlawful handguns, and easy access — both lawful
and unlawful — to powerful ri es, or to shotguns which, given time to reload,
would have the same result?” They should ban everything, or nothing, the
argument went; and on this point, the father from Dunblane was in agreement.

***
There was a cafe in Dunblane that was a popular meeting spot. One local group
of women had co fee there every week. They knew many of the families struck by
the tragedy, and one day, they found themselves talking about that morning of 13
March — remembering how, across the whole village, there had been only one
species of ower in bloom: white snowdrops.

These friends were setting out on a quest to pass new gun reforms, and chose this
ower as their symbol; they announced the Snowdrop Campaign in a letter to the
Sunday Tim , in which they challenged the United Kingdom to take action
within the year: “Next March when the snowdrops appear, let us remember
Dunblane,” the mothers wrote, “but let us also be able to say, ‘We made our
feelings clearly known to those who govern us and seek to shape laws to protect
us.”

3rd July, 1996

Highland Council Chambers — Inverness
The father from Dunblane waited near the chamber’s entrance, alert for the
Scottish MPs who would be adjourning from their session at any moment. As
each lawmaker emerged from the chamber doors, the man presented them with a
petition from the Snowdrop Campaign. It read:

111
 Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your honourable House introduce
or amend the law relating to the ownership and usage of firearms such
that:

1. All firearms held for recreational purpos for use in authorized

sporting clubs to be held securely at such clubs with firing mechanisms
removed.

2. The private ownership of handguns be made illegal.

3. Certification of all firearms be subject to stricter control.

Attached to the petition were the signatures of over 700,000 voters.

The UK’s gun lobbies sensed the changes coming. Gun rights advocates began to
mobilize, but as one MP told The Independent, o f-the-record: “The [UK] gun
lobby is in uential in the sense that its supporters are rich and high-pro le. But
this is not America where there is a large number of supporters.”

Even so, the British gun advocates voiced arguments that were reminiscent of their
counterparts in the former colonies; the SRA — Shooters’ Rights Association —
proclaimed, “The spectre of the most pernicious and evil legislation to stalk
Europe since the reign of the Third Reich is about to be forced upon the British
nation.”

MPs sympathetic to the gun lobbies tried to divert attention away from the
scoutmaster’s weaponry: “Nothing will stop determined fanatics, in particular one
who is quite happy to sacri ce his own life. In the absence of guns he will use
arson, or a stolen lorry, both of which are easily capable of killing 20 or more
people at a time.” Another leader, a man who had overseen the ine fectual
legislative response to the Hungerford shooting, wondered if the scoutmaster
could have employed the use of a cricket bat just as easily as a handgun. Would
they then be discussing the outlaw of all cricket bats?

The father from Dunblane struggled to remain patient in the face of such
arguments. There was a reason, he was quite convinced, that men like the
scoutmaster did not use re, or cricket bats, or hijacked lorries to summon their
maniacal fantasies into reality: each of these would-be improvised weapons served
a primary purpose that did not involve killing. Guns kill, so killers like guns.
Simple.

112
Other gun advocates strove to be compassionate, even while opposing the
Snowdrop Campaign. They argued that the movement was an emotional
reaction, and that such an approach made for poor legislation. “No matter how
awful and obvious the devastation caused by guns,” the father from Dunblane
interpreted these leaders as saying, “there should never be any emotional
response.” He believed di ferently: “To be objective and detached is to deny the
reality of what happened. This is an issue which calls for an emotionally informed
response.”

16th October, 1996

House of Commons — Palace of Westminster
A statement from the Home Secretary was read on the House oor as the nal
recommendations of the Cullen Inquiry were being distributed to the MPs.
“Among all the words which have been written since Dunblane, there is one
irrefutable fact,” it said. “The dreadful crimes committed on 13th March were
committed with a gun which was legally bought and legally possessed. Those facts
place an onerous duty on the Government to consider what controls there should
be on the ownership and possession of guns.” Lord Cullen’s recommendations
were, accordingly, simple and sweeping: all high-calibre handguns — anything
over a .22 — would be banned. The .22’s would in turn be heavily restricted; a
vital part of the gun would have to be removed (the slide for semi-automatics, and
the cylinder for revolvers) and kept under lock and key at a licensed gun range. In
the home, only single-shot pistols would be permitted intact.

Lord Cullen knew that a particularly vocal minority of his countrymen would see
these measures as burdensome, even tyrannical. He painstakingly explained how
his sta f had explored every lesser avenue rst, but found that each led to nowhere;
they had even considered banning high-capacity magazines, and leaving the guns
alone — but as one rearms expert explained, that was not as simple as it seemed:
“Most modern magazines are unnumbered, and no one knows how many have
been sold. No one knows how many people have them in their possession, and
they are readily available in other parts of the world. You could introduce a
restriction now, but its e fects are very uncertain.” So they would have to go
further, if they wanted their actions to have any real consequence.

The gun lobbyists were already scrambling to sound the alarm over Cullen’s
recommendations. But then, the Home Secretary attached his own position on
the matter:

I propose to go considerably further than Lord Cullen h su ested. [...]

We will ban all handguns from people’s hom . I do not agree with Lord
Cullen that it would be safe to allow single shot handguns to remain in

113
 the home. I believe that they should be subject to the same controls which
we impose on multi-shot handguns.

To the father from Dunblane, and the other members of the Snowdrop
Campaign, even this was not going far enough. They “saw no reason to
distinguish between the dangerousness of handguns on the basis of calibre,” and
wanted the .22’s banned outright along with everything else. They produced an ad
that ran in movie theaters during previews that fall, which showed a close-up of a
.22 handgun being red at a gun range. The actor Sean Connery provided
narration: “It is said that a total ban on handguns, including .22s, would take away
innocent pleasure from thousands of people. Is that more — or less — pleasure
than watching your child grow up?” And then the screen went dark, followed by
the father from Dunblane’s simple message: REMEMBER DUNBLANE,
BAN ALL HANDGUNS.

The father from Dunblane was to be disappointed. When it was all over, the ban
as-written was the most that his country was willing to do. The .22’s would stay
legal. Still, the sort of handguns used at Dunblane, at least, would be no more.

***
As the one-year anniversary of the tragedy approached, and the snowdrops once
again bloomed across Dunblane, the House of Lords were signing their approval.
On the 27th February, the bill was granted Royal Assent, and the gun ban became
the law of the land.

On 5th March, 1997, the Dunblane police con rmed that they had destroyed the
guns the scoutmaster had brought to the school; these would be the rst of many.
That summer, thousands of citizens across the kingdom turned over their guns
for destruction. The owners were compensated — to varying degrees of
satisfaction — and the hordes of .22 pistols followed their larger-bore counterparts
soon af er: destroyed, or simply locked up, safe and secure, from their owners or
anyone else.

Their work done, the Snowdrop Campaign disbanded. The families from
Dunblane released a statement ahead of the rst anniversary of the tragedy,
announcing that there was to be no public ceremony on 13 March 1997, as they
still longed to grieve in privacy:

We do wish, however, to invite our fellow residents to mark the

anniversary with one simple gesture. At 7 o’clock in the evening on 13
March we would ask you to place, with due care, a lighted candle in

114
your front window. In th way you can show how much the memori of
our children and their teacher shine on in Dunblane.

115
 Part II

Tide & Season

116
 11. The Village
(a brief history of Newtown, Connecticut)

On a bright Wednesday morning in 1705, three land speculators and their crew
boarded a vessel in Stratford, where the great Housatonic River drains into the
Long Island Sound. They rowed north, into the high untamed wilderness, and as
they came around a hook in the river, the white men saw that the waterway split
around a hill, with the slender branch of the river owing o f to the south. On the
hillside above, they saw a cluster of wigwams where the natives had formed a
village, and here, the settlers came ashore.

The white men were farmers, the second and third generations descended from
British families who immigrated to the colonies. The coastline in New England
had grown crowded, and so the men had gone up the river to nd unexploited
land, where they could build larger farms and start futures for their families. This
spot, where the rivers diverged, was perfect.

117
The natives were peaceful. They said they called the smaller river “Pootatuck”
(meaning “falls river”) and the land in the surrounding hills — as the white men
transcribed it on the land purchase — “ uanneapague.” The meaning of the
name is unknown to this day.

The white men made their o fer on August 5th, 1705, and the trade was signed; in
return for permanent ownership of the tract of land (roughly eight miles long by
six miles wide), the Pootatuck tribe accepted from the settlers a trade of four guns,
plus ammunition (“forty pounds of lead, ten pounds of powder”), plus “four
broadcloth coats, four blankets, four ru felly coats,” and so on — each a full
wardrobe. The business done, the natives retreated, further up the river with their
new nery, and the white men settled in their place, keeping the native name for
their new village: uanneapague.

The village lasted for three years before the colony of Connecticut put a stop to it;
the colonial government possessed “sole power and control of purchasing Indian
lands” within its borders, and they had not transferred any such authority to the
speculators before the men decided to head up the Housatonic. Facing prison, the
settlers surrendered their claim back to the colony, and their transgression was
forgiven. In 1708, “in the reign of her Majesty, ueen Anne,” an o cial charter of
settlement was granted, and the town began anew, rechristened simply
“Newtown.”

THE MILL & THE MEETING HOUSE

The town grew outward from a single crossroads, as towns do. The road that ran
from the north to the south — delivering travelers from the riverbank, back down
to Stratford — would be known over the immediate years as Town Street, or
Newtown Street; eventually, it would be called simply “Main Street.”

The other road came down from the hills in the east, crossing Main Street and
departing Newtown to the west along a crooked, wandering path. “As there could
have been naught but natural obstructions,” the town historian would observe
from a later century, “we cannot account for its serpentine course unless, in the lay
out, the Indian trail as it led from the Pootatuck, over the hills to Danbury, [and]
the Hudson river, was followed.”

There were thirty families in Newtown at the start, and each chose a plot of land
near this crossroads, about a mile from the Pootatuck river. The settlers then went
to work, each clearing away their share from the wilderness, and carving a greater
space for their new civilization to ourish.

118
For the rst few years in the village, each settler had to grind their grain
themselves, with a mortar and pestle, or else have the task done at a grist mill in
Danbury, with the grain returned by horseback at considerable expense. So it was,
that the rst municipal structure ever built in Newtown, in September of 1715, was
a grist mill on the eastern shore of the Pootatuck river. For generations to come,
the mill provided for the townspeople, its great wheel turning day and night on
the riverside.

***
In order for the colony of Connecticut to recognize any of its villages as an o cial
“town,” they required that the white men owning land there rst organize a
church. Newtown thus formed its o cial Ecclesiastical Society without delay, and
started collecting the town’s rst tax, to pay for a minister.

Across Connecticut’s territory, in the village of Killingsworth, a small group of

congregational ministers had recently met to pool their religious texts. So was
founded Connecticut’s rst institution of higher learning: a “Collegiate School,”
to educate and train clergyman. Each year, another group of new ministers was
blessed, and sent out in search of ocks to gather; from one of the earliest
graduating classes, a young theology student named Thomas Toucey would make
his way west, to the little village of Newtown. He was ordained on October 15, 1715
as the rst minister of Newtown’s Congregational Society.

Reverend Toucey would need somewhere to preach. On January 8, 1719, the

citizens of Newtown gathered, and voted to build their rst church, to serve also
as the town’s meeting house. It would sit in the middle of the intersection of Main
Street and — as the ancient serpentine path would now become known —
Church Hill Road. This was not an unusual place to build a structure then, right
in the middle of a street; af er all, the meeting house would be Newtown’s most
important and prominent structure, so it was only appropriate that it dominate
the crossroads. In an an era of slow travel, along wide dirt paths, a church would
not be any great obstacle to maneuver around. It would be the town’s anchor.

The structure’s function as a meeting house was also a welcome addition, so that
the “inhabitants of ye Town might be under better advantage for ye enjoyment of
all ye ordinances of God in his sanctuary according to Divine appointment,” as
town records show. It was a modest building when completed, “nothing but wide
benches for seats and no other furnishings save an open re place where they
could roll on logs for bodily comfort.” And in these early years, the townspeople
were summoned to the meeting house by the beat of a drum, its low roll heard
echoing throughout the valley and up into the eastern hills, where the natives still
dwelled among the outlying settlers.

119
 ***
Around this time, ownership of this eastern portion of the land came into
dispute. A Pootatuck native — a man calling himself “ uiomph” — appeared
and went before the town elders, stating his claim to the eastern tract that
extended out to where the Housatonic river formed an “elbow” — or hook —
just downstream from where the white settlers had rst gone ashore. Since
uiomph was not present for the uanneapague land purchase, his tract was not
rightfully included in the deal for the four guns and the ru felly coats.

Fortunately for the settlers, however, he was willing to negotiate.

Newtown paid uiomph a fee of sixteen British pounds to settle the matter.
uiomph signed his name with an “X”, and summarily disappeared, back into
the forests. The neighboring area between the two rivers, “right against ye
Wigwams,” was henceforth added to Newtown’s boundaries, forming a sister
village in the new territory, known thereaf er as “Sandy Hook.”

***
There would be more con icts between the natives and the settlers as the years
passed, and as Newtown’s borders started to expand. Relations were not always
peaceful. But the settlers, in the long term, had little to fear; they vastly
outnumbered the natives, who had been ravaged by disease brought from the new
world. And, as the natives well-knew, the white men always had plenty of guns.

THE CROWN
On March 12, 1723, the sound of the drum lled the valley. At that evening’s town
meeting, “by reason of uneasiness,” the citizens formally asked that Reverend
Toucey “lay down ye work of ye ministry among us.” Once again, Newtown
would be without a minister.

It had been eight years since Toucey’s ordainment, and though the historical
record is not de nite about the circumstances, the “uneasiness” in the
Presbyterian society appears to have been due to a great number of the
townspeople having lef the congregation, to attend services at an Episcopalian
church in Stratford, twenty miles to the south. Toucey having lost his ock was
bad enough, but since the church in Stratford was of an Anglican parish, those
Newtowners making the long trek every Sunday were not just forsaking their
hometown: they were fundamentally rejecting the Presbyterian concept, in favor
of the English crown.

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This con ict was representative of a larger one, then taking place at Toucey’s alma
mater: even as the Collegiate School was graduating more of Connecticut’s
ministers, there was a spiritual war unfolding over the validity of the doctrine they
were being sent to spread. The root of the con ict was that each town’s
congregational church granted spiritual authority — over themselves — to their
minister, based on the will of that church’s elders. But meanwhile, Episcopal
churches came from the Anglican tradition, where ministers were granted
authority by a bishop, one who in turn traced their own blessing back through the
centuries to the Pope; ostensibly, this was a chain of succession that began with
Jesus Christ himself. Compared to that lineage, a congregational church’s
connection to divine authority seemed tenuous, and alumni of the Collegiate
School watched with dismay as many of their ock drif ed toward the crown.

Rev. Toucey’s ouster from Newtown was one manifestation this great theological
schism, but his dismissal from their church would not be enough to satisfy the
con icted townspeople. It would be up to Toucey’s successor to again ll the pews
at the old meeting house, where the defectors once sat.

This young preacher’s name was John Beach, and he set out for Newtown from
the same college as Toucey. However, his relocation crossed considerably less
distance: the Collegiate School had since moved to a permanent campus in New
Haven, just twenty miles east from Newtown, and changed its name to Yale.

***
Reverend Beach became one of the most in uential personalities in the history of
Newtown: greatly beloved by many of the villagers, and given considerable areas
of land in their domain. However, he would prove ill- tted for reconciling the
forces pulling at their hearts. The rif that tore through Yale also ran through
Reverend Beach’s own soul, and he was honest with his ock about the con ict he
felt, until nally, in a town meeting in January 1732, it was written, “Ye Reverend
John Beach declareth himself to be partly reconciled to ye Church of England,
that he questions the validity of ye Presbyterian ordination, that he cannot in
faith, administer the Sacrament and refuseth to administer them.” This time, it
was the shepherd himself who had wandered to the crown.

The search for still another Presbyterian minister commenced anew; meanwhile,
John Beach sailed across the Atlantic to Scotland, where he was ordained as an
Anglican priest. He returned to Newtown, a missionary in his own land, but he
was no longer con icted about his faith. And a new ock awaited him.

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 THE AWAKENING
The 1740s ushered in the American colonies’ very rst intellectual revolution:
what came to be remembered as the “Great Awakening.” It arose from another
theological schism, but this time, the dispute was over faith itself, and
predestination: traditional worshipers, like the rst Newtown settlers, were of the
“Old Light”: encouraged by their ministers to lead a life without sin, so that they
might one day enter heaven. But suddenly, a revolutionary movement within the
church — the “New Light” — declared this attitude to be contrary to biblical
scripture. Instead, the New Light preached that only a sacred personal experience
with God could save one’s soul, and that any attempt to “win God over” with
earthly acts would only compromise the sacri ce Jesus made for mankind. Faith
was what counted — not actions.

The New Light burned bright in Newtown, stoked by the re-and-brimstone

sermons of famous itinerant Rev. George Whit eld as he traveled through
Stratford, New Haven, and other surrounding villages. Soon, the Newtown
congregation draf ed a Rev. David Judson to nally lead their church — a
preacher straight out of Whit eld’s mold, and remembered by town historians as
“the Great Awakening incarnate.”

The dissenting “Old Light” believers soon wandered from Judson’s congregation,
and many of them were drawn to the alternative: the Episcopal church, the crown,
and the welcoming arms of Rev. John Beach. Beach and Judson thus battled for
the souls of Newtown, and soon the con ict came to a head: each champion
would preach their case in their respective church, and then print copies of the
day’s sermon to be distributed along Main Street: a “pamphlet war” for all the
town to see.

As the town’s historical society remembers, Judson’s pages blazed that “man was
so drenched in sin and wickedness that any attempt to live a Godly life was
impossible.” All one could do was repent.

In contrast, Beach’s philosophy was liberating, o fering Newtown’s residents “the

opportunity to live in their fair and pleasant land without a sense of their own
guilt and unworthiness.” The Anglican preached that the townspeople had a need
to see purpose in their earthly actions, and so he was con dent the rising of the
New Light, “instead of diminishing, increases the number of my hearers.” Of his
rival Judson’s doctrine — in which evil deeds could not damn a soul any more
than good works could save it — Beach wrote, “Where those monstrous tenets are
received, there will remain a temptation for wicked men to turn to in dels.”

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Judson and Beach became the mainstays of their churches over the next three
decades, and the faithful in Newtown nally stabilized around these two poles.
The Episcopalians would continue to draw worshipers away from the town’s
Presbyterian ock — but as Newtown’s population increased, both churches
would ultimately thrive.

The Congregational Society’s growth over the years can be seen in the changes to
the meeting house itself: a church belfry was added in 1746, and af er a long
search, the drum beat that had echoed throughout the valley was replaced by the
tones of a bronze church bell, nally hung in 1763. The bell was donated by a
citizen, “procured for ye use of ye society so long as there should be a Presbiterian
society to meet in [said] house.” Four years later, the same man ordered two of his
slaves (their names are not recorded) to quarry slabs of granite, and haul them to
the Newtown crossroads by oxcart, where the stones were fashioned into a new
staircase, leading up to the front doors of Rev. Judson’s church.

THE REBELLION
On April 19, 1775, the colonies and the crown nally clashed, as militiamen in
Lexington, Massachusetts stood strong against an advancing British regiment.
Someone — whichever side they were on — red the “shot heard round the
world,” and propelled the colonists into a nal showdown for American
independence.

In response, Newtown’s government presented “an able protest to the State

Legislature against the action of Congress” — a condemnation of the colonial
rebels. General Washington’s forces thusly determined Newtown to be a “Tory”
stronghold. The citizens would have to be disarmed.

In November of 1775, the American rebels swept through Newtown, and as one
resident wrote in his daily journal, “Almost every house was ransacked from ye top
to ye bottom.” The revolutionaries seized every rearm they could nd, and
af erward, the only residents still owning guns in Newtown were criminals.

***
Meanwhile, John Beach and his church found themselves in an awkward position.
Beach’s con icting loyalties were evident every Sunday, when the reverend would
lead his congregation in a prayer for the health of the King of England. At a time
of war, these were not just words; soon, rebel leaders from neighboring Redding
delivered Beach a letter, requesting quite rmly that he cease praying for the King

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in public. “Your compliance herewith may prevent you trouble,” the rebels not-
so-subtly threatened.

Beach ignored the warning. Soon af er, a handful of rebel soldiers arrived at
Trinity Church during Sunday service, armed. As one parishioner remembered it,
the men dared the reverend to pray for the king one more time, at gunpoint — he
did as he was told, “with no change or even tremor in his voice,” and the rebels
lowered their ri es. (Another account says that they dragged Rev. Beach out of the
church, escorted him to the foot of the hill, and told him to say his last prayer, “for
they were about to shoot him.” He instead prayed aloud for his would-be
executioners. The soldiers walked away in shame.)

***
On July 10th, 1781, soldiers with the French Expeditionary Force passed through
Newtown, under the command of famed general Count de Rochambeau. They
were marching across Connecticut to join forces with the rebel Gen. George
Washington, who waited on the banks of the Hudson River, preparing for what
would be the Battle of Yorktown.

Several of the French o cers kept journals during this march, texts that live on as
rare eyewitness accounts of early Newtown, seen through foreign eyes. From these
writings, there are signs that the rebels’ concerns about the townsfolk were well-
founded: one o cer wrote as he passed through Sandy Hook, “This is the capital
of Tory country, and, as you may well imagine, we took great precautions to
protect ourselves from their acts of cruelty.” Of the Tory loyalists, he wrote, “They
usually strike by night, when they go out in bands, attack a post, then retire to the
woods where they bury their arms.” In fact, General Washington himself had
written a top-secret letter to the Count’s men, warning them that they were “now
in a very disa fected part of the country.”

Other accounts from the visitors are more tranquil. “Newtown is on a hill
surrounded by hills which are still higher,” wrote an o cer Blanchard, from his
lodgings near the main crossroads that night. The next morning was a Sunday,
and having heard the tolling of the church bell, he documented what he witnessed
at the meeting house across Main Street: “I counted more than a hundred horses
at the door of the temple, where I heard singing before the preaching, in chorus or
in parts. The singing was agreeable and well performed, not by hired priests and
chaplains, but by men or women, young men or young girls whom the desire of
praising God had assembled.”

Meanwhile, across town, many of the other French troops were similarly
occupied, as the chaplain of Rochambeau’s regiment held a ceremony never before
seen in Fair eld County: a Catholic Mass.

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The Battle of Yorktown proved to be the decisive victory of the American
Revolution. One year af er the Frenchmen had passed, they were seen again on
their return trip through Newtown, now as victors and — to some — liberators.
A little girl named Mary Anne, who grew up near the old mill, would remember
in her golden years how she peeked out a window and saw Rochambeau’s soldiers
marching past, their bayonets glinting in the sun as they disappeared over the
eastern hills of Sandy Hook, on their long journey back home.

***
It was around this time that a curious symbol rst appeared over Newtown, on
the steeple of the meeting house: a distinctive rooster (or “chanticleer”) weather
vane. Nobody knows who made the rooster, or quite when they put it up there,
but its construction shows it was fashioned out of copper, sometime in the 18th
century. The chanticleer’s eyes are solid glass, and its body is hollow. As early as
anyone can remember, its surface has shown dimples from being hit by gun re,
also of unknown origin (though local legend has it that it was Rochambeau’s
troops, using the Newtown rooster for target practice).

***
Rev. John Beach passed away at his home in Newtown in 1782, not quite living to
see the king recognize American independence the following year. His legacy
would be carried on through the Trinity Church he lef behind, which (af er only
a brief reversal during the war against the crown) would continue to surpass the
Congregational Society in devotees. His “New Light” adversary, David Judson,
had preceded him in 1776, falling ill af er visiting troops who were dying of
smallpox along the Atlantic coast.

THE FOUNDATION
The lingering uncertainty — over just which church would triumph as
Newtown’s predominant faith — came to some resolution in the 1790s, when the
Trinity parish announced that they would be building a new, permanent, stone
temple. They chose a conspicuous place to build: right at the crossroads, on the
southeast corner of Church Hill Road and Main Street. With the meeting house
occupying the center of that intersection, its front door would have blocked
Trinity’s new entrance. So one church had to go.

The bell above the meeting house tolled, and when the votes were counted, the
gathered townspeople ultimately sided with Rev. Beach’s ock, opting “to render
it more convenient for the Episcopal Society in Newtown to erect a church.” And
so on June 13, 1792, a team of strong men gathered at the crossroads, surrounded

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the old meeting house, and all at once, lif ed it from its foundation; over the
course of an hour and a half, they transported the entire structure, “together with
the steeple entire, about eight rods [132 feet] west of its present site,” to its new
home.

The new foundation was thus o f-center from the intersection — no longer
blocking Main Street as it traveled north-and-south, but remaining in the middle
of Church Hill Road, blocking east-west tra c. To this day, the two lanes of West
Street brie y split into a “Y,” to accommodate the spot where the townspeople set
the meeting house back down, in 1792.

***
The meeting house lasted just over a decade af er the move. In 1803, with the
house’s timbers rotting, the townspeople voted to build a new structure in its
place. (The construction was to be paid for, partially, by a church lottery.) The
new meeting house was nished-enough to provide shelter from the winter of
1816, and the builders incorporated as much of the original timber as could be
salvaged. The stone steps were also carried over into the new structure, as was the
church bell, and the copper rooster on the steeple.

Facing it across the street, now, was the completed stone-and-stained-glass facade
of Trinity Church.

Meanwhile, the colony around them had formally begun it history as the State of
Connecticut, af er the Americans draf ed and rati ed their Constitution of the
United States. In 1787, the Congress attached a list of ten amendments — a Bill of
Rights, protecting the Freedom of Speech rst, followed by its Second
Amendment:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,

the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

THE LOCOMOTIVE
One day during the winter of 1839-1840, a thunderous sound was heard echoing
across the Housatonic Valley — an iron-and-steam racket cutting through the
forest, drawing closer and closer to Newtown: the railroad era had arrived.

A man who would become the town’s foremost historian, Ezra Johnson, was
seven years old and sitting in class at one of the town’s tiny one-room
schoolhouses that morning, when he heard a classmate exclaim, “The locomotive
is coming!” With that, Johnson writes, “All the children, without a permit from

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the teacher, went helter-skelter out the door and on to the stone walls where all
stood in mute amazement to see the rst of these work trains as it passed.” Back at
Ezra’s home, his father’s young horse, “never broken to harness,” was so frightened
by the sound of the alien machine that it scaled the high barnyard fence and
bolted east, so far that Ezra had to go fetch the animal back down from the hills of
Sandy Hook.

The Industrial Revolution spread throughout New England, and Newtown

changed rapidly. Downtown became a hub of production, its workshops at rst
making mostly hats, combs, and buttons. But then, 1839 saw the arrival of a
miracle product: Charles Goodyear discovered the process of rubber
vulcanization, vastly increasing the material’s durability, and giving rise to
America’s rubber industry. The actual discovery happened in Woburn,
Massachusetts — not Sandy Hook, despite local folklore — but one of
Goodyear’s nieces did marry a man from Newtown, who in turn established a
series of rubber factories at the north end of Sandy Hook, near the old mill, their
crankshaf s powered by the ow of the Pootatuck River. The rubber products
owed out of Newtown, capital owed in, and the town’s economy swelled.

The locomotive’s rst appearance had not been to bear freight, nor passengers,
but to supply the railroad’s construction crew, steadily laying the tracks before
them as they crossed New England. The railroad’s laborers were mostly from
Ireland, and many of them took notice of the quality and abundance of the land
around them; longtime Newtown farmers had been giving up their homesteads to
seek fortune in the city, in business and manufacturing. And already, the rubber
factories on the river were being purchased and retro tted by New York Belting
and Packing Company; now the factory was in need of laborers, to help make a
new kind of high-pressure re hose, necessary to extinguish ames at the top of
the era’s new, taller buildings.

The Irish came to Newtown in waves, escaping the Great Famine that was
ravaging their homeland. They brought with them a di ferent way of life, and the
town changed around them as their ranks grew; Newtown’s rst Roman Catholic
Church was organized on August 1, 1859, when the Reverend Francis Lenihan
began conducting mass out of an old Universalist temple, just north of the town
crossroads. Its cemetery is still marked by the names of soldiers from the 1860s,
each representing Newtown’s sacri ces in the Civil War: men that had followed
the ow of arms from Colt’s factories in Connecticut, down to quell the southern
rebellion.

The Catholic parishioners of Newtown would continue to meet in their second-

hand temple until 1882, when they nished building their own house of worship:

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St. Rose of Lima Church, located a half-mile east of the meeting house, on
Church Hill Road.

***
The waves of Irish immigrants arriving in Newtown coincided with a boom in the
newspaper industry. The town’s rst paper, the Newtown Bee, debuted in June of
1877 as just a weekly publication, with surprisingly little actual news about
Newtown. Their rst local competitor, the Newtown Chronicle, started as a daily
paper in 1880, and right away, the Chronicle was the clear favorite: each issue was
tailored especially for the town’s Irish readership, with local headlines alongside
detailed reports from Ireland — even breaking down gossip by county, so that the
immigrant community could read about their homeland, and their new home, in
one place.

The Bee was sold into more capable & local hands in 1881, and the new owners
overhauled the publication into a competitive daily. The Chronicle surrendered in
April of 1882, sold itself to the Bee, and suddenly, Newtown became a one-
newspaper community. The Bee lives on as the essential source of daily news for
the residents of Newtown, published from its o ces on Church Hill Road,
around the corner from Trinity Church.

***
Meanwhile, across Long Island Sound, in New York, a man was organizing a
marksmanship tournament. He was the editor-in-chief of the Army Navy
Journal, and before that had fought for the Union in the Civil War, where he had
been appalled at the lack of rearms experience demonstrated by his fellow
soldiers — especially those draf ed from cities. He thus advocated gun-range
competitions, as "one of the means of rendering the National Guardsman familiar
with his piece, giving him con dence under excitement, and siding him to secure
accuracy of aim."

Writing in his newspaper, he contrasted the state of American marksmanship with

that of England, where “an amount of attention is given to the subject and the
pursuit of practice with the ri e [that is] unknown in this country.” These
shooting competitions across the Atlantic were organized by the “British National
Ri e Association,” he wrote, an organization that espoused, “It is the man and
not merely the weapon that decides the battle.” He felt the United States should
have a similar organization, of their own.

Soon, the editor announced he was creating just such an organization, together
with an associate from New York. Their stated purpose was “to promote and

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encourage ri e-shooting on a scienti c basis,” con dent that it “would be a paying
investment.”

At the association’s rst meeting, they nalized plans for constructing a ri e range
on Long Island, to host the inaugural tournaments. Thus was born, on
November 17, 1871, America’s National Ri e Association — the NRA.

THE FLAGPOLE
In 1876, the United States celebrated the 100th anniversary of the signing of its
Declaration of Independence. Newtown observed the Centennial by establishing
a new, patriotic landmark: a agpole, right in the town’s center, in the middle of
the intersection of Main Street and Church Hill Road, where the meeting house
once stood.

The agpole was made from two lengths of wood, joined as one, like the mast of a
ship. Exposed to the harsh New England weather, it lasted until 1892 before its
timbers grew brittle, and the town cut it down, erecting a new, second agpole in
its place.

Newtown celebrated its own Bicentennial in 1905, marking two hundred years
since the rst treaty with the Pootatuck natives had been signed. During the
festivities, it was observed that the second agpole was already showing signs of
wear, and guy-wires had to be strung to anchor it upright, and ensure the safety of
the parade as it marched down Main Street.

A few months later, the weakening agpole was struck by lightning. Its top mast
burst apart, littering main street with glowing cinders, and the ag, which had
been raised at the time, was burned. The town Men’s Club raised money to
purchase a new mast, replacing the top portion, and the second agpole stood in
the intersection for six more years.

On February 28, 1912, during a powerful storm, a big gust of wind came roaring
up main street, and the agpole came crashing down, snapped o f f een feet from
its base. The results could have been much worse; thankfully, the mast fell north,
into the empty street — and not onto the meeting house, or Trinity Church.

The stump of the fallen pole is visible in photos of U.S. Army maneuvers from
August of 1912 — part of the nation’s readiness e forts, as the outbreak of war in
Europe increasingly appeared inevitable. In a simulated military struggle that year,
a “red team” attempted to seize possession of New York City from a “blue team”
of defenders, to “demonstrate the safety or peril” of the city in case of foreign

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invasion. The battle lines came right through Newtown; an August 16 account
from the New York Tim detailed the red cavalry pushing from the east, where,
“The folk who live in this Sandy Hook country had never before seen even a little
battle, and they had the time of their lives watching the progress of the noisy and
smoky, yet bloodless con ict.”

As part of the skirmish, small airplanes were employed to scout troop positions,
these air vehicles among the rst to ever appear in the skies over Newtown.

Ultimately, the blue team triumphed in the two-day war game, and New York was
saved.

***
That there would be a third agpole was a foregone conclusion, yet the wind that
had fallen the now-familiar landmark had also brought a moment of opportunity:
automobiles were becoming a common sight in New England by then, and the
agpole’s placement in the town’s central intersection was increasingly viewed by
visitors as an unnecessary hazard, given the rate of travel that the newer vehicles
a forded. Why not move the pole to the sidewalk, or to the small park at the north
end of Main Street?

This sentiment gained considerable momentum af er Main Street itself became

part of Connecticut’s state road system — the path through Newtown now
serving as a conduit from the city of Brook eld in the north, to Bridgeport in the
south. The State Highway Commissioner in fact ordered the agpole relocated,
but he was met by erce resistance; the agpole at the crossroads had become a
part of the fabric of Newtown by then, and the townspeople refused to move it.
Eventually the state gave up, telling Newtown in 1914 that they could rebuild their
prized tra c hazard, right where it was.

The third agpole was raised on Independence Day, 1914. Its two pieces of timber
arrived from Oregon by rail, and were brought to the intersection, where a
decorative golden sphere was a xed to the top of the pole. When assembled, the
third agpole was Newtown’s tallest yet, at 100 feet; as the ag was raised on it for
the rst time, a pastor from St. Rose of Lima Church delivered a brief address,
and a great celebration followed, with musical accompaniment from the Sandy
Hook Band.

That same year, Newtown joined the electronic age. While the rubber factories
and other industrial buildings had been generating their own power from the ow
of the Pootatuck river since the 1880s, the town’s residences and small businesses
had until then relied on gas for their light and heat. The outbreak of the rst
World War had made borrowing money for civic projects di cult, but over the

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summer of 1914, workers gradually strung wires along 30 miles of tree branches,
from Danbury to Newtown. On October 14, the switch was ipped, and the grid’s
rst light bulb blinked to life, in the general store belonging to resident R.H.
Beers on the south end of town. From there, the wires gradually spread up Main
Street and across Church Hill road, and nally over to Sandy Hook in 1922.

***
One night in 1920, the old academy building that was serving as Newtown’s high
school mysteriously caught re, and burned to the ground. A local heiress, Mary
Hawley, volunteered the money to build a new one at a site on Church Hill Road,
down the street from the Newtown Bee o ces, and across from St. Rose of Lima.
This new school turned out to be a state-of-the-art facility, with a gymnasium and
a chemistry lab — things students in Newtown had never seen before. In a way,
the Newtown Bee would write, “The burning of the [old] high school led the way
to the modern school system.” Finished in 1922, Mary named the building Hawley
School, af er her departed parents.

In 1930, another of Mary Hawley’s gif s appeared: over on Main Street, just north
of the agpole, in the spot where the rst Trinity Church once stood, the brand-
new town hall opened its doors. Edmond Town Hall was also home to what
would become known as one of Newtown’s most enduring traditions: moving
picture shows for the townspeople at bargain prices, projected in its new 560-seat
theater. The tradition had started at the original town hall, with the silent pictures
of Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle; slapstick fare, accompanied by a live
piano. But at Edmond Town Hall, the townspeople heard something entirely
new: “talkies.” Films with spoken dialogue.

***
Newtown was spared the worst circumstances of the Great Depression; although
farmers continued to ee, the population of commuters to-and-from New York
grew in their place, while out-of-state demand for inexpensive summer housing
held steady. The most visible changes in Newtown were the discontinuation of
passenger rail service, and the closure of one of the local hotels, for its conversion
into a Federal Transient Camp. Other towns had it much, much worse — the
people of Newtown donated and volunteered generously to ease their su fering,
including holding Red Cross “sewing bees” at the meeting house every two weeks,
where the women of Newtown craf ed clothing for the nation’s out-of-work.

During these hard times in America, an unemployed architect in Poughkeepsie,

New York named Arthur Butts began developing a new board game, inspired by
his love of crossword puzzles. He assigned number values to each letter of the
alphabet, printed on square tiles, and arranged a playing board with di ferent

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multiplying scores on certain positions. He called the game “Criss Cross Words.”
One of its earliest devotees was a man from Newtown named James Brunot; fed
up with his commute to New York City every day, Brunot secured the rights to
Criss Cross Words, made some modi cations to the rules, and hired Sarah Mannix
— who operated a wood shop out of her home on Main Street — to produce the
wooden tiles for each game set. Finally, he changed the name of the game to
“Scrabble.” For its rst 25 years, every game box was marked prominently,
“Production and Marketing Co., Newtown.”

***
In 1939, a granite statue was dedicated at the small park on the north end of Main
Street. Its o cial title was the Liberty and Peace Monument, but it became more
popularly known around town as the “Soldiers and Sailors Monument.” The
statue is 30 feet tall, and depicts a woman in robes standing atop three joined
pillars, carrying a ag with a speared tip. She is the spirit of victory.

At the base of the monument, two bronze slabs are embedded, listing the names
of Newtown’s veterans from the great World War, alongside those from the
Revolutionary and Civil wars. Inscribed below the slabs, a message dedicates the
statue to the memory of these townspeople “who ventured all unto death that we
might live a republic with independence, a nation with union forever, a world
with righteousness and peace for all.”

But war came again on December 7, 1941, and Newtown once again sent its
ghting men overseas in service of their country. (One who served with
distinction was a Francis J. Bresson, an army sergeant who saw combat in two
campaigns with the Army Air Corp in the Asiatic Paci c Theater. His family
owned a dairy farm in Sandy Hook, high on a hill.)

***
The third agpole endured longer than either of its predecessors. But by 1947, it,
too, was showing signs of decay. Hoping to avert the loss of another agpole, the
town dug a hole around its base, lled the hole with concrete, and welded a steel
collar around the decaying wood. They expected that the restored pole could last
another 25 years; but just 3 passed before the rot was back again.

This time, the town decided against repairs, and drew up plans for a fourth
agpole. This one was to be made from metal.

In January of 1950, two long, steel cylinders were hauled to the intersection, and
welded together, creating a 100-foot span that weighed two and a half tons. A
crane pulled the pole upright, and lowered it into its base, a 16-inches-in-diameter

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steel housing that now sits atop the pavement, securing the bottom 11 feet of the
pole underground. The gold-gilded sphere from the third pole was kept, and
a xed to the top, as the new agpole’s height was raised to the sky.

With that, the central intersection of Newtown — Main Street and Church Hill
Road — had fully taken shape: the old Presbyterian Meeting House, with its
copper rooster weather vane on top, splitting the lanes of West Street on one side,
and the stone edi ce of Trinity Church facing it from the east side, with the
town’s iconic agpole in the middle.

The strength of the fourth agpole’s construction would be tested most

stringently a few decades later, when a speeding car crashed into it head-on; the
pole stood unscathed. The car was demolished.

***
Newtown celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1955, and marked the occasion by
adopting an o cial town seal: a silhouette of the copper rooster, as seen on the
steeple on top of the meeting house.

THE SCHOOL
In 1954, the Newtown School Board convened a meeting; with the nation
becoming increasingly suburbanized af er the war, the town’s population had
exploded past 7,500, and enrollment at the only elementary school in the district,
Hawley School — which was handed down to the younger students af er the
construction of Newtown High School in 1951 — was well above capacity. And it
was only going to get worse. Something had to be done, and quick.

The town had recently purchased a plot of land in Sandy Hook, along the
Pootatuck river, about a mile downstream from the old rubber factory. The
solution to the town’s overcrowded elementary schools would be built here, just
o f Riverside Road, and they would name it Sandy Hook Elementary School. It
would be a simple, single-story structure, with a oor plan the shape of an “L.”

Early during the school’s construction, tragedy occurred: A. Finn Dickenson, the
town’s rst selectman (the highest o ce under Newtown’s charter, taking the
place of a mayor), was visiting the building site on May 17, 1955, when a truck
driver who was maneuvering a load of bricks failed to see him. Dickenson was
struck and killed. The town decided that the curving driveway leading to the new
school, from Riverside Road, would be named Dickenson Drive in his honor.

In the fall of 1956, Sandy Hook Elementary School opened its doors.

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Newtown continued to grow, and in 1964, the voters approved funding for an
expansion to Sandy Hook Elementary. More classrooms were added, and the
outline of the school grew: from an “L” shape, to a “U.” The school's sixth grade
class took up donations to install a plaque in the new hallway, dedicated to
President John F Kennedy, who had been assassinated in Dallas just the year
before. It showed a pro le bust of the late president, alongside his famous quote:
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your
country.”

***
In 1974, the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire Department built its central rehouse on
Riverside Road, on the corner of Dickenson Drive. With its location right next to
the school, the re drills at Sandy Hook Elementary would just have the students,
af er lining up for roll call, simply walk down the short curve of Dickenson drive,
to the waiting remen.

In 1993, the school again required an expansion. More classrooms were added, and
the ends of the “U” outline were joined, to make a square. The school became one
big, looping, corridor, with an open courtyard at its center.

***
That same year, Newtown’s agpole was struck by another vehicle. Again, the
pole stayed upright — but this time, the impact knocked the decorative gold
sphere o f its top, sending the globe sailing down Church Hill Road. Thankfully,
no one was hurt. The golden ornament was recovered, and put back in its place: at
the top of the agpole, in the center of the crossroads.

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 12. Yogananda

Sandy Hook, Connecticut

From the top of a hill in Sandy Hook, Francis Bresson witnessed Newtown grow,
and change. When he had lef to ght in the second Great War, the roads back
home were still dirt paths; when he returned, with a row of medals pinned across
his chest, the streets were all paved. Then, as the 1970’s and 80’s passed, and as
Newtown’s population surged to 18,000 and beyond, the roads branched,
spreading further out from the agpole, as civilization steadily crept upward,
toward the wood fences of Bresson’s old dairy farm.

Finally, the Bressons sold their land to developers from out-of-town, and the dairy
farm disappeared. But the road to the old farm persists to this day, with Bresson
Farm Road curving east, high into the hills of Sandy Hook.

Nearby, the damming of the Housatonic has created Lake Zoar, drowning the site
where the neighboring Bennett family’s old bridge once spanned the river. In the
right conditions, when the reservoir is low, you can still sometimes see the stone
pylons peering over the surface of the water, past the end of what is still called
Bennett’s Bridge Road, a reminder of the path that vanished with the rising tide.

The names of more recent paths through Sandy Hook are of en much harder to
place.

Yogananda is a Sanskrit word, a name that means “bliss through divine union.”
The term was likely rst heard by Americans af er the Hindu monk Swami
Vivekananda rst brought Vedantic philosophy to the west from India, and
established the Vedanta Society of New York in 1896. One noteworthy attendee of
the society’s rst meetings was a peculiar man from Brooklyn, a Dr. John Street;
he was a “well-known apostle of the occult” and “powerful psychic,” and was
famous for his collection of magic crystals, which he claimed could show him
visions of future events. The visiting Swami Vivekananda was apparently
impressed with Dr. Street’s character, and ordained him; Dr. Street henceforth

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took on a new name, Swami Yogananda — or as he was usually known, Doctor
Yogananda. The society later opened an ashram in West Cornwall, Connecticut,
not far from Sandy Hook; this outpost of eastern thought could, by come
forgotten vector, have introduced the name Yogananda to Fair eld County, where
it still lingered a century later. It’s one possibility.

But the most famous person to call themselves “Yogananda” — the gure most
likely to have inspired a namesake in Newtown — came to America twenty- ve
years af er Dr. Street was ordained: Paramahansa Yogananda was a yogi who
immigrated from India in the 1920s. He founded the Self Realization Fellowship,
and shortly af er his arrival in the U.S., embarked on a historic speaking tour
around the country, being among the rst to bring the practice of “yoga” to the
west. Today, he is widely remembered for his series of essays on inner peace, and a
philosophy with the goal “to liberate man from his threefold su fering: physical
disease, mental inharmonies, and spiritual ignorance.”

Perhaps it was a blessing bestowed on the family of a future land developer, or a

chance reading of Paramahansa’s enduring Autobiography of a Yogi that brought
such an obscure Sanskrit word all the way to Newtown. Whatever the source, it
came to pass that in 1996, when a rm from the nearby town of Monroe cleared a
path through the woods that surrounded the old Bresson dairy farm, they settled
on the name “Yogananda Street.”

The developers broke their purchase into 2-acre lots, and uprooted the trees,
leaving a vantage point overlooking Sandy Hook that was to be one of 17 selected
by the townspeople in 1998, “deemed worthy of preservation during a time of
continuing rapid development.” Such an enviable view of “the unique, rural open
character of Newtown, its visual quality and signi cant landscapes and natural
areas,” would last as a blessing to the family who made their home at 36
Yogananda Street.

July 23, 1998

36 Yogananda Street — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The house at 36 Yogananda was built by a man named Robert. He designed it as a
two-story, colonial-style home, with an attached two-car garage. It came with four
bathrooms, and four bedrooms. Robert built the house high at the back of the
lot, on a hill overlooking the development, and painted it a pale yellow with
forest-green shutters. A winding driveway led down the hill from the house, with
a plain, grey mailbox where the path met the street.

The Lanzas signed the mortgage that summer, for $405,900.

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Robert liked the Lanzas. At some point af er selling 36 Yogananda to them —
possibly while nishing the basement af er they had moved in — Robert
remembers meeting their two sons; of Adam, he noticed “nothing out of the
ordinary or remarkable.”

***
Nancy said she was looking for a “fresh start” in Newtown. She wrote to friends
back in Kingston that her new surroundings were beautiful, and full of activity.
The house was more than twice the size of the old place on Depot Road, and to
Nancy’s delight, they now had the money to ll this big house with new furniture,
new appliances, new everything. But she was determined to stay humble. “Most
people buy a house in this neighborhood and cop an attitude,” she reported to
friends, shortly af er moving in. “They say to themselves, ‘hey, I paid a half million
for this house...I DESERVE to be treated like royalty. If this goes wrong, or if that
isn’t perfect..I DEMAND that someone gets here to handle it right away.’”

Nancy wasn’t like that. She prided herself on her manners, and even more so, on
doing the hard work herself. In her heart, she would always be the girl from the
farm.

Nancy started planning how she would make 36 Yogananda “home.” She had the
builder, Robert, set up outlets for a gaming room in the basement, and the boys
couldn’t wait to hook up their Nintendo 64 for sessions of Goldeneye. The rest of
the basement would be for the laundry, or Nancy’s exercise room. Then there was
an un nished storage area, with the furnace, and a tank that stored the home’s
heating oil for the winter.

Above-ground, Nancy began lling the empty spaces with her purchases. She
chose them meticulously: for the study, a maroon Oriental rug; for the dining
room, a giant framed print of “The Dinner Party” by French post-impressionist
Jules-Alexandre Grün. There were two living rooms, each furnished with
decorative shelves that would house displays of Nancy’s ne glass and antiques,
which she immediately began collecting. (Here, money was no object: if Nancy
loved a piece, it was going to be hers.)

She even got to build her dream kitchen. From the cookware to the dishes, she
chose everything — the cloth on her perfect kitchen table, she decided af er much
deliberation, would be white with Wedgewood Blue owers. The kitchen had oak
oors, three sinks, and the counter tops were platinum-granite — Nancy searched
all over town until she found a cutting board that matched perfectly.

A staircase led up from the foyer. The four bedrooms were on the upper oor,
and the master bedroom, where Nancy and Peter slept, was a lef turn from the

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top of the staircase, at the end of the hall. Nancy chose a polished wood furniture
set, and placed photos of her beloved sons around the room, facing her bed.

Fall 1998
Sandy Hook Elementary School
The school bus stopped on Yogananda street. Nancy had enrolled Adam at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in September of 1998, to start rst grade. His older
brother Ryan would be there with him for the trip, to join the f h grade class.

The bus took the Lanza brothers down Bresson Farm and Bennett’s Bridge roads,
out of Sandy Hook and into Newtown proper, just long enough to see Newtown
High School pass by out the lef window; that year, the boys could have caught a
nal glimpse of the high school’s “Newtown Indians” logo on the side of the
sports stadium, being painted over and replaced with an image of the school’s new
mascot, the Newtown Nighthawk.

The bus came to a “T” intersection, and turned right, up Riverside Road, past the
site of the old mill, and back into Sandy Hook. Across from the rehouse, an old
wooden sign, painted white and hung under an iron bar, marked the turn:

SANDY HOOK SCHOOL

1956

VISITORS WELCOME

Reaching the top of Dickenson Drive, the Lanza boys hopped out at the curb,
and joined the crowd of students as they led through the school’s glass front
entrance, ready for their rst day of class.

***
Newtown picked up Adam’s education plan right where Kingston had lef o f: he
was to continue receiving the same kinds of speech and occupational therapy
sessions that he was getting before, just in new surroundings.

According to the Child Advocate’s o ce, “best practices” for Planning and
Placement Teams at the time called for more than this: Newtown was, ideally, to
coordinate directly with Kingston, and review the prior district’s original
evaluations (the materials underlying the IEP itsel ) before coming to their own

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conclusion, and nalizing a new IEP for their incoming student. But the 2014
investigators at the Child Advocate’s O ce would not nd any indication that
such source documents were ever “provided, asked for, or considered.” And so,
while Nancy said she had moved to Newtown because she believed Sandy Hook
was a better school, it is likely that Adam’s new teachers had little choice but to
follow the old plan, handed o f from New Hampshire.

***
There were twenty-one students in Adam’s rst-grade class. Many of the faces in
this classroom were ones whom Adam would recognize again and again over the
course of their education together, and who would recognize him back. Their
teacher was a Mrs. Lavelle, and she shared with them her plans for the school year
to come: the kids would be acting in several plays, and going on a eld trip to the
Beardsley Zoo, in nearby Bridgeport. There was also one feature of Mrs. Lavelle’s
classroom, itself, that was unique: hers was the home of Sandy Hook’s “Culture
Corner,” which meant that each month, a section of the classroom would be
transformed into a series of exhibits about another civilization found somewhere
around the globe — from Chinese New Year, to the mysterious circular calendars
of ancient Mexico.

On picture day, Mrs. Lavelle led her class into the auditorium at Sandy Hook
Elementary for their group photo. She positioned Adam immediately in front of
herself; he is seen wearing a white turtleneck sweater, patterned with racecars. His
expression looks as though he was trying to smile — but, standing among his new
peers, the boy’s face is tense, and bug-eyed, conveying something closer to
confused alarm.

***
Nancy would spend a lot of time up north that rst year, back home in Kingston,
lingering among familiar surroundings and familiar people. If she didn’t have the
boys with her, she would of en spend all day on shopping sprees at the luxury
stores in North Conway — the kinds of places she could have only dreamed of
a fording during her days at Front Street Laundry. It was a three-and-a-half hour
drive back to Newtown, and the suitcases and shopping bags began to strain the
con nes of her old commuter car. “Oh well, needs change and there is no way to
predict how they will change,” she wrote to a friend, as she started shopping for a
new model. One with a little more space. “Maybe a Lexus, or an In niti… just as
long as it isn’t a minivan,” Nancy said. She was upgrading, not selling out.

Nancy toured the village, and took in Newtown’s carefully preserved colonial
landmarks; the agpole, the meeting house, and the churches. She glowed when
she described her new surroundings for the folks back home, calling the town

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“picturesque.” She said the boys were doing well at their new school, and that
Peter was making great money.

Even so, there were already some things Nancy missed about the farm: while the
treeline facing 36 Yogananda’s backyard was e fective in separating the property
from their neighbors, at night, wild deer would creep out from the darkness,
eating her decorative shrubs, and dropping tics. Lyme disease was a growing
concern, and so naturally, Nancy wanted to shoot the deer; but she was soon
disappointed to learn that in Newtown, she would have to wait until hunting
season.

Nancy and Peter brought the Ruger Mini-14 “ranch ri e” with them from
Kingston, and kept it in a gun safe, somewhere in 36 Yogananda. (They may also
have brought the .45 pistol with them — or, they might have sold it before the
move. Nobody remembers for sure.)

***
The move to Connecticut meant that Adam had to change pediatricians. When
Nancy took him for a check-up that fall (apparently as part of the IEP process) the
records note that Adam had already been “diagnosed” with sensory processing
problems, and that the family reported a previous diagnosis of a “seizure
disorder.” But it does not appear that there was ever any o cial diagnosis of a
seizure disorder during Adam’s years in Kingston, nor af er. (However,
investigators would later nd a curious piece of evidence in Nancy’s closet at 36
Yogananda, tucked in a cardboard box full of Adam’s early-childhood artwork: it
is a simple drawing of the Nintendo character Pikachu, scribbled child-like in
yellow marker, but it is drawn on a sheet from a set of promo stationary that is
branded with the logo for Dilantin — a drug used to treat and prevent seizures.)

In a return visit a few months later, ostensibly to address “joint pain” that her son
was experiencing, Nancy again raised the prospect of Adam su fering a seizure.
This time, the boy’s mother clari ed the issue: she told the doctor there was the
possibility of a seizure if blood w drawn; Adam was sensitive, and couldn’t
handle needles. She emphasized to the medical sta f that they should perform only
diagnostic tests that did not require drawing any of her son's blood. Even if such
tests were not as e fective at determining his health status, as far as Nancy was
concerned, that was preferable compared to what would happen to Adam's
emotional state, if she ever let the doctors come near him with a needle.

***
Later in the fall, the team at Sandy Hook Elementary invited Nancy down to the
school for one of their regular Planning and Placement Team meetings. There,

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Mrs. Lavelle and the sta f reported to her that Adam was reading “at grade level,”
and they had determined that he was actually above-average in math. He was
always respectful, and behaved appropriately.

His di culties, the sta f found, were in his written expression, which was
attributed to his more fundamental delay in developing speaking skills — an echo
of the Adam that New Hampshire observed in his preschool years. He was
“timid,” and “needed prompting to participate.” He needed to “learn to take
initiative.”

Nancy and her team agreed to an update of Adam’s IEP; the goals they set, while
broad, mostly indicate that Adam remained sensitive about touch, such as with
the tags on his clothes that Nancy was still having to remove; if lef unaddressed,
these “aversive reactions” could lead to full-on avoidant behaviors (such as
pathologically refusing to touch certain surfaces), and so the team added a goal to
Adam’s plan, to “improve sensory processing related to daily school activities” by
“focusing on tabletop activities in appropriate ways.”

***
In November 1998, a tepee rose in the courtyard of Sandy Hook Elementary
School. It was a sign that the culture that Mrs. Lavelle’s class was set to study that
month was not from a foreign place at all, but a foreign era; with the
Thanksgiving holiday approaching, they were to pay tribute to the continent’s
indigenous tribes, the Native Americans.

Mrs. Lavelle’s class took turns playing a dance game in the tepee, hopping along
the oor to the rhythm created by the pounding of a native drum, and a rattle
made of deer toes, as they waited to pick up candy from the oor when the beat
stopped. A group of visiting Lakota had constructed the tepee out of sticks and
bu falo hide, and now were playing the old instruments for the children, in hopes
of making them feel closer to the people who lived there once before — in a time
when the wigwams still lined the rocky banks of the Housatonic, and the land was
known only as uanneapague.

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 13. The Ghost in the
Cabin

May 21, 1998

ADX “Supermax” Federal Prison — Florence, Colorado
The United States sentenced Timothy McVeigh to die for blowing up their federal
building in Oklahoma, and shipped him o f to a maximum-security prison in
Colorado — a locked box in the barren shadow of the Rocky Mountains,
commonly known as “Supermax.” The facility had high walls, heavily armed
guards, and technology advanced enough to restrain any man. There was no hope
for escape; until McVeigh’s execution day came, he had little to do but work on his
appeals, watch television, and write letters.

McVeigh maintained regular correspondence with a journalist from the Oklahoma

Gazette, and in his letter to that reporter from May of 1998, McVeigh had to
apologize for recent delays on his end of the conversation: “This place has turned
into a complete circus. Kaczynski is literally my neighbor — and hence, most of
my problems stem from this.”

Theodore John Kaczynski was the latest arrival at Supermax. His presence in the
next cell was not, by itself, troublesome to his neighbor; it was the accompanying
heightened security measures that needled McVeigh, including a 24-hour guard
stationed in their cell block, and the lights kept on well into the night. The aura
around the new arrival re ected that Ted Kaczynski was indeed something of a
treasure at Supermax: he was the prize at the end of the most expensive manhunt
in the history of American law enforcement.

***
The rst bombs turned up back in 1979, in mail rooms at various universities
around Illinois. One such device even started a re, aboard a ight from Chicago

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O’Hare to Washington DC — if it had gone o f as intended, hundreds would
have died. Af er that, investigators with the FBI and the US Postal Service started
collaborating, in a frenzied search for the mysterious mad bomber (or bombers).
Forensics, and a few bombs that were recovered intact, showed that the devices
were not very big, and were crudely put together, but also that each one showed
more sophistication than the last; the task force had to nd the party responsible
before they perfected their craf .

Whoever it was, they didn’t seem to have any demands. There were no letters, or
claims of responsibility for any of the bombs. And the packages were all
postmarked from public mailboxes in di ferent cities, with false return addresses.

This didn’t leave the FBI much to go on, so they hoped to narrow the bomber’s
location based on the parts he used. But even that turned out to be a dead-end:
each time, every piece used in the bomb’s construction was made from cheap
wood, or recycled junk materials. Totally untraceable. It was as if there was just
some hostile force, out there in the mail system, one that for some reason held a
grudge against universities and airliners. The FBI thus dubbed their new task
force UNABOM, and from there, their mysterious prey got a name: Unabomber.

***
In 1985, the Unabomber suddenly changed his mod operandi: an employee at a
computer store was watching out the front window when she saw a man placing a
package in the parking lot, in between cars. A few minutes later, the parcel
exploded.

An FBI sketch artist’s depiction of what the clerk saw from the store window
would soon form the iconic picture of the Unabomber: a thin, Caucasian man,
with a mustache. The hood of his sweatshirt is up, and he is wearing aviator
sunglasses, obscuring most of his identifying features. It is the portrait of a ghost.

The Unabomber suddenly dropped o f the radar af er that. There were no bombs
for six years.

***
When the explosions started going o f once again, in 1993, they were noticeably
more powerful. And there was another change, even more signi cant: suddenly,
the ghost had a message. Af er decades of mystery, the mute force behind the
mayhem wanted to communicate.

The Unabomber sent one of his packages to an advertising executive’s house, and
at the same time sent a letter to the New York Tim , explaining why the target

143
was chosen — out of “general principle,” since his chosen business was “the
development of techniques for manipulating people’s attitudes.” As the bomber
believed, “The people who are pushing all this growth and progress deserve to be
severely punished.”

But there was more to it than just revenge: the Unabomber wanted an audience
now.

Five months later, a package arrived at the o ces of a forestry association,

addressed to the CEO. The CEO opened it, and it exploded.

At the same time, the Washington Post and the New York Tim received copies of
the bomber’s 35,000 word “manifesto,” entitled Industrial Society and its Future.
It was a dense, but lucid text, laying out a detailed case: that the progress of
human civilization, away from the species’s natural habitats and behaviors, had
been the cause of incalculable su fering. Advanced societies were factories of
misery, where the citizens primarily engaged in “surrogate activities” — such as
scienti c study, or athletics — rather than hunting and gathering. We were
building an unsustainable and perverse system to maintain control of humans,
and as technology advanced, it would only get worse; universities, computers,
advertising, airliners… all of it was a mistake. And if this “progress” didn’t stop
soon, the bomber argued, then the consequences for humanity would be far
deadlier than a few mail bombs.

The bomber promised to send more devices through the mail if the manifesto was
not published in a major newspaper. On September 19, 1995, the Tim and the
Post jointly published the text as an eight-page supplement — acting on
recommendation from the Director of the FBI, and the Attorney General — in
the interest of “public safety.”

The general rule at the FBI was not to negotiate with terrorists, much less cede to
their demands — but the bureau wanted the Unabomber bad. And they needed a
break.

It worked. The essay captured the Unabomber’s philosophy in one document,

written in his own distinct voice. When David Kaczynski read it, he recognized
the voice on the page, and told the FBI where to look: they could nd his brother
in a cabin, on a mountain in Montana.

***
Ted Kaczynski had been a brilliant math prodigy in the late 1960s, graduating
early from Harvard and taking an assistant professorship at UC Berkeley. Only
two years passed there, however, before he abruptly told his department heads,

144
“out of the blue,” that he was giving up mathematics — and academia in general.
Most of his colleagues at the school were mysti ed, but one of Ted’s superiors had
a theory: “Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy, and as far as I know he
made no close friends in the department. E forts to bring him more into the swing
of things had failed.”

Af er resigning, Kaczynski disappeared, wandering o f into the Montana

wilderness. He told his brother he was venturing out to live alone, to survive o f
the land, and to pursue what he believed was an ideal human existence — in
harmony with nature, and without the complications and degradation that
technology wrought. His brother even came out to the mountain in Montana,
and helped build the tiny cabin, where Ted could live out his days with no indoor
plumbing, and no electricity. His dream home.

***
The FBI went up the mountain on April 3, 1996, and dragged the ghost out of the
cabin, suddenly unmasking the bomber as an unkempt, grizzly-bearded hermit
whose goal was — quite literally — to bomb human society back to the stone age.

Captured, the Unabomber would insist that his campaign had started as a counter-
attack: if he had been allowed to, he would have stayed in his cabin, on the
mountainside, and kept to himself. Indeed, he said there had been periods back
on the mountain when he was lucky, and weeks would pass, during which he
could forget that civilization existed at all — as long as he wasn’t interrupted by an
airliner passing overhead, or by new highways slicing through the woods, closer
and closer to his cabin.

At trial, the bomber’s council pursued an insanity defense, and summoned

doctors who would testify that the “mad bomber,” Ted, was indeed mentally ill: a
paranoid schizophrenic. But Kaczynski himself vehemently rejected this diagnosis
— as did many outside observers. Why, af er all, should it be considered “crazy” to
subsist in a way that is comparable to the conditions in which all of human
civilization once lived?

Kaczynski begged the judge to let him represent himself, but found that his own
defense team had already vetoed that option, working against him behind the
scenes. So, on the eve of his trial, forced to choose between being diagnosed with a
mental illness, or death, Ted tried to hang himself with his underwear.

It didn’t work. Finally, the Unabomber took a deal: he pleaded guilty, and
accepted a life sentence at Supermax. It was the only way to avoid a public trial in
which his own defense would portray him as insane, and surely dismiss his essay
— Industrial Society and its Future, his life’s work — as the ravings of a madman.

145
And so, the state’s forces nally dragged Ted to Supermax, and stu fed him in the
cell next to the Oklahoma City bomber. His cage for the rest of his days.

***
On the other side of the wall, Timothy McVeigh was wrapping up his letter to the
journalist in Denver, and he shared something he had just overheard: “One of the
guards out in the hall last night told another about the shootings at the school in
Spring eld, Oregon. The other guard’s response? (I’m not kidding...) — ‘Job
security.’”

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 14. Promised Land

May 22, 1998

Lane County Courthouse — Eugene, Oregon
Sheri ’s deputies led the Thurston High School shooter into his arraignment with
his hands cu fed behind his back, and clad in a black University of Oregon Ducks
sweater they had given him af er they seized his trench coat. Meanwhile, across
town in Shangri-La, the bomb squad was still busy clearing his house; they had
found a large explosive device made from the casing of a re extinguisher in the
shooter’s bedroom, and several pipe bombs stashed in a crawlspace. It would be
days before they could declare the home safe.

The judge read 58 felony charges. The shooter pleaded guilty, by reason of
insanity.

News reports gave a preview of what was to come once the trial was called:
Oregon prosecutors said that the shooter had fancied himself “the next
Unabomber,” and indeed the freshman had told his friends on the school bus that
he idolized Kaczynski, along with the Oklahoma City bomber — one kid claimed
of the freshman, “He always said it would be funny if someone blew up the
school and went on a rampage.” Meanwhile, a search of school records showed
that the shooter had turned in a creative writing assignment depicting exactly that,
about a year before the attack. His appetite for destruction had been an open
secret at Thurston High; the caption under his yearbook photo had jokingly
deemed him “most likely to start World War III.”

The shooter was a minor, so the death penalty was o f the table. He had pleaded
guilty in the hope of somehow getting less than a life term without parole, or — if
he really got what he wanted — a bed in one of the state’s crowded mental
institutions. But that wasn’t an easy task; his defense would have to convince the
jury that he was very, very sick.

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 ***
The Thurston shooter said he had been hearing “voices” ever since he was twelve
years old, commanding him to kill. There were three of them: the rst voice
always put him down, and wrecked his self-esteem. During the ride home from
the police station the day before the attack — what his father had experienced as
nothing but silent tension — the shooter was hearing the voice say, You stupid
piece of shit, you’re worthless.

The second voice gave commands; on the night before he attacked the school, as
he stood waiting in the darkened garage, watching his mother park her car, the
voice told him, Kill her, and — with his father already lying under a sheet upstairs
— Look at what you’ve done. You have no other choice.

The third voice never had anything original to say; it only quoted the rst two.
But the shooter knew it when he heard it. All three were distinct, like di ferent
individuals, all taunting him along the path to destruction. The torment they
in icted was re ected in the shooter’s tearful confession, recorded by police
minutes af er they had pried the knife from his hands. On the tape, the teen sobs
maniacally, “I had no choice! God damn it...these voices inside my head!”

The prosecutors weren’t buying it. They planned to make the case that the
shooter was just a coward, trying to get away with doing what he had always
wanted to do. There were no “voices” at all; even the statement, “Damn these
voices inside my head,” was just a quote from the shooter’s favorite Nine Inch
Nails song. He was faking it, pure and simple. Af er all, he had been to a
psychiatrist before the shooting, to whom he never mentioned anything about the
supposed voices — and he had committed numerous “volitional acts,”
particularly in the way he ambushed each of his parents, all of which suggested a
clarity of thought that should be impossible if he were truly delusional. He hadn’t
somehow just stumbled into creating a tragedy; he stole a vehicle, and drove
straight there.

The Shangri-La shooter’s trial was thus set to unfold as an inverse of the
Unabomber’s: with the accused trying to convince everyone he was mentally ill,
while the state argued that he was actually sane.

But the Thurston High School shooter’s case would never make it to trial. Just
three days before jury selection was set to begin, he abruptly withdrew the
“insanity” claim from his guilty plea, and threw himself on the mercy of the court.
The judge could have given him as little as 25 years under the circumstances of this
plea, but instead, he sentenced the freshman to 111 years in prison, with no
possibility for parole. The state of Oregon locked the shooter away for the rest of

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his life. They could only pray that the voices, if they were real, could be banished
along with him.

May 23, 1998

Roosevelt Room — The White House
With 1998’s Memorial Day weekend approaching, President Clinton devoted part
of his weekly radio address to the community in Spring eld, and the latest tragedy
to visit an American school:

Like all Americans, I am stru ling to make sense of the senseless, and
to understand what could drive a teenager to commit such a terrible act.
And like all Americans, I am profoundly troubled by the startling
similarity of th crime to the other tragic incidents that have stunned
America in less than a year’s time.

We must face up to the fact that these are more than isolated incidents.
They are symptoms of a changing culture that desensitiz our children
to violence; where most teenagers have seen hundreds or even thousands
of murders on television, in movi , and in video gam before they
graduate from high school; where too many young people seem unable or
unwilling to take responsibility for their actions; and where all too o en,
everyday conflicts are resolved not with words but with weapons, which,
even when illegal to possess by children, are all too easy to get.

But it was still a mystery, exactly why the same irrational crime kept repeating
itself. That meant the cycle could well continue.

June 7, 1998
Pennsylvania Convention Center — Philadelphia
The National Ri e Association held its 127th annual convention in the City of
Brotherly Love, and more than 40,000 NRA members turned out for the
occasion. As part of the proceedings, they would ultimately elect a new president
of the association: Hollywood actor Charlton Heston.

At one point during the ceremonies, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Tanya Metaksa
(who would of en remind reporters of the spelling of her last name, “it’s ‘ak’ as in
AK-47 and ‘sa’ as in semi-automatic”), delivered a speech in tribute to the
students from Thurston High School. Two of the students were even onstage
alongside her: Jacob Ryker, the teenage wrestler who had tackled the shooter and
sustained two gunshot wounds himself, and Jacob’s brother Josh, who had joined
the struggle moments later. The Rykers were from an “NRA family,” and

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Metaksa had invited them to the convention as “a team of heroes that showed all
can be well and right and proper in American youth.” She challenged the audience
to show the same courage, should they ever face a crazed shooter: “If you’re
trained by the military or the NRA, do you take cover, or take charge?”

Af er her speech, Metaksa and the hero brothers from Spring eld were joined
onstage by Charlton Heston himself, in one of his rst acts as NRA president. All
joined in a prayer for “the land of the strong, the land of the vigilant, the land of
the active, [and] the home of the brave.”

Later in the convention, Heston returned to the stage to deliver his acceptance
speech. He expressed his rmly-held belief that the trend of school shootings was
“a child issue, not a gun issue,” and took the opportunity to direct some words at
President Clinton (then in the midst of impeachment proceedings, af er lying in a
civil deposition about his sexual involvement with a young intern). “Mr.
Clinton,” he proclaimed, “America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old
daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns!”

The crowd roared.

As the new standard bearer of the NRA, Heston’s professed goal was to bring
sportsman shooters back into the fold; many of them, identifying as
traditionalists, had followed in the path of former President Bush in drif ing away
from the gun lobby since Oklahoma City, but it was a rif that went all the way
back to the “coup” in Cincinnati, and the abandoned move to Colorado. And
now that Clinton was getting his big gun laws passed, and talking about passing
more, Heston felt it was time to come together.

In his speech, the new NRA president told the members, “Freedom has only one
enemy it cannot defeat: negligence.” He looked to the future, laid out the political
struggles before them, and then asked every gun owner in attendance to declare
their allegiance to his vision, and to the ght ahead: “Before we go any further, I
want to know: who is with me, and who is against me?”

Again, the crowd roared, hunters and sportsmen included. Faced with what
looked like an existential threat, the NRA was nally reuni ed, and reborn.

***
It would not be long before Heston’s leadership was tested; passing a national
assault weapons ban had been a major victory for the forces of gun control in
America, perhaps their biggest triumph yet. However, as their critics had argued,
the vast majority of gun violence was still being perpetrated with handguns — the
availability of which had changed little, beyond the waiting periods and

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background checks brought by the Brady Bill. And whatever the rearm used, the
underlying fact was, Americans were still getting shot far, far too of en.

***
It was by chance that, around this same time, the major tobacco companies in the
United States were nally surrendering to their own legal pressures, faced with
seemingly endless lawsuits from nearly every state in the union. Their battle was
over liability for the products they sold, and recompense to the various
municipalities nationwide for the staggering costs of treating health problems
associated with smoking.

Desperate, “Big Tobacco” had gone to Congress for relief, and ended up signing
an unprecedented settlement, in the hundreds of billions dollars, to be paid out to
the states in perpetuity. Smoking would never be seen in the same light again. And
many of the same lawyers who took down Big Tobacco were, by 1998, looking to
the rearms industry as their next target.

October 30, 1998

New Orleans, Louisiana
It started in a city with one of the highest rates of gun crime in the nation: the
mayor of New Orleans called a press conference, and announced that he was suing
an array of gun manufacturers — including Colt, Sturm & Ruger, Beretta and
Smith & Wesson — in addition to a number of Louisiana pawn shops. On behalf
of the municipality of New Orleans, he alleged that the defendants were
“companies and organizations who manufacture, distribute, promote, market, sell
and/or instruct in the use of rearms,” which were being sold without “the means
to prevent [the gun from] being red by unauthorized users,” and other safety
features. It was as a result of these failures, the mayor claimed, that his city was lef
to “pay out large sums of money” for emergency services to victims of gun crime,
while also su fering a loss of “substantial tax revenue due to lost productivity.”

Two weeks later, a second legal skirmish erupted, in Chicago: announcing the
city’s lawsuit against 23 gun manufacturers, 12 local gun dealers, as well as a
number of middle-men distributors, the mayor declared, “We are going to hit
them where it hurts, in the wallet.” Handguns had already been e fectively banned
within Chicago city limits since 1982, but the ban wasn’t working; the mayor
alleged that the gun industry “created a public nuisance” by knowingly making
and distributing handguns to dealers in the suburbs surrounding their city, who in
turn would sell them to Chicago residents. “This is not a product-liability suit,”
he said. “The problem is the guns work all too well.”

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Two months later, the battle lines came through Colt territory. The mayor of
Bridgeport’s lawsuit sought damages “in excess of $100 million,” and focused on
an issue that New Orleans rst introduced to the ght: “smart guns,” that would
detect the owner’s hand before allowing the gun to be red. Despite all the
advances in consumer technology in recent years, smart guns were still totally
absent from the market. The city argued, “The defendants have the ability to
make guns safer by incorporating locks and other safety features that would
prevent children from shooting guns and killing themselves or others, but they
have chosen not to do so.”

On it went, with municipal lawsuits much the same as these, led by the mayors
of cities like Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston,
and dozens more by the end of 1999.

January 23, 1999

Georgia World Congress Center — Atlanta, Georgia
When Atlanta’s mayor announced that he was planning to join the anti-gun ght,
it brought a special con ict for the gun industry; the 21st annual “Shooting,
Hunting and Outdoor Trade” (SHOT) show was set to take place at the World
Congress Center that year, right in downtown. Suddenly, the vendors didn’t feel
so welcome in a place that was suing them, and the event's attendees were having
second thoughts about spending any of their money there.

The SHOT show was hosted by an industry trade organization, the National
Shooting Sports Foundation. The foundation had been expecting attendance to
top 25,000 that year, but that was before the lawsuits came; now, with rumblings
of a boycott growing louder, the organization sent out a letter to calm their
vendors, and in it, revealed part of their plan to deal with the situation: “It is,
perhaps, appropriate that the First Annual State of the Industry Report,
announcing the launch of historic outreach and legal responses to these lawsuits
and other challenges to our industry, will take place in Atlanta,” the NSSF wrote.
“Your absence will send no message or the wrong message to our adversaries and
to your allies in our industry.”

At the inaugural State of the Industry dinner that weekend, NSSF President and
CEO Bob Delfay rst reminded the attendees, “We are not just merchants and
manufacturers, but also the heirs to, and the current stewards of, our 200-year-old
hunting and shooting-sports heritage.” With that, he unveiled the NSSF’s new
“Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Fund” — a legal and legislative defense
initiative “based on a voluntary manufacturer contribution of 1 percent of
hunting-and-shooting-related sales.” More than seventy gun companies would

152
join the foundation before the year was through, an army mustering against the
cities that had promised to “hit them where it hurts.”

The NSSF strategy was simple: hit back. But they were, as always, careful to check
the NRA’s strategy before plotting their own. The NSSF had been doing that,
informally, since their beginning. It was just good business sense.

***
The NSSF was formed in 1961, as a trade organization devoted expressly to “the
development within the American public of a better understanding and
appreciation of the Shooting Sports.” It sprang from a recognition at the time
that American society was changing, and spending less time outdoors; hunting
was in decline, and gun sales were down. And the NRA (this being before Wayne
and the hardliners seized power in Cincinnati) was spread too thin. “In the past a
tremendously unfair burden has been placed on one or two associations which
have had to ght some lonesome battles,” the NSSF’s founding Chairman said at
their 1961 inaugural banquet. Since the NRA represented gun owners, it was time
for the gun makers and gun sellers to step up.

But even as the debate over gun rights narrowed, so did the perception of guns
themselves in American culture, the chairman explained. With the homicide rate
just starting to rise in 1961, ending decades of welcome statistical decline, guns
were suddenly being portrayed in a negative light in America. Too much e fort
was being expended “solely to ghting anti-gun legislation,” rather than “taking
the POSITIVE approach and promoting the shooting sports for the bene cial
and recreational activities they have been in the past... and can and should be in
the future.”

The NSSF’s rst Executive Committee included a VP from Colt, and —

representing Sturm & Ruger — Bill Ruger himself. But the focus was on more
than just gun sales. The governor of South Dakota also spoke at the banquet, and
said that as an avid hunter himself, he believed “that in the some-25,000,000 gun
owners of the United States rests a political forcefulness which, if ever mobilized,
could swing the entire country.” Such voters lived in places where — as the Guns
& Ammunition reporter in attendance put it — “the shotgun behind the door is
standard equipment, [and] where its loss as a daily tool and instrument of
country fun would be unthinkable.”

***
In the decades since, the NSSF had kept a relatively low pro le. They focused on
expanding the market for hunting and target shooting, while the NRA did the
dirty work in Congress and the state legislatures — protecting the individual’s

153
access to guns. Now, with the alliance of mayors on the rise, and signaling that the
theater of battle would be shif ed to the court of liability law, the NSSF created
the Heritage Fund — to protect the gun industry’s access to consumers.

The launch for the Heritage Fund raised everyone’s spirits. The high point came
when Charlton Heston took the stage, having been invited to the SHOT show
that evening to represent the NRA. For him, it was the culmination of his months
of e fort to unite the forces of America’s gun-rights communities — but their
show of solidarity raised a few eyebrows as well. Of this, Heston was aware; in his
speech, he attacked the suggestion that there was a con ict of interest: “For a
century the NRA and the rearms industry have thrived independently of each
other’s in uence. You make rearms, we preserve the right to bear them — but
now your ght has become our ght. Your legal threat has become our
constitutional threat. What is at stake is not just your livelihood, but liberty.”

With the historic NRA/NSSF alliance in place, the 21st annual SHOT Show came
to a close. The vendors and buyers went back to their home states, and President
Bob Delfay went back to the NSSF’s headquarters — located in Newtown,
Connecticut, since 1993. The foundation’s o ces were located in a stately colonial-
style building on Mile Hill Road, o f of Main Street, just down the road from the
town’s agpole.

154
 15. Eagles Circle

Boston, Massachusetts
Marvin Lafontaine opened his email account. He had a new message, from an old
friend:

From: Nancy Lanza

Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 11:20pm

To: Marvin LaFontaine

Subject: Testing testing...

See? I was right here the whole time!!! All you

had to do was click your mouse three times and
say... (Is that analogy lost on you? I’m never
sure if you get these references to American
culture!)

Love,

Nancy

January 19, 1999

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The Lanzas had been waiting for the internet to be connected at 36 Yogananda for
months. Nancy knew it was nally working when she got her reply back; Marvin
assured her that yes, they did get The Wizard of Oz where he grew up in France,
so he got the reference... and it was just so good to hear from Nancy again. (They
would go on to exchange emails regularly over the next eight months — from the
Lanza family’s rst winter in Newtown, through the start of their second year.)

155
Marvin, ever the scout leader, asked if there was a troop there for the boys to join.

Yes, Newtown did have a scout troop, Nancy said. She had signed Ryan up with
them, and in fact, she had just attended their annual charity fundraiser, which
provided her with one of her earliest moments of culture shock; in Kingston, the
event would have been a modest potluck at a parent’s house. But in Newtown, it
was a catered banquet. “Fund raising doesn’t ever seem to be much of an issue,”
she reported back. “I think that cash just drips o f the trees down here!”

Still, they weren’t going to be with the scouts much longer; Ryan had decided not
to “cross over” to the Boy Scouts that year. One more pinewood derby, and he was
done. “I wish he would stick with it...but he is certainly old enough to make his
own decision on this issue,” she wrote of her 10-year old. Ryan wanted to move on
to karate, basketball, and debate, and she wanted to support him.

Adam dropped out of the scouts at the same time, still following in his older
brother’s orbit. But a neighbor remembers seeing him at one of those last scout
meetings, in Newtown. “Adam seemed to do the bare minimum as far as
participation goes,” they recall. “He really didn’t take to a special interest and/or
hobby. In my opinion it appeared as though Adam was forced to participate in
the scouts by his family.”

***
Nancy wrote of en about her plush new life, and she admitted that part of her was
already growing accustomed to it: she recently had been planning a family
vacation to Disney World, and was discussing a certain hotel with a girlfriend who
had stayed there before. The friend told Nancy it was a nice place, but “I don’t see
YOU staying there.” Nancy asked why not; the friend said, “Three words...NO
ROOM SERVICE!” Nancy had to cop to this: “She knows me well!”

Meanwhile, life back in Kingston had carried on without the Lanzas. Marvin
complained about a wedding he had to attend soon, and Nancy gave him some
tips on how to enjoy the day: “Mix and mingle...keeping a sharp lookout for
weaknesses...it’s great sport.” Once, she had attended a wedding where “the Bride’s
side LOATHED the Groom’s side,” a situation that became a source of
entertainment: “The drunker the families got, the more open hostilities
became...and of course I went from one side to the other...fanning the ames. Too
much fun for one day! The bonus is that you get to gossip all day and dance all
night! Who could pass up a chance for that???” As for the families that she got so
riled up, they never had a clue what she was up to. “I was incredibly discreet and
they were far too self-absorbed to notice!”

156
February 5, 1999
Some friends from Kingston stayed at 36 Yogananda one weekend. They brought
Nancy fresh gossip, and Adam and Ryan got to see some old faces. Af er the kids
all went to bed, Nancy and her friends stayed up watching There’s Something
About Mary, giggling into the night.

When the guests woke the next morning and parted the blinds, they found that
snow had fallen, blanketing the old colonial town in a layer of sparkling white.
Nancy’s guests turned to her and gasped, “What is it about Connecticut…
everything is just SO picture perfect!!”

Nancy only smiled, and said, “We pay extra for this!”

Shepaug Hydroelectric Power Station— Southbury, Connecticut

At the same time, four miles north along the Housatonic, where Shepaug Dam
opens downstream into Lake Lillinonah, a ock of bald eagles was stirring from
their nests. The birds wintered every year at a nature reserve there, on the grounds
of the hydroelectric facility. This habitat on the Housatonic, like the lake itself,
was a chance side-e fect of a human civilization having been in need of 42,800
kilowatts more energy back in 1954, and deciding to build their hydroelectric dam
at that spot on the river: since its construction, whenever the river froze over in
the winter, making it impossible for the predator birds to feed on its sh —
circumstances that would typically force the ock to y further south for the
season — the waters just downstream from the dam’s turbines would still be
owing.

There had been precious few sightings of the eagles at Shepaug Dam that year. It
was always hit and miss: sometimes they soared and put on a show, and sometimes
they hid in the trees. But it so happened that the waters of the Housatonic were
running high that day; the workers at the dam decided it was prudent to open the
ood gates, sending a curtain of churning, white water cascading down the slope
of the dam — and dumping thousands of river herring into the lake.

Suddenly, a whole ock of birds took to the sky; so many, in fact, that the next
day’s Newtown Bee would report that a new record had been set for sightings in
the skies over Sandy Hook.

The eagles, circling, drif ed over 36 Yogananda. Thousands of feet below, Nancy
watched the majestic creatures from her porch, with her house guests. She
counted ten birds, soaring back and forth over their snow-covered neighborhood
for the better part of an hour. Then, a real treat: two of the bald eagles separated
from the ock, and descended, down into the backyard of 36 Yogananda. The two

157
birds landed on one of the bare branches of the trees facing the Lanza family’s
backyard; they were not f y feet from Nancy, who sat in awe, capturing the
moment on the family video camera.

“My Place” Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut

Nancy found her favorite spot in Newtown. “My Place” was a local institution,
with an ambiance that visitors would of en compare to Cheers; when Nancy set
out to nd a social hub in her new surroundings, it was one of her rst stops: on
ueen Street, one block over from Main Street, right between the agpole and St.
Rose of Lima church. She told Marvin she would have to take him to My Place
sometime: “I go there with the boys for dinner on Wednesday or Thursday nights.
When we have weekend company, we usually go there one night so that I get a
break.”

As it turned out, the family that owned My Place were all Red Sox loyalists; season
ticket-holder Nancy already had an “in,” and plenty of memories to share. She
soon got to know the bar’s regulars, and some of them still remember her from
this time, back when the family was new in town: the loving mom bringing her
two boys in for breakfast, or coming in for “to go” salads, and then lingering in
the bar with a glass of chardonnay, chatting about baseball, or politics, or her
favorite vineyards.

“Americans have little regard for wine...80% of American households don’t even
own a corkscrew!” Nancy once raved at Marvin. “It is criminal!”

Of course, Nancy was not one of those Americans; she even kept a spare
corkscrew in her overnight bag. She wondered if she got her palette from her
mother, whom she remembered would make her own vintage down in the cellar
of the old colonial home on Depot Road. Nancy had never tasted that wine, she
said, but it was “potent...I’m sure!!!”

March 2, 1999
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Just before midnight, Marvin got an email from Nancy. Their conversation had
recently drif ed into politics: President Clinton had been acquitted in his
impeachment proceedings, defeating charges of perjury and obstruction of justice,
and it was clear he was going to stay in o ce until the end of his term. Marvin had
apparently expressed what was a common sentiment at the time: Clinton only lied
about adultery, so what did it matter?

158
Nancy was so mad, she said she had to take a few hours to calm down before she
wrote her response, to get her “ranting and raving under control.” Her now-
tempered reaction was nonetheless ery: “ARE YOU SERIOUS???????”

She wanted to make two things clear: she did not like Bill Clinton, and she
thought Marvin was wrong to dismiss what the president had done. It was a
matter of principle; in her view, Clinton had violated his oath of o ce, and
committed perjury — period. It didn’t matter why, or that it was about a personal
matter, or how the Senate had voted on the impeachment. It was wrong.

This message stands out from all of the other correspondence between Nancy and
Marvin: she sent it in the middle of the night, with uncharacteristically poor
spelling at some points, and excessive punctuation in others. “I have to tell you
that the ‘Everybody else is doing it’ mentality doesn’t cut it for me,” Nancy began:
“He has opened the door for anyone with that ‘Everyone else does it’ attitude to
commit perjury without a second thought. It underminds the entire justice
system.” Clinton’s oath of o ce meant that he was “supposed to uphold the
Constitution...not de le it,” and if lying under oath was now acceptable in
America, Nancy believed, “We may as well turn over to the English System of
Courts.”

Besides, it wasn’t the adultery itself that Nancy was o fended by — “I could care
less if he is unfaithful to his wife” — it was the lying, and the manipulating. “I
have a problem with someone who puts his friends, wife, and daughter in that
position without a thought to their feelings.” That applied to everyone — but it
was far more serious when the person was in the Oval O ce, and there were
potentially lives at stake:

We entrust him to use good judgement...and he has

worse jugement than a high school jock. He
doesn’t take the responcibility seriously...he
talks to senators about whether or not to deploy
troups to Iraq...while getting a blow job! How
would you feel if he was deciding on sending one
of YOUR children into harms way...with so little
concern!

“One more thing,” Nancy threw in, just before she clicked SEND: “...can you tell
how upset this has made me? I will look forward to your rebuttal...”

***
The next morning, Nancy was feeling remorseful. She sent a follow-up to Marvin,
in advance of the reply she had just egged-on the night before.

159
 Sorry...just a slight aftershock. You are causing
me to suffer from Politicaltosis..... a rare form
of posttraumatic stress syndrome.

Carry on.....

Love,

Nancy.

Marvin assured her that it was okay. But Nancy just apologized more.

The glossy nish she had been trying so hard to put on her situation, almost in an
instant, faded away: things were not perfect at 36 Yogananda, af er all. She was
under a lot of stress, in an unfamiliar place, and most of all, “I have been a bit
lonely down here in between visits from friends.”

Early April, 1999

The approach of spring meant birthdays for both Ryan and Adam (theirs being
only twelve days apart), and the recent move meant still another multiplying of
the festivities that Nancy had to plan. “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. That is a grand
total of SEVEN parties...UGGGHHH!!!!”

Nancy said she had to get to work on the invitations soon. Marvin hazarded a
guess: Peter wasn’t helping with the parties, right?

“Yes, you are correct,” Nancy replied. “Peter always comes to the parties, but
doesn’t help with the planning. The planning is one of my strong points, so I
handle that.” Of course, no one could accuse her husband of being lazy, and lately
he’d been taking it to still-another level for General Electric. “Peter works
incredible hours...he leaves at 5:00 to 5:30 in the morning and gets home usually
around 10:00,” Nancy said. “Sometimes he comes home early...7:30...and
sometimes later ...12:00. Major workaholic, but, as you know, there are worse
things.”

Still, the harder her husband worked to provide for the family, the more Nancy
felt like she was running the house and raising their children almost by herself:
“Peter usually likes to spend the weekends with the boys if he isn’t working. It is
really the only time he sees them since they are of en in bed by the time he gets
home, and he leaves before we wake up.” Her resentment, at times, was

160
unmistakable. “Peter has no house related chores...I take care of everything
myself...so that frees him up for the fun stu f.”

***
Nancy talked about some of the steps she was taking to reduce the stress in her
life. Her mother had recently visited from Kingston, and at one point Nancy sent
Adam, Ryan and Peter out to show grandma the town — and to give Nancy some
time to herself. “She is very good to them,” she wrote of Grandma Dorothy’s time
with the Lanza boys.

Marvin asked Nancy if she was like her mother, which drew a laugh: “We are polar
opposites.” She went on to say that she was actually “very di ferent than anyone”
in her family. It had always been that way. Sometimes, she said, the family would
joke that she had been adopted, “or that there was some mix-up at the hospital.”

With the kids out of the house, Nancy decided had to take a “spa day” for herself
at the fancy Noelle salon in Stamford — “much needed and well deserved!!!” —
and having found herself calmed by the experience, she recommended to Marvin
that he try and reduce the stress in his own life: “Stress can make you susceptible
to many things...” She also wrote the she had recently begun seeing a masseuse
who was a student of Reiki, “an ancient oriental practice of healing and
spirituality.” She claimed that the Japanese therapy had been e fective in
improving her mood. “I am just SO healthy and relaxed you would hardly
recognize me.”

Only one thing bothered her about the healthy-living lifestyle: how did her
husband stay so driven without any of it? “Peter eats a TON of junk food,
wouldn’t consider a glass of water, even as a last resort, doesn’t exercise, doesn’t
get more than 5-6 hours of sleep a night, and has only used 3 sick days in the last
20 YEARS.”

For two of those sick days, she was careful to add, Peter had worked from home.

Rock Ridge Country Club — Newtown, Connecticut

Peter’s boss from GE took him out on the golf course one day, and invited Nancy
to come along. When the boss saw Nancy’s swing, he said she was a natural; he
suggested Peter stay home with the kids once in awhile, so Nancy could put in
some time on the links, and develop her technique further. Nancy was attered.
“Golf is very enjoyable and very relaxing....as long as you don’t take yourself too
seriously, and you are with someone who is fun,” she wrote. But, she still didn’t
know many people in Newtown, much less anyone that played. And it was no fun
to go alone.

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She had encountered the same problem years before, signing up for dance lessons;
“I would want to take Ballroom...learn the Tango and all the great old dances,”
she said. But Peter wouldn’t go along with it. He would just tell her she was
welcome to go dancing by herself. “I tried that once, but the instructor took too
much of an interest in my instruction, and I only got a couple of lessons in before
I quit,” she told Marvin. “If I could nd someone to go with I would try again,
but it is not a thing that you can do on your own...even though the
advertisements say that no partner is needed.”

***
One day, Nancy was listing o f to Marvin the extravagant celebrations she was
considering for New Year’s Eve. It was still months away, but this was not going to
be just any holiday: the year 2000 was coming, and the symbolism of a new
millennium was on everyone’s mind. “We tried to make reservations in one of the
hotels overlooking Times Square FOUR YEARS AGO and all were booked!” she
wrote one af ernoon.

The Lanzas would instead choose between an assortment of other galas to attend,
but Nancy knew of one she would de nitely not be signing up for: “We have a
friend in Chicago who has a jet that seats 14. He is going to be ‘Time-Zone
Hopping’ to make it to several New years Eve parties. (England, Egypt,
Australia...etc.)” Nancy wanted none of it.

Marvin said it actually sounded great.

Nancy replied: “ARE YOU INSANE??????” She dropped a reminder that the
ultimate sof ware glitch, Y2K, was still approaching, and was sure to bring
technological cataclysm at midnight:

First Y2K will knock off the radars...the sky

will be littered with small flights. [...] Add to
that all the chartered flights and the
possibility of a complete air traffic control
meltdown due to y2k...

I will be on the ground with my family...possibly

in the $3,000 suite in NYC if we luck out...or at
a small private party. I like my chances of
living through the night at ground level. I can
almost guarantee that there will be air disasters
on that night, although I certainly hope I am
wrong.

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Marvin wrote back, and took the scenario further, speculating that the arrival of
the year 2000 might be even more cataclysmic than the planes falling from the sky;
he was, like so many others in western society at the close of the 20th century,
imagining something closer to the apocalypse.

“So...you think the world will blow up on the BIG day, huh?” Nancy replied. “In
that case, I will de nitely stay on the ground… I would have no interest in
rebuilding the world without my boys...you will have to nd someone else to
mastermind the reconstruction!”

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 16. Revolution

A boy and a girl were talking online.

BOY: if everyone was dead except say 4 or 5 of

us, would you want to build up a new human race
or eventually let us go extinct?

GIRL: i think i would want us to go extinct but

it would be inevitable that people would have
sex..

BOY: true..

GIRL: it just is inevitable.

BOY: yeah.

maybe if we were all sterile. (couldnt reproduce)

GIRL: hehe

and i think all stupids should be sterile anyway

BOY: yeah, in our dreams.

it would be great if we were that lucky.

i dont think i would want to bring a child into

this world.

The boy was more serious than his chat partner could have known. He thought
about mass extinction all the time. He hated humans... in fact, he hated just about
everything.

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But he loved being online. Free information coming in, and an anonymous public
stage going out, all of it un ltered. One of the rst things he plucked from the
stream of 1’s and 0’s was The Anarchist Cookbook.

For his own contributions, the boy lef behind some home-brew DOOM levels,
and a public web page, with two lists on it. The rst one was all of his answers to
the prompt “YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!?” — entries on it included
“PEOPLE WHO ARE MEAN TO ANIMALS!!!!!” and “when people drive
really slow in the fast lane!” His list of hates scrolled for pages. On, and on.

His family knew he had anger problems, and they cared about him. They made
him see a counselor, who had prescribed him Luvox. Traces of the drug would be
found in his bloodstream, when it was all over.

The second list — things he loved — was much shorter. “Driving FAST!” and
“making fun of stupid people doing stupid things!” Most of what he identi ed as
love, it seems, came from the way hatred felt in his heart:

YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE!!!?

Natural SELECTION!!!!!!! God damn its the best

thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting
rid of all the stupid and weak organisms......but
its all natural!! YES! I wish the government
would just take off every warning label. So then
all the dumbasses would either severely hurt
themselves or DIE! And boom, no more dumbasses.
Heh.

Modern society was crooked; the human species had de ed nature’s innate laws by
living peacefully, and ensuring that the weak were free to multiply, overwhelming
the exceptional beings and enslaving them. The way things were supposed to be
— the natural order — was “might makes right.” And he believed he was mighty.

Littleton, Colorado
The boy was smart. He knew to keep his most antisocial thoughts to himself — or
online, where no adult would nd them. But he was also arrogant, so he liked to
drop hints, for fun. In his video-production class at school, he made a commercial
for a “hitmen for hire” revenge service, featuring him and his partner stomping
through the halls of Columbine High School in their black trench coats,
intimidating a bully. It was a preview of the uniform he had settled on for the
attack: black duster, black military-style pants, and black combat boots. He even
had a t-shirt custom-made for the day: white, with black text reading

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“NATURAL SELECTION” across the chest. And he would nish o f the
costume with a black, ngerless glove on his right hand.

He gave the matching glove to his partner. The boy in the lef glove was from the
same high school class, but a few months younger, still seventeen years old. He
was taller at 6’4”, but also gawkier, and more shy — af erward, people who knew
both boys seemed a little more surprised that Lef was capable of what they did.
He wore a black shirt on the day of the attack, with red block-lettering:
“WRATH”.

Their code-name for the plan was “NBK” — Natural Born Killers. No one knows
which one of the boys really started the whole thing; Right was the more
dedicated of the pair, but the rst hints of what was to come appear in Lef ’s
journal: in late 1997 — the school year in America that somehow seemed haunted
by shooters — he makes an almost passing mention of a plan to obtain a gun, af er
which, “I’ll go on my killing spree against anyone I want.” By February of 1998,
the idea has started to crystallize: he writes about his depression, and a girl at
school, predicting, “Soon… either I’ll commit suicide, or I’ll get with [her] & it
will be NBK for us. My happiness. Her happiness. NOTHING else matters.”

It seems Lef wanted to become Mickey from Natural Born Killers... but he
couldn’t get a Mallory. The girl at school barely even knew him. She would soon
fade as part of the fantasy... but “NBK” would stay a two-person job. He couldn’t
go alone.

Lef titled his journal “Existences,” and its pages re ect that he was depressed, and
suicidal (though he never took any medication for it). His philosophy overlapped
with some of his partner Right’s “natural selection” rhetoric, but the perspective
was di ferent: his metaphor for life was that everyone was faced with a sheer,
vertical cli f. Finding the ideal climbing partner made all the di ference, because
together, a couple could reach the plateau: true love. He, however, was cursed.
Innately burdened. “Clinging onto the smallest rocks” and watching as everyone
else climbed past. Sometimes, it felt like they climbed right over him.

***
One day in Creative Writing class, Lef turned in a short story. He wrote it as if he
witnessed the events with his own eyes: It depicted a mysterious male gure,
dressed in black, heavily armed and “fueled by some untold purpose, what
Christians would call evil.” It was af er midnight, and the man was on foot,
approaching a busy college-town pub. As he passed by, the story’s narrator could
“feel his anger, cutting thru the air like a razor.”

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A group of “college-preps, about nine of them” happened to be exiting the bar
just then, and they stopped in their tracks upon seeing the man in black. One of
them sarcastically muttered “nice trench coat dude.” Another, “the smallest of the
group, obviously a cocky, power hungry prick,” dared the gunman to shoot,
calling him a “pussy” and questioning if he was even capable of pulling the trigger.

The man in black laughed. Lef described the sound of it in detail:

It w faint at first, but grew in intensity and power I heard the man
laugh. Th laugh would have made Satan cringe in Hell. For almost
half a minute th laugh, spawned from the most powerful place
conceivable, filled the air, and thru the entire town, the entire world.
The town activity came to a stop, and all attention w now drawn to
th man.

The man in black took out his guns, and shot all of the “preps.” Then he pressed a
button on a small transmitter he had in his pocket; in the distance, a series of
explosions rumbled, what the narrator understood were “diversions, to attract the
cops.”

Calmly leaving back the way he came, the man in black passed by the narrator
once more. “He stopped, and gave me a look I will never forget,” Lef wrote. “If I
could face an emotion of god, it would have looked like the man. I not only saw in
his face, but also felt eminating from him power, complacence, closure, and
godliness. The man smiled, and in that instant, thru no endeavor of my own, I
understood his actions.”

It was two months before their attack, and they had just obtained their guns.

***
It was not going to be a “random” act. They had a single, speci c target: the
school. The place where their existences came into contact with the system, and
the site of many humiliations for them both. They had long memories, and thin
skin. They wanted revenge for everything, against everyone.

But if there was any one moment that pushed them over the edge, it came in
January of 1998, according to what Right wrote in Lef ’s yearbook: “My wrath for
January’s incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons.
GAWWWD SOOO many people need to die.”

However, early 1998 seems to have been a particularly trying time for the boys:
three di ferent events stand out as candidates for “the January incident.”

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The rst indignity happened at the school. Lef came home one day with his
clothes covered in ketchup stains. He was very upset. His mother asked what
happened, but Lef refused to say, only explaining that it was “the worst day of his
life.” Later, the story came out: a circle of boys had been “taunting” Lef and
Right in the commons, shoving them, calling them “fags,” and spraying them
with ketchup packets in front of everyone. The exact details of the incident vary,
and it may be more of an embellished rumor than whatever actually happened;
but then, it was always the injury to their image that really pissed them o f.

The second event happened during class. Someone in the school “reported” the
boys, saying they had drugs on them; the two were taken out of class, and
searched. Their lockers and their cars were searched, too. Meanwhile, the school
watched, and whispered rumors that it had been a false report, just done to
humiliate them. The assumption around Columbine was, the “jocks” had been
behind it.

The third event happened miles away from the school, in the middle of the night.
The two boys had been conducting what they called “missions” for the past year
— mostly petty thef or vandalism, or sometimes setting o f a pipe bomb in the
woods. That particular night, they had happened upon an electrician’s van,
parked unsupervised on a quiet backwoods road; the stu f inside looked valuable,
so they broke the window, took a few handfuls, and drove o f. Once they found a
parking lot and started sorting through their haul, the cop following right behind
them announced his presence, and put them under arrest. When it was all said
and done, they each got 12 months in a youth diversion program, some nes, and
45 hours of community service. (This was, also, why Right was made to see a
psychiatrist.) The “superior” beings had been outsmarted by the system they
hated, and made to submit. Inside, they nurtured fantasies of settling the score.

***
As this was going on in the suburbs, Timothy McVeigh’s trial was underway in the
city; a federal judge had determined that there was no way the bomber could get
an impartial jury in Oklahoma, and chose Denver as the venue instead. The trial
went on for months, plus the sentencing proceedings. The notorious bomber was
on local TV and in the Denver newspapers all the time.

Right, in particular, appears to have become xated on the Oklahoma City

bombing. The scope of the destruction was unprecedented, and McVeigh’s face
was on the cover of TIME magazine, cast in an aura of terror. Yet the bomber was
de ant, never expressing a shred of remorse for attacking “the system.” And
McVeigh had chosen a date that was already notorious, and forced comparisons:
April 19th. The burning of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993. When the

168
day came around again in 1995, he detonated his truck bomb in Oklahoma City.
One reball, overlapping another. Striking back.

So, the two boys in Littleton chose a date for NBK: April 19th, 1999. Not because
they considered themselves McVeigh’s comrades, either; more like his competition.

The “system” materialized before them in one structure, the source and the
symbol of nature’s order being violated: Columbine High School. Their plan was
detailed, but the concept itself was simple: they were going to blow up their high
school, and then shoot as many survivors as they could. Then, they would die.

***
Right turned in a class assignment in late 1998. It was an analysis of the recently-
enacted “Brady Bill” (which by now had been expanded to apply to long guns as
well as handguns). He wrote that there were still “a few loopholes” in the law, and
that “the biggest gaping hole is that the background checks are only required for
licensed dealers...not private dealers.” Indeed, this rule was commonly known as
the “Gun Show Loophole,” as it allowed attendees at the shows to “sell shotguns
and ri es to anyone who is 18 or older,” as Right put it in his essay. No
background check at all.

Prom was approaching, then. But Right wasn’t attending. His mother mentioned
something about that to her hairdresser: that her son wasn’t able to nd a date,
and she had felt so sorry for him earlier that day, sitting next to him on his bed as
he re ected, “Sometimes being a teenager really sucks.”

Lef , meanwhile, did have a date for the prom. She wasn’t his Mallory, but she was
eighteen, and she liked him, so he knew he could exploit her. He got her to buy
most of their rearms for them, at a gun show in Denver, passing neatly through
the exact loophole that Right had written about. There was no background check,
and no forms to sign; handing her two friends their straw purchases, the girl asked
if they were going to shoot anyone, and they assured her: they weren’t that stupid.

Prom was on Saturday, April 17th. They got a limo, and Lef wore a tux, a ask of
Schnapps tucked in his jacket pocket. Classmates saw him laughing and carrying
on that night, exchanging pleasantries with the same people he was planning,
shortly, to incinerate.

The team had some last-minute di culties obtaining ammo, and ended up
delaying "NBK." The attack on Columbine was rescheduled for the next day —
which, it so happened, was Adolf Hitler’s birthday; that may have just been
coincidence, but the boys certainly didn’t mind.

169
 JUDGMENT DAY

April 20, 1999

Columbine High School
5:30am: Lef ’s parents hear him yell “bye” on his way out the door. It’s his usual
time to leave for school. They assume he is headed to his 6:00am bowling class.

6:00am: The bowling instructor takes roll. Lef and Right are recorded absent.

8:25am: In second period, Columbine’s closed-circuit “Rebel News Network”

plays the school’s daily announcements on the televisions in the classrooms. The
“thought for the day” is a senior prank, making reference to the marijuana-themed
“holiday” that some students would be ditching class for. The text scrolling across
the screens reads “You don’t want to be here today. 4/20, 4/20”

9:12am: Surveillance cameras at a Texaco gas station, a couple miles from Right’s
house, capture some blurry footage of a teenage boy buying a tank of propane. He
is wearing sunglasses, and a white t-shirt with black lettering across the front.

He has already purchased several more tanks, at gas stations around Littleton.
Meanwhile, Lef is at another station, lling gas cans.

At some point in the morning, one or both of them drives to an empty eld near
Right’s house, and plants a backpack in the grass. Inside it is an explosive device,
with a timer set.

9:30am (approx): The pair meet up again at Right’s house. His parents are both at
work. The two assemble explosive devices in the back seats of their cars, and,
according to their plans, “practice gear-ups.” They know they have some time to
spare at this point; they had scouted the commons carefully over the last few
weeks, keeping track of the exact moment when the most students would be
packed into that one place: 11:17am.

Sometime around 10:45am, Right picks up a video camera. He begins lming Lef ,
who is standing in his family room, and tells him, “Say it now.”

“Hey mom,” Lef speaks to the camera. “Gotta go. It’s about half an hour before
our little judgment day.” He apologizes for “any crap this might instigate” —
anticipating the civil lawsuits to follow — and quickly signs o f: “Just know I’m
going to a better place than here. I didn’t like life too much and I know I’ll be
happier wherever the fuck I go. So I’m gone. Good-bye.”

Lef takes the camera, and the view ips around, lming Right.

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“Yeah...Everyone I love, I’m really sorry about all this. I know my mom and dad
will be just like... fucking shocked beyond belief. I’m sorry alright. I can’t help it.”

Lef interjects: “We did what we had to do.”

They leave some meager possessions to their friends — “if you guys live” — and
then both say a nal “Good-bye.” In the footage, they are dressed in their chosen
t-shirts and black pants. Two large du fel bags are visible on the oor next to
them.

11:00am: The pair drives separately to Columbine High School, a ve-mile trip.
Right parks in the Junior lot, and Lef parks in the Senior lot. Neither are in their
assigned parking spots.

A classmate, on his way across the street for a cigarette, sees Right in the parking
lot. He asks him why he wasn’t in class for a nal exam, earlier that morning.
Right, taking a du fel bag out of his car, just laughs, and says, “It doesn’t matter
anymore.” Right tells his classmate “I like you now. Get out of here.”

The boy can tell Right is very serious, but he is also bewildered by this statement,
playing it back in his mind as he continues away from the school; the two were
once friends, and had recently mended fences, but there had been long, very bitter
times in between. Right had even threatened to kill him, publicly. The cops knew
all about it.

11:14am: The surveillance cameras facing the commons in Columbine High School
stop recording, while the custodian changes and rewinds the tape.

11:15am: Right and Lef each carry du fel bags, containing large homemade
explosive devices, into the commons. Blending into the dense lunch crowd, they
manage to plant the bags and exit, largely without notice.

There are 488 students in the commons, and as far as intent, Lef and Right have
just murdered each and every one of them — “jock” and “goth” alike.

11:16am: Lef and Right each return to their cars. They have a good view of the
school’s front entrance, and the entrance to the commons. They count the
seconds until 11:17am, awaiting the visual they have been planning and imagining
for a year and a half: their school, exploding into ames and chaos. They prepare
to attack the survivors of the initial blast.

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.

11:17am: ...nothing happens. The bombs don’t go o f.

Right and Lef meet back up, somewhere in the parking lot, and talk. It is evident
that the timers on the bombs in the commons have failed — and meanwhile, the
ones in their cars are already ticking.

They hastily come up with a “plan B”: apparently, to ip the order of the shooting
and bombing. Now they would shoot their way into the school, and try to
detonate the bombs manually, before any responding forces can stop them.

11:19am: Lef and Right are seen ascending the concrete steps outside of the school,
leading from the commons downstairs, up to a hallway entrance on the second
oor. They are wearing their black trench coats, which conceal their guns. Around
them, groups of students are streaming out of the commons, or lying in the grass,
eating lunch in the sun.

One of the two shouts “Go! Go!” — and the team suddenly take out their ri es
and sawed-o f shotguns, and shoot as many of their classmates as they can.

The gunmen laugh and hoot as they re. One shouts, “This is what we always
wanted to do!” The other shouts back, “This is awesome!”

11:20am: Across town, someone reports a small re in a eld. Emergency Services

dispatches one engine to put it out; responders nd an un-exploded backpack
bomb, and some burnt grass around it from the fuse going o f. The shooters
intended this to be “a diversion, to attract the cops,” and buy more time. But it
doesn’t work.

11:22am: The security cameras in the commons start recording again. As the
footage picks back up, students are all turning to look at something out the
window. They hesitate, looking confused: it a senior prank? A fight?

Meanwhile, there is another change evident in the camera’s view, af er the

recording resumes: two of the lunch tables each have large, black du fel bags
placed under them. Students stand just inches away, oblivious.

11:24am: A teacher suddenly comes sprinting through the commons on his way
upstairs, motioning frantically for the kids to evacuate. As if coming out of a
trance, the students suddenly begin to stampede toward the exits. Others hide
under the tables. Meanwhile, the sound of gun re has moved inside the school.

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11:25am: A sheri ’s deputy — Columbine’s resource o cer — arrives on the scene,
and witnesses Right shooting near the upstairs entrance, next to the library. The
deputy shoots at Right from the parking lot, and Right returns re. Both miss,
and then Right retreats into the school, clearing a jam in his ri e. The deputy stays
put, awaiting backup.

11:26am: The teacher who had warned the students in the commons has now
reached the top of the staircase, and is running up the hall — when he suddenly
encounters the gunmen, shooting and throwing pipe bombs near the library
entrance. The teacher stops, and turns to run the other way. Right shoots the
teacher, seriously wounding him. The man takes cover in a science classroom,
along with a few students who begin to frantically perform what rst-aid they can.

The shooters continue on, roaming the hallways for several minutes, blowing up
lockers and shooting wildly.

Meanwhile, in the library, hiding behind the counter, another teacher is on the
phone with 9-1-1. On the recording, she is heard periodically shouting at the f y
or so students in the library, “Get under the tables!”

She tells the dispatcher that alarms are going o f, and that smoke has begun
pouring into the library from the explosions in the hall. Then, in the middle of
her conversation with 9-1-1, she goes quiet, as the gunmen burst into the library.

11:30am: One of the gunmen shouts “everybody get up!” — or it might have been
“all jocks stand up!” Either way, no one obeys; all of the students stay in their
hiding spots under the library tables. One of the gunmen says, “Fine, I’ll start
shooting.”

Behind the counter, the teacher who had called 9-1-1 quietly crawls to a better
hiding spot, dropping the phone’s handset. But the line stays open, and for the
next seven-and-one-half minutes, Littleton’s emergency services can hear periodic,
indistinct shouting, and bursts of gun re, as the two gunmen move around the
library, terrorizing their helpless classmates.

The library is large, and some witnesses will remember hearing di fering
statements being uttered by the gunmen, as they made their way from one table to
the next. Most report some variation of, “This is for all the shit you put us
through,” followed by gunshots.

At one point, Right stops at a table, and asks a girl hiding under it, “Do you want
to die?”

“No,” she says.

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Right laughs. “Everyone’s going to die.” Lef goads him to shoot her, but Right
waves it o f. “No, we’re going to blow up the school anyway.”

They see a boy performing rst-aid on a classmate, and shoot him instead.

They nd a black boy under one of the tables. Lef grabs his arm, and calls him a
“fucking nigger.” Right walks over to the boy and shoots him.

They throw a pipe bomb, and it shatters the big library windows. They go over to
the gaping holes the in the glass, and re shots down at the parking lot below,
where more police are now arriving. They miss.

The gunmen pause to reload, when they hear an injured student across the library
crying out in pain, “Oh, God!”

The shooters go over and nd the girl, who has crawled out from under one of the
tables. One of them asks her, “Do you believe in god?”

Panicked, she fumbles with the answer, saying “no” rst, and then settling on
“yes.”

“Why?”

“My parents taught me, and I believe.” She then crawls back under the table, and
plays dead. The shooters move on.

They even encounter one of their friends, cowering on the library oor. The boy
recognizes Lef , and asks out of dumb desperation, “What are you doing?”

Lef responds nonchalantly, “Oh, just killing people,” and tells him he should “get
out of here” — which the boy promptly does.

The gunmen nd a male student wearing a baseball cap, hiding behind a counter.
“Oh, look what we have here,” Lef says. Pointing his gun at the boy, he demands,
“Are you a jock?”

The boy in fact does consider himself a jock — but he’s not stupid. He says no.

“Well, that’s good, we don’t like jocks,” Lef replies. “Let me see your face.”

The boy removes his ball cap, and tilts his face up to the shooter. Lef looks down
at him, straight in the eye, and says, “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t
kill you.”

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Fumbling for words, the boy stammers “I don’t want to get in trouble,” unsure of
just what he means even as he is saying it.

“Trouble?!” Lef barks, leaning down closer. “You don’t even know what fucking
trouble is!”

The terri ed boy scrambles to recover: “That’s not what I meant, I mean, I don’t
have a problem with you guys, I never will and I never did.” Lef holds his stare for
a few moments, and then turns away, calling to his partner, “I’m gonna let this fat
fuck live, you can have at him if you want to.”

Right doesn’t seem to be paying attention. “Let’s go to the commons.”

11:36am-11:43am: The shooters take an indirect route, wandering the halls and
shooting at the ceiling, and at empty walls. They throw Molotov cocktails and
bombs into some empty storage rooms, starting small res. As soon as the coast is
clear, a teacher emerges from a nearby classroom, and extinguishes the ames.

11:44am: Surveillance cameras capture the shooters as they arrive back in the
commons. The once-crowded area is now mostly deserted, with a few students
hiding under the tables. The shooters don’t seem to pay them any attention;
they’re there for the bombs.

Right rests his carbine ri e on a railing, taking aim across the cafeteria. He knows
just which bag to hit, and squeezes o f a few rounds. But nothing happens.

Lef walks over to the device, and ddles with something, while Right takes a swig
from a bottle of water that was lef on one of the lunch tables. Then Lef steps
back, lights an explosive, and tosses it at the propane bomb.

One of the gas cans incorporated into the bomb’s construction has by then leaked,
and suddenly, a bright column of ame surges upward, from the oor of the
commons to the ceiling, engul ng the abandoned table and the backpacks around
it. The shooters, appearing satis ed that their long-delayed detonation is now
imminent, scurry back upstairs, out of view.

About ten seconds later, the school’s alarm system detects the re, and the
sprinklers overhead activate, dousing the ames.

11:47-11:55am: The shooters again wander the halls of their school, mostly passing
through empty o ce areas. About eight minutes go by, and they probably notice
there still has not been any explosion. They head back down to the commons.

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11:56-11:59am: On camera again, Lef and Right return to nd that the oor of the
commons is now covered in water. The sprinklers are still going o f, drenching the
area they came to torch. They hal eartedly toss a few more small bombs at the big
bomb, but it’s useless. The two appear defeated, slouching as they leave the
commons again. In their last captured moments, they are marching back up the
steps, to the library.

Noon: Nearly all of the survivors they lef behind have since escaped the library.
The two car bombs in the parking lot were supposed to detonate around this
time; they were the biggest bombs of all. It’s possible that Lef and Right went
back upstairs to get a good view of the police and paramedics getting wiped out by
the day’s nal explosion, down below the library’s broken glass wall.

It is another disappointment. Both car bombs are duds. The two gunmen squeeze
o f a few more shots down at the rst responders, out the windows, and again
miss every time.

12:05-12:07pm: One of the shooters lights a Molotov cocktail, and places the bottle
on a table, near the library windows. With luck, maybe the fire will keep burning,
and take the school down a er all...

It’s not clear who went rst. They each pulled the trigger on themselves, sometime
in the three minute span just before 12:08, while a bottle of gasoline burned on the
table next to them.

12:08pm: The school’s alarm system detects a re in the library. A sprinkler turns
on overhead, dousing the ame before the bottle’s contents could ignite. The re
had barely even scorched the tabletop.

Pathetic.

176
 17. Cascade

April 20, 1999

CNN Center — Atlanta, Georgia
War had occupied the news for months. If there had been no developing stories to
report, CNN’s programming that Tuesday probably would have continued to
feature fresh footage of NATO airstrikes, blowing up Yugoslav tank positions in
Kosovo. But just before noon, the control room in Atlanta ipped a switch, and
CNN’s video feed changed to live footage from a domestic a liate in Colorado —
yet somehow, the aura of a war zone lingered over the screen.

Many of the details were still sketchy, and that was part of what made the whole
thing so extraordinary — the crime was still unfolding in Littleton when the
BREAKING NEWS ash cut into regular broadcast programming. Viewers on
other channels, watching daytime soap operas, suddenly found themselves
looking at something even more dramatic than their stories: a high school under
siege, live and in-progress.

Columbine was shown at a distance, the cameras held back at the police perimeter,
along with the many distraught parents who came down as soon as they heard
that there was a shooting at Columbine. Then the police line parted, to allow a
column of SWAT o cers through; the men steadily advanced on the school, clad
in body armor and carrying ballistic shields, as terri ed students and sta f came
sprinting past them from the exits.

Inside the school, some of the students who were barricaded in their classrooms
were also dialing into news stations, for on-air interviews. Their stories did indeed
sound like scenes from a war, with bombs going o f and crowds running for cover,
bullets ying all around them. Anchors had to discourage the teens from
specifying their location within the school; the gunmen were still at large, and
they could be listening. Viewers were on the edge of their seats.

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Just then, another survivor came running out, and when she reached the
perimeter, a reporter saw that her clothes were stained with blood. She had
escaped the library, and she fought fevered sobs as she delivered the rst accounts
of the horror that had unfolded there: “Everyone around me got shot and I
begged him for ten minutes not to shoot me, and he put the gun in my face and
started blaming everyone and started laughing, saying that it was all because
people were mean to him last year!”

On a nearby roof, a police sniper was scanning the school’s science wing through
his ri e's scope, when he spotted, in one of the classroom windows, a small
handwritten sign:

ONE

BLEEDING

TO

DEATH

Inside the room was the teacher who had sprinted to the commons when he heard
the rst shots, and nally got the packs of gawking teens to run for their lives;
now, the students were trying to save him. But while the SWAT team was still
clearing the school, room by room, the injured teacher was already out of time.

***
President Clinton had been in a meeting with his economic team when the news
of Columbine broke. He rst spoke to the nation just af er 2:30pm, Colorado
time:

Ladi and gentlemen, let me begin by saying that we all know there h
been a terrible shooting at a high school in Littleton, Colorado. Because
the situation, I le to come out here, apparently ongoing, I think it
would be inappropriate for me to say anything other than I hope the
American people will be praying for the students, the parents, and the
teachers. And we’ll wait for events to unfold, and then there’ll be more
to say.

Almost as the president nished this sentence, news stations suddenly cut back to
a breaking development at Columbine; there was something moving up on the
second oor, visible through the holes in the library’s shattered glass wall: a
teenage boy, bleeding badly, and crawling for the window’s ledge.

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The nation held its breath, and saw a soon-to-be iconic moment unfold on live
TV: as the boy is about to drop a full story to the pavement below, suddenly, a
commandeered bank truck rolls into frame, with SWAT o cers on top who
barely catch the boy in time. In their other hands, the o cers each carry
submachine guns, ready to confront the shooters. They are unaware that by this
time, their two adversaries have been dead for nearly three hours.

***
The SWAT team nally breached the library at 3:22pm. Clearing the nightmarish
scene, they noticed that two of the students were di ferent from the others; they
were not lying folded under tables, but out in the open. They had guns and
bombs next to them, and their T-shirts read WRATH and NATURAL
SELECTION.

Lef and Right were identi ed, and the siege of Columbine came to an end. But as
soon as their names went public, the narrative went paranoid; the trench-coated
shooters were alleged to have been members of a notorious “Trench Coat Ma a”
— Columbine’s name for a clique of alt/goth-mis ts, formed just before the
shooters came to Columbine as freshmen. Now, the whispers said, the "TCM"
were waging all-out war on Columbine's “jocks.”

It was mostly myth, the rst of many; the shooters hadn’t really been members of
the group that called themselves the Trench Coat Ma a at all, just traveled in the
same circles. And they loved the uniform. A lot of boys their age did.

The self-confessed “jock,” who had escaped the library with his “never had a
problem with you guys” line, gave an interview to TIME shortly af er the
shooting. No longer at gunpoint, he bragged of the atmosphere at Columbine,
and the way the shooters were disrespected:

Most kids didn’t want them there. They were into witchcra . They were
into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with
kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It’s
not just jocks; the whole school’s disgusted with them. They’re a bunch of
homos, grabbing each other’s private parts. If you want to get rid of
someone, usually you tease ‘em. So the whole school would call them
homos, and when they did something sick, we’d tell them, “You’re sick
and that’s wrong.”

His description of the shooters (or perhaps the TCM) sounded more like a collage
of all the mis t groups wearing black that a jock might have passed in the hall on
any given day: a mass of nobodies, blurring into an opposing team.

179
Other students at Columbine would refute his characterization — but still others
would endorse it, as if students at the school experienced two di ferent
Columbines. The same divide registered all over the country, and soon, there
began a “national conversation” on bullying in schools. (Years later, the
conversation would still be ongoing; looking back, Columbine’s escaped jock
would see the shooters he witnessed that day in the library more clearly, now
through a man’s eyes; both, he says, acted like “the ultimate bullies.”)

Brie ng Room — the White House

As the sun set on April 20, 1999, and as the enormity of Columbine started to sink
in, the president called another press brie ng. He said he had just had a
conversation about the school shooting phenomenon with a representative from
Je ferson County, who had shared a hope that, “Perhaps now America would
wake up to the dimensions of this challenge, if it could happen in a place like
Littleton.”

A reporter asked him what the country should “wake up” to.

The president said that there were “a lot of kids out there who have access to
weapons — and apparently more than guns, here — and who build up these
grievances in their own mind and who are not being reached.” Hinting that this
would not be his last words on guns, nor Columbine, he added, “Af er a little time
has passed, we need to have a candid assessment about what more we can do to try
to prevent these things from happening.”

21 April, 1999
House of Commons — London, United Kingdom
In the UK, the process of gun buy-backs was mostly complete, but the memory of
Dunblane remained. There had not been a school shooting since; Britons had
watched in horror as the phenomenon instead began haunting the Americans, for
whom it just seemed to get worse, every time the season came around.

An MP from Scotland took a moment during the chamber’s daily business to

“send condolences to the people of Denver, Colorado, af er the horri c incident
that they su fered yesterday.” She then turned to the Prime Minister, and
(assuming, like he and many others in the wake of Columbine, that handguns
were the primary weapon used) asked, “Given that this country su fered a similar
incident in Dunblane in Scotland not so long ago, will my right honorable Friend
reiterate how important it was to ban handguns af er that incident?”

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Tony Blair stood to respond; gun control, and the Snowdrop Petition, had been a
major issue in the 1997 election that had brought him and his party to power, and
af er the gun ban became law that year, he had proudly declared that his
Government had “paid its debt to the people of Dunblane.” He shared the lesson
he took from the UK’s tragedy:

Because of Dunblane, the events of Littleton, Colorado are bound to

evoke many special memori and emotions for people in th country.
We were right to take the position that we took on handguns. The laws
of the United Stat are a matter for that country. I strongly agree with
the sentiments expressed by President Clinton last night, [and] I know
that my hon. Friend and her constituents will look back on the tragedy
of Dunblane, from which they are still recovering, and recognize how
much better our future a result of the action that we have taken.

April 22, 1999

T.C. Williams High School — Alexandria, Virginia
The next day, the president hosted a round table discussion on school violence. In
attendance were students and teachers from Pearl, and Paducah, and a number of
other towns where the disaster had struck. Clinton observed how one of the
things that made the attacks so shocking was that, for some reason, the
phenomenon did not occur as of en in dense, urban areas, where populations and
crime rates were higher. “They tended to occur more in small towns and rural
areas or suburbs,” he said, “where you normally would not think that society itself
falling apart around you would happen.”

The president also said that he was struck by “this whole black trench coat deal,”
and he lingered on the common psychological threads among the boys who had
donned the costume: “That’s something that really struck me when I read these
accounts, is how alienated these young people were because these athletes were
saying bad things about them or who else was saying bad things about them. They
were di ferent, so then they had to look for somebody to feel bad about.”

It was an informed observation. The president had seen early results from an FBI-
organized expert’s symposium on school shooters, held earlier that month. And
from this, he knew of another common thread, now reinforced in the emerging
pro les of the Columbine attackers: internet access. There seemed to be a tidal
e fect, a pull, with the darkness in a young man’s mind seeking out more of itself
online. “If you are very lonely and very alienated and you feel you don’t belong
with anybody or anything,” the president said, “you nd something on the
Internet that you can read that you can relate to, and then things begin to spin out
of control.”

181
“You don’t want me to choke o f the Internet, it’s one of the greatest things that
ever happened,” Clinton continued. “But the problem is, how do you — how do
parents limit their children’s access to something they shouldn’t be able to see?
And I do think that the role of the Internet, and the way it’s bringing everything
into the home, has made a parent’s job much more di cult.”

Private Residence — Upstate New York

Watching the news from Colorado, David Kaczynski, the Unabomber’s brother,
shared some of President Clinton’s concerns. He knew that the Columbine
shooters had found their pipe bomb recipes online, and he foresaw mass
communication progressively lowering the bar for every aspiring mad bomber to
come. And at the same time it was providing the technical knowledge, it was also
spreading inspiration to “strike back” at the establishment; The Anarchist
Cookbook was not just a list of recipes, af er all, but was interspersed with essays,
such as in the introduction to the very bomb-building section that the school
shooters were all studying:

There are individuals, in our society, who claim that we cannot exist
without oppression and regulation, because we are children. I agree that
we are children, because we have always had supervision, and have
never been allowed the freedom to see ourselv in a different light. We
are all children of the humanistic revolution, and, whether certain
individuals like it or not, American children are growing up, fast.

This was rhetoric from 1971’s anti-Vietnam War underground protest movement,
but now, a generation later, it seemed like the out-of-print book was nding an
unlikely second life among the disa fected children of its original audience.

David ultimately decided to write an open letter — one co-signed by one of his
brother’s maimed victims, and a survivor of the Oklahoma City bombing. It was a
warning, addressed to America Online, Microsof , Yahoo, and other internet
rms, about the dark potential he saw in the emerging online sphere, and how
America’s increasingly digital society was allowing “every troubled kid out there to
become the next Tim McVeigh.”

Anticipating that free-speech advocates would object to any act of censorship, the
group's letter went on to argue that, "No one has a constitutional right to use an
Internet company’s property to facilitate murder," but rather, "the companies have
the constitutional right — and the moral obligation — to stop this use of their
property.″

182
Even so, it wasn’t clear yet what, speci cally, any of the companies could do, or
should do, with the technology — they all insisted that they "already prohibit"
information like bomb-making recipes, or anything encouraging violence. But
this new threat wasn’t going away. David Kaczynski was the man who had
recognized the Unabomber’s voice; he was hearing it again, now, seeping in from
the ether.

O ce of Indian A airs — Je erson County, Colorado

Symbols of condolence and comfort continued ooding into Littleton for
months, from all over the country. The massive collection of teddy bears, quilts,
letters, and photos would ll a tractor trailer, and then nally a whole warehouse.
Administrators in Je ferson County had to gure out what to do with all of it.

One day, not long af er the tragedy, a unique gif turned up at the county’s O ce
of Indian A fairs. The package came from Michigan, and contained a
“dreamcatcher”: a Native American charm made from feathers, beads, and a ring
of willow reeds; the wood hoop holds taught a web of string, to catch evil spirits
in the night, and leave good dreams and good spirits to pass through. The
dreamcatcher’s sender had two plaques added to the frame holding it, each
carrying a phrase written in the Odawa tribe’s language:

Gda dwendaagnananik
“all our relations”

Ba ma pee
“let us see each other again”

A woman from Muskegon, Michigan had made the dreamcatcher just for
Columbine, by hand. She was part of a group of parents who ran the city’s native
education program. As she put it, when her indigenous peoples’ group heard
what had happened to the community in Littleton, “We just sent good spirits to
them.”

Depot Road — Kingston, New Hampshire

It was Spring Break for Newtown’s schools, that week in April of 1999. The Lanza
family were on vacation, visiting old friends and family back home. Nancy took
the boys to the old ice cream shop, Memories, and of course, they got to spend
some time visiting their Uncle Jimmy.

The Kingston locals got to hear more about Nancy’s new life in Newtown. It all
sounded so fancy, and they noticed how generous she was whenever she came to
visit, always looking to pick up a check. She liked to show o f the good life — and

183
perhaps, to prove that while she missed her old hometown, the bets she had
placed on Connecticut had paid o f. Big time.

Nancy didn’t talk about Adam very much. Adam barely talked at all. Everyone in
the family already knew that he had “issues,” and he hadn’t got better since
moving away; none of them expected the frightened boy to interact. He mostly
listened.

Maybe it was the television, or a parent or uncle whispering too loudly from
another room, or maybe it was another kid — but it would not have been long
into the af ernoon of April 20th before Adam heard the news: the most
unbelievable thing was going on at a high school in Colorado. It was another
school shooting, like the ones in Kentucky or Oregon, but it was so much bigger
this time. There were reports of grenades raining down from the roof of the
school, and teams of gunmen in black trench coats exchanging re with the police,
refusing to surrender. It was like the ultimate, end-all power fantasy, come to life
— and it was happening at school.

Newtown, Connecticut
The atmosphere in the village had changed. Littleton was cause for introspection
in every American suburb, captured by the TIME magazine cover showing the
yearbook photos of both smiling Columbine shooters, side by side, captioned in
stark lettering: “THE MONSTERS NEXT DOOR.”

A few slots over on the newsstand, Columbine was on the cover of the Newtown
Bee, under the headline “Columbine tragedy resonates in Newtown.” The Bee
wrote that the tragedy in Littleton felt so meaningful to Newtown “because
Columbine High School appears to be the typical American school — very much
like Newtown High School.” They even printed a letter to the editor, sent from a
former Newtown resident who had years ago relocated to Colorado, and who
warned that the similarities were not just imagined: “Please believe me when I say
that they are the same, and the tragedy that occurred in Littleton can happen in
places like Newtown.”

Newtown High School

Reporters from the Bee visited the high school, to nd out for themselves. Many
of the students they met agreed with the letter’s author; the stories coming out of
Littleton, about the social hierarchy and sports culture at the school, sounded like
Newtown High. “Kids are too mean,” said one junior. “Some students are
constantly being harassed about the way they look or the way they dress.” Others
con rmed these accounts, and claimed that the administrators turned a blind eye.

184
It was going on right under their nose. “Newtown is full of people with money,”
said a sophomore boy. “They think they’re better than everyone else and they put
others down. There’s a lot of mental abuse and some kids can’t take it anymore.”

One day that spring, as if to illustrate the point, there was a commotion at
Newtown High when a male student came to class wearing a black trench coat. A
teacher quickly ordered him to remove it.

***
A few students — active in their church, and concerned about violence at their
high school — started organizing to bring awareness to “the lessons of
Columbine.” They received support from the principal as well as religious leaders
from Newtown Congregational Church, and its neighbor Trinity Episcopal across
the street; the onetime “pamphlet war” adversaries had come together, to help
Newtown learn from the tragedy in Colorado.

The group held a candlelight vigil at Newtown High, on the football stadium’s
f y-yard-line. They lit a candle, and the students crowded around, holding
smaller candles — each lighting their own wick from the ame, and then their
neighbor’s, so that as the ceremony proceeded, the light spread through the
crowd, while the clergy of Trinity Church led them in prayer. Then the Newtown
High School chorus sang “Lean on Me,” and the procession moved to the front
lawn of the school, where they planted a single weeping cherry tree, surrounded
by an arrangement of perennial, white Columbine owers. The organizers
expressed hope that this living memorial would last as “a constant reminder to
students that there is good in everyone, and that harsh words and actions can only
lead to pain.”

***
Even as the students were gathered around the weeping cherry tree, their parents
were worrying for their safety. The Newtown Prevention Committee sent out a
survey, asking each family in town what their areas of concern were when it came
to safety in schools. The results “placed the highest priority on addressing student-
to-student behavior and improving communication and respect between
students, parents, sta f and administrators.” Other areas of concern were
“addressing class sizes and creating a de nitive emergency response plan.”

Duck Pin Bowling Alley — Danbury, Connecticut

Two days af er Columbine, Adam turned seven years old. His “new friends”
birthday party — the last of the set that Nancy had been overwhelmed with
sending out invitations for — was held at the Duck Pin Bowling Alley.

185
One of the boys throwing miniature bowling balls down the lane that day was a
schoolmate of Adam’s, from Mrs. Lavelle’s class, who was there with his mother,
Wendy Wipprecht. Wendy was friendly with Nancy, and knew how withdrawn
Adam was; she wasn’t surprised to nd that he looked uncomfortable at his own
birthday party, being the center of attention.

While the kids played, Nancy took Wendy aside. She was looking for advice. “I got
into a long talk with his mother,” Wipprecht recalls of the scene. “She was
concerned mainly that Adam wasn’t tting in well in his classroom. He was
obviously very bright and very shy. She was worried he wasn’t doing as well as he
should be.”

Nancy feared that it could be some kind of “neurobiological condition,” but

Wendy was skeptical of that. Her own son had been diagnosed with autism, and
had a one-on-one aide assigned to him every day at Sandy Hook to address it. She
knew autism very well, and whatever was behind Adam’s bashful nature, she
didn’t expect that was it. “I thought it was his shyness and uncomfortableness in
large social situations. I mean, a class of 20 people is a lot for a 6-year-old to
handle."

Nancy had agreed to move her whole life to help her son, but so far it still just
wasn’t enough. Perhaps that meant Sandy Hook Elementary wasn’t enough; she
told Wendy she was considering switching Adam to a tiny parochial school in
town, run by St. Rose of Lima church, “because classes were smaller and she
thought he might do better there.” She hadn’t made up her mind yet, but she
knew things had to change for Adam’s upcoming second-grade year.

The more Wendy listened, the more she felt sorry for her friend, still struggling as
she was to nd the answer to why her son acted so di ferently from his peers:
“Even if you’re merely suspicious, it’s a kind of awful thing to have to deal with.”

Summer 1999
Sandy Hook Elementary School
As the end of the school year approached, Nancy was busy with the urry of
activities scheduled for each of her boys: class picnics, eld trips, and school plays.
She frequently volunteered to help, like she had with the scouts; that way, she
would be present to watch out for Adam during group activities.

One day at home, she spied him rehearsing for his role in Oklahoma! and thought
it was cute. “Adam has taken it very seriously,” she wrote to Marvin, “...even
practicing facial expressions in the mirror!”

186
On June 10, 1999, Nancy’s older son, together with his 5th-grade classmates, were
having their “Stepping Up” ceremony, marking the end of elementary school and
their transition to Newtown Middle School. Nancy volunteered to help. She later
received a thank-you card — beneath the pre-printed message, there was a
handwritten note:

Dear Mrs. Lanza

The children achieved a most successful year with the dedication from
your active involvement. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Terri Lavelle

Nancy kept this token of appreciation from Sandy Hook Elementary School for
the rest of her life.

In a way, the ceremony marked a change for both of her sons: that year at Sandy
Hook marked the last time when Adam’s older brother would be attending classes
at the same school as him, at the same time. From then on, each of the Lanza boys
would be on their own.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Nancy had always enjoyed designing gardens. But the more she dug under the
lawn of 36 Yogananda, the more rocks she found, and the more she missed home;
the soil back on Depot Road had been perfect, tilled for generations. Here, she
was starting from scratch. But she was determined: her goal for the summer of
1999 was to plant the perfect garden.

Nancy called in a team of landscapers, with a bulldozer and bucket loader. Adam
and Ryan watched in rapt attention as the team used the heavy equipment to
excavate 36 Yogananda’s rocky soil. Standing next to her, the boys told their mom
that it looked like a fun job.

The rocks went out, and three truckloads of the best topsoil in town went in its
place. Nancy meticulously researched, selected, and positioned every ower in the
garden. She wanted to do as much of the work herself as she could, telling Marvin,
“I have help for the heavy stu f...but I have to be right there while it gets done. I
have a very speci c vision, and being a perfectionist means that I can’t delegate!”

187
She had been driving to nurseries all over Fair eld County, looking for the perfect
centerpiece plant, but she ultimately decided that the best owers to grow in the
Newtown soil were ones shipped from back home. She told Marvin she was
thinking long-term: “The rst year in, a garden is setting roots. The second and
third you start to get the results.”

She even gave Marvin tips on his own garden, and discouraged him from listening
to any of the Home Depot clerks: “ALWAYS go to the bookstore or library rst,
and get a good book. (Or ask for MY expert advice!)”

***
As the two old friends wrote back and forth, suddenly, in the summer of 1999,
their correspondence took an ominous turn: Nancy was discussing the rigors of
working in the garden when Marvin apparently asked her (only Nancy’s side of
the conversation is available) if laboring in the sun was hard on her eyesight.

Nancy’s response demonstrates that Marvin was one of the few she had trusted
with a big secret: she was actually very ill, and had been for years.

It was probably Multiple Sclerosis, as she had con ded to a few other friends and
family members before she had moved away. She of course told Peter about her
MS years ago — but as always, emphasized that she wanted to keep it private.

She assured Marvin that she was getting by, and in fact was doing surprisingly
well: “The heat has not kept me from gardening. I go out early in the day...or af er
dinner. It is generally tolerable at those times.” And, she had some good news: the
decision to move to Newtown had in fact been key to her recovery. “My eyes have
improved considerably. When I got down here, I was referred to a group of
experts who discovered that I had been misdiagnosed in N.H.,” she wrote. “I have
had no serious headaches, no blurred vision, no dizziness, no disorientation, etc.
since they have taken over. [...] I have gotten MUCH better with the proper
treatment.”

It hadn’t been all good news, along the way. Nancy revealed something she had
been holding back, even from Marvin: that until the recent breakthrough, her
condition had been far more serious:

...my spirits were raised when they were able to

say with a degree of certainty that I was NOT in
the incurable/inoperable and going to die group
that I had been told I was in. Apparently my
original brain scans had been misread to a

188
 certain degree...they are still going to do a
follow-up brain scan to confirm that I am ok...

Marvin wrote back, alarmed, asking about the “going to die” group that Nancy
had been saved from; it turned out that when Nancy had agreed to move to
Newtown the year before, she knew that it could well have been the last Lanza
family milestone she would live to see:

My diagnosis was not good. I was going under the

premise that I had a limited time left...about
enough time to get the boys settled in...at one
point I was trying to deal with a time frame of
about 12 months.

Definitely a hard thing to deal with, and not

something that I wanted to talk about. As it
seems to be turning out...because my symptoms got
better and disappeared rather than getting worse,
a lot of what is going on is a genetically based
problem. It showed up recently when they did a
series of DNA strands. I am currently being
"monitored" and "managed".

It is kind of like an on/off switch. Right now,

it is on "off". As long as it stays that way, I’m
fine. If something happens to turn it on, I’ve
got problems. At this point, they don’t really
understand how it works or why.

Whatever her mystery brain ailment was, she had seen what it does to a person —
the same thing had taken her grandfather: “It was so quick that nothing could be
done. Six weeks. His auto-immune system went haywire and attacked his skin and
muscles. No way to stop it...no cure.”

The fear that Nancy had, until then, been keeping bottled up inside, now was
pouring out. “It is like living on top of a time bomb,” she wrote. “I am carrying
the gene for this type of self-destruct. It started up, but then stopped by itself.
Right now I am ne and hoping to stay that way.” But she couldn’t let her guard
down.

She gave Marvin one request: if she should suddenly die, she wanted him to say a
few words at her funeral. “I know how much you will hate that, given the fact that
you don’t like to speak in public...but I would get a big smile from it, so I know
you will do it! But at this point I feel like I could live to be 100!”

189
 ***
One day, Nancy called Robert — the man who had built 36 Yogananda. She had
discovered that there were some rough patches on the oak oors in her kitchen,
where the varnish was uneven, especially in front of the stove. “I snagged a few silk
stockings, which is very aggravating AND expensive.”

The contractor that Robert sent over to smooth out the oak oors would surely
regret the day he met Nancy Lanza; “I didn’t like the man’s attitude, PLUS he
mumbled when he spoke,” Nancy wrote of the encounter. “Believe it or
not...when I showed this moron one of the places that was rough...he didn’t even
get down and feel it. He just mumbled, ‘I don’t see nothin’ wrong with it, but I’ll
go over it if you say so.’ To make a long story short, I told the guy to pack up his
tools and get out of my house.”

Robert’s phone was ringing before the mumbler was even out from Nancy’s
driveway. Soon enough, Robert was headed up to the pale yellow house himself,
oor-sander in tow. He walked into the home he built, felt the surface of the oor
in front of the stove, looked at Nancy, and mumbled “I don’t see nothin’ wrong
with it.”

She was ready to erupt, until Robert cracked a smile; “He said that knowing how
PARTICULAR I am, (do you think that was meant as an insult??) it was best if
he did it himself.”

Fall 1999
Sandy Hook Elementary School
For the 1999-2000 school year, classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary were going
to be more crowded than ever. A Newtown Bee headline that year, "C
A C C A S H S ,” ran above a story that
focused entirely on the scant resources lef at SHES; the paper reported that there
were 700 students enrolled that year — more than any of the other elementary
schools in the district — and the numbers were expected to increase sharply for
years to come. A reporter described the strained conditions: “A part-time speech
instructor works out of a cramped o ce in the language arts room; an
occupational therapist works out of a closet-sized room in the gymnasium.” The
list of Newtown’s budget-and-population-in icted compromises went on, and on.

***
Nancy deliberated for most of the summer, but ultimately, she decided against
moving Adam to St. Rose of Lima’s school. Instead her son would again be in the
regular classes at Sandy Hook, for 2nd grade. But there would be one change to

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the curriculum: af er the school day was over, and the other kids went home,
Adam would stay behind, and Nancy would make the trip down the hill to the
school, to help him 1-on-1 through anything his nervousness had made him miss
from the day’s crowded class lessons.

Early in the new school year, Adam’s IEP shows that his occupational therapy was
discontinued. He was “still having problems with ne motor skills (e.g., shoe-
tying and zipping his jacket)” but was, overall, getting better. Teachers reported
that “sensory processing was improving,” and that he was “no longer distracted by
tactile input.” It was enough progress to remove the goals for his sensory
integration from the education plan — though Adam’s team still wanted to focus
on “improving articulation through speech supports.”

In class, Adam seemed to be doing well. He was described as attentive to detail,

and “an excellent student.” He was socializing a bit more, too. His teachers wrote
that he was “conscientious, quiet, but more talkative since he was grouped with
another second grade student.”

In October of 1999, a progress report records Adam to be “a thoughtful friend to

peers” with “wonderful thoughts and ideas to share.”

Years later, Adam’s teacher that year would recall him as a somewhat thin, very shy
boy who nonetheless seemed to be able to handle the school day. He never got in
ghts or picked on anyone, and his grades were unremarkable. The woman
remembers that Nancy came to all the PTA meetings, and didn’t express any
concerns about her son’s experiences in class. “Some kids coming in from rst
grade need more attention,” the teacher says, “but academically, he was ne.
Socially, he got along with the others. I don’t remember him as hostile.”

And he didn’t say anything memorable. Hardly surprising, since he barely spoke
at all. “There was a quiet depth to him that I couldn’t penetrate.”

In the photo of his second grade class, they are standing side-by-side. Adam is half
of his teacher’s height. His smile has smoothed out somewhat, and Nancy has
updated his hairstyle to a bowl cut, the same as captured in the photo of him on
her nightstand, squinting from a rocky shore.

***
One of Adam’s classmates, who lived down the street, invited him to their
birthday party. The girl still remembers that day, with all of her class at her house
wearing party hats, and how awkward the Lanzas were:

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 The one thing that I thought w odd w Adam’s mother, Nancy
Lanza, stayed for the entire party. Typically, the parents would drop my
classmat off at the house and leave. Nancy stayed and helped with the
cutting of the cake, etc. [and] stayed with Adam throughout the entire
party, which caused me and my other classmat to not interact much
with him because it wasn’t ‘cool.’

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Some of the trees in Nancy’s garden weren’t taking root. She wanted to try again,
planting them at a di ferent spot in the soil, but with all the development going
on in Newtown, her favorite landscapers were booked solid. Af er much
searching, she nally managed to track down a contractor — one she hadn’t hired
before — and decided to give him a chance.

The way she told it to Marvin, she never saw it coming: the man was older than
Nancy (who was about to turn 39) and had worked in the garden all af ernoon,
right alongside her, chatting about the weather. She was wearing nothing more
provocative than a baggy Red Sox tee and jeans; but suddenly, the man changed
the topic, and “without getting into disgusting speci cs,” Nancy wrote in her
email that week, “he has made some inappropriate comments.” Something about
older men being generous lovers, and how he was so sick of his own wife before
his divorce, he almost wanted her killed. Nancy was at least glad to hear the man’s
wife had lef him — “we are de nitely talking psychopath here!” — and said she
told the guy to get lost. He had called a few times since then, but it was nothing
she couldn’t handle.

Marvin practically had to remind her that she was married. Why didn’t her
husband intervene?

“Peter doesn’t really get involved in the day to day stu f,” Nancy wrote back. “He
is very busy at work, and doesn’t like the annoyances of real life.” She described
this state of a fairs as “unfortunate.”

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 18. Wave of Evil

May 20, 1999

Senate Chamber — United States Capitol Building
The Senate had been debating the “Gun Show Loophole Amendment” for weeks,
and nally, the moment of truth had arrived. If this amendment passed (and then
also passed in the House), the loophole would be closed: private merchants at gun
shows would be bound by the same rules as licensed dealers, and that meant they
would have to run a background check through NICS whenever they sold a gun.

From his bench overlooking the chamber, Vice President Al Gore called for the
vote, and a clerk handed him a long slip of paper: 50 ayes, and 50 nays. Only Gore
could break the tie, and with the end of Clinton's second term approaching, Gore
was also heading for a tough contest to succeed him. Every move counted.

The basis for this amendment was a report put together by the ATF the year
before, GUN SHOWS: Brady Checks and Crime Gun Trac . In it, the bureau
presented statistics showing that disquali ed buyers, especially felons, were still
regularly making illegal purchases of rearms at gun shows. And at that moment,
everyone in the chamber knew how signi cant the loophole had become: it had
been exactly one month since the Columbine attack. The opportunity to prevent
that disaster had already passed... but what about the next?

One senator (a war veteran who had lost an arm and both legs in Vietnam) had
made headlines when he switched his vote to support the amendment, causing the
tie. “What’s happened has touched a raw nerve, and people have reached the point
where enough is enough,” he said. “The normal gun politics of pro-gun, anti-gun
are not going to be looked at as connecting with anyone. Now we’re talking about
children getting shot.”

Gore raised the Senate’s ivory gavel. “I personally would like to dedicate my tie-
breaking vote to all of the families that have su fered from gun violence.” When he

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brought the gavel down, the amendment to close the Gun Show Loophole
o cially passed the Senate. Halfway home.

Dakota Ridge High School — Littleton, Colorado

At the same moment the white gavel came to a rest, the President of the United
States was visiting Littleton. Taking the stage in the school auditorium, the
students and sta f who greeted him were chanting their school’s name — “we are
CO LUM BINE!!” — but the place where they were standing was actually miles
away from Columbine, at Littleton's other high school, Dakota Ridge.
Columbine itself was still a crime scene.

“Something profound has happened to your country because of this,” Clinton

told the crowd. “I want you all to understand that. I’m not even sure I can explain
it to you.” He was detecting the same energy that the group of Newtown High
School students sensed, as they planted the weeping cherry tree in the soil at their
own school. “You have a unique chance, a chance to make sure that the children of
Columbine are never forgotten.” He challenged the community in Littleton to
lead the way in envisioning a brighter future, “a future where society guards our
children better against violent in uences and weapons that can break the dam of
decency and humanity in the most vulnerable of children.”

For a few moments, he discussed the gunmen. He was still getting updates from
the FBI task force, and he knew what the pro lers were learning about the school
shooters. And what he had heard seemed to match his own theories about the
phenomenon:

One thing I would like to share with you that I personally believe very
much: These dark forc that take over people and make them murder
are the extreme manifestation of fear and rage with which every human
being h to do combat. The older you get, the more you’ll know that a
great deal of life the stru le against every person’s own smallness and
fear and anger, and a continuing effort not to blame other people for our
own shortcomings... or our fears.

As the president lef the stage, an aide handed him his next set of prepared
remarks: a reaction to the latest school shooting, which had just unfolded, in
Georgia.

Heritage High School — Conyers, Georgia

The skinny white boy had somehow accessed his parents’ locked gun safe that
morning. Before heading out to catch the school bus, he tucked a .22 ri e down

194
the leg of his jeans, and put a .357 revolver in his book bag. He knew — like the
president and the vice president knew — that exactly one month had passed since
Columbine, and he wanted to mark the occasion. He lef a note under his bed:

One big question I leave behind for you to find why. But for the sake
of my brothers and sisters related to the Trench Coat Mafia, those
answers will have to remain out of the public eye.

Th h nothing to do with Hitler, and it not because I w picked

on.

Then he went to school, walked into the commons, pulled out the ri e, and red
every shot. When it was empty, he ran outside and fell to his knees, taking the
revolver from his backpack. He put the barrel to his own head. But then he
hesitated.

Behind him, he heard a voice speak sof ly: “It’s going to be alright. Give me the
gun.”

He turned, and saw the school’s assistant principal, waiting with his hand
outstretched. The boy dropped the revolver into the man’s palm, and then hugged
him tightly, crying, “Oh my god. I’m so scared.”

There were only injuries, minor ones, at Heritage High School. It easily could
have been a heavier toll, but witnesses said they saw the shooter aiming low,
targeting legs and feet; most victims were out of the hospital in a day. Police
determined that although the shooter attacked his school, he didn’t actually want
to kill. He did it because he wanted to die.

May 27, 1999

Rayburn House O ce Building — Washington, D.C.
Wayne LaPierre was scheduled to deliver testimony to the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime. With the Gun Show Loophole halfway closed, he was
there to spread the NRA’s latest public relations campaign: “Be Reasonable.”

He presented it as a compromise; he outlined which gun control measures the

NRA could support — what was “reasonable” — and surprisingly, closing the
Gun Show Loophole was on his list. He said he felt it was reasonable to “provide
for instant checks at gun shows just like at gun stores and pawn shops.”

But despite Wayne’s conciliatory tone, the NRA was in fact very much opposed to
Clinton and Gore’s amendment. It was all nuance; gun shows were held on

195
weekends — of en holiday weekends, when courthouses were closed — and so
Wayne knew there was no way to guarantee any such “instant” background check.
When the bill came to the House, that was exactly the weak point that the NRA’s
representatives would attack.

Wayne lef the microphone, and the next speaker in line stepped up. He was a
father from Littleton, and he had something to say about the NRA: “The rst
recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the eld. The
villain was not the club he used. Neither was it the ‘NCA’ — the National Club
Association. The true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be
found in Cain’s heart.”

The man’s daughter had been the very rst victim at Columbine, and although he
faulted the shooters for taking her, he came to the hearing that day to warn that
the two teenagers in black were as human as anyone there in attendance. “We all
consist of body, soul, and spirit,” he said. “When we refuse to acknowledge a third
part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to
rush in and wreak havoc.” His appeal was for spiritual healing, rather than
legislation. “No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months
planning this type of massacre,” he said. “The real villain lies within our own
hearts.”

***
The NRA purchased a full-page ad in USA Today, with the text of Wayne’s “Be
Reasonable” speech. But he sent a di ferent message directly to NRA members, in
that month's mailing: “None of this has a thing to do with the Littleton or
Georgia school attacks or any violent crime anywhere in America,” Wayne said. “It
has everything to do with an attempt by gun haters and the enemies of your
Second Amendment freedoms to dismantle the Second Amendment, one step at
a time.” Background checks at gun shows would amount to a gun registry, he
warned, one that “gives the Federal Government authority to keep names and
addresses of citizens in FBI les, even af er they are cleared as honest people
entitled to buy rearms.” If the government knows who is armed, so the
precaution went, the government knows who to disarm. Americans had to resist.

Hall of the House of Representatives — Washington, D.C.

The bill came to the House oor, to face its nal hurdle. As in the Senate, both
sides were dug-in. It would come down to only a handful of swing votes.

One representative, from New York, watched the debate over the loophole
amendment with more interest than most. Until December 3, 1993, she had been a
hospital nurse; her husband had boarded the 5:33pm train to Long Island on that

196
night, along with her son, but he never came home. A man on the train had
pulled out a handgun, and shot everyone that he could, before the passengers
restrained him as he was reloading. Her husband hadn’t done anything wrong; it
was just bad luck. (Her son was also wounded, but survived.)

She had been a nurse her whole adult life, until then. But she couldn’t just let it
pass. She ran for her district’s congressional seat, campaigning on gun control, and
she won.

When the Vice President dropped his ivory gavel in the Senate that year, and
passed the Gun Show Loophole amendment, she was proud to then sponsor it in
the House. But now she watched in growing frustration, and then anguish, as the
built-to-fail “instant” background check requirement had its intended e fect. Just
seconds before the nal, now-doomed vote was called, she pleaded with her
colleagues, with tears in her eyes, to vote yes:

We have an opportunity here in Washington to stop playing gam . That

what I came to Washington for.

I am sorry that th very hard for me. I am Irish, and I am not

supposed to cry in front of anyone. But I made a promise a long time
ago. I made a promise to my son and to my husband. If there w
anything that I could do to prevent one family from going through what
I have gone through and every other victim that I know have gone
through, then I have done my job.

Let me go home... Let me go home.

Before she could wipe her tears, the chorus of “no” votes came cascading down.
Wayne LaPierre chalked up another win. The “Gun Show Loophole” amendment
was stricken from the bill, and so the nation’s gun show attendees could continue
buying guns from private parties with just an ID, to verify they were eighteen.
There would be no background check, instant or otherwise.

NSSF Headquarters — Newtown, Connecticut

A reporter from the Newtown Bee came down to the headquarters of the National
Shooting Sports Foundation, for an interview with “America’s other gun lobby.”
Knowing that NSSF President Bob Delfay was a close ally of Wayne LaPierre, the
journalist wanted to know if Delfay had any response to some recent comments
from his colleague: that Clinton “needs a certain level of violence in this country,”
and that the president is “willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his
political agenda, and his vice-president too.”

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Delfay did not waver. He told the Bee that the NRA was “saying some unpopular
things that needed to be said,” and lef no doubt that he saw the political reality
just as starkly as Wayne had; he predicted that the upcoming election would be
“one of the most important in the history of the [ rearms] industry,” and he was
con dent that a President Gore would only be “delighted” to put gun
manufacturers out of business. The NSSF, of course, were not going to sit by and
let that happen.

***
Ever since forming the Heritage Fund at the ‘98 SHOT show, the NSSF had been
“batting 1000” (as they put it in their company literature). Some 150 gun
companies had signed onto the fund, and the results had proven to be worth every
cent they poured into it, as the NSSF’s attorneys beat back municipal lawsuits
from Bridgeport, Miami-Dade, Chicago, and more. The lobby was even going on
the o fensive: taking the municipalities back into court, and suing them for
conspiracy. The litigious mayors, so smug just a year before, now were witnessing
their dreams crumble before them.

There was only one problem — and its name was Columbine. On the night of
April 20, as the magnitude of the tragedy was becoming clear, Bob Delfay had
dispatched a memo to the entire Newtown o ce:

Because firearms were used and because we

represent firearms manufacturers, it is
understandable that the NSSF staff may feel more
concerned and more disturbed by this tragic
incident than our fellow citizens.

Incidents such as this have no logical

explanation and perhaps no means of explanation.
Our society has had firearms, troubled people,
and a sensationalist media for generations.

The NSSF never wavered, and now, with the Gun Show Loophole amendment
sunk, the gun lobbies had once again soldiered through the af ermath of another
mass shooting.

Meanwhile, there was still the war to ght against the nation’s mayors, and their
municipal lawsuits. The Heritage Fund’s directors planned to keep the pressure
on — but they were starting to plan for a victory maneuver on that front, too.

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June 18, 1999
Texas State Capitol Building — Austin, TX
There wasn’t a single mayor in the Lone Star state that had even hinted at suing a
gun company, but the NRA had felt the climate there was right. They pushed the
Texas legislature to be the latest state to pass a new kind of gun law: one granting
special exemption to all gun manufacturers, from any product liability lawsuit —
in e fect, a liability shield.

The only real exceptions were for malfunction, and “negligent entrustment” —
when a gun dealer sells to someone even though the dealer “knows, or reasonably
should know, the person to whom the product is supplied is likely to, and does,
use the product in a manner involving unreasonable risk of physical injury to the
person or others.”

This was a high standard to meet, and otherwise, as long as the gun worked as
intended, you could not take the manufacturer to court if someone got shot.
Period. (When Georgia passed a law like this, the mayor of Atlanta’s lawsuit
against the gun companies suddenly disappeared. Same with Louisiana, and New
Orleans.)

Suzanna Gratia was watching. She had never dreamed of suing Glock, or Ruger,
for what happened at Luby’s. “These lawsuits are ludicrous. They’re nothing but a
backdoor attempt at gun control,” she said from the oor of the State House.
And this time, she was not there as a guest; she was the elected State
Representative from Bell County. She had already helped stop Texas’s state-level
version of the “Gun Show Loophole” bill, and with the gun-shield bill, she would
carry the gun industry to victory in Texas once again.

Governor George Bush signed his state’s new gun-shield bill into law in June.
There was no public ceremony, and no comment; he was the front-runner for his
party’s presidential nomination, set to face o f against the sitting vice-president,
and it wasn’t popular to be be a gun industry supporter af er Columbine. The
NRA commented to CNN, simply, “Governor Bush has always been good on this
issue.”

September 15, 1999

Wedgwood Baptist Church — Fort Worth, Texas
In the sanctuary of the red-brick church, some 150 teenagers were watching a
Christian rock band perform, swaying to-and- fro with their arms outstretched.

199
Leaning against the far wall was a nineteen-year-old named Jeremiah. He had once
been a loyal Boy Scout, but his life since then had taken some bad turns: he
dropped out of high school, was on probation for thef , and his shif s at a fast-
food restaurant were barely covering the bills. Back home, his girlfriend was
pregnant. He was praying for a miracle.

With the rock band playing loudly in the closed sanctuary, Jeremiah didn’t hear
the old Pontiac pull into the parking lot outside.

The driver was a thin man, middle-aged. As he stepped into the church hall, he
had a black jacket on, a black hat on his head, and a cigarette dangling from his lip.
In each hand, he held a semiautomatic pistol: a Ruger P85 9mm, and a cheap .380
“Saturday night special” revolver.

The security guard saw the man’s cigarette rst, and told him he had to put it out.
The man in the black hat shot him, and then began shooting everyone in the
church that he could, starting at the merch table and moving into the sanctuary.

The band dropped their instruments, and ran. Most of the audience ed, too,
while others ducked under a pew — as had Jeremiah’s friend, who was whispering
for him to “get down.” But instead Jeremiah did the only thing that occurred to
him: he sat down in the pew, folded his hands in his lap, and prayed.

The band had lef their video camera running, on its tripod. It picked up a good
portion of what happened next, according to the Chief of Police in Fort Worth;
on the tape, the man in black was deliberate, controlled: “He ejects the magazine,
reloads and continues ring. It wasn’t rapid. It was slow and methodical, picking a
target, aiming and shooting. He didn’t seem in a panic. He would stand in one
place, shoot and then move to another position and shoot again.”

Soon, the gunman came to Jeremiah, and took aim. But Jeremiah didn’t look up
at him. He just said, “Sir, you don’t have to be doing this.”

“Shut the hell up,” the gunman spat back. “What’s your religion?”

“Christian. I’m a Baptist.”

“That sucks,” the older man said, sneering that it was a “stupid religion.”

“No sir,” Jeremiah said. “It doesn’t suck. It’s a wonderful thing. God put me on
this earth for a reason. I’m certain of that.”

The gunman pivoted, and red a few shots into the sanctuary walls. “This religion
is bullshit!”

200
“Sir,” Jeremiah replied, “what you need is Jesus Christ in your life. You can shoot
me if you want. But I know where I’m going. I’m going to heaven. What about
you?”

The shooter stared at him for a few seconds, in silence. Then he told Jeremiah
“fuck o f,” sat down in the pew, and shot himself.

Jeremiah ran out the front door, along with most everyone else. He wasn’t a hero.

One man, a youth minister, stopped at the shooter’s body, nding it slumped over
on its side, still holding the Ruger. The minister delicately took the pistol from
the gunman’s limp hand, and walked it to the front hallway before setting it
down. “I guess I’ve seen too many movies where the bad guy keeps coming back
to life.”

***
The investigators identi ed the gunman and headed for his home address, nine
miles across town. They passed four other churches along the way, each just as
well-attended as the concert had been; even though they would never nd any
indication that the shooter had been to Wedgewood Baptist Church before,
something apparently drew him there.

The police made their entry into the shooter’s small home. Everything inside was
smashed to pieces; there were huge holes knocked through the drywall, apparently
with a shovel, sometime before he attacked the church. He had punched through
every door, and dumped cement in the toilets, and motor oil in the shower heads.
He had smashed the family photos in the living room, and even torn apart the
family bible, page by page.

Holy Redeemer Catholic Church — Grand Rapids, Michigan

Governor Bush took a brie ng about the Texas attack while at a campaign stop. In
his speech af erward, he said a prayer for the victims, and, sensing the anxiety in
the country, said that the gunman who attacked the church “obviously was acting
as a result of evil in his heart.” Bush continued, “There seems to be a wave of evil
passing through America now, and we as a society can pass laws and hold people
accountable for the decisions they make, but our hopes and prayers have got to be
that there is more love in society.”

He did not think that restricting guns would solve the problem: “I don’t know of
a law — a governmental law — that will put love in people’s hearts.”

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One reporter asked Bush if the gunman had a concealed-weapons permit, under
the law he himself signed as governor back in 1995; Bush said that no, the man did
not. “I don’t know [the shooter’s] background,” he continued, “but it sounds to
me like he’s mentally deranged.” Bush said that people like the shooter were the
ones he didn’t want getting guns. But like the father from Columbine, he blamed
Cain, not the club. The problem went beyond the laws we make on earth.

San Diego, California

The Vice President was at a campaign stop of his own, at a high school in
California, when he heard about the church shooting. He fundamentally
disagreed with the Governor of Texas: “A hurricane is something we cannot do
anything about. It is an act of God. But this shooting is something people do to
people.”

He found himself thinking back to the legislation he and Clinton had gotten
passed when they rst took the White House together. “We do know that the
availability of assault weapons and deadly weapons in the hands of people who
shouldn’t have them contributes to a repeat [of such] incidents, to having these
things happen over and over again… we have to respond to the ood of guns.”
The Gun Show Loophole Amendment had ultimately slipped through his
ngers. But he knew if he could just make it to the Oval O ce, he would have
another four years to get it right.

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 19. Radar

FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime —

Quantico, Virginia
Af er nally tracking the ghost back to his cabin in Montana, the FBI pro lers on
the UNABOM task force were set to return to their traditional fare: serial killers,
and terrorists. But as it turned out, their next mystery attacker was one that had
struck in Moses Lake that same year, and again in communities across America
ever since: the school shooter.

It was an awkward t for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime
(NCAVC); pro ling is usually done in an open criminal case, to help identify a
speci c individual that already committed a crime. The nation’s schools were
clamoring for something bigger than that: they wanted something to watch out
for every day. They wanted to know what the next shooter would look like.

Shortly af er the FBI pro lers got to work on this request, sure enough, they
found that coming up with a “shooter pro le” would not be an easy task — if it
was possible at all. The school shooter phenomenon seemed to have come from
nowhere, and their data analysts said it was too new and too rare for them to reach
any meaningful statistical conclusions about it. There just wasn't enough of a
sample size. Yet at the same time, just from following the news over the last few
years, it seemed to be getting worse; the cycles were coming faster and faster, so
quick that the nation could barely register one before the next attack hit, and each
time, it increased the pressure on law enforcement to nd a solution.

What the NCAVC needed was data. The problem was, unlike the FBI's typical
"bad guys," teenage shooters generally didn’t have lengthy criminal records or
employment histories to comb through. So, the feds went to the schools.

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July 1999
Leesburg, Virginia
What came to be known as the “Leesburg symposium” would focus on 18 speci c
school shootings (including some that were foiled attempts) with the goal to
“develop a better understanding of the incident itself, and the shooter, his
background, the school, and other social dynamics which may have in uenced the
crime.” The FBI brought in representatives from all 18 communities where the
phenomenon had appeared — from the teachers and principals, to the local police
who had investigated the crimes. And at least one of the adults, from each
community, was one who had known the shooter personally.

Everyone at the symposium was aware that there was, in fact, something of a
“school shooter pro le” already out there, drif ing around pop culture: the
shooters were always a quiet boy with white skin, who wore black clothes, and
listened to dark, angry music. They would be outcasts, bullied for years, until they
nally snapped and brought a gun to school, for their ultimate act of revenge.

Comparing notes, the attendees in Leesburg found that only the broadest strokes
of this portrait re ected reality: the 18 shooters were indeed overwhelmingly
(though not exclusively) white, and they were always boys. But with every other
trait, they were all over the map. “At this time,” the nal report from Leesburg
would read, “there is no research that has identi ed traits and characteristics that
can reliably distinguish school shooters from other students. Many students
appear to have traits and characteristics similar to those observed in students who
were involved in school shootings.”

In other words, whatever it was that made the shooters di ferent from the millions
of other white boys in America’s schools, it wasn’t showing up in the
demographics. There was, simply, no meaningful or useful pro le for a school
shooter.

The best that the FBI could do with the data from the Leesburg symposium was
provide the schools with a “threat assessment protocol.” This tool couldn’t tell
them which student to look at, but if they ever had what they thought was a
threat on their radar — if there was “leakage” of a possible plot — the protocol
would help them evaluate just how serious the danger was.

The protocol consisted of a list of factors, sorted under the four key aspects of
each case: the shooter’s personality, their home life, societal factors, and then the
school itself. The more boxes that were checked under the four columns for a
given suspect, the more the school should be concerned.

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 ***
Shooters tended to be sensitive boys. Many would be “injustice collectors,”
keeping a running inventory of all the wrongs they felt they needed to set right.
Both traits were strong signs of narcissism, the doctors at Leesburg pointed out.
But as the sessions went on, another condition appeared to be even more
common a factor: the shooters usually exhibited a number the classic symptoms
of depression — “lethargy, physical fatigue, a morose or dark outlook on life, a
sense of malaise,” and a “markedly diminished interest in almost all activities that
previously occupied and interested him.”

Being adolescents, the shooters all also had an extra subset of depressive symptoms
to look for, and these boxes were of en checked-o f too: shooters would display
“unpredictable and uncontrolled outbursts of anger,” or “generalized and
excessive hatred toward everyone else, and feelings of hopelessness about the
future.” They would also have more di culty articulating these extreme feelings,
compared to an adult. With fewer outlets, the internal pressure would build much
faster.

At school, the shooters were not usually “loners,” in the classic sense; many of
them had a tight-knit group of friends. What was more signi cant was that these
social circles tended to be “closed groups,” and usually out on the school’s social
fringe, where the shooter’s abnormalities may be less noticeable, and where dissent
from conformity was valued; no, being a “goth” never made anyone into a school
shooter — but the goth clique, by de nition, was not going to react as strongly to
every mention of violence and death.

One checkbox led to more disagreement at Leesburg than any of the others, and it
was the issue spurring debate everywhere in the country: bullying. There were,
undeniably, accounts that some of the shooters had been bullied at school, and
several had speci cally cited revenge for bullying as their motive — but despite
this, the FBI did not believe bullying was a signi cant factor in school shootings.
“These students were not disproportionately bullied as compared with their
classmates,” a pro ler said. “The di ference is how student shooters perceive the
bullying.”

A psychiatrist from Kansas disagreed sharply: “I think there is an under-emphasis

on the e fect of bullying on students.” He argued that in all 18 shootings they
studied, “the school settings were extremely victimizing,” even encouraging
bullying in certain environments, such as in athletics. “Until schools adopt a more
accepting and less-restrictive stance in which bullying is discouraged,” he
predicted, “school shootings will continue to happen.”

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The homes the shooters came from ran the gamut, from foster care to upper-class.
Some had experienced abuse — but not signi cantly more than the non-shooter
population. Really, the dynamics in their homes tended to be out-of-balance in
more subtle, intangible ways: the student would demand “an inordinate degree of
privacy,” and his parents would invariably provide it. Traditional family roles
would be reversed; “The child acts as if he were the authority gure, while parents
act as if they were the children.” If the school confronted the parents, the parents
would react by defending their child, regardless of the evidence. There would be a
culture of denial within the home that grew gradually, a course inverted against
the child’s emotional decline.

Many of the shooters had internet access, and the recentness of such technological
advances could reinforce the family’s upside-down power structure even more;
now there was an invisible, uncensored information pipeline into the home that
the parents’ generation never had to deal with — and frequently, had no concept
of.

Access to guns was, undeniably, a factor — especially if there were guns in the
home that were “treated carelessly, without normal safety precautions.” But even
in homes where there were no guns, a child could develop an unhealthy xation
on them, one that could go unnoticed; the Heath shooter had stolen all his guns
from a neighbor, but he says he was ful lling a fantasy he’d had since
kindergarten: “I remembered a time when I wanted to bring a gun to Show and
Tell, and whoever didn’t like it, I was going to shoot them. Of course, I didn’t
have access to a gun, so it was not realistic. But I do believe that if I had had the
means at the time, I would have gone that far.”

Finally, the symposium looked at modern society: movies and television were
indeed more violent than ever before, and bloody video games like DOOM and
Mortal Kombat gave still another stream of graphic content for the adolescent
male psyche to absorb.

On the other hand, these same video games were also very, very successful, and the
market for them was almost exclusively adolescent boys. And yet, school
shootings were still quite rare.

But even here, the shooters of en took it a step further than other boys, showing
“an unusual fascination with movies, TV shows, computer games, music videos
or printed material that focus intensively on themes of violence, hatred, control,
power, death, and destruction.” Rather than the graphic content itself, the
professionals were more concerned with the potential for such media to provide
“cultural scripts” — narratives that the boys would absorb and then try to act out
in their own lives, like the convergence of A Fistful of Dollars, Rage and Natural

206
Born Killers that the Frontier High School shooter launched out of Classroom 15
in Moses Lake.

But censorship didn’t seem an e fective solution, for reasons that would give the
symposium attendees even further reason for concern: now the shootings
themselv seemed to be evolving into their own, independent, cultural script.
Shooters were emulating shooters — so, the cycle could be self-sustaining. The
same frightening prospect was invoked by a man who knew the Shangri-La
shooter’s father — and had been on the phone with him just minutes before he
was attacked. “Killing your parents, going to school and shooting everybody, is an
idea we’ve accepted,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s on the screen. I think there will be
many more of these things, and that they’ll get worse. Because the idea is out
there. You don’t have to think it up — it’s available, ready-made.”

United States Department of Education — Washington, D.C.

Waiting for “leakage” to appear wasn’t enough for the Department of Education.
The federal agency still felt the pressure from the nation’s school districts to do
something about school shootings, and not just wait to react. They resolved to go
deeper, and nd the pro le that the FBI must have missed.

But the educators could only do half of the job themselves; they knew schools, not
crime. Fortunately, there was another agency, besides the bureau, that had
expertise in identifying deranged gunmen. And they wanted to help.

Headquarters of the Secret Service — Washington, D.C.

When the United States Secret Service puts a person under their protection, the
work they do falls into two categories: traditional protection (such arranging
bodyguards and physical security measures around the protectee), and then
“protective intelligence”: an investigative practice that comes from the
understanding that keeping the protectee safe is easiest if “persons with the
intention and capacity to mount an attack on a protectee are identi ed and
stopped before they come near.”

The agency began focusing more on protective intelligence af er a high-pro le

shooting in Manhattan in December of 1980: the victim was musician John
Lennon, killed by a man with a revolver who seemed to believe he was living
inside his favorite novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Though not an “assassination”
in a political sense, this crime got the Secret Service’s attention because it was an
instance of what they called “targeted violence”; the agency was trying to put
together a “pro le of an assassin” at the time, but they didn’t have enough data.
The gunman who shot the Beatles member seemed cut from the same cloth as

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their prey, and they wondered if studying such non-political slayings could help
them catch future assassins.

Three months later, Ronald Reagan was shot, by a young man wearing a John
Lennon button. This gunman’s claimed motives, like the Lennon attacker, turned
out to be quite bizarre; he was trying to win the a fection of a famous Hollywood
actress. He did not know the young woman at all, but had become obsessed with
the 1976 lm Taxi Driver, in which an aspiring political assassin crosses paths with
a child prostitute, played by that actress. As the Reagan gunman said into his
cassette-tape diary before his attack, the actress was “all I think about really. That,
and John Lennon’s death. They were sorta binded together.”

Af er he shot Reagan, in the gunman’s hotel room, agents found a poem he had
written:

Guns are Fun!

See that living legend over there?

With one little squeeze of th tri er

I can put that person at my feet

moaning and groaning and pleading with God.

Th gun giv me pornographic power.

If I wish, the president will fall

and the world will look at me in disbelief,

all because I own an inexpensive gun.

Guns are lovable, Guns are fun

Are you lucky enough to own one?

His assassination attempt, it turned out, wasn’t about the president at all. It was
about him.

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 ***
Completing the "assassin pro le" became a top priority for the Secret Service af er
that. “They gave us a room,” one psychologist on the project remembers, “and
put a bunch of cases in front of us. We spent that summer reading the cases and
trying to gure out if there was any way to gure out who wanted to kill the
president.”

The team was dubbed the Exceptional Case Study Project, and the cases they
looked at went as far back as 1949 — but they also reviewed literature on the
subject going back hundreds of years. And almost immediately, they noticed
something strange: all of the societal elements associated with assassination were
present in the eighteenth century — and yet, there were extremely few political
assassinations during that time. There were plenty of guns, and wars, and political
con icts, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century — and then, rather suddenly
— that assassinations became a global epidemic. And as the rate of assassinations
rose into the 20th century, the assassins themselves also seemed to be changing;
increasingly, they were found to be “mentally disordered,” and so were less likely
to have some tangible political outcome as the goal of their attack. That made it
very di cult to see them coming.

The earliest documentation the Secret Service researchers could nd on the

psychology of United States assassins was from an article in a 1911 edition of the
Journal of the American Institute of Criminolo , published ten years af er an
anarchist shot and killed President McKinley. Arthur MacDonald, a criminal
anthropologist and “Specialist in Education as Related to the Abnormal and
Weakling Classes” for the U.S. Bureau of Education, wrote of a personality type
he had identi ed as “the Assassin of Rulers”:

The most dangero criminals are the assassins of rulers. They may be
sane, insane, or partially insane, or simply monstro criminals.

They may be degenerat with certain peculiar traits, instability, and

the continual changing of their occupation and habitation. They are
usually vain, irritable, impulsive and mystical, and are easily influenced
by surroundings.

They are usually proud of their crime, protest with indignation if called
insane, and usually show great courage on the scaffold, clinging to their
ide or delusions until the end.

Their most common characteristic a want of mental balance or

equilibrium, which may take vario forms, exaltation and

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 mysticism. If circumstanc be not favorable to its development, it may
remain dormant and inoffensive. But if it finds in the events of the day,
wars, revolutions, political dissensions or extreme theori of sects; in
publications or books inflaming the mind; if, in short, it finds a soil
favorable to its development, it liable to appear and sometim
culminate in most terrible crim .

McDonald noted how di cult it would be to identify such persons if they did not
reveal themselves, but he proposed several measures that might, as of 1911, decrease
the likelihood that they would strike, such as “for newspapers, magazines and
authors of books to cease publishing the names of criminals,” theorizing that “this
would lessen the hope for glory, renown or notoriety, which is a great incentive to
such crimes. [...] As far as scienti c study is concerned, names of persons are not
necessary.”

***
The Secret Service never quite found what they were looking for in their assassin
research. The agency completed its guide “Preventing Assassination” in 1997, with
a threat assessment protocol, and a warning: “Attackers do not t any single — or
several — descriptive or demographic ‘pro les.’” Instead, the assassins came from
all sorts of backgrounds, and had all sorts of reasons for doing it. Few were
“crazy.” uite of en, the individual chose to become an assassin rst, and their
actual target last; sometimes, they just went with the closest and most signi cant
victim they could nd. Their real target was something more abstract.

***
The agency decided to keep the Exceptional Case Studies Project open, as a
permanent operation. And these were the assets that, in the summer of 1999, the
Department of Education hoped to tap into when they enlisted the Secret Service
for their “Safe School Initiative.”

The Secret Service approach would be more in-depth than the one the FBI had
adopted in Leesburg. And they opted to cast a wider net, making a list of every
school shooting they could nd — de ning one as “any incident where a current
student or recent former student attacked someone at his or her school with lethal
means,” and where the shooter intentionally chose the school as the location for
the attack. With this criteria, they identi ed a total of 36 attacks, occurring
between 1974 and 1999. This number, by itself, brought a realization: that the
school shootings were not a brand new phenomenon af er all, and that in fact
there had been previous waves that passed over the country, going back 25 years.
But af er each one peaked, there was a calm period, a generation cycling through
the schools without experiencing the fear, so that when the next wave came, it

210
seemed like a new phenomenon all over again. Really, it was just the season
returning.

Each of the 37 cases was assigned to a review team. They would break down every
detail of the given incident, and whenever possible, personally interview the
surviving shooter. They wanted to nd any warning signs that could have been
missed — anything that could help in the ongoing struggle to catch the next
shooter before he struck. But it was going to take time.

A year later, a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Tim tracked down one of the
team’s forensic psychiatrists, and asked him if they had solved the mystery yet.
“What caused these shootings? I don’t pretend to know, and I don’t know if it’s
knowable,” the doctor said. “We’re looking for di ferent pieces of the puzzle, not
for whether kids wore black clothes.”

211
 20. Distortion

July 22, 1999

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Somewhere deep in Nancy Lanza’s brain, a switch turned to ON.

Marvin checked his email. He had one new message, from his old friend. “I hope
you are having a good week,” Nancy wrote. “It couldn’t be worse than mine...I
had a seizure on Tuesday and have been with my Neurologist since, being tested,
poked, prodded, injected and otherwise tortured. My arms ache (injections) and I
have been terribly tired and sensitive to light.” Her health crisis, held at bay ever
since arriving in Newtown, had returned.

Nancy said the doctors wanted to do more tests — “24 hour eeg” and a visit to a
cardiac specialist — but as of that moment, she felt okay. She told Marvin he
shouldn’t worry: like she said before, the condition could have come back any
time. It was something she had to manage, but she was in no immediate danger.

Marvin asked if there was a diagnosis yet.

“There isn’t a fancy name for my problem,” Nancy wrote back, “just a genetically
awed auto immune system...when (i ) it activates...then it could become any one
of a hundred di ferent diseases.”

Her friend was stunned. W there anything he could do to help?

“The best thing you can do for me is to promise to keep this in con dence.” She
hammered that point home, again and again: he must not tell anyone about her
failing health, especially not her family back in Kingston. “I decided not even to
tell my little brother, since he would be so upset and worried. It was hard enough
to leave my friends and family, without all this hanging over everyone’s head.”

What w she going to do?

212
“My plan is to live well, and ignore the possibility of a potential problem. If it
happens, I’ll deal with it as I go. For now...I am ok.”

***
A few weeks passed. Marvin wrote in one of his regular updates that he was
feeling sorry for himself, realizing he was about to turn 40. When Nancy
responded, she slipped in an update on her health; the news was not good. She
said Marvin should feel fortunate that he was going to be 40, as it was looking like
she might not even make it to that milestone:

They found another legion in my brain. I just

spent the last 2 weeks having tests...some
excruciatingly painful. Any hope I had that
things were going to be OK or that I could be in
any kind of a permanent remission are gone. There
is this mad scurry to find out if anything can be
done. I look at my boys and think about what will
happen to them. I have to put on this big brave
face for my family, but I am terrified.

Nancy was prepared for the worst. “I get the ‘big talk’ from my Doctor on
Monday… results of tests, etc.” she wrote later, in the fall. She said it was taking all
of her energy just to keep up the facade, to hide that anything was wrong:
“Amazing what you can do for your kids, isn’t it?”

As before, she said that she was going to keep her ailment a secret. She did not
want anyone else to be afraid. It would have been a di cult choice for her to make
— if any of it were true.

***
Nancy was not being honest with Marvin. Not at all. Everything she had told him
about her health had been a lie. And he wasn’t alone in that — contrary to what
she claimed, she had not been sparing her family from similar stories. Nancy was
not dying, and she never had MS, but her claims to the contrary were putting
many of those closest to her in needless suspense, each thinking they were keeping
a secret from each other, the awful un-truth securely compartmentalized among
them all.

In reality, the single time that Nancy visited a neurologist that summer, they told
her everything looked perfectly normal. And Nancy’s primary physician wrote
only that she was experiencing “signi cant stress in her life related to her
husband.” Further tests were recommended, but also psychotherapy, “for Mrs.
Lanza’s emotional issues.”

213
 ***
Marvin saved one last email from Nancy:

From: Nancy Lanza

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 9:46am

To: Marvin Lafontaine

Subject: Happy Monday???

Hi! I can’t write much...hurrying off to another

Doctor’s appointment.

Not all the tests were back yesterday...some

things are ruled out, they are still waiting for
pieces of the puzzle. I wish I could make you
feel better about this...but it is VERY serious
and although medicine has made a lot of progress,
there are a good many things that can’t be fixed.
On the bright side...lots of things CAN be fixed.

I have to be in the hospital on Friday. They have

to stop my heart for a few moments. They said it
is safe. A cardiologist with a crash cart will be
right there to zap me back. It looks like another
2 weeks of testing before I get to the bottom of
this.

Anyway...I really have to run, but I will call

you later this afternoon. Please don’t spend time
worrying about me. Worrying never solved
anything, it just makes you crazy!

I’ll talk to you later!

Love,

Nancy

Not long af er receiving this message, Marvin changed jobs, and email accounts;
so, the history of his exchanges with Nancy stop here. But the two old friends
would still keep in touch, over the years. And like each of the persons in Nancy’s
life that she had lied to about her health, Marvin would go on thinking that she
su fered from a very serious disease; Nancy would never tell any of them the truth.

214
 21. Basement Tapes

December 20, 1999

Community Center near Littleton, Colorado
A middle-aged man stood calmly onstage, holding a microphone, as the press
gathered below him, to hear what he brought to share. He was the same grieving
father who had told Congress about the void in the heart, where the shooters
came from, and for months he had been saying that the attacks were happening
because American culture had taken God out of its public schools. Now, as he
promised the New York Post, he had evidence.

What would become known as the “basement tapes” were recovered from the
Columbine shooters’ homes in the af ermath of their attack, but the footage had
been kept a secret until just the day before the father’s press conference, when
word leaked that TIME magazine was going to publish a story on the tapes. Even
the victims’ families were blindsided.

There was an immediate backlash against Je ferson County’s sheri f, who then
hastily arranged for family members of victims to view the footage before the
story’s release, if they wished. The father onstage had smuggled a cassette recorder
into the viewing room, and now was summoning the press there because, in his
view, “It’s inevitable, now, that the world is going to nd out,” and he “wanted to
be the rst person to say to the world what was on the videotapes.”

Onstage, he lowered his microphone, and waited.

The mu ed hiss of an audio cassette came over the community center’s PA

system. Two voices on it began to speak, and they sounded angry. The audience
shif ed in their chairs, as the realization sank in: that they were hearing the
Columbine killers taunt their classmates, from beyond the grave:

RIGHT: ...and those two girls sitting next to you, they probably want
you to shut the fuck up, too! Jes !

215
 LEFT: I don’t like you stuck up little bitch , you’re fucking little..
Christian, Godly little whor !

RIGHT: Yeah.. ‘I love Jes ! I love Jes !’ — shut the fuck up!

LEFT: What would Jes do? What the fuck would I do!? [mak
gunshot sound/gesture]

RIGHT: I would shoot you in the motherfucking head! Go Romans!

Thank God they crucified that asshole.

And the static demon voices went on, cheering the Romans at Golgotha, as the
tape wound to a stop.

While the outside world had spent the last eight months debating the motives and
inspirations behind Columbine — Marilyn Manson, DOOM, or the Trench Coat
Ma a — behind the scenes in Je ferson County, the sheri f was hearing the real
answers, from the shooters themselves.

When Je fco rst revealed the existence of the tapes, in December of 1999, they
were planning to show them solely to TIME magazine. Af er the public relations
debacle, the sheri f would insist that TIME's reporters had agreed not only to not
take any pictures, or make any copies of the tapes, but also that they weren’t to to
make any direct reference to the tapes at all in their article. When Je fco saw the
cover headline “THE COLUMBINE TAPES,” they said the magazine had broken
their agreement.

But it was too late. Although the tapes themselves would remain sealed in an
evidence room, to smooth things over with TIME’s competitors in the press,
Je fco agreed to allow more journalists to view them in the weeks af er.
Collectively, the news stories that followed would paint a detailed picture of just
what the tapes actually contained.

***
The scene is set up like a talk show, with the shooters seated on a couch and
recliner in Right’s basement family room. They give the date — which, assuming
it’s accurate, places the lming less than ve weeks before their attack — and make
the purpose of their message clear: they want full credit for everything they are
going to do. Furthermore, the wanted it known that it was just the two of them
who earned it, not the prom date or the work friend who had unwittingly
provided them with their guns. “We used them. They had no clue... don’t blame
them. And don’t fucking arrest them,” they tell the police, in between sips of

216
whiskey and mouthfuls of candy. “Don’t arrest anyone, because they didn’t have a
fucking clue. If it hadn’t been them, it would’ve been someone else over twenty-
one.”

They leave no doubt that bullying and revenge were factors. Lef says he’s felt
hated in school ever since the “stuck up kids” at his daycare, and he hated them
right back. “Being shy didn’t help. I’m going to kill you all. You’ve been giving us
shit for years.”

Repeatedly, they explain it as, “We’re going to prove ourselves.” The shooters get
excited thinking about it. At several points, Lef even has to calm Right down, and
remind him not to wake his own parents, who are in bed upstairs.

Right turns the energy back at his partner, getting him wound up and egging him
on — “More rage, keep building it!” — and Lef indeed seems to feed o f of his
energy, becoming more animated. “I know we’re gonna have followers because
we’re so fucking God-like,” he says, stroking his shotgun. “We’re not exactly
human — we have human bodies but we’ve evolved into one step above you,
fucking human shit. We actually have fucking self-awareness.”

On another tape, they give the viewer a tour of their arsenal. They say, “We are,
but we aren’t psycho,” as Lef tries on his trench coat, a halo of ammo and pipe
bombs scattered on the oor around him. Several of the magazines seen are for
Right’s 9mm Hi-Point carbine ri e; behind the camera, Right narrates that he has
“100 bullets and 10 loaded clips.” He ips the camera around to say directly into
the lens: “You guys are lucky it doesn’t hold more ammo.”

Back in the basement, the shooters share a belief: that “World peace is an
impossible thing,” in part because anyone can look on the internet and nd
recipes for “bombs, poison, napalm,” and “how to buy guns if you’re underage.”
They then laugh at the gun control legislation that they expect to follow in their
wake: “Go ahead and change gun laws — how do you think we got ours?”

Throughout the tapes, the shooters address an audience that would never truly
exist: those reacting to the bombing at Columbine High School, with the shooting
being just the af ermath. In the shooters’ eyes, looking to the future, there
ickered a high school in ames. “The most deaths in U.S. history,” predicts Lef .

Right lif s his shotgun and gives the barrel a kiss. “Hopefully.”

“We’re hoping. We’re hoping. I hope we kill 250 of you,” Lef adds. “It will be the
most nerve-wracking 15 minutes of my life, af er the bombs are set and we’re
waiting to charge through the school.”

217
Right — who elsewhere on the tapes apologizes to any friends he might hurt —
says “I hope people have ashbacks. Isn’t it fun to get the respect we’re going to
deserve? We don’t give a shit because we’re going to die doing it.” Indeed, as grand
as their vision for “NBK” was, the two shooters hoped that it would only be the
beginning; they lef the tapes behind because they wanted their darkness to linger,
long af er their res had gone out. “We’re going to kick-start a revolution,” the
shooters call out from the abyss. “A revolution of the dispossessed.”

March 22, 2000

Newtown High School
On a quiet Wednesday morning, the fear engulfed Newtown High School.
Students arriving for class were met by two Newtown Police cruisers, parked
prominently outside the senior lot. And when class started, many of the desks
were empty anyway; rumors of some sort of “plot” had spread through the village
the previous evening, and as a result, no less than 130 students stayed home from
school that day. As NHS’s principal told the Newtown Bee, “There was a rumor
heard by some kids that there was going to be a shooting.”

It had all started with a dream: one student was telling a friend about a nightmare
he had, involving a shooter. Another group of students, passing by in the packed
halls, apparently misheard the conversation, and brought the “rumor” home to
their parents. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought,” one parent
said — but now, she ended up telling her daughter to skip. “With the climate in
our society, I thought it better to err on the safer side.”

In response to the threat, the resource o cer for Newtown School District
canceled her shif over at the middle school, and she and the high school’s
principal spent the whole day patrolling the halls of NHS, while an extra
Newtown PD patrol o cer was stationed in the cafeteria, keeping an eye out for
any Columbine-wannabes.

Thankfully, nothing happened. They discovered the source of the rumor soon
af er, and realized it was a false alarm. Relieved, the school’s principal saw a silver
lining in the clouds, and commended the students who had reported the tip,
regarding it as a sign that they had crossed over to the vigilant, post-Columbine
world. “That is what we want them to do.”

Fall 2000
Sandy Hook Elementary School
Y2K came and went. Nancy needn’t have worried about the air control radar
going o ine, or the planes falling from the sky. Everything was ne.

218
Adam went back to Sandy Hook Elementary for third grade, in the fall of 2000.
In class, his articulation continued to improve, though records show that he
“needed to be drawn out in discussion.”

Midway through the school year, a new progress report noted that he was making
a “concerted e fort to volunteer answers,” but would still not ask many questions.
And he would never communicate spontaneously. But beyond these concerns,
they viewed him to be a normal, healthy kid. His work was “neat and thoughtful”
and he was a “good citizen.” He would follow rules, help others, and accept
responsibility.

***
Later that school year, Adam turned nine years old. By then, Nancy had expressed
to the Planning and Placement Team that she was unhappy with how the third
grade was going for him; his grades were still ne, and there were no reports of
him acting out, but whatever the intangible gap was between he and his
classmates, it was just get wider, no matter what she did.

Adam was learning to write. In his class journal for the third grade (pages of which
would later be obtained and published by the Hartford Courant), he wrote that he
wanted to be a farmer when he grew up, and in one homework assignment, he
wrote for several pages to tell the story of a recent trip that he and his family had
made, to a beach in New Hampshire:

It w good to be in the water. I went out far I could until I could

not go anymore. I w calm and w looking for my dad. When I
turned back around a two foot wave w coming. I tried to swim away
but my feet were too close to the ground. I had to go fast I could
run. I w close to the shore when it swallowed me.

In his telling of the story, he soon makes it safely to shore, if a bit muddy. The next
morning, he is thrilled when Peter tells the boys, “Let’s go to the arcade,” and they
spend thousands of tickets to earn Adam a plush Pikachu doll.

Later that year, at home, he would write a thank-you letter to Santa, just two
weeks af er Christmas, saying “I like the Pokemon cards you sent me and I would
like it if you sent me more this year,” then clarifying “can they be rst addition
[sic]?” Adam was also careful to note that it was okay if Santa sent the cards now;
it wasn’t necessary to wait until next Christmas.

***

219
Even though these writings seem cheerful enough, Nancy was still worried. Her
son’s IEP would show that he was “shy” and “frequently ill” that school year —
she had started keeping him home a lot. And since he never voluntarily spoke, and
had no close friends, she was really the only person who could say how he was
doing, or what he was feeling.

In May, with the end of the third grade approaching, Nancy sent an email to
Sandy Hook Elementary’s sta f. She con rmed that the team there had gone to
great lengths in order to accommodate her son, but she wanted to change things
up again, starting next year:

Adam is a quiet, considerate child with a

tendency to withdraw. He has made tremendous
strides in your school system and has benefited
from speech therapy. He does, however, tend to
‘over focus’ on rules and can be very hard on
himself as a result. This year has been a
challenge due, in part, to a slight mismatch in
teacher style and student style. I would like to
take a moment to praise [TEACHER]’s recognition
of this problem, as well as her efforts to
resolve the issue. I realize the difficulty of
modifying a classroom approach to accommodate an
individual. [TEACHER] also has been very helpful
in keeping Adam’s stress level at a minimum.

I am hoping that next year Adam will be placed in

a classroom with a more casual feel to it. He
responds well to a nurturing environment, and I
would like his emphasis to be on learning rather
than coping. He focuses on his work, enjoys
structure and always adheres to the rules, but a
certain level of strictness seems to bring on
anxiety and depression. I have appreciated
[TEACHER’S] willingness to work with me on this
issue. I believe that if Adam is matched to the
right environment for his particular learning
style, the process could be less teacher-
intensive. That would free Adam up to enjoy the
learning process with a better result for
everyone...

A classmate from the year before remembers seeing Adam at Sandy Hook in third
grade. They weren’t in the same classroom anymore, but at recess, she would spot
him all alone on the playground, while she was playing a game with her friends:

220
“It seemed as though Adam knew and/or realized that he shouldn’t be sitting
alone. Adam would move towards where we were playing the game, but never
participated.”

Nancy’s email to Sandy Hook shows that she noticed her son’s behavior changing.
She was still coming to the classroom af er school each day, to help him ll in the
gaps that his focus on “coping” lef behind; however, those arrangements, along
with the IEP, appear to have been the extent of the measures she took at this time,
to address whatever was going on with her youngest son.

221
 22. Smart Guns

March 17, 2000

The Oval O ce — Washington, D.C.
The president was on a conference call with the attorneys general from New York
and Connecticut, along with some of the mayors who were suing the gun
companies, when he made an announcement: his administration would soon be
taking a totally new approach to stopping gun violence. It would require everyone
to work together, and so Clinton was now brokering a peace treaty: if the gun
makers agreed to make safer guns, then the mayors would agree to drop their
liability lawsuits.

It was an unusual arrangement, and it was designed to attract more mayors and
more gun manufacturers to sign on as it went — thus defusing the war, city by
city. The rst pairing to sign would be gun manufacturer Smith and Wesson, and
the City of Boston; the treaty would become known as the Boston Agreement.

To get on board, the gun manufacturers would have to meet speci c

requirements: within two years of signing, each of the company’s “safer” gun
designs would have to incorporate locking devices, and two percent of all revenue
from rearms would have to be dedicated to development of “authorized user
technology” that would detect the owner’s hand before ring — the long-sought
“smart gun.” A technological solution to the school shooting problem.

The new guns would also have to “not be able to accept ammunition magazines
with a capacity of over 10 rounds.” (The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban had halted
production of such magazines, but the market was still ush with product made
before the ban, and these "grandfathered-in" accessories remained legal to sell.)

There would be changes to sales and distribution, too: Smith and Wesson agreed
to sell only to authorized dealers and distributors, and those dealers, in turn,
would be required to agree to a “code of conduct.” There would be background
checks for every sale, and gun stores would be required to implement a thef -

222
prevention plan. And they could not carry “large capacity ammunition magazines
or semiautomatic assault weapons,” which were considered “attractive to
criminals.”

The president hinted that there would be a cherry on top for the early adopters:
“Smith & Wesson stuck their neck out here. I think that all of us, including the
Federal Government, in our procurement policies, if we really are serious about
making America safer, ought to send a clear signal that we appreciate what they
did. I think that that will accelerate the day in which the other manufacturers will
follow suit.”

***
The Boston Agreement was a disaster. The industry, rather than following Smith
& Wesson’s example, immediately turned against them. The NRA said that the
company's signing of its name under Clinton’s peace accord was just “running up
the white ag of surrender.” The gun manufacturer’s revenues plummeted, and
soon, their workers in Connecticut were being laid o f. Faced with nancial ruin,
Smith & Wesson abandoned the agreement. Overnight, all talk of “smart guns”
ended.

The NSSF, meanwhile, had criticized the Boston Agreement as ine fective; even if
the cities who signed the agreement had backed o f their suits, “hundreds more
could come down the road,” Bob Delfay told the New York Tim . “That’s why
the industry is interested in a uni ed, national solution.”

May 14, 2000

National Mall — Washington, DC
On Mother’s Day that year, a crowd of women and supporters rallied outside the
Capitol Building, as part of the “Million Mom March” on Washington — a
“grassroots e fort to focus the nation’s attention on the terrible costs of gun
violence.” Marching with them, with his own mother, was a grieving father from
the village of Dunblane, who had helped carry the Snowdrop Appeal to victory in
the United Kingdom three years before. “Should we in Britain concern ourselves
with the situation in the USA?” he later questioned when writing about the
event. “We certainly should, for not only is slaughter o fensive wherever it occurs
in the world, but there are knock-on e fects on other countries. The gun culture is
infectious and pernicious. It spreads, if lef unchallenged.”

At the other end of Je ferson Street, at a smaller counter-protest arranged by the

“Second Amendment Sisters,” was Suzanna Gratia. “If guns are the problem, as
the women across the Mall assert,” her voice came over a bullhorn, “why haven’t
we seen any of these terrible mass shootings at NRA conventions, or skeet and

223
trap shoots, or the dreaded gun show... If guns are the problem, someone explain
this to me!”

The evening before, President Clinton had hosted a Town Hall meeting at the
White House. A panel of mothers from the march, as well as Suzanna, were
invited to ask him questions. During the interview, Clinton acknowledged his
recent policy setbacks; he said he was still reeling from the “gut shot” that he had
sustained along with Smith & Wesson, and from the failure of the Gun Show
Loophole Amendment. He attributed the setbacks to “the intense lobbying e fort
against [gun laws] and the longstanding ability of the NRA to in uence
congressmen.”

Pushing back against Clinton's agenda, Suzanna told the president her story of
that helpless day at Luby’s when she lost her parents, and of the gun laws she had
helped pass in Texas since then. The president conceded that she had a point: “On
this particular incidence, if there had been someone in that restaurant who knew
how to use a gun and was lawfully carrying it — for example, an o f-duty police
o cer, or in a State with a concealed weapon law, someone who was properly
trained and had it — maybe they could have stopped this horrible incident.” But
the accidental-death statistics in America, he argued, showed that many gun
owners were not as responsible. More guns actually meant more loss of life, no
matter who possessed them. “So it’s a question of what makes you safest overall.”

August 3, 2000
First Union Center — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A burst of confetti and a column of red, white and blue balloons fell from the
arena’s raf ers, as George W. Bush, the governor of Texas, accepted his party’s
nomination for president. “I know the presidency is an o ce that turns pride into
prayer,” he proclaimed, standing at the top of a long, spiral staircase. “But I am
eager to start on the work ahead, and I believe America is ready for a new
beginning.” His father had been dethroned by Clinton, and in facing Clinton’s
heir apparent in the upcoming general election, it was an opportunity to set
things right, and take the country in a di ferent direction — away from any new
gun legislation, to be sure.

Governor Bush had embraced life as a rural Texan; when it came to gun control,
his campaign’s priority was to promise free “trigger locks” to every family that
owned a rearm. “It seems like to me one of the things we ought to do is be
common-sensical about how we deal with gun safety,” Bush told NBC TV’s
Today Show. “I think this makes sense.” He actually got the idea from the NSSF;
they had launched the program shortly af er Columbine, and called it “Project
HomeSafe.” As part of his presidential campaign, Governor Bush provided the

224
NSSF with a million-dollar grant to launch the program in Texas, making just one
change: Project HomeSafe was renamed “Project ChildSafe.”

Later that evening, TV coverage of the convention went to a commercial break,

and one of the ads seen was produced by the National Shooting Sports
Foundation. It showed a politician in a suit, tearing apart a large American ag
with a knife, as if dissecting it, while a voice nearly indistinguishable from that of
actor Martin Sheen (it was actually his brother, Joe Estevez) warned of “big-city
mayors whose greedy lawyers are using your tax dollars to sue us for criminals they
won’t prosecute.” It was a voter-mobilization e fort, turning the mayors’ failed
e forts back against Gore and his party, and implying that they were plotting to rip
up the constitution if the voters allowed them to stay in the Oval O ce for
another four years.

October 3, 2000
Traders Sporting Goods — San Leandro, California
The bell rung over the door, and Tony called out af er his latest satis ed customer:
“George W all the way!”

The proprietor of the notorious “Traders” had not shied away from controversy
in the years since the Stockton shooting. The huge “National Ri e Association”
placard he kept in the front window at Traders still summed up his political views,
and he was still raging against California’s assault weapons ban, telling the
Oakland Tribune that year that it was “hurting law-abiding citizens... with all the
hoops you have to jump through to get a legal rearm.”

At times, he could almost feel the ATF sni ng around his store again, gearing up
for the next audit. “Bush would be our choice in this election,” he repeated. But
still, Tony's praise of Bush was tempered. “He’s for enforcing the existing laws,
and we do have more laws than we really need presently.”

***
There was no clear victor on election night 2000. The vote was so close, it came
down to a few counties in Florida; Gore sued when he lost the rst manual
recount, which touched o f a legal struggle that went on for weeks. A
constitutional crisis loomed.

November 15, 2000

Oxford University — United Kingdom
Meanwhile, the gun lobbies had worked hard to put Bush in o ce, and suddenly,
their investment was looking uncertain. “I think Mr. Gore is ling these lawsuits

225
and it is inappropriate,” NRA president Charlton Heston told the Oxford Union
debate society. “Whichever man is installed in the Oval O ce will have his tenure
in question. He will not have an easy time.”

Having made the trip to speak to a UK audience, Heston took the opportunity to
comment on the gun laws that their government had passed af er the Dunblane
Primary School attack. He said the handgun ban was an example of politicians
having too much power over the citizenry — the same kind of tyranny that had
caused the founders of the United States to rebel against the crown in the rst
place. “If Tony Blair can have his bodyguards and the police are all allowed to
defend themselves, then so should the people,” he said. Banning guns was
“cultural cowardice and a subtle form of surrender to the criminals.”

From Dunblane, one of the mothers who founded the Snowdrop Appeal
responded to Heston’s comments. She noted that the movement she helped start
at the co fee shop in Dunblane had not, so far, led to the spread of government
tyranny throughout the UK, and in fact her grassroots advocacy group had
immediately disbanded af er achieving their stated goals. She then shared an
observation, in light of veteran actor Heston’s classical training: “All I can say is
that if he has spent all those years studying Shakespeare, he still doesn’t
understand what the playwright is saying about the frailty of human nature.”

December 12, 2000

United States Supreme Court — Washington, D.C.
36 days passed af er the election, the United States Supreme Court stepped in, and
ordered the recounts to stop. The next day, Al Gore called George W. Bush, and
conceded the contest.

The NSSF could not have been more proud. “While we certainly aren’t suggesting
that the Heritage Fund alone is responsible for the election of George W. Bush,”
the foundation wrote, the fund did provide “some $3 million of an overall $6
million industry investment in radio and television advertising, and a voter
registration and mobilization campaign in key battleground states.”

President Clinton, in a post-election interview, could only agree on the impact

that guns had on the race’s outcome: “I don’t think there’s any doubt that in at
least ve States I can think of, the NRA had a decisive in uence because they
disagreed with our attempts to close the gun show loophole and have child trigger
locks, safety locks, and ban large-scale ammunition clips.” He believed that the
gun vote was a “key factor” in losing the White House.

226
“You’ve got to give it to them; they’ve done a good job,” the president said of the
gun lobbyists, on his way out the door. The af ermath of Columbine had been his
last chance to pass more gun laws. And he had failed.

227
 23. The Ghost in the Cage

January 16, 2001

ADX “Supermax” Federal Prison — Florence, Colorado
Ted Kaczynski found it nearly impossible to adjust to life in Supermax. While his
cabin in Montana hadn’t been much bigger than his cell now was, the
Unabomber didn’t care anything for indoor space, or amenities, anyway. He
missed being up on the mountain, and being immersed in nature — as free as
could be, and as close as he could possible get to the life of a primitive human.
Almost an animal.

But now he was completely surrounded with walls, and right-angles, and bells and
buzzers. He had no freedom. Everything was rules. And likely, the worst rule of
them all was that he could only go outside, and be under the sky, for just one hour
a day. The cell walls even followed him out to the exercise yard; each prisoner at
Supermax was put in their own wire-mesh cage for their rec time. Ted usually
spent his jogging in a circle.

One day, his neighbor called him over to the mesh boundary separating them: it
was Timothy McVeigh, and he wanted to ask Kaczynski a question.

Kaczynski had some concept of who this young man with the army buzz-cut was,
and why he had blown up the federal building in Oklahoma City — something
about the 2nd Amendment, and Waco — but these had just been shadows outside
the Unabomber’s proverbial cave, when he still lived up on the mountain.

Fortunately, the mountain life was all McVeigh really wanted to ask about: he
heard that Kaczynski did a lot of hunting for small game during his years in
Montana. What type of rifle had he used?

The Unabomber told him he actually had two hunting ri es: a .22 and a .30-06.
McVeigh nodded. Kaczynski went back to his exercise.

228
 ***
A few days passed, and once again Kaczynski was jogging in his circle in his cage,
when he heard McVeigh calling over to him. The younger man wanted to share
one of the advantages of the .30-06 over the .22: “You can get armor-piercing
ammunition for it.”

“So? What would I need armor-piercing ammunition for?” the old math
professor replied. And as he remembers it, McVeigh’s response “indicated that I
might some day want to shoot at a tank.”

The Unabomber thought that was pretty silly, but kept it to himself:

If I’d considered it worth the trouble I could have given the obvio
answer, that the chanc I would ever have occasion to shoot at a tank
were very remote. I think McVeigh knew well that there w little
likelihood that I would ever need to shoot at a tank—or that he would
either, unless he rejoined the Army. My speculative interpretation
that McVeigh resembl many people on the right who are attracted to
powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of any
likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people
tend to invent excus , o en far-fetched on , for acquiring weapons for
which they have no real need.

That thought, in turn, made Kaczynski want to ask something of McVeigh: What
exactly the distinction between the political “right” or “le ” in America
anymore?

Kaczynski, confessing that he had a limited understanding of this concept due to

his decades of seclusion, clari ed, “The word ‘right,’ in the political sense, was
originally associated with authoritarianism,” and this “raised the question of why
certain radically anti-authoritarian groups (such as the Montana Freemen) were
lumped together with authoritarian factions as the ‘right.’”

In response, McVeigh “explained that the American far right could be roughly
divided into two branches, the fascist/racist branch, and the individualistic or
freedom-loving branch which generally was not racist.” He said he didn’t
understand why these two branches were lumped together as the “right,” but in
practice, there was only one real, consistent di ference between them, collectively,
and the lef : “The lef (in America today) generally dislikes rearms, while the
right tends to be attracted to rearms.”

Kaczynski was surprised to nd that he actually liked McVeigh. He thought most

people probably would too, if they met him on the street, and didn’t know who

229
he was, or what he had done. The pair talked more as the months went past, and
the Unabomber — an avowed anarchist, but portrayed as an incoherent nut —
found McVeigh wasn’t the “extreme right-winger” that he was depicted as, either.

McVeigh t neatly into his own expressed theory of the real political divide in
America; he obviously loved guns, but he spoke respectfully of other cultures —
even of the Iraqis he fought in the Gulf War — and in doing so, Kaczynski
thought that McVeigh sounded more like a liberal. “He certainly was not a mean
or hostile person, and I wasn’t aware of any indication that he was super
patriotic,” Kaczynski would write. “I suspect that he is an adventurer by nature,
and America since the closing of the frontier has had little room for adventurers.”

Kaczynski never asked McVeigh about Oklahoma City, or why he did it. But the
professor had his personal opinions about the attack (having himself pondered
di ferent choices of targets many times, while assembling package bombs during
his solitary years in the cabin). He thought that bombing the federal building in
Oklahoma was a “bad action,” speci cally because “it was unnecessarily
inhumane”:

Most of the people who died at Oklahoma City were, I imagine, lower-
level government employe — office help and the like — who were not
even remotely responsible for objectionable government polici or for the
events at Waco. If violence were to be used to express protest, it could
have been used far more humanely, and at the same time more
effectively, by being directed at the relatively small number of people who
were personally responsible for the polici or actions to which the
protesters objected.

It was a question of tactics. The Unabomber didn’t need to wonder why someone
would want to blow up “the system” — the airplanes passing over his cabin had
been enough to make him plant a bomb on one of them. But he was a younger
man at that time, and he had since grown to regret the action. He had said so even
before he was identi ed, in one of his “Freedom Club” letters he had sent down
the mountain to the New York Tim :

We don’t think it necessary for to do any public public soul-

searching in th letter. But we will say that we are not insensitive to the
pain caused by our bombings. [...] In one case we attempted
unsuccessfully to blow up an airliner. The idea w to kill a lot of
business people who we assumed would constitute the majority of
passengers. But of course, some passengers would likely have been
innocent people — maybe kids or some working stiff going to see h sick
grandmother. We’re glad now that that attempt failed.

230
 ***
In January of 2001, Timothy McVeigh dropped all of his appeals. The federal
government moved him out of Supermax, to a federal penitentiary in Terre
Haute, Indiana, where he would await his execution, scheduled for that May.

No longer neighbors, and forbidden to communicate directly, the bombers

instead exchanged reading material; Kaczynski arranged for McVeigh to receive a
subscription to the radical environmentalist newspaper Green Anarchy (which
would be publishing some of Kaczynski’s own essays later that year). In return,
McVeigh sent Kaczynski a copy of the book Into the Wild, by nature writer Jon
Krakauer. The story seemed perfect for the Unabomber: the true tale of a young
man who goes out into the woods, to get lost, and to nd himself. McVeigh
gured the Ghost from the Cabin would identify. (Indeed, Kaczynski — a
notoriously tough reader to please since his Harvard days — quite enjoyed the
story.)

***
Six days before McVeigh was set to be executed, the Attorney General issued a
postponement of 30 days, over concerns that McVeigh’s attorneys did not have
access to certain pieces of evidence at the trial.

During the delay, McVeigh granted a death-row interview to CBS’s 60 Minut .

On prime time television, Ed Bradley asked him why he did it; McVeigh talked
about Ruby Ridge and how it had made him feel, and about the time he traveled
to the perimeter at Waco, before it all went up in ames. He saw what he had
done as striking back.

Bradley asked him about his friendship with the Unabomber; McVeigh con rmed
the rumors, and said that he and Kaczynski had found they had a lot in common,
even though he considered the mountain man “far lef ," and himself “far right"
politically: “I found that, in a way that I didn’t realize, that we were much alike, in
that all we ever wanted or all we wanted out of life was the freedom to live our
own lives however we chose to.”

The attorneys nished reviewing the case, and the United States Government
scheduled Timothy McVeigh’s execution for June 11, 2001. When that morning
came, survivors and relatives of his victims watched on closed-circuit television as
the lethal injection was administered. The most notorious terrorist in America
was no more.

231
March 5, 2001
Santana High School — Santee, California
A group of three senior boys were getting drunk one weekend, blowing o f steam
over their grades and their teachers. They hated their school. One of them, the
new kid in their group, said he wanted to shoot someone there. “You’re a pussy,”
his friends told him. “You won’t do it.” But as the night went on, they found
themselves drawing maps, and talking through the best way to go about it, as a
team. Someone called it “pulling a Columbine.”

They all forgot about it once they sobered up — except for the new kid. He
hadn’t known much about Columbine before that, but he hated his life, and had
been looking for a way out. So the next day, he brought his .22 pistol to school,
shot a few classmates in one of the bathrooms, then came out into the hall, and
shot into the crowd. But when police arrived — bringing the moment the
gunman had been waiting for — he found he couldn’t muster the nerve to point
the gun at them. So instead of suicide-by-cop, he just got arrested. Eventually, in
prison, a forensic psychiatrist would diagnose him with a “major depressive
disorder.”

The White House — Oval O ce

It was the rst time that President George W. Bush was faced with responding to a
school shooting incident. He was standing in the same room his father had in
1989, when George H.W. Bush rst acknowledged the Stockton attack.

Taking a few moments before his planned update on tax cuts, he told reporters
that what happened at Santana High School was “a disgraceful act of cowardice,”
and that the country would be better o f “when America teaches their children
right from wrong and teaches values to respect life — and the values that respect
life in our country.”

He called on an Associated Press reporter:

Reporter: What can the president do, if anything, to stop children from
shooting children?

The President: All of , all adults in society can teach children right
from wrong, can explain there a — that life precio . All of must
be mindful of the fact that some people may decide to act out their
a ressions or their pain and hurt on somebody else, and be diligent. We
don’t know enough of the facts right now, [ to] what took place. But I

232
 do know that first things are first, and that , our prayers go with the
famili who lost a child today.

Upon his inauguration just two months before, President Bush had appointed a
new Secretary of Education, who would oversee a special project that the Clinton
administration was handing o f: the report from the Secret Service and
Department of Education’s “Safe School Initiative,” nearly complete.

Af er the shooting in California, as questions started to mount over what the

administration’s priorities were going to be when it came to addressing school
violence, the Secretary urged patience, but said one thing was for sure: “It’s
beyond guns. The guns may be the instrument of the violence, but they’re not the
cause of the violence. We need to look to the cause of the situation.”

And as for that cause, “Probably the biggest problem we have is the amount of
alienation and rage in our young people.”

For a solution, he pointed to an increase in funding toward the “character

education” classes that President Bush had announced as part of his new budget
plan, and to the newly-established White House O ce of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives: a task force designed to help religious and community
groups obtain federal tax dollars for their social-service work. The secretary said
these sorts of af er-school programs would be “an opportunity to teach kids
things like empathy, compassion, tolerance — all values that we all know are
wonderful.”

Fall 2001
Sandy Hook Elementary School
Little of record is known about Adam Lanza’s 4th grade year, beyond that he
again attended Sandy Hook Elementary School. What remains are a few scattered
memories, and scraps of the education plans put together by his Planning and
Placement Team.

It is not known, for instance, if he was placed in (as his mother wrote in her
request) “a classroom with a more casual feel to it.” However, early in the 4th
grade, Adam’s IEP shows that he once again “met all speech goals.” Subsequently,
the district discharged him fully from the special education program. He
apparently got no special treatment for the remainder of this year at all; however
(as the Child Advocate would later observe) the decision to remove these speech
supports may not have been appropriate, as it was based on tests that only
indicated that he had “no error sounds” — an observation that (once again) did
not speak to his challenges with expression.

233
In another brief le from this school year, Adam was documented to be
performing at “age-appropriate levels of academic and social skills.” He took the
standardized Connecticut Mastery Test, as required of all 4th graders in the state
under President Bush’s “No Child Lef Behind” act, and got good scores — an
overall 4 out of 5 (with 5 considered “Advanced.”)

If there was anything seriously wrong with Adam at this time, it wasn’t showing
up in his school work. Meanwhile, his mother was likely experiencing signi cant
anxiety herself; the problems in her marriage were getting worse, and she did not
react well to stress.

***
A few weeks into Adam’s 4th grade school year, on a clear Tuesday morning,
classes were interrupted with breaking news: terrorists had crashed hijacked
passenger jets into the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon. All of a sudden,
America was at war.

***
A week later, postal workers, along with a few employees opening envelopes at
U.S. Congressional o ces, started getting sick; someone in New Jersey was
sending military-grade anthrax spores through the mail.

Almost overnight, the paranoia spread across the region, and it was so sharp that
even Newtown felt the fear; the police had to shut down ueen Street on the
af ernoon of October 13, when a 9-1-1 call reported a woman seen “tossing a white
powder from a bag.” A search found no dangerous substances, but similar false-
alarm calls continued well into the new year.

In this atmosphere, for once, Adam’s anxiety level might have looked normal.

Traders Sporting Goods — San Leandro, California

Tony was seeing more and more customers in his store, and their purchases were
changing. “What happened was that people got another big scare when the Twin
Towers were attacked,” he told the Los Angel Tim . And Tony was always well-
positioned when fear drove the market — people were stockpiling for the
apocalypse, more so than they ever had during the lead-up to Y2K. He had run
out of gas masks, and he was selling through pallets of MRE’s (Meals Ready to
Eat) every week. And many customers were also buying their rst rearms, plus
ammunition in bulk. As he would tell the Tim , “This is a group mostly from the
suburbs who thought nothing would happen to them.” That was, until 9/11.

234
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Sometime during the fall of 2001, life at 36 Yogananda changed forever: Adam’s
parents told the boys they were separating. Nancy and Peter weren’t actually going
to le for an o cial divorce just yet, but the marriage was de nitely through. Dad
was moving out.

The family unit at 36 Yogananda actually didn’t register Peter’s exit much, at rst;
Nancy had already felt like she was parenting alone, ever since moving to
Newtown. Peter had only ever been around to help with the boys on weekends
anyway — now they would just consider it his visitation rights. “I was working
insane hours,” Peter would later admit. And that certainly wasn’t about to
change.

Still, even if just ceremonially, it was a profound shif in lives of everyone in the
home: the point when the union of Nancy Champion and Peter Lanza, together
since their high school days and all through their years in Kingston, had nally
broken down. From there on, it was going to be just Nancy and her two boys in
the pale-yellow house on the hill.

Peter got an apartment in Stamford — an hour to the south, and closer to work.
A decade later, there would still be boxes of his clothes, marked “PJL” in black
marker, lef behind in the attic of 36 Yogananda.

***
A neighbor sent Nancy an invitation to a dinner party, sometime around then.
The host had met Nancy before, but they weren’t close friends. When they
crossed paths again, the woman asked Nancy why she never RSVP’d, and she
remembers Nancy explaining that it was “because there was no return address on
the envelope, so she thought there was anthrax in it.” The neighbor couldn’t
decide if she was joking or not.

***
Adam turned ten years old in April of 2002. Baseball season had come, and Nancy
signed him up for a little-league team. A Newtown Bee article from May of that
year documents Adam participating in an 8-to-4 victory over the team sponsored
by Connecticut Dental Associates. Adam’s team was sponsored by Danbury
Hospital.

Some members of Adam’s little league team recall being warned to keep an eye on
him; no one was sure where the idea came from — maybe it was his mother —
but word had gotten around that Adam might not be able to express pain, if he

235
were to somehow hurt himself. Some teammates were even under the impression
that this was because Adam could not feel pain.

***
There was family up the street who had a teenage son, Ryan Kraf . Every once in
awhile, Nancy would hire him to babysit Adam, so she could get out of the house.
Kraf remembers that “the kids seemed really depressed” about their parents
breaking up. The older son was thirteen already, and didn’t need any real
supervision — but when it came to the younger boy, Kraf found Nancy’s
instructions to be unusually vigilant: “Don’t turn your back on Adam. Keep an
eye on him at all times. Don’t even go to the bathroom.”

This wasn’t Kraf ’s rst babysitting gig, and he didn’t see what the big deal was.
He did notice that Adam was quiet — how could you not? — and that the boy
would get very xated on a given task, when it fell into his area of focus. “He was
in his own world,” Kraf would tell CBS News, remembering the sight of the boy
playing video games, or craf ing Lego scenes on the carpet. Still, he seemed
harmless at rst glance. But in some of the rare instances when Adam broke his
silence, it began to dawn on his babysitter just why Nancy thought he needed so
much attention: when Kraf tried to put Adam to bed early, or when he ended an
activity before Adam was ready, the kid would suddenly throw a t that was
totally beyond what he would expect from a nine-year-old; the tantrum looked
like something you might see from a much younger child, his rage almost totally
unrestrained. Then, there were the rumors around the neighborhood about
Adam — that he was “troubled,” and was seeing a school psychiatrist. Things
started to t.

***
At the other end of Yogananda Street, there lived a girl who was a student at
Sandy Hook School. She came home from the bus stop crying one day. Her
mother calmed her down enough to ask what was wrong, and the girl told her
about the assignment they had in class, where all of the children composed a
“hand poem” — writing words on each of their ngers that expressed how they
felt about themselves. The girl had become upset because she rode the bus home
with the quiet boy who lived at 36 Yogananda, and she had seen what he wrote on
his hands: the words “UGLY” and “LOSER.”

Headquarters of the Secret Service — Washington, D.C.

The Secret Service’s Exceptional Case Study Project nally nished their work
later that year. 37 teams working 37 shootings all compiled the most important
conclusions they had reached, to share with all the schools who were worried they

236
might be next. Co-signing the nal report along with the Director of the Secret
Service, Bush’s Secretary of Education wrote, “It is clear that there is no simple
explanation as to why these attacks have occurred, nor is there a simple solution to
stop this problem,” but he assured all who could hear that “the ndings of the
Safe School Initiative do suggest that some future attacks may be preventable.”

What the Secret Service found con rmed many of the conclusions that the FBI
had reached, and they thus strengthened society’s knowledge of the threat it faced:
once again, "the shooters" were always boys — and were almost always white —
who rarely got in trouble, and of en got above-average grades. They usually
weren’t “loners” — but they might be perceived as such, especially by themselves.
Most of them got their guns from home, and nearly all of them did the deed
alone. There was usually some kind of “leakage” prior to the attack — sometimes,
enough-so that there was even a chance that someone could have averted disaster
in time.

Sometimes not.

Most shooters had a speci c target in mind (slightly more likely to be a teacher or
sta f member than another student). Some put together “hit lists” with multiple
targets. But either way, none of it seemed to matter once the shooting started: the
hit list never matched the victims’ list, and of en the shooter had no speci c target
at all. As the Secret Service researchers wrote, “The target may even be the school
itself.”

The Service then turned to the big question — the one that rippled in the wind,
raised on a ag over Frontier Middle School, back when the dark season had rst
dawned: WHY?

More than half of the attackers wanted revenge. Others wanted to “solve a
problem.” About a quarter did it out of sheer desperation: to force a change in
their life — any change — or simply to commit suicide. A comparable number
were seeking attention, or recognition. And bullying was, undeniably, a huge
factor; debate would continue to rage over whether it was new, or whether it was
being dealt with appropriately in America’s schools, but 71 percent of the shooters
the Secret Service looked at “felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to
the attack.” Their nal report lingers on this point:

In several cas , individual attackers had experienced bullying and

harassment that w long-standing and severe. In some of these cas the
experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the
attacker and appeared to have been a factor in h decision to mount an
attack at the school.

237
More than half the time, the shooter actually had multiple motives; their attack, in
one way or another an attempt to completely abandon their previous identity,
presented a solution to what they saw as an array of problems. They wanted to
escape their given set of circumstances, which had built over time.

The most common trait of all was that the shooters had experienced a signi cant
“loss” in their life — a “perceived failure or loss of status,” or the end of a
friendship or relationship — normal setbacks, but ones the boys weren’t
emotionally equipped to recover from, and that their school could usually do
nothing about.

The shooters did not “snap” — that much was abundantly clear. School shootings
were the result of logical planning, and intent. The planning might be poor, and
might even have started on the day of the shooting, but almost no one just
happened to have a gun with them at school, and decided to start shooting their
classmates without thinking it through. Most were planned at least two days prior
to the attack. Sometimes, like at Columbine, they took over a year — but there
was nearly always a plan.

The director of the Exceptional Case Studies Project — a veteran agent of

President Reagan’s security detail — detected a possible explanation why the
“snapped” myth persisted: it lessens the burden. “If kids snap, it lets us o f the
hook,” he said. “[But] if you view these shooters as on a path toward violence, it
puts the burden on adults. So believing that kids snap is comforting.”

All of these ndings supported a theory that the Secret Service teams had
suspected was the case all along: that the school shooters really were the same as
the assassins. They were analogous creatures, who just happened to choose a more
abstract target for their violence.

And the FBI had been correct about another thing: there really was no “pro le.”

Overall, the tone of the Safe Schools Initiative report was encouraging. “In light of
these ndings,” the team wrote in their conclusion, “the use of a threat assessment
approach may be a promising strategy for preventing a school-based attack.” The
Secret Service predicted that a community with alert schools, and a well-trained
police force, would usually be safe — “if they know what information to look for
and what to do with such information when it is found.”

238
Part III

Thin Air

239
 24. The Hospital
(a brief history of Fairfield State Hospital)

Dr. Waldo Desmond had just turned thirty years old, when he opened his general
practice in the fall of 1925. He was a native of Connecticut, and had just graduated
from Yale University Medical School, af er a two-year residency at Connecticut
State Hospital for the Insane; but he was ready to move on from treating the
mind, and to turn his focus to the body. So he moved to Newtown, bought a
house on Main Street — right next to the old crossroads — and he set up shop.

It was the era of the third agpole, when only 2,800 people lived in Newtown,
and when most families still supported themselves by farming, or with a job at the
rubber mill in Sandy Hook. There were as many horses as there were cars, and
light bulbs were still something of a novelty.

***
One day, in the summer of 1928, Dr. Desmond came home to nd a visitor
waiting on his porch: his old boss from Connecticut State Hospital, Dr. Roy
Leak. Desmond's old mentor told him that he needed his help in a matter of great
importance: the old asylum in Middletown had always been overcrowded — even
during Desmond’s tenure — but just in the three years since his departure, things
had grown signi cantly worse. And the state’s only other mental hospital, in
Norwich, was just as bad. Something had to change. Connecticut needed to build
another asylum, and they had hired Dr. Leak to help them choose a site.

The state’s needs were simple: they were searching for a spot with “at least six
hundred acres of fairly good agricultural land, an abundant supply of pure water,
and some proximity to a railway,” along with access to the state’s highways. And
they had nally found just such a spot, right there in Newtown: on a hill at the
south end of the village, where a wide area of meadows and farmland was fed by
the waters of the Pootatuck river, and the locomotives rolled by on the nearby
tracks like clockwork. It was just what Connecticut was looking for, and they were
ready to buy; now, they needed the townspeople to agree to sell.

240
Dr. Desmond tried to envision it; the people of Middletown had welcomed
Connecticut State Hospital when it was built there in 1887, and Norwich had
followed suit in accepting their own asylum in 1902 — “We had but to signify our
wishes, and they were granted” the Governor had said then — so the state could
have been forgiven for thinking their path would be clear for a third time. But
Newtown was going to be di ferent. Even a latecomer like Desmond could see
that: the townspeople had always resisted growth, choosing to retain the
atmosphere of a parochial village well into the 20th century. By the late 1920's,
Newtown had matured into a bucolic, vacation-home town; a new hospital
campus was not going to be a natural t.

Even before Dr.’s Desmond and Leak could commence with any o cial planning,
rumors started circulating in Newtown: about a new mental asylum being built,
up in the hills. Controversy soon followed. As expected, the citizens worried
about Newtown’s reputation, and especially its economy; as a member of the
town’s Board of Trustees would recall telling Desmond, of his constituents,
“Their idea of a hospital was founded on the ancient traditions of a mad house, a
bedlam, and a hospital that was little less than a pest house.”

***
It came down to a vote, at a town meeting on December 15, 1928. Expecting a large
turnout for such a momentous decision, Newtown opted to hold the meeting in
the auditorium of the brand new Hawley School, on Church Hill Road.

When Dr. Desmond arrived that af ernoon, he would later write, the auditorium
was crowded, and, “The atmosphere was tense and brittle.” He could hear a
woman in the audience who was vocally opposed to the deal with Connecticut,
predicting that if the hospital were built up in the southern hills, “Newtown will
become a ‘ghost town,’ and across the valley will come the moans and screams of
patients in padded cells!”

The town fathers agreed. The president of Newtown Savings Bank predicted that
an asylum’s presence there would hurt business, and that bank deposits would
stall.

He was echoed by a prominent realtor, who stood and proclaimed that “property
values would, at least, drop f y percent.”

Next, a council member warned that the population of the town would dwindle
— perhaps to just 1,000 souls — with tax revenue collapsing in-kind; they weren’t
just voting on a hospital that day, but the town’s very survival.

241
Still, the asylum was not without its supporters. In particular, the farmers at the
south end of town were eager to sign deals with the state; this time (unlike at
Norwich or Middletown), the local land owners would not be giving their
property to Connecticut for free. The farmers stood to pro t handsomely.

Agreeing with the farmers, many of the younger men in town saw employment
potential if the deal went through: both in building the new hospital in the near
future, and keeping it sta fed in the decades to come.

The debate lled the auditorium, and then splintered into smaller conversations,
until nally, a voice in the crowd shouted, “I’d like to hear what Miss Hawley
thinks!”

Everyone turned to Newtown’s wealthy and benevolent heiress, seated there

among them in the new, modern school she had so generously funded. (Down the
street, her latest gif , Edmond Town Hall, had just begun construction.) But as
charitable as Mrs. Hawley’s reputation was, something still troubled her about the
prospect of living next door to an insane asylum. “I don’t know how to express
my feelings,” Hawley said, “but I do know I don’t like it.”

Dr. Desmond watched from the back of the room. Some of the townspeople
recognized him in their midst, and began nudging him forward, toward the stage.
He started to panic inside, not knowing what he could say to appeal to his still-
new neighbors. But somehow, by the time he reached the stage, he had found his
voice.

Dr. Desmond waited for the crowd to fall silent, and then calmly told them: the
state had no plans to build an insane asylum in Newtown; their plans were for a
mental hospital.

To illustrate the nuance, Dr. Desmond shared that as part of his general practice,
he had just visited the bedside of a man who had barely survived a bout of lobar
pneumonia. “For three days this patient had seen cows in the trees,” Desmond
said. “And if one considers the delirium which of en comes with high fevers, then
the majority of the people in this room have been at these times as mentally ill as
the patients in a mental hospital.”

Desmond then addressed each of the town fathers’ concerns directly: to the
banker, he predicted that the hospital would bring such growth to Newtown that
it would actually become a “two bank town” in ten to f een years. To the realtor,
he cited statistics showing that property values during that time would not go
down, but in fact double. And as to population, the doctor predicted that

242
Newtown would not drif into the ghost-town abyss, but instead grow to over
10,000 souls.

Casting his gaze over the faces of the gathered townspeople, he remembered years
later, “I then concluded my speech by saying that new methods of treatments
promised more than just custodial treatment, that padded cells were abolished,
that new research was so promising that we in Newtown might indeed be
privileged and thrilled to be a part of the advancing knowledge of the prevention
and cure of the mentally ill.”

His pitch nished, Dr. Desmond strode back the way he came, down the aisle to
the rear of the auditorium. He heard scattered detractors cursing him — “You’re
through in this town!” and “Carpetbagger!” — but louder, over his shoulder, he
heard the votes as they were called: a consensus, building to an ovation. The
doctor smiled to himself, as his neighbors o cially welcomed Fair eld State
Hospital into being, and changed the face of Newtown forever.

ON THE HILLSIDE
Dr. Desmond was there to see the cornerstone lain on June 10, 1931. Presiding over
the ceremony was his mentor — and the man who would be the hospital’s rst
superintendent — Dr. Leak.

Standing in the meadow with them were 200 of Newtown’s citizens, a crowd who
followed behind the two doctors as they roamed the hillside and ponti cated,
visualizing the facilities that would soon appear: Dr. Desmond foresaw a ring of
buildings — the psychiatric wards — arrayed in an oval shape, with kitchen and
administration buildings in the center. There would be large recreation areas too,
and the buildings would be su ciently spaced so that on a clear day, the sunlight
would touch every window.

The inaugural Chairman of the Board gave a brief address, formally dedicating the
new hospital’s mission:

For the care and, so far may be possible, the cure of those unfortunate
people whose minds have become deranged with strange fanci and who
have lost control over their thoughts and emotions. Here we hope that
the pure air and sunshine and the cheerful outlook on nature so
abundantly available on th beautiful hillside, combined with modern
equipment and skillful treatment, may make it possible to restore to
mental health many who have been groping in the fogs of despondency

243
 or hallucinations, and that at least some of the gloom and suffering may
be driven from the mind of the incurable.

The ceremony ended with a benediction, given by a reverend from St. Rose of
Lima Church. Then the townspeople went back to their homes, from where, as
the days passed, they witnessed the walls of the mental hospital rise in the
southern hills: red-brick with limestone trim (in a colonial style of architecture
designed to resemble the campus buildings of Harvard University).

Activity at rst centered on just a small section of the oval, as Connecticut was
determined to nish construction on the rst two patient wards quickly, and get
them into operation while the rest of the “ring” was still in the planning stages.
Meanwhile, under the surface, crews were digging: there would be a network of
tunnels connecting each building’s foundation, so that patients could be moved to
and fro underground, in private, according to their needs.

***
On June 23rd, 1933, a single motorized bus crested the long hill to the new campus,
bearing Fair eld State Hospital’s very rst patients: 32 adult males, transferred
from Middletown. The schizophrenic or depressive among them were to be
treated with techniques that were modern for the era: irritative therapy (medicine
is administered that brings convulsions in the patient); insulin therapy
(hypoglycemic shock induced by an injection); and hydrotherapy (the patient lies
in a “continuous bath” of cold, cycling water, wrapped with wet sheets, and
hopefully is calmed as their body cools).

The less-severe cases, meanwhile, would spend time in occupational therapy: there
was a sewing room for the women, and a carpentry shop for the men. But the
most popular station for both groups was out on the farm; every spring and
summer, the people of Newtown would see trucks passing on the streets, lled
with patients in overalls and straw hats: men and women on their way to work the
elds. The patients looked forward to the harvest all year, and in the fall, visitors
to the hospital’s kitchen could see dozens of them seated at long tables, husking
corn and shelling peas. There was even a picturesque old colonial-era farmhouse
out there, across the meadow, visible from one of the hospital wards; several of the
patients found it soothing to paint the scene.

As Dr. Desmond had promised, there were no padded cells installed at Fair eld
State Hospital. But a patient would still be put in restraints when things got bad
— and if necessary, there were “seclusion rooms”: empty cells, with only a “rough
blanket” on the oor, and a single window with a wire screen over it. A patient
put in the seclusion room was stripped of all clothing, and the cell door had an

244
unbreakable glass panel set into it, so that the sta f could check the patient’s
welfare from outside. Meals would be delivered on paper plates, nudged around
the brie y-cracked door. The seclusion would of en last for many hours.
Restraints were similarly harsh, binding the patient by the wrists and ankles. Such
measures were considered a last resort, to be applied in two situations: when a
patient was going to hurt themselves, or hurt others.

At the other end of the treatment spectrum, there was a “parole unit,” which
housed only two kinds of prisoners: those who were about to be discharged,
needing only minimal supervision, and those “who, although considered well-
adjusted within the protected environment of the hospital, could not adapt to the
stress of community life.”

The least-restricted patient status of all was an “extended home visit”: a one-year
purgatory outside the hospital walls, but not yet a formal return to society, during
which the patient would stay with their family, and be visited by social workers
periodically to track their progress. If the patient was healthy af er a year, they
were discharged.

Some of these patients spent their twelve months in a boarding house, supported
with funds that were allocated to the hospital by the state of Connecticut. The
state considered this a worthwhile expense; it was the ones who needed to stay in
the hospital inde nitely that were the real drain on resources. Each one could
occupy a bed for decades.

***
Within two years of opening Fair eld State Hospital, Connecticut was asking Dr.
Leak to increase capacity by 500 beds; new wards were already set to open around
the oval soon, but the overcrowding at Norwich and Middletown could not go on
any longer. They would have to nd space. So, Dr. Leak ordered beds moved into
the cafeterias, onto porches, and even the sewing room — the only buildings on
campus they wouldn’t be moving patients into were the employee dormitories.

The new wards opened that spring, but the extra capacity didn’t last. By 1937, all
three hospitals in Connecticut were again over owing, so the legislature
appropriated money to build still more wards at Fair eld State — enough for
2,000 more patients — as well as a sta ng increase. This expansion brought
marked bene ts for the patients: Dr. Leak instituted a psychiatric nursing
program, sta fed with graduate students on loan from local hospitals for three
months at a time. The nurses would live on campus, and work closely with their
patients every day.

245
But the expansion came at the cost of a small tragedy for some longtime patients:
in order to clear more land, Fair eld would have to tear down the scenic old
farmhouse out on the meadow. When the day came, as the bulldozer approached,
one patient stood by and read a short verse aloud, expressing sorrow over the loss.

BEDLAM
With the outbreak of World War II, Fair eld State Hospital became a designated
emergency shelter. If Newtown were ever bombed, the tunnels under the wards
could serve as bunkers. And once the dust settled, any intact buildings would be
converted into conventional hospital stations, to treat the town’s wounded.

The draf notices came next. Suddenly, many of the hospital’s male sta f members
were disappearing from its halls. At the same time, many of the doctors and
administrators were leaving to take on positions in the defense industry. To re ll
its ranks, the hospital had to hire more nursing sta f, and began allowing their
female orderlies to be assigned to the male wards for the rst time. The Selective
Service Administration also approved Fair eld State as a facility where
conscientious objectors could work in lieu of military service (which also had the
fortunate side bene t of easing the hospital’s payroll).

During these years, the patients said that the quality of care at the hospital
generally improved. And the range of treatments continued to expand; electric
shock therapy was rst used at the hospital in 1941, and though controversial at
rst, the practice gradually came to be relied upon as one of the most e fective
treatments for depressed patients.

The rst military casualties came in 1942. They were the draf ees who had been
found mentally ill during basic training, men that the war e fort could not use.
But following soon af er would be the combat casualties — men who had gone o f
to ght overseas, and came back haunted by the battle eld, exhibiting the Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that was then known most commonly as
“shell-shock.”

***
Overcrowding continued to be a thorn in the hospital’s side, at great consequence.
By 1944, several patients had even died at the hands of other patients; every time,
the state’s investigators attributed the security lapse to inadequate supervision,
something the state’s voters had given them no money to address.

Bad publicity followed, and public opinion in Newtown began to turn against
Fair eld State Hospital. Dr. Leak had expected this: “Never, despite improvement

246
in the past three to four decades, have public mental hospitals really enjoyed good
standing in the community,” he told the hospital’s Board of Trustees. “The barrier
is psychological and related to persisting distorted concepts of mental disease
which accentuate the unpleasant aspects, but fail to recognize the social and
economic values in maintaining mental health and restoring the maladjusted.”

Af er the war ended, Newtown’s men came back to their posts at Fair eld State
Hospital. Conscientious objectors were phased out. Meanwhile, in Washington,
Congress sought to build domestically upon the lessons that the military clinicians
had learned while mobilized for the con ict. They passed legislation that
established the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), to “provide for,
foster, and aid in coordinating research relating to neuropsychiatric disorders.”
Soon, it would be up to NIMH to respond to the rapidly growing post-war
population of mentally ill Americans.

***
Late in 1945, a patient from Boston Psychopathic Hospital was transferred to
Fair eld State, having undergone a new and potentially groundbreaking
procedure: the frontal lobotomy. Doctors at Fair eld were amazed at the patient’s
recovery; once considered severely mentally ill, he was now declared “cured,” and
was successfully discharged within one year. Soon, Fair eld began performing
lobotomies regularly: a total of 107 patients over the next two years. (Of this
number, 35% were subsequently discharged, another 35% were considered
“slightly improved,” and 26% percent were “unimproved.” The remaining 4% did
not survive the procedure.)

The electroshock therapy program was also expanded, treating 275 patients on an
at least weekly basis — some of them, every day. The practice was ne-tuned by
then, incorporating muscle relaxants and anesthetic to reduce the pain from the
shocks. The treatment was observed to be e fective in controlling the behavior of
disturbed patients, and it helped many chronically ill patients return to a level of
functioning where they could care for themselves.

These more advanced practices would steadily replace the insulin and irritative
therapies at FSH. The hospital began rapidly to modernize, attracting more
professionals. Medical students passed through in groups of ten, assigned from
Yale Medical School to experience a real clinical setting, with modern treatment
methods. But unfortunately, the more advanced the procedure, the more nursing
sta f it required, and consequently, the more modernized that FSH became, the
more its resources would be diverted away from day-to-day contact with the
patients in its wards.

247
 ***
On May 3, LIFE magazine printed a bombshell article, “Bedlam 1946.” It was an
exposé on the conditions at many state mental hospitals, based on observations
from conscientious objectors during the war years. All three Connecticut hospitals
came under re: in one section, the article reported that two FSH guards had been
“charged with complicity in two separate beatings of patients, one of whom
died.” But it was the overall living conditions observed at the hospitals that
shocked readers most.

Connecticut’s mental health system was thrown into a national scandal. In a

public letter to the Governor, the United States Representative from Fair eld
County made reference to the Nuremberg trials then-ongoing, arguing, “If one-
half of the indictments made in this article is true, then we are harboring in our
midst institutions that are as unforgivable in civilized communities as Buchenwald
and Belsen.” He railed against “inhuman pinch-penny appropriations” in the state
budget, and urged funding “in order that our state may not be included among
those which have brought shame to our country in the treatment of the helpless
victims of insanity.”

In Newtown, the head of the Student Nursing program went to the FSH Board
of Trustees, to bring the sta ng issues to light herself. She reported that, with the
scarce headcount at FSH, even the basic operations of the hospital were under
strain. Patients who could not manage their own hygiene showed an unkempt
appearance, the length of their hair and ngernails a testament to their neglect.
Meanwhile, when the kitchen was behind, some patients did not get breakfast; if
they transferred workers from the laundry to make up for it, soon patients were
seen sleeping in the same day-clothes, for weeks.

Then there were the truly regrettable measures taken; patients were locked in
single rooms, or in “mass seclusion” halls along with several other disturbed
patients, without supervision. The Head Nurse told the Board that she viewed the
conditions of FSH to run counter to the fundamental practices of nursing: “The
test of such service is not whether patients are being secure in locked buildings,
but whether they are being given the bene t of care designed to improve their
mental health.”

In response to the bad press, administrators at Fair eld Hospital did not waver in
their stance: that the patients’ families knew best, and that the vast majority of
them said they were satis ed with the care their loved one was receiving at the
hospital. And in any case, they couldn’t increase sta ng without an increase in
taxes, and that would be up to the voters.

248
The wave of public uproar eventually passed — but not without leaving
Americans’ esteem for their mental health system badly damaged. (The only
reaction documented coming from the people of Newtown at this time was that
they were not so much concerned with the treatment of the patients, as much as
they were with ensuring that the patients did not wander from the campus.)

***
In 1949, Connecticut’s General Assembly authorized voluntary admissions at all
state mental hospitals. Under this statute, a patient could legally sign themselv
into the hospital — so that when they wanted to leave, they would just have to
give their physician a written notice of their intent to do so. From that point, the
doctor would have ten days to — if warranted by the patient’s condition — certify
the need to keep them hospitalized, or to initiate probate court proceedings to
have them ordered to stay. Otherwise, they were free to check themselves out just
as easily as they checked themselves in. It was an arrangement designed to, as
much as was possible, shorten the amount of time that a patient occupied a state-
funded bed.

THE CURE
In 1954, a revolution came to Fair eld State Hospital. It started in two wards for
disturbed women, af er a visiting doctor from London was brought on sta f: he
was there to conduct a research study for a new drug, Reserpine, and his doing so
would be the rst time that the state of Connecticut authorized a tranquilizer for
use in the treatment of one of their patients.

The doctor chose 80 chronically ill schizophrenics for the study — patients
considered by the nursing sta f to be di cult to manage, and who had proven
unresponsive to other therapies. The results of the study were dramatic: the most
responsive patients, 25% of them, were “very much improved” from taking the
medicine; another 50% showed varying, but notable, degrees of improvement;
only 25% of the patients still didn’t respond.

One sta f member wrote of the astonishing change happening before his eyes,
af er the medicine was administered:

The research wards became quieter and cleaner; in fact, the atmosphere
w so changed that they were no longer recognizable wards for very
disturbed schizophrenics. Activiti such church attendance, tea
parti , sewing groups, walks, movi , and even bingo parti were now
participated in by patients who were previously so disturbed and

249
 hyperactive that they required sedation and seclusion. For the first time
in many years, they were able to relax and enjoy what they were doing.

The hospital itself began to change into a more home-like atmosphere, with
curtains rather than cages on the windows, and upholstered chairs replacing the
heavy wooden benches that were once bolted to the oors. The behavior of the
patients improved so much that some of the sta f called Reserpine the “miracle
drug.”

It was indeed Fair eld’s harbinger of a new era, just as lithium carbonate would be
in Norwich — a trend that would shortly spread throughout the nation
(particularly in the form of chlorpromazine, a tranquilizer sold under the trade
name Thorazine); with such medicine available, for the rst time, Americans
began to embrace the idea that mental illness was something that could be treated
e fectively... maybe even cured.

The pills reduced the need for more drastic kinds of therapy, too; at Fair eld State
Hospital, the use of electroshock therapy began to drop. Patient discharges, and
parole placements in the community, went up.

However, even as more patients were being discharged, the still-rising rate of
admissions was outpacing them. In the mid-1950s, Dr. Leak made a request to all
FSH physicians: that as many patients as possible be changed to a “voluntary”
status, the rst step in an e fort to discharge as many such patients as they could.
But no matter what they did, the hospital was always over owing. The source of
the phenomenon seemed to be somewhere outside the hospital’s walls, beyond
what the doctors could control.

The congestion at the hospital was aggravated further as psychotropic drugs

became the norm, and the logistics of medicating so many patients, multiple times
a day, became a nightmare to manage; medicine closets bulged with pill bottles as
new drugs came to market, and untrained sta f members were responsible for
administering medication to upwards of f y patients apiece. Interns arriving at
Fair eld were appalled to see nurses preparing hundreds of doses of medications
in the evening, to be administered by another sta f member the following day —
each dose a violation of a basic nursing principle: that whoever prepares
medication be responsible for both administering it, and observing its e fect. But
the same nurses, as time went on, would confess that this was the only way such a
massive amount of medication could be distributed from a central location.

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 ROSEMARY’S LEGACY
The patient population in America’s public psychiatric hospitals peaked in 1955, at
more than 560,000. The overcrowding at Fair eld Hills was not exceptional
compared to other states, and it was a situation that could not be ignored any
longer. The American Psychiatric Association called for a national commission to
“study current conditions and develop a national mental health program,” and
legislation answering their call was brought to Congress later that year, co-
sponsored by a senator from Massachusetts: John F. Kennedy.

When the work of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health was
complete, the experts recommended sweeping changes to the nation’s mental
health care system. To reduce both costs and overcrowding, they pushed for a shif
away from treatment, and toward prevention — promoting “mental health,”
rather than simply treating “mental illness.”

An entirely new infrastructure would be necessary for the vision to become

reality; “If the development of more serious mental breakdowns is to be
prevented,” the commission wrote, they would require “one fully-sta fed, full-
time mental health clinic available to each 50,000 of the population.” For such a
system to be e fective, a clinic would also have to be located in a given patient’s
community; at the time, this equated to some 3,000 new clinics being built across
the country, with the goal to treat patients “in the community” as of en as
possible.

The commission took six years to produce their nal report, Action for Mental
Health. But part of the delay was intentional; the Washington D.C. doctors on the
commission wanted to wait until af er the 1960 presidential election, anticipating
that John F. Kennedy might take the Oval O ce — and knowing that if so, he
would be particularly compelled to act on their recommendations.

It was widely known, by then, that Kennedy’s oldest sister, Rosemary, was
mentally impaired in some way, usually cited as “mental retardation.” However,
what was not as widely known was that Rosemary had also been mentally ill; and
still another secret, even more closely protected, was that Rosemary had
undergone a lobotomy in the fall of 1941. The procedure had been a disaster; the
surgeon, having cut too deep, lef her worse than before, and thereaf er Rosemary
would spend her life unable to care for herself, nearly catatonic.

The director of NIMH — who was also responsible for draf ing the mental health
commission’s recommendations — was among the very few who knew all of this.

251
On February 5, 1963, President Kennedy delivered a televised “special message to
Congress,” broadcast from the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He
challenged each legislator to take up the recommendations from Action for
Mental Health. “Nearly half of the 530 thousand patients in our State mental
hospitals are in institutions with over 3,000 patients, where individual care and
consideration are almost impossible,” the president said. “It has been
demonstrated that 2 out of 3 schizophrenics — our largest category of mentally ill
— can be treated and released within 6 months, but under the conditions that
prevail today the average stay for schizophrenia is 11 years.”

The new system wouldn’t just be cheaper; it would enable the mentally ill to get
better in their own communities. The president predicted that when the
recommendations were carried out, it would bring an end to “con ning patients
in an institution to wither away,” and that “reliance on the cold mercy of custodial
isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and
capability.”

Congress met his challenge, and President Kennedy signed the Mental
Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act,
in the Oval O ce, on Halloween day 1963. This marked the beginning of a
process, whereby the federal government took control over what it viewed as a
failed state-based mental health care system. With pen in hand, JFK declared:

It w said, in an earlier age, that the mind of a man a far country

which can neither be approached nor explored. But, today, under
present conditions of scientific achievement, it will be possible for a
nation rich in human and material resourc ours to make the
remote reach of the mind accessible. The mentally ill and the mentally
retarded need no longer be alien to our affections, or beyond the help of
our communiti .

It was the last public bill signing that President Kennedy would host. Twenty-two
days later, he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet while visiting Dallas.

***
Whatever vision the late president had for the way the Community Mental
Health Centers (CMHCs) were supposed to work, in light of how they turned
out, it can safely be presumed that his dream did not come true.

The new system was fundamentally awed, in that it nancially encouraged the
closing of state mental hospitals — but did not provide any actionable plan for
what would happen to the discharged patients once they were back on the street.

252
And most glaringly ignored were the patients who would refuse to take medicine
that was necessary for controlling their condition, and who would now have no
watchful presence making sure they took their doses, “in the community.”

Finally, the act paid to build the CMHCs, but it did not fund the centers long-
term, and so each state would either have to appropriate new funding, or divert
money from their existing mental health budget — away from the state hospitals.
The end result for places like Fair eld State Hospital was that beds and sta f
would continue to disappear, while the discharged patients being ushered out the
door would all nd themselves the latest subjects in NIMH’s grand community
science experiment.

FAIRFIELD HILLS
Forty years af er he sold Fair eld State Hospital to the people of Newtown, Dr.
Desmond retired from practicing medicine. In the decades since that af ernoon at
the Hawley School, the “carpetbagger” predictions from of his detractors had
been proven wrong. Desmond instead became a local xture, delivering more
than 3,000 babies for Newtown’s families in his private practice, while also serving
for more than thirty years as the sta f epidemiologist at FSH. And he had watched
as his own predictions from 1928 were tested by the passing years, with each
coming to fruition: the town’s population had just passed the 10,000 mark, and
property values had doubled years ago. All the while, the hospital had never
ruined Newtown’s good name; the stigma was as strong as ever, but it stayed
largely up on the hillside, with the patients.

For his retirement years, Dr. Desmond chose to remain in Newtown. From his
home he would witness further changes unfold, up in the hills.

***
Early in the 1960's, families in Newtown each received a survey in the mail, asking
what they thought about renaming Fair eld State Hospital; with the lingering
negative aura around state institutions af er the “Bedlam” stories, together with
the shif from state to federal management of mental health, Connecticut’s
legislature had authorized all the state hospitals to change their titles. Connecticut
State Hospital was now Connecticut Valley Hospital; Norwich State Hospital had
become, simply, Norwich Hospital.

Following in Norwich’s footsteps, FSH’s superintendent (Dr. Leak’s successor)

suggested they change the name of Newtown’s hospital to simply “Fair eld

253
Hospital” — that way, they wouldn’t have to spend money on new signs, and
stationery; funds were more scarce than ever.

Meanwhile, the surveys they got back from the townspeople weren’t much help;
most residents didn’t care what they called the place — as long as it wasn’t
“Newtown Hospital,” or anything else with the town’s name in it.

Eventually, the Board voted to rename the facility to Fair eld Hills Hospital.

***
NIMH held a conference in Connecticut in 1964, inviting sta f from all three of
the state’s mental institutions. There, the administrators from newly-christened
Fair eld Hills learned that, in order to adapt to their decrease in funding af er the
1963 CMHC bill, they would need to fundamentally change how their hospital
functioned — and as a consequence, the style of care their patients received.

Ever since the very rst busload of new admissions crested Mile Hill Road thirty
years before, the hospital in Newtown had functioned by sorting patients into
di ferent wards based on four factors: the length of their illness, the degree of their
illness, their behavior, and their gender. There was a ward for disturbed women,
and another for alcoholic men, and another for geriatrics, and so on, as necessary.
The wards for disturbed patients were further segregated, by a graduating order of
wellness: a new patient might be considered “acute,” and put in a higher-security
locked ward, but as their behavior improved, they would be moved to what the
sta f informally called the “semi-disturbed ward,” and then to a “quiet ward,” and
then nally to an “open ward,” with practically no security, in anticipation of
their discharge and release into the community. If at any point their behavior
faltered, the patient could be sent back a level, until they could demonstrate
improvement again.

This time-trusted approach had its advantages, but its key shortcoming — what
made it obsolete in the Community-based era of mental health care — was that it
simply took too long. It was too gradual. There weren’t enough beds to sustain it,
and there weren’t enough sta f. Going forward, it would be vitally important that
the hospital get their patients back out the door, as soon as they could.

Under the system NIMH was recommending, wards would be sorted by location:
the population of a given building would be determined almost entirely by the
county in Connecticut where the patient originated from, without regard for
other factors. This meant that disturbed patients, not-so-disturbed, and
convalescents would all be in the same wards. And accordingly, all wards would
have to be locked.

254
The good news about “decentralization” was, it would allow the hospital to watch
over a greater number of patients, while keeping fewer attendees on sta f. Escapees
were becoming a concern down the hill in Newtown; that same year, three
patients had escaped together and abducted a man from his home, forcing him to
drive them to New Jersey. But they were caught shortly af er, and fortunately, no
one was harmed.

THE PENDULUM
While the patients of Fair eld Hills slept behind their barred windows, the events
that dictated the paths of their treatment, and their lives, played out mostly in
courtrooms in the nation’s capital.

One night in the fall of 1962, a 60-year-old woman, Catherine Lake, was found
wandering the streets of Washington D.C., confused and disoriented. The police
picked her up, and took her to D.C. General Hospital for an evaluation; the
doctors there found that physically, she was ne — she was just “aged,” and
su fering from a “chronic brain syndrome associated with arteriosclerosis.” And,
she had a habit of wandering.

A judge ruled that she was “of unsound mind” and ordered her committed to the
local mental hospital, St. Elizabeths, against her will. Ms. Lake appealed the ruling,
arguing that she was not a danger to anyone, nor herself. She wanted to be
released.

Four years later, in a landmark decision, the Chief Judge on the D.C. Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled that St. Elizabeths could only keep Lake there if the state
had attempted to nd a “less restrictive” placement (such as a halfway house,
nursing home, outpatient clinic, etc.) for her, in the community, without success.
With that, the concept of the “least restrictive environment” entered the legal
lexicon. Still to this day, any psychiatrist performing an emergency evaluation of a
new “non-dangerous” patient is legally required to recommend them to the least
restrictive level of treatment that will be suitable to meet their needs. The same
doctrine is followed in institutions of every sort, from public schools to prisons.

***
On another night in D.C., in 1962, an 18-year-old petty criminal named Charles
Rouse was spotted by a police patrol. He was standing on a street corner, carrying
a heavy suitcase, and the o cers recognized him from previous arrests. They
stopped Rouse, and searched him (which Rouse would later argue was unlawful)

255
and discovered he was carrying a fully-loaded .45 semi-automatic pistol. Inside the
suitcase, they found more than 500 rounds of ammunition.

They arrested Rouse under the charge of possession of an unlicensed pistol, which
carried a sentence of up to one year in prison. But doctors determined he was
“su fering from a passive-aggressive personality disorder,” and that the gun o fense
was “a product of this mental illness” — so Rouse avoided prison, and got
committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital instead.

This might have seemed, initially, like a light sentence — except there was no term
to serve. Hospital stays were inde nite.

Years passed, but Rouse couldn’t get discharged. He led a petition for habeas
corpus, and when the case again came to a hearing, the judges on the higher court
were sympathetic to his plight:

Of course I strongly disapprove of anybody carrying a .45 automatic

unless he in uniform and on duty, and of anybody carrying 500
rounds of ammunition, but, certainly, that not a symptom of insanity,
Doctor, because many sane people do those things. [...] You know, we just
couldn’t accept any psychiatric testimony or theory to the effect that the
commission of a crime a sign of mental disease, because if we accepted
that our whole system of criminal law would have to break down.

Still, the court found that Rouse was indeed mentally ill. No, he wasn’t getting
better, but that was beside the point. He was denied habeas corpus, and sent back
to St. Elizabeths. But Rouse would then appeal that decision all the way to D.C.’s
federal court — and the same judge who had ruled on the Lake case.

This time, the judge ruled that every con ned patient had a “right to treatment”
— if the hospital couldn’t treat Rouse, then they also could not hold him against
his will.

The consequences of this decision, for the country, soon became apparent: there
really would be no more “custodial care.” Hospitals would either treat their
patients, with measurable results, or they would have to let them go. But as
sta ng levels continued to dwindle, rather than ensuring e fective treatment of
the mentally ill, the “right to treatment” encouraged hospitals to simply release
the patients who were most resistant to treatment — the ones who, in another era,
were deemed to need custodial care the most.

***

256
In 1965, Congress took under consideration a series of amendments to the Social
Security Act that would create a new sub-program, called Medicare. It was to be
completely funded by the federal government, to provide care for citizens over the
age of 65. (The very notion of such a program was highly controversial at the time,
considered by critics to be “socialized medicine.”)

Late in the process of passing the amendments, one senator, from Arkansas,
tacked on what seemed like an insigni cant addition: the “Grants to States for
Medical Assistance Programs” — usually referred to thereaf er as Medicaid.
Arkansas was one of the poorer states, and this program would arrange for the
federal government to match the state’s funds when they paid for their citizens to
receive care — regardless of their age, unlike Medicare — if the patients did not
have the resources to pay for it on their own.

Medicaid was never intended to pay for mental health care. In fact, the bill’s
author speci cally tried to rule that out, designating the federal funds to only be
paid out for nursing costs “other than services in an institution for mental
diseases.” At the same time, this de nition meant that Medicaid could still pay for
“community-based” care — and so, the incentive to move chronically ill patients
out of the hospital, a trend already gathering momentum, grew even stronger:
every day that a Medicaid patient spent in the ward was one that the state would
have to pay for all by itself, but once they were discharged, not only would the
cost of their care drop dramatically, but the federal government would resume
paying for its half again.

***
States tried to nd ways to adapt to the new era. Alabama paid for their Medicaid-
exempted patients through a special tax on cigarettes, and that proved e fective at
keeping their hospitals sta fed for years — right up until 1970, when the state
decided that cigarettes had gotten to be too expensive, and cut the tax. Soon af er,
hundreds of psychologists and other State hospital employees were getting laid
o f.

In response, the sta f at Bryce State Hospital in Tuscaloosa led a class-action

lawsuit against the state of Alabama, on behalf of a 15-year old patient at the
hospital, named Ricky Wyatt. He was a “juvenile delinquent,” whose probation
o cer had decided he should be committed, but the hospital argued they were
not able to provide him adequate care with their reduced sta ng levels — one
nurse for every 250 patients.

The judge from Alabama agreed, and the resulting Wyatt v. Stickney decision
would again shake the foundation of the state mental hospital system in America:
it held, for the rst time, that the “right to treatment” meant that every single

257
involuntarily committed patient was entitled to care that would “give each of
them a realistic opportunity to be cured or to improve his or her mental
condition.” The basis for this ruling was found in the Constitution, the judge
wrote, because, “To deprive any citizen of his or her liberty upon the altruistic
theory that the con nement is for humane therapeutic reasons, and then fail to
provide adequate treatment, violates the very fundamentals of due process.”

His decision went on to establish, in detail, exactly what the “minimum standard”
of care was that hospitals were obligated to provide: there was to be one toilet for
every eight patients, and a shower for every f een. There were dietary
requirements for the food, temperature ranges for the heat and air conditioning
(“not to exceed 83°F nor fall below 68°F”), and a minimum number of doctors,
orderlies, typists, dentists, repairmen, cooks, and more, for every 250 patients.
And going forward, each patient, in every hospital, would have to have an
individualized treatment plan.

To the hospitals, what this all meant was that care, per-patient, was going to get
much more expensive, or else it was going to be nearly impossible to con ne
someone — unless they were considered a danger to others, or to themselves. And
unless the states found more money to run the hospitals, there was still only one
sure re way to reduce costs without reducing the standard of care: discharge more
patients.

DOWNHILL
In Newtown, by the 1970’s, it was becoming apparent to residents that something
was wrong up at the old hospital. The kinds of patients coming down from
Fair eld Hills seemed to be changing; escapees, always a concern, suddenly carried
more frightening implications.

In 1971, a patient wandered o f the campus, and into a Newtown home. He

encountered a teenage girl in her bedroom, and held her at knife-point,
demanding money and transportation.

In 1972, a just-discharged patient came down the hill and raped a 15-year-old
schoolgirl.

Later that year, a few more patients broke out — just to jump onto the train
tracks when they heard the locomotive coming. The rails had gone by the campus
ever since opening day, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the hospital had to install a
high fence, to stop anymore such “incidents.”

258
In 1973, a patient in her twenties was found dead in one of the wards, having
rolled her nightgown into a rope, which she then tied around a window-hook.

As stories continued to ll the newspapers, the townspeople started demanding

answers. What w going on up there?

A representative from the hospital employees’ union spoke to Connecticut’s

Sunday Herald, and blamed it all on the chronically low sta ng levels. “Security
at the hospital should be at a maximum, not at a minimum as it is operating now,”
he said, highlighting the danger that was only now becoming evident to the
outside world:

It’s a very peculiar situation there. The administration says it mixing

the assaultive patients with the non-assaultive patients on the premise
that some of the good points of the better patients will wear off on the
worse patients. But in fact, in my experience it seems to be working in
reverse, and the bad wearing off on the good… Most of the wards are
very dangero now, both for patients and employe because of the
inter-mixing of different typ of patients.

In response to the latest round of bad press, and the outcry from the community,
the Superintendent of Fair eld Hills held a joint press conference with
Newtown’s rst selectman, and the two men pledged a number of security
upgrades. First, they would establish a phone system for the townspeople, to alert
the hospital of any “wandering patients,” and the operators would be trained to
watch for “disguised calls” (ones coming from captive residents, who have an
escapee in their house watching them, and have to pretend to be cancelling plans
with a friend or some other ruse). The hospital would also shif some of its budget
to hire more guards, who would run patrols around the campus in a station
wagon at night, rounding up any escapees they spotted.

The town’s rst selectman, for his part, made ve of the senior security guards
into honorary Town Constables; under the state’s regulations, until then, the
guards had no authority outside of the campus boundaries, and so had no power
to retrieve patients who made it all the way into town. The title of Constable
allowing them to cross the threshold from the hospital into the community, and
bring the wandering patients back up the hill.

***
In Florida, a retired couple was enjoying a rare visit from their 48-year-old son — a
man named Kenneth Donaldson, who had been diagnosed with paranoid
schizophrenia many years before. He hadn’t had any sort of episode in a long

259
time, and seemed to be supporting himself just ne — but midway through the
visit, he started mumbling about his neighbors poisoning his food, or plotting to
slander him. The stu f he used to talk about during the bad times.

Concerned, his father called the police, and signed an “inquisition of

incompetency,” authorizing them to arrest his son. Donaldson was committed to
Florida State Hospital, and re-diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic; the judge
who signed this commission order stated that Donaldson was “being sent to the
hospital for a few weeks to take some of this new medication,” and that he was
sure Donaldson would be “alright soon.”

15 years later, Donaldson was still trying to get out. Florida State Hospital was
dangerously understa fed (the minimum standards established by Wyatt taking
years to be fully implemented), and he was put in a ward with over 1,000 patients
— many of them violent criminals — with only one doctor to treat all of them.

From the day he arrived, Donaldson demanded to speak to a lawyer, insisting that
he was no longer mentally ill, and that even if he was, Florida was not providing
him any treatment for it anyway. He wasn’t dangerous, so they had to let him go.
But the hospital rejected him at every turn; while they admitted they were not
providing him any treatment during his con nement, they argued that the mere
condition of being confined — the “therapeutic milieu” of the hospital — was
itself a form of treatment. Donaldson was trapped.

O’Connor v. Donaldson made it to the United States Supreme Court in 1975. The
court’s decision on the case was unanimous, a rming that a diagnosis of mental
illness, alone, “cannot justify a State’s locking a person up against his will and
keeping him inde nitely in simple custodial con nement.” It didn’t matter if the
diagnosis was accurate or not; “There is still no constitutional basis for con ning
such persons involuntarily if they are dangerous to no one and can live safely in
freedom,” the court ruled.

To clarify their decision, the justices volunteered an answer to a question they

immediately anticipated would arise from the lower courts:

Q. May the State fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its
citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different?

A. One might well ask if the State, to avoid public unease, could
incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric. Mere
public intolerance or animosity cannot constitutionally justify the
deprivation of a person’s physical liberty. In short, a State cannot
constitutionally confine, without more, a nondangero individual who

260
 capable of surviving safely in freedom by himself or with the help of
willing and responsible family members or friends.

The state courts would be lef to interpret the meaning of the clause “without
more” for the next 40 years.

THE ASSASSIN
On the morning of August 13, 1981, President Reagan sat down to a table outside
of his California residence, Rancho del Cielo — “Heaven’s Ranch.” With his black
dog Lucky at his side, he signed the latest Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act
into law, and thus implemented historic tax cuts.

A thick fog bank had just rolled across the Santa Ynez Mountains, and through
the haze enveloping all of them, the president said to reporters that the sweeping
changes he had just made to the federal budget were “a turnaround of almost a
half a century of a course this country’s been on,” and marked “an end to the
excessive growth in government bureaucracy, government spending, government
taxing.”

One major feature of the new budget was that it completely overhauled the
federal funding of mental health care in the United States; it took all of the funds
normally allocated to the Community Mental Health Centers, and — af er rst
slashing it by 26% — simply block-granted the remaining cash to the states, for
them to spend on services however they saw t. Reagan’s signature that foggy
morning thus marked the end of JFK’s vision; the new era, that had begun not
twenty years before with Kennedy’s vision to “make the remote reaches of the
mind accessible,” was already dead. Instead, Rosemary’s legacy had amounted
mostly to a drawn-out mass-closure of state hospitals, and a steady movement of
patients into the community, where they would rely on a threadbare net of mental
health services that varied from state to state: “de-institutionalization.” The
modern era of American mental health care had arrived.

As the ink dried on his signature, President Reagan took questions, handling the
back-and-forth with ease; ve months had passed since he was shot outside the
Hilton, but he had been back on the job af er just two weeks. His friend Jim
Brady would have a much longer road to travel.

***
The gunman who was arrested outside the Hilton pleaded not guilty by reason of
insanity, and news coverage of his trial would be, for many Americans, their rst

261
exposure to how their criminal courts dealt with issues of mental illness.

In one session, the shooter’s mother took the stand, and fought back tears as she
recounted how her son kept failing to make it in the real world, moving back
home again and again, his spirits darkening with each turning of the cycle.
Though his parents didn’t know the details of his interior world at the time —
like his obsession with the actress from Taxi Driver — they could see him falling
apart. “He just seemed to be going downhill, downhill, downhill and becoming
more withdrawn, more and more antisocial, more depressed, and so down on
himself,” his mother sobbed. “We didn’t know what was wrong, but we knew
something was not right.”

The defense explained how the young man’s family had sent him to a psychiatrist
in their community, and how when that doctor asked him how he felt, the young
man replied that he su fered from “severe anxiety attacks” and “unparalleled
emotional exhaustion” — and that recently, “[his] mind was on the breaking
point.” Separately, his mother had told the doctor she was worried about her son,
worried that he might take his own life, and that she wanted to have him
committed to a mental hospital.

“No, don’t do it,” the community psychiatrist told her. “It will really make a
cripple out of [him] if you put him in an institution.” He told the woman that
her son didn’t have any serious mental illness; he was just depressed, and what he
actually needed was to get his life together, and move out of her house. He said
she should give her son an ultimatum: if he isn’t working and saving for an
apartment by the time her chosen deadline came, she would throw him out on the
street.

She followed the advice, and her son stormed out. When the deadline came, she
turned on the television, and saw him shooting the president.

The gunman’s defense team would signi cantly blame this community
psychiatrist for what happened, calling his guidance “totally inappropriate, [and]
in fact harmful... an absolute calamity.” Meanwhile, they hired four of their own
doctors to examine the shooter; though they all came back with a di ferent
diagnosis, all four could agree on one thing: he was insane at the time of the
shooting. That meant he could not go to prison for it.

***
Of course, the prosecution argued that this was all hogwash; that the community
psychiatrist had in fact been correct in his assessment all along, and the
assassination attempt had only proven it. Plus, the prosecutors had their own

262
expert witness, one who had interviewed the shooter several times in his prison
cell: a forensic psychiatrist named Dr. Park Dietz.

In Dietz’s expert opinion, the gunman’s real motive was simply his “longstanding
interest in becoming famous without working.” He had been obsessed with
assassins since he was nine years old — when his family lived in Dallas on the day
JFK was shot — and now he “liked the idea of fame without following rules...
[He] didn’t want to be an accountant or an insurance salesman.”

Reviewing the shooter’s life choices, Dr. Dietz had to concede, “These are not the
reasonable acts of a completely rational individual” — but that was still a far cry
from being outright delusional. His own diagnosis of the shooter amounted to
several relatively common mental disorders — foremost among them, Narcissistic
Personality Disorder. Dietz said that this amounted to “falling in love with
oneself,” and “preoccupations with fantasies of success and fame,” along with a
lack of empathy. Meanwhile, the young man was not truly “schizophrenic,” but
more likely showed a “schizoid personality disorder,” or what Dietz called “the
loneliness disorder.” It manifested as a marked lack of friendships throughout life,
an inability to interact, and “emotional coldness and aloofness.” He said this
disorder was quite common among “cowboys, forest rangers, and others who
choose solitary occupations.”

The gunman’s other disorders fell along these same lines; nothing that would
impair anyone’s understanding of right and wrong. Dietz then introduced one last
aspect of the crime that demonstrated the gunman was in fact sane — simply that,
despite not taking anyone’s life, his plan had been successful. Af er all, the shooter
had lef for the Hilton that morning knowing that “no crime carries as much
publicity as the assassination of the President of the United States,” and the fame
he achieved in those 1.7 seconds, “is by no means a delusion, it really happened.
He did indeed become a famous criminal.” His objectives were “odd, and in the
lay sense, crazy,” but still his goal “was indeed reasonable, because he
accomplished it.”

The gunman had even told Dietz as much, himself. “It worked,” he said from his
prison cell in the days af er the attack. “You know, actually, I accomplished
everything I was going for there. I should feel good, because I accomplished
everything on a grand scale.”

As Dr. Dietz was testifying to this exchange with the shooter, across the
courtroom, at the defense table, he could see the shooter now, locking eyes with
him and silently mouthing curses. The reporter for the New York Tim could see
it too. Everyone could.

263
The prosecution wrapped up. In their view, it wasn’t even all that complicated a
concept: some people are willing to do evil things for fame, and that does not
make them crazy. It makes them evil.

***
The jurors looked visibly exhausted as they went into seclusion. By the end, they
had watched a total of seven di ferent psychiatrists take the stand, each of them
saying that another of their colleagues was dead-wrong; at times, the very practice
of psychiatry itself would appear to be the real entity on trial. Even the judge
sounded overwhelmed, remarking, “I think there is either enough to guide the
jury, or to confuse the jury.”

Af er four days of deliberations, they had a verdict: not guilty, by reason of

insanity. The gunman was to be committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he
would remain until he was no longer considered a danger to himself or others; and
if that day ever came, he would be released, a free man.

The courtroom, and the nation, were stunned.

Shock soon gave way to anger; almost immediately af er the verdict, lawmakers
started talking about raising the bar for the insanity defense. There were Senate
hearings, where the jurors from the case expressed frustration about the position
they were put in, saying the shooter “contradicted himself so much and made
fools out of a lot of psychiatrists, so how are we going to gure out what was his
problem?”

Trying to defend their profession, the American Psychiatric Association

announced their support for reforming the insanity defense, reminding that,
“Psychiatrists are experts in medicine, not law,” and that “insanity is a legal
construct, not a medical concept. It is a label that says society wants this person
institutionalized. Society, not psychiatrists, should make such judgments.”

A committee came up with a new version of the law, which would establish that
an “insane” defendant had to be “unable to appreciate the nature and quality or
the wrongfulness of his acts,” and then speci cally stated that “mental disease or
defect does not otherwise constitute a defense.” The new law also shif ed the
burden of proof — o f of the prosecution, onto the defense.

When the legislation was ready, President Reagan introduced it from the brie ng
room of the White House: “These measures will simplify the justice system and
make it more likely that those who commit crimes pay a price. The American
people want a system of justice they can understand and they can have con dence
in. That is our goal as well.”

264
A reporter asked if the verdict itself, against the president's own attempted
assassin, played any role in his endorsement of the bill. Reagan — who had just
stated that he would not be answering questions on that particular af ernoon —
simply grinned, and shook his head “no.” The bill became law soon af er.

***
President Reagan contacted the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital in 1983,
hoping to forgive his attempted assassin in person. However, he said, he did not
want to do anything that was not in the patient’s best interest.

In response, a hospital o cial told the president that it would be best if he stayed
away; the gunman had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, af er all, and
such a meeting was not going to help him in recognizing his delusions of
grandeur.

Six years later, on Reagan’s nal day in o ce, aboard the plane usually called Air
Force One, as it shuttled him to a surprise welcome rally on a tarmac in Los
Angeles, Reagan re ected on the troubled young man who had thrown his life
away, just to harm him: “My thoughts about him af er he did it was when I was
praying for my own recovery. I prayed that he’d recover too, that whatever caused
him to be that way, that he would be cured.” Reagan added with regret, “I don’t
know that he has been; I understand he’s still in the hospital.”

LAST DAYS
In 1988, the United States Congress passed an amendment to the Social Security
Act, narrowing the “Medicaid exception” so that the program would not pay for
“a hospital, nursing facility, or other institution of more than 16 beds, that is
primarily engaged in providing diagnosis, treatment, or care of persons with
mental diseases, including medical attention, nursing care and related services.”

It was just one last blow to the system; by the late 1980’s, state hospitals were
disappearing.

Fair eld Hills held on longer than most, adapting to house tuberculosis patients,
or alcoholics, or drug addicts in its nal years — whatever they could nd funding
for. But it was a losing battle; for a facility as big as Fair eld Hills, the best that
Connecticut could do was to delay the inevitable.

As funding disappeared, wards along the oval started to close, and the state
resorted to using some of the retired buildings as o ce space. One of the tenants
to pass through was a team of land inspectors: the townspeople saw them wading

265
down to the aquifers of the Pootatuck River, and scooping water into test tubes,
evaluating the suitability of a lef over portion of the land that Connecticut had
bought from Newtown back in the 1920’s. It was a spot across the long meadow,
and down the eastern slope from where Fair eld Hills’ cornerstone was lain; the
state’s Department of Corrections had plans for a building site there.

Newtown didn’t want a prison, and many of its citizens were outraged at the
proposed site’s proximity to Fair eld Hills. The townspeople held a protest rally at
the site, where the Newtown High School marching band played, as more than
500 citizens chanted “Mental health and jails don’t mix, Fair eld Hills is not the
x!”

One of the organizers read a letter to the crowd, written by “Michael,” a patient at
Fair eld Hills. “I stand here alone, rejecting my con dentiality and my stigma to
present my thoughts,” said the man in the hospital up on the hill. “As the
mentally ill, we are already prisoners. Prisoners of our minds. The jail comes too
close to our fear that we are bad. At Fair eld Hills, we will put forth the e fort to
get well. Please, no jail.”

The rally’s organizer then turned to the crowd and promised: “The state is going
have a ght on their hands.” Soon, the townspeople voted to set aside $150,000 in
tax revenue to take Connecticut to court, and to do whatever they could to block
the prison’s construction. As their representative in the state senate told the New
York Tim , “If they are totally incensed, hell hath no fury like the people of
Newtown.”

But the state wasn’t intimidated. “Lawsuits can do anything,” one o cial said,
“but we don’t think anyone could dispel the fact that the state needs new
prisons.”

***
By the end of 1989, two thirds of Newtown’s legal war chest had vanished.
Meanwhile, Connecticut had only sweetened their o fer: the state agreed to pay
for a new sewer system and police cars for Newtown, and to subsidize a new
nursing home, if only they could abide a state prison in their midst. But the town
still said no.

This time, the state ignored them, and starting moving ahead with construction
anyway.

Desperate to stall, Newtown’s rst selectman ordered emergency repairs of the

access road leading to the prison’s construction site — the resulting tra c detour

266
blocked the path of the cement trucks the state had hired, thus buying Newtown
one more day. But it was no use.

Out of legal options, Newtown cut a deal. The prison — Garner Correctional
Facility, o cially — would be built af er all, right where Connecticut said it would
be, in the shadow of Fair eld Hills. But in exchange, the state would give
Newtown a million dollars a year (in lieu of property taxes). The town would get
its infrastructure upgrades, too. And then, a cherry on top: nineteen acres of land
right at the north end of the Fair eld Hills campus, where Mile Hill Road turned
into Wasserman Way. The area was mostly just a sloping, empty eld, but now,
the village could do with it as it wished.

As for the remainder of the land Connecticut had bought so long ago, and the old
hospital built on top of it, Newtown would get the right of rst refusal, so that
one day, when the state inevitably put the assets back up for sale, Newtown might
reclaim its southern hills.

***
The nursing sta f looked on, as the last of their patients boarded the nal bus out
of Fair eld Hills. Across the half-mile meadow, and down the hill, the barbed-
wire-strung walls of Garner Correctional Facility were already rising.

The sta f knew that some of their patients would be transferred, sent o f to join
the remaining state population at Connecticut Valley Hospital, while other
patients were just heading home, to their families and support communities —
but as for the rest, the nurses weren’t sure just where they would end up.

Finally, on December 8, 1995, Fair eld Hills Hospital — formerly Fair eld State
Hospital — closed its doors for good.

***
Years passed. The old hospital stood vacant, vines of ivy curling through its
boarded windows. Every once in awhile, a movie production would come to town
and set up their gear at Fair eld Hills, when they needed a scene in a spooky old
mental institution. And Connecticut still posted guards on its property, just to
keep out the curious teenagers and occasional ghost hunters. But their patrolling
ashlights at night were the only regular activity to be seen. On most days, the
oval with the red brick buildings was just a part of Newtown that passed by a car’s
window from up on the hillside, stuck in time: a lingering memory, waiting to be
forgotten.

267
 THE FUTURE OF NEWTOWN
The organizers of the June 6, 2001 town meeting knew there was going to be a big
turnout; instead of the old meeting house, they opted to hold the event in the
auditorium at Newtown High School, so that everyone could be there to cast their
vote. Sure enough, when it was called to order, that town meeting turned out to
be the biggest crowd most anyone in town could remember. And although there
would be only two issues on the ballot that night, together they amounted to
answering just one question, the one everyone wanted a say in answering: What
should become of Fair eld Hills?

Months before, Connecticut had nally noti ed Newtown that they were ready
to sell. As the townspeoples’ representative in Congress told the New York Tim ,
the oval campus was “like a pearl right in the middle of town — a big one.”
Accordingly, the price tag they were voting on was quite large for such a small
community — $21 million.

But, as the rst selectman explained it to the crowd in the auditorium, Newtown
wasn’t quite so small anymore. The fact that they had outgrown their
infrastructure was most evident at Edmond Town Hall, the nerve-center of local
government that Mary Hawley had gif ed them 70 years before; today, they were
on the verge of having to shut it down unless they got the building back up to
code. And the overcrowding in their public schools was illustrated vividly on the
town’s ball elds, where the sod was shredded from the constant tra c of cleats.
The town needed to invest in its future now — so the rst selectman told them —
and the $21-million-dollar package wouldn’t just cover the land purchase; it would
chart Newtown’s path into the 21st century, a course that could pass right through
Fair eld Hills, if enough townspeople supported it. Once they bought it back, the
land could be retro tted into whatever the town needed — and besides, if
Newtown didn’t buy Fair eld Hills, someone else eventually would: “The most
important thing for people to think about is that this allows us to control our
destiny by controlling what happens on that campus,” the rst selectman
concluded, handing over his microphone.

The townspeople started debating, passing around the mic. It looked like the
proceedings could go on for hours.

But the fate of Fair eld Hills had already been argued around every corner in
town, for years; it was time to make a choice. Af er a few more voiced their
positions, the mic was passed to a young woman from Sandy Hook with dark
hair, who said simply, “We don’t wanna be here ‘til midnight.” She motioned for
the vote to be counted, then and there. And it was.

268
Narrowly, the town approved the rst selectman’s plan. All of the acreage that
Connecticut had purchased from the farmers in the 1920s came back into the
village’s hands. The pearl was nally restored, and Newtown’s path to the future
was set.

***
The other vote that night concerned the land just across from Fair eld Hills — a
small parcel that the town already got back from Connecticut, as part of the deal
when they nally let the state build the prison down the hill.

The plan for it was put together by the long-serving Superintendent of Newtown
School District, Dr. John Reed. The price tag Reed had submitted — $27 million
— was even higher than the one for Fair eld Hills, but the more signi cant
di ference was, nobody in the auditorium could dare deny that this one was
urgent: Newtown needed a new school.

The town’s reputation as a “great place to raise kids” had spread so far and so wide
that it had become a burden; their four elementary schools were all over-capacity,
and every year, all four sent another batch of kids to crowd the halls together at
Newtown Middle School — the town’s only public school for 6th, 7th, and 8th
graders.

Dr. Reed’s plan was to build a bridge: an intermediate school that taught all of the
town’s 5th and 6th graders. It would ease the students’ always-fraught social
transition to middle school, while at the same time alleviating the crowding at
both ends of the bridge.

Some doubted the plan’s e fectiveness. They preferred building a second middle
school, or expanding one of the existing elementary buildings. Something less
disruptive. In the lead-up to the town meeting, one such justi cation for a scaled-
back solution was advanced by a Newtown Bee “Letter to the Editor”:

We realize th not efficient putting all 5th and 6th graders in one
school, but we think one of the many lessons from Columbine that our
children are not cars and our schools are not factori . They need a sense
of community to thrive. They need to feel that they belong. They need to
spend their days in a place where they are known. It’s hard to get these
things when their 5th grade class one of nineteen 5th grade class in a
building that they are only in for two years.

Dr. Reed had been around a long time. He was the longest-serving school
superintendent in the state, and he had learned to be patient with Newtown. But

269
at the last moment, even he was experiencing doubts about the town’s acceptance
of his vision.

When the votes were called, and his plan was approved, Dr. Reed sprang to his
feet, overcome by the ful llment of his wish, and he embraced everyone around
him, from the school board members, to the voters, to even a reporter from the
Newtown Bee. “Now we have to go out and get a wonderful school built,” he told
the local journalist, as written in the next morning’s edition. “I’m euphoric, but
we’ve got 18 big months ahead of us.”

270
 25. Treegap

Fall 2002
Sandy Hook Elementary School
The class passed a grey T-shirt from desk to desk, along with a red magic marker.
Each pupil signed their name on the front of the shirt, steadily forming a roll-call
of all of the 5th grade class, under the logo SANDY HOOK SCHOOL. When the
shirt stopped at Adam’s desk, he signed it in tiny, careful, cursive.

They weren’t long into the school year then, in the Fall of 2002, but many of the
names Adam saw surrounding his own, he would have recognized from as far
back as the rst grade — when they crowded around the Culture Corner together,
in Mrs. Lavelle’s class. The elementary school in Sandy Hook had been the most
consistent and stable institution in Adam’s young life, a period when both his
family and the school’s sta f put great e fort into getting him acclimated to society.
It was were where he learned to speak — when he wanted to.

His classmates from SHES would remember him as the quiet kid in the room, an
“extremely introverted” presence. Dan Lynch, another name scribbled on the t-
shirt, would recall to USA Today that Adam was “really skittish, always anxious
and nervous.” One memory in particular stood out: the f h grade was when
Newtown scheduled sex-ed classes for their students, and during the class’s
viewing of an educational video on the miracle of life, the Lanza kid suddenly
stood up from his desk, said that he was “about to throw up,” and rushed out of
the room.

Dan never saw Adam getting bullied, though; for himself, he thought well of his
quiet classmate: “A nice kid when he did talk to you.”

In their class photo, Adam appears somewhat frightened, standing rigidly with his
arms at his side, his shoulders slouched. He is wearing a striped polo shirt, several
sizes too big. Once again, the teacher has positioned him immediately within
arm’s reach.

271
The Child Advocate would nd that the school’s records from this year
documented that Adam had “exhibited good e fort” and was able to apply all of
his grade-level concepts and skills by himself. Socially, he showed appropriate
classroom behavior, but his teachers felt he “struggled initiating conversation with
anyone.”

***
Sandy Hook's 5th graders all kept reading journals that fall. A section from
Adam’s records his thoughts, over a series of handwritten pages, as they read
Natalia Babbit's 1975 classic children's novel, Tuck Everlasting.

The book tells the story of a ten-year-old girl named Winnie Foster, who lives in
the bucolic pastoral village of Treegap, sometime in the 1880s. One day, for the
rst time, she ventures out beyond the fence line of her home and into a secluded
forest, where she happens upon a young man, pitching stones into a spring. As it
turns out, the spring is an actual “fountain of youth,” and the young man, Jesse
Tuck, has been immortal ever since he drank from it eighty years before (hence,
the story’s title). The rest of the Tuck family soon discovers that Winnie knows
the secret of the magic spring, and they take the frightened girl back to their farm,
hoping to keep her away from Treegap long enough for them to explain why she
should learn from their mistake — and never, ever drink from the Treegap spring.

The Connecticut State Police would later bookmark a section of Adam’s reading
journal, from the day he read Chapter Twelve of Tuck Everlasting: a scene in
which Angus Tuck, the patriarch of the family, takes Winnie out on his rowboat.

Drif ing along the surface of a forest pond, its waters calm, Angus shares his
beliefs about the fundamental principles of life on earth: “It’s a wheel, Winnie.
Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it,
and the bugs, and the sh, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the
same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always
moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it .” The only
exceptions, then, were the Tucks, who drank the water from the spring.

As they drif further down the river, and Angus shares more of his philosophy on
mortality, it is enough to bring Winnie to the brink of an existential crisis:

“We ain’t part of the wheel no more. Dropped off, Winnie. Le

behind. And everywhere around , things moving and growing and
changing. You, for instance. A child now, but someday a woman. And
a er that, moving on to make room for the new children.”

272
 Winnie blinked, and all at once her mind w drowned with
understanding of what he w saying. For she — y , even she — would
go out of the world willy-nilly someday. Just go out, like the flame of a
candle, and no use protesting. It w a certainty. She would try very
hard not to think of it, but sometim , now, it would be forced upon
her.

She raged against it, helpless and insulted, and blurted at last, “I
don’t want to die.”

The elder Tuck acknowledges Winnie’s fears. He understands the burden she is
working through; he also knows that drinking the water will not make it go away.
“It’s something you don’t nd out how you feel until af erwards,” he says. “If
people knowed about the spring down there in Treegap, they’d all come running
like pigs to slop. They’d trample each other, trying to get some of that water.
That’d be bad enough, but af erwards — can you imagine? All the little ones little
forever, all the old ones old forever. Can you picture what that means? Forever?”

Later, when Winnie goes shing with Jesse’s brother, Miles, a mosquito lands on
her knee. She slaps at it, then thinks to herself, the gravity of the Treegap situation
becoming clearer: “If all the mosquitoes lived forever — and if they kept on
having babies! — it would be terrible. The Tucks were right.” With that, she
decides to keep the magic spring’s powers a secret, for the good of the planet.

Sitting in the classroom at Sandy Hook, with these themes on his mind (as well as
the English nursery rhyme Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin), Adam picked
up his pencil and wrote a poem:

No frogs, No birds.

too many ants are coming

Ants overpopulate.

Ants dig dirt.

dirt grows plants.

Cock Robin died.

273
 Be die.

ants feed be to babi .

Ants will overtake to win.

One baby died.

3 e s won’t hatch

Adam continued reading Tuck Everlasting as the weeks went past. It turned out
that when the Tucks had revealed the secret of the Treegap spring to Winnie, and
brought her back to their cottage, that a mysterious “Man in a Yellow Suit” had
been secretly following them, listening.

In Chapter 19, the man suddenly appears on the Tuck family’s doorstep, and
announces that he is taking Winnie back to her family, who have promised to sell
him the land in Treegap in return. The Man in the Yellow Suit proudly announces
to Winnie and the Tucks, “I’m going to sell the water,” and “not just to anybody.
Only to certain people who deserve it. And it will be very, very expensive. But who
wouldn’t give a fortune to live forever?”

The Man in the Yellow Suit then sets out to collect his bounty, taking Winnie
harshly by the arm. Suddenly, Mae Tuck, the family’s matriarch, moves to stop the
sinister man, swinging the butt of the family shotgun at his head — and in icting
a blow that soon proves fatal.

On a Friday in December, Adam wrote in his journal about Chapter 19. In the
photos released by forensic investigators of these pages, one section is illegible, but
it is clear that Adam agreed with Mae’s actions:

Dec/6/02

I think Mae w justified to hit the man in the yellow. The world w
in her hands, because if everyone drank the water, the world would be
overpopulated but no one would think of that at first, they would just
rush to buy the water and drink it. Th w [xxxxxxxxx] if you are
mad at someone, it would be immortality and some people could abuse
that ability. Actually the Man in the Yellow Suit the real kidnapper.
Winnie wanted to go with The Tucks but did not with the man. I would
have done the same thing Mae just did.

274
On the opposite page, Adam drew a picture of the scene. At the bottom, he
scribbled a small diagram depicting the cottage, with ve stick gures (each of the
Tucks, and Winnie). He lled the lef over majority of the page with an arresting
drawing: the Man in the Yellow Suit, standing in the cottage doorway and
announcing to the Tucks:

I’m

coming

in

your

house

now!

Later entries in his reading journal cover other books: Adam drew a Venn diagram
sorting the characters from the 1976 novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry into
“good,” “bad,” and an overlapping grey. On another page, he documented the
plot to Dragonslayer, a novelization of the 1981 Disney fantasy lm.

Then, in a page-and-a-half essay, his clumsy block-handwriting details an event

from China’s military history — the “Battle of Wan,” as chronicled in the 14th
century historical legend, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The scene he describes
is one of the more violent from the wartime narrative, as a king’s lone bodyguard
fends o f an entire army, racking up a staggering body count in the process — a
detail that particularly caught the ten-year-old’s attention:

When the castle w about to be raided, Lord Dian Wei stood in front
of the enemy’s army and attacked. He had two halberds to hold them
off when they got chopped in half he pulled out h sword and when that
shattered something [xxx] happened. He actually picked up two corps
and swung them around like h halberds. When he w killed, the
enemy’s army still did not dare to pass the castle gat because of all the
damage th one man did.

Back home at 36 Yogananda, the Lanza family owned several copies of Romance of
the Three Kingdoms. (Adam was even playing video games based on the same
source material at this time, including an entry in the Dynasty Warriors series that

275
depicts this exact battle, among many others.) And scraps of childhood artwork
suggest that Adam’s xation on ancient Chinese military history indeed had deep
roots: drawings of warriors, each labeled with names from the legends, and each of
them wielding a giant sword.

Newtown High School

On the other side of Interstate 84, Newtown High School’s security director, a
man named Richard Novia, was inspecting the school’s brand-new, 23-camera
surveillance system, just installed at a cost to the town of $40,000.

The cameras were positioned to show both the hallways and exterior areas of the
school, and from his security post, Mr. Novia could pan and zoom each viewpoint
individually, to see anywhere in the school where there might be trouble. Mr.
Novia had been in his role at NHS for over a decade, and had of en claimed that
there were cameras in the ceilings — but the fall of 2002 was the rst time he
would not be blu ng.

Among the new faces passing by on the screens that year would be Adam’s
brother Ryan, walking past the spot where the weeping red cherry tree and the
columbine owers were planted, for the rst day of his Freshman year.

276
 26. Bushmaster

October 7, 2002
Benjamin Tasker Middle School — Bowie, Maryland
A woman stopped her car across the street from the middle school, and dropped
o f her thirteen-year-old nephew. The boy had been suspended from riding the
school bus for a week, for eating candy, so he needed the ride. It was 8:09am, and
class was about to start.

The boy set down his book bag for a moment on the sidewalk, looking up to wave
to his aunt as she started to drive away — suddenly, a gunshot rang out. There was
a scream, and he fell to the pavement.

The boy’s aunt was terri ed and confused, the gunshot seeming to have come
from nowhere. But she remained focused. She slammed on her brakes, put the car
in reverse, went back and picked up her injured nephew, and then raced him to
the hospital while calling 9-1-1.

***
The boy was badly injured, but he would survive. Many others that fall of 2002
were not so lucky — the attack on Benjamin Tasker Middle School was the ninth
in a series of seemingly random ambush attacks, scattered across the capitol
region, a murder spree that the press attributed to an unidenti ed “Beltway
Sniper.” Whoever it was, they had the entire country’s attention, and the police
desperate for clues.

The forensics team found a single shell-casing, 75 yards down the street from the
middle school. Alongside the brass cylinder, they found a tarot card, face down.
On the back of the card, the sniper had written “For you Mr. police” and “Do not
release to the press.”

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The o cer ipped the card over; it was the “Death” card, and above the grim
reaper, the shooter had written “Call me God.”

Later that day, “god” gave his demands: ten million dollars, and a message that
was to be read by police on live television that af ernoon: “Your children are not
safe anywhere, at any time.” Until the sniper got what they wanted, they were
going to keep shooting.

From wound ballistics, authorities already knew that the shooter always used a
.223 ri e (a fact con rmed by the recovered shell casing), but the investigators
could not identify the exact weapon, since no one had yet seen just where, exactly,
the shots came from. Of en, a person shot by the sniper was surrounded by
witnesses, but still, there was no suspect, and no description. The bullets just
seemed to come from thin air.

The FBI ran with a theory that the shooter was ring from within a vehicle, and
sent out a press release urging the public to be on the lookout for a white van, or
white box truck, as some witnesses reported seeing near several of the attacks. In
the same notice, the police warned against believing any of the rumors that they
might have identi ed the murder weapon, with the Chief of Police stressing, “We
have to keep in mind that weapons are interchangeable, as are vehicles. Please
don’t narrow your focus to just one weapon.”

***
The break in the case nally came when the white truck was ruled out, and the
shooter’s vehicle was instead identi ed as a dark blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, with
New Jersey plates. The same car had been seen at a red light near Benjamin Tasker
Middle School, shortly before the “Death card” was dropped.

It wasn’t long af er the bulletin went out that a trucker driving through Maryland
spotted the blue car at a rest area, and called 9-1-1. Within minutes, police had the
vehicle surrounded, and were arresting the two men sleeping inside. They were a
team; a getaway driver that doubled as a spotter, and the gunman. The “Beltway
Sniper’s” reign of terror was over.

As the o cers carted the sniper team o f to jail, investigators searched the Caprice,
and discovered that the upholstery and cushioning of the car’s backseat had been
cut away, to accommodate a sniping position that red through a small hole
drilled through the trunk. Opening that trunk, they found the murder weapon,
ready for the next stealth attack: a Bushmaster XM15-E2S. In news reports, the
gun was of en referred to by its broader category in the rearms lexicon: an AR-15.

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The shooters were identi ed, and suddenly, the question of just how they got
possession of the ri e loomed much more ominously; the older shooter had a
domestic violence conviction, and the younger shooter wasn’t eighteen. So there
was no way they could have bought the Bushmaster legally.

The gun in the trunk had its serial number, L284320, stamped on its barrel, so the
ATF ran a check for its purchaser — but to their surprise, they found that there
was no corresponding “Federal Firearms License” (FFL) transfer on le. The ri e
in question had gone missing, having vanished sometime af er it lef the factory.

Bushmaster Headquarters — Windham, Maine

“The sad thing is the shooter, who sounds like a pretty deranged individual, got a
hold of our ri e,” said an executive from Bushmaster to the Bangor Daily News.
As ATF agents were presenting search warrants for his company’s records, the rep
added that the same model of ri e that the D.C. snipers wielded “is also used by
tens of thousands of people and law enforcement agencies. We’re just as upset as
everyone else that this crazy man got a hold of it.”

Bushmaster located the serial number in their les, and said they had sold the gun
to a distributor in Washington State, who then sold it to a gun store in Tacoma.
The ATF sent a query to Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply for the name of the person to
whom they had sold the AR-15, and then, they found the problem: Bull’s Eye had
no record that the gun was ever sold, and could not explain how it had vanished
from their shelves.

***
The lobbyists and legal organizations in favor of gun control were still bruised
from the collapse of the Boston Agreement, and the sti ing of their municipal
lawsuits. Now they saw an opportunity for justice; the boy who was injured
outside of the middle school, along with several other survivors and families of the
DC Sniper’s victims, might have had grounds for a liability case, somewhere along
the murder weapon’s failed chain of custody. “Bushmaster deliberately continued
to utilize Bull’s Eye as a Bushmaster gun dealer and supplied it with as many guns
as Bull’s Eye wanted,” their court ling would read, “despite years of audits by the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms showing that Bull’s Eye had dozens of
missing guns.”

As the D.C. Sniper lawsuit proceeded, from Newtown, the NSSF were watching
very closely; they had been planning their legal endgame for years, and were
almost ready to make their move.

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 27. The Big Book of
Granny

December 23, 2002

Construction Site o Wasserman Road — Newtown, Connecticut
Two days before Christmas, Dr. John Reed toured the campus of the new
intermediate school, o f Mile Hill Road. He had retired over the summer, capping
a 20-year career in Newtown, and though he had visited this site of en over the
past few months, it had just been a work-in-progress then. Now, he was nally
seeing his vision brought to life.

The 170,000 square-foot facility was built into the side of the hill, with the
school’s entrance and shared areas at the top, and with two symmetrical wings —
“houses,” as the architect called them — extending down the slope, connected at
an angle around a triangular courtyard. One house held the 5th grade classrooms,
and the other the 6th grade. The simplicity of this layout, the town hoped, would
help the intermediate school serve its function as a half-step, between the
elementary and middle school systems.

The man who would be replacing Dr. Reed as superintendent, 46-year-old Evan
Pitko f, had been meticulously maintaining his “punch lists” all year, as the
contractors steadily completed each step in the new school’s preparation; nally,
the only major piece that the school was still missing was a name. Then, in
October 2002, John Reed learned that the school would be named in his honor;
the traditional hand-carved, wooden sign, painted white and facing Mile Hill
Road, would be directing the town’s school buses to “Reed Intermediate School.”
The rst day of class was scheduled for January 6, 2003.

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Sandy Hook Elementary School
Something truly unexpected happened in Adam’s f h grade year: he made a
friend. With his shyness, this alone would have been positive news, but even
better, his new friend happened to live right in the neighborhood.

The other boy’s mother, when asked about Adam years later, would remember
her son’s classmate well. She says that Adam and her son would ride bikes around
Sandy Hook, and do “boy stu ” together. When the school assigned a team
project, the two would inevitably pair up, and she remembers Adam coming over
to visit for several homework sessions. She thought him to be a “normal and
polite” boy — and at least once, she even sent her own son over to 36 Yogananda,
where the boy met Nancy; when he returned home, the boy did not report seeing
anything out of the ordinary during his time in the yellow house.

***
Years later, a peculiar document would be recovered, from an unspeci ed location
inside 36 Yogananda. It is a custom-made, spiral-bound book, with a purple cover,
bearing a title “The Big Book of Granny” across the top. At the bottom is Adam’s
name, and that of his friend — the authors. In the middle, there is a crude MS
Paint-style drawing of a human gure with a bell-shaped torso, her hair in a bun,
her face in an angry expression, and holding her cane out to the side by its handle,
as if the cane were a gun. This is, clearly, “Granny.”

Above the drawing, the boys added some ne-print:

Granny a trademark symbol of [REDACTED] the creator. Adam

Lanza holds all rights to all of the following content. [REDACTED]
the creator of the Granny Picture and holds all rights to it.

When investigators eventually opened the Big Book of Granny, years af er it was
printed, they were shocked at what they found. The homemade book is, in the
words of the Child Advocate, “a very dramatic text, lled with images and
narrative relating child murder, cannibalism, and taxidermy.” Their reports would
repeatedly emphasize the book’s excessively graphic content: “Clinical reviewers of
this work have noted that the violence depicted far exceeds that typically found in
the drawings and creative writing of boys of this age.”

***
As cataloged into evidence, the Big Book of Granny is divided into four sections.

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The rst section of the book is three pages long, and consists of 85 “Granny Jokes”
— each of them a “degrading statement beginning with ‘Granny!’”

The second section appears equally innocuous: a list of advertisements for

“Granny Products of the Future,” such as “Granny Action Figure” and “Granny
Oats,” complete with prices for each product, and a phone number for ordering.

The third section of the book is labeled as “Granny’s Clubhouse of Happy

Children.” It consists of “typed dialog from an imaginary TV show,” starring the
character of Granny, her son who uses the stage name “Bobolicious,” and “several
children.” The premise of the show appears to be that the “Granny” character is
so aged that her speech is unintelligible, but the reader/viewer can infer what she
is saying from the reactions of other characters, who are able to understand her.
It's a comic setup somewhat reminiscent of Han Solo and Chewbacca — but the
similarities end there. In the world of The Big Book of Granny, all of the child
characters hate and torment Granny, and Granny is a cruel person who uses her
gun to shoot at seemingly anyone who appears on the show.

As the imaginary show begins, Bobolicious introduces himself to the audience of

children. He tells the children he hears a noise, and one of them suggests it was
"Billy's atulence." But then another of them says they hear it getting closer:

Bobolicio : ...You hear a noise too!? What it!?

Children: ...

Bobolicio : It's Granny! That's right! Let's say that in Spanish! To say
Granny in Spanish, say dumbo!.... Say it with me! Dumbo! That's right!
Good Spanish! ...Granny.....Granny! Dont point that at the children!
Granny! Granny! No! Don't pull that tri er! No!

Children: [laughter]

Billy: No, Granny! Don't throw that match so close to me! (Boom)!

(Silence)

Bobolicio : Are all you little blood-sucking demons okay!?

In the next “episode,” Bobolicious tells the children, “Remember last time when
everyone was slaughtered!? Well…You bread-brain leeches gave me 75 years of
prison for that so called ‘tragedy’! I was having fun!”

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The “game” section of the show then begins, and a new character named “Dora
the Beserker” (a take-o f on the Nickelodeon TV character Dora the Explorer) is
introduced:

Bobolicio : Hi, Granny! What are we going to play today!?

Granny: AAARQU!

Bobolicio : Hide and go Die!? How do you play!?

Dora the Beserker: All you do hide, children! When I find you, you'll
get a treat!

The children go to their hiding spots.

Dora the Beserker: Granny! Shoot them!

Granny: AARQU! (Bang Bang Bang)

Bobolicio : Hey! You're killing the children, which mak *me* go to

jail! ...Can I help?

Once the "game" is over, as the boys write, “every child that’s still alive” comes out
of their hiding places. One of these is the recurring character “Mommy's Boy,”
who had been searching for his mother throughout the story:

Mommy's Boy: I...I...I FOUND MY MOMMY!

Mommy: Shut up, kid! I've been trying to run away from you th
whole time! You're such a loser! I hate you and just want you to go away
forever!

Mommy's Boy:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! IT CAN'T
BE TRUE!

Mommy: I hope I never see you again!

The nal section of the Big Book of Granny is entitled simply “Adventures of
Granny.” There are eight chapters, all of which involve a dialog between Granny

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and “Granny’s Son” (now without the “Bobolicious” stage name), with other
characters dropping in and out.

In chapter one, Granny and Granny’s Son rob a bank. During the robbery,
Granny shoots people with her ri e-cane, as depicted on the book’s cover, before a
character “Steinbrenner” (apparently a portrayal of the famed Yankees owner, or
the recurring Seinfeld character based on him) appears:

Steinbrenner: I am outside with a stick of dynamite! I will throw it in

and everyone will die! ...But I need a match... Y ! I found the one in my
pocket that I w going to use to light the dynamite which I will use to
kill everyone. Bye-Bye, Granny! (He throws the dynamite in).

Mayor: Oh no! That dynamite! (Boom)

Granny's Son: Granny! Everyone dead except you and me! ...Let's take
the bank's money! (They take all the money).

Granny and her son then go back home, and take naps. When Granny wakes up,
she shouts for her son to fetch the shotgun, to protect her from Steinbrenner, but
Granny’s Son becomes annoyed with her:

Granny: AAARQU!

Granny's Son: Shut up! I'll give you one more chance!

Granny: AAARQU!

Granny's Son: What h more brains than Granny with a shotgun to its
face!? The wall behind it!

(He shoots Granny).

Granny: PICKAW!

Granny's Son: I told you you couldn't catch a bullet in your teeth!

In the second chapter, Granny and Granny’s Son go on a boat ride. Granny falls
out of the boat, so Granny’s Son throws her a otation device; it’s made of
concrete, and Granny sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

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In the third chapter, Granny and Granny’s Son abduct "Mommy's Boy," and then
attempt to stu f him, to put on their mantle. A struggle ensues, and Granny kicks
the boy into the home’s replace, where he begins to burn. The boy jumps out of
the re, and then Granny punches him in the face, and shoots at him three times
with her ri e cane, missing each time. Finally, Granny throws out one of the
Granny Action Figures from the beginning of the book; with the boy distracted,
the action gure comes alive and shoots him. Granny’s Son says “Yay! Now we can
hang it!”

In chapter four, Granny and Granny’s Son go to a hockey game. Granny goes
onto the ice, punches one of the players, and then shoots him with her ri e cane.

In chapter ve, Granny goes to a Marine boot camp, and meets a returning
character:

Dora the Beserker: I'm Dora the Beserker! I love hurting children!

Swiper the Racoon: And I'm swiper the Racoon.

Mommy's Boy: Mommy! I thought that their nam were Dora the
Explore-

Snitch: I'm telling you! You're going to have such a law-suit!

Granny: AAARQU!

Translator: Granny wants to know if you would assassinate Soldier

Larry at the stroke of midnight, Dora.

Dora the Beserker: Of course!

Soldier Larry: Ahh! Now I know I'm gonna die! (Soldier Larry jumps
over-board).

Granny: AARQU!

Translator: She says nevermind.

Dora the Beserker: Oh...But...I like hurting people...Especially

children...

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When Granny escapes boot camp and goes home to Granny’s Son, she tells him
that she lef boot camp “because she killed the entire Marine legion.”

Chapter six begins with a group of characters, many with “fatty” in their name,
discussing where to go eat. Much of the dialogue in this chapter suggests a
preoccupation with body image, and nutrition:

Old Fatty: Say, would you all like to go to that brand new Chinese
restaurant in the Restaurant Mini-Mall?

Granny: AAARQU!

Old Fatty: I.. I beg your pardon! I am certainly not addicted to food! I
have never been overweight and never will! You and your little son of
yours put together are 3 tim heavier than I am!

Later, Dora the Beserker is driving, when she comes upon Granny, and Granny’s
Son, on the side of the road. Dora picks them up, and tells Granny that they must
go to the daycare center. When they arrive there, Dora hatches a plan with Swiper
the Raccoon:

Dora the Beserker: Now, Swiper. You give me the 'thing', and run in.
You be the distraction. Then, I'll run in... We're here. Go!

(Swiper runs into the daycare center).

Bobby: Cute...

Swiper the Racoon: Follow me to the front of the room, children!

Junior: Okay...

Swiper the Racoon: Now!

Dora the Beserker: Let's hurt children!

Mary: Oh no. We be doomed...

The scene soon changes to a mall food court, where another familiar hazard
returns: “Ahh! Let's get out of here! The fat is expanding! It's pushing out the
walls! [...] Get away from me, atomic fat!”

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In chapter seven, Granny and Granny’s Son go to visit Dora the Beserker, and they
all go on an adventure to nd someone named, simply, “Drunk.” During the
search, they battle a rooster, and have to call upon a bag full of weapons, with each
one speci ed: “A handgun, AK-47, M16 ri e, rocket launcher, musket and
shotgun.”

In chapter eight, Granny and Granny’s Son gain the use of a time machine. They
go to the past, and meet the members of The Beatles. Granny then murders each
one, and says that she “kills every bug she sees.” At the conclusion of the Big Book
of Granny, the authors note that the characters Granny and Granny’s Son had
been arrested for their crimes, and “sentenced to 75 years in jail for killing The
Beatles.”

***
There are con icting accounts regarding the circumstances behind the Big Book
of Granny’s creation. The state police write vaguely that the book was “related to a
class project,” and the way it was printed and bound shows the creators had access
to the same kind of equipment that the Newtown School District did indeed
own, and had made available for elementary school assignments at the time. Still,
it is not clear if the book itself was ever turned in — or, if the two boys instead
created it by themselves, outside of the Sandy Hook school curriculum. There are
only clues.

The text contains several meta-jokes, in which the characters censor themselves, in
a manner suggesting that the authors wrote it to be shared. One instance appears
in the sequence where Granny and Granny’s Son have kicked a boy into their
replace:

Mommy’s Boy: Oo ! Wahhhhhhhh! Mommy! I’m burning! Where are

you!?

Granny’s Son: Granny! It jumped out! Punch it in the face!

Granny: AAARQU!

Granny’s son: You’re right! We would be banned from being read if you
did that in detailed performance!

Meanwhile, a sub-section of the document, titled “Granny learn how to write,”

does appear to be in the context of a class assignment, perhaps having started with
a template: it lists the various forms of english sentences, along with “Granny”
lines as examples — such as “Declarative: Granny’s shades are black.”

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At the end of this section, Granny herself appears one last time, to deliver a
strange commentary on the value of writing in sentences:

The importance of a sentence the fact the [sic] we have the perennial
ability to communicate amongst ourselv . Without sentenc , the world
would have billions of neandrathals even dumber than the gorill in
2001: A space Oddysey before the monolith w planted by the extra
terrestrials. With sentenc , we can buy items from plac , talk on our
1970's cellphone, and even read th right now!

~Granny breath loudly and falls over

Whatever the case, Adam’s parents were aware of the book at the time, if not its
exact contents; Peter Lanza would later give a lengthy interview to writer Andrew
Solomon, and would tell him that Adam “tried to sell copies of the book at school
and got in trouble,” while the Child Advocate would claim in their own report
that Adam “may have attempted to ‘sell’ the book to peers for 25 cents, and that a
school administrator spoke to Mrs. Lanza about the matter.” (Also among the
documents later seized from 36 Yogananda, along with the Big Book of Granny, is
an undated holiday card, which includes a hand-drawn depiction of the same
“Granny” gure — this time wishing Nancy a happy Mother’s Day.)

Even to Connecticut’s team of seen-it-all child psychologists in 2014, the book

would stand out, “a text marked by extreme thoughts of violence that should have
signi ed a need for intervention and evaluation.” But if indeed a school o cial
had ever looked at the Big Book of Granny, there’s no sign that they brought it to
the attention of the school psychiatrist at Sandy Hook, nor any other mental
health professional.

It is di cult, in retrospect, to quantify exactly what level of concern would have

made a di ference; the book’s contents may have been interpreted in any number
of ways. But to the doctors working with the Child Advocate’s o ce, the book
showed “a boy who is struggling with disturbing thoughts of extreme violence
that seem to have poured out in the form of stories and visual images of a
caregiver and child-like character who are alternately victimized by and victimizers
of each other.” This suggests that “on some level,” by age ten, Adam Lanza was
“deeply troubled by feelings of rage, hate, and (at least unconscious) murderous
impulses.”

***
Eventually, in 2013, the authorities would track down the co-author of the Granny
book. The boy (now a young man) appeared to have a quite detailed memory of

288
the day he and Adam began writing the Big Book of Granny: he said that the
book had been created as part of a “group” assignment, involving several other
students, all pitching ideas to Adam for inclusion in the story. The co-author
remembers that they had all agreed to write the story in a “Calvin and Hobb
style,” and that he drew the cover art himself. In his memory, the book was turned
in, an actual assignment — the school did the binding, and he and Adam each
received a grade.

The co-author sharply deviated from his own mother’s testimony, in a major
aspect: he had never, he claimed, been to Adam’s house, and Adam had never
been to his. They were not friends, and never rode bikes together — they never
interacted outside of school at all. He simply could not account for his mother’s
markedly di ferent recollections about his friendship with the boy in the yellow
house.

This 2013 interview would be conducted at the former student’s assigned

probation o ce; the book’s co-author had experienced his own problems since
those days in 2002, and he was now living “in a group home under constant
supervision,” having been diagnosed with a mental illness as the result of an
unrelated case, involving unspeci ed “motor vehicle charges.”

***
When Adam and his friend signed their names on the t-shirt passing around
Sandy Hook Elementary, it was not just a commemoration of their last class
together: theirs would be the very last f h grade class ever at Sandy Hook
Elementary. And they weren’t even going to nish the school year there; with the
completion of Reed Intermediate School, they, like all of the town’s f h and sixth
grade students, would imminently be transferred to their new school, right af er
winter break. And while Adam and his friend would thus still be attending the
same school together, the class lists had already been announced: they had
di ferent teachers. Whatever level their friendship had truly reached, af er the
winter break, it was over. Adam was alone again.

Late in December of 2002, Adam nished his last day as a student at Sandy Hook
Elementary. The school's psychologist — who had personally overseen each
meeting of his Planning and Placement Team, and thus communicated with
Nancy many times — may not have had much face-to-face interaction with the
boy. If she did give him any thought, as he walked out the school's front entrance
for the last time, she probably assumed that they would never cross paths again.

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 28. Shield

May 8, 2003
Lincoln Monument — Washington, D.C.
“As we dedicate ourselves to growing the hunting and shooting sports, we must
also commit ourselves to preserving our rearms freedom.”

Doug Painter, the President of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (af er
Bob Delfay had retired in 2000), was lming scenes for a video, one meant for gun
industry companies that had contributed to the Heritage Fund. Pacing along the
base of the columns fronting the Lincoln Monument, he told the camera, “This
past year, the Heritage Fund focused its e forts and its resources in building
support for critically important legislation: the Firearms Lawsuit Prevention Act.”

The video then cuts to images from the NSSF's mailers. “We mounted a multi-
million dollar print campaign to build grassroots support for this legislation,”
Painter continues, as a depiction of the United State Capitol Building appears,
overlaid with the text “Stop Lawsuit Abuse.” Next, there is a blindfolded gure of
Justice holding her scales, with the 2nd Amendment on one side — and on the
other, a rat wearing a suit (identi ed as a “TRIAL LAWYER” by the label on his
briefcase). Painter then boasts that his team “reached many more millions through
a special TV spot that aired nationwide on the outdoor TV networks.”

In that commercial, Painter’s message is tailored di ferently. He is now seated next

to a camp re in the woods, and has shed his overcoat and slacks to dress in
camou aged hunting gear, a bolt-action ri e at his side:

When a criminal us a gun in a crime, who’s at fault? Believe it or not,

there are those who are trying to pin the blame on the compani who
make firearms. Their goal: to sue America’s firearms industry out of
business.

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 A backdoor attack on your firearm freedoms? You bet it ! To put an
end to these junk lawsuits, contact your U.S. Senators and voice your
support for Senate Bill 659!

The NSSF had been successful in ghting o f the mayors in court, but here, in
early 2003, they unveiled their legislative end-game: what Painter referred to as the
Firearms Lawsuit Prevention Act, but what ultimately became known as the 2003
Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).

***
The PLCAA was an ambitious e fort, expanding the concept of Texas’s “shield
law” to a national scale. uite simply, the PLCAA would prohibit any civil
lawsuit against any gun manufacturer (or distributor, dealer, or importer) for the
harm caused by any unlawful misuse of a legally-sold gun, “when the product
functioned as designed and intended.” The rule would take immediate e fect, even
on cases still at trial — the remaining municipal lawsuits would all disappear, and
there would no more on the way to replace them.

Just then, as the NSSF’s shield law was making its way to the Senate oor, the
capital region was suddenly gripped in terror by the unfolding “Beltway Sniper”
case; when the ATF traced the Bushmaster from the blue Caprice’s trunk, it was
even more bad news for the industry. Suddenly, it was not a good time for gun
companies to try and shield themselves from all civil lawsuits. The bill’s supporters
suddenly decided to hold back.

But by the next spring, the news headlines had mostly moved on, focusing more
on the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The supporters of the
PLCAA decided it was time to make their move, and brought the bill to the oor.

Immediately, a representative from Illinois made the connection:

The famili of the victims who were killed by the DC snipers believe the
gun dealer should be held liable and accountable for its negligence in
selling guns without keeping the records that are required. And the
Senator from Rhode Island telling me we are bringing a bill to the
floor of the Senate to exempt the gun dealer who sold the weapon that
killed these innocent people in the Washington, DC area from liability.
Is that what th debate all about?

The congressman who was sponsoring the shield law, a senator from Idaho,
argued that the gun dealer in Tacoma still faced consequences for losing the
murder weapon, since the ATF would still possess the power to shut them down

291
due to their poor record keeping. The question was: should the victims be allowed
to sue Bushmaster, just because a gun store lost track of a product the company had
legally manufactured?

The PLCAA’s opposition tried to dilute the bill, in one instance attaching
legislation that would require handgun manufacturers to include trigger locks
with each gun they sold, just like the campaign President Bush had picked up
from the NSSF’s Project Homesafe.

The senator from Idaho objected to this too, highlighting what he saw as the
limitations of such safety measures:

Gun locks are designed to address what I believe a narrow range of

threats. At the same time, when a child’s life lost, how tragic it , and
all of understand that. Of course, then it mak tremendo news and
the world wonders why th happening. The reason it happens
because in many instanc there w a parent who w less than
responsible, who really didn’t lock that gun up.

At the same time, let’s also recognize the phenomenal complication

involved. Sometim guns are placed in locations in hom for security
and for safety, and easy access critically important if that gun to be
used for [that] purpose. At the same time, that do not deny the
responsibility that important. Gun locks address that narrow range of
threats. Clearly, they will deter the casual curiosity of a small child far
more readily than it will deter what I say the committed thief, or the
person bent on murder and mayhem.

Larry Keane, the Vice President of the NSSF, entered the Senate chamber on
April 2, to help defend his shield law. Ahead of him in the list of speakers, he
would have spotted an ally from Connecticut: the VP and general counsel for Colt
Manufacturing Company.

The originators of the AR-15 — and its infamous cousin, the Sporter — were still
emerging from the dark days of bankruptcy in 2003, the state having recently sold
their interest in the company. Colt's executive argued at the hearing that, in light
of the ongoing War on Terror, the anti-gun forces and their legal onslaught
presented a threat not just to Colt’s balance sheets, but by extension, the security
of the United States:

As I walk through our plant, Colt workers stop me to ask how the war
going, and we post announcements about the success and battl that we
are fighting, but the war that our workers are asking or reading about

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 not that war. It the war we are fighting against these plaintiffs, spurred
on by plaintiffs’ trial lawyers. [...] We are dutifully helping to defend our
country when attacked and in tim of war. I ask that each of you help
in our time of war so that we can foc on making the best small arms
available for our men and women in uniform.

When Larry Keane’s time before the microphone came due, the NSSF man chose
to linger on the note struck by Colt, invoking the looming situation in Iraq as
cause for the government to protect the gun industry. He asked the chamber, “If
these companies are driven out of business, from whom will our military and law
enforcement purchase their rearms?” Turning to the nuts and bolts of the bill,
he continued, “It does not, as anti-gun interest groups have falsely alleged, close
the courthouse doors to those that have been injured by rearms that have been
illegally sold,” nor any of those injured with guns that were “supplied to one likely
to use the rearm in a manner involving an unreasonable risk of injury.”

The NSSF knew that their bill would meet erce resistance — including the
“poison amendment” tactics that had inadvertently banned the Sporter in
Connecticut. The Heritage Foundation had been plotting strategies around such
a move, and President Bush himself had even released an o cial statement
regarding the prospect, challenging the Senate to pass a “clean bill,” and warning
that “any amendment that would delay enactment of the bill beyond this year is
unacceptable.”

But a senator from California did it anyway.

She was no stranger to gun legislation, and in fact was more concerned with
another gun law that year: the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which she had
authored nearly ten years before. That piece of legislation had passed with a built-
in “sunset provision,” af er all, and the sand in the decade’s hourglass had almost
run out. The Californian now spied one last opportunity to save the federal gun
ban from expiring: she amended the pending shield law to include a renewal of
her gun ban. The legislative arithmetic immediately changed.

In the ensuing debate, the opposition to the NSSF showed that they could exploit
fears of terrorism just as adeptly as the gun lobby. One senator claimed, “A
terrorist training manual discovered by American soldiers in Afghanistan in 2001
advised Al aeda operatives to buy assault weapons in the United States and use
them against us,” which he cited as evidence that “terrorists are bent on exploiting
weaknesses in our gun laws.” A robust defense against terrorists, then, would
actually impel more restrictions on gun companies, contrary to what those same
companies were telling the people.

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The strategy of those seeking to restrain gun rights immediately proved e fective.
The until-then-supporters of the PLCAA balked at the poison amendment, and
turned against their own bill. Senators up for election that year were suddenly
checking their Blackberry smartphones, which lit up in unison with a warning
from none other than Wayne LaPierre, and the NRA: they were to reject the now-
compromised bill, or else they could expect to see their vote accounted for “in our
future evaluations and endorsements of candidates.” As all the senators well-
knew, such candidate ratings were the NRA’s true source of power; many of them
would not have been in o ce without theirs.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms act died in the Senate, losing a vote
of 90-8.

Larry Keane headed back home to Newtown — defeated, but not surrendered.
The NSSF’s Heritage Fund would live on, and as soon as he landed, his
organization would set about planning their next moves.

May 15, 2003

Bushmaster Headquarters — Windham, Maine
The one manufacturer receiving the most time in the spotlight over gun liability,
meanwhile, was openly indi ferent about renewing the now-attached Assault
Weapons Ban. A reporter from the Associated Press visited Bushmaster’s plant in
Windham, and learned that their sales had actually “increased 900 percent”
during the nine years since Clinton’s ban had gone into e fect.

Bushmaster’s strategy had been the same that Colt employed when they designed
the Sporter. “Basically, what we did was going forward, we eliminated all those
items that made it a banned rearm,” said Bushmaster’s VP of Administration.
“We adjusted our business, as to what was allowed and what wasn’t allowed, and
we’ve grown since then.”

The changes they made to their AR-15, he went on to say, were merely cosmetic,
and didn’t have any impact at all on the weapon’s performance. The company
employed the same strategy in states like Connecticut, which had their own
features-based assault weapons ban, and it hadn’t hurt sales there one bit. “From
our point of view,” Bushmaster’s VP concluded of the federal law, “extending the
ban is probably okay.”

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 29. On Time, On Budget

January 6, 2003
Reed Intermediate School — Newtown, Connecticut
The bridge was ready just in time for the crossing. The school’s bell rst sounded
on a frigid Monday morning, at 11:00am — ninety minutes late, but only due to
mother nature, blanketing Newtown with fresh snow during the night.

The convoy of school buses nally came into view, rolling down ueen Street to
Mile Hill Road: passing by the old Fair eld Hills campus, turning at the white
wooden sign, and curving around the looping driveway at the new school’s
entrance. The lead bus came to a stop at the curb, its door opening with a hiss,
and there disembarked a beaming Superintendent Pitko f, leading the way for the
students, and declaring it “one small step for a child, one giant leap for
Newtown,” his breath clouding in the af ernoon’s freezing air. The
Superintendent was wearing a badge on his overcoat that read “ON TIME, ON
BUDGET,” and he was carrying a large pair of novelty scissors to cut the
ceremonial ribbon over the doorway, o cially marking the beginning of the rst
day of class at Reed Intermediate School.

The ribbon fell, and the students came streaming in, pausing to gawk at the sheer
spectacle of their new facility, with its high polished-wood ceilings, rows of
elevators, and sleek computer labs. It was a like a whole di ferent world from
Sandy Hook Elementary School; the only part that was familiar were the ceramic
tiles that each of the students had decorated while at their previous school, now a
permanent part of the Reed edi ce. And for any kids that got lost in their strange
new surroundings, there were twenty parents stationed around the school that
rst morning, each in a recognizable red shirt, ready to guide them to their new,
spotless, classrooms.

As the mass of students rushed past, one of the guides happened to crane his neck
to see out the front windows; he was stunned to witness an unprecedented tra c
jam, snaking all the way up Mile Hill Road, past the NSSF’s o ces, and all the

295
way up to the agpole. It was the rst of many tra c jams that winter; soon, the
clog of school buses at the beginning and end of every Reed school day became
the scourge of Newtown.

As classes began, and the new routine set in, the students took their rst real steps
onto the bridge. In practice, Reed provided its mid-step (between the centralized
elementary-school, and scattered-classroom middle-school environments) by
grouping adjoining classrooms in pairs, and installing movable walls that
separated them, to modify the environment around the students. The walls
would be in place for focused instruction, and when a larger stage was needed, the
classroom could be uni ed, while an LCD projector descended from the ceiling to
display high-de nition video.

***
One of the rst bits of footage shown, two weeks af er the school’s grand opening,
was an interview with Natalie Babbitt, author of Tuck Everlasting. A teacher from
one of the classes back at Sandy Hook had taken video of her students asking the
questions they had for the writer, af er reading the book, and brought the tape
out to Babbitt's home in Rhode Island over the holiday break. Now, the teacher
had brought back Babbitt’s answers.

Asked about some of her book’s philosophical aspects, Babbitt commented that
she “wanted people to think about their lives on Earth and how they live them, as
well as learn to deal with change, whether it is joyful or sad, but nd out what life
has to o fer.”

One of the kids at Sandy Hook had asked about “The Man in the Yellow Suit.”
Babbitt explained that the character was actually a singular exception in her
writing: he was based on a real person. Usually, Babbitt just borrowed bits and
pieces from real life, but the sinister kidnapper was “the only time I took someone
directly from real life and put them in a book.”

***
Amid the general upheaval at the new school, and with only half a term together,
it appears that the sta f at Reed did not get much of an impression of Adam in the
f h grade (surely, his withdrawn personality contributed to this). His homeroom
teacher would recall only that he was “a very quiet boy who didn’t stand out from
others, as neither an exceptional student nor a behavioral problem.” Adam always
completed his work on time, and never disrupted the activities going on around
him. His teacher would tell police that she “cannot remember anything that
struck her as odd” about her student. She never saw him getting bullied by anyone
— that much, she was quite sure of.

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Outside of school, there were some notes of concern. A witness close to the Lanza
family, in a heavily redacted report, remembers that Adam stated sometime
during the f h grade that he “did not think highly of himself, and believed that
everyone else in the world deserved more than he did.”

He was spending more time outdoors, lately. He would go on hiking trips with
his mother or father; frequently, they trekked up north to the woods around his
old elementary school. This was at Adam's request — perhaps it was just a lef over
compulsion af er so many daily commutes to the area (another "ritual"), but his
parents noticed that he was still drawn to the area around Sandy Hook
Elementary, despite no longer being a student there.

February 7, 2003
Department of Justice — Washington, DC
On a Friday morning, the United States Attorney General announced he had
raised the “Threat Condition” on the recently-enacted Homeland Security
Advisory System, to status Orange: “HIGH RISK OF TERRORIST
ATTACKS.” Worried Americans were told that the increased threat assessment
was in response to intelligence reports — all classi ed — which had ominously
suggested that “Al aeda leaders have emphasized planning for attacks on
apartment buildings, hotels, and other sof or lightly secured targets in the United
States.”

Newtown Congregational Church — Newtown, Connecticut

Later that night, in Newtown, the tolling of the church bell lled the valley, and a
group of some one hundred townspeople assembled in the old meeting house.
Many had lived in Newtown long enough to remember the last time their young,
enlisted, men were sent o f to war in the Persian Gulf, and several could even
attest to the atmosphere in town af er Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. They had also
watched that morning as the Secretary of State presented evidence to the UN on
Iraq’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” program, and were getting a familiar
feeling.

In an e fort to bring the town together in dark times, the congregation’s Human
Services Committee had organized an evening’s “Dialogue On The Possibility Of
War,” and invited a number of local academics to share their views about Iraq.

Midway through the evening, one of the speakers, a political science professor
from Western Connecticut State University, urged a global perspective, invoking
the Space Shuttle Columbia mission that had ended in tragedy in the skies over
Texas that same week: “I encourage everyone to picture the world as the crew of

297
Columbia did. We have more in common with each other than we have di ferent.”
She urged restraint, and hoped that the US would grant France’s request for a
third round of weapons inspections before any use of force. “We must foster
future comprehensive world peace. Are we certain that military action at this time
will ensure a better world for our children and for the world’s children?”

Another WCSU professor, retired, did not so much disagree, but simply called the
debate “irrelevant” to the events about to unfold: “The decision has already been
made. We will invade Iraq, we’re just not sure when.”

***
Later that week, a newly-formed federal agency made one of its rst o cial
announcements; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created from
the ashes of the 9/11 attacks, and its mission was to prevent and defend against all
terrorist threats. In this new emergency bulletin, DHS advised every family in
America to be prepared in case of a terrorist attack:

To “Shelter-in-Place:”

* Bring your family and pets inside.

* Lock doors, close windows, air vents and

replace dampers.

* Turn o fans, air conditioning and forced air

heating systems.

* Go into an interior room with few windows, if

possible.

* Seal all windows, doors and air vents with plastic

sheeting and duct tape.

* Be prepared to improvise and use what you have

on hand to seal gaps so that you create a barrier
between yourself and any contamination.

* Local authorities may not immediately be able to

provide information on what is happening and what
you should do. However, you should watch TV,
listen to the radio or check the Internet often
for o cial news and instructions as they become
available.

298
 ***
The next day, just down the street from their o ces on Church Hill Road, a
Newtown Bee reporter watched as customers streamed in and out of Newtown
Hardware, stocking up on supplies. Duct tape and plastic sheeting were ying o f
the shelves.

A grandmother from Sandy Hook was picking up two rolls of each, when the
reporter asked her what she was feeling. “I just think we should be prepared for
the unknown. We know they [Al aeda] have what they need to hurt us and they
have the motivation, too. I just hope our government will be able to spoil their
plans.” Asked what her next destination would be af er the hardware store, the
woman said she was headed for Castle Hill — one of the high vantage points
facing the old crossroads — “where you can look out over Newtown, and the
agpole, and pray.”

Six weeks later, on March 21, 2003, the aerial bombardment of Baghdad began,
and the resulting “Shock and Awe” marked the start of America’s second war with
Iraq.

May 2, 2003
Headquarters of the Newtown Police Department
That spring, the Newtown Police Commission issued a revised policy on the
department’s use-of-force; it included a new “Active Shooter Protocol” — a tactic
designed to respond to incidents like Columbine, “in which one or more people
are participating in a random or systematic shooting incident, demonstrating their
intent to continuously harm others, in icting death or serious bodily injury on
people.”

Active Shooter training had become as ubiquitous to local police departments as

lockdown drills already were for high schoolers. While such training certi cations
had been around since at least the Luby’s shooting, they were rarely sought, until
recently. It was Columbine that changed everything — seeing it unfold on
television, live, with the heavily armed police inching cautiously toward the
school, a sign reading “1 BLEEDING TO DEATH” in the window. Af er that,
everyone could tell that something had to change.

Newtown’s active shooter protocol would be the same standard that most other
towns were adopting: upon receiving a “shots red” call, and arriving on the scene
(be it at a school, or a shopping mall, or a workplace, or anywhere else), and
nding that the attack is still ongoing, it should be considered an active shooter
situation. From there, the protocol was fairly simple: move in and physically
engage the shooter as quickly as possible, and shoot to kill. Don’t stop to treat

299
wounded, or to establish a perimeter, and don't try to negotiate. Just get there,
and shoot him.

Police agencies nationwide would train regularly for such scenarios going forward,
and so, while the season of the shooter seemed to have died down since 9/11, if it
ever came back, places like Newtown would be prepared.

Fall 2003
Reed Intermediate School — Newtown, Connecticut
Reed Intermediate School opened its doors again in the fall of 2003, for the start
of its rst full school year. Adam returned to the school, moving to its other
“house” for the sixth grade, and the second half of the bridge.

September 18 was “Picture Day” for the new sixth graders. Adam pulled an orange
Old Navy hoodie over his bowl-cut that morning, and in his portrait, he smiles.
He had never looked more normal.

Indeed, though the sta f from Adam’s sixth grade year would have a slightly
clearer recollection of him than those from his fractured 5th grade year, their
accounts all attest to just how unremarkable he seemed: the home-room teacher
on his side of the movable partition that year thought that Adam was a perfectly
normal kid. He earned A’s and B’s, and always had his homework done on time.
He was “reserved in the classroom, never made trouble or distracted others.”
When the teacher called on him, he always knew the answer. He was, simply, “a
normal child with no oddities.”

The other teacher on the team remembers a boy who was “bright, if reluctant,
with good ideas regarding creative writing.” Adam didn’t initiate conversation
with the other kids, but he didn’t outright ignore them, either. He was never
bullied or teased.

Adam was even in the school band at Reed. He played the saxophone, and his
band instructor remembers him just as her colleagues would: “A shy, quiet boy
who listened and participated in class.” She remembers that Adam’s demeanor
was always “neutral” — in that he “did not show enthusiasm, extreme happiness
or extreme sadness.” He was never bullied, and in fact, she swears, he had at least
one friend.

The band put on concerts, and though Adam never once volunteered to play, he
always attended — and every once in awhile, when the teacher said it was his turn,
he would perform. Always without complaint. But there was something the
teacher noticed from up on the conductor’s stand, as the children played their

300
songs: the saxophone player, trying his hardest to hide behind the other students
and their instruments, disappearing as much as he could.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

For adults closer to Adam, who saw him outside of school, the signs of a shif in
his aspect were more apparent. Peter had noticed that his youngest son — who he
always knew was “weird” in his own way — now “began to seem a little di ferent,
less happy.” He was noticeably more anxious, and would have “trouble
concentrating and seemed easily overloaded.” Any direct attention, especially,
brought on an acute state of fear: Adam began avoiding eye contact more, and it
was apparent that he didn’t like to be photographed, or seen in pictures.
However, he “did not seem to [his father] to be angry or aggressive” during any of
these periods, no matter how agitated he became.

Shortly af er his 11th birthday, in 2003, Adam’s pediatric records show a new
development: his doctor prescribes him an over-the-counter skin ointment,
Aquaphor, to treat “excoriated areas on his hands,” attributed to “obsessive
washing behavior.” It was a hallmark of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Adam
was washing his hands so frequently, it was leaving his esh raw. The doctor also
made note that Adam was engaging in constant shirt-pulling, and other “obsessive
compulsive tendencies.” However, the Aquaphor was the extent of the remedies
the doctor prescribed; there was no referral to any sort of treatment or counseling
to identify any underlying mental disorder.

Under “recreation activities,” the pediatrician wrote that Adam frequently played
“DDR” — Dance Dance Revolution. It was a video game, but somewhat more
meaningful to the player’s health than that implied; at the time of its release, DDR
was unique, unlike anything that grownups would have before associated with
“video games.” In the typical DDR setup, the arcade cabinet’s screen is positioned
facing a platform on the oor, about the dimensions of a small elevator. Once the
player has put in his or her payment, the platform lights up, and the speakers start
pumping out Japanese dance music, which the player then must keep up with as
they hop from one foot to another along the grid, following the screen’s
commands in rhythm with the beat. The whole thing is not unlike a neon-lit,
dance-music version of hopscotch. Adam played it constantly, and over time,
became very, very good at it.

September 2003
Traders Sporting Goods — San Leandro, California
Tony had just received the worst news he could imagine, a nightmare piece of mail
he had been dreading for years: the ATF wanted to inspect his records again.

301
Everything had been going so well. A friend of the NRA was in the Oval O ce,
and a municipal lawsuit from San Francisco, which had ensnared Traders and
lingered in the courts for almost a decade, was nally settled (and for far less than
the anti-gun crowd rst sued for). But now, just when he thought he might again
be in the clear, Tony saw the existence of Traders in peril all over again.

It was bad. This time, in their audit, the ATF counted at least 1,723 individual
rearms that Traders could not account for — and that was just the start of the
violations.

The ATF told Tony it was over; this time, he would have to surrender his license
for good.

Instead, Tony again sued the ATF, claiming that the supposed violations were
“hyper-technical,” and that the e fort to take him down was just a sign of how
long the federal vendetta against his gun shop had been going on. As before,
Traders would stay open while the appeals process ground toward its conclusion,
and Tony was prepared to put up a ght. But for the gun industry in the post-
D.C. Sniper environment, nothing was certain.

October 2003
Intersection of Washington Blvd and Tresser Blvd — Stamford,
Connecticut
Downtown tra c in the city of Stamford suddenly came to a standstill. Motorists
got out of their cars to peer down the street at whatever was going on, annoyed at
rst — but when they saw the source of the hold-up, they started cheering, and
pounding their car horns.

There was a monkey — a chimpanzee, actually — gleefully rolling around in the

middle of the street, soaking in all the noise. When the police tried to corral the
animal, he’d leap up and scamper nimbly along the roofs of the cars that were
backed up. It was like a scene out of Benny Hill, playing out in the middle of rush
hour. You couldn’t ask for better entertainment.

The police started searching desperately around town for a tranquilizer gun to
shoot at the animal, but none could be located. The city was in gridlock, and the
diapered beast continued running amok, pausing to slap cops on the behind when
they tried to chase him, and hooting and screeching all the way. The authorities
even deployed a dish of ice cream and cookies, in an e fort to coax the animal back
into his owner’s SUV — that would work momentarily, but he wouldn’t stay put.
Teams of burly o cers threw their shoulders against the SUV’s doors, trying to

302
get it shut, but it was no contest: an adult chimp possesses the strength of ve
men. When he wanted back out, he got out.

Eventually, af er two hours of running amok, the chimp got tired, climbed back in
the SUV, and buckled his seat belt. His owners, a local woman and her husband,
got in and took him home. The crowd applauded the chimp upon his exit; it was
the damnedest thing they ever saw. Meanwhile, Peter Lanza might have been
among those late for any appointments that af ernoon, but he had a good excuse
— it had all unfolded just eight blocks from his apartment.

May 2004
My Place Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut
It was a great time to be a Red Sox fan, and nobody felt it more than Nancy
Lanza; even her email address — [email protected] — was a reference
to the last time her favorite team had won the World Series, and she had always
wanted to witness them “break the curse.” With her season tickets, of course, she
was going to every home game at Fenway Park. But the best place to watch the
away games was at her favorite neighborhood bar.

Nancy had been coming to My Place for over six years. She had become a familiar
face, known to all the regulars, and many of them had become her friends. She
didn't of en go into detail about her private life, but they all knew Peter had
moved out.

When rumors of Nancy and Peter’s separation eventually made their way up to
Kingston, some of the townies there — including Marvin — wondered if Nancy
would be returning to her hometown, to raise her two boys back on the farm, and
be closer to her brother Jimmy. But as Nancy told her newer friends, at My Place,
she had decided she was staying put; in May of 2004, Peter signed a quit-claim
deed to transfer ownership of 36 Yogananda solely into Nancy’s name (the
mortgage released from General Electric’s employee bank, over to People’s Bank),
at $490,000. The home was Nancy’s, now, and her reason for staying seems to
have been the same she had for agreeing to leave Kingston in the rst place: she
was still betting on Newtown School District as the best place for her boys to
grow up.

***
Settling in for the long haul, and single again for the rst time since graduating
from Sanborn High, Nancy began exploring the dating scene around Fair eld
County. At the same time, she got in touch with a dress maker in town (who had a
boutique just around the corner from NSSF headquarters), and told her she
wanted a “complete style makeover.” Nancy ended up spending so much time

303
with the dress maker, the two became friends; Nancy’s day books — one of her
boyfriends joked “if something was not in [Nancy’s] day book then it did not
happen” — show that she would meet with the dress maker regularly, usually on a
weekly basis, for years to come.

One man that met Nancy around this time, and who saw her romantically o f-
and-on over the next two years, would later tell police detectives that he knew she
had two sons, though he never met either one. He remembered that Nancy of en
spoke of how “intelligent” twelve-year-old Adam was — but also would say that
he was “very distant when it came to his ‘feelings’ and that he needed everything
in his life a certain way.”

Peter had visitation rights with the boys, and the estranged couple always honored
them without any fuss. One of his family photos from this time shows him with
Adam, on a hiking trip somewhere in the White Mountains of northern New
Hampshire. Adam is seated on a rock formation, and Peter stands next to him,
their eyes level, his arm wrapped lovingly around his son’s shoulders. Adam is
grinning, appears peaceful, and is making “bunny ears” for the camera, behind his
dad’s head.

June 5, 2004
Intersection of Church Hill Road and Main Street — Newtown,
Connecticut
An attendant went out to the intersection, and brought Newtown’s ag down to
half-mast, where it would remain for a week of mourning: the news had just broke
that Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, had died at his
home in Bel Aire, California. The assassin’s bullets from twenty years before had
o cially failed to achieve the gunman’s vision; the president instead passed away
from pneumonia, af er more than a decade battling Alzheimer’s Disease.

Summer 2004
Reed Intermediate School — Newtown, Connecticut
As the last day of the school year approached, the intermediate school’s Weekly
Reed newsletter cautioned parents to be aware of the stress that their sixth-grade
child may be under; the rst batch of students were about to step across to the
other end of the bridge, once again leaving behind familiar teachers and social
groups, while at the same time having to focus on nal grades. “As adults, we have
learned which coping strategies are best to help us handle the stresses of this busy
time,” principal Donna Denniston wrote to the parents. “Most kids haven’t yet
developed the repertoire of strategies. They may not even be able to identify what
is stressing them out.”

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 ***
Reed Intermediate School never really got around to normal operations during its
rst full year (the last that Adam would attend). Superintendent Pitko f and the
rest of the school board were still wrangling with contractors to get the carpets
just right, and the wood nish around the school’s entrance changed, and the rest
of the grass planted on the soccer eld. Even the nal report cards were late,
arriving weeks into summer break; but when they did arrive, Adam’s academic
performance was shown to have been as stable as ever — “A’s and B’s across
content areas” — despite his increasingly apparent anxiety and social aversions.
And, o cially, he had made it across the bridge, to middle school.

***
The neighbors down Yogananda Street hosted a Christmas dinner every year.
Their daughter remembers the year they invited the Lanza family over; her parents
told her to be a nice host to the two boys, and she was familiar with Adam ever
since his “hand poem” had caused her to come home crying from the school bus.
She had grown accustomed to the family since then; she would say “hi” to the two
brothers on the bus, and Ryan would respond in kind — but Adam usually
wouldn’t even look her in the eye.

The girl’s mother recalls hearing from her back then, about the younger Lanza
boy: “[He] was not connecting with anyone at all. He was not bullied, however,
he was just lef alone... he never associated with others and when he got on the bus
he would sit with his headphones and listen to music.”

In fact, there was only one instance when the girl could remember Adam looking
directly at her: he was angry, though she did not know why, and he said that he
was going to “bomb” her.

That Christmas, when the two brothers arrived for the party, they just went
straight downstairs to the family gaming room, to play the rst-person-shooter
Halo. Everyone seemed to get along.

The neighbors invited the Lanzas back the following year, and many af er that,
but the girl never saw Adam in her house again. Once in awhile, though, when she
was in her bedroom, she would hear Nancy visiting with her mother downstairs.
Mrs. Lanza would talk about men she was dating, or her views on fashion, but
more and more, she heard Nancy speaking in hushed tones, about Adam;
somehow, she had become convinced that her son was “sick.”

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 30. Dusk

September 8, 2004
Bushmaster Headquarters — Windham, Maine
The news came in a press release, signed by Richard E. Dyke, chairman of
Bushmaster Firearms, Inc.:

Bushmaster Firearms pleased to announce a conclusion to the DC

sniper case brought by the victim’s famili and the Brady organization.
The balance of the insurance policy not spent on legal fe , approximately
$550,000, will go to the victim’s famili for their grief.

Bushmaster reaffirms its commitment to BATF requirements and the

National Shooting Sports Foundation’s (NSSF) goals. Bushmaster
supports that FFL Dealers and Distributors who sell its products follow
the recommendations of the BATF newsletters and the National
Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) publication “Don’t Lie for the
Other Guy” program and their other safety literature.

In all, the eight families of DC Sniper victims, and the survivors, including the boy
who was injured outside of Benjamin Tasker Middle School, would share an
approximately $2,500,000 payout (the gun store in Tacoma was responsible for
the majority of damages.)

Bushmaster was annoyed when the Brady Campaign took credit for a legal
“victory” over them, and the gun maker did what they could to diminish that
interpretation. “We felt the compassionate thing to do was give it to the victims’
families, not because we had to but because we wanted to,” Bushmaster explained
in their press release. “The Washington DC Brady Group should learn what
compassion is really all about!”

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NSSF Headquarters — Newtown, Connecticut
On the day of the settlement, a spokesman for the NSSF emphasized that
Bushmaster had admitted no wrongdoing, and was merely giving what was lef of
their $1,000,000 liability insurance payout to the families, “for their grief,” rather
than wasting it on more lawyers. “Everyone in our industry has great sympathy for
the victims in this tragedy,” the representative told the Washington Tim . “It’s
unfortunate that the focus is not on the individuals who plotted and went on a
shooting rampage. Instead, we’re focusing on a shopkeeper who had a product
stolen.”

The NSSF knew that the settlement was bigger than just the D.C. Sniper case; as
much as Bushmaster wanted to frame it as an act of compassion, it was an
unprecedented outcome for a liability case involving a legally-manufactured
rearm. Now, the anti-gun lawyers would smell blood. This signi cance was
recognized by the investment website Motley Fool, which warned owners of gun-
company stocks that, although the manufacturer of the snipers’ weapon was not a
publicly traded company, the rearms industry as a whole could still take a hit.
“It’s now only a matter of time before Bushmaster is known not as the only
manufacturer to settle such a lawsuit, but as the rst manufacturer to settle such a
lawsuit.”

September 13, 2004

Capitol Building — Washington, D.C.
Five days af er the D.C. Sniper settlement was announced, the rearms industry
and its opponents observed another major milestone: ten full years had passed
since President Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law.

For the last decade, advocates and opponents of gun control alike had debated the
bill’s e fectiveness, mostly centering around the same old weakness in the language
that had been around since the late 1980’s: that manufacturers could always
modify a “banned” gun, call it by a di ferent name, and go right on selling it.
Meanwhile, the high-capacity magazines manufactured before the ban went into
e fect were still legal, and abundant. Measuring the impact of the ban would be
di cult — if it ever again mattered.

Since the Assault Weapons Ban had a sunset provision, the tenth anniversary of its
signing was also its expiration date. On September 13, 2004, the sun set, and the
ban was no more.

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Hartford, Connecticut
“Right now, we have the Federal government recalling the Super Soaker toy gun,
at the same time we are within hours of letting assault weapons back on our
streets,” said a U.S. Representative from Connecticut, at a news conference that
af ernoon. “The mere notion that we would again legalize these guns is
outrageous.” He had just been one of the congressmen to vote for the federal
ban’s renewal, but there were no longer enough like him in other states to sustain
it.

Within Connecticut, the lif ing of this federal law meant that the state’s assault
weapons ban — a bedrock layer of anti-gun legislation that, until then, rarely
came into play (as it was mostly weaker than, or redundant with, the federal ban)
— was now the only restriction lef on such weapons. The state’s Attorney
General released a statement, emphasizing this new reality: “Our state must now
commit to continued, even stronger enforcement of our assault weapons ban. We
can no longer count on our federal agencies to assist us.”

Connecticut’s gun ban was still quite similar to the lapsed federal ban, so in
practice, there was little change as far as the legality of owning a semi-automatic
ri e in the state: if you weren’t a felon, you could usually still buy an AR-15 made
by any number of manufacturers. Just not a Colt AR-15 — and certainly, never a
Colt Sporter.

Fall 2004
Newtown Middle School
Newtown’s only middle school was built on a grassy plot o f of ueen Street —
the path one block over from Main Street, and the agpole. The school began its
life in 1951 as the town’s rst dedicated high school, a simple colonial brick
building of two stories and 55,000 square feet. The town’s surging population
quickly outgrew it.

In 1974, construction was completed on what is the current Newtown High

School, on the edge of Sandy Hook, at the north base of the sloping elds leading
up to Fair eld Hills.

The old high school on ueen Street was thus handed down to the younger
students, and now, simple, black, NEWTOWN MIDDLE SCHOOL lettering
marks its entrance. Above, a white, church-style spire rises into sky, the school’s
tallest point capped by an image straight from Newtown’s o cial seal: an iron
weather vane, in the shape of a rooster. A labyrinth of hallways snaking out of the

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back of the original structure records the growth of Newtown over the decades
since it opened, as the old hand-me-down building grew in phases from its
original footprint, into to a twisting 175,000 sq f campus.

***
It was Adam’s third school in as many years. Shortly af er starting the 7th grade, he
gave his father a tour, and even though Peter didn’t need to be shown around —
he had already seen Ryan pass through the sixth, seventh and eighth grades at
NMS — he was still caught o f-guard, just from seeing the way his son acted
within its walls. “Man, that kid, you couldn’t shut him up!” Peter would say,
when remembering the day a decade later. Adam was excited, maybe even happy
to be showing o f how ready he was for his new surroundings. And by this point,
expecting Adam to adapt to any change in life had become a tenuous proposition.
It was almost too good to be true.

For Adam and his classmates, the biggest departure from life at Reed Intermediate
was that they couldn’t just sit still and have the walls change around them
anymore; now there were seven class periods every day, each in di ferent rooms
scattered around a massive school. That meant passing periods in between —
exactly four minutes long, bell-to-bell — during which the school’s 861 students
would all empty from its 69 classrooms, lling the halls and forming into currents
and counter-currents, a mass of people all rushing to get to their next desk before
the bell rang again.

Lunchtimes presented even more intimidating displays of humanity. In an issue of

the school’s "Lion’s Roar" newsletter that year, a Guidance Counselor painted, for
parents, the scene that she saw from her o ce every day at 11:00am, when as many
as 260 students at a time would be competing for space in the cafeteria:

Seating and company are of utmost importance, even at the expense of

eating your own lunch. There are those who dash to scout out the best
table and stake a claim or save seats. A few will not leave their seats for
fear of losing them. They’ll say, “No, I’m not buying lunch today” or if
they’re lucky, they’ll give money to a friend going to the snack line. Ah,
seat secured. [...] Nobody ever knows who made the mess, nobody ever
looks under the table, but somebody always cleans it up. Students least
happy to return to class sit farthest from the exit. “Neighborhoods”
happen…. Lunch may be the high or low point in your child’s day, but
it’s always an adventure. Just ask them!

Around this time, Adam told his mother he was a vegetarian. He could not
tolerate certain textures of foods anymore, or even smell them, and all meat

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products were de nitely out. Standing in the cafeteria, he would be nauseated by
the trays racing by him, carrying lunch-line staples like pepperoni pizza or
hamburgers. He was starting to question consuming cow’s milk as well, objecting
to what he viewed as inhumane (and, perhaps even more objectionable,
unsanitary) living conditions at dairy farms. When Nancy packed his lunch every
morning, she had to keep in mind that Adam liked things a certain way.

***
Later that school year, a parent approached the principal of Newtown Middle
School, and expressed concern about the school’s “climate.” Having heard the
sentiment before, Principal Diane Sherlock decided to share her response with all
the parents, in her column for the "Lion’s Roar."

“We know from research that students have a di cult time learning if they feel
threatened or afraid,” she wrote, and she shared that the school had a number of
strategies (such as grouping students into a sequence of classes together, with the
same teacher) that they would use to “transform a large school of adolescents
(who frequently are at the point in their development where self-con dence is
shaky) into one where ‘everyone knows your name.’” The assigned teachers would
become “expert advocates” for each of their 100 students, and the whole system
would work best “when parents, through conferences or various communiqués,
share their own understanding of their child.” Finally, the school’s counselors,
nurses, and special education sta f would “work to address the more ‘hidden’
needs of our students, again contributing to the positive climate we want our
students to experience on a daily basis.”

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 31. Nightmare

March 21, 2005

Red Lake High School — Red Lake, Minnesota
Derrick Brun became a tribal police o cer right af er graduating from Red Lake
High School. But at 28 years old, he had already put down that badge; now, he
was just a security guard, manning the metal detectors at the entrance to his old
high school.

Next to him at the security checkpoint was his partner, Leann, sitting at her desk.
Above them, a security camera recorded everything. With this setup, the school
was well-equipped to catch anyone trying to sneak a gun inside.

It was a frigid Monday af ernoon, and the bell was about to ring, marking the end
of the school day. Looking out the front entrance, expecting school buses any
minute, Derrick instead saw something else; suddenly he stood, and nudged his
partner.

Leann looked up and saw it too: a Red Lake Tribal Police SUV, approaching
through the parking lot. Normally, this would not, by itself, be a cause for a
concern — except that the big Chevy Tahoe had kept going, rolling right over the
school’s front curb, and now it was coasting, gradually, straight toward them.

The driver’s door opened and a large gure jumped out, landing on his feet. He
was tall, with black hair, and was now “marching, not walking” swif ly in their
direction. When he drew closer, they saw that he wasn’t a cop — he was a teenage
boy, dressed in a black trench coat. Still, the Kevlar vest underneath w police-
issue, just like the gun-belt around his waist, and the .40 caliber Glock 23 pistol in
the holster, and the Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun that he red into the air,
twice, just before reaching to open the school’s front door.

Through the security glass, Leann locked eyes with the shooter, and immediately
recognized him: he was a student at Red Lake High School, known for getting in

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trouble. He had been suspended earlier that month.

She wasn’t armed, and neither was Derrick. (The most common reason they’d
heard for not being allowed to carry a rearm on duty was that the tribe could not
a ford the increased insurance rates it would bring for the school.) Over their
shoulders, they could hear students coming out of their classrooms, curious as to
the source of all the noise.

The front door started to open. Snapping out of her shock, Leann suddenly
darted from her desk, quickly ushering a group of students down the hall with
her, and yelling for her partner to follow. “Derrick, run! He’s got a gun!”

The school’s security camera recorded that Derrick did not run. He stood tall, and
took four brave steps forward, confronting the trench-coated gure as he entered
the school.

Around the corner, Leann was running as fast as she could, going door-to-door
shouting for classrooms to go into lockdown — when she heard the shots echoing
from behind her. Then, she realized what they meant: Derrick’s sacri ce had
bought her a few seconds, and probably saved her life... but the shooter was now
inside the school.

A second later, the shooter came around the corner, ring at everyone he saw.
Leann ran for the exit. Down the hall, the shooter saw his old teacher, and
followed her, instead; the woman ducked into the nearest classroom — a Math
study hall — and locked the door behind her.

Crouching at the base of the classroom door, the math teacher could hear the
gun re getting closer out in the hall — and then the impact of bullets striking the
door’s lock, just over her head. She saw the door handle shake, as the gunman tried
to open it from the other side. But the lock held.

Then, she saw the shooter’s face, as he peered through the panel of glass set into
the door, and saw all of them hiding inside. A moment later, a shotgun blast
punched through the door’s window. The shooter reached inside, and turned the
lock.

From the neighboring classrooms, students and sta f could hear what transpired
next. The shotgun blasts were steady, and moved gradually along the length of the
classroom. Several witnesses heard the shooter repeatedly ask, “Do you believe in
god?,” followed shortly by another shot. Finally, there was a “CLICK!”

Back inside the math classroom, the shooter was loading more shells into the
Remington when one of the students hiding under their desk, a 15-year-old boy

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named Je f May, suddenly lunged out and stabbed the shooter in the abdomen
with a sharp pencil. The shooter dropped the shotgun, and went for his sidearm.
Je f saw it, and the two began wrestling for control of the Glock.

Je f May was on the school’s football and basketball teams. He was big. But so was
the shooter — who soon regained control of the pistol, and shot Je f in the
mouth, a wound the brave teenager would barely survive.

The shooter then lef the classroom, in search of more targets.

Moments later, the real police arrived. And they would not be setting up a
perimeter; they knew they were dealing with an active shooter, and they followed
the protocol. At 2:57pm, about eight minutes since the rst shots were red at
Red Lake, four armed tribal police o cers were moving down the school’s main
hallway in a diamond formation, when they encountered the shooter coming
around the corner. A brief gun battle ensued; the teenager in the black trench coat
missed every shot, while an o cer with a ri e hit him twice, in the hip and calf.

At that, the shooter suddenly retreated, ducking back into the study hall
classroom, where Je f May and several more survivors still laid injured. One of
them, from the oor, saw the shooter’s boots as he limped back in, and picked up
the shotgun he had discarded during his struggle with the football player. She
watched as the gunman sat against the far wall, put the shotgun to his own head,
and pull the trigger. Seconds later, she saw the police enter the classroom, and one
of the o cers handcu f the dead shooter’s wrists with a plastic zip-tie.

Technically, the "active shooter" protocol had worked about as well as it could that
day: the police were on the scene in minutes, engaged with the shooter directly,
and there were no more victims af er they arrived. And yet, Red Lake had still
been a nightmare.

***
The Red Lake Indian Reservation is a small, isolated community. Members of the
tribe live on a pocket of territory, shrunken from the vast land their ancestors had
roamed. By 2005, most families had been on the reservation for generations —
everyone knew each other. So, when the police arrived at Red Lake High School
and started evacuating students, there were plenty who said they saw the shooter,
and they were able to identify him.

The o cers knew the boy, too.

His father had died eight years before: there was an armed stando f with the tribal
police at his home, that went on for days. Then he shot himself. (It’s not clear if

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his son was home with him when that all happened; he would have been eight
years old.)

Two years later, the shooter’s mother was involved in a very serious car accident.
She su fered brain damage, and was never able to care for her son again. He would
live with relatives instead, af er that, usually at his favorite aunt’s place. But lately,
he had been staying at his grandfather’s.

His grandfather was a tribal police o cer. When the stando f happened back in
1997, the man was there at the barricades. He tried to talk the shooter's father —
his own son — out of it, to get him to put the gun down... and then he heard the
shot.

He had tried to move on af er that, and now was known all over town as the cop
in the SUV, who gave a friendly wave to every driver he passed on the reservation’s
lonely roads. The same vehicle was, just then, being surrounded by backup
o cers, found abandoned just outside the entrance of Red Lake High School.

***
O cers swarmed to the grandfather’s house, sprinted up the empty driveway, and
kicked down the door. Inside, in the master bedroom, they found their colleague’s
body; his wounds were from a .22 pistol, which the detectives determined had
come into the shooter’s possession “about a year” before the attack. (If they ever
found out where he got it, the tribal police decided to keep that to themselves.)

Scouring the crime scene, the forensics team would determine that, sometime on
the morning or early af ernoon of March 21, 2005, the shooter had gone upstairs
into his grandfather’s bedroom, where the man was sleeping, and shot him
multiple times in the head. Then the shooter stole his keys, his Glock, the
Remington shotgun, and body armor. Sometime af er this — but before the
shooter had departed — his grandfather’s girlfriend came home. She was
apparently carrying a load of laundry up the stairs, oblivious, when the shooter
ambushed her with the Glock. Then, he got in his grandfather’s SUV, and drove
to Red Lake High School.

***
There are con icting reasons cited for why the shooter had been suspended from
school. The principal even said he hadn’t been suspended at all, but was simply
placed in a “homebound” instruction program, because the school had
“recognized behavioral problems.” He declined to elaborate.

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Virtually everyone who knew the shooter knew that he was obsessed with
violence. “He looked like a cool guy — and then I went and talked to him a few
times,” one classmate said. “He talked about nothing but guns and shooting
people.”

It was re ected in his artwork, too; one of the school’s administrators told the
Washington Post, “He just sat there and drew pictures of army people with guns.
He was a talented artist, but he drew terrible, terrible scenes.”

One student, who had the same English period as the shooter, recalled a sketch
that the kid in the trench coat had produced. It was hanging on the wall of the
classroom not a month before the shooting: a skeleton strumming a guitar, with
the caption underneath, “March to the death song ‘til your boots ll with blood.”

***
The same dark signals could be detected online. He was always on his computer.
In a writing community, where teams of strangers were collaborating on horror
stories, he contributed pages and pages about zombie attacks, obsessing over the
weapons and their gory e fect.

One of the scenes he produced begins at a high school, with the protagonist
passing through a security checkpoint, when the “ape like” security guard takes
him aside for a pat-down. “Even for a small town the security was tight,” the
shooter wrote. “Af er the school shooting’s [sic] like Columbine, they had stepped
up the security at the front door.”

Later, the main character is in class when he hears gun re, and the resulting scene
demonstrates that the writer was from the “lockdown drill” generation; “If
someone entered the building with a gun," the shooter wrote, "teachers were
supposed to lock their classroom doors and move all students to the back of the
room,” as then happens in the story.

Listening to the sounds of combat in the halls, not yet aware of the source, the
protagonist wonders if the apparent school-shooter is one of his friends, and
thinks, “The school had it coming.”

***
A little more than one year before he launched his attack, the shooter registered an
account on a discussion forum dedicated to conspiracy theories and the
paranormal. It seemed to become his favorite destination online; in February of
2004, he asked the forum for some advice. “Last night, or yesterday evening,
something very weird happened,” he wrote, explaining that although it was the

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middle of the day, “I was so depressed I felt like sleeping... So I went to bed at 1
PM and slept till 6.” Waking up then, still lying in bed, it happened:

I could see my alarm clock across the room, it’s

red numbers, and the yellowish glow the light on
the extension cord gives. I could see this black
figure. It was really well defined against the
darkness, sort of darker then dark (I know that
sounds weird but thats how it was), about 3 ft
tall... For some reason, I reached for it (I was
in the dreamy state -- but I could tell I WASN’T
dreaming), and touched it. When I was reaching
for it... I felt really fatigued and weak, like I
could barely move my arm… I was sort of scared,
but it was then (after touching it) I fell right
back into a deep sleep...

He claimed that the aura he felt was not so much “evil” as it was “like when you
walk into a room and can automatically feel like somethings amiss.”

Most commenters on the site said he was probably just half-awake, half-dreaming.
He wasn’t sure either. “It may or may not have been a dream there are other
instances where this kind of thing has happened that I have not posted, because I
don’t believe everything I see or hear is real.”

***
April 20, 2004 was the f h anniversary of the Columbine shooting. Online, the
shooter later shared what he experienced at Red Lake High School on that day:

Apparently someone was supposed to shoot up the

school on 4/20, and there was alot of buzz around
me, and for good reasons I guess. I wear combat
boots (with my pant legs tucked into them), wear
a trench coat, and at the last basketball game my
friend (who happens to wear a black trench coat
like mine) did a ‘Sieg Heil’ during the national
anthem (for shock value), so they had us pegged
as “Trench Coat Mafia.” My other “friend” even
said that I fit the profile of a school shooter
that she saw on 60 minutes. [...] So it’s not
hard to label a school shooter.

I happen to be “not so popular,” Gothic (in the

sense that I wear nothing but black, spike my

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 hair in “devil” horns, and happen to be an
emotionally disturbed person) if you could call
me that. So it’s really no problem slapping a
label on someone because they fit the stereotype.
And no, I wasn’t the one who did the threat. On
“Game day” (4/20) the Feds were all around the
place, watching, cop cars on nearly every corner
around the school... So they WERE prepared for
something to happen.

Red Lake High School had received a number of bomb threats in that April of
2004, and there had been rumors, widely-heard, that a school shooting was being
planned for the Columbine anniversary. Police had indeed been ready. But the
threat didn’t materialize.

Later that month, the shooter attempted suicide. In June, he tried again. He was
admitted to a psychiatric hospital, willingly, and was discharged a few weeks later.
He went to several visits with a therapist af er that, his grandmother recalls, but
the sessions were “sporadic.”

As summer wound down and the new school year approached, a doctor
prescribed the shooter some Prozac: 20 milligrams a day. Then, the dosage was
bumped up to 40 mg, and nally to 60 mg. “He was a lot more quiet,”
remembered his aunt. “I wouldn’t say any better.”

***
Near the end of summer break, the shooter registered an account on a website
that hosted content for amateur Flash animators. In his pro le, he listed his
favorite lms, which included Elephant and Zero Day — both depicting school
shootings that are loosely based on the Columbine massacre. Elephant, in
particular, seemed to be one that he was interested in; just weeks before his attack,
the shooter watched the Gus Van Sant lm with some friends, who recall him fast-
forwarding through the non-violent majority of its running time in order to get to
the scenes where the shootings were being plotted, or the shooting itself.

In October, the shooter uploaded a short animated clip that he had produced.
Entitled “Target Practice,” the 22-second black-and-white Flash sequence depicts a
man with a ri e, shooting random people in a park. Then a police car arrives on
the scene, and the gunman tosses a grenade, blowing up the vehicle. The animated
gunman then puts the gun in his own mouth, and res.

Once, on another site, when he was looking for advice on interpreting his dreams,
another user had lef an insulting comment. He wrote a reply back: “Would you

317
please try to be a little bit more considerate? I had went through alot of things in
my life that had driven me to a darker path than most choose to take.” He talked
about his suicide attempt, and said “I am now on Anti-depressants, and just
because you’ve probably never been through anything Like I have doesn’t give
you the write to say what you have. I am trying to turn my life around, I’m trying
really hard, the attitudes of people like you are what set me back.”

The other user apologized. He was just trying to be funny. “Eh...no problem,” the
shooter wrote back. “I would try to be a little bit more easy about it all, except it’s
hard to be humorous about the things I’ve been through. No worries though
man, water under the bridge.”

***
He started a Livejournal in December 2004. It was unremarkable teenager stu f at
rst. But within a month, things went bad. “There isn’t an open sky or endless
eld to be found where I reside, nor is there light or salvation to be discovered,” he
typed. “Right about now I feel as low as I ever have. So fucking naive man, so
fucking naive. Always expecting change when I know nothing ever changes... I
sacri ce no more for others, part of me has fucking died and I hate this shit. I’m
living every mans nightmare and that single fact alone is kicking my ass.”

Two months later, he updated his public MSN pro le. Under “Interests,” he
selected from the list “Military,” “High Schools,” and “Death & Dying.”
Prompted to describe himself, he wrote “16 years of accumulated rage supressed
by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black. I
can feel the urges within slipping through the cracks, the leash I can no longer
hold.”

Under the heading “Favorite Things”, the shooter had typed three:

* moments where control becomes completely

unattainable

* times when maddened psycho paths briefly open

the gates to hell, and let chaos flood through

* those few individuals who care enough to

reclaim their place.

His MSN pro le’s main picture was a still image from Elephant: the two teenage
gunmen viewed from behind as they march into their high school, dressed in
black, carrying their shotguns and du fel bags.

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 ***
Five days later, the shooter donned his grandfather’s police equipment, and drove
to Red Lake High School.

Along the way, he would have passed Red Lake’s juvenile detention facility, still
unnamed. This building was brand new, built with grants from the Bureau of
Indian A fairs; the bureau had promised to fund its daily operations as well — but
when the day came, they balked. Red Lake’s self-governing Chippewa tribe
wanted to run the place as “a treatment facility for the youth to get services for
behavioral health, mental health and chemical dependency.” The BIA would only
pay for it if it was a jail. So it never opened.

The tribe had almost secured a second source of federal funding for it earlier that
year, in the form of a $3 million “Safe Schools/Healthy Students” grant. This
program had started as a collaboration between the Department of Education and
the Department of Justice in 1999, “in response to a series of deadly school
shootings in the late 1990s,” and was intended to “promote mental health among
students and create safe and secure schools.” But there was a problem: the grant
application had been lled out by the county, which contained Red Lake’s school
district along with several others, and one of these other districts had failed to sign
some of their paperwork. So, the Department of Education rejected the
application. As a result, when the shooter drove the stolen police SUV to his
school, the brand-new mental health facility he passed was still vacant — never
housing a patient, nor prisoner.

***
On the af ernoon of the 21st, when the rst shots were red at the school’s
entrance, a male student in the library down the hall suddenly jumped to his feet.
He could not possibly have seen who the shooter was, yet, but he blurted out a
name — and it turned to be correct. Some assumed he guessed based on the
shooter’s reputation around the school, but when police searched the shooter’s
email history, they found out the real reason.

For the entire two years leading up to the shooting at Red Lake High School, the
shooter had been trying to recruit other boys to join him in the attack. He
discussed the details freely, and said how “funny” it was going to be. Authorities
ultimately identi ed no less than 39 students who “knew in varying degrees” that
the shooter was planning to attack the school the year before, but the big plan
zzled when none of them were able to procure weapons as he had requested.
(Meanwhile, around the same time, a series of anonymous bomb threats had
caused the security at the school to spike. Someone probably leaked.)

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The cops found a homemade map of Red Lake High School in the shooter’s
bedroom, and based on its markings, determined that he originally wanted to
begin his assault in the school’s gymnasium, during a crowded event, and that he
wanted to station his accomplices at the gym’s exits. This map, and its
implications, mirror a scene in Elephant, from the same sections of the lm that
the shooter’s friends recall him fast-forwarding to: “There should be kids ushing
out in all directions,” the ctionalized shooters say, standing over their map. “And
we’ll be able to pick them o f, one by one.” This became, the investigators learned
from the shooter’s chat logs, his plan to top Columbine.

But one aspect of the Red Lake shooting that investigators were never able to
resolve was the timing — why March 21st? They suspected that something had
had transpired between the shooter and his grandfather the day before the attack,
something that caused the teen to initiate his newest plan prematurely. Until then,
the date he had in mind was still a few weeks out: April 20, 2005.

March 25, 2005

Prairie Chapel Ranch — Crawford, Texas
President Bush stepped into the study at his ranch home in Central Texas, on a
clear Friday morning. On the desk, a microphone waited for his weekly radio
address.

It had been a tense week in the United States. On television, all anyone could talk
about was a woman who had fallen down in her apartment in Florida some f een
years before, af er su fering a “severe anoxic brain injury.” Terri Schiavo had lapsed
into a persistent vegetative state, and she lef no will behind, so when her husband
decided in 2002 that her feeding tube should be removed, it seemed his right —
but instead, it set o f a series of escalating legal battles and public debates (roughly
resembling the "pro-life" vs "pro-choice" abortion-rights controversy, and with the
same forces opposing each other.)

The “Palm Sunday” bill was supposed to end all that, mandating that the case be
moved from Florida to the federal courtrooms. President Bush ew to
Washington to sign the act at 1:00am the next morning, the 21st; and so it was in
the wake of this massive ongoing controversy that news of the Red Lake shooting
rst broke on Monday af ernoon.

It was the worst school shooting since Columbine. But President Bush did not
make any public comment.

Tuesday went by, and then Wednesday. By Thursday, the president still hadn’t
made any statement; soon, that neglect itself became the story. “N

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A C B ’ S ” read the Washington Post headline on
Friday morning — “R S S I C W
P ’ I S C ”:

“From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red
Cross h come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington
hasn’t said or done a thing,” said Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian
who the founder and national director of the American Indian
Movement here. “When people’s children are murdered and others are
in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer h
condolenc ... If th w a white community, I don’t think he’d have
any problem doing that.”

With this atmosphere in mind, from his ranch, the president took a deep breath,
and pressed record.

Good morning. Th weekend, millions of Americans celebrate the

joyo holiday of Easter. Easter the most important event of the
Christian faith, when people around the world join together with family
and friends to celebrate the power of love conquering death.”

He said a prayer for the military, and the soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The rest of the message, he dedicated to the community in Red Lake. He singled
out Derrick Brun, speaking of the fallen security guard with the same respect as he
had the soldiers: “Derrick’s bravery cost him his life, and all Americans honor
him.” Searching for words to soothe the grief of the native people, the president
turned again to his faith, signing o f, “In this season of renewal, we remember that
hope leads us closer to truth, and that in the end, even death, itself, will be
defeated.”

As the sun set on the 25th of March, President Bush picked up the phone, and
placed a call to the Chairman of the Red Lake Band of the Chippewa. He assured
the tribal leader, “We are doing everything we can to meet the needs of the
community at this tragic time.”

Littleton, Colorado
Many former students from Columbine High School recognized the pain that
Red Lake felt, and some decided to send a special token of sympathy. When the
tribe in Red Lake unwrapped the dreamcatcher, they would nd the gif ’s original
recipients had added their own dedication along its frame:

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In the Circle of Life, we will all be together again. Th healing
dreamcatcher came to Jefferson County, Colorado a er the Columbine
tragedy. In the spirit of healing, we pass it to the Red Lake Nation
Indian Education Program. May it never travel again!

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 32. Fantasy

Report Card

Student: Lanza, Adam

Grade: 07
Homeroom: A18
Third Marking Period - Newtown Middle School

SCIENCE 7
Marks: A-
Effort: A
Comments: “Adam is making good progress.”

ENGLISH 7
Marks: B
Effort: B
Comments: “Adam’s satisfactory work continues”

SOC ST 7
Marks: A
Effort: A+
Comments: “Adam is always on task and eager [to
learn]”

MATH 7
Marks: A-
Effort: B+
Comments: "Adam is conscientious, responsible"

Spring 2005
Newtown Middle School
Over the course of her son’s rst year in middle school, Nancy witnessed him
undergo a dramatic change. Suddenly, he wasn’t leaving the house as much as he

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used to. He quit the school band, and in fact stopped playing the saxophone
altogether. He quit playing baseball and soccer, as well — and when Nancy asked
him why, he told her that he had never enjoyed playing sports. He had only been
doing it to appease her. That wouldn't be enough, anymore.

He also declared that he hated celebrating birthdays, and all holidays. Peter
suspected that this was due to the basic function of a holiday: disrupting the
regularly scheduled patterns of life. Adam hated surprises.

Strangest of all, Adam had almost completely stopped spending time in the
woods. He used to love climbing trees, and hiking; before, he wanted to climb
every peak in New Hampshire. Now, he wouldn’t leave his bedroom.

The talkative Adam, the one that had shown Peter around his new middle school
at the start of the year, had not lasted long there. The passing periods, in
particular, were causing Adam’s anxiety to spike, and on many school days, by the
time he got to class, his tolerance for any stimulation at all was gone. Even the
colors on the pages of his textbook would be enough to overload him. Nancy tried
to mu e the noise level, even nding out what chapters Adam was assigned on a
given day and photocopying them in black-and-white ahead of time. Her son was
still a smart kid, and his grades hadn’t dipped much, but there was the inescapable
feeling that Adam was, by some less-tangible measure, falling behind.

***
In the March 2005 edition of the “Lion’s Roar,” Principal Sherlock dedicated her
column to an issue that concerned many of her students and their parents:
bullying. Af er sharing her own experiences of being bullied as a little girl, she
explained how things were di ferent now:

While my guess that most of have either witnessed or experienced

similar treatment, until fairly recently, bullying seemed to be a problem
many thought w just a by-product at some time or another of being a
kid. Yet upon closer investigation, we have learned that many unhappy
teenagers and adults credit their unhappiness to the scars of childhood
bullying. Finally, the topic receiving not only national attention but
also legislation and h become behavior that will no longer be tolerated.

Our Board of Education policy defin bullying “any overt acts by a

student or group of students directed against another student while on
school grounds or at a school-sponsored activity, which acts are repeated
over time.” Obviously, in order to stop bullying, we must know it
happening. Reporting key!

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Sherlock added that they would also take anonymous tips. “Each report will be
investigated, and a written report will be led and kept for future reference.”

***
There is no o cial record that Adam was ever bullied during his time at
Newtown Middle School. Many of his classmates would later tell the police what
they remembered of these years, and none of them recall ever seeing Adam being
bullied, either.

On the other hand, there are a few friends and family members of Nancy’s who
remember her claiming that Adam was getting bullied at school, or that he came
home with bruises on his body — or maybe they remember her saying that she
had to physically come to the school to prevent the bullying from happening. But
no one who was actually at the school recalls this as a reason for her visits. They
only remember Nancy coming to the campus for one reason: because Adam was
having “issues.” His mother appeared on those days — which came more
frequently as the months passed — when he couldn’t handle being around the
other kids. Nancy’s phone would ring, and she would come and take Adam back
to 36 Yogananda, so he could calm down. That was all. (And if she wanted to wait
closer to the school, “My Place” was right across the street.)

In one message Nancy wrote around this time (the recipient has not been
identi ed), Nancy appears more forthcoming about her concerns:

Other children will tease him and undermine his

confidence. He will learn to talk less, not more.
Already some children are saying he’s weird when
they don’t understand him. At this point he
thinks it’s funny when they say that. As he gets
older, he will realize that it isn’t.

The feedback loop thus seemed to have set in: Adam’s anxieties over the social
aspects of the classroom would distract him from the course’s content, and then
he would fall behind in homework; but he would also be too afraid to ask
questions, because then the class would slow down to his level, and he could sense
resentment whenever that happened, cranking up his anxiety level even further.
“One on one he is extraordinary. In a classroom setting he is performing well
below age level,” Nancy continues in the message (later released to the Hartford
Courant as the result of a FOIA lawsuit). Even she stops short of calling such
implied teasing “bullying,” though; her son didn’t need to be bullied to feel
overwhelmed.

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Peter, meanwhile, simply assumed that his youngest son w getting bullied, in
that way one expects any shy, awkward, funny-looking kid to get pushed around
in middle school. Peter recognized that it was “crystal clear something was wrong”
with Adam by this time: the rigid, upright way that he walked, in particular,
struck Peter as being something that would get his son picked on. Still, he never
heard of an actual incident taking place. It just seemed obvious that it would
happen, eventually, one way or another. It was only a matter of time.

Adam himself felt the same way. Things were easier for him at home, where there
was both comfort and escape; the Lanza family owned every current video game
console, and the boys had just gotten the new release from the Call of Duty
franchise, Finest Hour — the rst time the series came to a home console. Now,
Adam could experience a cutting-edge recreation of World War II through the
eyes of a soldier on the front lines, all from the safety of his big yellow house.

There were moments of light in Nancy’s life that fall, as well; on October 27, 2004,
the Red Sox won the World Series, and the 86-year “Curse of the Bambino” was
nally broken. Nancy couldn’t have been more proud; she brought home a
framed set of photos showing the 1918 and 2004 World Series champion teams,
and also a limited-edition “Red Sox Supper” print, which showed Leonardo da
Vinci’s biblical masterpiece The Last Supper — with the faces of Red Sox players
painted over those of Jesus Christ and the apostles.

Newtown High School

The high school’s Tech Club was in what Richard Novia called “expansion
mode.” As the head of security for Newtown High School, his day didn’t end
when the last bell rang; he still had to keep an eye on the dozens of af er-school
clubs that would be gathering in classrooms scattered around the campus. It was
back with the Class of 1995 when he had rst decided to start one of his own; the
idea for the Tech Club was that it would be like the “A/V Club” at most schools,
with an added emphasis on computers. Novia formed it with just two students,
who felt the school was falling behind on technology. “It all took o f from there,”
Novia would tell the Newtown Bee.

Starting in 1999, the local cable company, Charter Communications, gave

Newtown High School their own public access channel, to beam sports games
and announcements all over Newtown. The Tech Club was responsible for
producing all of the programming on “Newtown TV Channel 17” — from the
cameras, to the audio, to the editing. In 2004, when the Tech Club had grown to
30 students, “NTV17” won a regional award from the National Television
Academy — the same organization that awards the Emmys.

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Gradually, Mr. Novia began to see the club’s potential from his perspective as
director of security: it gave the nerdier boys — the awkward and vulnerable ones
that were likelier to get picked on, if they didn't band together in some way —
something to do as af er school. And, it gave the socially isolated ones something
truly invaluable: a group of supportive peers that they t in with.

For the bullied kids, of en the pattern of abuse was well in place before their rst
day at the high school. That was the reason why Mr. Novia was now steering the
Tech Club into “expansion mode”: to bring in kids straight from Newtown
Middle School, before they ever passed by the lenses of his security cameras. Every
few weeks, he and the Tech Club students would load up their equipment, take
the short drive to the middle school, set up their robotics in the commons there,
and proceed to “wow” the younger kids. When the presentation ended and the
activities started, Mr. Novia would be pacing around the stations, watching the 12-
13 year-olds as they assembled basic machines on the oor.

One of those kids, one day, was Adam Lanza. “From when I rst met him,” Novia
would tell PBS Frontline in 2013, “I recognized him as a person who would be
likely to be bullied or picked on.”

Novia soon took the boy’s mother aside. He already knew Nancy — Ryan Lanza
had joined the Tech Club shortly af er arriving at Newtown High School, and
through it had made a lot of friends — but they had never discussed Adam before.
Knowing that he would eventually be responsible for her youngest son’s safety
when he enrolled at NHS, Novia asked what conditions the boy had that he
should be aware of, and what strategies Nancy had found over the years to deal
with his issues.

Nancy replied that Adam had “multiple disorders,” including Sensory Processing
Disorder. It was because of that issue, she explained, that Richard would need to
watch out for what Adam was doing at all times, because if Adam was ever in
pain, he may not be able to communicate so. And if anything else bad happened
to him, his shyness meant he probably would never report it.

“I think I can help him,” Richard told her. He wanted to have Adam along for
more of the Tech Club events, even as a middle-schooler, to see how well he
acclimated to the group. Nancy gave Richard permission to try, but confessed that
she didn’t think it would do any good. “She was failing at bringing him out of his
little world,” Novia would recall of Nancy’s self-image, years later.

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April 2005
St. Rose of Lima School — Newtown, Connecticut
School was dismissed for spring break on Friday, April 15, 2005. There would only
be eight weeks lef in the school year, once the crowds of students came back to
Newtown Middle School — but Nancy’s son wouldn’t be among them. She had
made her decision, and she was going to do now what she wished she’d done when
Adam was still at Sandy Hook Elementary. But rst, she went to the store and
bought a crisp blue polo shirt, and a pair of khakis for Adam: his new uniform.

Adam became a student at St. Rose of Lima school shortly af er his 13th birthday.
The tiny campus sits on the same plot of land as the church, and is made up of a
series of modest brick buildings that are a complete departure from the snaking
corridors at NMS. And St. Rose of Lima admitted just 311 total students that year.
(Even this had been an increase, part of a trend that Principal Mary Rose Maloney
would proudly explain was “because people really want the faith-based education
we o fer, and because of the great community of parents and teachers who pull
together in good times and bad.”)

To Nancy, this little parochial school seemed to o fer the best hope yet for an
environment that her son could handle. It appears to have been entirely Nancy’s
call, too — her son hadn’t had a real IEP with the district since the fourth grade.

***
Adam’s classmates at St. Rose seem to remember him more vividly than the public
school kids, probably owing to the smaller class sizes that brought him there. Still,
the Adam in their memories would be a clean progression of the one seen at his
previous schools: one classmate remembers that he “wasn’t an outcast, but he
didn’t t in either.” Another says that Adam “wasn’t interested in what normal,
average 13-year-olds were interested in.” He “didn’t like contemporary music,” for
one example — he was more comfortable listening to music from the 1950’s, or
soundtracks from Japanese anime.

Beneath the surface, there were signs that emotionally, he was getting worse. One
instructor at St. Rose of Lima would never forget the pale, thin, 13-year-old’s
presence in his classroom:

[A] er my years of experience teaching 7th-grade boys, I know how they

are supposed to act. But I saw Adam being not normal with very
distinct anti-social issu . Adam w a very intelligent boy but he w
also very quiet, barely spoke, and never responded to h classmat ’
kindness of trying to help him fit in... I also remember Adam never

328
 wanting to participate in anything... I truly do not believe that Adam’s
parents were upfront with teachers about [h ] mental capaciti ...

The same teacher became more concerned when he read what Adam was turning
in for his class assignments — stories that were expansions on the themes from the
Big Book of Granny, and continued downward on a dark path:

I remember giving creative writing assignments to students, instructing

them to write a page or two on whatever they wanted to talk about . . .
Adam would write ten pag obsessing about battl , destruction and
war. I have known 7th grade boys to talk about things like th , but
Adam’s level of violence w disturbing. I remember showing the
writings to the principal at the time, [and] Adam’s creative writing w
so graphic that it could not be shared.

If Principal Maloney was indeed shown any of these writings that Adam
produced, no one made a record of it; when his le was subpoenaed by the United
States Attorney’s O ce in January 2013, the folder would contain no mention of
any graphic assignments being turned in. As for his parents, the O ce of the
Child Advocate found, “There is also no indication that Mr. or Mrs. Lanza were
aware of or were reviewing what [Adam] was producing for school, or whether
they had any concerns about it at all.”

In fact, the same teacher’s recollections suggest that Peter, at least at times, was
intentionally kept in the dark. The teacher remembers “instructing [Adam] that
he had to write something else to share," for an assignment that was to be shown
at an open-house, "[so] instead he wrote a poem that from what I recall was
beautiful.” The teacher then recounts the scene when Adam read the poem aloud
to a group of students and parents in the classroom: the teacher, in disbelief,
looked for Peter Lanza in the crowd of adults — and, nding him, saw that there
were tears streaming down his face. Whether it was the poem that had moved
him, or just the fact that his son was speaking in public at all, the teacher could not
discern.

Spring 2005
Reed Intermediate School — Newtown, Connecticut
In the year-and-a-half that Adam Lanza had attended Newtown’s “5/6”
intermediate school, the district faced down many growing pains: the mid-year
migration, the horrible tra c — and even a mysterious rash that turned out to be
the product of a leaking pipe, nurturing mold spores in the school's ceiling. But
another kind of challenge came the year af er Adam and his class had moved on, as

329
the new school found itself faced with answering a question that every educator in
the country had been asking themselves ever since Columbine: What do we do if
we think one of our students may be a school shooter?

It had all started on March 24, 2005. A student had reported a thef , and Principal
Denniston ordered security to search their classroom. They didn’t nd the stolen
item, but the search turned up something far more concerning: a boy’s writing
journal, in which he fantasized about murdering one of his classmates. And he
had identi ed the other boy by name.

Principal Denniston called the unsuspecting classmate’s house, and spoke to the
targeted boy’s parents. She read for them the entry in question, in which the
killing was “portrayed as a ctional account,” but which graphically described
“deadly, violent acts” being committed against the boy, as well as against his
parents. Principal Denniston said it was her responsibility to notify them, and
that the school was taking care of it.

If she thought that simple assurance was enough, she was wrong. “Folks, we are in
big trouble if something outside the normal realm of teaching our kids occurs,”
the parents told a reporter from the Newtown Bee that June, frustrated af er
months of back-and-forth with the school district. “They were more concerned
about violating the rights of the child who wrote the threats than in protecting
our child. The principal was trying to keep it quiet, no bad perception, no bad
press.”

The story ran under the front-page headline “S J ‘T ’

S P C — A A R .” In
response, Reed administrators told the Bee the same thing they told the family:
that the boy who had written the threatening journal entry had been “suspended
for a few days,” and had been spoken to by a school psychologist. To maintain
con dentiality, the school emphasized, they were not able to disclose any further
details. Period.

The targeted family wanted the school to go further, and contact the Chief of
Police to investigate the threat. They believed it was serious. “I would like to know
that they have checked out this child’s background, home life, and websites or chat
rooms visited on the computer,” the father said. “Do I think this is a Columbine?
I would say it is close to a zero chance, but it needs to be investigated.”

In the same Thursday, June 9 edition, the Bee also ran a “Letter to the Editor”
from the concerned father:

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 As my wife and I became exposed to more details of the situation, the
level of concern we felt increased exponentially. The child that wrote the
journal entry thought things through very specifically. In my experience,
th w not a casual piece of ‘fantasy writing’ the school leadership
described. Th w a precursor to potentially more serio actions.

By the way, since when writing about killing another student in your
class and h family an acceptable fantasy?

The family didn’t mince words about what the consequences could be if their
warnings were ignored. They knew all about what had just happened at Red
Lake:

We are extremely unhappy about the way th issue w handled. We are

terrified about the concept of what may or could in the future happen.
Not to be overly dramatic, [but] read the facts about the boy in
Minnesota ... He w doing a bit of “fantasy writing” before he decided
to get serio and enter h school with a weapon and kill innocent staff
and students.

In all of my experience, there one common theme when individuals

suffer from horrific events: they all thought that it would never happen
to them or in their town.

The purpose of our writing th letter simply to make other famili

aware that, y , we live in a wonderful community, but there no doubt
in our minds that with all the violence on television, video gam , etc,
that children and their actions need to be monitored for the safety of
all.

But Principal Denniston stood rm, and Superintendent Pitko f backed her all
the way, delivering Newtown’s boilerplate response: “We have procedures in place
but we are limited. We cannot comment.” The controversy died out by the start
of the next school year, and Newtown never named the student who wrote the
disturbing journal entries.

May 22, 2005

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Upstairs at the pale yellow house, Nancy’s son was creating an online pro le. He
had nally settled on a username he liked: "Blarvink."

331
He created a pro le on GameFAQs, and thus lef behind his earliest known online
footprint; the account would allow him to vote on user-submitted guides for the
video games he was playing, or to submit data to esh out a game’s pro le page. It
was just a small thing, a few letters on a forum... and yet his avatar, Blarvink, was
doing something that Adam increasingly could not tolerate to do himself: be seen.
By strangers, even. The potential of the technology resonated with something in
him, a seeming realization that it was easier to interact like this, without facial
expressions to interpret, or eyes to make contact with. And, without any
expectation of holding up his end of a conversation in real-time, he could gather
and transmit his genuine thoughts, nally sending signals out from the sealed
interior — if he ever chose to.

***
Two and a half weeks later, on June 8, 2005, a user submitted a drawing to the
website 2draw.com under the title “Elder crying over Nuclear Weapon.” It was a
somewhat crooked, Microsof Paint-style digital doodle, created through the
website’s mouse-based drawing interface. It depicts an elderly person in the
foreground, facing away from the viewer and toward a massive explosion in the
distance, which appears to have been set o f by a tossed cigarette, or match. The
“Elder,” as indicated in the drawing’s title, is shedding a tear. The artist submitted
it with the description “It’s my rst picture...”

The overall shape of the “Elder” in this digital sketch — with the large black shoes,
wide silhouette, and with a cane in one hand — is very reminiscent of the drawing
of “Granny” from the cover of the Big Book of Granny, at least one copy of which
never lef 36 Yogananda. In addition, the scene being depicted in the 2draw
submission recalls a scene from the Granny story, in which Granny “throws a
match and causes an explosion and threatens to shoot and kill the children,” as
summarized by police in 2013.

The drawing took 40 minutes to produce. It was submitted by a user under the
name “Blarvink.”

June 14, 2005

St. Rose of Lima School — Newtown, Connecticut
A girl brought her camera along with her to class one day. She saw her recently-
arrived classmate, Adam Lanza, seated at his desk, a crumpled lunch bag in his
hand. He had developed a strong aversion to being photographed in recent years,
but — whether he was feeling more at-ease that day, or was just caught by surprise
— when his classmate came up and clicked the shutter, he smiled and waved for
the camera.

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This frozen moment in a classroom at St. Rose of Lima is date-stamped in orange
digital type: 06 14 ‘05. At thirteen years old, Adam’s grin is tight, but his eyes are
wide, staring into the ash. He has a pimple under his nose. He is wearing the
school’s blue polo, too big for his body and buttoned all the way to the top. Both
arms, and his neck, are noticeably thin. One arm rests on his desk, and with the
other Adam is waving at the camera, his hand slightly blurred, in the middle of a
hello — or, just as appropriately, a goodbye.

***
One day, near the very end of the school year, teachers at St. Rose noticed that
Adam’s desk was empty. The reasons for his abrupt removal from the school
remain elusive: medical records from a few years later document that Adam
“became obsessed with religion” while attending the Catholic school — but he
ultimately “disapproved” of religion, because he considered it “illogical.” (To an
online acquaintance, years later, he would write that religion "requires actions and
encourages types of behavior which are based on delusions which don't have any
basis in reality.”)

In an excerpt from a later class assignment, released in the Courant case, Nancy’s
son was apparently writing about the integration of religion into the education at
St. Rose, and af er describing the environment only in vague terms, added, "It
appears as though this is a cult which has disassociated from society, but a closer
inspection reveals it to be Saint Rose School … It still has the e fect of a cult on its
followers, however."

This discordant state of a fairs — for reasons not elaborated upon anywhere in
the o cial records — quickly spelled the end of Nancy's experiment with private
schooling. It is also not clear if the decision to part ways was made by the Lanza
family, or the school’s sta f. (One possibility is that a deadline for a show of faith
from Adam was drawing near: students at St. Rose of Lima are expected to take
the sacrament of con rmation in the 8th grade.)

Whoever made the call and why, Adam did not nish even a single quarter at St.
Rose. He went back to 36 Yogananda, and stayed there for the nal weeks of the
school year. The way his dad saw it, Adam was in his “comfort zone” at home; but
for Nancy, the school year’s end was a grim milestone. St. Rose had been her
backup plan for years, and it had been a spectacular failure. It seemed her son
could not handle being at school — any school — and yet the education system
was the one force society possessed that was strong enough to regularly pull him
out of 36 Yogananda. She had bought her son some time, and carried him one
more step along the path to someday graduating, but now she needed another
plan, and fast.

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 33. Greater Love

February 24, 2005

Smith County Courthouse — Tyler, Texas
From a lof apartment overlooking the town square, Mark Wilson had an elevated
view of the Tyler courthouse’s rear entrance. He just happened to be at home that
Thursday, when the sudden sound of gun re came up from the streets below his
window; and almost instantly, the sound of return re joined in, indicating a
pitched gun battle between security forces at the courthouse and some unknown,
but assuredly criminal, party. Whoever it was, they had what sounded like a semi-
automatic ri e, and they just kept shooting, and shooting.

Mark knew guns. He had opened his own ring range in Tyler in 1997, and since
then had taught many new gun buyers about the basics of rearm safety, as well as
how to shoot accurately. Mark was also licensed to carry a concealed handgun in
the state of Texas; within seconds of hearing the shots, he picked up his .45 Colt
1911 pistol, and rushed downstairs, into unknown danger.

Glancing out his window af er hearing the rst shots, Mark would have seen a
maroon pickup truck parked across the sidewalk — and next to it, a man stra ng
along the base of the courthouse steps, rapidly ring what looked like an AK-47
ri e toward the building’s entrance. The gunman was trading re with police and
courthouse guards, with at least one o cer critically injured, but the shooter’s re
was mostly concentrated on two civilians sprawled on the court steps: a young
man who was injured in the leg, and next to him, a middle-aged woman who had
been shot multiple times. She wasn’t moving.

Mark didn’t have long to size up the situation. He couldn’t have known that the
woman had been entering the courthouse that day to testify at a divorce hearing,
accompanied by her adult son; her estranged husband had just ambushed them,
angry over the direction custody hearings were going concerning their other son,
age nine. The shooter was now advancing up the steps to nish o f his eldest son,
who had been testifying against him, when Mark Wilson arrived on the scene.

334
Across the red-brick street, on a restaurant patio, a construction worker (who had
just been eating lunch when the gun re broke out) watched in amazement, as he
saw Mark creep up to the scene, weapon at the ready. Mark took cover behind the
shooter’s parked truck, less than 20 yards from the shooter’s position on the steps.
The shooter didn’t see him.

Squinting down the sights of his pistol, Mark observed that his target was a heavy-
set man. He aimed for center-mass, and red, hitting the shooter square in the
back.

The shooter halted in his tracks.

There was another important factor that Mark Wilson could not have known
about on that day: the man he had just shot was wearing an army-issue ack
jacket, over a layer of body armor. The bullets from Mark’s .45 couldn’t hurt the
shooter — they just got his attention.

The man with the ri e turned away from his injured son, to run back to his
pickup truck. Mark red again as the shooter came toward him — again hitting
his target, and again to no e fect — before the shooter reached his vehicle, leaving
only the truck’s bed separated the two men.

At this point, Mark and the shooter engaged in a close-range shootout, popping
up and dodging each other’s re. Af er three or so volleys, Mark was hit, and fell
face-down.

Across the street, the construction worker watched in horror as the shooter calmly
rounded the truck to Mark’s side, aimed his ri e, and shot Mark dead. The
shooter then got back in his truck, and ed the scene.

***
Police backup arrived moments later, and their dash-camera footage recorded the
rest of the incident: in one memorable moment, replayed on news broadcasts later
that day, a police car pulls up to the courthouse with an o cer lying at on its
hood, belly-up, holding an AR-15 in his hands, ready to re. When he realizes that
the shooter is no longer at the scene, he jumps o f his moving platform, and gets
back in. His partner hits the gas, and their unit joins the car chase heading north
on US Route 271.

A few miles outside the city, the dash camera footage shows a swarm of Tyler
Police and Smith County Sheri ’s vehicles catching up to the shooter. He begins
ring at them out of the rear window of his truck, steering with his other hand.
Suddenly one sheri ’s patrol car breaks from the pack, speeding forth, and rams

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the shooter’s vehicle, with the deputy at the wheel also ring his 9mm service
pistol from his window, at the truck.

The shooter slams on the brakes, pausing the pursuit. The deputy who had
rammed him, now out of ammo, speeds away, as the shooter steps out onto the
highway with his ri e, apparently to resume the shootout.

Just at that moment, another police car skids to a stop on the highway’s shoulder,
and the o cer with the AR-15 steps back out.

The bullets red from the AR-15 are capable of piercing the shooter’s armor vest
— but with the o cer’s marksmanship, it’s a non-factor. He res twice, striking
the shooter in the back of the head as he is exiting his truck, and what began as the
Smith County Courthouse shootout, eight minutes and over a hundred bullets
earlier, abruptly ends.

Af erward, the police searched the shooter, turned over his body, and got an up-
close look at the gun: as it turned out, it wasn’t really an AK-47; it was a Norinco
MAK-90 Sporter… another semi-automatic clone of the real AK, and essentially
the same as the one the Stockton shooter had. This one just had a thumb-hole
stock rather than a pistol grip — that, and adding “Sporter” to the model name,
was enough of a change for the Norinco to get around the federal import ban.

***
As the story spread, many gun owners identi ed with Mark Wilson’s plight,
having wondered over the years what would have happened if they were on the
scene of this shooting or that, with their rearm ready.

The lesson was hard: that even if you are armed when a mass shooting incident
occurs, and even if you do not panic, and even if you successfully engage the
shooter (witnesses unanimously concur that Wilson’s intervention saved the life
of the shooter’s son), you may pay the ultimate price for your heroism. The
pairing of a high-capacity ri e with a plan had triumphed, even if only in this
instance, over bravery and a handgun. As a result, Tyler, Texas had lost a good
man.

February 29, 2005

Hall of the House of Representatives — United States Capitol
Building
Six days af er the shootout in Tyler, a man who had worked as a state judge at the
Smith County Courthouse for many years, and who was now a representative of
the state of Texas, stepped to the oor of the House chamber. He shared the story

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of Mark Wilson and his heroic actions, and he urged all Americans to take
inspiration from his sel essness:

For many of reflecting on Mark’s death, the words of Jes of

Nazareth capture Mark’s spirit: “Greater love hath no man than th ;
that a man lay down h life for h friend.” Those words came from
someone who knew, and Mark Wilson’s love what w praised. He
stepped up that love a notch by going and laying down h life for people
he did not even know.

Th country, th institution, needs a memorializing of such a

courageo hero Mark Wilson. H loving parents and dear friends
deserve to hear h prais sung once more for the record, and may the
retelling of Mark’s bravery bring them comfort, bring them hope, and to
the hopeless who think there no one out there who car : Mark cared,
and I would be willing to bet h caring will be perpetuated into posterity
for others that he h touched.

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 34. Emergency

Summer 2005
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy did the laundry. Adam would leave his dirty clothes in a basket in the
upstairs bathroom, under the counter, for her to pick up on her way downstairs.
That bathroom was really his, ever since his older brother moved down to the
basement; Nancy had her own, in the master bedroom at the other end of the hall.

Over the summer, Nancy noticed something: the baskets of Adam’s laundry were
lling up faster and faster. She was picking one up every day, sometimes two or
three. And it wasn’t like Adam was changing for fashion’s sake — he had taken to
wearing the same polo-and-khakis out t every day (a holdover from his uniform
at St. Rose that he “wanted to keep wearing,” despite the circumstances of his
exit). It was more that he always stayed inside, fully dressed, wearing his long
pants and socks, no matter how hot it got that summer. But with his OCD, he
couldn't stand the possibility that anything touching him was unclean, and so his
sweaty clothes would feel "dirty" within hours, and then he would have to change
into a new set. His feet were the worst; he was going through twenty pairs of socks
a day.

Each time Nancy hauled a basket of socks, khakis and identical shirts down to the
basement laundry room, she passed through Ryan’s section 36 Yogananda: a bed
at the bottom of the steps, and a bedroom that led to into the rec area. She didn’t
have to worry about intruding on Ryan’s privacy much; her older son was usually
out of the house, being seventeen and about to start his senior year at Newtown
High School. Nancy and Peter had been talking about his plans for the future;
with his grades, and his father’s salary, Ryan could pursue just about any career he
wanted. Ultimately, he would choose much the same path his father had taken: a
Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting, followed by a job at Ernst & Young.
Adulthood was in sight, and all was going according to plan.

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The contrast between him and his younger brother was, by this point, very stark.
It had been easier to attribute their di ferences to the four-year age gap when they
were growing up, but as the years went by and milestones passed, friends of the
family noticed Adam wasn’t keeping up. Then, af er one year of middle school for
Adam, it was like they were not even traveling on the same path anymore.

Part of the reason they had drif ed apart during Ryan’s high school years may have
been the typical younger-brother syndrome; an event with his friends from the
Tech Club wasn’t as fun for Ryan when he had to watch out for his fragile, timid
kid brother. But Nancy insisted that Adam tag along now and then; the Tech
Club meetings had been one of the few reliable ways to get him to leave 36
Yogananda. He wasn’t just becoming detached from his older brother, he was
drif ing away from the whole outside world.

***
Home was the safest place. Adam wasn’t afraid there. The biggest problem he had
with the house, during the warm months, were the windows: too many of them.
He didn’t like the heat, but more than that, he hated the light coming through the
blinds.

Still, two months of liberation from the school’s bells would have been just what
he wanted. He didn’t have to talk to anybody, or be anywhere. He could just stay
inside and play video games, and read, and watch movies. If he stayed up late
enough, and slept in, he could even miss the next day’s sun entirely.

He started to develop a peculiar taste in lm. Alone in his bedroom, he would put
on old vintage VHS tapes, running them through an analog TV VCR combo
unit. His favorite cinematic nd was Killer Klowns from Outer Space: a campy
schlock-sci horror movie about alien clowns who land on earth and begin killing
humans, transforming their victims’ bodies into cotton candy. Best of all, it had an
infectious pop-punk theme song, performed by the group The Dickies. Adam
loved the tune, and eventually would track down the CD.

Adam got his own computer, and frequently used it to play Counter-Strike — a
tactical rst-person shooter that was revolutionary at the time for its realism and
fast action. In older games like DOOM, an enemy could absorb hundreds of
bullets before falling, but in Counter-Strike, one well-placed shot to the head, and
they were done. It even took place in modern day, using real guns. And the
enemies weren’t a computer program, but other players, somewhere out there
online.

But more and more, Adam was on his PC just to browse the internet. He googled,
and googled. It provided a nearly perfect remedy for the anxiety he had carried

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home from Newtown Middle School: he sought isolation, information, and
escapism, and all three were abundant in the burgeoning broadband era, and all at
his own chosen pace. His bedroom became a custom learning environment, with
curriculum tailored exclusively to his idiosyncrasies and interests. He could stay
inside for days at a time, if his mom let him.

***
Newtown’s 2005-2006 school year was set to start on August 30, and Newtown
Middle School was expecting 905 students to be reporting for the eighth grade. To
what was surely a profound shock to the sense of safety he had settled into over
the summer break, Adam Lanza learned that he was going to be one of them;
Nancy was sending him back into the lion’s den.

Her decision to return her son to the school that fall is puzzling, and nothing in
Nancy’s or the school district’s les has been found to shed any light on her
reasoning. If Adam’s sudden exit from St. Rose of Lima at the end of the previous
school year had indeed stemmed from his stance on religion — as he and Nancy
claimed — then that con ict was apparently even more insurmountable than the
acute anxiety Adam had already displayed when he rst had to navigate the halls
of Newtown’s much, much larger public middle school.

Given the events that would unfold soon af er this decision, it is evident that what
Nancy had been planning over the summer would require a paper trail that
documented Adam’s inability to attend any school, and so perhaps sending Adam
back to NMS was just a step down that path. Or perhaps, for Nancy, the line
between real and imagined health issues was starting to blur.

Robert Anthony’s Hair Salon — Newtown, Connecticut

Every four weeks, Adam would get in the car, and Nancy would drive him down
the hill for a haircut. Starting in his early teens, the salon they went to was on
Church Hill Road, across the street from St. Rose of Lima. The stylist, almost
always the same young woman named Jackie, would groom the boy to Nancy’s
speci cations. Jackie cut Ryan’s hair too, sometimes in the same trip, but the
strange thing was, she never saw the brothers actually talk to each other. They
seemed to exist in the same orbit — and never intersect.

The more Jackie thought about it, the less she was surprised. The two brothers
were just so di ferent. She knew Ryan; he was seventeen, and was into some of the
same music that she was into, so every once in awhile they’d run into each other at
a show. He’d always be friendly. “He was a nice, sweet, intelligent shy guy,” she
would say of Adam’s brother.

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But with Adam, it was like talking to an empty room. When his turn came in the
barber’s chair, he would walk across the hair salon with that awkward gait of his,
his over-sized shirt billowing like a tent, and he’d desperately avoid eye contact
with her or anyone else in the room. Upon taking his seat, he would immediately
look straight down, and place his hands in his lap.

Nancy gave Jackie special instructions to follow whenever cutting Adam’s hair:
don’t shampoo him in the sink, like most clients. Use a spray bottle to wet him
down, and keep him seated. Her instructions on how to style Adam’s hair were
always the same — what Jackie summarizes as “take an inch to 1/2 inch o f and
leave the bangs a certain length, more in his face.” Sometimes, Nancy made
corrections: “I don’t like it. Cut it shorter, trim his sideburns.” Jackie would do as
Nancy said, but when selecting from her barber’s tools, she knew the loud electric
clippers were pretty much out of the question; whenever she turned them on,
Adam would literally cower in fear.

At some point, Ryan (or it may have been Nancy; the hairdresser isn’t sure)
explained to her how to talk to Adam. “He’s very intelligent,” they told her, so
Jackie should just “talk to him normal.” The only thing was, don’t expect much of
a conversation in return. For him, that's normal.

Indeed, when Jackie followed the advice and started talking to Adam while
snipping his locks, he remained near-silent. “He would never return [the
conversation] with anything other than one-word answers,” she remembers, and
he would dip his head down when he spoke; “The answer would be in a sof
whisper, not a completed word, but enough that I could understand what he
would say.”

Af er the haircut, when Jackie asked Adam if he was happy with his appearance,
Nancy would step in to answer on his behalf. If she was happy with Jackie’s work,
her son would rise from the barber’s chair, and rigidly walk back to the front door,
where he would wait for Nancy. He can not wait to leave, Jackie would remember
thinking. But his mom wanted him to be presentable.

September 19, 2005

Pediatrician’s O ce, Fair eld County
Adam went for a doctor’s visit. Nancy told the pediatrician that she was concerned
her son wasn’t sleeping well, and as a result was “sleeping a lot during the day,”
and she noticed he wasn’t eating well, either. He had been back at Newtown
Middle School for less than a month.

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Adam stepped onto a scale: 98 pounds. The nurse measured his height at 5 feet
and 8 inches, and this corresponded to a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 14.9; Adam
wasn’t just a skinny kid, anymore. At age 13, he fell in the lowest single BMI
percentile of boys his age. And as he continued to grow taller, his already-meager
esh would be thinned even more.

Nancy’s son’s appearance made him stand out, a bad setup for someone who was
terri ed of attention. His eyes would bug out when he was frightened — and so
groups of people would inevitably notice him, as the boy with the bugged-out
eyes. Meanwhile, his rotating wardrobe of identical blue polo shirts, and grey
hoodies, just seemed to get baggier.

His day-to-day behavior was noticeably peculiar, too: he carried a box of tissues
with him at school, using them to cover doorknobs or other metal objects he
didn’t like to touch. If he ran out of tissues, he would pull the baggy sleeve of his
hoodie over his hand. And if he heard someone on the other side of a door, Adam
would wait until he heard the unidenti ed person go away before he entered the
room — just to avoid another social interaction.

Danbury Hospital — Emergency Room

It was on a school day, somewhere between the 21st and the 30th of September
that year, when it all nally fell apart. The fear engulfed Adam and he would not,
or perhaps could not, go to school even one more day. Nancy took him to the
emergency room at Danbury Hospital instead.

The ER doctors took in what they observed to be a very agitated 13-year-old boy,
“anxious,” “withdrawn,” and “hesitant to be touched.” Their assessment further
recorded that Nancy’s son “presented as agitated, hyper-vigilant, and
overwhelmed with fear,” and that he had been admitted by his mother because of
the anxiety episodes he was experiencing. She said he was “having trouble in
school, trouble in groups, and [was] exhibiting repetitive behaviors which had
gotten worse in recent days.”

The hospital sta f asked Nancy a standard set of questions about her son.

W Adam taking any drugs? “No.”

Did she believe that her son w homicidal? “No.”

Did she believe that her son w suicidal? “No.”

Had Adam been diagnosed with any disorders? Nancy told the doctors that Adam
had at one time shown signs of “borderline autism,” but for years she had believed

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that her son had “outgrown” the disorder. Now, she again feared “the beginning
of possible autism.”

The ER doctor listened, and scrawled a presumed diagnosis and course of action
on the intake form: “Anxiety Disorder, [Not Otherwise Speci ed]; Rule out
Asperger Syndrome; Rule out Autistic Disorder.”

First, the doctors suggested that they perform an extensive medical work-up on
Adam. Nancy declined, knowing the intensely negative reaction her son would
have to being interviewed and touched by a group of hurried strangers — not to
mention the needles.

She told them that Adam was “already scheduled to see a psychiatrist in three
weeks,” and that the only reason she had even come to the hospital that day was to
“obtain medical permission to allow [Adam] to stay home from school
inde nitely.”

The hospital’s crisis team told Nancy about the options available for child therapy.
They especially recommended a “therapeutic educational placement” at the
nearby Center for Child and Adolescent Treatment Services, which o fered an
“intensive outpatient” program. They even o fered to conduct a full psychiatric
evaluation of Adam, then and there, con dent that it would expedite his
admission to the therapy-focused program.

Nancy declined this o fer, too; she insisted that Adam would be “better o ” at
home than staying at the hospital any longer. All the prodding and commotion
was causing her son even more anxiety than the halls of Newtown Middle School
had in the rst place. She said that she could “manage” Adam at 36 Yogananda,
and that she just needed the doctor's note, to keep Newtown Schools o f her back
about attendance for those three weeks. By then, she would have it all taken care
of.

Danbury Hospital did agree to write a note for Adam — but it was only to keep
him home for three more days, the expectation being that a Planning and
Placement Team would be assembled by then, and would schedule an emergency
meeting to address the situation. Af er more than three years without one, her son
needed an IEP.

The Danbury sta f had Nancy sign a written promise to bring Adam back to the
ER if his anxiety symptoms increased, and, with three-day note in hand, Nancy
and Adam rushed out of Danbury Hospital just as suddenly as they had arrived.
Nancy didn’t get quite what she wanted that day, but she did not give up. In the
meantime, Adam was going to stay home, no matter what anyone said.

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Newtown Middle School
An administrator with the school district remembers being in their o ce one day
that fall, when they were noti ed that a parent of a student was there to see them.
In walked Nancy Lanza, age 45, who told the administrator that she wanted to
“home school” her youngest son.

Her son didn’t even have an IEP, so this was quite a dramatic request. The
administrator started asking questions, and Nancy explained that it was for
Adam’s sake: he couldn’t handle being at school. She had already taken him to the
emergency room in Danbury, but the environment at the hospital caused her son
so much anxiety that she felt it was “abusive” to him to keep him there any longer.
She wouldn’t need to keep him home “sick” anymore, if she could just home-
school him.

The administrator from Newtown Schools was unpersuaded, and told Nancy that
they didn’t agree that homeschooling would be appropriate in Adam’s case.
Instead, they proposed that “the family and school work together to try and meet
Adam’s needs, even in unconventional ways if necessary.”

Nancy could see that the homeschooling approach wasn't going to work, but she
still wasn’t about to give up.

There were essentially two ways for a student to stay home from school long-term
in Connecticut: the rst, and most common, was to be home schooled. The
second way was to be placed in “homebound” status. For that, you need a doctor.

October 18, 2005

O ce of Dr. Paul Fox, MD — Brook eld, Connecticut
Dr. Paul Lewis Fox came from New York. He interned at Benedictine Hospital,
and then was a resident at Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla, until
he married an archaeologist from Stamford in 1988. Shortly af er, they relocated to
Connecticut, and he opened his private practice, in a sycamore-shaded white-brick
o ce building in Brook eld (a town adjoining Danbury and Newtown) where he
specialized in adolescent psychology.

Nancy Lanza’s quest to liberate her son from Newtown Middle School ultimately
led her to Dr. Fox’s door — but nobody seems to know exactly how their paths
crossed. It’s unlikely that Danbury Hospital referred her there, since she had told
the Emergency Room sta f during the September visit that Adam was “already
scheduled to see a psychiatrist in three weeks.” On the other hand, one
unidenti ed administrator for the Newtown School District claims that they were
the one who referred Nancy to Dr. Fox; this would seem to settle the issue, except

344
that this administrator also claims that this conversation with Nancy happened
a er the ER visit. The confusion could be attributed to memory fading over the
years, or possibly to Nancy telling the doctors di ferent things than she was telling
the school district; whatever the case, it seems that one day in the late summer or
early fall of 2005, Nancy Lanza and Paul Fox suddenly knew each other. And for
some reason, Nancy — who for years now had been notoriously protective of her
son, particularly when it came to doctors — almost immediately trusted this
particular doctor with Adam like she trusted herself.

The “three weeks” time frame that Nancy asked the ER to excuse Adam for was
likely an indication that she was trying to document his condition to ful ll a set of
requirements established by the Connecticut State Board of Education, which
state that “homebound or hospitalized instruction shall be provided when a
child’s condition will cause an absence of at least three weeks’ duration.”

Immediately af er Adam’s second evaluation with Dr. Fox on October 18 — three

weeks removed from the emergency room visit — Fox sent a letter to Newtown
administrators asserting that Adam “should not attend school” because of the
“the lack of an appropriate placement” for him in Newtown’s facilities, where he
had been experiencing “mounting and overwhelming anxiety.”

That there was no “appropriate placement” for Adam was an extraordinary claim
for Dr. Fox to have made at this time, especially af er just one or two evaluations.
In doing so, Fox was not only claiming that attendance at Newtown Middle
School (which provided both “mainstream” and special-education classes) would
be inappropriate for his patient, but was also dismissing the possibility of
placement at any alternative school, as well as any sort of hospitalized or
institutionalized setting. In other words, any arrangement that would require
Adam to leave the con nes of 36 Yogananda was totally out of the question.

Demanding this of any school district would be a tall order. Federal regulations
required Newtown to place their student in the “least restrictive environment”
that his education plan could be implemented in, and homebound status was the
most restrictive kind of placement, as well Dr. Fox knew. So, in the same note to
Newtown, Dr. Fox — likely anticipating that the school district would propose a
less drastic measure for Adam’s IEP — ruled out any alternative. “Adam has
agreed to achieve competency in all academic subjects at home,” Fox wrote. “At
this point tutoring is not needed and could be viewed as counter-productive both
academically and emotionally.”

***
In an undated note, later found in Nancy’s IEP les from this period, Adam’s
handwriting lists the reasons he couldn’t tolerate Newtown Middle School,

345
underneath a doodle of a sad-face shedding a tear, and the word “School.” The list
is extensive:

* People

* Unsanitary

* Not enough time in the overcrowded hallways

* Teachers being disappointed in me

* I always seem to miss hearing homework being assigned (or implied...)

* Lunch too short to be enjoyable

* I have to wake early for just disappointment

*B

* I learn too slowly, they teach to the slowest children

* I can’t learn the way that school teach

***
Dr. Fox’s October 18 note bought the Lanzas more time, but there was still work
to do. Generally, Connecticut’s “necessary conditions” for determining
homebound status required an “expected date the child will be able to return to
the school,” but Dr. Fox was recommending indefinite homebound placement —
only permitted if “the child has a handicap so severe that it prevents the child
from learning in a school setting, or the child’s presence in school endangers the
health, safety or welfare of the child or others.” Homebound status would also
require a speci c diagnosis of a disability, one recognized under the IDEA act: a 13-
category list, ranging from speech and language impairments, to deafness,
blindness and traumatic brain injuries.

The “overwhelming anxiety” that Dr. Fox had cited was not a disability
recognized on the IDEA list, and so it would not be enough to get the Lanzas
what they wanted. However, the Child Advocate would determine in 2014 that,
given the observations Dr. Fox reported to Newtown, “consideration of the
criteria for emotional disturbance would have been appropriate.”

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Emotional disturbance is a recognized category of disability that is diagnosed af er
a student exhibits one or more characteristics “over a long period of time and to a
marked degree that adversely a fects a child’s educational performance,” of which
there are ve:

* An inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory,

or health factors

* An inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal

relationships with peers and teachers.

* Inappropriate typ of behavior or feelings under normal

circumstanc .

* A general pervasive mood of unhappiness or depression.

* A tendency to develop physical symptoms or fears associated with

personal or school problems.

Adam had exhibited at least the last four of these traits while in Newtown schools
over the years (Nancy had long attributed his learning delays to sensory issues.)
But there is no record that a diagnosis of emotional disturbance was even
considered. Apparently, Nancy and Dr. Fox saw something else in him.

Fox had one more meeting with Adam, and then he granted Nancy’s wish.

November 15, 2005

Newtown Schools got a letter from Dr. Fox. Af er years with the boy as their
student, this was their rst detailed insight into just what might be wrong with
Adam Lanza — and nally, a doctor had identi ed his primary disability:

Adam a 13 year old boy who I have evaluated on 9/30/05, 10/18/05,

and 11/15/05. He meets the DSM IV criteria for Asperger’s Disorder.

Adam presents with a significant social impairment including lack of

peer relationships, avoidance of eye-to-eye gaze, lack of understanding of
how to play or interact with peers. He avoids peer interaction and very
anxio around strangers. He lacks empathy and tends to employ a very
rigid systematic thought process.

347
 He demonstrat intense emotional rage when h systematic world
threatened due to h extreme need for routine.

He tends to take a very literal interpretation of written and verbal

material. Concepts like metaphor, symbolism and intangible referenc
are exceedingly difficult for him and can cause significant distress.

He tends to have an overly precise quality of speech and tends to not

comprehend emotional expression in others.

The note went on to document a shif in the atmosphere within 36 Yogananda, a

marked departure from the loving mother-son relationship that Marvin
Lafontaine had witnessed in Adam’s preschool years — when the boy was already
averse to touch, but could at least tolerate Nancy’s; as Dr. Fox reported, Adam was
now “phobic [o ] physical contact, even with his own mother who has been his
most constant and consistent individual in his life.”

Dr. Fox then went about proposing a new educational environment that was
based on accommodating Adam’s emotional vulnerabilities, along with a
curriculum that was to be conducted entirely at home:

Due to h extreme anxiety and emotional discord due to minor chang

in routin and/or h expectations, he unable to attend school.

Due to h need for systematic precision and logic there needs to be

modifications in the school curriculum. For example, the English
curriculum should foc on the grammar and writing in a clear precise
way. Literary choic should tend to be more literal and less figurative. It
would be constructive for Adam to have an accelerated program in
Math and Science by allowing him to take honor class in the high
school.

At th point I am strongly recommending that Adam not be compelled

to attend school. He h clearly demonstrated that the experience of the
school setting which h an intolerable level of noise and unpredictable
elements would promote extreme anxiety and discomfort.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to call.

It was just what Nancy had been chasing for the last two months: an inde nite
excuse to keep Adam home, with a qualifying disability and a doctor’s signature.

348
Her victory in place, she was nally ready to schedule a meeting of Adam’s IEP
team, three months af er the Danbury ER doctors had advised her to.

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 35. Protection

October 20, 2005

Hall of the House of Representatives — United States Capitol
Building
“Here we go again,” a congressman representing North Carolina announced. He
was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law,
and he was in a sour mood, because the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms
Act — the legislation that would raise the NSSF’s coveted liability shield — was
back before the House:

Another year of trying to close the courthouse doors to innocent victims

of preventable violence of any kind. Another year of radically altering
and undermining our system of Stat ’ rights, which so many on th
Committee have given so much and so much ener to saying that they
support. Another year of trying to confer sweeping immunity to a single
industry, the gun industry, in th case. Here we go again. Here we go
again.

The PLCAA had already passed the Senate in July of 2005 by a vote of 65-31, and
all that lay in the path to the president’s signature now was approval by the House
of Representatives.

Turning to the gun industry’s manufacturer/dealer relationship (set to gain

“unprecedented protection” under the proposed bill), the veteran congressman
re-dismissed the gun-rights arguments he remembered from 2003. “[They] didn’t
reveal to me any reason why individuals harmed by guns that were recklessly
placed in the stream of commerce should not be allowed to seek a remedy from
those responsible,” the congressman said — especially at a point when “the
number of deaths and injuries from gun violence and accidental shootings has
escalated. Under this bill, no one within the gun industry bears any responsibility,
no duty of care for the misuse of dangerous weapons.”

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For America’s rearms companies, the country’s legislative environment had
changed signi cantly in just one year. The sun had set on the Federal Assault
Weapons Ban of 1994, and so there was no longer any poison amendment for a
stubborn California senator to deploy; the wave that had been sent out from
Stockton in 1989 had nally broken, and rolled back out. It didn’t hurt, either,
that 2005 would not be an election year for the president. If the act was going to
pass, it was going to be now.

The debate became distilled into a familiar question: if the shield law had been in
effect then, would the D.C. Sniper victims have been blocked from suing
Bushmaster, and the gun store in Tacoma?

A representative from a Maryland district — the same where several constituents

had taken sniper re while trying to put gas in their car just a few years prior —
said that the PLCAA would have done to the snipers’ victims exactly what they all
feared; that, “The consequences of this bill would be making them victims twice.
It would be to deny the families of the victims their day in court with respect to
civil damages.”

A representative from Washington State then took the oor, to weigh in on his
own state’s connection to the sniper attacks:

The gun that w used in those crim w actually purchased in my

district, or actually, I should say, came from a store in my district. It
still unclear how that got to be in the person’s possession because the gun
shop h no records. They have records that they had the guns and then,
oops, they’re gone. They have no records of how it actually got to be in
somebody else’s hands or even out of their store, for that matter. [...] I
do not want to exclude that company from liability when they had some
number of guns that just went unaccountably missing. That
negligence, to my mind, depending on the facts. It’s at least a case for the
jury, let’s put it that way.

Seeking to ensure that a party in his state could still be sued, he asked again if the
bill would have blocked the Bushmaster lawsuit, and — showing that he had been
paying close attention to the proceedings in prior sessions — added, “I suspect
that I’ll get about ve di ferent contradictory answers.”

During testimony, a representative from the Brady Campaign pointed out that
the Bushmaster case they were debating was a prime example of why the
manufacturers and their advocates like the NSSF were exaggerating the toll of the
lawsuits in the rst place. “Consider the outcome,” the Brady rep said. “The

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sniper victims received justice. Bull’s Eye and Bushmaster were made accountable
for their shoddy business practices. And, again, no one declared bankruptcy.”

Some in the Senate had tried to amend the PLCAA, to clear up some of the
ambiguity over what cases the shield would, and would not, block from going to
trial. One such amendment was to make an exception for cases of a child being
harmed with a gun, whether in an accidental shooting or a school shooting. It was
brought to the oor on April 20, 2005, an anniversary that was not lost on the
amendment's sponsor, who compared the position of gun manufacturers to that
of drug manufacturers, when it came to potentially-dangerous products
spreading, and harming minors:

Now we want to be able to immunize [the gun industry] for the

proliferation of guns in the hands of not only criminals but in the results
of that: the use of the guns by those who may not start out to be
criminals. We want to make immune drug manufacturers who recklessly
manufacture without safety precautions, and, not [be] concerned about
where guns wind up.

My amendment simple.... That parents of minors have the right to sue

for civil damag when a minor under age of 18 injured or killed by a
gun. In th instance, th legislation seeks to give a cover of innocence to
gun manufacturers, on the very day of the tragedy of Columbine —
where these were not [convicted] criminals who took up these guns, but
their acts resulted in criminal activity, because of the proliferation of
guns and the lack of safety procedur with these guns.

A leading supporter of the PLCAA, a representative from Utah, argued back: “I

encourage the members of the committee to vote against this amendment because
the age of a victim of a crime should not and does not a fect the moral
responsibility of the person that pulled the trigger. It should be the person that
pulled the trigger who is held responsible regardless of the age of the victim.”

The representative from Utah had the votes, and the amendment was defeated. It
wasn’t the only one.

There was a motion to amend the shield law to permit lawsuits in any state that
had not provided to the Attorney General “at least 90% of records needed to
conduct a criminal background check” for rearms purchases. It failed.

There was a motion to permit law enforcement o cers to bring civil lawsuits in
cases where a police o cer was shot. It failed.

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There was a motion to permit lawsuits “when the seller knows that the name of
the person who bought the gun appears in the Violent Gang and Terrorist
Organization File” — also known as the “terrorist watch list.” It failed.

Finally, there was an amendment proposed that “allows the victims of domestic
violence to sue gun dealers for illegal rearm sales to persons with domestic
violence convictions.” The amendment’s sponsor, another representative from
California, made a statement:

I ask that everyone on the opposite side of the aisle who might oppose th
amendment to imagine your daughter, your niece, or a female friend
shot by a gun illegally sold to someone with a history of domestic
violence. Then imagine having to tell them that they can’t seek civil
damag for their injuri from the person who made the criminal gun
sale.

The representative from Utah argued back again. “Let me just tell you what my
view of right and fair is,” he said. “Right and fair is when your wife or your
daughter is not attacked because the rapist stalking her fears that she might have
an inexpensive and accurate rearm. I oppose this amendment, I urge the
members of the committee to also oppose it.” He won again. It failed.

At one point in the judiciary committee, a representative from Michigan, opposed

to the shield law, observed that Congress had not bothered to comment on the
Tyler, Texas shootout, among other multiple-shooting incidents involving
“assault ri es” that year — issues which he believed “should take precedence over
the one before us today, because they pose grave risk to human life.”

The representative from Texas, the same who eulogized Mark Wilson during a
House session earlier that year, defended himself — “Congress did respond, at
least this one did” — and then compared the attack to another in Texas history:

Because Tex h a concealed carry permit and the actions of Mark

Wilson and the prompt response by law enforcement a er Mark, we did
not have another Luby’s like we had years before where nobody had a
weapon when a crazy nut came in and started shooting wildly. Here, we
had somebody and we had a citizenry and a law enforcement that were
armed. They protected the public to minimize the damage that occurred
there, and I thank God for Mark Wilson and law enforcement and for
the laws that made that possible.

To the representative from the Tyler courthouse, Mark Wilson had been the
manifestation of what Suzanna Gratia wished she could have done in 1991, and the

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shield law’s passage would be in that same spirit of dedication to rearms freedom.
(Before he lef the podium, he also corrected his colleague on the Norinco: “It was
a semi-automatic weapon. It was not an assault ri e.”)

Just as they had heard from the Brady campaign, the committee also took
testimony from the gun industry’s representatives. First, the Secretary and General
Counsel of Sigarms, Inc. complained, “We have been ghting for our very survival
against these lawsuits, diverting time, money, and other of our limited resources to
defend ourselves.” Following Colt's lead, he went on to portray the survival of
Sigarms Inc. as vital to the nation’s security, reminding the committee that “SIG
Sauer pistols are carried by many in combat, most notably the U.S. Navy Seals…
these lawsuits have national defense and homeland security implications.”

It was near the end of the session when Larry Keane of the NSSF made his return.
His remarks were a redoubling his e forts from 2003, predicting, “If the coercive
e fect resulting from the staggering cost to defend these cases forces manufacturers
into a Hobson’s choice of capitulation or bankruptcy, [then the] anti-gun
plainti fs can implement their gun control policies through the entire nation.” He
urged congress to pass the law.

On the 20th, the nal vote came: yeas 283, nays 144, and 6 not voting. With that,
the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act became law, and a mighty shield
was raised.

October 26, 2005

Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive O ce Building — Washington
DC
In Room 350, in the o ce building next-door to the White House, President
Bush sat before the nal text of the act. He had already released an o cial
statement, upon hearing the news of its passage, which was in stark contrast to his
silence when signing Texas’s version of the law in 1999:

I commend the House for passing the ‘Protection of Lawful Commerce

in Arms Act.’ Our laws should punish criminals who use guns to
commit crim , not law-abiding manufacturers of lawful products. Th
legislation will further our efforts to stem frivolo lawsuits, which cause
a lo am in America’s courts, harm America’s small business , and
benefit a handful of lawyers at the expense of victims and consumers.

As he signed his name to the new law, he was surrounded by the men who had
been its architects, with Larry Keane and reps from the NSSF and Heritage Fund
front-and-center. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them, and beaming with

354
pride, was Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. Their alliance, and years of hard work,
had led to a triumphant, nal victory. The war was over.

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 36. Shelter in Place

December 9, 2005
Newtown Middle School
The Newtown Bee published a list of the town’s middle school students who had
made the Honor Roll that quarter. Adam’s name was printed there, under
“Eighth Grade - First Marking Period.” But he hadn’t attended a class in months.

Three weeks had passed since Dr. Fox sent his letter to Newtown Schools,
liberating Adam from the campus on ueen Street. However, there is no record
in the IEP les to indicate that Dr. Fox ever supplied the district with his formal
evaluation of their student, or the accompanying recommendations, as would
have been routine. All they had from him was that single letter.

Dr. Fox was in attendance when the Planning and Placement Team nally met to
establish Adam’s IEP for the 8th grade, in December of 2005, but he didn’t share a
copy of the evaluation then, either. This was just as well; at the meeting,
Newtown agreed to temporarily accept Dr. Fox’s request to grant homebound
status, extending the placement for another three months. It also appears that the
school district declined to identify Adam’s primary disability just yet, which
suggests that they were unconvinced by Dr. Fox’s work; if the school district
agreed with the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, the appropriate move at the
time would have been for them to update Adam’s disability to “Autism.”

The school district put more time on the clock, and said they wanted a second
opinion, o fering to evaluate Adam themselves. But Nancy atly declined, telling
Newtown Schools that another psychological evaluation would “not be in Adam’s
best interests.”

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

With Adam ensconced in the pale yellow house, the next steps in his IEP called for
Nancy to gradually get him used to visitors — at rst, educators coming into 36

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Yogananda for regular tutoring sessions. But from there, they would gradually
work towards bringing in school administrators, and doctors, getting Adam
acclimated to them, too. Finally having access to their pupil, the school’s
evaluators could then, hopefully, ascertain just what they believed his actual
disability and corresponding needs really were.

But when the time came for tutoring sessions to begin, already the plans were
changing — there would be no unfamiliar faces visiting 36 Yogananda af er all.
The only tutors Adam would be exposed to were his parents; Nancy would teach
the humanities, while Peter would be making the hour-long drive up from
Stamford multiple times a week, to teach Adam the sciences.

***
From the beginning, Nancy’s son refused to accept Dr. Fox’s diagnosis. He
welcomed the opportunity to stay home from school, of course, but whenever
Peter tried to talk to Adam about his disorder, he wouldn’t listen. “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 would later recall to Andrew Solomon. But
it was no use. “Adam was not open to therapy. He did not want to talk about
problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.”

He wasn’t alone. Nancy — who had just nished ghting tooth-and-nail to

obtain homebound status, ostensibly to alleviate and address what had just been
diagnosed — privately held doubts that her son really had Asperger’s Syndrome at
all.

***
The 8th grade tutoring arrangement never progressed past the rst stage. The
initial “up to ten hours” that was recommended in Adam’s IEP was likely nothing
more than a simple acknowledgment of the state’s standard recommendations,
which called for instruction to homebound students “for at least [...] ten hours
per week for children in grades seven through twelve.” IEP teams could make
exceptions to that whenever necessary, and ultimately, the Child Advocate’s O ce
would nd, “There is no evidence regarding how or if the recommended 10 hours
per week of homebound instruction was delivered during this school year.” In the
end, Adam appears to have obtained the exact education plan that Nancy had rst
requested through Dr. Fox in October 2005, back before anyone had even
mentioned Asperger’s syndrome: a vague agreement to “achieve competency”
from home, with no required tutoring or contact with the outside world
whatsoever.

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His primary goal achieved, Adam began customizing his habitat, in his bedroom
at the top of the stairs. Sections of black plastic sheeting were cut to t over each
window — just as Homeland Security had advised in case of terrorist attacks —
and the sheets were xed to the interior walls with layered strips of blue “Edge-
Lock” painter’s tape. It was in this way that he was nally able to establish a
physical space for himself that he could tolerate; he transformed his bedroom into
a sealed cocoon, where not a ray of light could penetrate, and no one, not even his
mother, was allowed entry.

***
A girl who lived on Yogananda street went to connect to a Wi-Fi network one
night, when she noticed a new connection on the list: “Night Elf.”

It was broadcasting from 36 Yogananda street. Adam had been into computers for
some time, but this connection represented something more: it was his pipeline to
a magical world, a plane of existence that was in harmony with his delicate
sensibilities, and where there was no anxiety, no natural light, and no eye contact:
the realm of Azeroth.

The PC role-playing game World of Warcra was developed by Blizzard

Entertainment, and was released to the public in November 2004. While not the
rst “massively multiplayer online role-playing game” (a sub-genre usually
abbreviated to “MMO”), World of Warcra quickly came to dominate the market.
Most importantly to Blizzard, the MMO format, with its endless gameplay
experience and constantly updating digital world, carried with it a subscription-
based pricing model: access to Azeroth cost $14.99 a month.

It appears that Adam and his mother were communicating primarily in writing,
around this time. Mixed in with handwritten formal requests to tweak this or that
in his environment, is what appears to be his obtaining payment for the World of
Warcra account (as there is no other paid-subscription service that he is known
to have signed up for):

I request that you wash my towels by using bleach. I will place them in
the dryer at approximately 10:30. [...] I request that you place more
toothbrush into my box and that you leave your credit card on the
counter for the subscription.

Nancy would go on paying that bill for years to come.

Adam had already played “WoW” at Tech Club events before, so he knew what he
was getting into, even as he installed it on his own PC for the rst time.

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Starting the game, Adam was prompted to create a character. He typed in a
username that he had grown comfortable with over the last year at GameFAQs:
“Blarvink.”

The game then prompted him to select a faction, a gender, and then a race.

A “night el ” — as the girl down the street later learned — was one of the eight
races that a WoW player could control during their time in Azeroth. This choice
was the most consequential in determining what a player could do, and the “role”
they generally played in the game’s community. Playing as a night elf, Adam
assumed a race that appeared in the game as a warrior from an ancient nocturnal
tribe, known for their reclusiveness, wisdom, and traditions of drawing power
from nature.

Whatever “class” Adam subsequently chose for his night elf, he didn’t much
follow the progression path laid out by the game’s designers. World of Warcra
represented something more signi cant to him than just scripted quests — it was
a virtual environment, populated by other real players, but also computer-
simulated non-player characters (NPCs), programmed to run shops and drop bits
of dialogue as they went about their day. Unlike most users, Adam liked to play
WoW as if he really was a night elf, exploring the countrysides and cities and
speaking to the arti cial NPCs while "in-character." For a boy who was afraid to
leave the house or speak to strangers, role-playing with automatons in a fantasy
world was the ultimate escape. And so, even as Adam was fading from the
memories of his classmates on earth, Blarvink was coming to life, in Azeroth.

The computer room was across the hall from his bedroom. Soon, it became
absorbed into his territory as well; Nancy had “blackout” shades installed over the
room's windows, to keep out as much sunlight as possible. (Most likely, the gun
safe was already in the the closet there, when the computer room became part of
Adam's zone; if not, it was moved there sometime in the following four years.)

Spring 2006
Beginning that school year, Connecticut made a change to its standardized testing
schedule: instead of the students taking the Connecticut Mastery Test right at the
beginning of the school year, in September, the exam dates were shif ed back to
March. So, when the time came for every single one of Connecticut’s 8th graders
(a class to which Adam still technically belonged) to be accounted for, that meant
it was someone’s job to locate Adam Lanza, and have him complete the test.

They didn’t get very far. Nancy was alerted, and she had Dr. Fox respond to
Newtown’s request for Adam’s availability. Fox told Newtown that Adam would

359
not be able to take the test.

In response, Newtown demanded documentation to that e fect:

In order to exempt Adam from taking the CMTs, we need a letter from
you indicating that he unable to attend school and
medically/emotionally unavailable for homebound instruction for the
testing period and the make-up testing period . . . without th letter, we
are mandated to send a certified teacher to Adam’s house to give him
the test.

In the “No Child Lef Behind” era, standardized tests were both a state and federal
matter. Newtown had no authority to make exceptions.

Adam’s psychiatrist faxed Newtown a note, explicitly stating that his patient was
“medically/emotionally unavailable to be tested” — and then added in
parentheses, “CMT.” In the same fax, Dr. Fox con rmed (as summarized by the
Child Advocate) that at this time, Adam “was not receiving home-bound or
hospital-based tutoring and he was not attending school at all.”

According to Nancy’s billing records, Adam was at least leaving the house for
regular sessions with Dr. Fox during this time, and did so at least twenty times
over as many months. In 2013, Dr. Fox would recall that these sessions usually
were with Adam and his mother, together in the room. Sometimes, Nancy waited
outside, and Fox met just with Adam; at least once, Nancy met with Dr. Fox by
herself.

***
Later that spring, Ryan turned eighteen. Adam’s older brother was o cially an
adult.

Twelve days later, Adam turned fourteen.

It was around this time, so he would later claim, that Nancy’s younger son began
to question the cultural foundations that de ned the concept of “adulthood.” He
believed the age of eighteen was an “arbitrary” and “meaningless” point in time.
The concept became a xation of his, and he began to question more of the
fundamental assumptions underlying modern society; it didn’t happen all at
once, but a part of Adam’s belief system began to splinter o f, drif ing toward
anarchy.

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13th March 2006
National Archives of Scotland — Edinburgh, United Kingdom
A father from Dunblane waited as a clerk from the National Archives brought
him the classi ed le he’d requested. Though the families of victims were invited
to watch the Cullen Inquiry from the balcony of Royal Albert Hall in 1996, there
had been at least one evidence exhibit that Lord Cullen ruled should remain
sealed; the police knew what it said, and the MPs knew, but they didn’t talk about
it at the Inquiry. No civilian, not even the families, had ever seen that le.

The o cial reason given for classifying it was that it contained the original 1991
report from the Child Protection Unit (from the same o cer who had warned
that the Scoutmaster would be “a risk to children whenever he has access to
them”), and this report had contained the names of minor children, which could
not be disclosed. It was for that simple reason that now, the whole le was sealed.

Since then — especially af er the Scoutmaster’s letters came to light, ranting about
the “brotherhood conspiracy” between the police, scouts, and Freemasons —
rumors had grown that the sealed le actually contained the names of powerful
UK politicians and police gures who were engaged in child abuse; the Cullen
Inquiry, it usually followed, had just been one big cover-up.

The le was set to remain sealed for one hundred years. Many said that was too
long, their suspicion of a government conspiracy escalating further. Others said
the les should never be unsealed at all. The father from Dunblane was one who
felt they should be released — he had studied the scoutmaster, and he did not
believe there was any conspiracy, but he wanted to know everything. As the ten-
year anniversary of the attack approached, a PM from Scotland decided to answer
the father’s wishes, and the documents were unsealed, 90 years ahead of schedule.

Lef alone in a room at the Scottish National Archives with the bundle of papers,
the father from Dunblane felt any lingering doubts dissipate. There was nothing
in the le that really changed anything — there was no conspiracy. Just the
familiar, demented scoutmaster, with his own fully-legal arsenal.

The father from Dunblane gave up looking for any other game-changing piece of
evidence, af er that. “It’s not going to provide the kind of explanations that we as a
society really need,” he told the Sunday Herald on the ten-year anniversary:

And that : ‘how do you deal with someone like [him] before he go
over the edge?’ He w a strange, unusual person, but part of the
community. [He] w accepted….some people have stood up and said ‘I

361
 didn’t find him too bad a chap.’ Now that not someone who evil.
But year a er year he w getting more and more upset about the society
he lived in. At what point can th be spotted? And at what point can
anyone intervene? We still don’t know.

April 7, 2006
Newtown High School
A 9-1-1 call came from NHS: there was a man in a dark van, parked across the
street from the high school, and he was ring a ri e.

As Newtown PD squad cars swarmed to the scene, Superintendent Pitko f

declared a district-wide lockdown of all seven Newtown schools, for the rst time
in the town’s history. All the students were told to take cover — as they had
practiced ever since Columbine — and all the doors were locked.

Newtown police detained the gunman, and soon determined that there was no
actual threat to the school: the suspect had only red a single shot from a Marlin
hunting ri e, into a tree across the highway from the school. He owned the
property there — but it was still against the law to shoot there, being so close to
the school, so he was arrested and charged with unlawful discharge of a rearm.
The “shooter” ended up getting probation, and a small ne.

At the end of the day, it was a relatively minor incident, and the emergency status
was lif ed af er just ten minutes. But it showed that Newtown could do it: they
had been practicing their drills for years, and when the alarm got pulled for real,
everything went smoothly.

***
Evan Pitko f had been down the road at Reed when the call came in, and drove
straight to the scene, where he was waved through a police barricade. Af er the
danger passed, and seeing the crowded halls of Newtown High School once again,
the more traditional challenges facing the district came back into view:
construction of the intermediate school had taken the pressure o f the
elementaries and NMS, but the high school was still over owing. Making matters
worse, while the population continued to surge, the townspeople had now voted
against school budget increases two years straight, leaving the school with even
less, to do even more.

In fact, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges had just completed
an inspection of Newtown High School, and released a report on the conditions
they found; the news wasn’t good. The inspection identi ed a number of causes
for concern that would have to be addressed, from “inadequate sta ng levels” to

362
“the signi cant overcrowding and space concerns,” made worse by “the absence of
any plan by the town to address the serious space issue.” Now, the school board in
Newtown was concerned that the Commission on Public Secondary Schools
might even put Newtown High School on “warning” status — a formal notice
that if things didn’t change fast, their high school could actually lose accreditation.

Former Campus of Fair eld Hills Hospital

At the other end of Wasserman Way, on the old hospital campus, a backhoe was
excavating the soil around the foundation of Bridgeport Hall. The large brick
building had once been the dining facility for all of Fair eld State Hospital, where
the patients came back from the farm with their harvest. Now, it was set to be
renovated, and repurposed into the Newtown Municipal Center — the facility
that would house all of the town government’s main o ces — while the old
Edmond Town Hall, af er renovations, would retain its ceremonial title.

Though the work had started, its conclusion was suddenly in question. Town
opinion on Fair eld Hills had shif ed since the big meeting in June 2001 — cash
was not “dripping from the trees” in Newtown as much as it once had — and
though the town hall and the school budgets were funded under separate
appropriations, a growing and vocal population within Newtown saw the
situation di ferently: they wanted to cut spending, and the high school expansion
was something they all acknowledged was an emergency. That lef the “Fair eld
Hills Master Plan” out in the cold — they had already waited for decades, and
now that the town owned the hills again, they could wait some more.

June 2006
Pediatrician’s O ce — Fair eld County
Nancy brought Adam in for another check-up. As they had done in 2003, Adam’s
pediatrician again prescribed Aquaphor skin ointment for his excoriated hands.
By itself, this entry in Adam’s medical records is an acknowledgment that his
compulsive hand washing had not abated while home from school. He was not
getting better, at least not as re ected in his daily rituals.

Stepping onto the doctor’s scale, Adam’s weight had decreased to just 94 pounds.
Nancy told the doctor she was concerned about her son’s continuing weight loss,
and they scheduled a consultation for August, just before the start of 9th grade.

Strangely, the pediatrician’s records don’t mention Adam’s visits with his
psychiatrist during this time. It would have been normal for the two medical
professionals to coordinate their e forts, but the pediatrician doesn’t even seem to
have been aware of Dr. Fox, let alone that they shared a patient.

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 ***
Shortly af er this “well-child” checkup, Adam’s IEP team convened for another
meeting. Again foregoing both autism and emotional disturbance, the IEP for
June 2006 only listed Adam’s primary disability as “To Be Determined,” while the
team agreed to again postpone their evaluation due to Adam’s extreme anxiety,
and Dr. Fox’s recommendations. This development came only af er Nancy had
signed a release that authorized the school district to communicate with Adam’s
psychiatrist about his condition — though once again, Dr. Fox did not supply the
school with a copy of Adam’s evaluation. And he never would.

Now that the 2005-2006 school year was winding down, the talk was more about
what to do the following year; tentative plans were being made to exit Adam from
homebound status af er the summer break. In the meantime, the Lanzas could
comfort themselves that they had won another victory in their campaign: Adam
had somehow nished the eighth grade, and as he was now advancing to his high
school years, he would never have to set foot back on the campus of Newtown
Middle School again.

The high school would be a whole new challenge. They knew they couldn’t just
put Adam right back into mainstream classes, so Nancy and the IEP team agreed
to take things gradually — and surprisingly, Adam seemed willing to give the
outside world another chance.

Only Dr. Fox expressed pessimism about the plan; during a phone call with a
Newtown special education teacher, Fox warned that the Lanza boy was “the
most anxious” patient he had ever seen, and predicted that Newtown “would
never get Adam back in school.”

***
On Friday, June 10 of 2006, most of Newtown Middle School’s 8th graders were
getting ready for their right-of-passage “Moving Up” dance. The middle-school
equivalent of Sandy Hook Elementary’s “Stepping Up” ceremony, this event
marked the end of 8th grade, and the class’s long-awaited transition to Newtown
High School. In order to attend the Moving Up dance, students had to be in 8th
grade, dress semi-formally, earn passing grades, and must have attended class on
the day of the dance.

Shut-in at home for the past eight months, Adam was not eligible to attend —
even if he had wanted to. But, he could still dance; Peter and Nancy had bought
him the home version of Dance Dance Revolution for his Playstation 2, complete
with a plastic mat that he could spread out on the oor of his bedroom,

364
mimicking the arcades. All he had to do was hop on. Now, for as long as he
wanted, whenever he wanted, Adam could dance with a machine.

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 37. Existences

Spring 2006
Je erson County Sheri ’s O ce — Golden, Colorado
Seven years had passed since Columbine. During that time, the county sheri f had
been steadily releasing evidence to the public piece-by-piece, in response to various
“Open Records Act” requests: documents from the diversion programs Lef and
Right were in, or print-outs of their AOL pages. Nothing that signi cant. But
every time they issued a release, the list of exhibits that remained locked up in
Je fco’s vault got shorter and shorter, until nally there were only two major pieces
of evidence lef undisclosed — the infamous “basement tapes,” along with the
shooters’ journals.

The Denver Post had been suing for access to both since 2001, but since the tapes
and the journals were seized directly from the shooters’ homes on the af ernoon of
the attack, the parents of the shooters — as owners of the searched residences —
argued that releasing them was their decision to make. And they wanted the items
to stay sealed.

The sheri f had sided with Lef and Right’s families: the basement tapes were
private property. But the Post pushed back. Eventually, the state’s Supreme Court
had to settle the debate:

Referred to ‘the basement tap ,’ these recordings include video and

audio tap evidencing the plotting for and preparation of the murders.
[...] They are criminal justice records under the Colorado Criminal
Justice Records Act and are subject to the Sheri ’s exercise of sound
discretion to allow the requested inspection or not, utilizing a balancing
test taking into account the relevant public and private interests.

With that, the sheri f had a decision to make: would it truly be “in the public’s
interest” to release the tapes and other documents? Even if it was, would that

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outweigh the private interests of the four parents — people who had never been
convicted of, or even charged with, any crime at all?

The sheri f found the “balancing test” to be even more di cult than it sounded.
He had seen the basement tapes himself, and knew how in ammatory they would
be. The written documents seemed harder to assess, but the decision to release any
of it, once made, was not something they could ever take back.

The sheri f turned to the community in Littleton to tell him what he should do.
He asked the victims families, and — as he would tell the Post — the responses he
received “ran the gamut”; one father had complained that “things keep coming
out in bits and pieces,” while he had been demanding the les for years. “We need
every single thing they have out now and be done with it. Release it all.” But
another victim’s mother took the opposite view, telling the Post “I feel like too
much information would not be helpful to society.” And half the families didn’t
respond to the sheri f at all. No matter what he decided, he knew it would be
controversial.

The sheri f went to the FBI. He knew their Behavioral Analysis Unit had looked
at the tapes and the journals back in 1999, for the o cial Columbine report, and
their Leesburg Symposium had incorporated Columbine into their study that
same year. The bureau was intimately familiar with the impact that Columbine
had on the shooters that followed, as well, having helped the tribal police in their
investigation of the Red Lake High School shooting.

The FBI's agents told Je fco that whatever they did, they should never release the
basement tapes — the footage could be “a call to arms” that would “provide their
audience with blueprints for this lethal school shooting.”

That summer, the sheri f announced his decision: Je fco would not release the
basement tapes, af er all. “I can guarantee that there is nothing to be learned from
the tapes,” he said — assuring that they were not the “key” to Columbine. He said
that “the tapes are very, very disturbing,” and so he had decided that keeping them
locked away was “the right thing to do.” (And he would keep his word: the tapes
never have been released. The 30 seconds one father secretly recorded would be all
that anyone outside of that screening room would ever hear from the basement
tapes.)

At the same time as they were locking away the tapes, the sheri f had determined
that nearly everything else, including the journals, could be released. These
exhibits amounted to another 936 pages, on top of what was already an 11,000+
page compilation of the o cial Columbine investigation le — what was
commonly referred to online, by then, as “the 11k.”

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The di ference between the journals and the basement tapes, the sheri f
determined, came down to two things: form, and content. First, because the
journals were written documents, they fundamentally did not have the same
emotional impact that the basement tapes carried, where the homicidal anger just
seemed to seep through the screen. Second (perhaps because the journals were
solo performances, unlike the basement tapes, where the shooters played o f of
each other for an audience) the writings were comparatively restrained, only
containing “snippets” of anything approaching the level of rage recorded on the
tapes. “Hopefully, this will be useful to mental-health professionals who can look
at the writings and get some insight into where they were at and where they were
going,” the sheri f said.

He then opened the pages to the world, and in that moment, and forever af er,
anyone with an internet connection could read the Columbine journals. As the
years passed, more and more would do just that.

***
The pages in the le are xeroxed, o f-center in scratchy black-and-white. Together,
the two journals con rm some long-suspected details about the reasons for the
Columbine attack: for one, they remove any remaining doubt that both teenagers
were responsible. Until then, some observers of the Columbine case had still
maintained hope in the theory that Right had, somehow, been behind it all — he
had brainwashed Lef into participating, or otherwise compelled his cooperation,
and Lef ’s performance on the basement tapes had been just that.

But Lef ’s journal clearly showed the truth, just as the ballistics had in 1999: he was
a full participant in the plot. In fact, he couldn’t wait to do it.

At points, Lef ’s journal indeed shows hints of why so many people found it hard
to believe that that he could kill. Depression had always, overwhelmingly, seemed
his guiding star — not “Wrath,” no matter what his t-shirt said. His journal starts
two years before the Columbine attack, when he was f een; but the voice in his
“Book of Existences” frequently evokes a disembodied consciousness, one that is
struggling to convey metaphysical concepts: “This is a weird time, weird life, weird
existence. As I sit here (partially drunk with a screwdriver) I think a lot. Think…
think… that’s all my life is, just shitloads of thinking... all the time... my mind
never stops...”

He believed that his level of thinking made him di ferent from humans; as a
“ponderer,” he could imagine other worlds, and visit them, his favorite being just
“miles & miles of never ending grass, like a wheat farm.” But inevitably, the reality
of his physical form would wrench him back to Colorado. He was not in paradise,

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he was in his sophomore year at Columbine High School. “The world is the
greatest punishment: Life.”

Lef thought of his role in civilization. “The framework of society stands above
and below me,” he wrote. “The hardest thing to destroy, yet the weakest thing
that exists. I know that I am di ferent, yet I am afraid to tell the society. The
possible abandonment, persecution is not something I want to face, yet it is so
primitive to me.”

His lowest times were when he regretted ever being a “ponderer.” He spurned the
gif , and in fact, actually envied the “zombies” — “I see jocks having fun, friends,
women, LIVEZ.” The jocks “don’t know beyond this world,” they way he did,
but that meant they were not obsessed with mortality, the way he was. So in a way,
the “jocks” and “zombies” and all the other conformists really were superior. And
Lef and Right really were the freaks, af er all: “Awareness signs the warrant for
su fering.” He envied his enemies, loathed himself for it, and wanted to die.

Right felt no such con ict. His disdain was overwhelmingly directed outward. He
wanted to kill.

His journal shows that he, too, was viewing himself and the world around him
from a philosophical perspective, but Right had somewhat di ferent
interpretations:

I hate the fucking world, too much god damn fuckers in it. Too many
thoughts and different societi all wrapped up together in th fucking
place called AMERICA. Everyone h their own god damn opinions
on every god damn thing and you may be saying “well what mak you
so different?” Because I have something only me and [Le ] have, SELF
AWARENESS. Call it ‘existentialism’ or whatever the fuck you want.
We know what we are to th world and what everyone else . [...] GOD
everything so corrupt and so filled with opinions and points of view
and people’s own little agend and schedul . Th isn’t a world
anymore. It’s Hell on Earth and no one knows it.

Introspection t him awkwardly. Right seemed incapable of communicating

anything at all about himself beyond his motives and his fantasies. He looked
inside and saw only his hatred for the world re ecting back at him. And while he
su fered under the weight of the “system” just as Lef had, Right never wanted to
escape. He wanted to win. There was no other point to existence. Though he
would repeatedly blame his impending actions on bullying, and the jocks, he
always abandoned the notion midway through, attributing their treatment of him
to the same factors that drove his own, far more transgressive sins: “I’ll get revenge

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soon enough.. Fuckers shouldn’t have ripped on me so much huh! Ha! Then
again it’s human nature to do what you did... so I guess I am also attacking the
human race. I can’t take it, it’s not right... true... correct... perfect. I fucking hate
the human equation.”

He returns to the phrase several times over the course of his writings: “the human
equation.” Here, the shooter’s thoughts appear to have been informed by his
study of the 17th-century philosopher Hobbes, who famously wrote, of the
natural and primitive state of humanity, “During the time men live without a
common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called
war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.”

A consequence of such a societal collapse, Hobbes continued, would be that each

man’s reach was reduced to that of the individual, essentially starting civilization
over for himself:

In such condition there no place for industry, because the fruit thereof
uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor
use of the commoditi that may be imported by sea, no commodio
building, no instruments of moving and removing such things require
much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no
arts, no letters, no society, and, which worst of all, continual fear and
danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.

***
Right anticipated the moral confusion that would ripple through civilization af er
he attacked it, as the column of smoke rose from Columbine High School. “When
I go NBK,” he wrote, “and people say things like, ‘oh, it was so tragic,’ or ‘oh he is
crazy!’ or ‘It was so bloody.’ I think, so the fuck what, you think that’s a bad
thing? Just because your mumsy and dadsy told you blood and violence is bad,
you think it’s a fucking law of nature? Wrong. Only science and math are true,
everything, and I mean every-fucking-thing else is Man made.”

Viewed from this position, his fascination with Hitler and the Nazis seems more
like nihilistic fandom than any genuine far-right political allegiance; overall, he
sounded much more like the Unabomber (whose infamous witness sketch he had
dressed up as for Halloween one year) — or at least like the Green Anarchy
newsletters Kaczynski had sent to Timothy McVeigh on death row. Right
continued:

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 Society tri to make everyone act the same by burying all human nature
and instincts. That’s what schools, laws, jobs, and parents do, if they
realize it or not… If humans were le to live how we would naturally, it
would be chaos and anarchy and the human race wouldn’t probably last
that long, but hey guess what, that’s how it’s supposed to be!!! Societi
and government are only created to have order and calmness, which
exactly the opposite of pure human nature.

Rather than imagining other worlds, Right fantasized about other rampages he
could commit, right here on Earth. If he just had access to more powerful
weaponry, he might never stop killing. “Hmm, just thinking if I want all humans
dead or maybe just the quote-unquote ‘civilized, developed, and known-o ’ places
on Earth,” he wrote. “Maybe leave little tribes of natives in the rain forest or
something.”

As he had on the basement tapes, Right tried to communicate his motives for
“Judgment Day” explicitly:

Someone’s bound to say ‘what were they thinking?’ when we go NBK or

when we were planning it, so th what I am thinking: ‘I have a goal
to destroy much possible so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings
of sympathy, mercy, or any of that, so I will force myself to believe that
everyone just another monster from Doom, [so] it’s either me or them.
I have to turn off my feelings.’ ...Keep th in mind. I want to burn the
world, I want to kill everyone except about 5 people, [so] if you are
reading th you are lucky you escaped my rampage because I wanted to
kill you.

On his calendar, in the slot for April 20th, he sketched a diagram of how he was
going to set up his gear for the attack; on the next page, under Mother’s Day, he
lef a quote from Shakespeare: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.”

***
When the seal on the Columbine journals was broken in the summer of 2006, and
the pages nally came online, they would emerge into a much di ferent
environment than they would have if the shooters had uploaded them to AOL
back in 1999. In that relatively short time, while the tapes were gathering dust in
an evidence locker in Golden, a billion more people were connected to the
internet (a tenfold increase over the 1999 version), and a whole generation had
participated in the evolution of its user interfaces and culture. Mobile devices were
becoming common, social networks were steadily taking over more and more

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aspects of human communication, and now a modern, digital society was
emerging, more connected than ever before.

June 16, 2006

Clement Park — Littleton, Colorado
Former President Clinton drove a shovel blade into the earth, and turned it over.
Located right next door to Columbine High School’s football elds, Clement Park
had already played host to a makeshif memorial in the years since the attack, one
that drew controversy: it had primarily consisted of a row of wooden crosses, each
representing a victim at Columbine. The controversy fell over just two of the
crosses — those for the shooters.

Turning over the shovel in Clement park, the president marked the end of the
debate, and the groundbreaking of a permanent memorial — one that would not
make any mention of the shooters at all. The groundbreaking was itself to be a
moment of healing, coming full circle from what Clinton said was “one of the
darkest days” his family saw during their time in the White House.

“You have kept faith with what I challenged you to do,” he said later that day
from a stage in the park, as a lightning storm cracked across the sky overhead, and
ribbons of construction tape uttered loudly in the heavy winds. He called back
to the last time he had visited Littleton, just one month af er the tragedy, when he
had told the townspeople how much he admired the endurance of their faith, and
he now challenged them to lead the way in envisioning a brighter future: “You
remind us that even in the midst of tragedy, we see the very best. The very best
there is to see about our nation, and about human nature.”

“I am here today because millions of Americans were changed by Columbine,”

the president continued, a crash of thunder punctuating his memories. “This was
a momentous event in the history of the country. And every parent lef feeling
helpless — even the president. Because more than anything else, we think the
natural order of things entitles every child to a safe home, a safe neighborhood...
and a safe school.” The president went on to share a story about his colleague and
friend, the same senator who had been seriously wounded in Vietnam, and who
was so vocal about closing the gun show loophole af er Columbine. Clinton said
that one of the man’s favorite quotes came from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell
to Arms: “The world breaks everyone. And af erward, many are stronger at the
broken places.”

Thunder rumbled over the hills, as the president looked up to the crowd of
Columbine survivors. “Every day, from now on, the world will break someone,”

372
he said. “These magni cent families, in memory of their children, and their
teacher, can help them always to be strong.”

373
 Part IV

The Gathering Eye

374
 38. The Prison
(a brief history of Garner Correctional Institution)

Inmates at Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in En eld, Connecticut had

been passing around iers all week, warning each other not to go to the cafeteria
on the 25th. They were sick and tired of the prison’s lousy food, and they were
going to protest.

It was sometime between 6am and 7am on that Tuesday morning when the
prison’s guards noticed something was going on: there were only a handful of
inmates entering the cafeteria when breakfast was called. Instead of the usual rush,
most of the prisoners were gathering in “the circle” outside — an open area in the
prison yard with several adjacent buildings — and a group that seemed like the
leaders of the strike were all seated at picnic tables there, heckling the few inmates
who passed by them on the way to get food. The crowd around the tables was
growing.

Two guards headed over to try and contain the situation. Someone must have
called it in on the radio at the same time, because as they approached the picnic
tables, an announcement suddenly came over the PA speakers, mounted on poles
high around the circle:

INMATES CLEAR THE YARD

The prisoners all stood from their picnic tables, looking ready to ght. The two
guards froze. They were surrounded, completely outnumbered. One of them
radioed, and told dispatch not to broadcast any more orders. Things were getting
dangerous.

INMATES CLEAR THE YARD

The mass of prisoners started to “bump” the guards to-and-fro. The guards were
unarmed. More and more inmates were coming out of the rec buildings, over
three hundred felons now marching around the circle and shouting. Order hung
by a thread.

375
INMATES CLEAR THE YARD

Chaos. Suddenly rocks were being thrown, and sts were ying. Someone set a
re. The two guards were injured, but managed to escape the yard, barely, with
their lives — locking the heavy steel door behind them, and leaving the prisoners
to run rampant in the circle.

The rioters burned down the cafeteria. Then they burned the gymnasium, too,
and looted the storage areas. A group of inmates unfurled a homemade banner in
the yard, with a message that “demanded media coverage,” as the state prosecutors
would later say. Instead, af er a few hours of mayhem, armored o cers with the
Connecticut Department of Corrections’ Emergency Response Team breached
the yard, and subdued the rioters with tear gas and batons.

It was June 25, 1990, and once the damages were all tallied, this day of chaos at Carl
Robinson Correctional Institution would emerge as the most expensive prison
riot in Connecticut history.

***
The Carl Robinson riot was just one in a series of violent incidents that unfolded
across Connecticut’s correctional system in the span of only a few years' time; at
another prison, in En eld, an illicit drug deal between inmates (a bag of marijuana
for a carton of cigarettes) went bad, and ended up sparking a gang war. Next door
at at Osborn Correctional, a guard tried to seize a prisoner’s stolen radio, took a
punch to the face instead, and within minutes, there was a melee; hundreds of
prisoners wielded weapons made out of boards they had ripped from the prison’s
mini-golf course, while other inmates raided the prison’s o ces, smashing
typewriters and setting re to counselors’ records.

The prisons that lost control all had something in common: they were low-
security or middle-security facilities, with “dormitory” style setups. These sorts of
prisons had been designed with few traditional “cells,” and no barred doors with
which to seal o f sections of the facility. The inmates all stayed in shared
dormitories, and during the day were generally free to wander the prison grounds
as they pleased. “Basically, the dorms are just like the street, except nobody has got
any guns — or at least not any guns that I saw,” said one Carl Robinson inmate to
the Hartford Courant.

It was no accident that the prisons had been built that way: it was the cheapest
design there was. Like nearly every state in the union, Connecticut’s prison
population had started growing in the late 1970’s, when the “War on Drugs”
starting driving more arrests, a trend exacerbated by the enactment of mandatory-
minimum sentencing laws. Over the course of the 1980s, the number of prisoners

376
in the state doubled. In fact, by 1990, every single prison in Connecticut was
overcrowded, lled to at least 110% capacity. And it was likely no coincidence that
Connecticut’s correctional system had the highest rate of inmate injuries in the
entire country — as well as the highest rate of assaults on guards, per inmate.
Things were bad, and getting worse.

In response to this unrest, the Governor signed a new billion-dollar spending plan
in 1987, making the construction of a new, higher-security prison an immediate
priority.

It was soon af er that when residents of Newtown were sighting state inspectors
down at the banks of the Pootatuck again, looking for the best spot to build their
new state prison. The town pushed back, of course, but they had little chance
against Connecticut, and the rising tide of incarceration. A small town’s lawsuit —
and a de ant rst selectman digging a ditch — could not hold back the ood.

***
When construction was completed, the layout of Newtown’s new prison stood as
a re ection of the lessons learned at Carl Robinson: its “yard” was contained, with
no isolated structures. It was surrounded by a honeycomb of eight three-story cell
blocks (“housing pods”), and then a high outer fence, topped with spirals of razor
wire. The interior of each of the housing pods was lined with 51 cells, 8 x 10 feet
each, most of them designed to hold two prisoners apiece. Then, each cell block
was completely enclosed by security checkpoints and steel doors (which could be
controlled remotely from a security station) in order to contain any potential
incidents, before they could build into something greater. (For recreation, most of
the pods had a small common area in the center, where the sound of sneakers
squeaking could be heard during inmate basketball games when rec time came
around.)

A sign out on Nunnawauk Road — just past the old mental institution, where
Wasserman Way branched south — marked the entrance, with bold, blue
institutional lettering cast against a plain, concrete slab: WARD A. GARNER
CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION.

The Department of Corrections had named the new institution af er a legendary

warden from a prison long ago; from 1911 to 1918 Ward Garner had been in charge
of Connecticut State Prison in Wester eld, where he was respected by inmates for
having mercifully lif ed the ban on talking during meals — and on one Christmas
in 1914, for allowing the rst viewing of a motion picture within the prison’s walls.

For many passers-by, the sign on Nunnawauk Road was the only way they would
even know there was a prison there — except on a clear winter day, when the coils

377
of razor-wire could just be seen through the bare hickory trees that lined the
southern path into Newtown.

CHAOS
Garner Correctional Institution opened on November 17, 1992. A convoy of
secured buses full of prisoners, anked by armed guards, came streaming down I-
84, and through Fair eld Hills to their new home. One by one, the cells were
lled, and the heavy steel doors swung shut.

Within the rst year, the sta f at Garner were in open revolt; guards were seen
picketing out on Nunnawauk Road, in protest of what they said was a string of
assaults perpetrated by inmates. One morning in July 1993, roll-call even had to be
delayed by 15 minutes due to the protests; as a consequence, six probation o cers
were red, and 30 permanent o cers were given 10-day suspensions without pay;
at a place like Garner, security lapses had to be taken very, very seriously.

O cials at the Department of Corrections did not refute that Garner was a
dangerous place — part of the problem was that the sta f at Garner were mostly
new to the profession, while most of the inmates had been in Connecticut’s prison
system for years and years. “It’s not a matter of Garner being di ferent,” a DOC
rep told the Hartford Courant. “Inmates assault people. They don’t check their
criminality at the door… that’s what we live with. It’s a dangerous job.”

Soon, the guards at Garner realized there was actually more to it: when the riot-
plagued dormitory-style prisons in En eld had been advised that a new prison was
opening to accept some of their over owing inmate population, “They took a lot
of the troublemakers and they shipped them o f to Garner.” From day one,
Newtown’s prison was home to the worst of the worst.

***
Shortly before 7:00pm on the evening of April 21, 1993, around two dozen
members of an all-black prison gang out of Hartford, called “20-Love,” were
gathered in the open area at the center of Cell Block B. At the rst moment the
guards weren’t looking, someone gave a signal, and in a ash, a mass of inmates
jumped the members of 20-Love, in icting severe injuries on all of them. Guards
rushed to contain the ght, but then they were beaten back, as nearly 100 inmates
streamed out of 51 open cells, wielding shivs and weighted socks.

Outnumbered, the guards retreated, and sealed o f Cell Block B. Through an

unbreakable glass window set into the steel door, they watched the mayhem
unfold: the inmates dragged their mattresses into the center of the pod and set

378
them ablaze, while others smashed computer consoles. Some convicts sought out
rivals, and settled old grudges, seizing the opportunity while disorder reigned.

Outside the walls, a ranger at Pootatuck Game Preserve — a hunting club that
owned a vast tract of land stretching almost up to Garner’s outer fence — got a
sense of what was going on in the sealed-o f cell block, as he patrolled his hunting
grounds in the setting sunlight. “From the sounds I heard, people were getting
hurt pretty badly,” he would tell the New York Tim . “Let’s put it this way, they
weren’t playing basketball.”

Newtown residents who lived near the prison (many of whom had been vocally
worried about its presence in their backyard), on their way home that evening,
passed by a large, illuminated highway sign on Nunnawauk Road, its array of light
bulbs ashing an emergency message: “TROOP A REPORTS A RIOT IS IN
PROGRESS AT GARNER CORRECTIONAL CENTER.”

Around 7:30pm, those residents who were looking out their windows could see a
convoy of ambulances and police cruisers streaming through Fair eld Hills on the
way to the prison, their blaring sirens rattling the windows of the old brick
hospital, while a column of smoke rose from behind the prison’s walls, bathed in
red-and-blue by the emergency vehicles' ashing lights. There were 30 o cers on
the Newtown Police Department’s roll call that evening, and before the night was
through, 29 of them were summoned to Garner Prison; they lef one of the
younger o cers behind to operate the switchboard, relaying orders in between
answering phone calls, from journalists and worried townspeople alike.

The next morning, negotiations between the prisoners and the Department of
Corrections were still “ongoing,” according to the Tim . Meanwhile, two van-
loads of o cers in riot gear from the DOC’s Emergency Response Team were
arriving on-scene. The state gave up on negotiations, and with a rain of teargas
and baton blows, the riot was quelled, and order was restored to Garner Prison. In
all, twenty inmates and three guards had to be taken to Danbury Hospital. And
there was signi cant damage to Cell Block B; the cost of repairs at Garner reached
nearly a million dollars.

Af er the riot, procedures at Garner changed. Instead of unlocking all 51 cells in a

given block during rec or mealtimes, only half would be open at any given time.
Connecticut also issued beepers to 54 “front line” residents in town — the ones
who lived closest to the prison — so that the state could notify them immediately
if anything went wrong again.

Not everyone’s fears were assuaged; “I’m not surprised that this has happened, and
I think it’s just the beginning,” one of the homeowners told the Tim . For years,

379
she had seen the patients wandering away from Fair eld Hills in the night, and
now she envisioned a darker future: “We’ve got a Level 4 prison here in this small
town, and one of these days someone is going to escape, and even these beepers
won’t keep us safe.”

***
Five months af er order was restored, on the evening of August 31, a regularly
scheduled bell rang over the yard, signifying the end of evening rec-time. Per
procedure, 90 prisoners were expected to line up in their khaki uniforms, to be
taken back to their housing pods — except, when the corrections o cers did
head-count, they only came up with 88.

Immediately, the alarm went up, and every inmate was shut in their cell. The
facility went into lockdown, and every inch was searched; eventually, the guards
found that the two missing inmates had somehow climbed over a 25-foot wall, and
“cut their way through a horizontal chain-link fence,” before escaping into the
night.

Outside, in the surrounding neighborhoods, 54 households suddenly heard their

beepers go o f.

A swarm of ashlights fanned out on foot in all directions from Garner Prison,
and into every shuttered building in Fair eld Hills. Spotlights lit up the meadows,
and helicopter teams crisscrossed over the forests. State troopers went door-to-
door in the neighborhood, telling residents to lock up and close their windows.

Descriptions of the two fugitives were broadcast to every law enforcer in Fair eld
County; the rst escapee was a 23-year-old from Georgia, who was three years into
his ve-year stint for third-degree burglary; they found him just two and half
hours af er the escape, hiding in the woods less than a mile from the prison’s walls.
But the second prisoner had managed to make his way to the town center, where
he stole a car — and there, the searchers lost the trail. The alarm was eventually
lif ed, and Newtown was advised to be on the lookout for the 35-year-old male,
but to not approach him under any circumstances — the man was serving a
sentence for armed robbery, and attempted murder of a police o cer.

***
Two weeks later, af er a trail of reported crimes led the US Marshals east out of
Newtown, a search warrant was served at a home in New Haven, and o cers took
the fugitive back to Garner in shackles. The fear in the village eased, but
resentment lingered.

380
 TRAN UILITY
By the rst anniversary of Garner opening, Newtown was already fed up.
Responding to their grievances, the Commissioner of Corrections, the highest
o ce in the state’s prison administration, personally came to the meeting house to
try and explain why his policies weren’t tougher on the inmate population. “If
you hate too much, you run the risk of becoming like what you fear and what you
hate,” he said, assuring them that it just took some time to “get used to” having a
prison in town.

A New York Tim reporter sitting in the pews observed, “Many people here are
enraged and fearful about the violent tensions boxed up in their midst.”

One resident stood to rebut the commissioner. “This is not 'getting used to' a
facility, this is getting terrorized by a facility,” she said, glaring at him. “The
protection of the individual citizen has got to come above and before the rights of
the criminal.” As the woman sat back down, many at the meeting house
applauded.

The commissioner tried to ease them by talking about some of the new programs
they were developing at Garner. One was called “close custody,” and they were
hoping it might nally get the state’s prison gangs under control: it meant that
whenever a “gang incident” assault occurred, both the perpetrator of the attack
and the gang leader who ordered it (if he could be identi ed) would be moved to
isolated cells, in separate units. If necessary, they would send them to a di ferent
prison entirely, just to weaken the gang’s structure. Early results looked promising;
the commissioner called it “cutting the head o f the snake.” And as for the
environment in the prison being too sof , he argued, “If you get the same thing by
incentive [as with force], if you get it without hostility — you tell me which of
those is more secure and safe.”

***
Thirteen months later, he was unemployed. It was an election year in
Connecticut, and the state's new Governor had run on a platform of “get tough
on crime.” Firing the commissioner was one of the rst things he did.

Garner got a new warden, too — one who summed up the changes in store for the
inmates who were gang members: “It’s all over.”

It turned out that the ousted commissioner’s “close custody” program had indeed
seen some promising results at Garner, but there was only one problem: sending
the o fenders to solitary cells meant that as the program grew, there were fewer
and fewer two-person cells in the prison. Capacity dropped. And besides, the new

381
warden explained, solitary con nement in general seemed to be losing its
e fectiveness on the worst prisoners: “These guys feed on it. When they get out,
they wear their time as a badge of honor.” So the new iteration of the system
would take a di ferent approach.

Starting in 1995, Cell Block D became the exclusive domain of Garner’s close
custody inmates. It was a di ferent world, within the prison: all inmates wore
canary yellow jumpsuits, and were locked in their cells for 23 hours a day — always
with a cellmate. In the rst phase, their cellmate would be a member of the same
gang that they had claimed, to ensure safety. Then, not only would they have to
obey all of the rules, they would have to attend counseling workshops with the
other D Block inmates, and perform custodial work throughout the prison,
mopping the oor in the yellow jumpsuit in front of the regular mates. If they
could do it and not act out, eventually they would have a chance to escape — back
into the old Garner. “In the past, the only thing we ever expected inmates to do
was their time,” the warden said. “If they didn’t want to go to school, they didn’t
have to. If they didn’t want to work, they didn’t have to. The system wasn’t based
on reality, where everyone else has to get up and go to work every day.” Now,
work and good behavior would be the only way to make it to phase two.

Phase two lasted three months, and it only came when room was available outside
Cell Block D. When a bed came up, the prison’s counselors, and the warden,
determined who was chosen to go back out into the general population, in their
normal khaki uniform, for a trial run: they would have their old friends back, and
more time outside the cell. The biggest di ference of all, though, was that their
phase two cellmate would always be from a different gang — another prisoner
who had graduated from phase one. Rooming peacefully with an adversary: that
would be the real test. They would also be let out of their cell more frequently —
but assigned to 12-man squads, like a class at school. The same group would eat,
study, and exercise together. Any ghts or any acting out, and they would be sent
right back to Cell Block D, and the yellow jumpsuit. But if they kept progressing,
eventually they could make it out of close custody, and even to one of the old
dormitory-style prisons. Away from Garner.

The corrections o cers in Newtown were appreciative of the changes. “Sta f

should have a reasonable expectation that they’ll leave at the end of the day
looking pretty much like they did when they came in,” the warden said in 1996.
“Since this program began, you haven’t heard about riots in our prisons. We’ve
gone through the longest period of tranquility in a long while.” It went so well, in
fact, that Connecticut started sending all of their “security threat” gang members
to Garner; they became the prison's specialty.

382
 ***
As the years went on, Garner would take even more freedoms from the inmates in
the yellow jumpsuits: the sta f began monitoring all of their phone calls, and
opening their mail. When Connecticut’s branch of the ACLU found out, the
organization vowed to take the state to court, arguing, “Even inmates in prison
have certain constitutional rights” — but the warden said Garner had no plans to
curtail the system. It had cost the state $400,000, and in fact had already resulted
in several arrests, well outside the prison’s walls. And once an inmate made it out
of close custody, this scrap of privacy would be restored to them. (The courts
eventually sided with the warden.)

Garner became the showcase prison for close custody programs, and sta f from
facilities around the country came to study how it functioned. But the state's
DOC commissioner cautioned that they were still keeping a close eye on the once-
notorious facility: “We are breathing a sigh of relief, but we know that’s when we
can become vulnerable again.”

***
On November 3, 1997, guards responded to a loud disturbance in Cell Block D. It
sounded like a ght between two cellmates. The guards came running, and as they
worked to unlock the cell door, they saw one of the prisoners inside, shouting
from behind the bars with blood on his yellow jumpsuit: “Get me the fuck out of
here!”

The guards pulled him out and handcu fed him; his cellmate was sprawled on the
oor, strangled to death in the bloody altercation. It turned out, one of the two
inmates was a member of the Latin Kings, and the other was in The Nation; the
sta f put them in the same cell thinking that the two gangs were allies, but they
were wrong.

ECHOES
Just before the turn of the millennium, Connecticut’s Department of Corrections
announced that Garner would no longer house the close custody program (which
would now be moved to one of the older prisons). This wasn’t any fault of
Garner’s; the program was still considered a success. But Garner was also the state’s
most modern high-security facility, its most advanced tool. And by 1999, the DOC
recognized that the challenge of dealing with prison gangs had been surpassed by
another, even more urgent trend in the inmate population: violent o fenders who
were diagnosed with a serious mental illness. Such prisoners were lling cells all

383
over the state, and over the next four years, they would become Garner’s new
“specialty.”

From the start, the transition was a challenge, and of en became violent. In 1999, a
paranoid schizophrenic inmate, two days af er being taken o f of his anti-
psychotic medication, got into a brawl with a member of the Latin Kings. Three
guards were injured breaking up the ght, which was caught on Garner’s security
cameras.

The tape showed what followed: at least eight guards dragging the schizophrenic
inmate to a separate room, to be strip-searched. He ghts back. They overwhelm
him, pinning him down to be shackled. He vomits, and then loses consciousness.
He never wakes up. “He was assaulting a sta f member and other sta f responded
and were in the process of securing him against further injuring this other sta f
member,” a spokesman from the Department of Corrections described the
footage, in his defense of the guards. The medical examiner ruled that the cause
was “sudden death during restraint,” along with “a signi cant existing factor of
coronary arteriosclerosis, or thickening or blocking of the arteries,” as reported in
the News-Tim .

The deceased inmate’s mother sued Connecticut, but the state eventually won; a
jury agreed that Garner’s sta f had used appropriate force in restraining a violent
prisoner.

***
By 2000, the state prison system was at capacity again, and Connecticut’s Prison
and Jail Overcrowding Commission determined that there was no getting around
it: the state needed to build more cells. The main reasons were “longer prison
stays, near-elimination of supervised home release, more juveniles sentenced as
adults, and a crackdown on drugs and gangs,” plus, “more inmates with mental
health needs.”

But they didn’t want to build new prisons. They were instead looking at
expanding the existing ones, and Garner was high on the list. Newtown’s rst
selectman (who at the time was in negotiations to purchase Fair eld Hills back
from the state) was livid. “The state has a problem with severe overcrowding, but I
would like state o cials to look elsewhere,” he told the New York Tim . “We’ve
done more than our share, hosting Garner and a state mental hospital for 62 years
before it closed.” He said that things had gotten better since Garner’s initial,
turbulent years, and so it would now be best to keep things the way they are,
writing to the commissioner, “Any attempt to build a second facility or a major
expansion of the existing Garner facility will be strongly opposed. Any political
might that we can assemble will be used.”

384
Newtown once again stepped up — and this time, nally, the state backed down.
The commissioner came to Newtown for a meeting with the Prison Safety
Committee at Edmond Town Hall, and said they had decided to expand
somewhere else. He even thanked the townspeople for their feedback,
acknowledging that, “The response of Newtown residents to the problems at
Garner in its early days has shaped how the Department of Corrections has come
to deal with the public in communities which host DOC prisons.” He told the
Newtown Bee, “It’s good to have communities that are active like this.”

The overall population at Garner was not going to increase — but the prisoners
cycling through it would continue to change: in 2002, Garner held 198 mental
health inmates. In 2003, there were 271. And based on the cases coming to trial
across the state, the numbers were only expected to increase. Connecticut would
have to put them somewhere.

***
When the namesake of Newtown’s facility, Ward A. Garner, was himself in charge
of a prison, a century before, he took great pride in the system of order he
maintained for his inmate population. Connecticut State Prison in Wethers eld
was already a relic even in Garner’s day, originally built in 1827, but it was not a
primitive institution: as Garner wrote to the state’s then-commissioner in 1911, the
prison’s buildings were all heated by steam in the winter, and the cell blocks “are
well lighted and ventilated and are kept scrupulously clean.” The inmates also had
modern accommodations: “Every cell is supplied with the necessary furniture, an
electric light, bowl with running water and a water-closet.” And the food served in
the cafeteria was “plain but wholesome, and a di ferent bill-of-fare is provided
each week”; showing the goodwill that he was long remembered for, he was
careful to note that “quiet conversation is permitted during the meals.”

Additional buildings on the grounds included workshops, where the inmates

made shirts and shoes by hand — wares that the prison then sold, diverting the
pro ts to pay 75% of the total costs to maintain the prison. And, if the inmates
did any work beyond their expected output for the day (which was not
mandatory, as, “Some do not care to [earn money] and some can not, I
suppose,”), they were allowed to keep that portion of their earnings. “Men are
leaving our institution every week with $100 in their pocket, that is nothing
unusual,” Garner once proudly told Congress.

There was also a laundry, where the female prisoners (who were housed
separately) worked, and then a chapel, where both Protestant and Roman
Catholic services, along with Sunday-school classes — all optional — were held
every week.

385
Finally, in an out-of-the-way spot, the execution house was built, “equipped with
with an automatic hanging-machine.”

When new inmates arrived at Ward Garner’s old prison, they were each given a
“thorough physical & mental examination,” and each had their body and facial
features measured for identi cation according to the Bertillon system (the rst
system for biometrically tracking criminals, recently developed in France). From
there, they entered a three-tiered inmate program, always beginning from the
second level. “Promotions and degradation between the [grades] is determined by
a system of marks,” Gardner explained, “which are given on conduct, work and
mental advancement. Members of the rst and second grades enjoy di ferent
privileges in regard to letters, reading matter and visits from friends, while
prisoners reduced to the third grade are deprived of almost all privileges.”

Petty infractions were met with a warning. Repeat o fenders were placed in
solitary con nement — where the rules dictated that they be treated humanely:
“Prisoners are given bread and water twice a day and are visited daily by the prison
physician. In some cases the o fender is required to stand with his hands chained
to the door in front of him. No o cer is allowed to strike a prisoner except in self-
defense.”

At the rst, and highest tier, prisoners would have access to the parole board, with
Gardner himself as the chair. The board could grant parole for “convicts who have
served their minimum term and who, by their conduct, career and character, give
presumptive evidence of a disposition to live an orderly life.” Prisoners let out on
parole had to check back once a month until their sentence was served; as of 1916,
about 90% of prisoners were in the rst tier, and only a handful all the way down
in the third.

The 1911 methods of accounting for prisoners with mental illnesses, meanwhile,
were fairly simple. Insane inmates (as well as those with acute tuberculosis) were
not housed with the rest of the population, and were not included in the prison’s
labor force; there was a “special ward for insane male prisoners” next to the prison
hospital, and they had a separate yard for recreation. A “consulting physician in
lunacy” was appointed to the insane ward, visiting at least once per month to
evaluate each inmate’s progress. The insane ward was for men only; Connecticut
State Prison did not accept female insane prisoners, and, “In case any female
convict becomes insane during her term of imprisonment, provision is made for
her removal by the order of the governor to the Hospital for the Insane at
Middletown.”

386
 NEW ERA
In 2003, Connecticut’s Department of Corrections was rocked by a massive
lawsuit. It was on behalf of all 1,700 corrections o cers in the state who were
female, and it arrived as something of a reckoning for the “tough on crime”
commissioner — who, it turned out, fostered a workplace environment where
sexual harassment, assault, and intimidation were commonplace.

The reports had been suppressed internally at DOC for years: male guards and
prisoners displayed pornographic images in the presence of female guards. Male
guards exposed themselves, and touched the female guards in sexually suggestive
ways. When one of the women wouldn’t go on a date with a male guard, he
allegedly “joked” about telling the inmates of the locations in the prison where
they might get away with raping her. When one of the women complained, she
soon found her o ce moved: across from a cell housing a known public
masturbator.

There were hundreds of stories, all of them bad.

The attorney pursuing this latest suit, aiming at the DOC culture itself, identi ed
the Commissioner of Corrections as the root cause of the problem, saying he
“knows full well that it is unspoken department policy to cover up harassment, to
lie to investigators and to turn a blind eye to the illegal, pervasive and dangerous
culture that has become the norm under his jurisdiction.”

The day af er the reports came out, the besieged commissioner announced that he
was taking an early retirement. He was soon spotted boarding a transport plane to
Iraq, having signed on as one of the occupying force’s top “corrections advisers.”
The following year, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal erupted.

***
Connecticut’s new commissioner was the rst female to have ever held the post,
and a 26-year veteran of DOC. She quickly announced that the abusive conduct
that preceded her would no longer be tolerated, that every complaint would be re-
investigated, and that she was signing a settlement with the female guards.

As she got on with the business of running the corrections system, she found that
the mentally ill inmate population was still the most urgent problem. More and
more were lling the cells, all over the state. She announced that DOC would
continue to “consolidate its mental health services for the o fender population at
the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown,” in order to “provide the

387
necessary standard of care in a scally prudent manner.” And Garner would be
partnering with psychiatric doctors from the University of Connecticut, to ensure
this growing crowd of prisoners received the services they needed.

The Corrections O cers’ Union welcomed the change in leadership at DOC.

They told the Hartford Courant they hoped it would mark the “dawn of a new
era.”

***
Later that year, the former mayor of the town of Waterbury stood trial, for
sexually abusing minors. Given the nature of the charges, and his former position
of authority, the prosecutors said they had concerns about his safety in the general
prison population; so, when the state moved him to Garner to attend the trial, he
was put in a cell in the most secure unit in the facility: the psychiatric ward.

The rst chance he got, the fallen mayor was pleading to a judge to move him to
another prison, because “people are yelling and screaming all night” at Garner.

The judge ruled that the placement was for his protection, and so he would have
to stay, and tolerate the yelling and screaming like everyone else in the ward.

When the Waterbury mayor was eventually found guilty, and sentenced to 37
years, they nally did let him move to Garner's “gen pop” — a few years af er, he
was assaulted by another inmate, wielding a sock lled with four AA batteries. He
got a concussion and needed stitches, but he still asked the Garner sta f that
whatever they did, they didn't send him back to the psych ward.

***
The commissioner had gotten settled into her new o ce just in time to weather
the next huge lawsuit against DOC: this time it was from another state agency, the
O ce of Protection and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities. Like the O ce of
the Child Advocate’s charge to represent the minor children of Connecticut, this
organization represented the state’s disabled citizens — including those whose
disability was due to a mental illness, and including any such persons who
happened to be inmates in state prisons.

Two other DOC o cials were named in their suit: the warden of Garner
Correctional Institution, and the warden of NCI (Connecticut’s “Supermax”
prison, in the town of Somers). These two sites, the Advocate’s o ce charged,
were failing to meet their responsibilities to their mentally ill inmate population.

Since Garner was increasingly the destination for the state’s mentally ill convicts,
the shortcomings found there were seen as especially serious: the Advocate’s o ce

388
observed discrimination against the mentally ill inside Garner’s psych ward, as
these inmates “of en receive disciplinary charges for behavior that is caused by
their mental illness.” Worse still — and contrary to the spirit of a correctional
institution — there was a real risk that Garner might actually be making them
worse. “Inmates in certain mental health units at Garner are subject to nearly
constant cell con nement and enforced idleness,” the suit charged, “conditions
that exacerbate their mental illness.” All of this amounted to a violation of their
Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Meanwhile, at NCI — the only Level-5 facility in the state (Garner was a level 4,
meaning “high” but not “max” security) — the gen-pop prisoners were
increasingly destined for Garner: “As a result of NCI’s oppressive conditions and
inadequate mental health services, [general population] prisoners become
mentally ill.”

Just a month af er the lawsuit was led, and as an early indication of its portents,
the new Commissioner of Corrections announced that there would be a change to
the DOC’s o cial Mission Statement. Until then, it had read:

“...to protect the public, protect staff, and ensure a secure, safe and
humane environment for offenders in a climate that promot
professionalism, respect, integrity, dignity and excellence.”

The DOC’s new mission statement would instead emphasize rehabilitation:

“...to protect the public, protect staff and provide safe, secure and humane
supervision of offenders with opportuniti that support successful
community reintegration.”

The change was announced as part of a shif in the agency’s "correctional mission,"
going from "the strict con nement model of the mid-and-late 1990’s to a new
Reentry model.”

***
Late in 2004, Garner, NCI Supermax, and the DOC agreed to settle the
Advocate's lawsuit. The terms of this settlement, more than any change in
commissioner, would bring Connecticut’s corrections system into the modern era
of mental health incarceration, with Garner Prison as its cornerstone.

First, the state would more clearly demarcate what would meet the standard of
“Serious Mental Illness,” and thus lead to a cell in the psychiatric ward at Garner:
the list included Schizophrenia, Delusional Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Major

389
Depressive Disorder. Also covered were the “mentally retarded,” or prisoners with
“organic” mental disorders, or traumatic brain injuries. Finally, the list included
any psychotic disorder “that is frequently characterized by breaks with reality that
lead the individual to signi cant functional impairment,” or any Severe
Personality Disorder that presents with “frequent episodes of psychosis, results in
signi cant functional impairment, or results in signi cant or chronic self-injury.”

Any of these conditions were considered severe enough that residency in the psych
ward was permanent. There were no cures.

The temporary residents of the psych ward, meanwhile, were mostly the suicidal
prisoners — until they were found to no longer be a risk to themselves, which
meant they were ready to go back to the general population. And, Garner would
reserve the option of placing in the psych ward any inmates with “severe and
debilitating symptoms” that were associated with anxiety, PTSD, or Persistent
Depressive Disorder, or who exhibited “chronic self injury” within the past year.

When Newtown’s prison was lled completely (as it very of en was), Connecticut
was permitted to keep the high-security psych prisoners at NCI Supermax — but
only if the prisoner warranted a “dangerousness exception.” The warden would
thus have to document why the prisoner was dangerous, and describe how all
potential “alternative placements” were unworkable. NCI would also have to list
what psychiatric services were going to be provided to the prisoner, “to help him
with his serious mental illness and to mitigate the e fect the conditions at NCI
have on that illness.”

Garner and NCI were mandated to establish a new “standard of care,” with
minimum clinical sta ng levels; for each 150 prisoners who were taking prescribed
psychotropic medications, the prison would employ at least one full-time
psychiatrist (or a part-time psychiatrist working together with an Advanced
Practice Registered Nurse [APRN]). And as for the medicating process, it could
only be initiated, changed, or discontinued af er a face-to-face meeting with the
patient — unless it was the patient himself who was discontinuing his taking of
medication, which he could do at any time. However, if their assigned psychiatrist
did not agree with that move, it would be back to gen-pop for the prisoner — and
if they ever acted out, back to solitary.

Once they started taking medication, a prisoner would be seen by a psychiatrist no

less than once every two months, to evaluate their progress. “If the prisoner
refuses to exit his cell to meet with the psychiatrist or APRN,” then those sta f
members were to “see the prisoner at his cell, assess the clinical situation, [and]
devise and institute an appropriate intervention for the individual prisoner.”

390
There would be a new Intensive Mental Health Unit at Garner, too, which would
o fer “out-of-cell therapeutic, educational, rehabilitative and recreational
programs” for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, available to “all prisoners who are
capable of safely participating.” (As the warden put it, “the goal is to keep them
busy.”)

Finally, every single psych-ward prisoner would have their own roadmap for how
the prison was going to help them improve their mental health: an Individualized
Treatment Plan. The ITP would be updated constantly to account for the
prisoner’s behavior, and how they were “responding to the programming” — the
sta f could force the prisoner to wear restraints during recreation time, for
instance, but would have to update that prisoner’s ITP plan, with a goal to work
toward “participation in therapeutic programs [for] at least 5 hours per day, 5 days
a week,” with the restraints o f.

As for the guards, each would get at least eight hours of training, per year, on
mental health issues, including “prevention of suicide and self-harm, recognizing
signs of mental illness, techniques for communicating with mentally ill prisoners,
and alternatives to discipline and use of force.” They would still be authorized to
use force in the psych wing, but Garner agreed that before doing so, “a clinical
intervention shall be attempted by a quali ed mental health provider,” who
would try to “verbally counsel the prisoner and attempt to persuade him to cease
the behavior that has led to the planned use of force.” The supervising guard
would then issue a nal verbal warning, and “provide the prisoner with a
reasonable amount of time to cease the o fending behavior.”

NO ESCAPE
Cell by cell, Garner was changing; it stayed a dangerous place. “We know we’re
coming into hazardous duty, but I don’t expect to come into a combat zone,” one
guard told the Hartford Courant, in an article that documented a sharp increase in
inmate-on-sta f assaults at the Newtown facility, right af er the transition to the
“new era.” Garner’s warden urged patience: “Part of the cultural shif is that the
way we’ve done business in the past is inappropriate with this new population.”

In May 2004, an inmate with “a history of mental health problems” was in the
middle of a supervised anger management session, when he suddenly became
“physically disruptive and assaultive.” Guards rushed in, knocked the prisoner to
the oor, and handcu fed him. He had a heart attack, and was pronounced dead
at Danbury Hospital that af ernoon.

391
A month later, one psych ward prisoner assaulted another with a razor blade. The
victim barely survived.

Two days af er that, an inmate was meeting with their mental health counselor in
the counselor’s o ce, when he physically assaulted her. Guards rushed in and
restrained the prisoner, but not before he had in icted serious injuries.

The next day, a 25-year-old inmate in solitary con nement tied one end of a bed
sheet around his neck, and the other to an air vent on the ceiling of his cell.
Guards didn't nd him until hours af er it was too late.

But despite all the chaos, taken as just one piece of Connecticut’s whole
corrections system, the transition at Garner was mostly seen as a success. One
supporter was a lawyer who had represented another Garner inmate who had
taken his own life that year; he didn’t blame the guards for what happened, but
instead expressed his view that the only way to prevent such an end would be a
camera in every single cell. “The human mind is the most di cult thing to
comprehend,” he said. “It’s a di cult problem.”

***
Garner’s security system got an upgrade in 2006. “1992 doesn’t seem that long
ago,” the warden told the Newtown Bee — but af er 14 years, the door-control
computers were “antiquated.” The state thus replaced them with modern
magnetic locks, while a new $300,000 surveillance system of 230 camera positions,
linked to a digital network, was piped into the prison's security station, replacing
the old closed-circuit monitors that rst came with the place. Archives of familiar
black-and-white time-lapse images, recorded to VHS, gave way to high-de nition
video les on a vast hard drive. And when Garner ran an escape drill, the
helicopters swooping overhead would be equipped with thermal imaging
cameras, to track the would-be escapee even through a darkened forest.

The residents who lived in the houses closest-by all had an upgrade by then, too: if
anything went wrong, they’d be alerted by text message. The pagers were nally
going away. “Nearly everybody has a cell phone, I think,” one police o cial said.
“That makes it a more viable system.”

He knew well the importance of e fective communication during an emergency:

in 1993, he had been the one cop lef behind to manage the switchboard during
the real-life Garner riot. His name was Michael Kehoe, and he was now Chief of
the Newtown Police Department.

***

392
Beginning in 2005, and depending on patient levels, the mentally ill population at
Garner would sometimes exceed the total number of beds lef at the only
remaining state mental hospital: Connecticut Valley Hospital, in Middletown. On
those days, this meant that the psychiatric wing at Garner was in fact the single
biggest state institution for the mentally ill in all of Connecticut.

Behind the prison walls, there would still be moments of chaos or danger at Ward
A. Garner Correctional Institution. But there would be no more escapes, and no
more riots. Newtown’s prison was the product of an advanced society: one where
disorder could be kept secured and contained, away and out of sight, for the safety
of the village.

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 39. Role Playing Game

August 30, 2006

Columbine High School — Littleton, Colorado
Principal Frank DeAngelis was ready to start the 2006-2007 school year. He had
been out making the rounds at Columbine all that morning, checking that
everything was right with the school before Littleton's annual population of
students returned to ll its halls, and he had just gone back to his o ce to do some
last-minute paperwork, when he noticed it: a new email in his inbox, from
someone he did not know.

He had been Columbine’s principal in 1999, too, back when it all happened. And
with every year that passed, the pain faded a bit more — but it never really went
away. Sometimes, it ared:

Dear Principal. In a few hours you will probably

hear about a school shooting in North Carolina. I
am responsible for it. I remember Columbine. It
is time the world remembered it. I am sorry.
Goodbye.

DeAngelis immediately called 9-1-1. Je fco scrambled to gure out a way to trace
the email, back to wherever in North Carolina it was sent from — but it was
already too late to stop the Orange High School shooting from happening.

Orange High School — Hillsborough, North Carolina

Students in the commons saw a black minivan pull into the parking lot. The
driver hopped out: a heavy-set 19-year old male wearing a black trench coat over a
white t-shirt, black cargo pants, and black combat boots. He had a sawed-o f
shotgun in a sling over his shoulder, and a 9mm Hi-Point carbine in his hand —
the same weapons, and costume, that the Right shooter had brought to
Columbine seven years before.

394
A lit smoke bomb billowed from his other hand as he approached the school. He
set the smoke bomb on top of a car, red the ri e into the air, and then took aim,
right where some students were milling around outside the lunchroom. They all
ran, or took cover, as the shots rang out — and none of them were hit.

One bullet did shatter a window, though, causing a boy who had taken cover
underneath to su fer a minor abrasion to his shoulder from the falling glass — a
wound that would require a Band-Aid. Then, the 9mm bullet, having lost nearly
all of its momentum, bounced o f a student’s chest; it in icting a bruise that
would leave a small scar, and cause her to have a cough for a few weeks af er.

The school’s Resource O cer came running at the sound of the gun re, and saw
the gunman still in the parking lot, trying to clear a jam in his ri e. The o cer
drew his pistol, and commanded the shooter to drop his weapon. Then, as the
policeman drew closer, he recognized the gunman: the young man had graduated
from Orange High School one year before. He also saw the messages written on
the gunman’s headband in black marker: “SHOOT ME” and “COLUMBINE.”
On the front of his t-shirt he had written “NATURAL SELECTION.”

The shooter recognized the o cer approaching him with his pistol drawn, and
urged him to pull the trigger: “Kill me. Shoot me. You’ll like it. You’ll like it!”

The o cer again told him to drop the gun, and to lay down on his stomach —
nally, the shooter obeyed, and the o cer had him in handcu fs just as the haze
from the smoke bomb was beginning to lif from the parking lot.

Police backup arrived, and as they wrestled the handcu fed shooter into a patrol
car, the wild-eyed young man shouted, “Remember Columbine! Remember
Columbine!” He called out the names of the Columbine shooters, and then the
Shangri-La shooter, saying (correctly), “It’s his birthday!”

The students in the school, standing up from cover in the commons, saw him in
the backseat of the squad car as it drove away: the shooter made a “gun” sign with
his hand, and put it in his mouth.

On the way to the police station, the o cers heard the gunman saying
“nonsensical things, talking about Columbine.” He tried to wrap the seat belt
around his own neck, and again begged the o cer to shoot him; the driver took a
detour to a hospital instead. The shooter kept rambling from the back seat as they
went, but one comment stood out: “He won’t hurt anyone else again.”

The o cer asked what he meant; the shooter said he was talking about his father.
“I sacri ced him. He won’t hurt anyone else again.” The o cer radioed for a unit
to go to the shooter’s home address, for a welfare check.

395
 ***
At the same time, across town, the shooter’s local newspaper, Chapel Hill News,
received a package in their mail room. It contained a videotape, and a letter. They
read the letter rst:

To Whom it may Concern:

I am responsible for the school shooting in Orange High school, located

in Hillsborough NC. The videotape enclosed not vulgar or obscene in
anyway. However, it may be disturbing. I send a videotape because I
want the world to look into the mind of a depressed and traumatized
individual. I sent you the tape because I do not want them locked away
just like the basement tap that [the Columbine shooters] made. The
police would not release them. Th will not happen again I want the
world to see myself. I know I am insane. Ever since I w young. I knew
there w something wrong with me.

The videotape, meanwhile, contained exactly what the police already en route to
the shooter’s home would nd when they broke the door down: the shooter’s
father, with a bed sheet draped over him, motionless on the living room couch,
right in the spot where he was ambushed by his son earlier that morning. In the
footage, the shooter stands videotaping himself standing next to his father’s body.
“Four times,” he says, staring into the camera’s lens. “I shot him four times. He’s
dead. I did it. I killed my father. I sacri ced him. He’s with the Lord now... and
now it’s time to get this done.”

The shooter had told the o cer in the front seat that he also lef behind some
“entertainment” for the cops; searching his bedroom, the investigators found it
laid out on the bed, a thick notebook with a hand-written title across the cover:
“MASS MURDERERS AND SCHOOL SHOOTINGS OF THE 20TH AND
21ST CENTURIES.”

***
Later that evening, back in Littleton, parents of Columbine students received an
email from Principal DeAngelis, showing support for Orange High School. “Our
hearts go out to the Hillsborough community and particularly the students who
will be deeply a fected by this event,” the principal wrote. Turning his attention to
the people in his hometown, he also acknowledged that they all felt a reciprocal
pain, whenever the tragedy replicated. “I regret any unwanted memories this
brings up. We are all deeply a fected by this unfortunate event.”

396
 40. Emergence

August 2006
Newtown High School
NHS’s Latin teacher waited alone in a portable classroom, one of several such
units that a truck had dropped o f in the parking lot over the summer. The
portables were an emergency measure, to alleviate crowding at NHS while the
town gured out a long-term solution. But that only made the arrangements the
Latin teacher had received for that class period all the more strange: she was going
to be teaching a class of exactly one student.

She heard a car parking outside. Then, in walked Nancy Lanza; she knew Nancy
already — having taught foreign languages to her son Ryan all through his years at
NHS — but she had never met the younger son before.

He came in close behind his mother, taller than Nancy by several inches, and the
teacher noticed the teenager walked sti y, staring at the ground. He was wearing
what she would come to recognize as his uniform over the next few months: khaki
pants, and an oversized blue polo shirt, usually topped o f with an even baggier
grey hoodie. His wardrobe was so consistent, his teacher would privately suspect
that he had ve sets of the same exact out t back at home.

Nancy introduced them, and he barely made a sound.

He had a briefcase with him — not a book bag, but an adult’s briefcase — and
when Nancy stepped into the other room to leave them alone for the instruction
period, the rst thing Adam did was open the briefcase, take out a bottle of
sanitizing gel, and spread a dollop of it all over the top of the desk, disinfecting the
entire surface before he would touch it.

The Latin teacher found Adam to be smart, like his brother. She thought that he
had a natural “Latin mind,” in the sense that that the language was so orderly and
structured. It seemed to t him.

397
He sure didn’t like to talk, though. And that might have presented a problem for
a language class; but the teacher knew the IEP that Newtown had signed o f on for
him lef a lot of room for creative solutions. Adam was special.

***
Nancy took her son for a pediatric checkup that September. The intake form
con rmed that he had been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
Anxiety, and Asperger’s Syndrome, and that he was to seek (or was already
seeking) psychiatric care “in the community.” This was a reference to Dr. Fox, still
the only doctor that Nancy was permitting to see her son.

Nancy and the IEP team were hopeful. NHS was a new school for Adam, and
another chance to get it right. But af er what happened at the middle school,
Adam’s team knew they couldn’t just throw him in with the regular student
population; he had displayed extreme anxiety in social situations ever since
arriving in Newtown, and now it had been nearly a whole year since he had even
set foot in a school. As long as it got him out of the house, they were prepared to
accommodate him in any way they needed to.

For the dreaded passing periods, they had a plan: on days when all the portable
classrooms were already in use, his classes would be held o f in one of the special
education rooms whenever possible. Since they were right next to each other, he
shouldn't need to travel very far indoors. And when he did have to take to the
halls, they had arranged for him to leave a few minutes early or late, to avoid the
crowds as much as possible.

And there would be one familiar face out there, every day, looking out for him:
Richard Novia. He was one of the few people Nancy had grown to trust with her
son, primarily through the Tech Club tag-alongs. Now, Adam was directly within
Novia’s sphere of protection, as the head of security. Adam could even participate
in the Tech Club as a full member — but they decided to hold o f on that, for
now. Everything in the plan was designed around one objective: don’t overload
Adam. Let him re-adjust to the outside world. As his Latin teacher remembers,
“He didn’t want to be around people. Our goal was to get him back in the
building.”

***
Despite these accommodations, there was no hiding the reality: Newtown High
School was a very crowded place. And so there were whispers, here and there:
friends telling friends about how they could’ve sworn they saw that Adam Lanza
kid, the one they thought had moved away. He was back, and weirder than ever.

398
Several longtime classmates all remember catching a glimpse of same scene in the
hallway, at one time or another that year: Adam, o f to the side of the foot tra c,
with his briefcase clutched to his chest, frozen in fear as the crowds bustled past.
One of those watching was the girl who lived on his block in Sandy Hook, and
who had come home crying af er seeing his “hand poem” when they were little.
She remembers that at NHS, he “always seemed to be wearing clothing that was
too large and had a kind of unkempt look to him.”

And he was always alone. From all available documentation, the closest that he
had come to a real friendship in his life so far had still been back at Sandy Hook
Elementary, with the boy who made the Big Book of Granny with him — even if
their bond really was as limited as the other boy now says it was.

That former classmate had since moved, out of the school district; but he would
remember hearing from one or more of his friends back in Newtown around this
time, about a classmate named Adam Lanza who was a “weird kid.” When he
asked what they meant, they said something to the e fect that he “would sit by
himself on the other side of the room and would not talk or associate with
anybody else.” And he always had a briefcase.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The family routine started to set in: coming home from class, Adam liked to go
straight to his room, and stay there. He’d be on his computer late into the night,
playing WoW and browsing the net; there was a new video-sharing website, called
YouTube, that he especially took a liking to.

Nancy came and went, o f to My Place on many evenings. One of her bar friends
was a guy who owned a computer repair business. He knew Ryan from the 18-
year-old’s time busing tables at the restaurant, and Nancy shared that her older
son was now heading o f to get his accounting degree. The bar friend ended up
hiring Ryan a few times to take care of the paperwork for his business, in between
classes at uinnipiac University. The friend thought Nancy’s oldest was “bright,
and a great kid.” He never got to meet the other son.

Ryan lef over the summer, moving into on-campus housing 20 miles away in the
town of Hamden, and leaving the basement at 36 Yogananda pretty much as it
was: with a bed o f in one corner, and a couch in front of the TV in the old game
room, his rows of “Gundam” anime models lining the shelves on either side. The
way it was furnished, a visitor might even think that someone still lived down
there. But from then on, it was just Adam and Nancy in the pale yellow house;
visitors would be rare.

399
Morgan Street — Stamford, Connecticut
Peter didn’t think that Dr. Fox was helping his son enough — if at all. Peter barely
even knew the man. (Interviews with the Child Advocate record that Peter “had
little direct involvement with [Dr. Fox],” and though Adam's father kept many of
the records from his son’s care over the years, when these documents were
eventually catalogued, none were found that had originally been sent from Dr.
Fox's o ce.)

Peter was an independent parent now, and he chose to go his own way; early in
Adam’s freshman year, he contacted the Employee Assistance Program that
General Electric provided as part of their bene ts package. The program’s intake
rep wrote that the caller wanted to obtain “evaluation and treatment for his son’s
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”

In an ensuing email exchange, the program's sta f tried to get a handle on what,
exactly, Peter’s situation was.

They asked if the Lanza family would be willing to travel in order to get help for
Adam; Peter said yes, within the state, “if there [was] a program/therapist to help
their son, and them, as his disorder [was] signi cantly impacting the family as
well.” Peter told them that he wanted a “specialist,” speci cally one who had solid
experience in working with children diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome.

The sta f told Peter they were going to schedule a meeting, for his son to go see a
Dr. Robert King, at the Yale Child Study Center. Perhaps there was something
that the boy’s mother, and her trusted community psychiatrist, had missed; maybe
the sta f at the old Collegiate School could identify it.

400
 41. Solstice

August 2006
Sandy Hook Elementary School
One morning that August, a contractor from Monroe made a service call out to
Sandy Hook. He drove up past the rehouse, and around Dickenson Drive, to the
old square-shaped elementary school, and got out his tools; Newtown Schools
had just approved a budget expenditure to upgrade the security at each of their
elementary schools, and today was Sandy Hook’s turn.

At the school’s entrance, the contractor installed a KC DAR Direct Access

Control System, manufactured by Aiphone. The “KC Video Entry system”
consisted of a speaker and microphone mounted just outside of the front doors of
the school, plus a camera sending a closed-circuit signal inside, where it could be
viewed on any of three monitoring stations at the front desk. (It was just the live
signal — nothing was recorded.)

As one enters the school, af er passing through the outer set of doors, there would
now be a short, transparent corridor, followed by another set of security doors —
an airlock, with the inner set of doors wired to a button at the front desk, so that
the sta f there could observe their visitor through the clear wall, and speak with
them, while not yet granting them full access to the school.

The school’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, sent a letter home to parents that fall:

Dear Members of our Sandy Hook Family,

Our district will be implementing a security system in all elementary

schools part of our ongoing efforts to ensure student safety. As usual,
exterior doors will be locked during the day. Every visitor will be
required to ring the doorbell at the front entrance and the office staff will
use a visual monitoring system to allow entry. Visitors will still be

401
 required to report directly to the office and sign in. If our office staff do
not recognize you, you will be required to show identification with a
picture ID. Please understand that with nearly 700 students and over
1,000 parents representing 500 SHS famili , most parents will be asked
to show identification.

Finally, she added that the doors would lock at 9:30am every morning; anyone
arriving af er that would have to get buzzed in.

The installer from Alarms By Precision put his tools back in his truck, and billed
Newtown for a total of $4,322.

No further upgrades were ever made to Sandy Hook Elementary’s security system.

Red Lake, Minnesota

Minnesota Public Radio had a guest in the studio for an interview: he was the
father of Derek Brun, who gave his life at Red Lake High School, and he had led
a lawsuit against the school district — one that Red Lake had just agreed to settle.
“My son should have never died,” Mr. Brun said. “There was many things that
could have been done to prevent it, including the school taking the proper action
to adequately arm security people, even though it would have been a little more
costly for the insurance.” If Derek had a gun, his father believed, he might have
stopped the tragedy entirely. He at least would have had a chance.

A few years later, the victims of Red Lake would win another settlement, against a
company from Minneapolis that the school board had hired to come up with the
school’s emergency response plans. The lawsuit had argued that Red Lake's
emergency plan had failed to meet the requirements of a law in Minnesota that
required every school to “provide a crisis management plan, train school o cials,
and evaluate the school’s security weaknesses.” The law was passed in 2001, in
response to Columbine.

September 13, 2006

Dawson College — Montreal, Quebec, Canada
A black Pontiac came to a stop on the city street, just outside the east entrance to
the college, where the smokers gathered along a set of double doors painted with
the institution’s logo: “DAWSON.”

The driver got out. He was wearing black combat boots, a black trench coat, black
sunglasses, and his black hair was cut into a mohawk; perhaps attention-grabbing,

402
but not signi cantly so on the streets of downtown Montreal. Pedestrians
continued to pass right by.

He opened the trunk, and took out a black du fel bag, and two guns: a Glock
9mm pistol, and a Beretta Cx4 Storm carbine — another 9mm, but in the pro le
of a long gun. It was the sort of semi-automatic ri e that the gunman could legally
obtain in Canada, where the guns were more regulated (though not quite as
regulated as the post-Dunblane UK).

What his arsenal lacked in repower, it made up for in volume — there was also a
pump shotgun made by Norinco in the du fel bag, nestled among hundreds and
hundreds of rounds of ammunition, for all the guns. It was more than he could
carry by himself, actually, so the rst thing he did was grab a mule: he pointed the
carbine at a random pedestrian, and motioned to the du fel bag. “Pick it up.
Follow me.”

The mule followed, at rst. But then the gunman leading the way raised his ri e,
and opened re on the students smoking their cigarettes by the entrance,
“sweeping the weapon from side to-side Rambo-style,” as one witness told the
Globe and Mail later that day.

Everyone ran. The shooter looked back over his shoulder, and saw the du fel bag
sitting out on the sidewalk, his mule long-gone. Frustrated, he lef the cache
behind, and headed into the college. (He likely did not know that police were
following almost right behind him, having responded to an unrelated call on
campus just minutes before.)

Inside Dawson, the shooter was seen marching up a wide staircase to the second
oor, past students who had no idea what had just occurred outside, amid all the
bustle and echo in the halls. Upstairs was the atrium-style cafeteria, always
crowded at this time in the af ernoon. The young man in the trench coat reached
the top of the steps, took out his guns again, and shot as many people as he could.

Again the students ran. Some took cover under their tables. One of them heard
the shooter yell, “Everybody on the fucking oor!” And he kept shooting.

Af er a few moments, there was more gun re, but from the stairwell behind him.
The police had arrived, and were shooting back. The gunman quickly took cover
in a small restaurant area that faced the cafeteria, and a stando f ensued.

From his position, the shooter could see a young male student, cradling an injured
female classmate. “Get over here. Come to me.”

The student looked up. Y , he w talking to him.

403
The student obeyed, and the shooter positioned him in front of himself, as a
human shield in case the police came storming around the corner. From where
they stood, his hostage could still see the injured friend he was trying to save,
moments before, and he begged the shooter: “Please, can I just take her outside so
she can get help?”

The gunman shrugged it o f. “Is she alive?”

“I don’t know, but she’s not doing good. She’s hurt bad.”

The shooter stepped out from behind his quarry — closer to the injured girl, but
still behind cover from the police's vantage point — and shot the girl seven times.
Then he went back to his position behind her friend. “Now she’s dead.”

The police rushed his position af er that, and managed to shoot the gunman in
the elbow, as he was reaching to draw his hostage closer. The shooter went down;
lying on his side, he drew his Glock pistol, put the barrel against his own head,
and red.

Pathetic.

The Dawson College shooting got a lot of press, certainly much more than the
bungled attack on Orange High School in North Carolina had, a couple weeks
before. That might have had as much to do with the di ference in casualties as it
did with the location where it happened: with Dawson, it was evident that the
Columbine phenomenon had gone international.

September 27, 2006

Platte Canyon High School — Bailey, Colorado
The bomb squad in Je fco got a call from a small neighboring town. The Bailey
City Police needed help, and what the department there told them quickly
brought back dark memories from a day in 1999: there was a man with a gun in
their high school, and he said he had a bomb.

As the armored truck sped toward Platte Canyon High School, more details were
coming in: it wasn’t an active shooter this time. The guy had hostag . And it
wasn’t a student; it was a “scru fy looking” middle-aged man, a stranger. He had a
Glock pistol, and some kind of revolver, and he had gone straight to a classroom
on the second oor, red one shot into the ceiling, then told all of the male
students, and the teacher, to leave. From the girls, he chose seven to stay behind,
and he told them to face the blackboard.

404
The bomb squad pulled into the parking lot. They saw the Jeep the gunman had
lef there, with a bunch of camping gear piled in the back. It looked like he’d been
sleeping in the woods for some time.

The SWAT team led the bomb squad into the school, up to the second oor, to
just around the corner from the classroom (the other rooms had all been
evacuated). There was a hostage negotiator there in the hall, doing her job. For the
next three hours, they waited, as she talked to the gunman, and one by one, four
of the traumatized girls were released from of the darkened classroom. When they
got to safety, each of them con rmed to the o cers their worst fears: that the
gunman had been sexually assaulting them at gunpoint.

The cops asked about the bomb. The girls said the man had set a backpack on the
oor, and had told them there was “three pounds of C-4” in it. Then, when the
f h hostage came out, a little af er 3pm, she said the gunman had told her “at
4:00 it will all be over.” And he still had two hostages in there.

They tried to get a sniper to take him out, but it was too dark. They tried to get a
tiny ber optic camera through a hole in the wall, but the gunman saw it, and
threatened to shoot the two remaining hostages if they didn’t take it back out.

Finally, as 4:00pm approached, the authorities decided it was too dangerous to

wait any longer. They detonated a breaching charge on the door, and a column of
o cers came charging through the cloud of smoke, into the classroom. They
found the gunman shielding himself with a hostage, his gun to her head. As one
o cer took the loose hostage away to safety, the SWAT team ordered the gunman
to drop his weapon, but he would not. He pulled the trigger, and then, all of the
o cers did too.

As an EMT attended to the fallen hostage, the other o cers rushed to pick up
every backpack they could nd, and sprinted out of the room with them,
throwing all the bags down a grassy hill they had cordoned o f, knowing they
could never search them all in time.

The clocks ticked down to 4:00pm, but there was no explosion. The Je ferson
County Bomb Squad searched through each backpack in the pile at the bottom of
the hill, and eventually they found the shooter’s. Indeed, there were never any
explosives; instead, as their evidence report lists, the bag contained “rolls of duct
tape, handcu fs, knives, stun gun, rope, scissors, massage oil, a dildo, a vibrator
and numerous rounds of ammunition.”

405
October 2, 2006
West Nickel Mines School — Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania
The schoolhouse was tiny, just a one-room speck in a sea of wheat elds. It looked
much like the old schoolhouses that were built by the original white settlers, when
they rst came to this part of the country, three hundred years before. And it was
built the same way: by devout Mennonites, with simple tools. In this older way of
life, they had to depend on each other to survive. A saying on the schoolhouse
wall spelled it out: “JOY — Jesus rst, Others Second, Yourself Last.”

There were only small signs of modernity that crept in around them, bare hints
that it was really 2006, and not some pre-Industrial era colony — things like the
ashing red lights they slung on the back of their horse-drawn buggies, so they
could still adhere to state law when they traveled on the paved roads. Some of the
farmers had a telephone shack on their property, for business needs or in case of
emergency. And they still milked all their cows by hand — but the milk all went
into a large, stainless steel tank, and a man driving an 18-wheeler would come by
every week or so to pump their stock into his truck’s huge milk compartment.
(Sometimes, the truck driver — who was not Amish, being a truck driver —
cursed as he ddled with the equipment, bringing in more of the sinful outside
world along with him. It was enough that one farmer would routinely take his
children out of the milk house until the man was gone.)

***
It was a warm autumn in Nickel Mines, so the teacher lef the schoolhouse door
open. She was in the middle of teaching the class, when they all heard a pickup
truck parking outside; she went out to see who the visitor was. It was the driver
from the milk company — and he had a pistol pointed at her. He ordered the
teacher back into the schoolhouse, and followed close behind, shutting the door
behind him.

Motioning with the gun, he told the teacher, her two aides, and the students (boys
and girls whose ages ranged from 6 to 13) to lie face-down at the front of the
classroom, in front of the blackboard. But the two adult aides immediately
disobeyed (in part because they did not understand English), and ran out the back
door, sprinting across a long wheat eld to a neighboring farm — and the closest
telephone.

At 10:35am, the 9-1-1 operator got a call from a abbergasted farmer: “There’s a
guy in the school with a gun.”

406
Back at the schoolhouse, the gunman had ordered all the male students to leave.
He seemed agitated. He pulled down the window shades, and started binding
several of the girls’ feet and hands with zip-ties, then tying them to each other —
but before he could nish, suddenly, one of the window shades snapped back up
with such force that it fell o f its hanger, onto the oor.

The truck driver picked it up, cursing, and then went to re-hang it over the
window, climbing up on a desk to reach. Just then, one of the schoolgirls lying on
the oor — with her hands bound, but her feet still free — swears she heard a
female voice speak to her, one that no one else heard; later, she would believe it
was an angel. The angel said: “RUN.” And she did, right out the back door, across
the eld, to the farmhouse.

The gunman nished tying up the girls, and then hauled in the supplies from the
back of his truck: duct tape, a hammer, nails, binoculars, ear plugs, a ashlight, a
candle, numerous wood planks, plastic zip-ties, a tube of lubricating jelly, cans of
black powder, and an extra set of clothes. Along with the 9mm, he also carried a
12-gauge shotgun, a .30-06 ri e, a taser, and six hundred rounds of ammunition.

He closed the doors, and used the wooden boards to nail them shut. The gunman
told his captives he was sorry he had to “do this,” but, “I’m angry at God and I
need to punish some Christian girls to get even with Him.”

Almost at the same moment — nine minutes af er the Amish farmer had made
the rst call from his phone shack — the gunman heard two cars suddenly pull up
outside the farmhouse. Then a voice, over a bullhorn: “This is the Pennsylvania
State Patrol! Put the gun down!” The cops had the schoolhouse surrounded. The
truck driver’s plan was foiled.

He took out his phone, and called his wife.

They talked. She had no idea what was going on, and he didn’t seem to be making
much sense during the brief exchange, but it was obvious that something was very,
very wrong. And that he was saying “goodbye.” As soon as he hung up, she called
9-1-1 — but she didn't know where her husband even was.

It was too late anyway. Back at the schoolhouse, the shooter told the police he had
hostages, and “I want everybody o f the property or else! Right now! Two
seconds, that’s it!” Then he turned to the girls, and whispered, “I’m going to make
you pay.”

The police, having backed away from the windows, were trying to re-establish
communication with the gunman through the bullhorn, but he had stopped
responding; suddenly, they heard a series of pistol shots. In an instant, the o cers

407
charged, breaking through the windows and boards with their batons, and as they
frantically came crawling into the schoolhouse, drawing their guns, the shooter
turned his pistol away from the students, to himself.

***
Later that night, the shooter’s wife told detectives that he had made a strange
claim during their brief phone conversation: that he had sexually abused two of
his relatives when they were children, and was thinking of doing it again. The
thing was, she knew it wasn’t true: the supposed victims were not even in the same
state at the time. The gunman was lying — meanwhile, the similarities between
what happened at the schoolhouse and what happened at Platte Canyon High
School, just the week before, were hard to ignore. It was as if the bond that the
shooter had formed with someone else’s fantasy had somehow grown stronger
than the one tying him to reality.

October 5, 2006
The Newtown Bee — Newtown, Connecticut
The season of the school shooter had returned, and the Bee’s reporters had been
interviewing local o cials all week for the story. “We are always concerned about
security in our schools,” Superintendent Pitko f told them. “When these terrible
incidents occur, it gets our attention.”

The Bee had rst called Newtown PD, to get the Chief of Police’s statement, but
Michael Kehoe only con rmed that there were “security measures that police and
school o cials have planned in the event that there is a dire emergency in the
schools, such as a person with a rearm threatening violence,” and he declined to
go into further detail — part of having an e fective security program was to avoid
talking about it publicly, he explained.

Meanwhile, the superintendent reassured Newtown that security procedures were

already in place at every school in the district; just to be sure, he sent a letter to all
the principals, “reminding them to review protocol with their sta fs.”

The Bee talked to several of them: Newtown High School’s principal said that any
visitors to NHS were required to wear an ID badge, and that administrators and
security personnel — Richard Novia’s team — were constantly on the lookout for
any strangers on school grounds. Over at Newtown Middle School, Diane
Sherlock said, “I think our security is pretty tight,” and explained how they had
recently banned students from carrying backpacks. “We will practice increased
vigilance.” And nally, Pitko f added, “As of today, all of our elementary schools
have a buzzer system to gain entry to the building.”

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October 10, 2006
National 4-H Conference Center — Chevy Chase, Maryland
President Bush sat onstage next to his Secretary of Education, and a panel of
experts; among them were the nation’s Attorney General, the Governor of
Colorado, and the director of crisis counseling for Los Angeles County schools —
all seated under a banner reading “CONFERENCE ON SCHOOL SAFETY.”
Behind them, the stage was set up to look like a classroom, complete with a
blackboard (on which “school safety” was written, over and over again, as if lef
over from a detention punishment.)

They were there to take questions from an audience of school representatives, and
students from around the country — including survivors from Columbine — to
try and ease their fears that another dark wave of school violence had arrived. “In
many ways, I’m sorry we’re having this meeting,” Bush told the conference. “In
other ways, I know how important it is that we’re having this meeting. The
violence that has been occurring in our schools is incredibly sad, and it troubles a
lot of folks… and it troubled me.”

The president shared with the conference his view that schools were about more
than education; that, “All of us in this country want our classrooms to be gentle
places of learning — places where people not only learn the basics — basic skills
necessary to become productive citizens — but learn to relate to one another.”

Later in the session, the crisis counselor from Los Angeles emphasized that
addressing school violence would have to begin with addressing mental health:

Dr. Wong: We found in the school shooters that o en depression and

homicide were two sid of the same coin. Each of [the shooters]
expressed a wish to die, well the intent to hurt others.

Bush appeared stunned by the very idea of it: that a student could make such a
statement, and not raise any red ags.

The President: Is it typical of a student that express a wish to die,

mak that clear to h or her peers, to — if people are attuned to what
that means, to pay attention to somebody who exhibits the behavior that
says, “I am depressed, and I want to die?” I mean, it… it’s a pretty
strong statement.

Dr. Wong: It’s a wonderful question, because there are behaviors, and
there are expressions of hopelessness that come before that. And so I
think we have to do a lot of education with just folks who say, you know,

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 “they’ve changed; they don’t have joy in life,” and that th an early
warning sign.

The safety summit closed with a brief Q&A session, during which an audience
member asked about “character education” classes being taught in schools, as a
possible means of preventing violence. President Bush con rmed that while there
were federal grants in place for such curriculum, he considered it more
appropriate for the states to implement them.

“Secondly, it’s really important,” the president continued, “that people not think
government is a loving entity. Government is law and justice. Love comes from
the hearts of people that are able to impart love. [...] I’m afraid [that love] comes
from a higher power than the Federal Government.”

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 42. Prosthetic
Environment

October 13, 2006

Edmond Town Hall — Newtown, Connecticut
The town hall was all boarded up for the big remodel, a half-century overdue.
There was to be just one more showing in its theater before the work began, and it
was a private screening: the town’s Building & Site Commission, gathering to see
the latest concept renderings of what the new town hall would look like, projected
against the rickety walls of the old. The images showed Fair eld Hills, and the
structure until-then known as Bridgeport Hall, sitting right in the center of the
oval, where the patients once brought in the harvest from the farm — but the
slides advanced, the building was reshaped to t the town's needs, now that all the
patients were long-gone.

All in attendance agreed that the designs looked ready to go; nally, the town’s
Fair eld Hills Master Plan, the new life for the old mental hospital, was coming
into focus.

October 24, 2006

O ce of Dr. Robert King — Yale Child Study Center
Nancy drove her son out to the old collegiate school in New Haven, for the
appointment. She had brie y talked to Dr. King on the phone before the visit —
she knew that he was no quack — but still, she didn’t like the idea of another
doctor looking at Adam. And she knew where it was headed; Nancy had told Dr.
King on the phone that yes, her son did have pronounced OCD, as his father had
said. But the OCD came along with his Asperger’s syndrome, which (she was
quite sure, and who knew her son better?) he absolutely wasn’t going to take any
medication for.

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Still, Adam’s father wanted the examination, and she had to cooperate. She could
console herself that at least Peter wasn’t going to join them for the session.

***
It was to be a single, three-hour evaluation. Nancy met Dr. King, who was a
middle-aged man, balding with white hair and mustache, and he was joined by a
Licensed Clinical Social Worker for the session; as they introduced themselves to
the Lanza family, Dr. King observed Adam to be — as he would describe in his
initial report — “a pale, gaunt, and awkward young adolescent standing rigidly
with downcast gaze.”

The doctor o fered Adam a handshake. Adam declined, desperately avoiding

looking Dr. King in the face. Nancy explained that this behavior was something
she had noticed her son doing more and more, recently: he wouldn’t look at
people.

“Why should I have to?” Adam asked. His voice, rarely heard by anyone but
Nancy anymore, was heard by Dr. King to be “in a at tone, with little in ection
and almost mechanical prosody.”

The doctor, having surely been asked this same question — why should I look at
people when they speak? — by awkward adolescents many times before, explained
how much could be learned from a person’s facial expression that would color
their words, and convey the speaker’s feelings: a smile, for example.

Adam answered back that di ferent people could interpret the same smile in
di ferent ways: “Some primates smile when they are frightened.”

Sitting down for the evaluation, the doctor went through some more questions,
ones designed to get an idea of Adam’s social anxieties, and how severe they might
be. “What is a friend?” Dr. King asked.

“It is di cult to de ne — in whose culture do you refer?”

“Yours,” Dr. King said. What w a friend in Adam’s world?

“I do not know.”

King scribbled some notes. “If you met a fairy godmother and she granted you
three wishes, what would you wish for?”

Adam thought for awhile, and nally said he couldn’t think of any. Instead, as
King wrote, “He would wish that whatever was granting the wishes would not

412
exist.”

Dr. King asked if he would like to have more friends. Adam said no.

Nancy provided Dr. King with a family medical history — both Peter’s charts, and
her own; she didn’t say anything to indicate that she had Multiple Sclerosis, nor
any other serious medical condition, at any point then or in the past. (Nothing in
her les said anything about the “genetically awed auto immune system,” or an
“on/o f switch” in her brain, either. Nothing even close.)

At some point (possibly when lling out the intake form), Nancy indicated to Dr.
King that Adam had previously been seen by a Dr. Fox, on ten occasions. She
claimed that Dr. Fox had already urged anti-anxiety medication, which Adam had
refused.

While both details may (or may not) have been true, Nancy neglected to add one
key fact — that Adam was still being treated by Dr. Fox, and so any treatment that
Yale provided or suggested would thus be overlapping with whatever their
community psychiatrist was doing. It was a signi cant omission, as she was almost
certainly aware; but for some reason, she wanted the experts divided.

Dr. King’s questions continued — some to Adam, but more to Nancy. Her replies
painted a picture of their life over the last two years: sometime around the seventh
grade, for some reason, Adam became very afraid. He was scared of leaving the
house, and the scariest thing of all was the experience of going to school with the
other kids. He would refuse to even use the phone, and started missing school,
and staying inside. She had turned to St. Rose, but her son’s belief that religion
was irrational had “proved the downfall of a brief placement at [the] small
supportive Catholic parochial school.” He even ended up staying home for all of
eighth grade. He was less afraid at 36 Yogananda, but within its con nes, he was
developing more and more rituals and superstitions he had to obey, or else he
would have an “episode:” in public, that had always meant withdrawing within
himself — silent and unmoving, totally unresponsive; at home, of en it would be
a t of rage. He constantly washed his hands, was extremely particular about the
textures of foods, and Nancy was starting to become a recluse herself in her tireless
e forts to help him through each day.

One document in Nancy’s les, from around the time of this visit, appears to be a
list she had given Dr. King — one that Adam had written to her at some point,
enumerated the speci c “problems” he had with the environment inside 36
Yogananda that day:

413
Problems:

The lights were too bright.

There were too many dirty dish .

I kept spilling food and such.

You were in the room, while I w in the kitchen.

The spiders.

My arm kept touching things.

My hair touched Ryan's towel in the morning.

There were no tissu .

There were not tissu in the pantry.

My corn w too wet.

My quinoa fork dropped with quinoa and I had to pick it up and there
were not tissu and my hands had quinoa on them.

It w too warm.

You were speaking angrily.

There were not enough towels.

My hair touched my desk towel when picking up quinoa.

I could not eat my quinoa because I dropped the fork.

The corn had spots.

There are more reasons.

414
 You threatened me twice.

Nancy explained that her son’s compulsions extended to her actions, too; just as
they were pulling up outside, for instance, he objected when she pressed the
button on the automatic gate opener. The control panel was a surface that
showed ngerprints, the kind that always looked dirty; never mind that it was the
only way to get into the parking lot.

Dr. King questioned whether the “homebound” status had been e fective at all,
given the apparent increase in Adam’s compulsive rituals. Adam insisted it was
necessary; that by Newtown Middle School he had concluded that “[I] did not
approve with the way I was being educated … it progressed very slowly.”

That led Dr. King to ask Adam why he quit the school band, too. Adam’s
reasoning was familiar: he couldn’t stand the other kids. “They all played badly,”
Dr. King summarized in his notes. “No one practiced. No one paid attention.”

Finally, Dr. King turned to the subject of Nancy and Peter's separation, and noted
that Adam had insisted that he didn’t want to visit his father at his apartment in
Stamford. He asked why, but Adam did not respond. Nancy said that he wouldn’t
tell her the reason, either.

Every step in Adam’s evaluation seemed to agitate him further. He could hear
them talking about him, piercing the bu fer of calm that his mother usually
maintained around his person. Specifying things wrong with him. Almost
interrogating him. By the end, his baggy shirt was drenched in sweat, and Nancy
was more worried for him than ever. It suddenly seemed like all of the calming
and seclusion they’d given him to soothe his anxieties over the past year had been
undone — like he was right back in the emergency room, at Danbury Hospital.
Finally, the visit ended, and Nancy ushered her stricken son back into their luxury
sedan, and retreated to the sanctuary of 36 Yogananda.

***
Minutes af er the session was over, Dr. King’s sta f at Yale were exchanging emails:
the boy they evaluated that day, they all agreed, would require “tons of special
education support, with expert consultation.” He needed the kind of care you
could only get in a therapeutic school setting — not at home, and certainly not at
any public school.

Dr. King sat down to assemble a draf report on his patient. In his expert view,
Adam Lanza “displayed a profound Autism Spectrum Disorder, with rigidity,
isolation, and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and
communications.”

415
Secondary to that disorder, Nancy’s son also exhibited “a variety of rigid,
controlling, and avoidant behaviors, which have been loosely described as OCD,
but seem to have several facets.” These behaviors were noted to include “his
refusal to open doors for himself because he did not like to touch the doorknobs,
and his worries about contamination of grease, dirt, and dust.”

King also documented more instances in which Adam’s need for rituals now
extended over to Nancy:

He impos many strictur , which are increasingly onero for mother.

He disapprov if mother leans on anything in the house because it
‘improper.’ … He also intolerant if mother brush by h 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 will insist she redo it.

As for Adam’s abrupt social withdrawal that began in the seventh grade, Dr. King
admitted that it was “di cult to interpret,” but o fered what he emphasized was
only a “plausible explanation”:

...Social engagement (largely focused on activiti ) in the [earlier] school

years mak relatively few demands for social sophistication... As
Adam’s peers moved into early adolescence and middle school, the
demands of social engagement changed dramatically, leaving Adam
feeling more inadequate or ostracized, setting off a cycle of withdrawal
and avoidance.

The doctor assessed that Adam “fell somewhere in the Pervasive Developmental
Disorder or Autism Spectrum,” and recommended further psychological
evaluations, as well as sessions to identify his “cognitive, social, and linguistic
strengths and weakness.” As for treatment, Dr. King was clear that any su ciently
e fective measures would be “di cult to implement outside of a broader
therapeutic day school setting.”

Nearing the conclusion of his report, Dr. King o fered a glimpse into one possible
future for the Lanza family, if the trends he identi ed continued unabated:

Beyond the impact of OCD symptoms on himself and h mother, we

are very concerned about Adam’s increasingly constricted social and
educational world. Much of emphas h been on finding curricular
level of instruction. Inability to tolerate even minimal interaction with
even older more mature classmat will have grave consequenc for h
future education and social and occupational adaptation unless means of
remediation are found. Inability to interact with classmat will prove

416
 increasingly deleterio to education. We believe it very important to
reframe the discussion with school from issu of curricular content to
much more urgent issu of how to accommodate Adam’s severe social
disabiliti in a way that would permit him to be around peers and to
progress, rather than regress, socially, well academically.

Understandably, Adam’s parents have gone to great lengths to

compensate for Adam’s hypersensitiviti and social difficulti and
aversions by providing home-bound instruction.

However we believe that there a significant risk to Adam in creating,

even with the best of intentions, a prosthetic environment which spar
him having to encounter other students or to work to overcome h social
difficulti . Having the emphas on adapting the world to Adam, rather
than helping him to adapt to the world, a recipe for him to be a
homebound recluse, unable to attend college or work productively into
h twenti and thirti and beyond with mother becoming increasingly
isolated and burdened.

King went on to explain to Nancy (and Peter, who received a copy of the
document) that in order to assemble an e fective plan for Adam’s learning, it
would be “essential” to subject their patient to further “psychological, speech,
language, and occupational therapy assessments,” and for Newtown Schools to
schedule a meeting of his IEP team soon, to update the plan accordingly. King also
recommended that the new IEP should include input from “experts in Autism
Spectrum/Pervasive Development Disorders.”

It was Adam’s use of social language, in particular, that the Yale report urged them
focus on — “using communication that is appropriate to setting, listener, context,
or purpose.” Dr. King believed that in the appropriate school setting — specially
tailored for children who were intellectually bright, but with developmental
challenges — therapeutic measures would have to be introduced right as Adam’s
“disabling OCD symptoms” appeared. It wasn’t something that could be done
through weekly, o ce-based therapy. Adam needed more — much, much, more.

And nally, the program Dr. King had in mind would include medication.

He explained how serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) worked (such as Zolof ,

Luvox, Celexa, Lexapro, or Paxil) and how they could likely be “helpful in
reducing Adam’s overall anxiety which inhibits him in risking new experiences.”

417
In closing, Dr. King advised that the Lanza family would need “tons of parental
guidance — without that, any o ce based approach to [Adam’s challenges] will
fail, certainly if it is without medication.”

Years later, Dr. King would still remember that day he met Adam Lanza. “My
concern,” he would tell police, “was that the [patient’s] social isolation and
withdrawal was increasing.”

October 25, 2006

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy read the initial report from Yale the next morning — and sent a reply e-
mail directly to Dr. King, clearly exasperated that his recommendations had
exceeded the limits she had laid out in advance:

Thank you for taking the time to meet with Adam

yesterday... I wanted to let you know that the
options you presented are not going to work at
this time. I would like to save you any further
investment of your time.

As I mentioned during the telephone conversation

previous to our meeting, Adam’s OCD component is
strongly tied to Asperger Syndrome and he is
adamantly opposed to medication. The OCD
component is now based on superstition or in an
effort to influence outside events or luck. I
thought I had been clear that I was looking for
individual intervention, perhaps some sort of
behavior modification, for the Asperger Syndrome
foremost, sensory integration disorder, and the
two OCD like components that are impacting his
ability to attend school.

His refusal to take medication would make it

impossible for him to be part of the study group
and will just further agitate him. He was quite
angry about the line of questioning that the
interview took. As you might expect from an
Asperger child, he had no understanding of the
metaphors, and was quite disturbed by the fairy
godmother scenario you gave him. You mentioned
that the wait list for treatment for Asperger is
quite lengthy, and that the study group was the
alternative. However, participation in a study

418
 group, with the implied possibility of
medication, will not be helpful in this case. So
while I very much appreciate your effort, this is
not the right course of treatment for him.

Dr. King wrote back as quickly as he could, trying to salvage his opportunity to
intervene; yes, the group placement that he had recommended for Adam (which
was part of a clinical research study) would have required that he take medication.
However, if the Lanzas refused, there was another option that he thought could
still be of some bene t. It was a totally di ferent approach: there was an Advanced
Practice Registered Nurse (APRN) at Yale named Kathleen Koenig, and she was
the coordinator of a group for children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders
(PDD). She seemed a perfect t, and would be happy to work with Adam and
Nancy directly, King assured. And she had a wealth of knowledge on
“treatment/education resources in the community.”

Nancy agreed to take Adam to see the nurse practitioner. She also clari ed in her
reply that it was mostly just Dr. King’s recommendations of treatment for Adam
that she disagreed with; the Yale report on her son was “insightful,” and there
were other recommendations King had made that she felt were “worth pursuing.”

To others, Nancy was less charitable in her assessment. Just two days af er the
evaluation with King, she would write to an unidenti ed friend that she “felt
horrible” in the session. She said that Adam was “frustrated, and angry and
anxious” during the interview, to the point where “his palms were sweating so
much that his shirt got wet and he looked like he could have cried at any
moment.” To her, it was as if Adam was being “tortured” during the Yale session
(an expression reminiscent of how she characterized the Danbury Hospital visit's
e fect on her son: "abusive.") uite the opposite of what she had told Dr. King the
day before, she said the Yale report didn’t have “even a glimmer of hope attached
to it,” and that the visit may even have made Adam worse than when he came in
— he was so angry about “the whole thing,” that “short of strapping him down,”
she couldn’t see Adam going to another doctor anytime soon.

Still, she kept the scheduled meeting with APRN Koenig. It was what Peter
wanted. And in the meantime, there was more work to be done for Adam’s IEP.

December 1, 2006
Newtown School District — O ce of Dr. Ridley
Dr. Michael Ridley was a psychiatrist on sta f with the Newtown School District.
He had reviewed his subject’s le (which went all the way back to the rst grade),
and so he was familiar with Adam’s di ferent IEPs from his years at Sandy Hook

419
Elementary. From there, the IEPs stopped, but transfer records showed the Lanza
boy nished f h and sixth grade at Reed Intermediate School, where there had
been no documented sign of any trouble — but then again, there were barely any
records at all from the brand new school. And then, right when he resurfaced in
the seventh grade, everything seemed to go wrong, with Adam moving schools,
and then dropping out, and then going homebound.

But Dr. Ridley wasn’t going to counsel the boy, just now emerging from his cave;
his role was only to measure just what 14-year-old Adam’s learning capabilities
were, so that his school curriculum could be updated accordingly.

Adam came to see Dr. Ridley three times that month, to complete a series of
standardized tests. These included the Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive
Abilities (which involves studying images for patterns and changes, audio memory
tests, and logic puzzles) as well as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
(WISC, which has similar tests, and also measures intellectual abilities such as
vocabulary and general knowledge).

Af er Adam completed the evaluation process, Dr. Ridley’s conclusion was that
his patient’s “overall cognitive functioning falls in the average range.” He then
went on to list Adam’s speci c scores in each category:

Verbal Reasoning: Average

Nonverbal Reasoning: Average

Processing Speed: Average

Working Memory: Superior

These sorts of tests showcased Adam’s competencies, such as they were. But it was
on the “Comprehension Sub-test” where his de ciencies stood out: described in
o cial records as “a task that requires social sensitivity and common sense
reasoning,” on this test Adam provided his responses to each item shown to him,
but of en, the response he chose was not “socially sensitive.” He also fell short of
average in his “nonverbal speed and accuracy and immediate visual recall on a
scanning task involving symbols.”

Having measured Adam’s abilities, Dr. Ridley then evaluated his existing
achievement levels — what, of the public-school curriculum, he already knew —
for grade placement:

Reading: Average

420
 g g
Math Reasoning & Calculation: High Average

Written Language Skills: Superior

Adam understood the rules of language, like grammar and spelling, very very well.
But again, in speci c sub-tests, his seemingly strong foundation began to show
deep cracks: his “[reading] passage comprehension and writing sample fell in the
low average range," and a "test of long-term retrieval fell in the well below average
range.”

Dr. Ridley’s conclusion was that, based on Adam’s testing performance, there was
“no evidence of any speci c learning disability,” and that instead, Adam’s issues
were “related to his identi ed emotional and/or Pervasive Developmental
Disorder (PDD) spectrum behaviors.” Based on this, his recommendation was
that he would bene t the most from “continuing to be eased into more regular
classroom time,” though he would continue to “need tutoring to assist him with
keeping current with his academic needs relative to high school graduation
requirements.”

In short, he should be at Newtown High School, and they should try to transition
him back into normal classrooms — gradually, and with any necessary supports to
address his emotional needs and developmental delays: the “least restrictive
environment” they could manage.

***
Newtown sent a copy of Dr. Ridley’s assessment to the sta f at the Child Study
Center. Yale found the data useful, and it supported one of their hypotheses: they
were already skeptical of Nancy’s belief that her son was “gif ed,” or “unique” in
terms of his abilities. They believed it was her son’s “singular appetites for certain
types of learning” that really created the perception that he was exceptionally
smart, when in fact this behavior was just “arising from his obsessive-compulsive
tendencies.” (In other words, he was fussy because he had severe OCD, not
because he was some perfectionist kid-genius.) They also believed that “his
parents, and certainly his mother, may have had greater than average di culty
with accepting the extent of their son’s disabilities.” Nancy exaggerated (or even
imagined) his strengths, and minimized his weaknesses. What she could not, or
would not see, was that her son “had average aptitude, and great de cits in certain
areas.”

421
Newtown High School
Halfway through Adam’s freshman year, his IEP team convened — “ostensibly to
review the district’s psychological evaluation” — but the records from this
meeting do not show that Dr. Ridley’s test results were even discussed. Still, the
plan did get an update: Adam was again determined to be eligible for special
education, and the team updated his heretofore “to be determined” primary
disability — not to Autism, as Dr. Fox had recommended, and not to Emotional
Disturbance, as the Child Advocate would later determine was appropriate — but
instead, to something the state recognized as “Other Health Impairment.”

This classi cation was designed for “students with limited strength, vitality or
alertness, including a heightened alertness to environmental stimuli, that results in
limited alertness with respect to the educational environment,” if the impairment
was due to “chronic or acute health problems such as asthma, attention de cit
disorder or attention de cit hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, epilepsy, a heart
condition, hemophilia, lead poisoning, leukemia, nephritis, rheumatic fever, and
sickle cell anemia.”

Adam had never been diagnosed with any of these conditions; the doctors from
the Child Advocate’s O ce would determine that, based on the information the
IEP team had at the time, this classi cation was “not appropriate.”

From this awed starting point, Nancy’s Planning and Placement Team created an
education plan that was “almost entirely without reference to [Adam’s] social-
emotional di culties, except to say that his anxiety disorder, Asperger Syndrome,
compulsive disorder, and rigidity impacted his learning in a regular education
environment as well as his ability to take part in a general education curriculum.”
The only plan to address what the Child Advocate would call his “crippling”
social development issues was to “increase time with others in a school setting.”

Going forward into the rest of Adam’s freshman year, there was to be “no
performance criteria or evaluative procedures [beyond] teacher observation.”
And, though Adam was observed having di culty in communicating with others,
this time, there would be no speech or language related services in his IEP at all;
next to the box where such supports would have been listed, the team wrote
simply “Not Applicable.”

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

One day when Adam came home, he went to his room upstairs, and logged onto
his computer. He starting clicking around, reading stu f online like he always did.

422
He came across a news article: it was about a shooting that had occurred in
Montreal, at Dawson College. The coward in the mohawk.

There had been so, so many school attacks in the United States that fall; but as a
calm nally started to settle with the dawn of 2007, the shooting that still lingered
in American headlines was the one that hit in Canada... and it was for the
strangest of reasons.

Like the shooter at Red Lake, the Dawson College attacker had maintained several
online pro les, each of which listed his favorite media: everything about him had
screamed “school shooter pro le,” from the movies (Zero Day and Bang Bang
You’re Dead, both depicting school shootings) to the music (“German Metal” and
Marilyn Manson), but it was the “Favorite Video Games” section of the Dawson
College shooter’s online pro le that the media latched onto. There, nestled
between two Warcra titles, was a game no one had ever heard of: “Super
Columbine Massacre RPG!”

***
By 2006, video games had gone mainstream in most respects, but the concept of
an “indie” video game was practically alien to most Americans. The title of the
“Columbine game,” by itself, suggested ominous connections: Had th latest
Columbine-obsessed shooter, in Canada, played too much of that video game? Did
he use it to train for h own school shooting?

The sensational headlines implied answers: "M

- C ," and
"V G K - ‘C M ’ ’
M ." Another said simply,
"K L C G ."

Reading these stories that covered the controversy, some web users, naturally,
went searching for the Columbine game itself, curious to see for themselves the
sof ware that had allegedly wrought such carnage in another country.

Google would bring them straight to the game designer’s red-on-black homepage,
emblazoned “Welcome to the world of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!” over a
security-camera-still of the Columbine killers — the image pixelized, like the event
had been piped through a Super Nintendo cartridge. Just a few rows down on the
page, there was already a link titled “Dawson College Shooting Statement,”
containing a message from a man who identi ed himself as Danny, and who had
designed and produced the game all by himself:

423
 To the Public:

I am, like most, saddened by the news of the

recent shooting at Dawson College. I extend my
condolences to those affected by this painful
event. Please refer to the artist’s statement for
the game’s intent. For further questions, please
contact me [by email.]

In the press I’ve been getting lately, I have

tried to articulate very clearly that Columbine
was a "wake up call" not just for our society but
for ME in particular as I was once headed down a
similar road. I found other outlets such as
filmmaking and theater... unfortunately, those
like the Columbine shooters, and apparently the
Dawson College shooter, did not.

As a game, “SCMRPG” was really nothing much: a 16-bit top-down RPG in a

style that the Final Fantasy series had popularized in roughly 1994 — except that
the clip art, music, and text were all customized to depict the events of the
Columbine shootings (or at least a stylized version of them). The notion that
anyone could “train” for a school shooting by playing this simplistic home-brew
game was absurd; the supposed “Columbine game” would have seemed archaic to
the Columbine shooters themselves.

Another link on the page read “Discuss the game here.” And as one might expect,
the SCMRPG forum hosted discussions similar to those that “Blarvink” had
participated in on GameFAQs, with users helping each other through stages of
the game. But the community here was expected to drif o f-topic, and have
conversations about whatever was on their mind — especially Columbine, and
other school shootings. These discussions were not just encouraged; they were
practically the whole point of the “Columbine game” itself, as Danny explained in
the “Artist’s statement” that accompanied the download:

This game asks more of its audience than

rudimentary button-pushing and map navigation; it
implores introspection. This is why the game’s
forum is equally important to the SCMRPG project.
Through it, people from six continents and all
walks of life are discussing the game itself and
the incident it is based on. [...] At the end of
the day, the understanding of the Columbine

424
 school shooting is deepened and redefined. That
is the real object of the game.

Indeed, upon entering the forum, the rst thing a visitor would see was that the
“Talk about the shooting” section was by far the most active, easily eclipsing the
“Help with the game” section. The forum was like a universe that was locked in
the immediate af ermath of the Columbine shootings, when the conversations
heard in the halls of Newtown High School were captured by the Newtown Bee.
Most of the topics of discussion on the SCMRPG forum weren’t much di ferent:

* your schools before versus after Columbine (29

posts; 1,425 views)

* Why is school such bullshit? (12 posts; 1,292

views)

* The Shooting Was NOT Caused By Bullying (18

posts; 2,454 views)

Over time, for regular visitors to the forum, the “Columbine game” itself became
an af erthought. Their discussions proceeded of their own momentum.

***
One day in late 2006, Adam was one of the curious searchers who found the
Columbine game and its accompanying discussion forum. (You didn't have to
register an account to access the forum, just to post on it; it was a public page, for
anyone to read.) And while he would later demonstrate a very detailed knowledge
of the conversations that occurred in this early era of the site's forum, he didn’t
register an account of his own; he thought about it, but he could not muster the
nerve. And it wasn’t just his normal aversion to communication: his fears were
re ected, and seemingly con rmed, in one of the forum’s most-read posts at the
time, bumped to the very top of the page:

Author: DISGUSTED

Subject: FBI TRACKING LIST

Message: Anyone who plays this game is obviously

not a stranger to death and torture and being
sick. Its obvious to me that this is yet another
Site that your IP ADDRESS is copied in and kept
in file.

425
 Its pretty well known that the FBI screens all
books in Public Libraries and black flags special
books.

There is no doubt in my mind that many people

will end up in deep trouble resulting from this
disgusting download.

***
Sometime during Adam’s ninth grade year, Nancy started telling people a really
wild story: that the FBI had recently paid a surprise visit to 36 Yogananda. The
way she explained it to one of the other moms in the neighborhood, there was a
team of agents that came knocking on the door because Adam had “hacked
through two levels of security on one of their computer networks.” Fortunately,
she kept her cool, and was able to convince them that her son was simply a
“computer whiz” and “just a kid that was challenging himself.”

She told the same story to an on-again, o f-again boyfriend at the time; he
remembers her saying that “Adam hacked into a Government website and agents
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation came to her residence.”

But the neighborhood friend never actually saw, herself, any FBI vehicles heading
up the driveway to the pale yellow house. And, as the woman's daughter knew,
that was the same home that was broadcasting unsecured Wi-Fi to the whole
block — hardly the signal you would expect to be coming from the lair of a
phenom computer hacker. The boy who lived there was more likely to be terri ed
of even accidentally breaking the law.

Still, it wasn’t impossible. It was just one of those special stories that Nancy told
people about her son, the one who wouldn’t speak for himself, and was always in
a panic over something. Maybe she did embellish things, now and then. But
people would have to take her word for it.

426
 43. Contagion

April 25, 2006

Hall of the House of Representatives — Washington, D.C.
The retired nurse from New York returned to the podium on the House oor.
“Last week the Centers for Disease Control released a report on the economic
burden of injuries in the United States,” she said. “The results were astonishing.”
She described how, as part of the project, the CDC had added up all the health
care costs, lost wages, and lost productivity that were due to injuries (accidents or
otherwise) to Americans in one year: the total came to $406 billion.

Supporting that price tag was an exhaustive report, laying out detailed statistics
behind all of the categories of injuries it studied — from falls, to res, to car
accidents, to sports injuries. But, as the representative from New York pointed
out, there was just one blind spot in the data: “There is no listing on the costs of
gun violence. [And] the public might ask, ‘how could the CDC avoid gun
violence when listing the causes of serious injury in this country?’ The answer is
simple: Congress won’t let them.”

***
The federal agency that would become known as the CDC had been around in
some form since 1946, when it was called the Communicable Disease Center; it
was just af er the surrender of Imperial Japan, when the federal government was
transitioning back to a peacetime footing, and they wanted to hang on to the
many scienti c advancements brought by the war e fort. There had been major
developments in medical techniques, particularly in combating malaria, that
would be invaluable in the southeast United States; the unconventional location
of the agency’s headquarters — to this day in Atlanta, Georgia, rather than
Washington D.C. — is a lasting reminder of this founding purpose.

But by 1951, malaria was e fectively eliminated in the country. The US, again, was
not about to just give up such a e fective operation, and so the Communicable

427
Diseases Center expanded its scope, to address all diseases. Then, in 1970, the
organization’s name was o cially changed to the Center for Disease Control.

The CDC experienced the most fundamental shif yet in its purpose in 1979,
when the Surgeon General released Healthy People — an in-depth status report
on the health of the American populace, and con rmation of just how far the
medical community had come in the last century. Healthy People showed that
Americans were living longer, thanks signi cantly to institutions like the CDC: its
bar graphs listed causes of death since 1900, and one could see plainly the infant
mortality rate plummeting over time, as sanitation standards rose. Polio, typhus,
malaria, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, simple bacterial infections... the scourges
of previous generations had largely been conquered. State-coordinated vaccine
programs, and development of antibiotics, completely changed how Americans
experienced disease. And in the 1960s, the CDC had played a key role in one of the
greatest achievements in the history of public health: the global eradication of
smallpox.

Based on Healthy People, the CDC, as of 1979, needed to again reassess its
purpose: to become almost a post-disease Center for Disease Control. Because
while the biological threats had decreased over the years, injuries had steadily
moved to the top of the list for causes of death — and yet, most Americans were
not tripping and falling (or having something fall on them, or getting in an auto
accident, or burning themselves) any more frequently than they had before.
Instead, the increases were associated with two things: young people, and violence
— young men, especially. Out of the over-21,000 Americans who were victims of
homicide in 1977, about 25 percent were aged 15 to 24, and they were ve times
more likely to be male than female. Six percent of deaths for white Americans in
this age group were from homicides; for blacks, it was thirty percent. “Easy access
to rearms appears to be the one factor with a striking relationship to murder,”
the CDC wrote. “From 1960 to 1974, handgun sales quadrupled to more than six
million a year. During that same period, the homicide rate increased from 4.7 per
100,000 to 10.2 for the overall population — and from 5.9 to 14.2 for young
people aged 15 to 24.” In other words, the most urgent biological threat to humans
increasingly appeared to be other humans, and so the prevention of violence
started to be viewed as a valid area of research for an organization like the CDC.

The National Research Council followed up with its own, similar study in 1985,
Injury in America — and this was what rst set into motion the series of events
that would bring the CDC into the ght over guns.

Assembled by the Committee on Trauma Research, this latest report exposed that
“injuries destroy the health, lives, and livelihoods of millions of people, yet they
receive scant attention, compared with diseases and other hazards.” More than

428
140,000 Americans were dying from injury — accidental or intentional — each
year. And in particular, the report continued, “Injury is the last major plague of
the young. Injuries kill more Americans aged 1–34 than all diseases combined, and
they are the leading cause of death up to the age of 44.”

There was a broad consensus in the research community — the same that had
defeated so many scourges of public health — that something now had to be done
about injuries. The research council and the Institute of Medicine decided that
the CDC would be the ideal agency to take up the charge, partly because of how
limited they were; being essentially a group of scientists and doctors, tasked with
researching threats, the CDC can only make recommendations, not laws. They
were, ostensibly, apolitical.

***
Meanwhile, the CDC’s name had been pluralized to Centers for Disease Control,
signifying the organization’s broadening focus. (A few years later, they added “and
Prevention” to the end of the title — but the agency would continue to go by
“CDC.”) While the older departments at the CDC continued funding lab work,
successfully identifying the causes of both Legionnaires disease and toxic shock
syndrome (and at the same remaining tragically inattentive to the symptoms of
the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s), new teams were setting up shop to focus
on studying injury.

It was immediately obvious to the researchers that they would be looking at the
role that guns played in the nation's injury and murder rates; they were
epidemiologists, and that’s where the data led. “Clearly,” one researcher said, “if
three fourths of homicides are caused by rearms, we have to look at their role.”

In 1989, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
released a report from their “Task Force on Youth Suicide.” It carried still more
bad news about guns, and young men: since 1975, there had been an astonishing
rise in the suicide rate for males between ages 15 and 19 — almost triple — and the
rise coincided with the already-known increase in national handgun sales. “Guns
now account for more suicides than all other methods combined,” the researchers
said. “65 percent of teen suicides are committed with rearms. An environmental
risk-reduction strategy would call for decreasing the availability of handguns.”

It did, increasingly, sound like a campaign for gun control. “Some 25 million
households have handguns and one-half of these keep their handguns loaded,"
one of the commissioned papers attached to the report read. "Adolescents are
impulsive. Having a loaded handgun around the house is an invitation to
disaster.” The Surgeon General encouraged more research on the subject, and the
CDC directed more funds accordingly.

429
 ***
In 1992, the CDC o cially established the National Center for Injury Prevention
and Control (the very organization that would eventually produce the price tag
that so shocked the congresswoman from New York in 2006). At rst, they
focused on supporting state and local e forts to advocate against drunk driving,
and to encourage the use of seat belts. That got results; so then, they pivoted to
the next item on the list for injuries: guns.

In a letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, signed

by three of the CDC's doctors, the organization predicted, “Just as we were able to
save countless lives from motor vehicle injuries without banning cars, we can save
many lives from rearm injuries without a total ban on rearms.”

The push-back was immediate; their wording seemed to imply that a partial ban
on guns might be on the way. And it didn’t matter that the CDC had no power to
enact such a ban, partial or otherwise; now the CDC had the NRA’s attention.

The last straw came in October 1993, in an article from the New England Journal
of Medicine: “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home.” The
researchers (based at Emory University, and funded by the Injury Prevention
Network) looked at homicide statistics from three major cities — Seattle,
Memphis, and Cleveland, including their surrounding counties — in the period
between 1987 and 1992. What they found suggested that ownership of a rearm
for home protection might actually be, strictly based on the numbers, a rather
stupid investment. In total, they found 420 homicides in which the victim was
killed at their home. But in 85 percent of those cases, there was no forced entry —
so the “home defense” gun owner had never been in a position to defend
themselves when their day nally came. Furthermore, their average attacker was
not a masked gunman or escaped convict; in 76 percent of the cases, the murderer
was someone the victim knew. Of en a family member. Only 3 percent were
known to have been killed by a stranger. (Though there was some elasticity in this
gure — since in 17 percent of the cases, police never identi ed a killer.)
Meanwhile, nearly half of the victims were killed with a gun, the most lethal
implement by far.

The NRA criticized the “New England study” the day it came out. They argued
that it wasn’t really giving the full picture: a gun was supposed to deter a homicide
of the person living in the home, and so the cases where it worked as intended
were all excluded from the study. It was a valid point, but one that also ignored
the separate set of risk-factor statistics — which showed that guns, by themselves,
increased the danger level in a home. Eliminating all other factors, simply having a
gun in the home nearly tripled the likelihood that someone who lived in the home

430
would be killed. It was the third most signi cant risk factor they found (behind
only illegal drugs and — by far the most signi cant factor — domestic violence).
“This study is the rst to clearly link the risk of homicide to the immediate
availability of a gun,” said the lead researcher from Emory to the New York Tim .
“In light of these results, people who are considering buying a gun for protection
should think again. And families who keep guns in their homes should strongly
consider getting them out of the house.”

The NRA tried to get the Injury Prevention Network shut down, exerting its
many appendages of political force all through 1994. But the center survived. The
old gun lobby’s powers were at an ebb, then — California had just passed their
gun ban, and both the federal assault weapons ban and the Brady Bill were
making progress under Clinton. The NRA’s savior, Charlton Heston, had yet to
arrive. It looked like the CDC had them beat.

Then, in 1995, the Injury Prevention Network — suddenly, and for no coherent
reason — gave the NRA exactly what it was looking for. The spring issue of the
IPN Newsletter — with the cover story “Women, Guns and Domestic Violence”
illustrated by a handgun blasting away pieces of a "female" symbol — included an
article entitled “What Advocates Can Do.” The advice it gave (intended for
research professionals and public health sta ) was blatantly political: “Put gun
control on the agenda of your civic or professional organization. Release a
statement to the media or explain in your organization’s newsletter why gun
control is a woman’s (or nurses’ or pediatricians’...) issue.”

The pamphlet further encouraged readers to “make your support for federal,
state, and local gun laws known to your representative,” which might entail
“opposing repeal of the assault weapons ban; maintaining support for the Brady
Law; restricting ammunition availability by caliber and quantity; increasing
enforcement of federal rearm laws; maintaining restrictions on issuance of
concealed weapons permits…” and the pamphlet just kept going. It told the reader
how to organize a picket line outside of a gun factory, and advocated campaign
nance reform that would “weaken the gun lobby’s political clout.” It was
everything the NRA had claimed the CDC secretly wanted to do — and right out
in the open.

***
In October 1995, eight NRA-aligned senators released a public letter, declaring
that the CDC’s Injury Prevention Network was wasteful, biased, and driven by
“preordained political goals and not from the desire for scienti c, balanced and
unbiased inquiry.” The senators publicly declared, “This CDC program can be

431
cut with no diminution of service in administering the public interest, and at a
savings to the taxpayer.”

Soon, a hearing with the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human
Services, and Education was scheduled, where a representative from “Doctors for
Responsible Gun Ownership” gave testimony bashing the CDC’s methods. The
former surgeon (and lifetime “Benefactor member” of the NRA) held up a copy
of the now-infamous newsletter, for all to see. “I would be just as vocal about this
if this were a pro-gun issue,” the doctor said. “Anti-gun, pro-gun, it is still wrong
to alter science to serve a biased agenda. Period.”

Behind closed doors, the CDC’s opponents in Congress were nalizing their
attack plan. They would indeed focus on the CDC’s funding, located in the 1996
budget appropriations: right in the middle of routine provisions for things like
education for refugees, and facilities maintenance, their amendment would add
the sentence:

...Provided further, That none of the funds made available for injury
prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention be used to advocate or promote gun control.

The congressman from Arkansas who sponsored the amendment in the House —
a lifetime member of the NRA, named Jay Dickey — rst sounded the alarm to
his colleagues on July 11, 1996:

...th an issue of federally funded political advocacy. We have here an

attempt by the [CDC] to bring about gun control advocacy all over the
United Stat . [...] Rather than calling violence a disease and guns a
germ, these people should be looking at the other root caus of crime:
Poverty, drug trade, gangs, and children growing up without parental
support, and the cruel trap of welfare dependency.

The “Dickey Amendment,” as it came to be know, was passed. And while the
language of the amendment only seemed to block the use of funds to “advocate or
promote gun control” — not the research of firearms injuri , like the New
England study — the CDC’s opponents also managed to earmark $2.6 million of
the agency’s budget (the exact gure that the NCIPC had spent on researching
rearms injuries the year before) and set it aside for other research. The
amendment might not have been a “ban” on studying guns, but in practice, that’s
exactly what it became. “Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause
was unclear,” the New England study's lead researcher would later write, “but no
federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency’s funding to

432
 nd out. Extramural support for rearm injury prevention research quickly dried
up.”

***
It wasn’t until 2006 that a member of Congress introduced legislation that would
repeal the Dickey Amendment. And that was why the nurse from New York was
at the podium then, expressing her shock and outrage at the price tag for injuries
to Americans, absent any research on guns. She wanted the amendment gone.

But the 2006 repeal ultimately failed, and the Dickey Amendment stayed right
where it was. The Committee only added some guidance when it came to
researching guns — that they “understand that CDC’s responsibility in this area is
primarily data collection and the dissemination of that information, and expect
that research in this area to be objective and grants to be awarded through an
impartial, scienti c peer review process.” But they still didn’t restore any of the
funding for such research that had been cut back when the Dickey Amendment
rst passed. And so nothing was going to change.

The nurse from New Jersey nished her remarks, and went back to her seat. She
already knew the CDC wasn’t going to take any risks; it was as if the agency itself
had been traumatized from its reckoning with the NRA, and had adopted its own
avoidant behavior as a result. The result was a unique set of circumstances for
such a heavily-armed society: if indeed guns made school shootings, or mass
shootings, more likely to happen, Americans would be the rst to experience the
phenomenon — and the last to understand it.

433
 44. The Fear That
Paralyzes

Early 2007
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy purchased a copy of the 2006 edition of The OASIS Guide to Asperger
Syndrome: Advice, Support, Insight, and Inspiration. Studying the book closely,
just as she had with the guides on horticulture when she was building her garden,
she found it was full of advice that was relevant to her situation. It explained how
children with Asperger’s were at increased risk for both Obsessive-Compulsive
Disorder and anxiety, just like her son displayed. And there were sections on day-
to-day parenting stress, and how to prepare one’s child for a psychiatric
evaluation. “Parenting a child with a disability of en demands being more
protective and more defensive than we might be of a typical child,” read one
section, among the several that Nancy bookmarked. “By the time you’ve received
a diagnosis or come into contact with professionals, you may have had a lot of
practice in feeling that it’s [just] you and your child versus the world.”

Nancy also highlighted a section about IEP teams, under the heading “WHEN
PROBLEMS ARISE.” She placed another bookmark on the section
“MEDICATION.”

Newtown High School

On days when there was a concert or a sports game going on at the high school,
the tech club’s two-dozen-or-so students each had a job to do for Newtown
Charter Cable Channel 17 — one related to either a computer, or a camera, or a
microphone. These feeds would all be pumping into the control room, where the
data is combined into one signal, and then bounced to Charter Communications
through a modulator, and nally transmitted to every TV in Newtown.

434
Production of live TV is a process that invites chaos, and the tech club’s e forts
had to be carefully coordinated to make it all work.

Af er most school days, though, the control room was quiet, and dark. There was
nothing to broadcast, and so anyone in Newtown tuning in to Channel 17 would
nd only a loop of local announcements, bumpered with a static “NTV” logo.
And those were the times that Mr. Novia would nd Adam there, alone in the
chamber. “The only illumination of the control room is the monitors, and
intentionally it’s dark in that room,” Novia would later explain. “He’d like that
type of environment. He’d like that quiet.”

Adam had started attending more of the Tech Club meetings as his freshman year
progressed. Novia had prepped his social environment in advance, making sure
the other club members knew about him: how sensitive he was, that he didn’t
really have any friends, and how they were just trying to get him used to being
around people again. The other members knew to leave Adam alone if he started
to withdraw; if he was in the building at all, that was progress. The control room
was not total isolation, but more like a bu fer, a security bubble that allowed the
anxious teen some degree of calm — exposing him to normalcy at a comfortable
distance. He couldn’t get that in his bedroom. “[Adam] likes isolation. He likes to
be alone,” Richard would continue, speaking to Frontline. “But at the same time,
not. He likes to be near, but not too close.”

Adam’s Latin teacher also noticed him becoming more social, as the school year
progressed. Slowly, gradually, Adam began looking her in the eye when she spoke
to him, and she could even swear that the thin, nervous boy was growing to trust
her. “He started talking — that was a big thing”; one day, he even told a joke.
Everyone knew he was book-smart, but Adam was so quiet, adults were of en
surprised to learn that he could also be clever.

O ce of Kathleen Koenig, APRN — Yale Child Study Center

Nurse Koenig was only a few years older than Nancy. She was psychiatric nurse
who had been working with autistic children since she was a teenager herself, in
Massachusetts, and she specialized in assessing children and adolescents with
autism and pervasive developmental disorders. As a research scientist, she had
helped conduct double-blind placebo-controlled trials to test the e fectiveness of
medications in treating autism; at Yale, she helped develop a “Social Development
Program for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Yale was held in great
professional esteem for their work in these elds, and Nurse Koenig was a
signi cant reason why.

435
Having read her colleague Dr. King’s report, Koenig had some idea of what to
expect when, a few weeks later, Nancy followed up on King’s referral, and drove
Adam back to New Haven for his rst meeting with her.

In that rst session, one of Koenig's objectives would have been to nd out if she
arrived at the same tentative diagnosis as King — ultimately she did not, at least
not quite. King had told her that Adam “su fered from a profound Autism
Spectrum Disorder,” to which his OCD was secondary. But upon meeting the
patient herself, Koenig suspected that Adam was “primarily debilitated by anxiety
and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” — in fact, she was skeptical of the notion
that Adam had any Autism Spectrum Disorder at all. (Note: At the time,
Asperger's was a sub-diagnosis on the Autism spectrum; in 2013, the DSM V
renamed both it and Pervasive Development Disorder, and merged them into the
broader diagnosis of Autism, which was then sub-categorized by levels of need for
services, instead.)

Writing her own initial evaluation, Koenig attached a list of the most prominent
patterns in her patient's behavior, observing that “Adam’s OCD severely limits his
ability to lead a normal, well-adjusted life,” and that he “participates in multiple
daily rituals — behaviors which he feels compelled to complete,” including:

Inability to touch doorknobs

Repeated hand-washing/showering

Obsessive cloth changing

Distinct avoidance of social interaction

Sensitivity to light

Koenig described Adam’s condition as “emotionally paralyzed.” That seemed to

t — Adam himself even acknowledged her insight: a police summary of the Yale
les reports that Koenig’s patient that day had “agreed, in part, with the clinician
that he was emotionally paralyzed by anxiety, but he did not feel that he su fered
because of it, nor was he willing to take medication.” (In another document from
sometime during the family’s interactions with Yale, Adam wrote, “I am unable to
distinguish between my problems because I have too many.”)

The meeting with Nurse Koenig also marked a new development in Adam’s
interactions with doctors: he had questions of his own. Over the course of their
conversations, Adam asked Nurse Koenig several “speci c questions” about

436
OCD; then — apparently unprompted — he asked about schizophrenia, too. This
condition had never been suggested by any mental health professional that had
assessed Adam, and the exact questions Adam asked about schizophrenia are not
known. Koenig simply records that she got “the sense that [he] was seeking
information, but was unwilling to share if he was experiencing any of the
symptoms of the disorders.” In response, she “discussed with him the clinical
components of these disorders, [as well as] those of psychotic depression.”

Time ran out, and Adam’s session with Nurse Koenig ended. This time, Adam
was not pouring sweat, or looking like he had been “tortured,” like with Dr. King.
His parents scheduled another visit, for just af er the New Year; and when that
session came, it seemed to go well enough, too.

Nurse Koenig sent an email to Nancy af er the January 2007 visit, apparently
asking for feedback, and checking on Adam’s “comfort level” so far. In response,
Nancy expressed some satisfaction with his progress — and shared a glimpse at
just how deeply she feared her son’s anxieties may run:

It was actually the best meeting Adam has had

with anyone. He was calm and conversational on
the way home, which is very unusual... As far as
his comfort level... it isn’t just that he is
painfully uncomfortable — he actually doesn’t
feel safe. He often tells me that he is
frightened, even in our own home and obviously
more so in public. I think it is the fear that
paralyzes him.

His father will be bringing him over on Thursday

so that I can get a couple of hours off, but
please let me know if you need any input or if
anything needs to be followed up at home.

My Place Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut

As Dr. King had observed, Adam’s dependency on his mother meant that as he
became more reclusive, increasingly, Nancy felt isolated too. Adam’s visits with his
father (Peter coming to see Adam, since Adam didn’t want to go to Stamford to
see him) were one of the few opportunities Nancy had to get out of the house.
And more and more, when these opportunities for escape arose, she could be
found at My Place.

By now, Nancy had long known that the owners of My Place were the Tambascio
family — a mother and her two sons. They loved when Nancy came in; the

437
regulars all knew her as a bon-vivant, who was well-o f to the point where she
could be generous whenever any of them were in trouble with money. And she
still looked great, at 46 — her honey waves had turned ash blonde, and she took
care of her skin. And of course, Nancy always dressed well.

But for all her blessings, the My Place crew didn’t envy her; while she usually kept
her home-life private — “We didn’t talk about family, she came in to have a great
time” — it was no secret around the bar that the years of trying to care for her
youngest son had taken their toll on her. They knew she had been switching him
around di ferent schools, and Nancy said she had home-schooled him for a time;
she had even brought Adam in once or twice, around the time he was starting
high school, and the regulars could immediately tell there was something
“di ferent” about him. He was certainly nothing like his brother. Adam would
just stand there in the restaurant, looking at the oor, waiting for his mom, never
saying a word. “He was very quiet and reserved,” Mark Tambascio would tell the
Associated Press. “Tough to communicate with. It wasn’t like he couldn’t speak,
[and] he didn’t have a speech impediment. He was just a highly intelligent kid.”

Mark’s mother Louise would add, “He didn’t want to talk. You couldn’t have a
conversation with him.”

Every once in awhile, Nancy would vent at the bar about her situation with
Adam’s IEP team. “She’d say, ‘I have to bring him here; I can’t go there because of
that; I can’t do this because of that; I have to be with Adam.’ Stu f like that. She
couldn’t do a lot of things because she had to care for him,” Mark says.

They could tell the strain was wearing on her. “I always said that I wouldn’t want
to be in her shoes,” Mark’s brother John would tell reporters. “But I thought,
‘Wow. She holds it well.’”

One of the regulars remembers a story Nancy told him: that at some point af er
she got her son to go back to school in the 9th grade, Adam had stayed home sick
for a day. Sealed back up in his bedroom at 36 Yogananda, he refused to let his
mother enter — but his anxiety was so intense that he still wanted her to be there
for him. So, Adam would periodically ask through the closed bedroom door: “Are
you there? Are you still there?”

Nancy, camped outside her son’s bedroom all day, called back to him: “I’m here...
I’m here.”

O ce of Kathleen Koenig, APRN — Yale Child Study Center

Nurse Koenig’s recommendations to Nancy had been simple: continue bringing
her son to their sessions at Yale — and medicate him.

438
Like Dr. King, Koenig was con dent that any e fective treatment plan for Adam
would have to include an SSRI. And she knew that Adam’s only previous
psychiatrist, Dr. Fox, had said he already “urged anti-anxiety medication,” which
Adam had atly refused to take. But this wasn’t, legally, Adam’s decision — he
was a minor, and his parents got to make those calls for him.

***
At some point near the end of January 2007, Nancy told NP Koenig something
that she had kept to herself until then: that Dr. Fox was still Adam’s primary
psychiatrist, and that he had been meeting Adam regularly, during the entire
three-month period Koenig had been in contact with her patient.

Stunned, Koenig contacted her colleague Dr. King, who shared the same puzzled
response; in staying silent about Dr. Fox, the family was withholding information
that would be very important in interpreting Adam’s reaction to the therapy.
What w going on?

Koenig immediately called Nancy back, and asked that she put her in touch with
Dr. Fox, so that they could coordinate their e forts. On February 1, 2007, Nancy in
turn wrote to Dr. Fox, giving him notice of the situation:

Subject: Adam

Dear Dr. Fox:

Kathy Koenig will be contacting you at some point

to discuss Adam. She is a clinician at Yale and
has background in Asperger in teens. Adam’s
father felt it was important to get Adam into
that group and possibly (and eventually) get Adam
into a teen support group over there. Whatever
her suggestions are, I would like your thoughts
on. You have spent the most time with Adam, and
have the best understanding of his situation. The
Yale group and Adam’s father are concerned about
Adam’s socialization and that is something I
hadn’t really focused on. I have been more
concerned with keeping him as comfortable as
possible and just getting through each day.
Although there will be quite a few people
involved in this process (Yale, Dr. Ridley,
Sherry [Newtown's Special Education
coordinator]), I really hope that you can take
the lead role. Once everyone has had some Input,

439
 I was wondering if I could have an appointment
with you to discuss what makes sense for Adam’s
IEP.

Going forward, it was to be a team e fort. Once Yale’s nal evaluation was done,
they could expect their recommendations to be considered for Adam’s IEP; they
might even be able to determine his Primary Disability, and nally do away with
the placeholders and second-guessing. If it was going to help Adam, everyone
involved was determined to make it work.

***
Having opened the lines of communication between Yale and Dr. Fox, Nancy
then did the same with Yale and Newtown; she signed a release that permitted
“any and all mental health and educational information” about her son to be
shared between the school district and the Child Study Center, and she told NP
Koenig that Newtown wanted her to “provide her input to the school regarding
Adam’s educational program.”

According to a treatment note in the records, Koenig then “agreed to call the
school to describe her understanding of Adam’s presentation.” The record further
shows that such a call did indeed take place — but there is no information
regarding what was discussed, nor what recommendations were made by either
party. Most signi cantly, there is no copy of Yale’s draf evaluation in the school
district’s les; investigators would nd the fax number to Newtown High School
scribbled on a page in Yale’s documents, but there, the paper trail ends. Wherever
the breakdown occurred, Yale’s input never made it to Newtown.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Adam wrote a short letter to his father, in the form of a list of video games he
wanted. The games were apparently to be purchased for Christmas; Adam still
didn’t like to celebrate the holidays, but since the rest of his family did, there was
little reason to leave the gif budget untouched.

Soon, there was an Xbox 360 console in the home, the newest generation of
gaming hardware. The Lanzas picked up the recently released Call of Duty 3 for it,
and Adam was once again deploying as a soldier in World War II, this time making
a push into Nazi-occupied France, and with more realistic graphics than ever
before.

***
On February 4, 2007, Adam went to wikipedia.com, and created an account —
indicating his intention to participate in the popular “encyclopedia that anyone

440
can edit.” He chose a familiar username: Blarvink.

It appears that he did not immediately do anything with the account. He would
just have it ready to go, whenever he wanted to make an edit.

February 2007
Stamford, Connecticut
One weekend, Adam spent an af ernoon with his father at an arcade, and later a
mall. Peter could see a change in his son’s behavior, in that he was at least “able to
visit a number of stores.” Tolerating crowds, even for a little while, was huge. Peter
wrote to Koenig about this development, saying that his son “has not wanted to
do anything like that for over a year.... it appears the time that you are spending
with Adam may be paying o f.” He would be sure to schedule another session
soon.

Still, there were aspects of Adam’s care that Peter found daunting; Dr. King had
urged him to get his son into “a therapeutic day school setting,” which was
actually a echo of what the Danbury ER doctors told Nancy two years before
(though it’s possible that neither Peter nor Dr. King knew that part). Now,
Koenig was advising the same thing: rather than periodic sessions, where it was
simply explained to Adam what he should be doing, ideally, his therapy would be
based around responding to his ritualistic behavior as it was happening. What he
needed was a fundamental change in his environment. Not more time in his cave
at 36 Yogananda.

Unfortunately, actually finding an appropriate therapeutic school was less of a

sure thing; one program that Peter looked at was “for children with non-verbal
learning disabilities and autism spectrum disorders” — but that school told him
that Adam’s testing indicated his need for “a more therapeutic environment” than
they o fered, and so they recommended that the Lanzas “work with an
educational consultant that specialized in helping families meet the needs of
children with nonverbal learning di ferences.” So, Peter tried another school, one
that was focused on serving “bright” children in a non-traditional setting; but
they too demurred, explaining they were “not a special education school.” (They
apparently added, signi cantly, that they were also not “a school for children with
emotional disturbance” — though how that notion was even brought up is
unclear.)

Peter repeatedly emailed Newtown school o cials, to try to get them to

communicate with Yale, as well as Dr. Fox's o ce. In one message to the high
school, he wrote that it would be “key” for his son to develop “necessary coping

441
skills,” and that mental health care providers would be “crucial in such a plan” if
Adam was to ful ll the goals put forth on his IEP.

In response, the school assured him that information from all parties would be
incorporated into the new plan.

Peter sent several emails to NHS personnel between January and March, hoping
to coordinate a meeting to discuss the “mental health services” aspect of Adam’s
plan. But they never got around to scheduling it. And Peter was never able to nd
a therapeutic school for his son. He “express[ed] frustration with the di cult
process,” according to investigators who reviewed his emails; Nancy had been cc’d
on most of them.

***
Nurse Koenig was beginning to build a rapport with Adam. While he could not
quite have been said to enjoy their discussions, he seemed to at least tolerate them,
and in some instances, was observed — by both parents — to have been
bene ting from the time he spent with her.

Then, suddenly, one day in mid-February of that year, everything went wrong. It
happened during a one-on-one session, when Koenig brought up to Adam the
one subject that Nancy had declared o f-limits: medication. Af er that session,
Adam angrily told his father that he did not want to go to the Yale center
anymore, and that he "did not believe the process would help him."

Peter wrote to Koenig to report this abrupt shif in feedback, and informed the
APRN that Adam wanted to have him come along if there was ever going to be
another session.

In her reply, Koenig had a reality check for Peter — she emphasized that not only
was his son’s resistance actually a sign that the treatment w working, but that if
Adam didn’t get help, his anxiety was not just going to stay the same; it was going
to get worse:

The process of asking Adam to talk with me

directly about what is going on is critical. I
appreciate that Adam’s view is that he wouldn’t
say anything differently if his father were in
the room, but I think he’s wrong. His judgment
about how social/family dynamics work in a
therapy situation is no more on target than his
views regarding doorknobs and hand-washing... He
wants to control how the treatment goes because

442
 his anxiety is nearly unbearable if he can’t feel
he knows what’s going to happen. I understand
that. At the same time, he can’t control the
treatment because his thinking is distorted and
irrational. I can’t agree to follow his lead!

In fact, when I talk with him alone he has to

respond, and last time I pushed him a bit. I am
not surprised that he was angry, that’s OK... I
told Adam he has a biological disorder that can
be helped with medication. I told him what the
medicines are and why they can work.

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.

I’m fine to see him this week at 11. I am OK to

talk with him and you at the beginning, but the
session to address his issues has to be just him
and me. I’d do it differently if I thought it
would help, but I’m convinced it won’t. Let me
know your reactions.

Peter wrote back. He agreed that his son’s opinion on medication was “no more
appropriate" than his judgment on therapy itself. He told Koenig that he and
Nancy would simply have to sit down with Adam and explain that it was not his
choice; as his parents, they “were responsible for his care and well-being and that
in that capacity, [they were] relying on the advice of a team of professionals.” In
keeping with those recommendations, Peter said that he would explain to Adam,
very plainly, that he and Nancy were “insisting” he take the SSRI.

This family conversation, or one like it, apparently did take place shortly
thereaf er. Adam submitted to the plan, agreeing to take the medication. Nancy
picked up a prescription for Celexa, and told Koenig that Adam would begin the
regimen shortly.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Two days passed.

On the third day, Nurse Koenig’s phone rang. It was Nancy Lanza, and she was
very upset. She explained that she had given her son the Celexa, just as directed,
and that Adam had already experienced severe side e fects: most notably, that he

443
was suddenly “unable to raise his arm.” She said that Adam “was attributing this
symptom to the medication.”

Koenig couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She tried to explain to Nancy that
unable to raise arm was not a side e fect that could conceivably have come from
taking an SSRI, and she urged Nancy not to abandon the plan. Nancy’s response,
she noted, was “non-compliant.”

Later, Nancy wrote an email to the Child Study Center that elaborated on the
“immediate and diverse” side e fects Adam had been exhibiting, including
“decreased appetitive [sic] and nausea... dizziness… disorientation, disjointed
speech, and sweating.” She recalled of her son on the third day, “He couldn’t
think. He sat in his room, doing nothing.”

Koenig replied again: some side e fects, like those described, were not unexpected,
and could be managed over time by tweaking the dosage. She again urged Nancy
to continue having Adam take the Celexa, pointing out that his obsessive-
compulsive disorder had apparently improved while on the medication.

Nancy red back, cc’ing Peter: Adam’s side e fects were “severe,” and he had been
“practically vegetative” in his room toward the end — how could that be
considered an improvement? She revealed that she had actually already spoken
with Dr. Fox about the side e fects, and, “We decided to discontinue the meds.”
She added that this decision was made partly due to her fears about the side e fects
Adam was experiencing — and partly to determine if those side e fects were
“psychological.”

Finally, Nancy wrote an email to Peter. She related more details about Adam’s side
e fects from the Celexa, claiming that he “had lost weight” (apparently over the
course of three days) and was so impaired from the meds that he “couldn’t even
pour his own cereal.”

She then outlined the current state of a fairs, as far as the treatment plan: Koenig
was “wasting her time” with Adam, who now “loathed” her. Nancy told Peter she
felt that the best course of action would be for Dr. Fox to assume the primary role
in treating their son. The family would thus be increasing the scheduling of visits
with him, while abandoning the meetings scheduled with Yale.

This time, Peter consented to Nancy’s wishes.

With how quickly these events unfolded, one curious fact seems to have gone
unnoticed: that despite the supposed severity of the reaction that Nancy reported
witnessing in her son, and her concern for his health, and her track record of over-

444
protectiveness whenever she felt he was in danger, there is no indication that she
ever contacted emergency services about these alleged side-e fects, nor did she take
her son to a hospital. She simply gave Adam what he wanted, and then the
problem seemed to go away.

***
In March, af er the Lanzas missed an already-scheduled session at Yale, Kathleen
Koenig wrote to Dr. Fox, and o cially threw in the towel. She said that everyone
involved had agreed that it would be better for the Lanzas to “work with one
provider,” and that the consensus was that Dr. Fox “would be the best person,”
because Adam already knew him, and trusted him.

Re ecting on their interactions, and the 14-year-old boy that she would never see
again, Koenig was still skeptical that Adam had an Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Instead, she was more sure than ever that Nancy’s son was primarily debilitated by
anxiety, and OCD. Both were common “co-morbid” disorders for Autistic and
Asperger’s children — but with Adam, Koenig theorized, they were the problem
itself. Not a symptom.

Yale’s psychological evaluation of Adam Lanza was never nished… but it had
reached its conclusion. His le was closed, its “DRAFT” label still in-place, and
the bundle of papers was led away somewhere in the Child Study Center’s
archives, never to be marked “FINAL.”

445
 45. Blacksburg

Morning of April 16, 2007

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
A “Nor’easter” storm has been pounding the Atlantic coast all weekend, gushing
rain with the strength of a hurricane. But now, on the third day, although the trees
that dot Virginia Tech’s sprawling 2,600 acre campus are still leaning in heavy
wind, it appears that the worst parts of the storm have passed north, leaving a
clear and chilly Monday morning in Blacksburg. Classes at the university are to
proceed as scheduled.

7:02am
West Ambler Johnston Dormitory
On the west side of campus, a female student is dropped o f by her boyfriend,
outside of her residence hall. He sees her go inside, and then drives o f in his
pickup truck, in a rush to make his own classes at nearby Radford University.

Inside the dormitory, the female student passes through the unsecured foyer area,
and swipes her pass-card to unlock the inner security door. She goes to her room
on the fourth oor.

Meanwhile, the list of card swipes logged on Virginia Tech’s servers is an imperfect
record, not quite catching everyone who gains access to the residence hall that
morning. At least one person has “tailgated” — they didn’t have a badge that
would access that building, but they followed behind a student who did. No one
saw who it was.

About ten minutes later, the residents on the fourth oor hear a series of loud
noises coming from room 4040. They debate what to do, for about ve minutes
— then tell another student, who decides to immediately call the campus police.
The person making the call says they thought someone might have fallen out of
their lof bed (as would happen in the dorms now and again).

446
The police tell them not to enter room 4040, and they dispatch an o cer to go
check it out.

7:17am
Harper Hall
At another residence hall, two buildings away, a male student swipes his pass card,
and goes to his room in Suite 2121. His roommates are not home. He logs onto his
computer, and deletes everything under his account from the University’s servers.
He removes the hard drive from his PC, and disposes of it, along with his cell
phone, neither of which are ever recovered. He changes clothes, dressing in black.

7:24am
West Ambler Johnston Dormitory
Back at the other dorms, police arrive at room 4040, and open the door. Inside,
they nd the female student, shot multiple times. Next to her is the dorm's
Resident Assistant, also shot; it is presumed that he heard the rst gunshots, and
came to investigate.

The responding o cer immediately calls for backup, and for homicide
investigators. The residence hall is locked down, and police are stationed inside
and out. They search every waste bin, looking for the gun, and interview every
resident on the 4th oor. But none of the students saw anyone leave room 4040
af er the noises were heard. So the police do not have any description of the
shooter; the only evidence lef behind are a number of 9mm shell casings, and a
few bloody footprints, leading away from the scene.

At 8:14am, the other student who lives in room 4040 arrives at her dorm to pick
up her books, and is surprised when she is met by police. She tells detectives that
her roommate spends the weekends with her boyfriend, who drops her o f in his
truck every Monday morning. They ask her if the boyfriend is armed; she says yes
— she knows he owns several ri es, for hunting and target practice.

The police declare the victim’s boyfriend a “person of interest,” and begin
searching the campus, but he is not found, and neither is his truck; an o cer goes
to the boyfriend’s listed address, and he is not there.

Based on the scant information they have, investigators reach the preliminary
conclusion that the shooting is likely to have been the result of a “domestic
dispute.” The chief of campus police tells his sta f that their person of interest has
probably escaped the campus, and soon, every unit in the county receives a BOLO

447
— “be on the lookout” — for the boyfriend’s vehicle. Meanwhile, campus police
allow the residents of West Ambler Johnston to leave for their 9:00am classes.

In response to the unresolved incident, the university’s Government A fairs

Director orders the president’s o ce to be locked. But the rest of the campus
continues operating as normal, while Virginia Tech’s Policy Group convenes, to
plan how they are going to notify students of the shooting.

***
At 8:45am, a member of the college’s Policy Group sends an email to a colleague at
another school, notifying them of the shooting. He says there is a “gunman on the
loose,” and adds “this is not releasable yet.”

He sends an update at 8:49am, and reminds the recipient “just try to make sure it
doesn’t get out.”

At 9:00am, classes begin.

9:01am
Main St. Post O ce — Blacksburg, Virginia
A professor from Virginia Tech goes o f-campus to pick up his mail. While at the
post o ce, he recognizes one of the other customers in line: a 23-year old male
Asian student, who lives in Harper Hall. He thinks to himself that the young
man, who was mailing a small package, looks “frightened” for some reason.

9:15am
Norris Hall
Fourteen minutes later, the student from the post o ce is seen by witnesses
outside of an engineering building, Norris Hall. This is not unusual, because he
has attended classes in the hall before, and his Deviant Behavior psychology course
meets on the second oor... except, that class is not scheduled on Mondays. The
witnesses observe that the young man is wearing a black shirt, and a khaki vest
over it, with large pockets. He has a black baseball cap on his head, turned
backward.

A few minutes later, another group of students go to enter Norris Hall — and
nd that the front entrance has been chained shut from the inside. They go to the
side entrances, and nd that these doors, too, have been chained shut.

Inside Norris hall, a faculty member nds a note taped to one of the doors. In
crooked handwriting, it reads, “Bomb will go o f if you open door.”

448
This is not the rst bomb-threat note found at Virginia Tech that year — students
tend to get desperate around nals time. She gives the note to a janitor, to bring to
the Dean’s o ce.

9:24am
Radford University
The boyfriend of the victim from the dorm is in class, one town away, when he
gets a text from a friend, asking him about the shooting at his girlfriend’s dorm.
He calls her — and when she does not answer, he immediately gets in his truck,
and speeds back toward Virginia Tech.

Two Montgomery County Sheri ’s Deputies, having received the alert about the
person of interest, suddenly spot the truck as it passes by on the highway. They hit
their siren, and the driver pulls to the shoulder. With guns drawn, they pull him
out of the truck and force him to the ground. They handcu f the young man, and
swab his palms to test for gunshot residue — but already, they notice that the
tread pattern from his boots does not match the description of the bloody
footprints leading from the dorm room. Also, he does not have any blood on his
clothes. They radio these details back to the campus police at Virginia Tech, who
begin to realize that their theory — that the shooting was a simple domestic
disturbance — may have been mistaken.

9:40am
Norris Hall
Students on the second oor see the young man in the black baseball cap, pacing
back and forth in the hall. At one point, he stops and pokes his head through the
open doorway of their classroom, looks around, and then moves on. They gure
he’s lost... though it seems strange, that a student would have trouble nding his
classroom so late in the term.

A professor in Room 206 is teaching an Advanced Hydrology course, to graduate

students, when suddenly the young man in black walks in. He is not registered for
that class. He does not say anything. He just draws two semiautomatic handguns
— a 9mm Glock 19 and a .22 Walther P22 — and shoots everyone in the class that
he can.

The shooter goes across the hall to the German class in Room 207, and shoots
everyone he nds there, too. He has extra magazines in his vest pockets, and is very
calm as he walks up and down the aisles, reloading as necessary, not saying a word,
just pulling the triggers over and over. It only takes about a minute and a half.

449
Af er he leaves, a few injured students crawl over to the door, and try to hold it
shut. None of the doors have locks.

Down the hall in Room 205, a graduate student is lling in for her professor,
giving a lecture on Issues in Scienti c Computing. Annoyed at what she thinks is
construction racket, or a loud chemistry experiment, she looks out her classroom
door — just in time to see a young man in black, coming her way, carrying two
handguns.

uickly, she shuts the door. One of her students exclaims, “We should block the
door!” and so they move a long, heavy table in front of the entrance. Seconds
later, the gunman is on the other side, trying to push the door open, but he can’t
budge it. Students lying prone on the classroom oor hear shots, and see bullet
holes pierce through the door over their heads. But the gunman moves on.

At the other end of the hall, in Room 211, a French professor tells a student to call
9-1-1. The class pushes a desk in front of the doorway — but the gunman is able to
nudge the door open this time, and gets inside. He shoots everyone he sees,
including the person calling 9-1-1, who drops their cell phone; when the shooter
leaves, an injured student crawls over to the phone, picks it up, and relays more
details to the police. She begs them to hurry.

The gunman goes back to Room 207, where the injured students are holding the
door shut. He beats on the door, gets it open one inch, and tries to re his gun
around it, but gives up again. He goes back to Room 211, where the injured
student is still on the line with 9-1-1, lying with her hair covering the phone. The
operators hear gun re as the shooter again paces up and down the aisles —
shooting everyone on the ground, including her. She does not move or make a
sound. When the gunman leaves again, she resumes talking to 9-1-1.

In the hallway, the janitor has just delivered the bomb-threat note to the dean, and
is coming up the stairs, when he sees the gunman, reloading. He turns and runs
back down the stairs.

In Room 204, an engineering professor named Liviu Lebrescu had been teaching
a Solid Mechanics class. He is a Holocaust survivor, and grew up in a Jewish
ghetto in Romania. He has been teaching at Virginia Tech for over twenty years
now, but he would never forget the evil he encountered earlier in life — and so, he
recognizes the force that he now hears approaching the doorstep of his classroom.

Lebrescu closes the door, leans his own body weight against it to keep it shut, and
tells his students to jump out the windows; falling from the second oor onto the
grassy hill behind Norris Hall, some of them sustain broken bones — but they

450
survive. Meanwhile, the shooter res through the door, and Liviu Lebrescu falls.
The gunman nally enters room 204, and shoots the handful of students that he
nds still climbing through the windows — but most of his targets are gone. He
quickly goes back to Room 206, where he started the attack, and the steady pop of
gun re resumes again.

***
At 9:45am — three minutes af er the rst 9-1-1 call — the police arrive at Norris
Hall. Hearing rapid shots, they pause to con rm that they are not under re, and
they then try to storm the building — but discover the doors have been chained
from the inside. They scramble to nd an entrance they can open, and locate the
door to the basement machine shop. It is always locked, but it has a push-bar, and
can’t be chained. An o cer with a shotgun blasts through the lock, and the police
nally rush into Norris Hall.

At the same time, everyone on campus receives an emergency alert in their email:
“A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away
from all windows.” The same message is broadcast over four loudspeakers, its
echo mingling with the sound of the gun blasts still coming from Norris Hall.

At 9:51, just as police reach the second oor, they hear a nal gunshot emanating
from Room 211, followed by silence. They nd the gunman there, dead of his own
hand. The Virginia Tech shooting is over.

***
Toxicology tests on the shooter’s body would nd nothing of note, while the
eventual autopsy records no abnormality more signi cant than his “weak
musculature.” But the coroner did nd something odd, when he inspected the
shooter’s right forearm — a mysterious message he had written on himself in black
marker: “Ax Ishmael.”

The attack itself had lasted only about ten minutes. The authorities found 17
empty ammo magazines littering Norris Hall, where they determined the gunman
had red at least 174 times. Some of the empty magazines were 10-round, and
some were 15; the gunman still had two 15-round magazines lef when he took his
life. Authorities suspected he ended it when he heard the shotgun blast
downstairs, and realized that opposing forces had arrived. He wasn’t about to
stand up to anyone that could shoot back.

Adhering to active-shooter protocol, the police had made reaching the gunman
their rst priority — and immediately upon him being eliminated, their rescue
operations began. Every resource was diverted to help deal with the massive

451
number of casualties at Norris Hall. They only had to do without airlif s — all
helicopters were grounded, as the still-strong winds of the Nor’easter raged
overhead.

452
 46. Caves

April 16, 2007

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
It was the worst storm Sandy Hook had seen since 1999. The Nor’easter cyclone
surged into Newtown and gushed eight inches of rain, causing the rst selectman
to declare a ood emergency. Roads were closed, automated emergency calls went
out, and the Sandy Hook Firehouse down on Riverside Road was used as an
improvised command post, where the re chief spent all morning dispatching
trucks to pump out ooded basements, and shore up levees where the sandbags
had washed away. Fortunately, the town never lost power.

***
High on a hill at 36 Yogananda, “Blarvink” was on Wikipedia. He had just made
his rst edit; Adam was reading the page for the Nickelodeon TV show Blue’s
Clu , and to his dismay, right in the middle of the article, some anonymous user
had added the words “blues clues is a brain washer for little children.”

He deleted the entry, and lef a note for the other wikipedians: “there was blatant
vandalism in the Origin section that I have removed.”

As the morning went on, with the storm raging outside of his bedroom window,
he edited more articles; he had just make a minor tweak to the article for “Zygote”
when, suddenly, news of the Virginia Tech shooting broke.

***
The death toll screamed from every headline: in ten minutes, the Virginia Tech
shooter had claimed more victims than the entire Columbine attack. Not only was
it the worst school shooting ever, but the gunman at Norris Hall had killed even
more than the man in the sparkling blue truck who crashed through the window
of Luby’s cafeteria, f een years before. Virginia Tech had now become the site of
the deadliest mass shooting in United States history, period.

453
Diplomatic Reception Room — The White House
At 4:01pm that af ernoon, President Bush appeared on television, and delivered a
brief, solemn statement. “Schools should be places of safety and sanctuary and
learning,” he said. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every
American classroom and every American community. Today, our nation grieves
with those who have lost loved ones at Virginia Tech.” The administration
immediately began preparations for the president to visit the campus, just a short
ight from the nation’s capitol.

April 17, 2007

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The following morning, at a press conference, a police o cer spoke the shooter’s
name on television for the rst time. Few who knew the young man were
surprised to hear it. Indeed, several of the shooter’s former classmates had already
made the assumption: that the kid they knew from the way he signed his name at
roll, with only a question mark — the boy who never talked, yet was always angry
— had nally done what everyone was afraid he was going to do.

They started to come forward and share their stories of interacting with the crazed
gunman. “He would sit by himself whenever possible, and didn’t like talking to
anyone,” said a senior who had been in a play-writing class with him. “I don’t
think I’ve ever actually heard his voice before. He was just so quiet and kept to
himself.” But that class was also participation-based, and so everyone’s writings
were disseminated, in advance of being read aloud. When the silent young man's
classmates read what he had been writing, then they really grew concerned:

Before [he] got to class that day, we students were talking to each other
with serio worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I w
even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in
with a gun, I w that freaked out about him. When the students gave
reviews of h play in class, we were very careful with our words in case
he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing
comments.

One of the plays the shooter submitted illustrates why: it tells the story of a young
college student, “Bud,” who one morning wakes up early, dresses in black, and
goes to school, where he watches as “students strut inside smiling, laughing,
embracing each other….A few eyes glance at Bud but without the glint of
recognition. I hate this! I hate all these frauds! I hate my life….This is it….This is
when you damn people die with me...” Bud then goes to an “arbitrary classroom,”
where a teacher is teaching and, “Everyone is smiling and laughing as if they’re in

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heaven-on-earth, something magical and enchanting about all the people’s
intrinsic nature that Bud will never experience.”

Suddenly Bud runs away, telling himself “I can’t do this... I have no moral right...”
and as the story progresses, he meets a “gothic girl,” to whom he con des, “I was
going to kill every god damn person in this damn school, swear to god I was, but
I… couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Damn it I hate mysel !” The girl drives him to her
home, and they fetch her M16 ri e. The story concludes with the line “You and
me. We can ght to claim our deserving throne.”

“It was like something out of a nightmare,” the shooter’s classmate said. And now,
in the af ermath of the tragedy, he felt the same helplessness that he did then: “As
far as notifying authorities, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any system set up that
lets people say ‘Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this
guy!’ If there were, I de nitely would have tried to get the kid some help.”

Another student in the class had told a friend, simply, that their classmate was
“the kind of guy who might go on a rampage killing.”

Adding to this chorus were several faculty members from the college’s English
Department, where the shooter had been a topic of concern for years. The most
pointed con ict occurred when he had taken an advanced poetry-writing course
taught by the Prof. Nikki Giovanni, a prominent feminist writer. For the rst six
weeks of class — every day, as the professor recalls — “We would have this ritual”:
the shooter would sit down wearing re ective wrap-around sunglasses, his hat
pulled down low, so that he was practically wearing a mask. Professor Giovanni
would have to pause her lecture, and come over and tell him to uncover his face,
and she’d have to stand there next to him until he complied. She felt like he was
“trying to bully her.” She was made even more sure of that when the young man
started coming to class with a scarf wrapped completely around his head, like a
desert Bedouin. A childish escalation.

When it was his turn to stand and read his poetry, he would “read from his desk in
a voice that could not be heard.” And when he read his prose assignments,
sometimes it was simply a description of how much he wanted everyone else in
class to die.

Prof. Giovanni went to the administration, and said she did not want the young
man in her classes anymore. She wasn’t asking: if they didn’t get him away from
her and her students, she was ready to resign. “There was something mean about
this boy,” she would tell TIME magazine, and she went on to explain that he was
more than just a troubled student. “Troubled kids get drunk and jump o f
buildings. It was the meanness that bothered me.”

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The shooter had targeted his classmates with his sinister behavior before, too: he
had been caught surreptitiously taking photos of students with his phone, and
there were rumors that he had been in trouble for stalking several girls on campus
(though not the girl from room 4040 — investigators would never nd any
indication that she and the shooter had even met before).

The shooter’s roommates had intervened when they saw one of their female
acquaintances had added the pro le named “ uestion Mark” to their list of
Myspace friends — they knew who that was. They messaged her right away:

MALE STUDENT: he is a creep i would block him

just doing u a favor

FEMALE STUDENT: ahahha yeah

MALE STUDENT: well i would block him he got in

trouble forr stalking recently so i just wanted
to warn you

FEMALE STUDENT: yeah..hes called me...written on

my door...all of that

kinda freaky

MALE STUDENT: written on your door? like your

room

FEMALE STUDENT: yeah

MALE STUDENT: the RA’s are trying to do something

about him

FEMALE STUDENT: yikes

at first i thought he was one of my friends

joking around...and i only accepted him cuz i saw
a few of my friends were friends with him

then he turned out all psycho

MALE STUDENT: i think he is is schophrenic or

however you spell it

456
Cassell Coliseum — Virginia Tech
President Bush arrived on the campus of Virginia Tech that morning, stopping on
the “quad” to sign the makeshif memorial the students had assembled: a six-foot
“VT” logo that had been cut from plywood and spray-painted red (the school’s
color), and lef leaning against a tree outside of Norris Hall, where a collection of
ower bouquets steadily grew as the mourners passed.

That evening, during a memorial convocation that packed the college’s sports
stadium, the President of the United States gave remarks that struggled to
encapsulate the magnitude of such a loss, beref of any discernible reason at all for
it having taken place:

...it w the worst day of violence on a college camp in American

history, and for many of you here today, it w the worst day of your
liv . It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those
whose liv were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were
simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they’re gone, and they
leave behind grieving famili and grieving classmat and a grieving
nation.

The president sat in the front row for the rest of the ceremony. The evening’s
closing remarks were delivered by Prof. Nikki Giovanni, who had detected the
shooter’s aura in her poetry class well before it darkened the corridors of Norris
Hall:

We do not understand th tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve

it, but neither do a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the
invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the
rogue army, neither do the baby elephant watching h community
being devastated for ivory, neither do the Mexican child looking for
fresh water, neither do the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of
the night in h crib, in the home h father built with h own hands,
being run over by a boulder because the land w destabilized. No one
deserv a tragedy.

A standing ovation spread around the stadium to receive her nal words for the
night: “We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than
we think and not quite what we want to be.” In what would become an iconic
moment from the tragedy’s af ermath, she improvised the ending: “We will
prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail... We are Virginia Tech.”

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36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy’s son opened the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! discussion forum, and
found that the game’s designer, Danny, had posted a public statement in response
to the Virginia Tech shooting:

Will this community endure in the years to

follow? Will we care enough about each other
tomorrow to reach out and connect with those who
‘don’t fit in,’ who ‘don’t seem normal,’ who
‘always keep to themselves?’ The answer is
ultimately up to all of us. I do not believe that
the cause of such atrocities are ultimately
unknowable; I believe there are complex but clear
conclusions to be drawn from the school shooting
epidemic. I hope in the years to follow we are
willing to be honest with ourselves in
confronting this challenge. In summary, no school
shooter has ever said, ‘I feel connected,
understood and valued for who I am.’ This much
should be instructive.

The level of attention being paid to this latest and worst iteration of the tragedy
was rising almost to the level of Columbine itself, and summoned many of the
same debates from 1999 back to the surface, still unresolved. The forum thrived.

April 18, 2007

30 Rockefeller Plaza
On the morning of the 18th — two days af er the assault on Norris Hall — a
package arrived in the mail room at NBC headquarters, in a at, cardboard
envelope. Like all incoming correspondence, it was scanned through a metal
detector, and once cleared, came to a clerk for delivery; they promptly noticed the
parcel’s return address, and postage date: 9:01am 04/16/2007 BLACKSBURG,
VA. The name of the sender read “A. Ishmael.”

The mail room clerk looked inside the large envelope, and then called security.
“We saw a number of pages inside the package, and a loose disk,” the manager at
the network would tell a reporter. “I knew it was going to be a problem as soon as
it landed in my hands.”

The shooter’s typed “manifesto” ran 23 single-spaced pages. And, judging by the
small portion disclosed by NBC that day, the shooter wished to convey a motive
that he himself did not seem to fully comprehend:

458
 Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being
counted one of you, only if you didn’t fuck the living shit out of me.

You could have been great. I could have been great. Ask yourself what
you did to me to have made me clean the slate.

Only if you could be the victim of your reprehensible and wicked crim ,
you Christian Naz , you would have brute-restrained your animal
urg to fuck me.

You could be at home right now eating your fucking caviar and your
fucking cognac, had you not ravenously raped my soul.

Af er rambling for several more paragraphs about unidenti ed “charlatans” who

supposedly “raped” him, the shooter compared himself to Moses, and pinned the
blame for his actions on “you” — everyone except himself, and the followers he
hoped to lead into oblivion:

By destroying we create. We create the feelings in you of what it like to

be the victim, what it like to be fucked and destroyed. Because of your
annihilations, we create and raise new breeds of Children who will show
you fuckers what you have done to . Like Easter, it will be a day of
rebirth.

The rage went on and on, but never quite reached coherence. It was a paranoid,
in amed view of humanity, re ected through the eyes of a person who had
actually spoken to very few human beings in their life; the familiar cry of the
“angry loner” — the guy who is just certain that everyone is having a good time,
except him — only with the volume cranked way up, well past the point of
distortion.

Then, nally, removing any need for speculation, the shooter proudly named his
inspirations: the Columbine shooters. Right and Lef were “martyrs,” and he
himself was the latest in their lineage, the most calculating and savage to have yet
enlisted for their “revolution of the dispossessed.”

As for the remaining 21 pages of the manifesto that NBC decided to hold back, the
network would only say that it contained “over the top profanity” and “incredibly
violent images.”

Along with the typed pages that fell from the A. Ishmael parcel, there was also a
DVD R disc, containing a gallery of 43 pictures taken by the shooter — mostly

459
“sel es.” The photo series begins innocently — just the shooter smiling for the
camera — but then it takes a turn, one familiar from the Dawson College
shooter’s online pro les the year before: the shooter pointing guns at the camera,
and striking dramatic poses with a knife, and then a hammer. One image in
particular seemed to show the gunman the way he perceived himself; when it hit
the news, it was quickly solidi ed as the iconic image of the mass shooter: a gure
wearing black, hat turned backward, ammo vest bulging, and standing with arms
outstretched, a murder weapon in each hand and a scowl on his face. Cruci ed,
and ready for revenge. Against no one, and everyone.

Also on the burned DVD were 27 uickTime video les — each a brief scene of
the shooter lming himself reciting his manifesto to the camera (though he
seemed unable to look directly into the lens). NBC would release two minutes,
out of the twenty- ve total; on that evening of Wednesday the 18th, the videos
aired on virtually every news station in the country, the shooter’s face lling the
TV screen, admonishing the human race in his droning, monotone voice, as he
fumbled to play the role of a warrior, to whoever would listen.

Bangor, Maine
The writings from the Virginia Tech shooter ricocheted around American
popular culture, and eventually, they landed on the desk of the author of Rage
(and former high-school English teacher) Stephen King. In his role as contributing
editor to the magazine Entertainment Weekly, he decided his column for the next
issue would seek to address a question, one that he noticed seemed to follow in
the wake of such tragedies: “Where, exactly, does one draw the line between
imagination and disturbing expression that should raise red ags?”

King rst re ected on his own childhood, admitting that his writings from middle
school (such as his early draf s of Rage) “would have raised red ags, and I’m
certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them,” had they
had been produced in “this sensitized day” of 2007. King pointed out that despite
these apparent “warning signs,” he had interacted just ne with his peers as a
student.

At any rate, it was his experiences as a teacher that more informed his response to
the gunman’s schoolwork; he shared a memory of one of his own students, a boy
who “raised red ags galore in my own mind” with the level of violence in his
stories, tales about “ aying women alive, dismemberment, and, the capper,
‘getting back at THEM.’” Mr. King couldn’t do anything about it at the time, but
he was quite certain: “If some kid is ever gonna blow, it’ll be this one.”

460
Except the boy never did. King ascribed the peaceful outcome more to the
circumstances at the time; 1972 was “in the days before a gun-totin’ serial killer
could get top billing on the Nightly News and possibly the covers of national
magazines.” (That these words were themselves printed in a mainstream magazine
article might have sounded hypocritical, but by then, likely, most of the damage
had already been done.)

Turning his attention back to the gunman at Blacksburg, King dismissed the
man’s writing aspirations entirely. “For most creative people, the imagination
serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never
actually do.” Meanwhile, the VT shooter didn’t seem “the least creative,” and his
writings didn’t seem to King to provide any real insight into the shooter mindset:

Dude w crazy. Dude w , in the memorable phrasing of Nikki

Giovanni, ‘just mean.’ Essentially there’s no story here, except for a
paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by
Columbine, but only because he w too dim to think up such a scenario
on h own.

April 20, 2007

American Psychiatric Association
On the eighth anniversary of the Columbine attack, as the Virginia Tech shooter’s
media package continued to circulate, and dominate the news cycle, the American
Psychiatric Association (APA) sent what they characterized as “an open letter to
the news media urging them to stop airing the disturbing writings, photographs
and video,” referring to the parcel the shooter had sent to NBC:

It evident to many that the Columbine tragedy w a powerful force in

[the VT shooter’s] writings. The media have an important role to play
in limiting the power of such tragedi by choosing not to sensationalize
them. [...] However, some outlets, including NBC News, continue to use
the materials. [...] The massacre at Virginia Tech newsworthy and it
the media’s job to report on it, but we believe the media have a
responsibility to balance the public’s need to know against the potential
danger of provoking copycat behavior. The APA urg , for the public
good, that all media cease airing the graphic materials from the shooter.

Meanwhile, as the investigation progressed into the Virginia Tech shooter’s past,
another indication of Columbine’s impact on his adolescence came to light: in
1999, when the shooter was in the eighth grade, and just a month or two af er the
Columbine shootings, his parents received notice from his middle school about
some “disturbing” writings he had produced. The report states that the

461
assignment the shooter had turned in “depicts suicidal and homicidal ideations,”
and “celebrates the Columbine shootings in April of this year.” According to one
sta f member, the shooter had then expressed that he “wanted to repeat
Columbine.”

But the earliest signals that something was wrong predated Columbine by a few
weeks. They came from the VT shooter’s art therapist in March 1999: she had
been working with the f een-year-old over the past year, and noticed he
“suddenly became more withdrawn and showed symptoms of depression.” At the
same time, she witnessed his artwork taking an abrupt stylistic turn: his drawings,
all of a sudden, were always of spiraling circles — like the opening of a tunnel, or a
cave.

***
Two days af er the APA’s plea for media restraint, a boy in Connecticut turned
f een years old. The winds of the Nor’easter had calmed outside his window, but
he was still following every second of the Virginia Tech coverage, as it unfolded,
and he had never been so excited in all his life.

462
 47. Lost in the Wild

May 2007
130 Morgan Street — Stamford, Connecticut
Peter Lanza had reached a dead end. None of the therapeutic school programs in
the Newtown area quite t what the Yale doctors told him his son needed, and in
the fallout from the February showdown with Nancy over medication, the
foothold he established at the Yale Child Study Center had crumbled. If he
wanted to play any signi cant role in his son’s education plan, he would have to
start all over.

uietly, Peter reached out to the school district in Stamford, inquiring about
“what special education programming that district could provide if Adam came to
live with him.” The options may well have been more abundant there, in the big
city, but this plan never went far; they would have had to completely extricate the
15-year-old from his “comfort zone” of 36 Yogananda. Adam would never agree to
it, which meant Nancy would never agree to it. And she would have been
reinforced by Dr. Fox’s stated position: that the harm in icted on his patient by
removing him from his safe environment would outweigh any bene ts.

Peter folded. The alternative course of treatment he had pursued for his son —
initiated eight months before, with his call to the Employee Assistance line — had
o cially failed. As of the next IEP meeting, he decided to let Nancy take charge
again. And this time, the arrangement would be permanent — Peter would stay
informed as much as he could, but from now on, Nancy was in control.

***
During this time, Adam’s schoolwork was solid, as it nearly always was. He turned
in a paper on “political and economic reforms in Japan under United States
occupation,” as well as an essay on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, and the
country’s nuclear weapons program. He kept up his solo Latin sessions, and was
scheduled to take a “computer course,” in support of which there was one entry

463
added to the “accommodations” section of his IEP: he would get a laptop
computer.

He remained as emotionally stoic as ever. Nancy had grown to accept, and expect
it. But while she had known since at least his third grade year that his silence could
hide depression, the same shell also masked his stimulation — so no one knew just
how excited he was, inside, about the Virginia Tech shooting. There was great
activity underneath the surface, but no signal escaping.

On Wikipedia, Blarvink’s trail hints only at his school curriculum; that spring, he
was updating pages on the “Gas constant” — likely part of his chemistry class, a
subject which he would later claim he “taught himsel ” — and then pages on the
Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs. These likely re ect his “modi ed” history
curriculum; Adam expressed frustration with the standard texts in an email
conversation with his father that year, emphasizing that he was “not satis ed 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
su cient extent and did not analyze the implementations of the events.”

May 3, 2007
State Assembly Chamber — Sacramento, California
The LA Tim ran a retrospective piece that week, to mark a special anniversary:
forty years had passed since the Black Panthers marched into the California
Assembly building with their guns drawn, to protest the bill that would ban
open-carry in California. The piece featured quotes from several who were there
that day, including a retired political correspondent who remembered the scene
well: Governor Reagan out on the lawn, enjoying a picnic with some
schoolchildren, when the Panthers suddenly arrived, with their ri es and shotguns
and revolvers out in the open. “They looked like an infantry company coming
through the trees.”

It was a day that changed US history. The showdown in the assembly chamber
not only launched the Black Panthers to national prominence, but it inadvertently
sparked the modern era of gun rights activism, and legislation.

Another now-graying assemblyman, a freshman lawmaker at the time, chuckled,

“It was a great initiation… Frankly, I wasn’t scared because I was too naive to
realize what was happening.”

His career as a lawmaker turned out to be a long one. He would still be there
when the Attorney General brought an unloaded semi-auto AK-47 into the

464
chamber in 1989, af er Stockton. In fact, he would be the sponsor of California’s
Assault Weapons Ban, and lead the state Senate in getting it passed that year.

California's ban had been the harbinger of all the gun laws — and attempts at gun
laws — in the two decades since, and though the sun had long set on the federal
version, Californians still had their state-level ban on "assault weapons," for all its
aws; so did a lot of other states. Yet the phenomenon that struck Stockton
seemed to strike everywhere now, all the same. Another Tim reporter who was
there in 1967 would re ect, “On that day 40 years ago, no shots were red.
Nobody was hurt. The Panthers looked scary, but really weren't. Today, some
people don't look scary, but really are.”

August 2007
Former Campus of Fair eld Hills Hospital
It had been dark in the tunnels under the hospital campus for over ten years. Ever
since the last patient lef , and the power was cut. Then suddenly, the walls began
to shake; the steel teeth of an excavator came crashing through the tunnel's ceiling,
and sunlight came pouring in. The jaws of the chugging industrial machine
closed, and ripped away layers of concrete and tile, with a cacophony that echoed
throughout the subterranean network.

Above-ground, a bulldozer surged forward, pushing a load of earth into the

cavity, and leveling a hill outside of Fair eld House — the northeast section of Dr.
Desmond’s original oval design for the campus.

From across Primrose Street, a foreman from Standard Demolition Services stood
watching. Newtown’s Parks & Recreation department said the grass would need
to be seeded soon if the new baseball diamond was going to be ready for next fall,
but the construction couldn’t start until Fair eld House was gone: it was a three-
story treatment facility built in 1940, where the tunnels once brought patients
from all over the campus to take their medications. But now the windows of
Fair eld House were all boarded over, and the only residents inside were the
wildlife and insects that wandered into its con nes. “The biggest obstacle in the
way of a [baseball] eld is this building,” the demolition foreman told the
Newtown Bee, as one of the giant machines set about tearing away it walls.

Given the construction materials Dr. Leak’s contractors had used back in the
1940’s, the demolition team couldn’t just knock down the majority of Fair eld
House; that would risk contaminating the very ground set for the baseball eld.
“We’re essentially dismantling it and it will come down in a process, not wildly,”
the foreman said.

465
So, Fair eld House was slowly erased from Newtown, vanishing over a course of
weeks, the team chipping away layers of brick and tile and plaster, until all that
remained of the structure was a concrete outline on the ground, next to a pile of
rubble.

August 23, 2007

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
In the 22 months since November 2005, Dr. Fox had billed Nancy Lanza for his
services a total of 19 times. But af er July 2007, the payments to Adam’s
community psychiatrist suddenly stopped.

***
The Lanzas received a document from Newtown High School on August 23rd:
the schedule for their son’s upcoming sophomore year. Sociology, AP U.S.
History, AP Chemistry, AP Physics, English, Math, and Latin — then, almost as if
it were nothing, the le noted that the “[s]tudent will participate fully in regular
classes.”

It wasn’t a typo. Another note in the le con rmed it: Adam’s very own stated
goal for that year was “to be a typical student.”

Three days later, Adam’s IEP le was updated again, to include correspondence
from an unnamed “psychiatrist,” who stated that they had “reviewed [Adam’s]
history with Mrs. Lanza,” and that they were “con dent that Adam was prepared
and ready to attend Newtown High School as a full time student that fall.”

This psychiatrist never appears anywhere else in the o cial records; when
investigators contacted him in 2014, he con rmed that he had simply been lling
in for Dr. Fox at that time, taking on patients while his colleague was on a leave-
of-absence. The Child Advocate would determine that this stand-in for Dr. Fox
“may have written the letter strictly on the basis of communications from Mrs.
Lanza.”

August 27, 2007

Newtown High School
The day af er the surrogate psychiatrist’s note, the Planning and Placement Team
convened to discuss the changes to Adam's IEP. Nancy told them that her son was
determined to return to school, and told one sta f member that he “insists on
walking through that front door,” and that he was “prepared” for the
mainstream. He was just going to be a normal student — almost like he didn’t
have an IEP at all. There were no objectives for his peer relationships, no

466
therapeutic goals, and no standard services outlined to help improve his
communication and behavior issues.

It was a curious decision, in retrospect: Nancy had spent years trying to get special
treatment for her son, and now, seemed to be demanding none at all. One possible
explanation is that the brief appearance of Yale in the family's orbit, and the
aborted plan to medicate Adam, indirectly presented her with an opportunity to
shif responsibility for things that she had been in denial about until then:
whether her son actually took the Celexa or not, Nancy's observation of him
during those two days — sitting idle in his room, sweating, unable to feed himself
due to anxiety, losing weight and not having any appetite — was, in large part,
already accurate to his daily behavior over the previous few years. It appears that
Nancy took those long-building problems, o oaded them onto Yale's shoulders,
and then adopted the new position that Adam did not actually have a problem; it
was Yale that was the problem. Peter’s interference, and forcing of medication in
contradiction of her and her son's wishes, was the problem. So, they xed the
problem. And now Adam, resentful of all his disability assessments over the years,
was demanding to be "mainstreamed." He was nally about to prove them all
wrong.

Or at least, that was something she had allowed Adam to convince himself of.
Nancy's goal, meanwhile, was not to actually meet his demands, but only to
enable him to think that she had. Her and the IEP team were instead going to shif
toward implementing his special accommodations in ways that were invisible to
him; Adam would indeed be in “normal” classes with the rest of the teenagers that
year, but beforehand, the teachers would be prepped with special rules, detailing
how to treat him in class. And he would be kept totally in the dark that this was
going on, whenever possible; if he knew the supports were there, he would surely
refuse them, and then he really would be lef to fend for himself.

The school nurse at NHS — who had spoken to Kathleen Koenig "about Adam’s
presentment" back when the APRN was still in the picture — gave detailed
instructions to all of Adam’s teachers. She described their incoming student as
having “high functioning” Asperger’s Syndrome, and anxiety. She said that he
wanted to be at the school, despite his anxiety, because he was interested in
increasing his knowledge, and that he had “come a long way” with his “crisis
team” over the course of the previous school year. She went on to explain that it
had all been accomplished with the help of one sta f member, in particular: the
school’s head of security, Richard Novia.

The nurse wrote that Adam was “bright” and, speci cally, that he did not want to
be viewed as “defective.” That’s why it was so important that the sta f were careful
to reinforce the reality that Nancy and the team were trying to prop up around

467
him: she wrote (apparently quoting Nancy) that, "It is ‘more scary if he does not
understand and rocks and withdraws. Being unclear can be devastating to this
child and his family.’ [...] He is non-emotional." And as she later recalled of the
system they worked out, "He was to email teachers if he wanted to ask questions.
There was concern that re drills ‘might freak him out.’ This was to be addressed
by having a teacher stay with him."

The nurse advised NHS's sta f that Adam would come to class early, before most
of the kids got there. He would leave later, af er most of them had already gone.
And no matter what, teachers could expect a “continuing high level of anxiety,
germ phobia, and sensitivity to smells,” now that he was going to participate fully
in their regular classes.

During the IEP meeting where all of this was decided, Nancy also raised a concern
familiar from Adam’s elementary school years: that if he ever hurt himself, it
would likely be an accident attributable to his “sensory-motor integration de cit,”
which could prevent him from even noticing it happened. And even if he did
know he had hurt himself, he would still be reluctant to tell anyone — but only
because of his shyness.

***
The day af er the IEP team met, at 12:59 in the af ernoon, Blarvink signed into
Wikipedia, and made an edit to the page for Newtown High School. He updated
the total count of students attending for the new school year, and (in leaving his
source citation) revealed that it was rst-hand knowledge:

Blarvink: According to what the surrogate vice

principal stated in the auditorioum to the 9th
and 10th grades on 8/28, there are 1,737 students
in Newtown High School this year. I Updated the
page accordingly.

A few days later, Adam walked sti y upright, past the spot where the Class of
1999 had planted the weeping red willow tree, and he opened the front door of
Newtown High School. He entered NHS as a normal student — mixed in with all
the other normal students, for the rst time since the seventh grade.

***
From the very rst day of the school year, many of the other students at NHS
found Adam to be a strange, even fascinating presence in their classroom. He was
the mostly-silent boy who wore the same giant out t every day, accessorized with
a pocket protector and pens, and he carried a briefcase. They noticed that the

468
teacher never, ever called on him — but this seemed to be done deferentially, like
he had nothing to prove.

His Latin teacher remembers him from her mainstream class that year, the
frightened boy from the portable now sitting right alongside all the other
students, as she always hoped he would. “There was never any meanness or
bullying,” she says. “They’d ask Adam to sit with them.”

One of the students, a boy named Kyle, remembers that Adam “didn’t have any
friends, but he was a nice kid if you got to know him.” Kyle was one of the few
who did make the e fort, but familiarity with Adam still brought no real insight:
“He was very, very shy. He wouldn’t look you in the eyes when he talked. He
didn’t really want to lock eyes with you for very long.” Although Adam never
spoke about himself or engaged in much chit-chat, he would correct his
classmates’ Latin assignments when asked to, and the students saw that he was
adept at the language.

Adam’s English class viewed him similarly. A girl who sat in the desk behind him
remembers that he would communicate to some extent, but, “It was almost
painful to have a conversation with him, because he felt so uncomfortable.” That
semester, they read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and JD Salinger’s The Catcher
in the Rye. The girl behind Adam kept nding herself glancing over his shoulder;
“I spent so much time in my English class wondering what he was thinking.”

Another girl, in the same class, also remembers that Adam’s intelligence was
evident — “You could tell that he was, I would say, a genius” — but it seemed to
almost be too much. “There was something [to Adam] that was above the rest of
us.”

September 10, 2007

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Blarvink opened Wikipedia again, and looked up the article for the “Darwin
Awards.” These were a morbid, tongue-in-cheek honor, bestowed posthumously
from the internet, upon humans who had gotten themselves killed in
exceptionally stupid or humorous ways. Blarvink clicked Wikipedia’s “edit”
button, and erased the article’s “Controversy” section — which until then had
read:

The Darwin Awards are a self-confessed mockery of

premature, accidental deaths by their very
nature. Because of this many find them vulgar and
offensive. The families of mentally retarded

469
 individuals also take offence to the awards. In
general the Darwin Awards overtly promote the
dangerous idea that greater intelligence means
greater validity of existence.

Blarvink wrote that his basis for his deletion of the above was its “point of view,”
which ran counter to Wikipedia’s aim for objectivity: “I have removed unsourced
POV liberal propaganda.”

Within a day of that edit, he was reading the wiki page for the book Into the Wild,
written by Jon Krakauer. The book tells the story Chris McCandless, who in 1990,
at age twenty-two, had suddenly cut o f all contact with his family, and set out on
a nomadic quest to “make each day a new horizon” — what eventually develops
into a pursuit of a primitive, instinctual, wilderness existence (in the tradition of
Thoreau’s Walden). Embarking out onto the Alaskan frontier, McCandless writes
of himself in his journal: “No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he ees, and
walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.”

Four years later, Into the Wild became a best-seller; it was the same book that the
Oklahoma City bomber had gif ed to his friend Ted Kaczynski back at Supermax
in 2001; by 2007, it was of en part of the English curriculum at American high
schools (as it was in Newtown).

Part of the book’s appeal was that, over the course of telling McCandless’s
mysterious story, Krakauer also analyzed his subject’s precursors: the archetype of
the modern man who tried to return to the cave. One such specimen had spent
more than ten years living in the Alaskan wild in the 1980s, dressed in rags and
hunting game with a stone-tipped spear. “I was interested in knowing if it was
possible to be independent of modern technology,” the mountaineer later told an
Anchorage Daily News reporter; she, in turn, wrote of the man, “He became
convinced that humans had devolved into progressively inferior beings, and it was
his goal to return to a natural state.” It wasn’t as if the wanderer did this out of
physical necessity, either: he was born wealthy in Seattle, and had a strong college
education. His need for nature came from within.

Into the Wild’s main story thread had a similar hook: McCandless was a child
born of some privilege, and he wanted to forsake all of it, to brave the frontier.
This was also the aspect of the story that Blarvink focused on: reading Wikipedia’s
summary of Into the Wild, he had paused at the sentence “McCandless changed
his name, ceased communicating with his family, gave away his savings of $25,000
to OXFAM and disappeared, later abandoning his car and burning all the money
in his wallet.”

470
The only problem with this sentence was that the sum given to charity was
wrong; Krakauer actually wrote “more than twenty-four thousand dollars.”
Adam made a single-digit edit, noting to other wikipedians that “$25,000 has been
changed to $24,000.” Details mattered.

471
 48. The Ghost in the
Machine

November 7, 2007
Jokela High School — Tuusula, Finland
At 11:28am, an 18-year-old high school student uploaded a number of les to the
hosting website Rapidshare. The zipped folder contained a series of photos, a
video clip, and several written documents. One of the les was labeled “Attack
Information.doc”:

Event: Jokela High School Massacre.

Targets: Jokelan Lukio (High School Of Jokela),

students and faculty, society, humanity, human
race.

Date: 11/7/2007.

Attack Type: Mass murder, political terrorism

(altough I choosed the school as target, my
motives for the attack are political and much
much deeper and therefore I don’t want this to be
called only as “school shooting”).

Location: Jokela, Tuusula, Finland.

Weapons: Semi-automatic .22 Sig Sauer Mosquito

pistol.

The student then got on his bicycle, and rode through his village, to the school.
Fourteen minutes af er the le was uploaded, the rst shots were red: it started in
a hallway, and then he passed through a series of classrooms, targeting students

472
and teachers. When police arrived, the shooter was trying to burn down the
school — but the two-stroke fuel he had brought along wouldn’t ignite. He shot
at the police outside, then retreated further into the building. The cops nally
entered the school an hour later, and found the shooter in a bathroom, dying
from a self-in icted wound.

“He was considered to be fairly shy and quiet and some pupils thought he was
introverted,” the o cial report on the Jokela High School shooting would read.
From his Social Studies and History classes, many remembered that the gunman
had expressed “politically strong and changing, of en extremist opinions.” Police
con rmed that “he had also been bullied at school,” and that the shooter “liked to
keep to himself and spent a lot of time by the computer and on the Internet.”
Finally, a review of the shooter’s medical records showed that he had “su fered
from slight panic disorder and performance anxiety, for which he had a
prescription,” but “he was not on regular medication.”

Following in the footsteps of the Virginia Tech gunman, the les that the Finland
shooter uploaded to Rapidshare were essentially his custom press kit: designed to
capture the narrative for his imminent moment in the spotlight. The di ference
was, he didn’t need NBC; he had a YouTube channel. He had already posted his
video clip, for all to see: entitled “Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007”, it
displayed several photographs of the school, before dissolving to a sel e of the
shooter, wearing a black t-shirt with white block-text — “HUMANITY IS
OVERRATED” — and aiming his pistol into the camera. The whole slideshow
was set to the KMFDM song “Stray Bullet,” the lyrics of which the Columbine
shooters had typed out and shared on their AOL pages almost a decade before.

The Jokela shooter also posted his materials on his “IRC Galleria” pro le (the
Finnish equivalent of Facebook at the time). Though few seemed to realize it yet,
the rise of social media meant that it wouldn’t be up to the police or the press to
release or withhold information about shooters anymore; that era had o cially
passed, swept away in the digital revolution.

Further in the “Attack Information” text le, the shooter shared his motives,
which turned out to be another progression of the old Columbine philosophy:
“It’s time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
back on tracks!”

In his journal, looking forward to the day of his assault on Jokela High School, the
gunman seemed to recognize that his mental state was deteriorating, yet rejected
the idea that there was anything inherently wrong with him, or what he wanted to
do, in terminology borrowed directly from the Unabomber’s Industrial Society
and its Future:

473
 Naturality has been discriminated through
religions, ideologies, laws and other mass
delusion systems. Individual, who is going
through his/hers natural power process and trying
to live naturally, but is being told that the way
he acts or thinks is wrong and stupid, will
usually have some reactions which might be
considered as "psychological disorders" by the
establishment. In reality they are just natural
reactions to the disruption of natural power
process. They will have some of the following
(depending on individual’s personality): feelings
of inferiority / superiority, hostility,
aggression, frustration, depression, self-hatred
/ hatred towards other people, suicidal /
homicidal thought etc... and it is completely
normal.

The Jokela shooter had downloaded Kaczynski’s treatise two months before
starting work on his own manifesto. He wrote that “knowing as much as I know
has made me unhappy, frustrated and angry. I just can’t be happy in the society or
the reality I live.” He concluded that “due to long process of existential thinking,
observing the society I live and some other things happened in my life... I have
come to the point where I feel nothing but hate against humanity and human
race.”

***
He was far from the rst to connect Columbine and the Unabomber; Kaczynski’s
own brother had expressed concerns about the dangers of the internet, comparing
his brother to the internet-educated aspiring bombers from Colorado, and more
recently, the designer of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was pursuing a dialogue
on the subject: a recurring topic on his discussion board concerned “Anarcho-
primitivism” — a philosophy that (although there are some di ferences) the
arguments of Industrial Society and Its Future are commonly associated with.
And three years before developing the Columbine game, Danny had produced an
animation clip based on an allegorical short story written by Ted Kaczynski, Ship
of Fools. Such writings became a major in uence on the Columbine game, as
Danny would explain in a post to the discussion forum in the fall of 2006:

I think more people are waking up to the idea

that modern civilization delivered only empty
promises and we need to seriously rethink the way
we live. Ten years ago Unabomber Ted Kaczynski (I

474
 believe another "canary in the mine") warned us
of this with his manifesto, ‘Industrial Society
and its Future.’ He’s serving life in prison for
some very foolish mistakes but I hope his message
(and mine) continue to resonate in the dire times
ahead.

In Finland, the whole thing would have been next to impossible to explain, just a
few years before. Even now, it seemed alien — likely, few of the shooter’s
classmates had even heard of Columbine High School before that day. Yet it was as
if, somehow, a black trench coat from someplace called Colorado had squirmed its
way through the ducts of the internet, and sprang out in their tiny village across
the world, bringing tragedy with it.

The same technology, ironically, was now sustaining the luddite Unabomber’s
philosophy: Kaczynski’s writings might have drif ed away into history af er his
arrest, were it not for the technological marvel of the internet, with its limitless
memory and increasingly sophisticated search capabilities: everyone, connected
with everyone.

Fall 2007
Newtown High School
A teacher emailed a colleague:

OH MY GOSH! Adam Lanza is ready to join my

class??? I HAD BETTER GET READY! I’m so nervous!

Let’s talk... are they starting with a short

visit or two or jumping right in and seeing how
it goes with the potential to leave early as
needed???

What about “prepping” my class before his arrival

— today I have an appointment at 2:30... but we
can talk on the phone tonight...

Many of Adam’s teachers had questions like these. The answers depended on the
class — and how Adam was maintaining, according to his mother.

The other teacher wrote back, with the basics of how to tailor a classroom to
Adam’s presence in it:

My guess is that he will start with an entire

class. In my past experience, observing a class

475
 is more difficult than participating in a class.
As for your other students — when in doubt —
IGNORE ADAM. Any attention is tough. In terms of
prepping them — just think about what you know
about Adam.

* No loud noises

* No strong smells

* No sudden movements

* No unpredictable actions, noises, smells, etc.

* Speak with a purpose or “Let me work.”

* Adam may be uncomfortable around the boys, but

I don’t know that for sure.

Have you talked to [STAFF MEMBER] about the math

he needs for your class? Would you like me to do
that? So many questions! At least our jobs are
never dull.

This more-experienced teacher added, “I am sure he will tell us whatever is a

problem.” Likely, they were really referring to Nancy.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

One morning that year, Nancy sent an email to the high school. It was an apology.
She said that Adam’s homework wasn’t done, and it was all her fault: she had
“interrupted him” by cooking dinner the night before, even though she knew that
the smell of food waf ing upstairs would make him upset, and ruin his
concentration. Even more disruptive, a repairman had showed up that morning,
and came into the house to x a pipe. As a result of the intrusion into Adam’s
bubble, her son was “highly agitated.” Nancy told the sta f member that they
should try and make the day “as smooth as possible” for him, and she even
promised that she would stay in her car in the parking lot af er dropping him o f
— just to be ready, in case they had to abort the school day.

The measures that Nancy resorted to — both to accommodate Adam, and to hide
from him that he was being accommodated so — became more drastic as the
school year went on. She had emailed his English teacher, saying that her son “has
indicated that he would like to try to learn about symbolism and use of gures of
speech,” and asked, “Can you suggest any good books on the subject?” But soon

476
af er that, they gave up on interpretation; Nancy wrote again, rejecting some of
the books that were on the reading syllabus. In this message, she gave some insight
into what she knew of Adam’s emotional world; behind the blank shell, he
“worried about dying, being bullied,” and was “acutely aware that he is di ferent
from other kids.” In turn, Nancy “feared that any story that referenced these social
issues in a way that Adam could identify with would bring on periods of
insomnia and a loss of appetite.” Finally, she wrote, “Another thing we might have
trouble with is ‘boy-meets-girl’ type [of stories.] An adapted reading list is being
provided as a substitute for the standard curriculum.”

In their never- nished report, the Yale sta f viewed Adam to have even more
fundamental obstacles facing him whenever he tried to study literature; although
he was an attentive reader, he showed “no grasp of empathy for characters'
motives, feelings or perspectives.”

***
That year, Nancy’s emails started carrying the signature line “sent from my
iPhone;” the smartphone era had arrived at 36 Yogananda. Nancy loved hers, but
Adam never got one. He had no use for them. He didn’t socialize, and he didn’t
like feeling that he was “on the grid.” When he wanted to communicate with
others, he preferred piloting his avatar through the realm of Azeroth. And besides:
touch-screens always looked lthy.

Also that year, another video game started to compete for the slot World of
Warcra typically occupied, at the center of Adam’s cloistered daily life: the new
“Call of Duty” title, Modern Warfare. It was the fourth in the series, but it was
also a new beginning; this version of the rst-person military shooter transcended
gaming itself, becoming the moment when a new “Call of Duty” release registered
as a cultural event on the same level as a new entry in a blockbuster Hollywood
movie franchise. Much of that was because Modern Warfare nally shed the
World War II setting, depicting instead (as the title suggested) “modern”
battle elds, just like the places where soldiers were ghting in real life. The player
assumed the role of elite British SAS and US Navy SEALs, and the guns depicted
were like a real military arsenal: AK-47s, Glock pistols, Skorpion submachine
guns, M16s, and Saiga magazine-loading shotguns. The production was lavish,
and the action was fast, and most of all, the multiplayer was addictive as hell.

Adam picked up his controller, and like millions of gamers that year, began laying
down hundreds of hours unlocking guns, racking up achievements, and obsessing
over their “kill/death” ratios.

477
Peter stayed in touch with Adam, mostly via email. His son wouldn’t say much.
Of en it was just questions about school, or possible careers paths in the sciences.
Peter had a le at his apartment in Stamford, one that grew as he tried to nd ways
to connect: scraps of paper listing books like The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing
and The Pleasure of My Company — both depicting young men with severe
OCD.

Peter knew his son didn’t have much of a social life outside of his computer — but
the Tech Club was starting to draw him out, at least. “He t in there,” Peter
would tell Andrew Solomon. “They’re all weird and smart.”

Newtown High School

In October 2007, Newtown High School’s website published a list of the various
activity clubs that would dot the halls af er the school day was over. Among them:

TECHNOLOGY CLUB

Meets Tuesdays after school in A218. Inquisitive,

investigative, and experimental, this group is
not for the technology beginner. Must have an
open, creative mind.

That year, Adam went to every Tech Club meeting, and he showed up to help
with broadcast production at nearly every school event. The students who were
members of the Tech Club that year got to know him better than anyone had in a
long time: he didn’t quite make the other boys (there were no girl members that
year) his friends, but they were all friendly to him, just as Richard Novia had
secretly requested of them. They would try to sit with Adam at lunch, and engage
him in conversation, or they would nd him in the Tech Club room during his
free period, and say hello. He was the small kid, in the big clothes. They noticed
he would frequently take a plastic comb out of his pocket, and x his hair. “He
was a generally quiet kid and I would say he seemed overly anxious partly because
of his facial expression and that he always seemed to walk very upright,” one club
member would say.

They didn’t care about this stu f, but they weren’t naive about what high school
was like, either. “I don’t remember anything about him being bullied or teased,”
one member would say. “We in the Tech Club certainly did nothing of the sort,
but I would not be surprised if he was bullied/teased at NHS, as bullying was a
real problem in our schools.”

During the club's meetings, Adam wasn’t much for conversation, but he would
follow the instructions given by Mr. Novia, and always operated a camera without

478
trouble when it was his turn. As the year went on, he even started to come out of
his shell, just a tiny bit; there would be a conversation going on around him
between the other members, and every once in awhile he would contribute a
comment — if it was clear to him that he was being included. From what little he
said, he seemed smart.

On weekends, some of the club members would host “LAN parties” at their
houses (Local Area Network, a protocol used for multiplayer PC gaming), and
several boys remember Adam coming out for at least one. He “seemed to enjoy it
and was chatting with people there,” if awkwardly.

The members of the Tech Club from that year are unanimous on one thing:
Adam never brought up violence or guns to any of them, even once. The only
account that mentions violence at all comes instead from Richard Novia, who
remembers being concerned about Adam’s response to some of the video games
they played: “Adam had shown, at that point [...], some high interest in the
violent aspect of those games.” Of course, the students, being teenagers, had all
played violent video games before. But as Novia saw it, that was di ferent.
“They’re healthy… healthy kids. Adam was not a healthy child.”

***
Mr. Novia had asked the other members to be on the lookout for any “odd
behavior” Adam showed. They knew he didn’t mean the compulsive use of hand
sanitizer, or the way Adam wiped down a game controller before he would touch
it. It was something more. Most of them would witness what Mr. Novia was
really talking about: sometimes, you could be saying something right to Adam’s
face, just you and him, and he would suddenly stop responding. End of
conversation, and he’s looking down at the oor. Sometimes he would go and
walk o f to some out-of-the-way spot and just sit still, by himself, totally silent.
When that happened, one of the other members would go and tell Mr. Novia:
“You need to go take a look at Adam.”

Novia had gotten used to these episodes over the years. No matter how much
Adam appeared to improve, there were always the bad days, when the fear would
get him and he would totally withdraw inside himself. It didn’t take much to
trigger it, either: any kind of break from the routine, anything that would make
him uncertain, could do it. Once, they were all playing rst-person-shooters on
the Tech Club computers — team deathmatch, the most kills wins — when
someone suggested they switch to “capture the ag” mode. Adam had never
played that; a new set of rules, a rush of anxiety, and suddenly his character wasn’t
moving. His chair was empty, and he’d wandered o f by himself.

479
When these episodes came, Richard Novia would go and sit down next to Adam.
He wouldn’t say anything, he’d just let him get used to the presence of another
human being for a few minutes. Half an hour, if that’s what it took. Then, he’d
ask: “How we doing?”

If Adam responded, then they would go back to the group together. Crisis over.
But sometimes, Adam still wouldn’t come out of his shell, and Mr. Novia would
have to call 36 Yogananda: “Nancy, you need to come up to the school.” This was
old hat by then, and Nancy would already be getting her keys as Novia explained,
“He’s having an episode and I’d prefer that he’d go home.” She would never
complain, she would just drive down the hill and pick him up. (Once, it happened
while the Tech Club was having a sleepover at NHS; something about being in the
dark, empty school spooked Adam, and so Nancy came down and picked him up,
in the middle of the night.)

One of the last times Novia saw Adam having an episode was at a school event
where they were lming. Richard decided to try something di ferent; he had been
reading the DSM-IV, and understood that people like Adam sometimes
responded to technology better than they did to other people. So when he sat
down next to Adam, who was in mid-episode, he just took out a “gadget” he had
with him — “a Palm Pilot, something like that” — and put it between them. A
minute or two passed, but eventually, Adam’s hand drif ed down, and picked it
up. Af er dgeting with the device for a bit, he was ready to come and help with
the production. He still wouldn’t speak, but he’d come out of his cave.

A series of digital photos was lef on one of the Tech Club’s hard drives from that
year, apparently from the day they had their pictures taken for their ID badges.
Several of the photos are of Adam, submitting to a camera’s lens for the rst time
since St. Rose of Lima, two years before. He is standing outside the control room
at NHS, a giant blue-and-white “NTV” logo painted on the wall behind him. His
shirt is so oversized that its short sleeves come down to his forearms. Pen caps peek
out of his breast pocket, and his hair is a mop, combed down perfectly smooth.
The prospect of even getting this photo taken was likely enough to trigger one of
his episodes; while his face is captured in an emotionless, bug-eyed stare, at the
bottom edge of the photo, clutched tightly in his hand, is what appears to be a
Palm Pilot.

Kingston, New Hampshire

Marvin and Nancy had drif ed apart over the years. They each had domestic
priorities — marriages crumbling, and children with special needs. But Marvin
still heard from his old friend now and then, checking in via email.

480
He would swear that Nancy said, around this time, that Adam was being bullied
at school. Verbally, and physically. Sometimes, according to his mother, he would
even come home with bruises on his body. Nancy said it was getting so bad, that
she had to come to the school, and practically go to class along with Adam, to
ensure he was safe.

***
Whether or not her son was a victim, there was indeed bullying at his school. In
one incident that made local news that year, a group in a detention class had been
ganging up on a particular kid, and he reported to it to the administrators; the
next time he ended up going to detention, the bullies got some packing tape, and
wrapped it all around him while he was sitting in his chair. His arms restrained,
one girl wrote “SNITCH” across his forehead in permanent marker, and added a
Hitler mustache on his lip, while the others emptied sugar packets all over him.
Then they got his chair onto a moving dolly, and paraded him through the af er-
school halls of NHS; when they came to a stop, the chair fell over, and the bound
victim sustained a head injury when he hit the hard vinyl oor. The o fenders
posted photos of their torment on Facebook, and uploaded video of the boy
taped to the chair to YouTube, leading to their being identi ed.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The most remarkable thing happened that year at 36 Yogananda: Nancy’s son
hosted a party. It was a LAN party, the same scenario he had participated in at
other Tech Club members’ houses, but this time he was welcoming others into his
own comfort zone.

Nancy could hardly believe it. It seemed like there hadn’t been any social visitors
allowed at their house in years, much less a whole group of them. But when the
day came, there they were: a bunch of teenage boys, in the basement with their
laptops, playing Starcra and Warcra III with her son.

As the guests recall, Adam only asked that they take o f their shoes before
entering, and be “respectful of the house.” They didn’t venture to the upper
oors of 36 Yogananda, but Nancy came downstairs and said hello. They thought
she was very nice.

The basement looked pretty much how Ryan had lef it, with all the anime scrolls
on the wall, and a bed in the corner. Some elements might have been Adam’s
additions: a “Tanks of World War II” poster on the wall, next to one of
Nintendo’s Pikmin. A plush Pikachu doll o f in one corner. A boxed set of
Romance of Three Kingdoms on the bookshelf.

481
He showed his guests some of his old console games, and even let them borrow
some. One of the kids liked Pikmin, but didn’t have a Gamecube to play it on;
Adam said he could take the console, too.

Nothing unusual happened at the party. Nobody saw any rearms. The next day
at school, some members who missed the party heard it was “fun.”

They liked the shy kid from 36 Yogananda. “Overall, I considered Adam Lanza to
be normal and thought no di ferent of him from other members,” one would say.
“The smartest kid in Tech Club,” said another. Nancy’s son sat right next to them
in the tech rooms, when they would watch anime movies, and he shared mixed
CDs he made of the soundtracks. They knew he didn’t like to be touched, but
they got to the point where they were comfortable doing it anyway, sometimes
poking Adam for laughs. He seemed to take it in the good-nature it was intended.

One time, they were all having a conversation, and Adam made a joke; everyone
froze for a second, stunned, and then they all started laughing, right at the same
time. Soon af erwards, “We gave Adam a group hug and he seemed to let us do it
without a problem.” Looking back, they said, “We really did try to befriend him.”

They knew he didn’t have any real friends, but they couldn’t have known just
how signi cant it was, that they had even been allowed to cross the threshold.
Af er the party, when the house was empty again, Nancy wrote a message to Peter.
“It was nice to hear Adam talking to the other kids and everyone joking with him
and treating him so well.”

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 49. Static

June 13, 2007

Hall of the House of Representatives — Washington, D.C.
The widowed nurse from New York came back to the podium. "Individuals who
shouldn't have access to guns are getting them with ease and are killing innocent
people," she said. "The NICS system is supposed to prevent this from happening,
but a database is only as good as the information put in it."

Virginia Tech had been on everyone’s mind for months, but hers especially; back
in 1993, the man who had attacked the commuter train with her family aboard
turned out to have lef a trail of warning signs for years, but he had still been able
to obtain a handgun. Such tragedies were exactly the sort of thing she came to
Congress to stop. And indeed, the nation’s system of background checks had been
completely overhauled since those days, with the passing of the Brady Bill and the
establishment of NICS — but now tragedy had struck again, at Norris Hall.
Worse than ever. As President Bush said of the shooter in his weekly radio address,
just af er the VT attack, “This was a deeply troubled young man — and there
were many warning signs. Our society continues to wrestle with the question of
how to handle individuals whose mental health problems can make them a danger
to themselves and to others.” Still, he believed the country could nd a solution,
because, “Together, Americans have overcome many evils and found strength
through many storms.”

***
It turned out that the campus police at Virginia Tech had been well aware of the
disturbed young man who lived in Harper Hall, for a long time. In November
2005, wholly a year-and-a-half before the tragedy, he was writing to a girl online, as
“ uestion Mark.” Af er a few messages back and forth, the female student heard a
knock at her door: there she was met by a young Asian man — who had somehow
got into the secure building — with big mirror sunglasses on, and his hat pulled
down over his brow. “I’m question mark,” he said.

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She shut the door, and called the cops. She was, as the police report would later
say, “freaked out.”

The police came and talked to the shooter at his suite in Harper Hall. The o cers
told him to knock it o f: leave the girl alone.

Three days later, the shooter called Cook Counseling Center, just a few buildings
away on the south end of campus. He voluntarily made an appointment to speak
with a clinical psychologist — but then, when the day came, he no-showed.

One month later, he was at it again, online: another girl, in another residence hall
on campus, raising another alarm about the “ uestion Mark” person who was
sending her creepy messages. She had brie y been acquainted with the shooter
personally, af er his dorm mates brought him to a party the year before; he was
quiet all night, and then at one point, took out a moderately sized knife, and —
for no apparent reason — started stabbing the carpet.

Remembering this, she had guessed “ uestion Mark’s” identity, and called him
out by name. But he would only respond, “I do not know who I am.”

The police came and had another talk with the shooter. This time, shortly af er
the cops lef , his roommates came home, and they got an IM from him in the
other room: “I might as well kill myself now.”

The cops got another call, turned around, and took the shooter for an emergency
mental evaluation; the roommates breathed a sigh of relief. Now law enforcement
was involved.

The shooter was evaluated by a representative from the local Community Services
Board, who determined that he was “an imminent danger to self or others.” A
temporary detaining order was issued, and the shooter was transported to
Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital for an overnight stay, with a full mental
evaluation the following day. But this session would go much di ferently: the sta f
psychologist concluded that the young man “does not present an imminent
danger.” Another doctor agreed, asserting that “there is no indication of
psychosis, delusions, suicidal or homicidal ideation.” Both recommended
outpatient counseling, and they scheduled the shooter for a follow-up
appointment. Then he was discharged, back into the community.

***
There was only a year to go before his attack then, and he would spend it turning
in disturbing writings in school, bullying his teachers, recording his martyr video,
and — just two months before the shooting — buying his rst gun. He bought it

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online, from a website TheGunSource.com, and picked it up at the closest FFL
dealer — the pawn shop across the street from the Virginia Tech campus. He
bought the other pistol directly from a gun store, one town over.

He was, exactly, the sort of guy who was never supposed to get his hands on a gun,
let alone two.

President Bush ordered his Department of Health and Human Services,

Department of Education, and Department of Justice to start a joint
investigation: nd out exactly where the background check system had broken
down, and what it would take to x it.

The joint investigation nished its work that June. Many of their ndings were
taken directly from the Virginia Tech case, but they applied nearly everywhere in
America: “The state’s mental health laws are awed and services for mental health
users are inadequate. Lack of su cient resources results in gaps in the mental
health system including short term crisis stabilization and comprehensive
outpatient services.”

They found that the reasons for St. Albans letting the shooter go were mostly
structural: the involuntary commitment process was “challenged by unrealistic
time constraints, lack of critical psychiatric data and collateral information, and
barriers (perceived or real) to open communications among key professionals.”

The whole system su fered from “silo-ing” of information. Nobody along the way
had really examined “the shooter,” the way the post-attack investigators could; the
information was all scattered around, walled o f in sections. No one person knew
all of it, or even half of it. Only fragments. The doctors at St. Albans were totally
unaware, for example, of their patient’s documented obsession with the
Columbine attack, because that fact only appeared in the high school educational
records. Similarly, when the sta f at Virginia Tech grew concerned about his
writings a year later, they would know nothing about the commitment
proceeding, or any of his mental health history; those were private medical
records. Even some of the records they could share, they didn’t, being unsure of
the rules. And the K-12 IEP records were in yet another silo; Virginia Tech had no
idea that their English-major applicant was practically a mute, until his rst day of
class. He was a blank slate.

The second missed opportunity happened in early 2007, when the shooter was
buying his two pistols. In both instances, when he got to “ uestion 11F” of the
standard Firearms Transaction Record form — which asks the gun buyer if they
had ever been “adjudicated mentally defective,” noting that this would include
“determination by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority that you

485
are a danger to yourself or others” as well as “committed to a mental institution”
— the shooter simply checked “no.” He lied, violating federal law, but there was
no way to know that. The NICS background check would have shown if he had
ever been committed to an institution, but the way the law was interpreted, this
did not include being committed to outpatient facilities, in the community, like
the shooter had been to. Virginia immediately set about tightening the law to
include outpatient commitment, but many other states would continue on, with
the same ambiguity in their rules.

As for the rest of the NICS standards, the shooter didn’t have a criminal record, or
any warrants. So he passed the Brady Bill’s test, twice. When CBS News
interviewed The Gun Source’s president, he could only plead ignorance. NICS
had told his company to go through with the sale. “I don’t know how you can
ever stop a crazy person from doing crazy things.”

The VT shooter only had one more legal hurdle to clear: Virginia’s “one gun a
month” law. He would have to wait 30 days af er the rst handgun purchase
before he could buy another one. So, that’s just what he did; he waited out the
waiting period. The law was passed in 1993, and was meant to sti e interstate gun
smuggling. Not shootings.

***
The nurse from New York saw her opportunity. She already had a bill designed to
x the NICS system; she had been trying to get it passed ever since a gunman
attacked a church in her district back in 2002. At the time, she had called it the
Our Lady of Peace Bill. Now, it became the 2007 NICS Improvement Act.

She had gured out a major reason why background checks kept failing: money.
Some state records — and more at the county level — were still not online, and
when they were, they of en were not formatted to give the level of detail the FBI
needed to make the call on a gun sale. “Many states don’t have the resources to
keep the NICS database up to date,” she explained. So, her bill provided $200
million for state and local governments to modernize their record-keeping, funds
that could be re-approved annually. In return, those state and local governments
would notify NICS of anyone in their jurisdiction who had been involuntarily
committed. Simple.

The bill was met with broad support. Even the NRA was listening. They only had
two problems: rst, they noted that among the agencies whose records would be
incorporated into the now-expanded background checks would be the
Department of Veterans A fairs. They didn’t want veterans who had received
mental health treatment to be discriminated against, or to have their privacy
invaded. So, the representative from New York clari ed the language, so that “the

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VA will only provide records on veterans determined by the same procedures that
apply to non-veterans in regards to mental health.” Records of conditions that
“do not reach the legal threshold of mental illness” would not be sent to NICS.
And if NICS didn’t need the data they did receive, the FBI would erase it.

Second, the NRA camp wanted there to be a way for people who were prohibited
from buying guns — the ones who would fail the background checks — to have
their gun-purchase rights restored. So, the representative changed the bill again,
making it so that states could only qualify for the funds if they established a
“Program for Relief from Disabilities,” where the gun buyer could essentially
inform NICS that their disqualifying condition was ruled incorrect, or no longer
applied. If it could be con rmed they weren’t considered dangerous anymore,
then they could buy guns again. And if their application for relief was not
processed within 365 days, it would automatically be passed.

President Bush signed the NICS Improvement Act shortly af er the new year. It
was the rst signi cant gun restriction to be passed since the Assault Weapons ban
in 1994, a law that was now only a memory. They had given up looking for the
next gun; now, they would look for the next shooter.

The limitations of the NICS improvements became apparent early on. Few states
were able or willing to establish their gun-rights restoration process (especially
af er a few high-pro le cases where a successful appeal led to another shooting).
But of the 14 states who fully participated in the new system, Connecticut was one
— now, if someone in the state who had been committed to a mental institution
ever tried to obtain a gun, their radar would pick it up.

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 50. Trinity

December 5, 2007
Omaha, Nebraska
A woman in distress came to the Douglas County Sheri ’s station in Omaha, and
told the deputy there that something was going on with her son. She was worried
about him. She'd known for awhile that he was depressed, and that morning, she
had gone over to her ex-husband’s house (where the 19-year-old was staying), to
talk to him about it. But he was gone. And so was her ex-husband's gun.

The teenager had lef behind a a pair of what appeared to be suicide notes: the rst
was addressed to FAMILY: “I’ve just snapped I can’t take this meaningless
existence anymore,” and “P.S. I’m really sorry.” The second note was addressed to
FRIENDS: “I’ve been a piece of shit my entire life it seems this is the only option.
I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster,” but “I just want to
take a few pieces of shit with me...just think tho, I’m gonna be fuckin famous.”

He didn’t say where he was headed, in either note. They were just goodbyes.

The deputy looked up from the two notes, and asked the boy’s mother what kind
of gun it was. She said she didn’t know the name, but it was a black ri e, and
“ugly.”

***
It was a AKM — another semi-automatic AK-47 model — and at that moment, it
was traveling in a car, with her son in the driver's seat, on the way to Omaha’s
Westroads Mall. He didn’t have any kind of special connection to the place, or to
the Von Maur department store he chose at the south end of the mall. It was a
building full of total strangers.

He took out his phone, and texted his girlfriend. He apologized, and said he was
going to have a “stando f.” Then he sent a text to his ex-girlfriend, saying the same

488
thing, and apologizing for breaking up with her. He tucked the ugly black ri e
under his black hoodie, and headed into the Von Maur.

The security cameras recorded him getting into the elevator, and going up to the
3rd oor. Then another camera recorded him aiming the ri e as he advanced onto
the sales oor, the stock against his cheek, with a 30-round magazine jutting out
below — and a second ammo magazine duct-taped to that one, upside-down,
“jungle style,” for faster reloading. He started shooting at the sta f, and the
customers, and then down at the janitor who was cleaning at the bottom of the
escalator. Panicked shoppers streamed out into the parking lot, calling 9-1-1, while
others cowered in dressing rooms, as the gun re continued. At one point, the
gunman encountered a stu fed teddy bear on one of the Christmas racks, and
blasted it. Then, as the sound of police sirens rose from the parking lot outside, he
turned the borrowed ri e on himself.

His name and his photo were on the news that night; the deadliest rampage to
visit Nebraska in 50 years, hearkening all the way back to the notorious pair of
teenage spree-killers that passed through in 1957 (leaving a trail of mayhem that
was so shocking it inspired the lm Badlands, and later, Natural Born Killers).
But times had changed since then, even in the Corn Belt; Rolling Stone would
eventually run a pro le on the mall shooter, the latest awkward white kid to go o f
of his antidepressants and turn crazed gunman — a bespectacled “Harry Potter
with an AK-47” — but the piece was mostly a commentary on just how routine it
had all become: “These days, teenage shooters come and go on TV with such
regularity that their sprees hardly seem surprising anymore; on the contrary, it
feels almost naive to be shocked.”

December 8, 2007
Arvada, Colorado
A message appeared online, commenting on the news from Omaha. “Sounds like
one of the Nobodies became a Somebody,” the anonymous person wrote. “Sure
he’s still hated by everyone, that is obvious, but at least now he’s a
somebody.....and he’s lef a world that didn’t give a shit about him to begin with.”

The message was posted to a forum for lapsed members of the Pentecostal church.
The person at the keyboard was an unemployed, 24-year-old man who lived at
home with his mother, in a suburb of Denver. Most of what he wrote were just
lyrics lif ed from a Marilyn Manson song, but even if they weren't his words, he
meant them very much; he had been a freshman when Columbine happened, just
a few miles down the road. It had made a big impression on him. His family was
deeply religious, and didn’t want him exposed to the excesses of modern secular
culture, so he was always homeschooled, and really only had to see other kids at

489
church events, or when studying to be a missionary — but despite never having
spent a day attending a public school in his life, he somehow identi ed with the
Columbine shooters more than anything in the world.

By this point, he knew that there was something wrong with him. He complained
about it on the ex-Pentecostal forum all the time; however, he did not accept that
the problem was anything inherent in his nature. He blamed his upbringing,
instead:

So many people don’t have any clue about The

Nightmare we’ve grown up in. I mean, it’s not my
fault I was raised in homeschool for 12 f***ing
years and that I’m not able to "socialize
normally." How am I supposed to socialize and
make new friends when I’m always left out of
everything, and always made to be the outcast?
I’m nice, I’m considerate, a lot of people tell
me I’m intelligent and kind....so why the f***
must everyone think they have some right to abuse
and reject me?

On the evening of December 8, three days af er the attack on Westroads Mall, the
young man in Arvada navigated to the Usenet group “alt.suicide.holiday.” He
started a new topic, typing in the subject: “You Christians brought this on
yoursel ”.

He wrote a few paragraphs... but then stopped. Something still wasn’t right. He
wasn’t ready.

He saved the message as a draf , and got up and put on his jacket. On the way out
the door, he told his mother he was going out with friends for the night.

***
About an hour later, at the Youth With a Mission evangelical school in Denver,
there was a knock at the door. The Resident Advisers inside were still cleaning up
from the evening’s “culmination banquet,” celebrating the approaching
graduation of a new batch of missionaries. They thought maybe one of the
students had lef their keys in their room. But when the RA’s opened the door, it
was someone they didn’t recognize: the 24-year-old from Arvada.

He nervously explained that he was a former student, and just needed a place to
stay for the night. The residents weren’t sure it was okay — but it was also a cold
Colorado night, so they agreed to let him wait in the hall while they gured it all
out.

490
The young man from Arvada knew the school’s layout well. He wandered upstairs
to the trophy case as the RA's talked, to see the photos of the graduating classes:
one of them, from ten years ago, had his older sister in it. A few years later, there
was another one that should have had him in it... but he missing.

The path his family had set out for him had ended abruptly, right in the building
where he was standing, ve years before, at his own culmination banquet. The
sta f let him be the DJ for the night, and he had decided to play some Marilyn
Manson. The program’s administrators, who already believed that his “antisocial”
demeanor was going to make him a poor missionary, said it was the last straw.
They told him it would be best if they parted ways, and that they were canceling
his missions trip. He never really recovered from that.

The RAs came back, saying they had made up their mind, and he had to leave. He
took out a handgun and shot them instead. Then he ran o f, into the night.

The rst police unit arrived on-scene just one minute and four seconds later, but
the gunman was already gone. Nobody had recognized him, or saw his license
plate. A description of a total stranger, from the survivors, was all they had.

Meanwhile, the shooter drove back home, went to his room — being careful not
to wake his mother — and then was on his computer until 3:45am.

***
His mother saw him the next morning, as she was leaving for church. He was
scraping ice o f of his SUV. She noticed that he had changed his clothes: now he
was wearing black combat boots, and black cargo pants. But he seemed in good
spirits, and even said “happy birthday” to his mother’s church friend who came to
pick her up. As the two women drove o f, the shooter’s mother glanced back
through the window of their home, and saw her son, sitting down to his
computer.

***
He opened the draf he had started the day before, and at 10:03am, clicked
PUBLISH. “I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the
@#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill,” the message read, quoting the Columbine
shooters. “I’m going out to make a stand for the weak and the defenseless,” it
continued, echoing the Virginia Tech shooter. The message ended, “Christian
America this is YOUR Columbine.”

He hauled his arsenal out to his car: a Bushmaster XM-15, an AK-47-style ri e,

and three handguns, including the one he had used the night before — all of

491
which he had purchased himself, legally, in the last year — and some other items.
Then he got on the freeway, and headed south: to the city of Colorado Springs,
home of the thriving mega-church New Life — known to some as the
“Evangelical Vatican.”

***
Meanwhile, the shooter’s cousin called his mother. She answered. She was at
another church, in Denver.

The cousin told her that he was very concerned about her son; he had spoken to
him on the phone the previous af ernoon, and her son said something about
being depressed, because, “He doesn’t understand other people, and they don’t
understand him.” Whatever was going on, it sounded bad.

She thanked her nephew, and said she would call her son, as soon as the church
service was over.

***
Af er a ninety-minute drive, the shooter arrived at New Life. He found a parking
spot. He also, likely, saw the police cruiser parked in front of the church; security
had been increased af er the YWAM gunman got away the night before. So he sat
in his car, waiting.

His phone rang. It was his “friend” from his days at YWAM (a girl who barely
even considered him an acquaintance, but also knew that he had no real friends,
and so tended to exaggerate their closeness.) She had a missed call from him the
day before, just a few minutes before she heard about the YWAM shooting. Now
she was calling back, to see if he knew anything about it.

They talked for 29 minutes, what amounted to “a philosophical discussion about

the craziness of society.” She asked him if he’d heard what had happened at their
old school, and he said yes, he had — in fact, he had been “researching kids who
do that.” Stu f like Columbine. “It’s crazy... like the Omaha shooting last week,”
he said. “I don’t understand what the world’s coming to.” He lingered on how the
attacks seemed to come in waves, tying YWAM to Westroads. “I can’t believe it,
one af er another. I was studying that.”

The former classmate got a sinking feeling. Later, she would tell police, “I realized
I was talking to the person who did this.”

She kept him talking, trying to probe for a confession. But the conversation came
to a halt suddenly, right around the time when an “Amen” brought services at
New Life to a close. As the police cruiser parked out front started up, and drove

492
o f, the shooter interrupted his friend, and said that he was “going to go to
church.” He hung up, and lef his phone behind — along with a note, addressed
“to god”, complaining “Jesus, where are you? Do you even care these days?”

***
Families coming out of the church saw two huge columns of black smoke rising
into the sky, billowing from canisters that were set on the pavement. Suddenly,
the shooter came marching through the haze, and opened re. The worshipers
scattered, some to their cars, and some retreating into the sanctuary.

Back in the shooter’s SUV, next to his letter to God, his cell phone was ringing. It
was his mother, checking on him.

Inside New Life, the church’s volunteer security guard — a former law
enforcement o cer — came down the long hallway toward the entrance, trying to
nd out what all the noise was. She saw the doors open, and the shooter enter on
a curtain of black smoke. The guard drew her pistol, and as the crowd in the
hallway parted, she shouted, “Drop the gun!”

He stopped, and mumbled something back, inaudible over the commotion. He

didn’t obey. The security guard took a breath, and pulled the trigger. “I just said,
‘Holy Spirit, be with me.’ I wasn’t even shaking,” she later said. “I engaged him. I
took him down.”

Injured, the shooter drew his pistol, and turned it on himself.

February 14, 2008

Northern Illinois University — Dekalb, Illinois
It was Valentine’s day, and it was snowing outside. A lecture on ocean
sedimentology was in session in Cole Hall, when suddenly, a young man stepped
onto the stage from the rear entrance. He was dressed in black, with a trench coat
over a t-shirt that had TERRORIST printed across the front. He had a Glock
pistol in his hand — not quite the same Glock model as the Virginia Tech shooter,
but as close as he could nd — and a shotgun slung across his back.

His classmates at the school knew he had a documented history of mental health
issues, but he had worked hard to get his masters from NIU; they thought, or
hoped, that he would continue improving and taking his medication af er he
graduated. But he didn’t. And besides, he had graduated six years ago. These
weren’t even his classmates.

493
He opened re on the students from the stage with his shotgun, then hopped
down into the seating area and turned his Glock on them for a few minutes. Then
he went back onto the stage, and turned it on himself.

***
The next day, from Washington D.C., a senator representing Illinois released a
statement in response to the tragedy at NIU, and the revelation that the
“madman” who had carried it out had obtained his guns legally:

We hear about heartbreaking, mindless acts of violence like th day

a er day, week a er week. They come in and out of the headlin , and
a er awhile, most of the world go on. But for all the loved on who are
le behind, the pain and the sorrow remain for a very, very long time.
Today we offer them our prayers, but we must also offer them our
determination to do whatever it tak to eradicate th violence from our
streets and our schools; from our neighborhoods and our citi . That
our duty Americans, and that our solemn obligation mothers
and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, neighbors and
friends.

The Illinois senator’s remarks drew more attention than they might normally
have; Barack Obama was in the running for his party’s presidential nomination at
the time. He was the community organizer from Chicago — the city that
outlawed handguns — and NIU was the rst mass shooting that he would
respond to publicly.

When asked to summarize his campaign’s position on the 2nd Amendment, he

said that he believed in an individual’s right to bear arms, but that it was subject to
“common-sense regulation.”

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 51. Pressure Drop

February 18, 2008

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Four days af er the attack on Cole Hall, someone in the pale yellow house got a
copy of the day’s New York Tim , and a pair of scissors. There was an article in
the newspaper about the NIU shooting, a few pages in — they carefully clipped it
out. (The cut-out from the newspaper would be found, years later, somewhere in
the basement of 36 Yogananda.)

***
Adam was interested in Glock pistols, probably as a result of following the
Virginia Tech story so closely. And now the NIU shooter had used one, too.
Three days af er the newspaper article was published, the website “Glocktalk”
registered a new user account: Blarvink.

Blarvink posted to Glocktalk at least 19 times over the next seven months — but
by the time the account was located, years later, its activity was already erased. He
was always doing that, deleting stu f af er so much time passed; hiding, or even
just covering his tracks, gave him comfort.

As intrigued as he was by the NIU attack, though, the Westroads Mall shooting
made even more of an impression. That might have been because the nerdy, pale
Nebraskan kid with the AK-47 seemed to have been the catalyst for the attacks
that immediately followed — it was where the dam broke.

Whatever the reason was, Nancy’s son never forgot Westroads. As with the
Dawson College shooter up in Canada, these gunmen who were in the news
during the rst couple years he was visiting the Columbine discussion forum,
despite their relatively brief moments of attention overall, would linger
prominently in his memory, well af er everyone else stopped talking about them.

495
 ***
Another week passed, and then Blarvink logged onto Wikipedia again. He
navigated to the article for Barack Obama, and went to the “Talk” page —
essentially a backstage discussion thread, where the site’s users debate changes to a
given article — and found a debate under the heading “Liberal.” One user had
announced that they would be adding mention of Obama’s “liberal” rating from
conservative publications, while another user was arguing that such ratings were
not “objective,” and thus should not be included in a reference article. Blarvink
chimed in: “And yet you see no problem with subjective sentences in the article,”
referring to an excerpt from a glowing review of a book Obama had written. “As
long as he is praised, eh?”

Newtown High School

A sophomore named Daniel took a Computer Repair class at NHS that year. The
teacher liked to give out group assignments, and sometimes, Daniel got paired
with Adam Lanza. He remembers that the 15-year-old “was a very quiet and polite
kid,” who was very adept at assembling and repairing the computers. But he
“never once spoke as long as I knew him…If he smiled he only smirked.”
However, Adam “clearly had a lot going on in his mind,” Daniel adds. “He was
fearful of people, he would always walk right up against the side of the hallway,
with eyes to the ground…”

Silence aside, though, Nancy’s son was a great partner to have. “He was incredibly
smart, and basically xed the whole computer by himself while I was goo ng o f.”

Later in the term, the class had to do solo presentations, demonstrating how to
tweak some part or feature on a PC. Adam did his presentation on how to change
the colors of the folders in Windows — but it was purely a visual demonstration.
Adam stayed totally silent at the front of the class, as he slowly clicked through his
slides, showing the words he intended to communicate without ever speaking any
of them.

One day, some of their classmates brought in some burned CDs with the team
shooter Counter-Strike on them, and installed the game on the class computers for
an impromptu LAN session. Adam had clearly played the game before, and
Daniel remembers the weapon load-out that he always chose: “An M4 assault ri e
and a Glock handgun.”

***
One day, a sta f member emailed Nancy; they had apparently noticed that Adam
was having trouble with going to the cafeteria for lunch, and o fered to arrange

496
other accommodations for him.

Nancy wrote back, and wearily explained how it wasn’t that simple:

He will not accept any preferential treatment at

all. Since he obviously NEEDS preferential
treatment, it leaves me scurrying around behind
his back fixing things… i.e. The gym thing. I
actually had to make up a story about liability,
bureaucracy, and being out of school for over 12
months, etc. … then I have to go to [staff
member] and get her to back that up … then I have
to go to [another staff member], and get him to
go along. Then his teacher slips up and tells him
that his IEP allows him to get out of study halls
and I have to get her to recant and say it was a
misunderstanding on her part. This is a high
stress, 24/7 operation of misinformation. He does
NOT have to go to lunch, but obviously I have to
come up with a story that he will buy and then
get everyone on the same page. Thanks for giving
me the heads up. I will get on it first thing in
the morning. I will think of something. He wants
to believe that he is an ordinary student, and I
think it is important to let him believe for his
self-esteem.

It wasn’t working. By February of 2008, her son had dropped out of most of his
mainstream classes — including Sociology, History, Chemistry, and Physics —
and he had arranged to complete English as “independent study.” The adapted
reading list, apparently, was not the solution they had hoped. None of it was.

As the “mainstream” plan crumbled around her, Nancy told the school that her
son “struggled tolerating other students, their presence or behavior, in certain
classes” — or, as Nancy explained it to family back in Kingston one visit, “Adam
was always very mature, and he did not like school because he thought all of the
other kids were immature.” But at the same time, he didn’t want to go back to the
special education classrooms; he believed that a “small classroom setting” meant
that it was a “stupid class.” He wanted to be away from the other kids, without
ever accepting that he had a disability. In practice, this translated to as many
“independent study” classes as he could get.

Nancy apologized to Newtown. She knew her son was “a di cult case, and [that]
everyone [was] working very hard to accommodate [him].” She just wanted to

497
make his “experience at school as tolerable as possible.”

She had been doing it for years, shepherding him through the school system. And
Nancy recognized how much Newtown had done to help them (as adversarial as
their positions could sometimes be). In one email, she wrote to the NHS
administration to praise a group of teachers and counselors, saying that as a
“parent of a child with special needs,” she appreciated the group leader’s
“accessibility, positive attitude, and ability to handle any situation that [arose].”
In another message, she said she thought at one point they had run into a “brick
wall” in adapting the school environment around Adam — but she was
“impressed” at how the group leader had demonstrated the “tenacity and
creativity to nd the doorways in that wall.”

And yet, none of it seemed to really help Adam. Whatever force had rst spurred
them to the Emergency Room in 2005, it seemed like it was coming back. Nancy
wrote to Peter later that school year, in messages he would share with Andrew
Solomon: “[Adam] had a horrible night.... He cried in the bathroom for 45
minutes and missed his rst class.” Another message, a couple weeks later: “I am
hoping that he pulls together in time for school this af ernoon, but it is doubtful.
He has been sitting with his head to one side for over an hour doing nothing.”

As Nancy withdrew Adam from one class af er another that Spring, eventually her
son was only setting foot on school grounds for special events — helping the Tech
Club with their Newtown TV productions. The club remained one of the few
things that could still get Adam to leave his room.

That February, Adam had a medical checkup. The doctor recorded that Nancy’s
son was still diagnosed with Asperger’s and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and
that there was no treatment of any sort being provided for either condition,
scribbling “no meds, and no psych” on the form. There was another section, titled
“Development,” asking for “af er school activities” and “peer relations” —
nothing was written there, except “10th grade.”

March 12, 2008

Newtown School Board
Then, it happened.

The reported incident occurred on a Wednesday af ernoon, and it didn’t seem like
much at rst: the resource o cer for Newtown High School had been in a room
with the director of security, Mr. Novia, and a “most notorious” 15-year-old
student, who had been in trouble many times before. They were questioning him
about a bullying incident he was suspected to have been involved in, and he

498
wasn’t cooperating. He wouldn’t even sit down. According to the police report,
Richard Novia nally stood up, and shoved the teenager down onto a chair.

That was all that was alleged to have happened. It was all that needed to happen.

The Board of Education put Novia on administrative leave, e fective immediately,

while they decided what nal action to take. They scheduled a hearing with the
board for May 6th. Novia got an attorney, and prepared to ght for his job.

***
At the hearing — which was attended by a Newtown Bee reporter — Richard’s
attorney pointed out that the security expert had been with the school district for
f een years, and never before had any administrative action been taken against
him. His suspension was “unjusti able.” And meanwhile, the student he had
allegedly shoved was no boy scout; he had since been expelled, and there was a
“warrant outstanding for his arrest.”

In fact, it was heavily implied that this student was the very same who was behind
the bullying incident earlier in the year, when the video of the boy taped to the
chair made it to YouTube and Facebook. The school board members repeatedly
had to remind Novia’s attorney that the student in question was a minor, and was
not supposed to be identi ed publicly. The attorney countered by accusing the
district of “tolerating the student’s behavior” in not expelling him earlier, and said,
“Parents deserve to know what’s going on at the high school that caused this
incident to happen,” before he was nally silenced.

Near the end of the session, some testimonials were read, sent in by the
townspeople. Most of them extolled Richard’s job performance. Others, from
teachers, con rmed the worst about the juvenile delinquent he had supposedly
harmed.

The school board ruled that Mr. Novia should stay on unpaid leave for now, and
scheduled one more hearing — where his fate in Newtown would ultimately be
decided.

May 20, 2008

Reed Intermediate School — Newtown, Connecticut
They held the meeting behind closed doors, in the still-new school across from
Fair eld Hills. As the evening dragged on, anxious townspeople began to gather in
the library; only a handful at rst, but then a dozen, and a dozen more. They kept
coming, more than f y of them — former students, colleagues, parents, cops —
all turning out to show support for Mr. Novia.

499
In the private meeting, the atmosphere cannot have been friendly — in part
because the political winds had changed in the last six months; Evan “On Time,
On Budget” Pitko f, the superintendent whom Richard had worked with for the
last seven years, had just lef Newtown to go x up another district, in nearby
Trumble.

Pitko f had learned to trust Novia, and respected him. Pitko ’s replacement did
not. She was new in town, and intended to shake things up.

***
One of the persons circulating in the library crowd, just outside the doors, was
Nancy Lanza. Richard had been her son’s champion ever since middle school, af er
all; in a time when everything else in her son’s life had seemed to fall away, Mr.
Novia was there. He was there when her son was frozen in terror against the
hallway wall, to get him where he needed to go — and to talk him back out into
society, when he started to withdraw into his shell. And if Richard lost his
position as Head of Security, that meant the Tech Club would get a di ferent
adviser, too; the last pieces of stability in her son’s life would vanish all at once,
right when the end was almost in sight.

Nancy was the security director’s most ardent supporter. Some of the other
parents in the library were even under the impression that Nancy herself had
arranged the gathering; but she had simply posted it on Facebook, to spread the
word.

***
The doors nally opened, and as Mr. Novia and his attorney stepped out from the
executive session, former and current students, family, and friends swarmed to
greet him. His attorney said there was “nothing to say” about how the session
went, but smiled, “I’m not surprised by the turnout.”

There was a brief public-comment session. One of the rst to speak was Ryan
Lanza, having come from uinnipiac to stick up for his old Tech Club mentor.
He talked about how much Mr. Novia had taught him, and how the man had
since taken Adam under his wing. “My brother has always been a nerd,” he said
with love. “He still wears a pocket protector.” The tech club was for kids like him.

***
The verdict came soon af er. Novia’s contract with the school district was set to
lapse on June 30th, and the School Board announced that they were not going to
renew. He was through in Newtown.

500
Her paladin fallen, Nancy immediately withdrew Adam from all classes at
Newtown High School, and pulled him back into the pale yellow house. She told
family that there was no one lef at Newtown Schools that she could trust. And at
any rate, it was obvious that the attempt at mainstreaming had failed. It was time
for one more change of plans.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Landscapers did some work at the house that spring. One day, one of them — a
new member on the crew — needed to ask Nancy for her speci cations on
redesigning the garden. He went to the front door, and rang the doorbell; the next
thing he knew, he was getting an earful. Nancy told him her son couldn’t tolerate
loud, sudden noises — they made him “angry.” That was why there were rules: get
her approval in advance before using any leaf blowers or loud equipment. Don’t
come inside the house; if you need to speak to her, she’ll come outside. And never,
ever ring the doorbell; just call her.

Adam stayed up in his room, while the remainder of the school year ticked by
without him. He played old video games, and returned to World of Warcra , and
roamed the internet. Blarvink found himself back at GameFAQs — posting in the
forum for an old Super Nintendo adaptation of Romance of III Kingdoms, set as a
military strategy game. He posted a topic, “Something hilarious just happened”,
about how one side in his game was able to hold o f the entire enemy force with
just one soldier in a castle, when the invading army ran out of rice and starved.
“That is one hard-core soldier.”

The Newtown Bee published its annual edition with the school district’s honor
roll in June. Adam was listed under the 10th grade, and also as having earned a
“Latin Award — Summa Cum Laude.”

***
Downstairs, Nancy was making phone calls. She had brie y found herself
considering homeschooling her son again, but she was concerned that it wouldn’t
look good on college applications. So she thought of a better way, a Plan C: she
would enroll him now at Western Connecticut State University, where he could
earn credits toward his high school diploma.

It’d be just one town over, in Danbury. It might not be a perfect x — there
would be 5,000 strangers there as undergraduates, and the classes would be
tougher than NHS had been — but at least they’d nally be getting Adam away
from the K-12 public school environment entirely. At the beginning of the 10th
grade, he had been determined to walk “through that front door” at NHS, but
now, he wanted never to go back. Nancy wanted the same.

501
May 21, 2008
Western Connecticut State University — Danbury, Connecticut
Nancy took her son over to the campus in the af ernoon. He went into a room at
the Testing Center, and answered some math problems to ensure he met the
Algebra pre-reqs for the courses she was signing him up for. The exam took him 9
minutes, and then the ACCUPLACER form printed out his score: 95.9 (which
put him in the General Education Level). Then he had to ll out a few questions
(likely just clicking multiple-choice radio buttons). Standard stu f.

W English the first language you learned? Y

W there any reason you feel the tests were not accurate? No

Gender? I choose not to answer

How do you describe yoursel ? I choose not to answer

Meanwhile, Nancy was lling out a form, under the heading PERMISSION FOR
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO REGISTER. She listed the names of people at
Newtown High School that the college could contact if they needed to verify
anything. She also picked up a schedule for WCSU’s summer term, set to begin
within days.

Adam emerged from the Testing Center, and they went to get his new student ID.
The camera that day captured Adam looking more frightened than ever: his eyes
are wide-open, the picture of a "deer-in-headlights." Even seen just from the neck-
up, he is visibly gaunt, with barely any esh sof ening the edges of his throat,
where his neck emerges from his hooded sweatshirt.

For his summer classes, Adam wanted to take two computer courses: Website
Production and Visual BASIC (a programming language). Nancy would drive
him to the campus for every class day, and take him back home af er.

***
Sometime during the WCSU application process, Nancy got in touch with Dr.
Fox. According to billing records, Fox hadn’t seen her son since the summer of
2007 — when the “mainstream” plan started, and they shed all pretense of
psychiatric care. But now, in October 2008, there was one, last payment: a single
blip in the data, af er more than a year of inactivity. Most likely, WCSU just
needed his sign-o f on the new IEP.

502
Dr. Fox would go on practicing psychiatry in the area, but he never saw Nancy or
Adam again. Still, in a way, he would continue to hold signi cant dominion over a
piece of their lives; Dr. Fox had been the only psychiatrist to have ever treated
Adam Lanza on any regular basis, and his records were all centralized in a single
le cabinet, at his o ce in Brook eld. He had never shared copies with anyone.

***
The Newtown High School yearbook came out, and again, Adam’s name was
without a photo. But he did appear in the af er-school club section, nestled in the
half-page group photo of the Tech Club: it shows about a dozen club members
standing in a semicircle, in a locker-lined hallway of the school. Most everyone in
the picture is smiling, a few hamming it up... and then there is Adam, staring
meekly into the middle distance, almost comical in his oversized clothing.

With the school year coming to a close, one of the boys in the picture was still
playing Adam’s Gamecube at home; during one session, his mother asked him
when he was going to return the console to its owner. “Mom, I can’t!” he yelled
back. “No one knows where he is!”

503
 52. Law of the Land

February 2, 2008
Las Vegas Convention Center
The NSSF held 2008’s SHOT show in Vegas, but as always, many of the industry
reps in attendance were familiar faces from back home, in Connecticut’s “Gun
Valley.” This year, the Sturm & Ruger booth housed something really special: a
brand new con guration for their famous Mini-14 ri e. And it was no minor
change; Bill Ruger — the man who in 1989 had signed the letter urging limits on
magazine size as the key to e fective gun control — had died six years before, and it
seemed some of his philosophy had gone with him.

For decades, the Mini-14s coming down the assembly line at Ruger’s factory all
had wooden stocks, and a short magazine that held only ve rounds. Plenty for
anyone sniping varmints on the ranch. But the model unveiled at the SHOT show
that year came standard with two 20-round magazines. And it had a black,
synthetic stock. In fact, the only non-black surface found anywhere on the gun
was the “grip cap” on the underside: there, embedded, was a shining, gold-colored
National Ri e Association medallion. Sturm & Ruger president Stephen Sanetti
— who himself wrote the "Bill Ruger letter" in 1989, saying that AR-15s were a
“military look-a-like” and “this is not Sturm, Ruger’s market” — now said, “It is
very important that we, as an industry and as individuals, support the e forts of
the NRA ILA as they work to protect our Second Amendment rights. A portion
of the sales from each Special Edition NRA Mini-14 will go to the NRA ILA to
support their ongoing e forts.”

A month later, Sanetti announced he was leaving Ruger. He had started his career
at the company in the 1970’s, defending them from product liability lawsuits, and
more recently, he was the mastermind of the company’s strategy to counter the
municipal suits of the late 1990s. That war was over, and he had helped win it for
the gun industry. Now, he was headed to Newtown, as the new President of the
National Shooting Sports Foundation.

504
April 6, 2008
San Francisco, California
At a private fundraising event, presidential candidate Barack Obama was holding
a Q&A session. Someone asked him which areas of the country his campaign was
going to have to work hardest to win; he gave a lengthy answer, explaining how
the collapse of manufacturing had impacted small towns in places like Ohio and
Pennsylvania over generations, and that voters there were going to be skeptical
about government promises of universal health care. But the part of his reply that
would make headlines that week came at the very end:

...the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.
And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush
administration, and each successive administration h said that
somehow these communiti are gonna regenerate and they have not. So
it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion
or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment a way to explain their
frustrations...

Obama’s description of gun owners (not to mention the religious) as “bitter”

sparked outrage, in the very states he was already acknowledging would be tough
for him to win. His campaign stumbled, badly.

May 16, 2008

Kentucky International Convention Center — Louisville,
Kentucky
A crowd of 66,229 gun owners, along with thousands of dealers and
manufacturers, were gathered for the NRA’s 137th Annual Meetings and Exhibits.
The theme that year was “Celebration of America’s Values.” One of the honored
guests was an executive from Ruger, who posed for photos with the head of the
NRA ILA as he handed the lobbyists a check for $125,000 — the rst donation
funded entirely from the sales of their Special Edition NRA Mini-14s.

With the arrival of another presidential election, the NRA was gearing up for war
once again. This time, they would do it mostly without the aid of their allies in
Newtown — at the NSSF’s 2007 meeting, their Board of Governors had voted to
dissolve the Heritage Fund. The war chest that beat the mayors, and dragged the
Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act over the line, had lasted ten years,
but now it had served its purpose.

505
The NRA was more than capable of lling the enthusiasm gap. They caste
Senator Obama as even more of a threat to freedom than Bill Clinton had been;
worse than Nazi-helmet-wearing storm-troopers. “Never in NRA’s history have we
faced a presidential candidate — and hundreds of candidates running for other
o ces — with such a deep-rooted hatred of rearm freedoms,” wrote Wayne
LaPierre to the NRA’s membership. Obama would be “the most anti-gun
candidate ever,” whose secret plan would be to ban all handguns, along with any
gun used for self or home defense. Period.

Obama’s actual stance on guns was less clear, but seemed to stop well short of
that; earlier in the campaign, from a church on Chicago’s South Side, he did
denounce an “epidemic of violence that’s sickening the soul of this nation.” He
had two proposals to address the problem: reinstate the federal Assault Weapons
Ban “and make it permanent,” and then close the Gun Show Loophole. At the
very least, he did seem intent to resume progressing down the path that the
Clinton administration had laid down eight years before — though of course,
hoping for better fortunes.

***
Despite all the guns on display at the NRA event, attendees were not actually
allowed to come to the convention center armed on that day. There were rows of
metal detectors at the entrance, and security was beefed up by the presence of the
Secret Service: a senator from Arizona was there to give a speech, and — unlike
Obama — he was already his party’s presumptive nominee, seeking to hold the
torch being handed o f by the outgoing Bush administration.

In his NRA speech, the senator from Arizona took a jab at another recent
statement Obama made, when Obama’s primary opponent said his “bitter
clingers” remark showed he was “out of touch.” In response, Obama had implied
she was being a hypocrite, acting “like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday,
packing a six-shooter.”

When Obama’s rival from Arizona recited that line, it was met with laughter from
the NRA audience. He added, “Someone should tell Senator Obama that ducks
are usually hunted with shotguns.”

While the NRA’s claims about Obama’s anti-gun agenda were based on thin
evidence, the di ference between Obama’s position on guns, and his opponent’s,
was evident in their voting records: the senator from Arizona had voted in favor
of the PLCAA in 2005. Obama had voted against it.

Even so, Obama’s opponent that year wasn’t quite the hero of the NRA, either:
while he had voted against the assault weapons ban in the '90s, he then voted to

506
close the gun show loophole. He had expressed support for “smart gun”
technology, and trigger locks. As a result, Wayne LaPierre seemed inclined to hold
back on supporting any candidate that year; he was considering simply going anti-
Obama.

As election night approached, however, and the polls stayed uncomfortably close,
Wayne relented, and the NRA threw the might of their Political Victory Fund
behind the senator from Arizona. His choice of Vice President, most of all, sealed
the deal: she was the Governor of Alaska, a proud hunter, and a lifetime member
of the NRA. Besides, the senator from Arizona was reliable where it counted; at
the time, the NRA’s primary objective was getting Washington D.C.’s gun ban
stricken down by the Supreme Court, and he was one of 55 senators — a majority
— who had just signed a “Friend of the Court” brief for that pending case,
formally arguing that D.C.’s handgun ban was, in light of the 2nd Amendment,
“unreasonable on its face,” and unconstitutional.

The NRA didn’t always get involved in presidential elections. It was Wayne’s call
to make; he had been the public face of the organization ever since Charlton
Heston had stepped down in 2003, at age 78 and in poor health, battling
Alzheimer’s disease.

Just a month before the 2008 convention, Heston had passed away. He did not
quite get to see it himself, but he had led his ock to the promised land.

June 26, 2008

United States Supreme Court — Washington, D.C.
The plainti f was a security guard in the nation's capital, where handguns had
been banned for 20 years. He carried a pistol when he was on the clock, protecting
a judicial building across from the Senate, but he wasn’t allowed to buy a
handgun of his own, to protect his apartment in the D.C. suburbs, across the
street from a notoriously dangerous public housing project.

He applied for a gun permit anyway, just to get the legal ball rolling, and sued
Washington D.C. on 2nd Amendment grounds when his application got rejected.

Though the NRA did not support it initially — seeing the security guard’s plight
essentially as competition for their own, similar case — once it became clear that
the Supreme Court was going to rule on Heller vs. District of Columbia, there was
no ignoring its signi cance: it would be the de ning court decision on private gun
ownership, the biggest rearm-related ruling in a generation. It would nally
settle the debate over what, exactly, the Second Amendment was really supposed
to protect.

507
The structure of the Amendment’s language was key to how the court would
interpret it:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,

the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Its phrasing was notoriously awkward; the court ruled that the rst clause was a
preface — it gave a reason (security of a free state) for enabling something
(militias). The actual right came in the operative clause, and was distinct: “The
right of the people to keep and bear arms” was protected, by itself. The ruling
justice even gave a rewording of the Second Amendment, as it might be written
today: “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Af er conducting a review of colonial history, to interpret the amendment’s key

terms in the way they were intended to be understood at the time, the court came
to their 5-4 decision — and the gun advocates’ prayers were answered. “Putting all
of these textual elements together, we nd that they guarantee the individual right
to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” the court declared.

The majority opinion then turned toward speci cs — what were “arms”? Exactly
what guns did Americans have an inalienable "right" to possess? Just muskets?

The court said “arms” meant the same thing it meant in the 18th century, and
cited a de nition from a 1771 dictionary: “any thing that a man wears for his
defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.”

This did not mean, as some “borderline frivolous” theories said, that only
weapons like those available in the 18th century were protected. “We do not
interpret constitutional rights that way,” the court reminded. Just as freedom of
speech is protected in modern forms of media, even though the founding fathers
may not have envisaged cable television or the internet, and just as police using
special cameras to scan heat signatures in a citizen’s home were still conducting a
“search” that would require a warrant, the right to bear arms extended to “all
instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at
the time of the founding.” Arming oneself with a gun meant “being armed and
ready for o fensive or defensive action in a case of con ict with another person.”

Heaving reached that point, it was then obvious that handguns would be
protected — that’s what Heller wanted to possess in his home, af er all. But if that
was the minimum protected... what was the maximum? A machine gun? A tank?
An atom bomb?

508
The question was partly answered by the prefatory clause, as it served to
“announce a purpose” — the guns in question were supposed to at least be
su cient to be deployed by a “well-regulated militia.” Therefor, there was still
another debate that the court had to settle: what was a “militia?”

Some gun-control advocates argued that it actually meant the military, and thus
the 2nd Amendment did not guarantee individual rights af er all; the court found
otherwise. It all came down to preventing the federal government from being able
to suppress dissent — even a rebellion, if it came to that — in the states:

The “militia” comprised all mal physically capable of acting in concert

for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal
Government would disarm the people in order to disable th citizens’
militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule.
The response w to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of
individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia
would be preserved.

Still, although the “citizen militia’s” access to repower was protected so that they
could ght back against a federal army, this did not, in the court’s reading, ensure
civilian access to military weaponry, or any other already-restricted class of
rearms. “The term [arms] was applied, then as now, to weapons that were not
speci cally designed for military use and were not employed in a military
capacity,” the court ruled.

Militias were not standing armies, but just regular citizens with everyday, lawful
guns — thus, "arms" simply meant whatever rearms they would have on-hand,
for whatever legitimate non-military purpose they intended, be it hunting animals
or protecting their property: the shotgun behind the front door. “It may well be
true today that a militia, to be as e fective as militias in the 18th century, would
require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large,” the court
conceded. “Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful
against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments
have limited the degree of t between the prefatory clause and the protected right
cannot change our interpretation of the right.”

The ruling didn’t necessarily mean the end of gun control legislation; the
Supreme Court even explicitly lef some avenues open:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right not unlimited... The
Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding
prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,
or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive plac such

509
 schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and
qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

Finally, that the right to bear arms was constitutionally protected did not mean
that it was without consequence. “We are aware of the problem of handgun
violence in this country,” the court wrote, “and we take seriously the concerns
raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a
solution.” These groups had options, the court had hinted — but certain things
were now o f the table, speci cally, “the absolute prohibition of handguns held
and used for self-defense in the home”:

Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment outmoded in a

society where our standing army the pride of our Nation, where well-
trained police forc provide personal security, and where gun violence
a serio problem. That perhaps debatable, but what not debatable
that it not the role of th Court to pronounce the Second
Amendment extinct.

With that, the security guard had a right to stay armed af er his shif was over, and
everyone else had the right to keep a gun at home, too. It was in the constitution
— and in a sense, always had been. It did not matter how many tragedies it cost,
or how powerful the rearms grew to be. Nothing anyone could do, short of
repealing the second entry in the Bill of Rights, was ever going to take away
America’s guns.

***
It would take some time for the gravity of the Heller ruling to sink in, and so gun
control did not become a central campaign issue that year, despite the NRA’s
e forts. The race was more about the sort of topics Senator Obama had so
controversially said were making the Midwest “bitter,” and about bringing
“change” to Washington af er eight years of Bush. Others attributed the nal
outcome more to the status of the Iraq war, or simply race, or — af er a nancial
meltdown began with the collapse of Bear Stearns in the spring, and exploded
into a big bailout in the fall — the apocalyptic state of the economy.

That November, the nation elected Barack Obama president. Gun sales began to
rise at an astonishing rate.

510
 53. Pale Yellow House

August 2008
Pediatrician’s O ce, Fair eld County
Adam stepped onto the scale. 112 pounds. His height had increased to just under
5’10, which meant his Body Mass Index was only at about 16; he was not
diagnosed with Anorexia (and never would be) — but less-malnourished 16-year-
olds of en are.

The doctor did note that his patient was reporting being constipated, and that he
had a history of this. (The Child Advocate would later observe that Adam’s
constipation was “possibly linked to his weight and nutrition issues.”) The doctor
handed Nancy a prescription for some laxatives.

***
Adam got a A and an A- in his summer classes at WCSU. There’s no indication
that anything noteworthy happened in either one. These classes were held in the
evening, in a building out on the western campus, and it seems that no one
particularly noticed he was there. To him, that was ideal.

With the fall term approaching, Nancy assembled the Planning and Placement
Team, and Adam’s IEP was updated for the 11th grade, again at WCSU: Nancy had
registered him for Data Modeling, and Introduction to Ethical Theory. Again, he
was to be provided up to 10 hours of tutoring a week, and a shortened school day,
to match the college’s schedule. His primary disability was still registered as
“Other Health Impaired.”

36 Yogananda Street — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

One night in August, Nancy must have noticed that her son was miserable. That
was nothing new, but this time, she had already been dwelling on some of her life
choices, and took it especially hard — she was about to turn 48 years old, and had

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sacri ced so much for her son, from the pain of bringing him into the world, to
dropping her career to take care of him, and then moving, and changing
everything, again and again... and for what? For all her hard work, she was getting
the impression that the boy she was raising now regretted even being born.

Nancy made her feelings known to her son, and in response, Adam seems to have
avoided answering the question — whether he regretted being born — and told
his mother that regrets were irrelevant in life anyway. This comment, or one like
it, set o f an argument — one that still wasn’t resolved when Adam went back
upstairs to his room.

Later that night, at 11:25pm, Nancy got an email from her son:

You do not seem to understand that I was

attempting to comfort you with what I consider to
be a maxim with which to live. You unfortunately
probably still do not understand what I mean. As
a disclaimer: I type nothing in this that is in a
tone that is condescending, vindictive,
malicious, snide, malignant, or any synonym that
you can think of. I mean well.

If you believe that you wasted your life, as you

seem to have insinuated, you will gain nothing
from regretting it and will only depress
yourself; you cannot change anything from the
past. There is something that I can assure you of
that will always be true: it does not matter if
you live for the next one year, five years, ten
years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years,
fifty years or even 100 years; the day before you
die you will regret ever worrying about your life
instead of thinking of what you want to do.

Every new year that you do live, you will regret

not having started anything that you wanted to do
the year prior, only regretting the past more.
What I mean is that you should think of what you
want to do today; not starting next year or next
month, but today. Thinking that you are not going
to be able to do anything in the future will only
ensure that fate. Also thinking that you are too
“old” is going to ensure the same fate.

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 It is not as though I mean that you are homeless
and begging; I would spend my life savings to
prevent that out of obligation for what you have
done for me. My personality is merely inherently
unmoving; I will not be upset over something that
you cannot change. And you should not be upset
either. What you should do is think about what
you want to do.

It is not clear what he meant by “life savings.” He had never worked a day in his
life.

He ended his message to his mother by revealing that he had secretly done
something nice for her, two weeks before: bought some RAM online for her
laptop, and installed it, doubling the unit’s memory “without even saying
anything until now.” He brought it up for a reason: “I do not try to avoid doing
anything for you as you seem to think. I am glad that I was born, and I appreciate
your having taken care of me.” As for the PC upgrade, “It is not my fault if you
have not detected as much of an increase in speed as I would have liked, however; I
blame its outdated processor.”

***
Nancy wrote back, an hour af er midnight:

I appreciate your effort to be a comfort to me. I

apologize if I seemed angry or antagonistic. I
was simply over emotional and as it is often the
case worrying about the future. I admit that I
have been feeling a bit overwhelmed by my
circumstances lately, but in no way do I regret
having raised two wonderful children. I have high
hopes for you both and will consider my life a
success if you and Ryan live happy and productive
lives.

There are a few things that I do regret... one of

the biggest is that I dropped out of college,
believing it to be more important to help your
father get through college. Financially, it was
impossible for us to afford a college education
for both of us, and it seemed more important that
he receive a diploma. In some ways I regret
leaving the workforce as it has severely limited
my prospects for the future, but again, it was a

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decision that I made to take more responsibility
for the house and the children, and to allow your
father to concentrate on his career. I do feel
that I was able to be a better mother and have
been able to put great effort into raising you
and your brother, so that regret is mitigated in
that respect. On the occasion that Ryan or you
show some appreciation for my efforts, I feel
completely justified in that choice and dually
rewarded.

I know that it is harder for you to show

appreciation, and that it does not come as a
natural response. I really do not want you to
feel obligated in that way. I do not expect any
help, financial or otherwise, from you or your
brother, and would not accept it if it were
offered. I am certain that I will not be homeless
or begging on a street corner, as your father is
obligated by law and morality to see that my 30
years of service and sacrifice are compensated
for. He has assured me that I will live a
comfortable life and that my health expenses are
covered. He is an honorable man. I am grateful
that I was married to someone who honors his
responsibilities. He has also taking [sic]
responsibility to provide a college education for
both you and your brother, so that neither of you
will have to struggle and sacrifice as we did.

If you choose to, you will emerge from college

with a master’s degree of your choice, debt free,
to pursue any career in life that you wish. When
I think of what I would like to do for the
future, I think I would like to get my college
degree first. I just thought of that tonight, as
a direct result of my conversation with you. I
think it would be possible as I dropped out only
a year shy of my degree, and it seems as I might
be spending quite a bit of time on campus waiting
for you to take classes, so why not take
advantage of that?! I suppose I could take
classes at the same time you are taking classes.
I agree with you when you say that I should try

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 to think positively of the future and what I want
to do today.

Nancy then brought up something that seems to explain some of the solemn
atmosphere permeating their correspondence:

There is nothing that I can do about my

diagnosis, and I do try to be as healthy as I
can, despite the prognosis. I am sure that you
noticed that I exercise regularly and do my best
to stay in good shape. It’s not like I have the
attitude that since I will be crippled anyway I
may as well give up and get fat and sedentary
now. I am working hard to stay as healthy as I
can, for as long as I can.

Further in the message, Nancy returned to what had really hurt her feelings, and
assured her son that now all was OK:

I would like you to know that no matter what, I

am very proud of the person you are. I have no
preconceived notion of how you should react or
respond. I know that you tend to be more reserved
and less emotional and I do not perceive that as
condescending, malignant, or callous. You are
pragmatic and stoical. These are fine attributes.
I am glad to know that you are glad to be born
and appreciate being taken care of. I love you
very much and am more than happy to take care of
you in any way I can. I suppose I have felt that
you didn’t even notice how hard I try to make
things as tolerable as possible for you and that
has made me feel sad in a way. I am much happier
now, knowing that you do not despise me for
bringing you into this world. Above all, I want
you to be happy, no matter what you choose to do.

She assured her son that she did indeed notice the increased speed on her laptop
— “I was able to get baseball scores for all the games in a split second” — and she
added, “You should let me know when you do thoughtful things so that you can
get credit!” Finally, she took ownership of the misunderstanding: “Thank you for
taking the time to send me this email. I now understand your motive and
meaning, and I truly appreciate it!"

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The exchange took place in the middle of the night; most likely, she was home at
the time (she kept her laptop in the den, downstairs.) As Nancy would later
confess to family back in Kingston, this had become the norm in the house at 36
Yogananda, when it wasn’t a school day: Adam staying in his room all day and
night, not even speaking to her. When he wanted to transmit a message, he would
send her an email — the signal traveling all the way across Newtown to Charter
Cable, and bouncing all the way back to the pale yellow house, one oor down.
When things were bad, that was preferable to the alternative: opening the
bedroom door, at the top of the stairs.

Fall 2008
Newport, Rhode Island
There was a guy named Russ who started frequenting My Place, around then. He
had a home up in Rhode Island, and he owned a boat. When his birthday came
that year, he invited all his friends from Newtown up to go sailing; later, when he
uploaded the pictures to Facebook, he tagged his friend Nancy. She was in several
of them, smiling under the clear blue sky: she looked serene, wearing a paisley silk
blouse with jewel earrings, the wind blowing in her layered ash-blonde hair, and a
glass of white wine in her hand. “That’s the kind of person she was,” Russ would
say of the photos he took. “She loved to celebrate the moment.” He had gotten to
know that side of her from the karaoke nights at My Place, when she would
always be ready to belt out her favorite Beatles tune: “Here, There, and
Everywhere.”

September 23, 2008

Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences — Kauhajoki, Finland
It had already seemed like the most random place on the globe for the
phenomenon to appear — and yet, ten months af er the YouTube shooter struck,
it happened again: another Columbine wannabe in Finland, leaving gun-toting
sel es and violent threats across the internet in the days before he nally laid siege
to his school. His IRC Galleria account had all the now-standard shooter tropes:
the shooter dressed in black; the shooter pointing the gun at the camera; the
shooter posing in a backwards ball cap. He had a YouTube channel, too, with one
clip showing his target practice sessions under the title “my walther p22” — same
as the gun the Virginia Tech shooter had ordered online. On the morning of the
shooting, he posted his nal video, entitled “Goodbye” — it showed him
emptying a clip at a gun range, and then waving farewell.

He had taken notice of his predecessor at Jokela, naturally. He bought his gun
from the same gun store. Sometimes, in the months before the attack, he got
drunk and asked people on the street, “Humanity is overrated, isn’t it?” He had

516
even improved on the Jokela plan — he brought fuel that he was actually able to
ignite. When emergency services arrived, just as he took his own life, parts of the
school were in ames.

The shooter’s friends knew that he su fered from anxiety and depression, and that
he was obsessed with school shooters. They noticed that he was xated on the
Virginia Tech gunman, in particular, and the videos the young man from Harper
Hall lmed of himself. He used to bring them up on his smartphone. “He told us
to have a look at [the videos] and said, ‘Isn’t it great?’”

November 2008
Google UK Headquarters — London
The BBC’s investigative teams ran a story on the Six O’Clock news: with some
simple searches, they had found YouTube to be full of videos “glorifying the
Columbine High School Killers,” and they wanted Google — YouTube’s parent
company — to give an explanation.

A spokesman for Google said that the site did have a policy against such content;
if “Columbine videos” were reported to them, the company would take them
down. But this mattered little; there was no e fective way to preempt someone
from uploading the same clips all over again — not with 13 hours of footage
getting uploaded to the website every minute, a rate that increased every year. At
the same time, there were free speech issues that YouTube wasn’t excited to get
near; were they supposed to ban all videos covering the topic of Columbine? Or
for all mass shootings? Did they only target the videos that “glori ed” school
shootings? Who was to say which videos did, and which ones were, say, tributes to
the victims?

The BBC located one of the users who was hosting a video featuring the
Columbine killers — he was a teenager from North England, who stammered that
he “in no way meant” to cast the gunmen in a heroic light; he only “wanted to let
people see behind the killers and see they were real people.”

Other clips online were not so ambiguous; one was just a music video, showing
news footage of a Columbine victim, lying motionless on the concrete walkway
outside the commons. The boy’s father, back in Colorado, told the BBC
“YouTube should maintain a certain degree of morality. [...] This is the type of
thing that our culture promotes.”

In the ensuing controversy, YouTube appeared to take the heavy-handed

approach. “We do not tolerate videos that glorify school shootings and have
removed the videos that fall into that category,” Google UK’s head of

517
communications told the BBC. Soon, videos showing the Columbine shooters —
or the Jokela shooter, or any of their ilk — were disappearing from the site. It
wasn’t going to last, as the spokesman had explained, but at least with the arrival
of 2009, for a brief moment, YouTube’s cult of Columbine fell quiet.

Western Connecticut State University

Adam got a “W” in his Data Modeling course: Withdrew from class. “Students
will design and implement a database application working from the E R modeling
stage through to the actual implementation,” the course description had read, but
apparently, it wasn’t for him. Adam ditched the textbooks in his bedroom closet.

He nished his Ethical Theory class. The basics: Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche,
Hobbes. That course brought him onto the campus proper — during the day,
with the crowds. The lectures were held in White Hall, an old building that was
once Danbury’s high school. He earned a C.

Nancy would be waiting in the parking lot every af ernoon, to drive her son
home. But sometimes, when class ended, he didn’t show up. She would go
looking around campus, and then nd him in the library: on one of the
computers, on the internet, having skipped a class entirely. He already spent all
night online at home, and when classes forced him to leave, sometimes he would
just look for the nearest portal back.

***
Nancy sent Peter an update later that year, indicating a change in the environment
at the top of the stairs. “Adam had a rough night. He moved EVERYTHING out
of his room last night. He only kept his bed and wardrobe cabinet.”

***
The Columbine forum was staying up-to-date with their conversation topics,
posting back and forth about President Obama’s sta f nominations, and gun
control, and wondering what would be on one Columbine killer or the other’s
Facebook pro le. Browsing through the topics, Adam noticed that in some of the
ones sharing “tribute videos” from YouTube, now there were only dead links. But
he had gotten diligent about saving copies of videos to his hard drive, for just that
reason. He could still watch the clips lef behind by the two Finland shooters,
whenever he wanted.

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November 12, 2008
Law O ces of Gary Oberst — Norwalk, Connecticut
Nancy and Peter Lanza’s marriage lasted 27 years. For the last seven, they had been
separated. But that fall of 2008, Nancy nally decided to make it o cial: she
signed the divorce papers on November 3rd, and a week later, Peter was served.
Nancy’s lawyer declared, in the typical phrasing of divorce proceedings, “The
marriage has broken down irretrievably and there is no possibility of getting back
together.”

It would be what they call a “no fault” divorce — they cared too much about their
sons to ght each other, and they had both moved on romantically. But even so,
the process would take months of court dates, with settlement terms going back
and forth. And although their older son was all grown up, and thus hardly
mentioned in the documents, Adam was still a minor.

As the terms of the nal agreement came into view, both Nancy and Peter would
acknowledge, as parents, “the obligation to consult and discuss with each other
major decisions a fecting the minor child’s best interests,” from Adam’s schooling
to his “general welfare.” They agreed to resolve any future disagreements about
his care between each other — but, as had been the case informally before,
“Mother shall make all decisions with respect to the minor child af er having
consulted with the Father.” The power structure in Adam’s universe became
locked in place, and Nancy would always be at the center.

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 54. Travis

February 16, 2009

Rock Rimmon Road — Stamford, Connecticut
There was a woman named Sandy who lived with her pet chimpanzee, in a large
house at the north end of Stamford. The animal was well-behaved, most of the
time — by the standards of his species, especially. But that morning, something
wasn’t right. Sandy could tell.

She had a remarkably close connection with her pet, having raised him more like
her son. In fact, the whole reason she had decided to buy a chimp in the rst place,
back in 1995, was because her daughter, her only child, had just gotten married,
and up and moved away; when the animal breeders nally called Sandy, to say that
their captive mother chimp had given birth, they told her, “Your baby has arrived.
It’s a boy.”

Sandy brought the breeders $50,000, and brought the baby chimp home to
Stamford, swaddled in a blanket. She named the animal “Travis” — af er her
favorite country singer, Travis Tritt. And the chimp was so young, that Sandy —
her face, her scent — was imprinted on him. In a way, she really was Travis’s
mother.

Travis had an almost human upbringing; Sandy potty trained him, and brushed
his teeth for him — eventually he learned to do it himself — and she bought a
whole wardrobe of human clothes to dress him in, as she then did, every morning.
She served him oatmeal, which he ate at the breakfast table, with a spoon. Her
husband taught Travis how to ride a tricycle — and when the ape got bigger, the
riding lawn mower. In his bedroom, Travis would use a computer to browse
photos online, and he liked to watch baseball on TV. He even knew how to
change the channels. (Sometimes he would demonstrate his pro ciency with the
remote when Sandy was on the phone, cranking up the volume to annoy her, and
hooting in delight when she got peeved.) Travis had his own bed, in his room, but

520
on most nights, he would get in bed with Sandy, slumbering alongside her and her
husband.

The couple owned a tow-truck business in Stamford, which grew to be quite

successful. Travis became their mascot —a local celebrity. Sometimes, when a car
broke down in Stamford, and the driver called Sandy’s towing service, the truck
would arrive with Travis in the passenger seat, waving hello. His image was
painted on the sides of their trucks, and the crew were used to seeing him scamper
around the depot during shif change. Everyone loved him.

In her o f-time, Sandy took him everywhere, and they were a common sight
around Stamford: the lady in the Corvette with the chimp sitting shotgun, his
black fur-covered arm draped casually out the window. Sometimes, people could
swear they actually saw Travis driving the car, by himself; Sandy said their eyes did
not deceive them. “He took o f with the car a couple of times.”

She spent a fortune just to feed him. If Travis heard the ice cream truck driving by,
he would practically do ips. Sometimes, Sandy took him to her favorite Italian
restaurant, and read him the menu; his favorites were let mignon and lobster tail.
At home, Sandy’s husband would share a glass of wine with Travis af er dinner,
the animal sipping daintily from a long-stemmed wine glass.

***
One day in 2000, Sandy’s daughter had been driving late at night, and fell asleep at
the wheel. She went o f the road, struck a tree, and died. The loss broke Sandy’s
spirit. Af er that, Travis was her only child.

***
There had been one incident before, when Sandy lost control of her “son.” It
happened in 2003; the family had been watching a baseball game together on TV,
and when it ended, Sandy said she needed to pick something up from the tow
shop. So they all loaded up into their SUV, and headed south through downtown
Stamford.

They were stopped at a red light when an unknown pedestrian, for some reason,
apparently saw Travis, and tossed an empty drink container at him, through the
open window.

Travis let out a grunt, unbuckled the seat belt he was wearing, got out of the SUV,
and started roaming around the street, apparently hunting for the perpetrator.
The bad guy got away, but Travis had escaped Sandy’s custody, and he seemed to
enjoy the chaos it wrought. He started jumping around everywhere, and running

521
from the cops like it was a game. It took them forever to get him back in the
vehicle, and back home. His antics caused a tra c jam that tied up the whole city.

***
Nobody got hurt, was the good news. But the incident changed everything for the
family. An animal control o cer, af er consulting with primatologists, contacted
Sandy with a reality check: Travis was now an adult. And there was a reason all the
chimps you see in movies are prepubescent: adult chimps are known to be
unpredictable — sometimes, violent. And they are extremely strong. Travis might
live for another forty years, and Sandy was already in middle age. The situation
was not sustainable.

A woman who owned a primate sanctuary in Kentucky contacted Sandy, begging

to let her take Travis. Sandy was con icted, trying to gure out what was best for
her beloved companion. She ultimately said no; she told the sanctuary that Travis
had to stay with her, because he was not normal. “He can’t live with other chimps.
He can’t live without me.”

Sandy even brought up the issue with the mayor of Stamford himself, or at least
she would claim she did. She said she was driving around with Travis shortly af er
the incident in the intersection, and passed by the mayor’s home. He was outside,
and Sandy stopped to chat. “He just said, ‘San, do me a favor? Don’t let him get
out again,’” Sandy remembers. She would have to keep Travis locked up, the
mayor added, because, “if he got loose again, they were going to shoot him.”

The mayor would deny this conversation ever happened (though he con rms he
had other chats with Sandy on occasion over the years). Either way, soon af er, she
stopped letting Travis out of the house, and stopped taking him for car rides. She
and her husband renovated the whole rear side of the house, constructing a sturdy
steel cage around Travis’s bedroom, with a heavy, lockable door to the hall, and
another door that Travis could slide open, to access his new enclosure in the
backyard.

Sandy and her husband mostly stayed home af er that, when they weren’t
working. They couldn’t take Travis with them anymore, and they didn’t like to
leave him without any company.

A few years later, Sandy’s husband suddenly died of stomach cancer. When Sandy
came home from the hospital alone, Travis was inconsolable, picking up a framed
photo of his father- gure o f of the wall, and holding it to his heart. Sandy was
just as shaken, and to sooth her grief, Travis would brush her hair for her while she
sat on the couch, weeping.

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It was to be just the two of them in the house af er that; as the years passed, Sandy
became almost a recluse. Travis continued to grow.

***
Behind the scenes, Connecticut was still trying to gure out what it could do to
resolve the situation. Late in 2008, a biologist from DEEP (Department of Energy
and Environmental Protection) wrote a memorandum to her supervisors. She
wanted to emphasize the danger of the situation out on Rock Rimmon Road:

Subject: Travis the chimpanzee

Importance: HIGH

The issue of the private ownership of Travis

continues to be a concern as to public safety.
...I’m afraid if he feels threatened or if
someone enters his territory, he could seriously
hurt someone. ...it has not been determined if
the enclosure is strong enough to secure the
animal. ...[Connecticut law] prohibits the
possession of the primate weighing more than 50
pounds. Travis does not meet the exemption, since
it’s over 50 pounds, and it has the potential to
inflict harm and danger.

The law she was referring to was passed in 2004 — the “50 pounds” language had
been inserted specifically to deal with Travis, the only animal in the state that it
would apply to — but Sandy had so far ignored the order to give up ownership of
her chimp, and the state had not been able to decide what it should do next.

The concerned biologist listed some options: the “friendliest” one would be to
have someone appraise the integrity of the enclosure, and certify it was strong
enough. But, that didn’t conform with the law: no primates over 50 pounds with
the potential to in ict harm and danger.

Another option was to send Sandy a letter advising her of her legal responsibility.
But it seemed likely that she would just ignore the letter, based on her past actions.

They could send an o cer out, to speak to Sandy. But that could set o f just the
sort of incident they were hoping to avert — “If an o cer just shows up, they may
be placing themselves in a dangerous situation."

A fourth option would be to have DEEP issue a permit, which would simply
make Sandy’s ownership of Travis legal. But that didn’t really solve the potential

523
danger either, and so the biologist felt it would be irresponsible to public safety,
“[because] we would just be condoning the activity.”

The biologist gave a nal option: “Have a quali ed veterinarian tranquilize and
remove the animal from the home.” To this, she added, “I would like to express
the urgency of addressing this issue: it is an accident waiting to happen.”

***
Sandy was trying to come up with options, too. Her husband had warned her, in
his last days, that Travis would be too much to handle alone, and urged her to
send their cherished pet to the sanctuary. Now, Sandy wrote the sanctuary a
message:

I live alone with Trav , we eat and sleep together but I am worried that
if something happens to me suddenly my husband what would
happen to Trav , therefore I have to try to do something before that
happens. I set up a trust fund for him but that’s not enough, he needs
someone to play with of h own kind and have the best most possible life
if I’m not here to care for him.

Sandy ended with a request to set up a meeting; but, she never sent the letter. She
lef it in a drawer, and instead decided, again, to confront the situation later.
There was still time. Travis was like anyone else — he had good days, and bad
days.

***
February 16th was a bad day.

The chimp had seemed “agitated” all morning, so Sandy put some Xanax in his
tea. It wasn’t the rst time she had done it. She frequently dosed him when he was
moody. (It is not known how she got the pills — but they were de nitely not
prescribed to a chimp.)

She fed him sh and chips for lunch that af ernoon, and some Carvel ice cream
cake. But he was still listless. He didn’t want to color, or pet his cat. Nothing on
the TV or the computer appealed to him.

Going about her household chores, Sandy went in to clean Travis’s room, leaving
her keys to the front door on the kitchen counter; when she came back out, the
keys were gone, and the front door was open. Travis had gotten out.

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He hadn’t lef the house in four years. If they saw him, the townspeople would
barely recognize Travis as the same nimble creature who had stopped tra c in
2003: he was 240 pounds now — morbidly obese for a chimp. And still
frighteningly strong; there was no guarantee that the iron gate at the end of the
driveway would actually keep him in, if he tested it.

Sandy picked up the phone, and called her friend Charla, who was also a longtime
employee of the towing company. Charla used to hang out with Travis in the
dispatch o ce when he was a baby, and she would still check in on him at home in
recent years, on the rare occasion Sandy was away. On the phone, Sandy told her
that Travis had gotten out, and was running from car to car with her keys,
apparently wanting to go for a drive somewhere; later, there would be some
dispute over whether Sandy was asking Charla for her help, as a friend, or telling
her to come over, as her boss. But in either case, Charla had a rapport with the
animal, and Sandy needed help.

Charla had just gotten a makeover, so her hair was di ferent than Travis had ever
seen it. And she was driving a di ferent car than normal. Sandy would later
speculate that when Charla arrived, Travis did not recognize her — he thought she
was a stranger. A threat. When she got out of the car, Charla was holding a plush
Elmo doll in front of her, to give to Travis as a present. Instead, Travis leapt onto
her, and began savagely ripping away pieces of her face.

Sandy was horri ed, and begged Travis to stop. She picked up a snow shovel from
the ground and starting hitting the ape with it, but he kept attacking. All three of
them were screaming. Charla tried to fend him away with her hands, but Travis
bit them o f. Sandy ran into the house, got a knife, and came and stabbed Travis
in the back. Travis kept on clawing at Charla. Sandy pulled the knife out and
stabbed him again, and again.

Finally, Travis stopped; he stood, turned around, and just stared her in the eye —
“He looked at me like, ‘Mom, what did you do?’”, she would later say. But then
he went right back at Charla.

Sandy ran to her car, locked herself inside, and called 9-1-1. In the call — audio of
which would shock audiences across the nation when it was played on the news —
Sandy pleads with the dispatcher to “send the police with a gun” while the sound
of Travis screeching continues ceaselessly in the background. “They got to shoot
him! Please! Please! Hurry! Hurry! Please! He’s eating her!”

***
The rst o cer arrived about ten minutes later. Coming to a stop in his squad car,
he saw Charla, alone, lying in the grass. Her face and her hands were gone.

525
Then, Travis appeared.

The ape slapped the car's driver-side mirror o f, and went over to the passenger-
side door, and tried to open it. Locked. He came back to the driver’s side, and
opened that one. The o cer inside, scrambling to draw his service Glock, looked
up and saw Travis baring his blood-stained teeth. He opened re.

Travis took four shots, and staggered backward. He turned, and ran on his
knuckles, back inside the house, leaving a trail of blood going up the porch and
into his bedroom, where he fell, reaching for his bedpost as he hit the oor, and
died.

The medics arrived soon af er, and they were able, barely, to save Charla’s life. But
they would never forget the carnage Travis had wrought. “What he did was
essentially what they do in the jungle,” one of them told Fox News. “This was a
beast taken out of his element and put into our world.”

526
 55. Undertow

January 28, 2009

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy opened her laptop and wrote a review online, for her friend the
dressmaker:

Excellent Service!

She is professional and courteous. Whether an

item of clothing needs a complicated overhaul or
a simple adjustment, her meticulous attention to
detail makes everything look great! As a bonus,
she showed me how to accessorize...

Nancy’s friend had given her a big makeover back when she and Peter rst split,
and now, with the o cial divorce proceedings underway, Nancy felt like it was
time for the next upgrade. And she knew she could amply a ford one: the alimony
paperwork was just being nalized, and she could count on a $10,000 payment
every two weeks. That was just to start: the total would increase year-over-year,
from an annual total of $240,000 in 2010, to $298,800 by 2015.

Peter was also, as Nancy had promised, going to “solely nance the cost of the
Children’s four year college educations and graduate school programs.” And,
nally, Peter agreed to purchase a car for their youngest son, “if and when he shall
wish to have one.”

Peter didn’t ght any of it; as his attorney remembers, “He was very upset that he
was getting divorced, but he didn’t want to take it out on anybody.” He would
come in for a consultation, and the lawyer would crunch some numbers and say,
“This is what your obligation is.”

“That’s not enough,” Peter would reply. “I want to do more.”

527
The Lanzas even agreed to peacefully share their season tickets at Fenway Park,
splitting up the nine home games evenly — “The parties will alternate attending
either ve games or four games each year.” If the Red Sox made the playo fs,
Nancy and Peter agreed to work that out game-by-game.

February 2009
Western Connecticut State University
Nancy again drove her son to every class. He was registered for two that spring:
American History Since 1877, and Introduction to German Speaking.

His history professor would remember that he “stood out” to her, “because he
was so much younger than the other students,” and he “looked like a scrawny 12
year old with oversized clothing.” He was always very quiet, and “would look
away when she would look in his direction.” During sessions when the students
were supposed to work with each other, he “tended not to interact.”

Her course focused on “the rise of industry, World War I, and the Civil Rights
movement.” When nals came around, the scrawny, quiet kid told her he was
planning to write his paper about the creation of the Federal Reserve, and its
history; that was perfectly ne, she thought, but when he later turned in the essay,
she was surprised to nd that he “went on a tangent [about] the US government
going o f the gold standard.” She found it especially odd because, in her
experience, “typically college students are not familiar with these ideas and do not
have such strong opinions.” It was rhetoric that the professor more associated
with “libertarians to the extreme,” who “embrace an array of conspiracy theories.”
(When investigators asked if she could clarify what she meant, the interviewing
o cer wrote that she “provided to me the example of Timothy McVeigh as being
someone who participates in this type of thinking.”)

Meanwhile, at 36 Yogananda, Nancy’s son had been reading a book by Ron Paul (a
more likely source for criticisms of the Fed). He would talk with his dad, the
accountant, about economic policy when they had weekend visits. And it was a
particularly vivid time to be studying the topic, with more foreclosure signs
appearing every day, all around them. The nation's economy was in ames.

***
A note in Nancy’s records shows that she told the IEP team that her son’s
schooling was going “much better” at WCSU. She recorded that he was not
receiving — and did not need — any psychiatric services.

At another checkup, his height had grown to fully 5’10, but he still weighed just
112 pounds. The provider checked o f boxes showing that “anticipatory guidance”

528
was provided to Nancy regarding the “issue areas” on the form; these included
“nutrition advice,” “siblings/peer relationship” and “internet safety.” The sections
for listing “peer relations” and “af er school activities” were lef blank. Under
“Assessment,” the provider lled in the bubble next to “well child/normal growth
and development.”

Perhaps the biggest change taking place at this time was something more personal:
Nancy’s son was working. He had apparently taken an internship with someone
his mother knew, xing up old computers. It was the same sort of stu f that the
Tech Club used to do to fund their operations; this employer wrote a letter
(apparently to the IEP team) that March, con rming they had hired the teen as an
“independent contractor,” and had observed that he was “cordial, professional,
and displayed expert attributes.”

“My Place” Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut

There was a regular at the bar who had known Nancy since about 2002. She had
told the man that she had two sons, and that one of them had “issues” of some
kind, but that he was smart — she said she decided to move him to college courses
because he was “brilliant” — and he enjoyed xing computers.

One night at the bar, Nancy’s friend mentioned that he was a Mac user, but found
that he wanted to be able to run some Windows programs on his machine when
he needed to. He knew it was possible to do that, but he couldn’t gure it out.
Nancy said don’t worry: her son can do it.

Not long af er, Nancy was pulling up outside her friend’s house, with her nervous-
looking son in the passenger seat. The man greeted them at the door, and shook
the meek 16-year-old’s hand. Then Nancy’s son took the computer into another
room, while Nancy stayed behind and chatted with her friend. She casually
mentioned that she was actually considering moving out of Newtown in a couple
years, once the real estate market brought 36 Yogananda’s mortgage back above
water. Maybe to Seattle. She said there was a special school there that would be
good for her son. He was trying to overcome his fears, and she wanted to help; she
said that during the drive over, he had “contemplated whether to shake hands or
not.” At least on this particular day, when the moment came, he was able to do it.

Af er about an hour, Nancy’s son came back into the room, and said he needed to
bring the Mac back home. He had more resources to work with at 36 Yogananda.
The man said sure, and they talked brie y about it. He noticed that Nancy’s son
was “very polite,” but also that he only spoke if you asked him a direct question.

***

529
A few nights later, Nancy showed up at My Place, and saw her friend drinking a
beer. Wait right there, she told him — she had his computer for him in her car, all
ready to go. When she handed it over, it came with a note: her son had
handwritten a meticulous list of the steps he took to x the problem, just in case
anything went wrong.

Thankful, Nancy’s friend said he wanted to pay for the service. But Nancy said no;
her son just enjoyed working with computers. He didn’t need money. She asked
him to write a letter of reference instead; they were starting to make college plans.

As neither were ever identi ed, it’s possible that Nancy’s bar friend was the same
“employer” who said he hired her son as an “independent contractor.” But if so,
that was a bit of an exaggeration; it was only one job.

April 3, 2009
American Civic Association — Binghamton, New York
The shooter parked at the rear entrance of the building. He pulled right up to the
doors, blocking them from opening with the front bumper of his car. Then he
went around to the front. He had taken classes there before, trying to improve his
English, but this time, he walked in wearing body armor, immediately drew two
handguns, and started shooting. He blasted a path to his old classroom — where
he had never been disruptive before at all — and shot everyone there, then
himself.

The police found that he had sent a letter to a television station, just before he
launched the attack. It appeared to be a list of paranoid hallucinations —
hampered by a poor grasp of the English language — detailing how the
“undercover police” were coming into his apartment when he was sleeping, or
were trying to get into tra c accidents with him, or were spreading rumors about
him around town:

I can not accepted my poor life. Before I cut my poor life I must oneself
get a judge job for make an impartial with undercover cop by at least
two people with me go to return to the dust of earth. Already impartial
now. Cop bring about th shooting, cop must responsible. And you have
a nice day.

...None of it made any sense.

***
Washington was consumed with draf ing a budget that week, trying to get the
spiraling economy under control. President Obama released a statement, saying

530
that he and his family were “shocked and deeply saddened to learn about the act
of senseless violence in Binghamton, NY, today.” They didn’t know all the facts
yet, but they were monitoring the situation. That was it, for the rst mass
shooting President Obama would have opportunity to respond to in o ce.

130 Morgan Street — Stamford, Connecticut

On April 22, 2009, Nancy’s son had his 17th birthday. He did not want to
celebrate it. He did, however, obtain his learner’s permit. And when Peter came to
pick him up for visits af er that — to go on a day hike, or to an arcade or a coin
show — he would o fer his son the wheel. Eventually, reluctantly, he took it; Peter
found that he drove much like he maneuvered the halls at NHS. His son was “the
most cautious driver on the face of the earth.”

Now and then, Peter wondered about Nancy. It would just be some little thing, a
behavior he noticed or something she said, but for all the time she spent with their
son, sometimes it seemed like her perception of him, and what his capabilities
were, didn’t quite match reality. Like one time recently, when Peter was dropping
their son back o f at 36 Yogananda af er a hiking trip; he was telling her how the
trip went, and mentioned that at one point their son had paused to tie his shoe.
Nancy suddenly interrupted the story, astonished: “He tied his own shoes?”

The divorce was grinding along, in the background. His son knew that he was
dating, but Peter decided not to introduce him to his new girlfriend. Peter gured
that would be “more than he could handle.”

He sensed that his son might be slipping away from him, like the distance
between them had somehow increased every time they saw each other. But Peter
chalked it up as adolescent angst; when he was a teenager himself, af er all, he too
had become alienated from his parents. Maybe it was just part of growing up.

Peter strove to see further down the path that his son was traveling, hoping to
anticipate where he would next need help. He was researching a program called
GRASP — Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership — hoping that
through its support group meetings, maybe one day, his son might even nd a
soulmate, and settle down. It wasn’t the most comprehensive plan, but it was
something. Time was running out. His son was going to be an adult soon.

April 28, 2009

Western Connecticut State University
Nancy came into the college registrar’s o ce. She said that her son was a student
there, for high school credits, and he needed to drop his German class. She handed

531
them a note he had written: his signed “drop request.”

The registrar printed out the revised course load, with the German class marked a
“W.” They scribbled a note on the o ce copy: “MOTHER CAME IN @
2:14pm.”

Nothing bad had happened in the class, as far as anyone could tell. The German
professor wouldn’t even remember Nancy’s son was there. His classmates did,
though; one, a young woman named Dot, would tell the Wall Street Journal a
familiar story: “We tried to say hi to him every so of en,” but “he just seemed
nervous.” Still, they were nice to him. He seemed to follow along in conversations
— “We’d joke, he’d laugh, that kind of thing.” Certainly, there was no bullying at
the college; they were all adults.

Another classmate, Gretchen, even invited him to come along with a group of
them to get beers af er class. “No, I can’t, I’m 17,” he responded.

“We were like ‘oh, okay,’ and then he went home.” Dot gured the age di ference
was why he was so quiet in the rst place. “He didn’t have anybody to connect
with because we were all older,” she says. “I assumed he was this super smart kid
who was just doing extra course work.”

They didn’t know he was getting close to failing the class — and that inside, he
was an emotional mess. Only his mother could sense that.

Nancy had sent Peter a series of emails that spring, documenting the rapid decline
in their son’s capacity to study: “He was exhausted and lethargic all day, and said
he was unable to concentrate and his homework isn’t done.” She continued, “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.”

Just before she headed over to WCSU to drop the course, she wrote, “He nally
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.”

Once again, as it had been throughout elementary school, language was the hurdle
he couldn’t clear. And with his years of Latin already done, they didn’t need the
foreign language credits anyway. It just wasn’t worth the stress.

Nancy, likely, was not concerned that her son might fall behind-schedule for
graduation. In fact, she had been going back and forth with the school district to
see what they could do to have the remaining goals met ahead of schedule.

532
 ***
Af er the term ended, and the German class was over, Dot was working her shif at
the local Gamestop store, when the quiet, “super-smart kid” came in. They
chatted, brie y, as she rang him up, both of them laughing about how hard the
class was. Dot said she failed one of the exams. He said he got a D on it.

She saw him come in a bunch of times af er that, an avid gamer. But they didn’t
talk. “He was one of those customers that came in, got his stu f and lef .”

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Beginning about this time — right around the end of the 2008-2009 school year
— anyone monitoring the tra c coming and going from the internet connection
at 36 Yogananda would have seen a sudden urry of activity; the shedding of one
identity, for another.

On May 2nd, a user visited the website NortheastShooters.com — advertised as

“New England’s premiere shooting forum,” it hosted such discussions as, “So is a
pistol-grip shotgun a handgun?”, and “Things I learned when shooting my new
AR-15”, as well as sub-forums on each New England state’s gun laws. One was for
Connecticut.

The visitor clicked to create a new pro le, and entered their new username:
Kaynbred.

It is not known if they ever posted anything to that forum, but they had plans for
the name. They went over to Glocktalk.com, and made a Kaynbred pro le there,
too. Then another, at Saiga.com — a site for owners (and aspiring owners) of an
exotic semi-automatic shotgun patterned o f the AK-47, with a detachable
magazine.

On June 6th, the user “Blarvink” logged back into the doodling website
2draw.com — it had been four years, almost to the day, since they uploaded “Elder
Crying Over Nuclear Weapon.” Now they reopened the picture of the Granny-
like gure in front of the mushroom cloud, and tried to erase it... but there didn’t
seem to be a function to do that. “Agh, I do not know how to delete this” he
commented below the drawing. So instead, he did the next best thing: clicked
“edit” to reopen the clumsy old doodle, clicked the paint bucket, the color white,
and then bleached the whole canvas away.

The next day, a Wikipedia user created a new pro le: “Kaynbred” didn’t change
any wiki pages, yet. But the pro le Blarvink was never used there again.

533
Summer 2009
Western Connecticut State University
Nancy did wind up taking a class that June: a Parenting Education Program
course, the same that Peter would complete per the terms of their divorce. It was
one af ernoon, held at a non-pro t Family Center in Stamford. They went on
di ferent days.

She only had to drive her son to one class that summer. Macroeconomics. But it
didn’t go well. He got frustrated, and eventually started refusing to go to class.
Nancy arranged for a tutor for him, but then he would refuse to leave the house
for the sessions.

She got an email from Peter, asking for a status update; he had been emailing his
son directly, but wasn’t getting any response. She wrote back:

He wouldn’t go to the tutor today. He seemed like

he would all along... I checked with him several
times during the day and he said he would go, and
even 10 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
its pointless, and he doesn’t even know what he
doesn’t know. I tried everything to assure him
and let him know it wouldn’t matter if he hadn’t
finished the work, or couldn’t finish, or didn’t
understand, and that’s what the tutor would
figure out... even if we go back and review
Algebra 1... but he couldn’t stop crying, so I
said we could try again next week.

She sent an update a few weeks later:

Something must have gone wrong with class today.

He wouldn’t speak on the way home and had his
hood completely covering his face. 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.” Did you look at the syllabus? Is it
possible he has already missed a deadline or not
been prepared for a quiz/test? I don’t know what
I should do. I don’t want to try to talk to him

534
 again because he sounds like he is on the verge
of crying.

Peter stepped in; his son had been talking lately about enrolling in college as a
regular full-time student next fall, meaning far more classes — and yet here he
was, falling apart with just one on his plate.

He wrote to his son:

As we discussed, we will be working on your study

skills in order to better prepare you for your
upcoming increased college class load. Teaching
post-graduate classes for the last 15 years makes
me qualified to coach you.

I have cc’d your mother on this email and asked

that she print it out and place it on the
counter. I will continue to include your mother
on these emails until such time that you
regularly check for, and respond to, emails from
me.

We will review your Math homework this weekend

when I am in Newtown. Please complete your Math
homework by Friday night at midnight. This
deadline is not arbitrary. Learning to set and
meet deadlines is a critical factor in time
management. Time management in turn, is a key
study skill. Over the years I had had a number of
students that have encountered problems because
they have under estimated the amount of time
required to complete their assignments. I find
that students who are good at time management
always do better than their less disciplined
peers. Let me know if you have any questions.

Dad.

His son passed the class, eventually. He earned a B, and three more credits. And
that, somehow, turned out to be enough.

June 25, 2009

Newtown High School

535
The NHS yearbook came out, and Nancy’s son was listed in the Juniors section,
once again under “not photographed.”

Next year, his name wouldn’t be there at all; it’s not clear exactly how, but the
course work he had been putting in at WCSU was enough for him to graduate a
year early. That had been his nal IEP.

The high school’s guidance counselor and special education teacher wrote a few
messages back and forth, getting things squared away for early graduation. The
student “did not wish to participate in any graduation activities,” but had
expressed that he “would like to receive his diploma and a handshake from the
principal.”

The Newtown sta f had to have felt some relief. It had practically been a war
between Nancy and the school district at times, but together, they managed to get
him through to the nish. Finally.

Back when Nancy had crossed this same milestone herself, she had been standing
in a giant "78," in the parking lot of Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston.
And although her son's path to the nish line had been much more circuitous
than her own, Nancy was proud of him for having made it, and surely felt some
relief for him. The tide that started pulling him out of the pale yellow house just
as soon as they moved in, coming back every fall, year af er year, was nally gone.
No more deadlines, no more class bells, no more crowded hallways. No IEPs, no
grades, no forced conversations. It would be up to him when he wanted to leave
36 Yogananda. He would still be a minor for another ten months, but as long as
his mother allowed it, he could do as he pleased.

Nancy asked her son what his plan was. His answer hadn’t changed since their
Depot Road days: he still wanted to be a soldier.

536
Part IV

Landfall

537
 56. The Void

August 4, 2009
Collier Township, Pennsylvania
The digital camera turned on. Its view nder lit up, showing a bedroom with
blank walls, and a full-length mirror — positioned at a slight angle, so that the
camera and its tripod didn’t show in the re ection.

Silence.

The camera wobbled.

A solitary, middle-aged man stepped into view, in the mirror's re ection. He

started speaking. “It is easy for me to hide from my emotions for one more day:
take a long drive in the car, listen to some music… daydream.”

His tone was confessional, but his expression was at. Nothing. “My objective is:
to be real and to learn to be emotional, and you know, to be able to emotionally
connect with people. Because when I’m ten to twenty years older than she is, you
know… she has to feel good about this thing.”

He wasn’t looking into his own re ection — he was matching the camera’s angle,
looking into the lens he saw in the mirror. It was to trick some people did, to
alleviate the tension that came with feeling like you were “on camera,” but while
still making eye contact with the viewer.

The man was an awkward, shy, sof ware developer, and he was recording the brief
clip of himself because he had recently attended a seminar, put on by a dating
guru who specialized in — as the silver-haired author had titled his book — How
to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35.

At 47, the man in the mirror talked about the hope that the seminar had given
him; when he heard that his chances to sleep with young women had not passed

538
him by — that in fact, “I have approximately 15 more years to be successful at this”
— he was astonished. “I didn’t realize I had that much time.” He ended the video
“I’m gonna post this, and see what comes back,” and then he uploaded the clip on
YouTube. Whatever reaction it originally received — if any — the internet has
since forgotten, but the point of the exercise was achieved: rather than attempting
live, face-to-face speech, just go online and interact. Communicate, but at a
remove.

Even while he was sitting in the seminar though, he wondered if there was
something wrong with him. And he realized that even if he really could achieve his
goals, he didn’t want to wait another 15 years. He soon gave up on meeting
anyone, young or old. Again.

The video of the mirror was from February 2008. Two months later, “The Gun
Source” got a new order, for an extended Glock magazine and a “Magloader” — a
little tool that lets one load a large amount of bullets into magazines without
getting a sore thumb.

***
In August, he started a new Google account, and he was lazy choosing his
password — so much so that a stranger online could guess it, one year later, and
share his browsing history with the world.

At rst, the engineer was just searching for how much he could sell his video
camera for. But eventually, his search terms wandered:

GLOCK
GLOCK 19 9MM AMMUNITION
ONE MAN BRIEFCASE 200 GUNS

In October, he went to AskJeeves and entered, “What problems will I face today
that will make me look stupid?”

Two days later, he ordered four boxes of ammunition, in 9mm and .45. The total
came to $97.26 — but the gun dealer’s website o fered the “NRA Roundup”
program; the sof ware developer checked the box next to the NRA logo, and his
order was “rounded up” to $98.00 even. The National Ri e Association received
a 74 cent donation.

He went back to Google.

SCHIZOID
AVOIDANT PERSONALITY DISORDER
CHOPPED OFF AT THE ANKLES

539
 COGNITIVE THERAPY
SOCIAL PHOBIA
SOCIAL PHOBIA SYMPTOMS

MASS MURDERS USA

MASS MURDERERS LIST
MASS MURDERERS MOTIVATION

He owned a website. The URL was just his full name, with “.com” af er it. He
had bought it back in the 90s, and didn’t really use it anymore. But when the
winter of 2008 came, he started writing a document there, one he updated
regularly, but kept locked; online, but private. Until he was ready to share.

December 22 2008

Time is moving along. Planned to have this done

already. I will just keep a running log here as
time passes. Many of the young girls here look so
beautiful as to not be human, very edible. After
joining this gym, started lifting weights and
like it.

Much info about weight programs, diet etc on the

web. Or anything for that matter. Instead of TV I
can Google for hours to relax. TV and most movies
are dull.

The bulk of his journal entries were just him complaining about not getting laid,
or wondering what was wrong with him. He kept searching.

LATINA WOMEN WHITE MEN

MEXICAN WOMEN LOOKING FOR AMERICAN MEN
HISPANIC GIRLS WHITE GUYS
MEXICAN WOMEN

OBAMA EXECUTIVE ORDERS GUN CONTROL

OBAMA GUN CONTROL

He mentioned in one journal entry that he got invited to a Christmas party. “I like
[work friend’s] parties. I can meet new people and talk.” But then he wrote about
how he had the whole following week o f of work, and how he wanted to “have
exit plan done and practiced by then. I know nothing will change, no matter how
hard I try or what goals I set.”

540
He wrote again af er Christmas. He didn’t mention how the party went. “I will
shoot for Tuesday, January 6, 2009, at maybe 8:15. I have list of to-do items to
make.”

MURDER SUICIDE STATISTICS

GOING TO DIE ANYWAY
MASS MURDERER PROFILE

He thought about the gym a lot. “My anger and rage is largely gone since I began
lif ing weights. Lif ing drains me but I still have energy,” he wrote. “I guess
strenuous exercise is necesary for a man.”

Sometimes he blamed whatever was wrong with him on his upbringing, how his
mother dominated the house and his dad never taught him how to be a man,
while his older brother was a bully. “Result is I am learning basics by trial and
error in my 40s, followed by discuragement.”

***
The big day came. January 6th. “It is 6:40pm, about hour and a half to go. God
have mercy. I wish life could be better for all and the crazy world can somehow
run smoother. I wish I had answers. Bye.”

The log ended. But then it picked up again.

“It is 8:45PM: I chickened out! Shit! I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!”

***
He went on with his life. He got a promotion at work. Bragged about how he
“survived our second general layo f,” while the economy burned. He liked his
workplace. “Most people there are OK and I would never have a shoot ‘em up
there. They paid me for 10 years, so far!”

AGE OF CONSENT PENNSYLVANIA

AGE OF CONSENT BY STATE
AGE OF CONSENT BY NATION
CORRUPTION OF MINORS

The feeling came back. “Some people are happy, some are miserable. It is di cult
to live almost continuously feeling an undercurrent of fear, worry,
discontentment and helplessness. I can talk and joke around and sound happy but
under it all is something di ferent that seems unchangeable and a permanent part
of my being.”

541
He said he was making a “list of items that will provide the motivation to do the
exit plan.” He kept the list in his wallet. Added to it, looked at it when he started
to have second thoughts.

He went to a website called “Is It Normal?” — where you can ask the internet
anything, and be totally anonymous — and he asked, “Is it normal for me to date
a young girl?” He wasn’t talking about anything illegal, he was careful to say.
“State law says I can go down to age 16. Not jail bait. Below 16 is.” He just wanted
to know, “How you would react (if at all) seeing a clean cut older man with a very
young girl in public.”

The users chimed in. Some were disgusted; others, not so much. “I’d think he’s a
lucky bastard...it’s amoral but so what, nowadays this is the world we live in.
Corrupt. Enjoy ruining the innocence of a young girl.”

***
Someone at work invited him to a picnic. He went. When he got home he wrote
how, “An older woman there, out of the blue, asked if I liked high school. Then
quickly asked if I was picked on very much. Intersting why she would ask that.”

He went back to the list in his wallet. Added some things. Then went back to his
journal. “Looking at The List makes me realize how TOTALLY ALONE, a
deeper word is ISOLATED, I am from all else. I no longer have any expectations
of myself. I have no options because I cannot work toward and achieve even the
smallest goals.”

He started making plans again. He chose August 4th, a Tuesday, and took the day
before o f work, to “practice my routine and make sure it is well polished.”

He wrote one last message, on Monday. A quick attempt to sum up his life.
“Probably 99% of the people who know me well don’t even think I was this crazy.
Told by at least 100 girls/women over the years I was a ‘nice guy’. Not kidding.”
Then he shared his net worth — “slightly more than 250K” — and signed o f:
“Death Lives!”

He saved the journal le, and put a link to it on his personal website, behind a
landing page with a banner “Life and Death.” Clicking on it brought visitors to a
simple password screen, with two text elds, asking for “My birth and death
dates.” He set the second password as “08/04/2009.”

Then he drove to the gym.

***
542
At the front desk, the log of membership card swipes would show him entering
the gym around 11:00am. He was probably picking up the schedule for the
workout classes — he would leave a copy in his car, with the 7:40pm “Latin
Impact” circled.

He came back then, and saw that the class was in session. There was not a single
male in it.

He turned around and lef again. When he came back, sixteen minutes later, he
had a du fel bag with him. In it were three handguns, including the Glock. He
walked past the front desk, not saying a word, just heading straight to his
destination. He went into the aerobics class, set down his bag, turned o f the
lights, and started shooting into the crowd. He could hardly have targeted anyone
if he wanted to; the shots were the only ashes of light, in a dark room full of
mirrors. He saved the last bullet for himself.

***
The next day, a newspaper asked the president of The Gun Source for a comment
on the latest mass shooting, the third to be perpetrated by one of his customers.
“This tragedy underscores the need for people to protect themselves and not rely
only on police,” the businessman responded. “There is evil all around us and we
must be able to handle it.”

543
 57. Black Plastic

August 5, 2009
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door at the top of the stairs was closed.

Kaynbred was on Wikipedia, reading an article that had been in existence for less
than a day: “2009 Collier Township shooting.” Under the section “Perpetrator,” it
talked about the gym gunman’s online journal. Someone had just updated the
article, to say that the shooter’s website had been taken o ine, as of 11:15am.

The user at 36 Yogananda clicked to the “Talk” tab, clicked “edit,” and added a
new entry to the conversation.

Kaynbred: It was not removed at 11:15 AM. It is

actually still available; just refresh the page
multiple times and it will appear.

He kept checking back. About a week later, he returned to the “Talk” page, to
con rm for anyone reading that nally, the shooter’s website had been taken
o ine for real. Of course, by then it hardly mattered. What the shooter wrote had
been all over the news.

***
He went to Google, and started looking up information on the Assault Weapons
Ban that Connecticut had passed back in ‘93. He was interested in a certain ri e, a
Czech-manufactured semi-automatic called a VZ Model 58.

He read about the name-ban, and the features-ban. He found it as confusing as

anyone else.

On August 25th, he registered a new account on the website “The High Road.” It
was a rearms discussion forum, like Northeast Shooters, but geared toward

544
providing information to new shooters. He went to the “Legal” forum — where
the users “try to understand what the law is, how it works, and how it applies” —
and posted a new thread.

TOPIC: “AK-47 type” legality and the CZ Vz. 58?

Kaynbred: The CZ Vz. 58 is a rifle which is

similar to the AK-47 only through their shared
7.62x39mm caliber and aesthetics. It functions
entirely differently and has no interchangeable
parts with the AK-47, including the magazine.

My state (Connecticut) has its own state-level

assault weapons ban. In it is the following:

Sec. 53-202a. Assault weapons:

Definition. (a)... inclusive, "assault
weapon" means: (1)... any of the
following specified semiautomatic
firearms:... Avtomat Kalashnikov AK-47
type...

According to what I have read, to be an “AK-47

type,” the firearm must be aesthetically similar
to an AK-47, operate similarly, and have
interchangeable parts. From a perfunctory search
of Google, I have seen multiple people claim that
because the CZ Vz. 58 does not meet these three
requirements, it is not an "AK-47 type" and it is
thus legal for sale in Connecticut. Does anyone
have any information on this?

The other users wrote back, polite and helpful. They assured him that the ri e
would clear Connecticut’s name-ban. And since it came with a detachable
magazine and a pistol-grip, he would just need to be careful that the one he
bought didn't have any additional "military features" installed.

He was also looking at an HK-91 (the same gun they used to market as an "assault
ri e" in gun magazines in the 80’s: “In a survival situation, you want the most
uncompromising weapon that money can buy.”) It was made in Germany, and
had been on the import-ban list since 1989 — but the PTR-91, manufactured in
South Carolina and nearly identical in its design, was legal. “Just make sure you
get one with a xed stock so that it conforms to the other stupid part of the CT
AWB,” the other users reminded him.

545
He started another topic, asking whether a semi-automatic version of the
Skorpion sub-machine gun would be legal in his state. It red the .32 ACP round,
a compact bullet usually chambered in “pocket pistols” like James Bond’s Walther
PPK. Nobody knew if it would pass the ban. One user suggested he simply call
the Connecticut State Patrol and ask; they were always helpful.

He wrote back:

Kaynbred: I was asking out of curiosity. I always

prefer asking through proxy when I can avoid
speaking to someone directly. I was just
wondering if anyone knew because I have a fetish
for .32 ACP.

***
He clicked to a new tab.

YouTube.

He searched for more clips of the L.A. Fitness shooter, like the “Hiding From My
Emotions” one, with him talking into the mirror. One of the top results was titled
“Pittsburgh shooting caught on security cameras.”

He clicked it. It was a hoax — the footage was clearly from a movie — but it was
attention-grabbing footage nonetheless: a man in a trench coat walks into a
crowded co fee shop, pulls out a machine gun, and mows down everyone there.

He looked for the rest of the movie; it turned out to be from a 1988 low-budget
lm, Bloody Wednesday, which was (very, very) loosely based on the 1984 shooting
at the McDonald’s in San Ysidro. As a psychological horror lm, it portrays a
mentally ill man who is discharged from a crowded mental hospital, and gets put
up in an old abandoned hotel, where he steadily loses his grip on reality (drawing
many unfavorable comparisons to The Shining).

He watched the whole thing, and it was instantly one of his favorites. He was just
fascinated by the McDonald’s shooter, and he especially liked one scene in the
lm: a surreal moment when the main character is surrounded by muggers,
reaches inside his stu fed teddy bear, and takes out a handgun.

***
He clicked over to another YouTube channel. A news station out of North
Carolina was uploading footage from a murder trial that was in-progress there: the

546
Orange High School shooter, who had ambushed his father at home, and yelled
“Remember Columbine!” from a squad car af er bungling his attack on his old
high school in 2006. He was pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, so the trial
consisted of going over all the details of his psyche, laying out the ultimate
Columbine fanboy’s mindscape for the consideration of the jury — and YouTube.

It turned out that when the shooter was f een, he had experienced feelings that
made him “worry that he might be a pedophile,” which “exacerbated his obsessive
beliefs that he was a horrible person living in a horrible world.” He told his
mother he was depressed, and asked about maybe trying psychiatric medication;
she said no. He grew obsessed with school shootings while attending Orange
High School, and shortly af er graduation, he started working on his “MASS
MURDERERS AND SCHOOL SHOOTINGS OF THE 20TH AND 21ST
CENTURIES” homemade book (which, for some reason, also included photos of
the man who tried to kill President Reagan.)

The Orange High School shooter had a video camera, and he had made hours of
recordings in his bedroom — his own “basement tapes.” The defense played each
of them for the jury, with the shooter’s VHS-distorted, wild-eyed visage projected
oversized onto the courtroom wall, speaking into his camera: “I believe that I was
stopped from suicide by God because I have to do another massacre... And I’m
not doing it for revenge. I love that school. I’m doing it to save them. Another
massacre has got to take place so we can remind the world of how evil it is.”

But the most surreal moment of the trial came when the courtroom viewed
another tape, from the shooter’s road trip to Littleton. He had recorded himself
from the passenger seat, his mother behind the wheel and just out of frame. The
jury could hear his excitement building. “This is it! Columbine High School, it’s
beautiful!” he exclaimed as the campus came into view.

His mother could be heard half-paying attention as they pulled into the parking
lot — “uh huh, si...” — and as they passed underneath the library’s windows, her
son pointed up at the long-ago-repaired glass facade, whispering in awe, “That’s
where they were shooting from” — knowing very well it is also where they died.

The boy's mother had hoped that this experience might somehow cure his
obsession. Get Columbine out of his system. She even bought him a black trench
coat while they were in Littleton, the same one he would wear when the day
nally came. Instead of breaking the spell, as soon as they got back to North
Carolina, he went to his room, and started a new section in his journal, titling the
page “PROJECT COLUMBINE.”

547
His insanity plea didn’t work. The jury wasn’t buying any of it. Maybe he’d have
ended up in a mental hospital before 1981, but instead, for shooting his father, he
received a mandatory life sentence. The judge recommended he receive mental
health treatment in prison.

The user at 36 Yogananda clicked back to the beginning of the trial, and watched
it over again.

The Redding Roadhouse — Redding, Connecticut

The restaurant was a local institution. Family-owned, with a bar that featured live
music on the weekends. Like “My Place,” but bigger. Nancy Lanza’s shiny, new,
silver BMW 3 series was parked outside.

One of the guys at the bar saw her come in, and bought her a drink. And another.
They hit it o f. He remembers that she talked about her hobbies, which included
gardening, and wine tasting. She gave him her phone number.

Nancy had been single for years, but now it was o cial. She signed the judgment
of dissolution af er an uncontested hearing on September 24, 2009. One of the
divorce mediators remembers the Lanzas: there had been ten or so two-hour
sessions, and both Nancy and Peter were respectful throughout. Nancy talked
about their 17-year-old son a lot; despite being nearly an adult, Nancy said she
“didn’t like to leave him alone.” Both parents said that they “went out of their
way to accommodate him.” Lately, he had been spending most of his time in his
room, and even sometimes shut the door on Nancy when she was talking to him.
But she tried to spend nights at home anyway, whenever she could; af er all, her
leaving 36 Yogananda was just about the only way to make him even more isolated
than he made himself.

Once in awhile, though, Nancy had to get out. She was a social creature. She
ended up seeing the guy she met at the Redding Roadhouse on and o f for the
next year. They met at di ferent restaurants in the area, or sometimes she stayed
over at his place. He remembers her reminiscing about growing up in New
Hampshire, and she mentioned at least once that she still had a son at home; the
boyfriend never came over to 36 Yogananda, but he got the impression from
Nancy that her younger son was “a quiet young man who was a strict vegetarian
and who was interested in string instruments and considering enlisting in the
Armed Forces.”

***
In other messages from this time, to family members, Nancy talked about what
she claimed were her chronic health problems. She said she had nally “come to

548
terms” with her prognosis, and was moving past it — she wasn’t in “denial,” but
she didn’t want to “let this thing de ne me,” either. “One VERY important thing
I’ve learned,” she wrote in one message, “is to keep a positive attitude and not
dwell on the negative.”

Norwalk Community College

Nancy’s son signed up for one, last college course in the fall of 2009: “A+
Computer Repair” at the local community college. He wasn’t working toward
any degree, and classroom time was probably minimal; A+ would serve as the
formal certi cation of the skills he had already been using with the Tech Club, or
when he secretly made upgrades to his mother’s laptop. Nancy was still talking
about her son going to full-time college soon, but she knew he wasn’t ready for
that yet. She still had a lot of planning to do for him rst.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The door was closed.

There was a sub-forum on Glocktalk, called “Tech Talk,” where the users would
discuss various aspects of PC repair.

Kaynbred: It seems as though the only situation

in which adding RAM would increase speed is if
the former amount was being completely utilized
and the hard drive’s page file was being
accessed. Am I just an inattentive philistine or
has additional RAM in a computer which was not
already deprived of it never helped any of you?

He asked a number of questions like that over the course of the summer. One
time, it was about the best mouse for gaming; he had been playing shooters more
than ever. Archived leader-boards show he was still playing Counter Strike online,
plus a newer squad-based online shooter, Team Fortress 2.

Those were very popular titles. But his latest favorite was an anomaly: Combat
Arms. Made by a Korean game company Nexon, it was retro-Counter Strike, but
with some of the RPG grind of World of Warcra bolted on: earning “loot,”
leveling up characters (by military rank), tweaking costumes, and unlocking a vast
arsenal of weapons.

Kaynbred signed up — “enlisted” — on September 19, 2009. He even found a

team (a “clan” in FPS terms) to join. The clan was called Mg14c, and they were a
“pistols only” team; with hundreds of weapons available in Combat Arms, all

549
modeled on real-life rearms, this clan chose the smallest guns, requiring the most
nesse. To win a round took teamwork, and a lot of practice.

Archives of the Mg14c clan’s forums show that the user Kaynbred joined up on
November 18, 2009. Probably, he had encountered a player in a public game who
was already a member, and they sent him an invite. As was customary for all new
recruits, Kaynbred posted his preferred weapons load-out:

Kaynbred: Pistols in order of descending

preference: Glock 23, K5, M1911, Anaconda, USP,
Desert Eagle…

[for] shotguns: Saiga-20 (Once I unlock it)…

I normally prefer low-caliber weapons such as

pistols and pistol-caliber carbines. I fire semi-
automatically much more quickly than I am capable
of aiming, so my accuracy is usually low. I enjoy
being surrounded, so I’d be good cannon fodder...

The way Combat Arms was set up, users had to play under their account name —
so to his clan-mates, he was always “Kaynbred.” But this was unusual; most of the
games he played were launched through the program Steam, which lets the player
change their display-name whenever they want.

***
During the fall of 2009, a user from Fair eld County, Connecticut logged into a
series of Counter Strike games under the username “pedobear” — the name of an
internet meme, associated with an image of a cartoon bear who is supposedly a
pedophile. (As summarized by the San Francisco Chronicle, “pedobear”
functioned as a “mascot of pedophilia” in troll culture, and the image had become
shorthand online for “you’re being creepy.”)

The user at 36 Yogananda had several images of the cartoon bear on his hard drive.
There was also a Word document, "pbear.doc" — but that le wasn't for trolling.

When last seen playing on a particular Counter Strike server, on October 15, 2009,
“pedobear” had changed his name again, to “Smiggles.”

550
58. Modern Sporting Ri e

May 14, 2009

Greater Phoenix Convention Center — Phoenix, Arizona
A brand-new model of rearm was announced at the NRA’s Annual Meeting and
Exhibits in 2009. It was called the SR 556 — the “556” because, like all standard
AR-15s, it was chambered for the 5.56 NATO round (while also accepting the
similarly-shaped .223 Remington.)

But by then, it was tough for the convention crowd to get excited; the “AR”
platform was the hottest gun market in America, largely because of the high level
of customization options and the generous array of accessories (which any new
manufacturer of an AR-15 was vying to tap into.) The downside of such
popularity was, practically everyone at the convention already owned an “AR.”
Many of them, several.

It was the “SR” in the gun's name that was more signi cant: Sturm, Ruger & Co.
The NRA Edition of their Mini-14 had marked Ruger’s rst step down this path,
but this new gun was an o cial acknowledgment: Stockton was 20 years ago, and
the gun industry had changed. Now, what were once labeled “weapons of war”
were, more pro tably, to be seen as household names.

August 15, 2009

Convention Center — Dayton, Ohio
“There’s no tax! There’s no paperwork! That’s worth something!” shouted a man
from behind his display of guns. Colin Goddard approached one of the booths,
with a friend at his side. He asked to see the ri e that one of the sellers had on
display for $660. It was just what Colin was looking for.

Colin was from Blacksburg. Two years before, he had been in Norris Hall, in his
French class, when he heard gun re coming his way. He was on the phone with 9-
1-1 when the gunman burst in. Colin was shot four times, fell to the classroom

551
 oor, and dropped his phone. A moment later, a girl picked it up, hid it under her
long hair, and started relaying updates to 9-1-1.

Colin spent a long time in the hospital af er that. When he emerged into the
public eye, it was at the foot of United States Capitol Building in D.C., alongside
several members of Congress, including the retired nurse from New York. “I was
one of the few survivors of the Virginia Tech shooting two years ago,” he said to a
gathering of reporters. “I’ve learned that something can be done to prevent
dangerous people from obtaining dangerous weapons. And I’ve learned about
closing the Gun Show Loophole.”

In Dayton, the hidden camera in Colin’s breast pocket recorded him accepting the
unloaded ri e — an Egyptian-made semi-auto AK-47 — and looking over its
features. “Collapsing stock, 30-round clip…” he tells his friend. The ri e wasn’t
like the Glock pistol that the silent shooter had attacked him with in Norris Hall,
and the bullets it red weren’t the same size as the ones that he could still feel
inside his body, as he stood there with the gun in his hands. And he knew that the
man who shot him had passed all the background checks. But to Colin, it wasn’t
about trying to prevent the exact scenario that led to his own trauma; it was about
people who weren’t supposed to have guns, getting them anyway. Whoever
bought this ri e, they would not have to undergo a background check. He knew
he was holding, in his hands, the potential for the next tragedy.

Colin’s footage shows him turn to his friend, in clear view of the gun merchant,
and ask the other patron to buy it for him: a blatant straw-purchase. The middle-
aged merchant didn’t seem to care. “There’s no paperwork,” he con rmed. “You
have to be over 18, though. So I need an ID.”

The straw-buyer shrugged. “I don’t have it with me.”

The merchant paused. He asked the young man for his birthday — his reply
indicated that he was 18 — and for his address. The young man gave his answer,
and the seller didn’t even write it down. He took the $660, and handed over the
ri e. “Have fun with it.”

***
Meanwhile, the retired nurse from New York brought the bill to Congress: the
2009 Bipartisan Gun Show Loophole Closing Act. It was much the same as the
one she begged her colleagues to pass af er Columbine — “Let me go home...” —
and af er ten years, it was met with much the same result. The loophole would
stay open. And to this day, it remains open.

552
November 2009
National Shooting Sports Foundation — Newtown, Connecticut
The gun industry noticed a trend by late 2009: things were getting back to
normal. They had sold millions of guns in the year since the election of President
Obama, most of them to people looking to stock up on the gun everyone
expected the new administration to ban rst: the AR-15.

At rst, it seemed a plausible fear: Obama’s attorney general said at his rst press
conference, “There are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make,
and among them would be to re-institute the [federal] ban.” But a year later, the
gun-grabbers still hadn’t come. They hadn’t even made a peep. Gradually, the
panic buying died out, and sales went back down to near-normal levels. The
“Barack boom” was over.

***
The AR was a vital segment of the rearms market, and the NSSF was,
fundamentally, a trade organization. So, in 2009, they announced they were
launching a “re-branding e fort” — they wanted Americans to stop thinking of
AR-15 style guns as “assault ri es,” and to instead see them as something more
benign: a “modern sporting ri e.”

They pulled out all the stops this time, like they hadn’t done since the PLCAA
shield law was proposed. Doug Painter went back out into the woods with his
lm crew, in his hiking boots and annel, and sat perched on a tree-stump to
impart his homespun rearms wisdom for the camera, a camo-painted AR-15
across his lap. “Never had anything against AR ri es like this one,” he smiles in
the video, “but I frankly didn’t think they had a place in the woods.” Then he
remembered, he says, that the “traditional” deer ri e was in fact a descendant of
the 1903 Spring eld — a World War I service ri e. Hunting ri e, infantry ri e...
really it was all the same. Painter smirked as he framed the debate: “Anti-gun folks
insist on calling these ri es ‘assault weapons.’ To label them as ‘bad guns,’ as
opposed to more traditional-looking ‘good guns.’ Now I ask you: how can any
ri e, any inanimate object, be inherently good or bad?”

The NSSF’s print campaign consisted of a list of tips for gun evangelists to help
change the culture, including:

If someone calls an AR-15-style rifle an ‘assault weapon,’ he or she either

supports banning these firearms or do not understand their function
and sporting use, or both. Please correct them. “Assault weapon” a
political term created by California anti-gun legislators to ban some
semi-automatic rifl there in the 1980s.

553
 Since the 19th century, civilian sporting rifl have evolved from their
military predecessors. The modern sporting rifle simply follows that
tradition… These rifl ’ accuracy, reliability, ru edness and versatility
serve target shooters and hunters well. They are true all-weather
firearms. And, they are a lot of fun to shoot!

The NSSF wrapped up its embrace of the AR-15 with a reminder of the stakes,
which were now right back to where they were when Clinton sent his letter to
hunters in 1992: “Remember, that if AR-15-style modern sporting ri es are
banned, your favorite traditional-looking hunting or target-shooting semi-
automatic rearm could be banned, too.”

San Leandro, California

The neon-purple “GUNS” sign in the window was long gone, and the parking lot
was bare. On the front door, there was just the outline of an NRA logo, a
silhouette of the glue from the back of a scraped-away sticker, baked into the glass
by decades of Bay Area sun. But the guns, and the panic buyers that had lled the
aisles af er Stockton, were long gone; gun crime still plagued Oakland, but the
perpetrators had to nd ways other than Traders Sporting Goods to arm
themselves. Tony was out of business.

The writing had been on the wall for a long time. Traders already had their FFL
revoked in 2003, but the appeals process had kept the doors open, for awhile. In
its nal year of operation, state law enforcement collected no less than 447 “crime
guns” that would be traced back to Trader’s. The highest number in California.

Finally, in 2006, af er at two decades of concerted e fort by the ATF and local
authorities, Tony’s license to sell rearms was revoked for good. He had sold his
last gun.

Traders tried to adapt, and stay open — as just a sporting goods store. No guns.
Unfortunately for Tony, the business brought through the door by sleeping bags,
MRE’s and shing tackle just wasn’t enough. Selling guns was always what kept
the lights on. “It sucks,” one former customer told a reporter from the East Bay
Tim , standing outside the store shortly af er it was shuttered. “The problem
isn’t the person who sells the gun; it’s the person who uses it.”

December 7, 2009
Superior Court — Stamford, Connecticut
The State’s Attorney called a press conference, to announce the latest legal
development in the “Travis the Chimp” case. Af er a careful review of all the facts

554
and documentation, he explained, the state had determined not to bring any
charges against the chimp’s owner, Sandy, as a result of what happened out on
Rock Rimmon Road. Despite the controversy and sensational headlines about
her, they found, “It was not evident that [she] had been deliberately reckless in
handling the animal.”

Sandy had maintained as much, since day one. She deeply resented it when people
said she cared more about Travis than her friend Charla — and not because she
didn’t care about Travis. It had traumatized her, having to ght the ape she loved
in those nal minutes. Now living in an empty house, Travis’s bedroom still the
way she lef it, she would of en call old friends in tears, sobbing, “I stabbed my
own son.”

The police o cer who had arrived at Charla’s house that day, and pulled the
trigger on Travis, was himself an animal lover. He, too, was traumatized by the
experience: both from killing Travis, and from seeing what Travis had done to
Charla. His colleagues on the force knew he had no choice but to use lethal force.
“We were not dealing with a human suspect,” the Chief of Police in Stamford told
reporters. “Anything could have happened.”

The announcement of no charges didn’t mean the end of litigation. Charla herself
gave her rst televised interview that same month, appearing with Oprah Winfrey,
where she expressed hope that her experience could help others. “These exotic
animals are very dangerous and they shouldn’t be around,” her sof voice spoke
from behind a veil. “There’s a place for them that is not in residential areas.” She
was planning to sue the state, for not acting when they were warned about the
beast.

In one interview, Sandy was asked if she regretted ever taking the chimp into her
home in the rst place. Not a chance. “They’re the closest thing to humans — to
us. We can give them a blood transfusion, and they can give us one. [...] He
couldn’t be more my son than if I gave birth to him....”

If there was any lesson to learn, she couldn’t nd it. “How many people go crazy
and kill other people? This is one incident.... I don’t know what happened.”

FBI Criminal Justice Information Services — Clarksburg, West

Virginia
In a small town four hours east of Washington D.C., in one drab o ce complex
among many, FBI employees were arriving for another day of work: processing all
the NICS background checks that ooded in from around the country every day.
Boxes of records lined the halls, and lled storage containers in the loading dock,

555
their paper contents waiting to be processed to micro lm; due to the 1986
restrictions on the government, designed to prevent “gun registries” that could
weaken the power of the citizen militia to defend themselves against tyranny, the
nation’s background checks of its gun buyers were all still done the old-fashioned
way. No computers.

Two years af er they were passed, the 2007 NICS Improvement amendments were
still being implemented at the local levels, but there was a feeling at the FBI that
the bureau could be doing more for its part; in studying “the rise of the recent
lone gunmen [such as the] Pittsburgh tness center shooter,” the FBI had found
that while the shooters were generally able to pass a NICS background check, they
nonetheless stood out, in the data, from the “traditional” gun buyers — rather
than just buying one gun, or building up a collection over time, the rampage
shooters typically purchased an arsenal in a relatively short period, not long before
their attacks. An internal memo making the rounds that year suggested the
bureau set up a new alert — a “tripwire” in NICS terminology — that would
notify them when a citizen purchased more than one rearm in 30 days. Then
they could subject that buyer to added scrutiny, of some kind.

The details never really got worked out; the text of the Brady Bill speci cally
stated that NICS could not “require that any record or portion thereof generated
by the system [be] recorded at, or transferred to, a facility owned, managed, or
controlled by” the government. The new program would have been, in e fect, a
thirty-day gun registry, so the logic went, and that was illegal. Shortly af er it was
brought up, the “two guns in one month” project was abandoned.

556
 59. Catalog

November 21, 2009

Fair eld Hills — Newtown, Connecticut
A small crowd, mostly town-government workers and their families, gathered on
the old campus of Fair eld Hills Hospital, outside of the building once known as
Bridgeport Hall. The o ce sta f, who mostly hadn't seen each other since
Edmond Town Hall closed, had been moving their furniture and les into the
renovated structure for weeks, preparing for the big day, and now nally, the
town’s o ces were again consolidated under one roof: the Newtown Municipal
Center. The future of Newtown, rst sold in the big vote in the gymnasium of
Newtown High School in 2001, was beginning to fall into place, piece by piece.

The town’s rst selectman came to cut the ribbon. It was one of his last acts in
o ce; Newtown had just gone to the polls, and a few weeks af er the doors
opened at the municipal center, there was to be a swearing-in ceremony held
there, for the new holder of his o ce.

The incoming rst selectman was no stranger to Newtown, or its government; Pat
Llodra had already chaired the town’s school board, as well as the education
committee. In 2004, she was the acting principal of Newtown High School, and
before that, she was active in the Sandy Hook PTA; records from 2000 show she
had successfully campaigned to have a safety fence installed at Sandy Hook
Elementary School, to ensure students on the playground didn't chase a ball out
into tra c on the neighboring streets.

December 9, 2009
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door at the top of the stairs was closed.

There was a typo on the Wikipedia page for “Dawson College shooting,” in the
section “Weapons” — where the mohawked shooter’s pistol-caliber carbine was

557
listed — someone had put a decimal point in front of “9mm.” Kaynbred
corrected it, and lef a sarcastic explanation:

Kaynbred: People say that 9mm is anemic, but this

is ridiculous.

He went to the page for “Westroads Mall shooting,” and found someone had
made an erroneous edit to that article, too, adding hoax information about the
scrawny mall shooter’s background. He deleted that, as well.

Then he went to the page for “Luby’s shooting.” Until about a month before, this
article had been very short; but then someone had added a section explaining the
possible motives of the man who crashed his sparkling blue truck through the
window. They had added the details of his enraged comments regarding women,
and unlike the Westroads page, it was all reasonably accurate information — but
not quite written in Wikipedia’s “objective” tone. Kaynbred undid the changes,
restoring the shorter version.

He continued on — to the page for the Wedgwood Baptist Church shooter from
shortly af er Columbine, the one that had led the then-vice president to declare
that a “wave of evil” was passing over the country. A recent edit had added the
details about the young man Jeremiah, who had preached to the shooter shortly
before it all ended — again, all accurate details. He erased them.

He went to the page for the Spring eld High School shooter, the one from
Shangri-La who was still locked up, and hearing voices. Kaynbred updated the
“weapons” section; the article had until then claimed that this shooter had used a
“Ruger .22 semi-automatic ri e,” but he knew that it was, more speci cally, a
“sawn-o f .22LR Ruger 10/22.” He updated the section accordingly.

***
Since graduating from high school, and sealing himself in his chamber at the top
of the stairs, he had been maintaining a number of documents on his PC’s hard
drive, adding to them here and there as he combed the internet. One of the text
les, he had saved under the title “tomorrow,” and (as described by the
Connecticut State Police) it consisted of text “detailing daily schedule, desires, list
of vocabulary words, a list of the bene ts of being thin and negative connotations
associated with being overweight, [and a] list of goals.”

In late 2018, as the result of the Hartford Courant’s FOIA lawsuit, sections of some
of these documents were released to the public. The list obsessing over “thin” and
“fat” was among them — essentially a set of motivational statements to oneself,
encouraging the pursuit of an eating disorder:

558
 01. You will be FAT if you eat today, just put it
off one more day.

02. You don't NEED food.

03. Fat people can't fit everywhere.

05. You'll be able to run faster without all that

extra weight holding you back.

06. People will remember you as "the beautiful

thin one".

07. If someone has to describe you, they'll say

"oh she weighs like 90, 100 lbs".

09. Starving is an example of excellent

willpower.

10. You will be able to see your beautiful,

beautiful bones.

11. Bones are clean and pure. Fat is dirty and

hangs on your bones like a parasite.

17. Anyone can have "inner beauty" but few can

earn real beauty, inside as well as out.

While the police description of this text appears accurate, the Courant’s
characterization of it (as being written by the user at 36 Yogananda) is not quite:
this same “list” had been making the rounds on the internet since at least 2005, in
the “pro-ana” community — pro-anorexia. He had simply found the text at some
point, copied it, and pasted it into his own Word document, right beneath his
daily schedule.

However, the spaces in numbering show that he had made edits, erasing some of
the entries from the list (mostly the gendered or fashion-conscious ones, such as
“04. Guys will be able to pick you up without struggling” and “13. The models
that everyone claims are beautiful, the spitting image of perfection, are any of
them fat? NO!”).

The “pro-ana” community was essentially another unforeseen side-e fect of the
internet’s spread; as an Irish newspaper, the Sunday Independent, wrote in a 2007
article on the phenomenon, such websites were a way for people with eating
disorders to gain a sense of community; but they would still be isolated, and,

559
“Underneath all the confessions, poems and pleas for encouragement exchanged
between anonymous pro-ana pals is one perilous message: anorexia is not a life-
threatening illness but is instead a proud lifestyle choice.” Theirs was a tribe that
did not dispute that they met the de nition of an eating disorder, but simply
denied that it was a disorder at all. And so while no doctor ever diagnosed the user
at 36 Yogananda with anorexia, it appears that in a way, he may have diagnosed
himself.

Another section of the “tomorrow” document, however, does appear to have

been written wholly by him. And it is another list:

Desires:

expert on “soldiers”
“infantry”
parkour
learn python and program games
write stories
instruments
1970s horror movies
become skilled in philosophy
pedophilia
learn esperanto
try being homeless
Correspond with someone you like, such as the
writer of X movie.
Parkour and gymnastics
Appalachian Trail
Cross-country Skiing
Visit Crypts

His desire for expertise in “soldiers” and “infantry,” though re ecting an interest
that was present ever since he was ve years old, may have become euphemistic for
something else by this point: these two were the only of his desires to require
quotation marks.

Meanwhile, another document of his — a departure from all the text les — was a
spreadsheet. And it was growing.

***
On the very last day of 2009, on the other side of the planet, a man shot his
girlfriend in their apartment in Espoo, Finland. He then walked to the nearby
Sello mall, where it is believed his girlfriend’s lover worked. He shot several
employees at the mall, and then took his own life. It was the third mass shooting

560
to strike Finland in as many years, and even though this one happened at a mall —
not a school — and did not seem to be directly related to, or inspired by, the
previous two, it was enough to make some in the country wonder if there was a
curse.

***
Three weeks af er the Sello mall shooting, Kaynbred edited the Wikipedia page for
the event: in the “See also” section, someone had listed the 1987 Hungerford
attack in the UK. That one never came near a mall; Kaynbred replaced it with
another link, to a 1985 attack at a mall near Philadelphia.

In another window, very likely, he had Microsof Excel open. His spreadsheet
listed every mass murder he could locate information on — what he de ned as
“involving a minimum of four casualties, whether through deaths or injuries,”
among other quali cations — and there were columns for each killer’s stats,
including number of casualties, disposition, and category of weapon used, where
he carefully listed every single weapon, even in the cases where shooters had an
entire arsenal. There were columns to track what day of the week an attack
occurred, as well as the date. But there was no section for commentary, or notes;
this was pure data.

The spreadsheet was sorted by the “kills” column by default, and the latest
Finland shooter barely rated. But still, he was one more row to add. The
spreadsheet grew. By the time he was done, it would contain thousands and
thousands of names.

He knew the top row very well, of course; the all-time global champion had been a
South-Korean policeman, who went berserk in 1982 — reportedly af er his
girlfriend slapped a y that had landed on his chest while he was sleeping — and
broke into the village armory to fuel a rampage that spanned two whole days. His
row in the spreadsheet had huge signi cance. And yet, the document wasn’t a
scoreboard, exactly; the user at 36 Yogananda thought of it more like a “catalog.”

***
The members of his Combat Arms gaming clan had no clear idea of who
“Kaynbred” was. He never mentioned any spreadsheet. But they did start to get
some impression of him, from communications on their message board and the
hours of in-game chat: he was always sarcastic, sharing some bit of internet
humor. And he loved to reference “pedobear.”

On the clan’s forum, someone started a thread, “RL Pictures.” RL was short for
“real life” — his teammates were sharing what they really looked like. Others were

561
just posting their old baby pictures.

Kaynbred posted a reply; four days later, he deleted whatever the image was, but
several of his teammates had already posted their reactions to it: “Wow o-o kayn.
Uhhh. At least your pictures as a child were cute,” and “LOL Kayn, so THATS
how it all happened.....”

Around this same time, or in the year that followed, the user at 36 Yogananda
acquired a grey 160gb “Storjet” external hard drive, and plugged it into his PC’s
USB port. In doing so — whether he intended to or not — he created what would
appear to be a backup of his entire hard drive at the time.

One of the les copied over showed a child of around 3 years of age, seated on a
carpeted oor, wearing camou age-print pajamas and a “boonie” hat; he has a
small handgun in his tiny hands, and he appears to be teething on the hammer-
end. Behind him in the room is a rack laden with guns and ammunition. There is
a belt of machine-gun rounds spread across his tiny lap, and a what appears to be a
hand grenade on top. The image has the lename “kayntdlr” — Kaynbred
toddler.

Another user posted their own baby pictures. A third user commented “what a
cutie lol. I have baby pics too but i don’t want to entice Kayn.”

***
On December 30th, he went to the Super Columbine Massacre RPG! board. It
was the site of the school-shooting discussion he had been following, quietly, for
over three years. But this time, for the rst time, he clicked “Register.”

He agreed to the forum rules, and certi ed that he was “over or exactly 13 years of
age.” He entered the username had been playing Counter Strike with for weeks:
“Smiggles.” As with his other accounts online, it appears he didn’t do anything
with it right away. He just had his next persona, ready to go. In the meantime, he
still had work to do.

February 2010
Mg14c did well in the rankings. Kaynbred was a standout among their new
recruits. He was playing so much, he had already racked up 83,496 “kills.” One of
his teammates even started a forum topic dedicated to screenshots of him in action
— “Kayn’s pwnage.”

He downloaded copies of the pics. The external drive made copies, too.

562
One of the forum users wrote “Kayn scares me,” having talked with him on voice-
chat during games. “He sounds exactly like my brother-in-law.” They wrote that
the resemblance was even eerier, because their relative was in the air force, and
“Kayn mentioned that he wanted to be in the military.”

***
One day, Kaynbred posted a YouTube link to the clan forum, showing the Bee
Gees performing “Staying Alive.” He said he never realized the high-pitched
singers were men. His teammates laughed, and one of them asked “u guys r really
that young? I thought evry1 knew the beegees were guys.”

He wrote back.

Kaynbred: I wish I wasn’t. I would gladly be in

my sixties if I had a choice.

Other users started naming bands from previous eras, seeing which ones people
had heard of. Kaynbred said he didn’t know any musicians more recent than the
1960’s, with two exceptions: The Dickies, who had recorded the theme song to
Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and the band Flogging Molly.

As he typed this, in the closet behind him was a small stack of CDs: a half-dozen
Flogging Molly albums, and the soundtrack to Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

On another occasion, someone had started a tongue-in-cheek topic about how all
of the best Combat Arms players were Asian, and how they should all try and
become Asian, to up their game. Kaynbred lef a comment:

Kaynbred: I want to be Hiroo Onoda.

Onada was an o cer in the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II, who did not
stand down af er the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender in 1945. He
stayed deployed in the jungles of the Philippines all the way until 1974 — when
his former commanding o cer, by then a simple book merchant, nally delivered
him a letter relieving him of duty. Shortly af er his return to civilization, Onada
released his autobiography, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War.

There was a copy of this book in the closet, next to the CD’s. Also in the stack was
the story of Green Beret Lieutenant James N. Rowe, Five Years to Freedom: The
True Story of a Vietnam POW, and the memoir of a Sgt. Franklin D. Miller,
Reflections of a Warrior: Six Years a Green Beret in Vietnam.

563
Above the books, on a coat hanger, was a vintage military uniform: an olive-drab
tunic, with gold stars on the epaulets.

***
His mother was worried about him. So was his father. The parents had been
exchanging emails more frequently since the new year.

Apparently, he didn’t fare well in A+ Computer Repair. One day, before class,
Nancy told Peter that his son had been “crying hysterically on the bathroom
oor.”

Peter replied: “[He] 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 wrote back. “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 sent a follow-up. “I have the feeling when he said he would
rather be homeless than to take any more tests, he really meant it.”

The reference to “more tests” — and their son’s anxiety that day in general — may
also have been in the context of entrance exams; lately, he seemed to have his heart
set on going to a military college. His parents knew that the time was coming to
give their delicate son a reality check.

February 24, 2010

Fair eld County Arms & Munitions Indoor Range — Monroe,
Connecticut
Nancy arrived at the gun range to take her examination: the NRA Basic Pistol
Course. The instructor, a man named Christian, had been teaching such NRA
courses since 1992. And right away, he could tell that Nancy already knew what
she was doing.

Guns were on her mind lately. She thought she still had the .45 somewhere back in
Kingston, but she was considering selling it, and getting something fancier; when
she mentioned this to one of her My Place friends, a retired cop who had just
moved to Newtown the year before, he advised her she would need to get a permit
to bring the handgun to Connecticut.

564
That’s why she needed the NRA course — up until the association expanded its
mission with the Institute for Legislative Action in 1975, the NRA was mostly
known for its safety and marksmanship certi cations. In many states, the NRA
courses were the only option available; in Connecticut, their course is speci cally
listed as a requirement in order to obtain a handgun permit.

Nancy passed the course, easily. Christian would see her again at the range, as the
months passed, stopping in for target sessions.

At some point, she came in for another NRA certi cation, and this time, she
brought her teenage son along; they each earned another set of certi cates,
necessary to bring long guns to the range — they still had the Ruger Mini-14 in
the house.

Nancy told her friends at My Place about bringing her son to the range. “Guns
require a lot of respect, and she really tried to instill that responsibility within
him,” the restaurant’s owners recall. “He took to it. He loved being careful with
them. He made it a source of pride.”

***
His birthday drew closer. She had just, nally, broached the subject with him:
about the dream he had been holding onto ever since he wore the green plastic
army helmet for Halloween, back in Kingston. And how that dream was never
going to come true.

One of Nancy’s friends from the neighborhood, named Ellen, heard the whole
story. She would tell the Connecticut Post that for years, Nancy had “liked the idea
that the military would give [her son] purpose, a career path and structure to his
life.” But in early 2010, “It became overwhelmingly clear to her that it wasn’t right
for him.” Nancy summarily “squashed” the idea, reminding her son that he didn’t
like to be touched; if he were ever injured on the battle eld, “doctors and medics
would have to handle him, to treat him.” Indeed, his mother had been making
excuses, ever since he was a child, for why he couldn’t be closely examined, such as
needles causing him to faint. He couldn’t even handle middle school, let alone
basic training.

Her son took the news hard. She felt bad for him; even if he wasn’t up to the
physical rigors of being an elite soldier, she truly believed that deep down, he
would have at least been ready for that level of responsibility. She would bet her
life on it.

565
March 2010
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door was closed.

He clicked “save” on the spreadsheet. Then, “export.” He gave it the lename

“colgam” — Columbine Game.

Kaynbred logged out of GlockTalk for the last time. Then, the High Road. Then
Wikipedia. He uninstalled Combat Arms, and quit his clan. The identity
“Kaynbred” was never heard from publicly again.

He went to the Columbine discussion forum, and logged in as “Smiggles.” He

clicked “New Topic” and entered the subject line for his new post — likely, his
rst ever on the board: “C
.” He attached the exported images of the spreadsheet, and
hit “SUBMIT” — sharing his months of research with the world.

He planned to continue re ning the data, and so in that sense, the project was not
truly done. Nevertheless, he had crossed a milestone: he was done shopping.

566
 60. L534858

The “AR” in AR-15 stands for “Armalite Ri e.” The gun was a creation of arms-
maker Armalite’s chief designer, an ex-marine named Eugene Stoner, who had also
worked on a number of previous “AR” designs before realizing his vision in the
15th iteration, in 1957 — the perfect battle ri e, as Armalite saw it. Their bet was
that they could get the U.S. Army to see the AR-15 the same way: it was a
lightweight infantry weapon with a detachable magazine, chambered for a new,
small-caliber, high-velocity round, the .223 Remington. And it was designed to
re fully-automatically.

Unfortunately for Armalite, when it came time for the Pentagon to choose their
next battle ri e, the brass went with Spring eld Armory’s M14 design, instead: it
wasn’t as much of a departure from the Army's then-standard M1, and in their
tests, it was more accurate than the AR-15 at long range.

Af er that, Armalite promptly cut their losses, sold the AR-15 design to Colt
Firearms, and moved on. And it could have ended there for the AR-15 — if not for
the Korean War, and especially, Vietnam.

In Korea, the American forces had to adapt against a new form of warfare:
“human wave” tactics, in which the adversarial nation sought to overwhelm the
U.N.’s advanced weaponry through sheer numbers of advancing troops. Against
this sort of dense onslaught, the Army learned, “accuracy of re” over long range
was not nearly as important as the sheer volume of re being directed at the
enemy.

Here, there was a problem: the U.S.’s lef over M1 ri es from World War II red a
big, heavy .30-06 round — and since one of the most signi cant metrics in
infantry warfare is the gross weight carried per-soldier, this was no minor detail. It
meant fewer bullets in their magazine before they would have to reload, and fewer
shots to re before they were out of ammo completely. Worse still, in the 1956
Hungarian Revolution, the Soviets' new Avtomat Kalashnikov ri es made their

567
 rst appearances on the battle eld: the AK-47 red a shorter, lighter, 7.62x39mm
bullet, and was designed to stay accurate during automatic re. (The soon-to-
debut M14 would technically be capable of full-auto, but like its predecessor the
M1, it red a longer and heavier round — the 7.62×51mm NATO — and as a
result was nearly impossible to control without a tripod.) A new era of modern
small-arms warfare was thus dawning, and it appeared that the United States was
going to be lef behind.

The Korean War would grind to a stalemate before any resolution to the “big bore
vs. small bore” issue could be reached, and so, when the rst American troops
were sent o f to Vietnam in the early 1960’s, they were still holding heavy, bulky
M14s. That ri e's shortcomings would become more evident as time passed, and
as more and more of the Viet Cong they met on the battle eld were armed with
AK-47's.

***
Meanwhile, Armalite’s designs for the AR-15 were still on the shelf at Colt, and
were looking better every year. The action of the ri e’s receiver used fewer parts
than traditional designs, which meant less weight. It was also constructed out of
modern materials — aircraf -grade aluminum and advanced polymers — which
shed even more of the burden on a soldier’s back. And the 5.56mm round (a slight
change from Stoner’s original .223 Remington) was smaller and lighter than the
AK’s. Army tests found that, “One 5-to-7 man squad armed with the AR-15
would be as e fective as a 10-man squad armed with the M14.” Numbers like that
were hard to ignore.

In 1965, a small batch of AR-15s — now designated by the U.S. Army as its Model
16, or more simply “M16” — made their way to the jungles of Vietnam, in the
hands of combat instructors and a few select South Vietnamese regiments. “The
boys who use it think it is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel,” one
American o cer told the New York Tim . And they found the AR, at six-and-a-
half pounds, to be far better suited for the generally-smaller South Vietnamese
soldiers to carry. It t their hands.

Giving up some long-range accuracy was no major loss; most of the ghting in
Vietnam was taking place in dense brush, at less than 100 yards. “Spray and pray”
of en won the ght. Year over year, more and more troops would be sent to
Vietnam, and as the weapon proved itself on the battle eld (and especially af er
some early reliability issues were found to be related to ammunition and
maintenance, rather than the gun itsel ), more and more of the troops would be
carrying an M16. Finally, in 1969, Armalite’s design was o cially adopted as the

568
standard service ri e for the United States military. The bulky M14 was nally
dethroned, by the gun of the future.

***
The tactical advancements that the M16 represented were not isolated to the
battle eld. Within a year of its deployment overseas, the black ri e rose from the
mud of the Vietnam jungle, and sailed back over to its country of origin, where
Colt began marketing a semi-automatic version, under its original model number:
AR-15.

A man named Mack Gwinn Jr. followed close behind the ri e, returning across
the Atlantic to his native Bangor, Maine, from his tours of duty with the Green
Berets. In the early 1970’s, he founded Gwinn Firearms, and began manufacturing
a variety of pistols and submachine guns. In 1973, a man named Richard Dyke
purchased the company from him for $241,000, moved the factory to the town of
Windham, and changed the name to Bushmaster Firearms.

Three years later, Colt’s patent on Eugene Stoner’s design expired, opening up the
market for any manufacturer to produce weapons based on the platform. A
number of manufacturers started doing exactly that, all at the same time; but the
AR-15s that Bushmaster produced, beginning in 1976, quickly earned a reputation
as some of the most accurate and reliable on the market.

***
In 2006, Richard Dyke sold Bushmaster to a private equity rm out of New York,
Cerberus Capital Management. Bushmaster would thus join Remington, Marlin,
and several other rearms manufacturers, as part the rm’s “Freedom Group.”
But, for the workers at the factory in Windham, nothing much changed.

***
On February 12, 2010, the factory in Windham was humming along like usual,
when a particular Bushmaster AR-15 came rolling down the assembly line. A serial
number, L534858, was etched into its barrel, and the long gun was loaded into a
crate with a half-dozen other ARs just like it.

Bushmaster sold the crate to a wholesaler, a company called Camfour. And a few
days later, Camfour shipped the gun bearing serial number L534858 to a gun
dealer in Connecticut.

569
March 29, 2010
Riverview Gun Sales — East Windsor, Connecticut
The door to the gun store opened, and Nancy Lanza walked in, to pick up her
son’s birthday present. Riverview was almost an hour’s drive from 36 Yogananda,
but they nearly always had AR-15s in stock. For her Bushmaster, Nancy paid
$1,164.94, af er tax.

She had been to Riverview once before, on the 15th — Connecticut had a two-
week waiting period — and on that day, the gun store had her ll out a “Firearms
Transaction Record,” for the background check. That form asked her if she’d ever
been convicted of a felony, or for misdemeanor domestic violence, or if she had a
restraining order against her, or if she’d been “con ned in a hospital for mental
illness within the past twelve months,” or if in the past 20 years she’d been
“discharged from custody af er having [been] found not guilty of a crime by
reason of mental disease or defect.”

She checked “no” for each of these.

On another sheet, she certi ed that she was not a fugitive from justice, nor an
illegal alien, nor “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant,
stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance.”

Riverview transmitted the pages to NICS, in Virginia, where the hallways were
lined with boxes of les. Nancy’s answers checked out, and the FBI sent Riverview
their verdict on the sale: PROCEED.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The door at the top of the stairs was closed.

He was watching a documentary on his computer — The Killing of America.

Released in 1982 as something between a true-crime documentary and Fac of
Death-style exploitation cinema, the lm vividly portrayed the rise of violence and
mass murder in America since the 1960’s. Its title came from a voice-over, late in
the lm, played out over a montage of a convicted serial killer’s daily life in prison:

Most sadistic mass murderers have an IQ above 125. Yet they continue to
kill like clockwork... Almost if they are dedicated to the killing of
America itself. One even said he mass-murdered college students because
‘I wanted to hurt society where it hurt the most. By taking its most
valuable future members.’

570
He liked the lm, a lot. And it was freely available on YouTube. He posted a link
to it on the Columbine forum — it was one of the rst things he did as Smiggles.

The 2010 archives from the forum are spotty — what survives, mostly, is just a list
of topics that the site’s users posted about that year, and some of the usernames
who posted under each topic, but not what was actually said. Still, from just this,
it is apparent (given the count of views and replies to the thread) that his
spreadsheet did not generate much interest; likely disappointed, he moved on to
commenting on other threads instead.

There were several topics discussing Harry Potter at the time, and users remember
that in one thread, shortly af er he rst appeared on the forum, Smiggles said he
“liked the Harry Potter idea that at the age of eleven, the kids were taken away
from their families,” to be brought over to their own society.

***
Downstairs, Nancy crossed the threshold, and in that moment, 36 Yogananda
became an AR-15 home.

She gave the "modern sporting ri e" to her son, to keep in the computer room,
across from his bedroom: in the closet, there was a tall, brown gun safe. It already
contained the family’s Ruger Mini-14 — and, there was another new addition,
purchased that same month: a Saiga-12 shotgun (nearly identical to the digital one
that “Kaynbred” said he wanted to unlock in Combat Arms.)

Nancy bought the Saiga on the website Gunbroker.com, placing a winning bid of
$999. She also ordered accessories for it: two bulging, 20-round “drum”
magazines. These went on a shelf next to the safe, resting on top of a pile of gun
manuals.

Tucked into one of the books on the shelf was a scrap of paper, with a shopping
list written on it:

$75 for the box of ammunition

$850 for the shotgun + 8-round magazine

$150 for all of the other magazin

The note wasn’t in Nancy’s handwriting. And it appears they exceeded the budget
they’d laid out — but the Lanzas could a ford it.

571
Ryan was away at college at this time, but as he understood the situation back
home, all the guns in the safe “had been legally purchased by Nancy, and were
registered in her name, but [his brother] actually owned the AR-15, and the
weapons were all kept in a gun safe in [his] bedroom closet.”

It is perfectly legal, even common, for Americans to purchase guns for their adult
children. Besides, he would have passed the same background check she had.

***
If he visited Bushmaster's website at this time — which he almost certainly did, as
part of researching a purchase that was very important to him — Nancy's son
would have found an online version of the gun's user's manual, and a list of its
technical speci cations, along with links to where he could nd a local dealer
(such as Riverview). At the time, on the right sidebar, there was a section headed
"Legislative Updates" with two links: one to the NRA ILA, and one to the NSSF.
Then, there was a prominent banner-image of the AR-15, with the ad copy
"CONSIDER YOUR MAN CARD REISSUED."

It was actually a link to a promotion, the "Bushmaster Man Card Sweepstakes,"

where you could win a free AR-15. The promotion would prove so successful,
Bushmaster followed it up with a full "Man Card" ad campaign later that year:

To become a card-carrying man, visitors of

bushmaster.com will have to prove they’re a man
by answering a series of manhood questions. Upon
successful completion, they will be issued a
temporary Man Card to proudly display to friends
and family. The Man Card is valid for one year.

Visitors can also call into question or even

revoke the Man Card of friends they feel have
betrayed their manhood. The man in question will
then have to defend himself, and their Man Card,
by answering a series of questions geared towards
proving indeed, they are worthy of retaining
their card.

The "man card" itself was meant to be shared on social media, as were the posts
one could send to a friend, notifying them that their Bushmaster Man Card was
"revoked," and which were all in the form of an accusation of some un-manly
behavior that the target had supposedly exhibited. One template alleged that the
recipient "AVOIDS EYE CONTACT WITH TOUGH LOOKING 5TH
GRADERS."

572
Along the bottom of every page was a banner graphic, featuring a soldier posing
in desert fatigues, carrying an AR-15, with a slogan printed across the scene: "I
' , ' .
B .T ' AR- ."

National Shooting Sports Foundation — Newtown, Connecticut

The NSSF hired a market-research rm, Harris Interactive, to take a survey of
Americans who purchased guns during a week-long period in March 2010. They
wanted to see if their “modern sporting ri e” re-branding campaign was having
the intended e fect on the gun market.

When the data came back, it showed they still had a lot of work to do:

uestion: Which of the following best describ the primary purpose for
your modern semi-automatic rifle (such AR-15)?

Collecting: 28%

Purchased to avoid any potential future ownership ban: 27%

Target shooting sports: 18%

Home/Personal protection: 17%

Hunting: 6%

April 8, 2010
Nanping — Fujian Province, China
A prisoner was led into the courtroom wearing an orange vest, over a black-and-
white checkered jumpsuit. The 42-year-old man appeared agitated. A pair of
policemen with white gloves restrained him as he stood in front of the judge,
while a at-screen monitor played security-camera clips showing what the man
had done at Nanping City Elementary School, two weeks before: parents were
arriving with their children outside the school, when suddenly, the man pulled
out a knife, and started attacking the students. The school’s security guard rushed
over, and with the help of civilians, restrained him until police arrived. He
reportedly told them, during the struggle, that “life was meaningless.”

Now, in the courtroom, he whimpered that he did it because a woman had

rejected him, and he felt he had su fered “unfair treatment” from her wealthy

573
family.

The trial lasted four hours. The judge sentenced him to death by gunshot. The
sentence was carried out two and a half weeks later.

But another strange and tragic thing happened, a few hours af er the execution:
700 miles away, in Leizhou, a city on the southern end of China’s east coast, a 33-
year-old man attacked another primary school. He had been a teacher himself, but
was on leave since 2006 for “mental illness.” Adults rushed him as soon as he
started swinging the knife, and he was arrested. Within weeks, he too was
sentenced to death, and executed.

The day af er the Leizhou attack, in a city all the way back at the north end of the
coast, it happened again. A 47-year-old man with a knife attacked a kindergarten
in Taixing township, in the province of Jiangsu. China’s state-run media would
report that he “admitted in court his motive behind the attack was to vent his rage
against society.” Though all of his victims survived, the judge still sentenced him
to death, because, “The attempt was hideous, the act brutal, the impact serious.”
He wrote that the attacker “could not handle his frustrations and vented his rage
against society in such a way that could not be tolerated.”

The following month, another one, in Weifang: a local farmer rammed his
motorcycle through the front gate of a preschool, and started attacking everyone
he saw with a hammer. He then doused himself in gasoline, and grabbed two
students; teachers were just barely able to pull the children back to safety before he
set himself ablaze.

By this point, the state determined that further coverage of such stories would not
be desirable, and so the latest incident was barely covered at all domestically. But
by then, the phenomenon had garnered global attention. “What is going on with
these people?” a father in Beijing asked CNN. “Why take out their frustrations on
defenseless children? We need better security in schools, but we also need to take
care of the mentally ill.”

The next one came in May. The worst yet, at a kindergarten. An outcry was
building, with parents demanding better security at the schools. The government
had already boosted funding for school security, when the attacks rst started, but
it wasn’t enough. China Daily interviewed a police o cer from the local force,
who said the crimes were “almost impossible” to prevent in such undeveloped
areas. “We can only focus on the schools with the highest populations because the
strength of the police force is just not enough” he said, adding that in another
township, “We have only 11 criminal investigation policemen for a population of
110,000. But at least 20 schools are located there.”

574
Another one came in August. Back in Shengdong, near the coast, in the city of
Zibo. A 26-year-old man attacked a kindergarten class with a knife. He was
arrested, put on trial, and executed. There was no known motive.

Wooster Mountain Shooting Range — Danbury, Connecticut

Peter took his son to an outdoor target range, one weekend. When he picked the
teenager up at 36 Yogananda, he saw his son had two long guns with him; one of
them was the AR-15.

Peter didn’t think much of it. The date of April 22, 2010 had just passed — as of
that date, his son was o cially an adult, in the eyes of society.

Around this time, Peter told the 18-year-old the same thing Nancy had: that there
was no way he could meet even the basic requirements for military service, and so
his plan to become an elite commando would go nowhere. Dreams were going to
have to stay dreams.

Peter could tell his son was resentful at receiving such a message, but got it
nonetheless: he never did enlist.

The range at Wooster Mountain was scenic. There was a long shooting bench, and
a backstop at the other end of a grassy eld where the targets would go up, and it
was all surrounded by the verdant canopy of a state forest. There were families
that looked just like the Lanzas, there every weekend, enjoying the same outdoor
activity.

Peter remembers he paid for all the ammunition he and his son used that day —
he always did, whenever they went shooting. And he’s sure they always red every
shot they purchased, before leaving.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

Ryan graduated from college that summer. Nancy put his graduation photos in a
nice frame, on a shelf right in the foyer at 36 Yogananda.

Ryan already had a job working at Ernst & Young in Manhattan, and soon he got
an apartment in New Jersey, with some friends. He was ready for real life.

Nancy’s younger son seemed to have nally disabused himself of his soldier-
fantasy, but she held out hope that he would at least be interested in going to
college. Even if so, she accepted that it would involve what would surely be a
fraught transition in his life: somehow extricating him from his room at the top of
the stairs, and sending him o f on his own, to be absorbed into a mass of other

575
students his age. So she got out a notebook, and scribbled some plans; what she
thought it would take to make the college plan work.

First, he would need another IEP. And they would again be updating it as
necessary, all the way until graduation. But these IEPs would be di ferent: he
wasn’t a schoolboy anymore. He was a man. And he wouldn’t have his mother
around all the time, to sof en the rough edges whenever he lef his comfort zone.
This time, the plan would treat him, ostensibly, like an adult.

Nancy would lose control of her son’s situation from the outset; he would be
deciding the school, not her. And whatever school he chose could potentially be
out-of-state, moving him even further from her zone of protection. But at the
same time, she knew that any place where he could thrive would have to be (as
summarized by the Courant, who rst obtained Nancy’s notes) “a school that is
accommodating to students on the autism spectrum.” She felt that her son was
“vulnerable to victimization,” even in college, and if there was any hope of the
plan working, “He would have to get a grip on his anxiety and depression and his
sensory issues.”

Nancy wrote, “He’ll need extra time for classes and pacing of major exams,” and
“stress management is key including the identi cation of calming methods.” She
foresaw that he would have to keep a daily planner, learn time management skills,
and keep his driver’s license valid; responsibilities she had handled until then, but
that, gradually, would be shif ed onto his shoulders.

Without his mother being a phone call and minutes away, he would nally be
forced to advocate for himself. And he would have to manage his anxiety over
social interactions, or else Nancy foresaw a “nightmare” unfolding, when he
attempted dorm life. He would have to memorize “dating etiquette,” as well as
strategies for coping with “peer pressure, criticism and rejection.” And he would
need to rely on “scripts” in order to interact with other people in this theoretical
college life — particularly, Nancy thought, when it came to girls.

As the Courant would relay it, Nancy felt that her son needed “warnings [to] stay
o f social media such as Facebook,” and to “be careful of porn.” She also expressed
“concerns over suicide” — but it does not appear that she elaborated on this
point.

Finally, Nancy’s plan mentioned “the possible use of medications” to help him
manage the stress — but Nancy surely knew this would be, at best, a distant wish.
She was there for the "Celexa" war. But apparently, she still held out some small
hope that, at whatever college her son chose to attend, the support sta f there
could succeed, where she and Yale had Dr. Fox had all failed.

576
 ***
“Kaynbred” wasn't playing Combat Arms anymore. It appears he only played it
for a period of about seven months — rst registering his account in mid-
September of 2009, and eventually quitting his clan in early March of 2010. But
the stats also show that the played an astonishing amount in that time: he was
averaging more than 500 “kills” every day. It was like a carry-over from his World
of Warcraf routine: hours upon hours in physical solitude in his room, but in
near-constant contact with the other players, online. And so he became familiar
with many of his teammates; but still, he didn't grow close to them — with just
one exception. There was one player in the clan that he found he could really talk
to.

In fact, at some point, he even indicated to this person that he loved them.

It appears that af er Kaynbred stopped playing Combat Arms, the teammate he

"loved" was still keeping in contact with him for some period of time. But the user
at 36 Yogananda had experienced a change of heart, and now wanted to sever that
social bond. He wrote an email (the message is undated in its released form, but
context shows it was sent roughly around this time) that revealed some of the
person behind "Kaynbred," and why their supposed love for their teammate was
now gone forever:

After having spent much time analyzing this, I’ve

determined which factors enabled me to love you.

I projected a personality, which I consider to be

virtuous, delusionally onto you. For the same
reason, I ignored the many things which I
fundamentally hate about you. I was deluding
myself.

I am heavily emotionally susceptible to

environments. Most of my social contact was
through those players. All of them are typical
detestable humans, and it bred an aura of
innumerable negative emotions for me. You were a
respite from that.

You could actually type coherently. Relationships

cannot exist if communication is not present,
which would immediately preclude me from being
able to have a relationship with 99% of the
humans there.

577
 Once every month or so in that game, I would meet
someone who would type properly, and I would
always try to play with them. I remember one
person in particular whom I followed around only
because he typed properly, which allowed me to
communicate with him without feeling as if I was
dealing with a severely handicapped duck. He
spoke disrespectfully of his girlfriend the first
day I spoke to him, which would normally serve as
the catalyst for my detestment of such a person,
yet I completely overlooked it because I was so
relieved to be able to speak with someone who was
in any way capable of communicating.

Relationships have absolutely no physical aspect

to me: all that matters is communication. The
nature of the internet fosters this.

I incessantly have nothing other than scorn for

humanity. I have been desperate to feel anything
positive for someone for my entire life.

Early on, you referenced serial killing multiple

times in ways people normally don't. That
immediately appealed to me.

Apparently, the Combat Arms teammate was routinely the target of some kind of
harassment by other players during some of their sessions with Kaynbred — or
possibly, this other player simply shared stories of such treatment, which they
endured in another setting. Whatever the experience was, Kaynbred had strong
feelings about it:

I have an affinity for people whom I perceive as

being abused, and consummate scorn for the
abusers. It was probably the primary enabling
factor. The way you are relentlessly treated by
these humans is obscenely offensive to me, so
every time they would do it, it would
simultaneously increase my sympathy for you and
increase my resentment for all of them. My wrath
for them fostered more of a negative atmosphere,
which would cause you to be ever more of a
respite from their depravity. It was self-
perpetuating.

578
 I'm capable of boundless affection. I had never
been in a situation to feel that way before, so I
thought that it was special.

I took my focus away from myself and directed it

toward you.

Despite the tone of the message, near the end of it, the user behind Kaynbred
made a passing reference suggesting that his own temperment had actually
improved recently, due to an unspeci ed change of circumstances in his life (likely
referring to his being liberated from the school system, and reaching the age of
eighteen; the circumstances that enabled him to retreat into his cave):

I used to be hate-filled and couldn't just

dismiss people I didn't like. It tore me apart,
and I needed someone who didn't.

Finishing his dismissal of his teammate, the former-Kaynbred tried to

depersonalize his critique of the other player's conduct; they weren't a bad person.
They were just another participant in a corrupt civilization, as made evident by
their adoption of their parents' values — the very enculturing process that
Kaynbred detested most of all:

Coercion is endemic to parenting in general.

Children are slaves to their parents' will in
virtually every family.

You're a Christian. Religion, being cultural,

inherently subjugates.

The whole "dishonor" fatuity. Something is

"dishonorable" not because it lacks virtue, but
because it goes against their "authority." All
they're doing is imposing their will on you.

You submit to the notion of culture, which your

parents forced onto you.

He nished his message, and clicked SEND — he was done with that period of his
online life. But he was still very much connected, under his new identity. It was
the only way he could really communicate. And most importantly, he didn’t have
to leave his room.

***

579
Nancy’s email records show that on May 24, 2010, she exchanged a number of
emails with a boyfriend, regarding “problems in their relationship.”

Things didn’t work out with the man she met at the Redding Roadhouse; a
friend of hers would recall that there was one boyfriend over the years — it’s
unclear if this was the same man, or someone else — who had even proposed
marriage to Nancy. But as Nancy told her friend, if she accepted, she knew she
would have to move. And she could never do that with her son living at home.

It was back to the single life for her. Fortunately, she was still seeing her friend the
dressmaker for dinner every week or two. Nancy was putting more energy into
looking good than ever.

June 2, 2010
Cumbria, United Kingdom
Fourteen years passed af er Dunblane before there was another attack in the UK.
But it did happen again; the shooter was a taxi driver, with no known history of
mental illness, and he used only the kinds of guns he could still legally obtain af er
Dunblane. Yet, he managed to harm many, many people across the village of
Cumbria — by driving around in his cab and calling pedestrians over, ambushing
them when they were at point-blank range, and then driving away. It went on for
hours. And though the police gave chase, the o cers were all unarmed,
themselves; when the cab stopped and the gunman turned around, they could
only duck and pray, waiting for the designated “Armed Response Units” to arrive.
By the time they did, it didn’t matter; the gunman had already run out of shotgun
shells, and then totaled his car. He walked o f into the woods with his .22, and
took his own life.

For many in the UK, it seemed like just the sort of incident that the Snowdrop
Appeal was supposed to have prevented. But the grieving father from Dunblane
rejected this notion; af er all, the 1996 gun ban had actually been a watered-down
version of what they called for in the Snowdrop Appeal. And if the gunman in
Cumbria had been given access to the same guns as the Dunblane shooter, it all
could have been far, far worse. Cumbria was more a sign that police responses
needed improvement — and that wouldn’t have made any di ference at
Dunblane. “It took 15 minutes until any police o cer arrived at the school, when
the incident was all over in three minutes.”

580
June 28, 2010
United States Supreme Court — Washington, D.C.
The only thing restraining the Heller vs. District of Columbia ruling from
overturning state-level gun laws nationwide was that D.C. was a federal enclave —
decisions there didn’t address the issue of states’ rights. The missing piece came
from Illinois, and the city that banned handguns.

As everyone on the south side of Chicago knew, despite the ban, all the criminals
still had handguns; Otis McDonald was a law-abiding resident who had seen his
neighborhood in Morgan Park decline over the last 40 years, and he wanted a
handgun for home defense. But the city wouldn’t let him have one. In response,
he said they were infringing on his constitutional right to bear arms. McDonald v.
Chicago was the result.

The NSSF submitted a brief for the case: “Personal ownership of rearms was, of
course, of en critical to survival in the 17th and 18th centuries (and long
thereaf er),” they said, “providing food before there were supermarkets, and safety
before there were police forces. More importantly, late 18th century Americans
deemed rearms to be their principal protection against tyranny — rst from the
British crown, and then from the new national government they were creating in
the Constitution.”

The court found that Americans themselves had changed since then, too. “By the
1850’s, the fear that the National Government would disarm the universal militia
had largely faded, but the right to keep and bear arms was highly valued for self-
defense.” Af er the Civil War, when the Southern States engaged in “systematic
e forts to disarm and injure African Americans,” the Fourteenth Amendment was
passed with the intent to protect the fundamental rights of such former slaves —
including their right to bear arms.

The court ruled 5-4 against Chicago, ordering that the city could not ban handgun
ownership. With that, the right for Americans to bear arms in individual self-
defense was secured in all f y states.

***
There would be more disagreements over guns, and more cases before the courts...
but for Americans who had already acquired rearms, it was too late for any of it
to matter. The remaining barriers to tragedy would have to be local, and personal.

581
Summer 2010
Norwich University — North eld, Vermont
Peter’s son nally obtained his driver’s license in July. Standing before the blue
background for his photo, he was as wide-eyed ever, with sunken cheeks.

Peter got him a car, as promised: it was a brand new, black, 4-door Honda Civic. A
very safe vehicle, for a very safe driver.

Father and son went for a drive up to Norwich University over the summer — the
oldest private military college in the United States, and the “Birthplace of the
ROTC.” Peter knew his son wanted to enroll, so they went to check out the
campus — but again, he sought to temper expectations; he suggested his son start
smaller, with a partial course load back at Norwalk Community college. Work up
to university from there.

This time, his son took it very personally. He said that if he had to go to Norwalk,
he wasn’t going to take a partial load, but in fact five classes: an overloaded
schedule. “I hardly ever saw him pissed, but he was pissed,” Peter would recall to
Andrew Solomon.

His father wondered if there was an unspoken issue that was really causing
friction: things were serious between Peter and his girlfriend, and they were
talking about getting married. Peter still hadn’t introduced the woman to his
youngest son, who had no interest in another social bond, but the 18-year-old was
surely aware that his father was planning to remarry. The fundamentals of his life
were shif ing around him, even as he stayed put.

August 2010
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door was closed.

He apparently stopped updating his spreadsheet back in June; the taxi driver in
the UK was the last shooter, chronologically, that he added a row for (although it's
possible he went on adding older shooters af er that). He knew what he needed to
know. Now he had moved on to studying them culturally, trying to nd every
movie and television reference to shooters, or depictions of gunmen in black
trench coats.

He found some like minds on the Columbine forum — at least when it came to
horror movies. He posted about Bloody Wednesday, the bizarre movie based on
the McDonald’s shooter, saying he didn’t think anyone else would like it — but

582
another user said they felt the same way, and together they gushed about the
“teddy bear” scene.

The forum had a function for sending “PMs” — Private Messages — and
Smiggles utilized it to talk to several di ferent individuals from the board. He
never gave any identifying information — no names or cities — and he never
talked to any of them outside of PM or email. But they nonetheless gleaned an
impression of the person on the other end of the correspondence. Years later,
some of them would still have copies.

***
In one exchange, late at night, the user behind “Smiggles” tells another user that
he of en nds himself listening to the same songs, over and over:

Smiggles: I don’t know if listening to it is

cathartic for my mind or if it just exacerbates
my relentless thoughts... I get preoccupied with
the simplest things and I obsess over them every
conscious moment until something else gets my
immediate attention, at which point the first one
gets relegated to some mental cesspool where
everything just keeps accumulating. It gets
irritating. I’m going to be awake for a while
thinking about something even though I’m
exhausted, and tomorrow probably isn’t going to
be better.

The conversation drif s to movies, and Smiggles explains how he had lately
acquired a taste for psychological horror lms from the 1970s and 1980s, like
Bloody Wednesday. He o fers an explanation for why the production style appeals
to him:

Smiggles: It emphasizes a looming atmosphere

that’s isolated, perfunctory, and despondent... A
lot of people probably treat media as some form
of escapism, but for me, it’s as if I seek
anything which might somehow augment the
atmosphere in my mind.

I don’t feel like I’ve ever had a "life". I’ve

been in my own mind for so long, and there’s
nothing really there. It’s more of a volatile
atmosphere than anything material, and everything
in my life is just following it.

583
 I guess that’s sort of why I’ve been interested
in Columbine and other massacres for so long. A
lot of them reflect the atmosphere in my mind,
but unlike my incorporeal thoughts, they’re
factual accounts of real incidents. Each massacre
is like a different manifestation of some
nameless emotion I’ve felt or mood I’ve had.

Later, he talks about the Orange High School shooter, who had ambushed his
father on the couch. Smiggles says the videos of the trial, with the shooter’s home-
movie confessionals projected against the courtroom wall, had the same aura as his
favorite horror lms: “enchantingly surreal.”

***
Later, in the thread "Favorite lms", Smiggles posted a list of his "Top 25." Nearly
all of the lms fell under the 1970s/1980s low-budget psychological horror
category that he had mentioned in the PM conversation. And while it may have
been more of a hobby — to occupy some of the many, many hours he spent idle
in his blank-walled room — there are some possible insights to be gleaned from
his carefully-selected list of lms.

One, 1973's The Baby, depicts a sadistic mother with a grown, disabled son whom
she infantilizes and con nes in his bedroom, in order to reap bene ts and
attention for herself.

Another, 1980's Don’t Go in the House, was notorious for its depiction of a
amethrower-wielding serial killer, but is more notable for the killer's xation on
his mother; Smiggles would post a clip to the Columbine forum from this lm
(his contribution to the thread "F "), which showed the
killer heading upstairs in his old mansion af er committing a murder, and hearing
the voice of his mother tormenting him — “Trash! Just like your father!” — right
af er which he hears other voices, telling him to "punish" her again (i.e. commit
another murder). He shouts up the staircase at her, enraged: "You hear that, old
lady? I'll punish you again!"

But the most common thematic element in the list of lms, and one which may
indeed have “augmented” the “atmosphere” already present in his mind, was one
of isolation: Bad Ronald, Pin, The Attic, and Crawlspace each depict reclusive
protagonists who hide in the walls and attics of large homes, and have antisocial or
violent tendencies. (He even had a copy of the novel upon which Crawlspace was
based, mixed in with the stack of books in his closet.)

584
And so while the environment he had long grown accustomed to was a
claustrophobic, sterile box, shut away from civilization, he did appear to have
some self-perception, an awareness that this was the case. (This was probably also
re ected in something he typed in one of his text les: a passing mention that he
had been listening to the Beatles song “Nowhere Man.”)

***
Peter had been trying to get in touch with his son for weeks. They hadn’t seen
each other since the ght at Norwich. And now, he wasn’t even getting responses
to his emails anymore. So he wrote to Nancy instead.

She wrote back. “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.”

There was already one more father-son visit scheduled, from prior to the Norwalk
ght. When the day came around, Peter headed up the long driveway to 36
Yogananda, and rang the doorbell, hoping for the best. But his son refused to
leave the house. Peter told him, “We’ve got to gure out a system so I can work
with you.” But he was getting nowhere.

Peter got in his car and headed back down the driveway. He was hurt, but he
gured his son would get over it, eventually.

585
 61. The Patient

August 2010
Private Residence — Milford, Connecticut
A few towns over from Sandy Hook, a woman was going through her mail, when
she found a bill from her 19-year-old daughter’s psychiatrist. Her daughter
happened to be home from WCSU for summer break just then, so she went and
knocked on her bedroom door. “What is this? Don’t you see him at the student
counseling center?”

“We needed more time.” The campus counseling center only scheduled one 30-
minute session per week, the young woman explained, so she had started going
directly to the psychiatrist’s community o ce, in Brook eld.

Her mother closed the door, annoyed. Campus visits were included in the tuition
she was paying; the o ce visits were not. Even worse, this Dr. Paul Fox wasn’t
even in-network. He was going to cost them a lot.

Still, she gured it was for the best. Her daughter had serious issues — Borderline
Personality Disorder, an eating disorder, as well as “depression and self-harming
(cutting)” as her mother would write — and the girl needed help. Her father had
hurt her, physically and emotionally. It was very, very rare for her to nd male
doctors that she could form a bond with. That was why her mother had been
hopeful, when she called home early in Fall 2009, to tell her that WCSU had just
brought this wonderful new doctor on sta f, and that they “clicked so well.” Dr.
Fox seemed like an answer to their prayers. At rst.

***
On the other side of the door, Dr. Fox’s patient was writing in her diary. Looking
back over the pages, they reminded her of just how she had gotten into this whole
mess.

586
She had been in a psychology class for her nursing program, shortly af er enrolling
at WCSU, when the professor introduced a concept called “transference” — what
she understood to be “a phenomenon when emotions, feelings and desires,
especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood, are redirected and
transferred to the therapist.”

She wrote in her diary af er that class: “I don’t want to talk to Dr. Fox anymore.
It’s unhealthy. I want him to be my father.”

She made a point to bring it up at their next session — “I think transference is

happening between us.” As she remembers it, Dr. Fox “didn’t express any concern
and dismissed the idea.”

Their sessions continued, and she could feel her and Dr. Fox grow closer. She got
him to start talking about himself. “How old is your daughter?”

He told her; roughly the same age she was.

“She’s really lucky to have you.”

The diary pages af er that were her fantasies, about Dr. Fox holding her, and
kissing her. “I was beginning to think that I loved him. I was very vulnerable and
very confused with myself,” she would later say, looking back.

They talked on the phone all the time over break. Late into the evening,
sometimes. She knew her mother wondered about them, hearing the mu ed
conversation as she passed in the hall. Isn’t the man married? Isn’t he at home
with h wife right now? Why he on the phone with you?

But the Patient wanted to hear his voice. Most of all, she wanted to hear him say
three little words; she even told him how bad she wanted to hear them. But he
wouldn’t say it.

She had called him in the middle of the night a few months before, and maybe the
words were what she really wanted to hear then, too — she was abusing her
medications in her dorm, and was in a dark place. She told him she had become
very dependent on him, and, “If you hang up, I’ll die.” So Dr. Fox stayed up on
the phone until the sun had come up, and she had dozed o f.

That was April Fool’s day, but it wasn’t much of a joke. And now, looking back on
this page in her diary, it seemed strange to her: he didn’t call for an ambulance, or
tell her to go to a hospital.

587
She took out a pen. New entry. “Maybe it’s because he cared so much about me.”
She gured Fox didn’t want her to go to a di ferent doctor, one who wouldn’t care
about her as much as he did.

***
The Patient went back to WCSU for her sophomore year, and brought her diary
with her. She talked with Dr. Fox about the way she felt, and the way she wanted
him to feel about her. She wrote that Fox “told me that my feelings weren’t
wrong, but that it was up to him what he should do to me and how to act towards
me.”

During one session, she said she felt a strong urge to hurt herself. She writes that
Dr. Fox held her hand, and she felt better. At the end of the session, they hugged.
He apologized for “being a human male,” and said “that he had sexual feelings for
me, but explained to me that these feelings were not the sole reasons as to why he
was hugging me. I remember him acknowledging my vulnerability and promising
me that he would not take advantage of me.”

***
Af er one session in September, she couldn’t wait to get back to her dorm. She
wanted to record the way it all felt, before the magic started to fade:

He said he lov me. He finally said it...I’m glad he told me. I feel wrong
and selfish and I’m worried about him. I’m worried so much....Should I
leave him? No, I can’t. I love him. He said we’re going to be friends.
He’s going to want to know how I’m doing and what I’m doing for the
rest of h life. He wants to be connected to me. He said he won’t leave. I
feel safe with him but at the same time I feel wrong.

The Patient went home for Thanksgiving. She told her mother that she had good
news: there wouldn't be any more out-of-network bills from Dr. Fox’s o ce
coming in the mail anymore. No bills from him at all, in fact. She was going to
continue seeing Dr. Fox… but just as “friends.”

Her mother couldn’t believe what she was hearing. By then, she knew Dr. Fox was
providing her daughter with medication — “pills to go to sleep, pills to stay
awake, she was turning into a zombie” — and worse, they were always free
samples. No prescription on record at any pharmacy, and so (if indeed the
medicine was helping) no way to get more — except through Dr. Fox. Now, with
that situation in place, they were going to be “friends?”

588
She confronted her daughter. “You are dependent on him, and it’s completely
inappropriate.”

The Patient was de ant; there was nothing sexual going on, and she could be
friends with anyone she wanted.

“Have you met his family?” her mother countered. “Has he met your friends?”
She kept going, trying to get her daughter to snap out of it. You’re 19, he’s 59. He’s
a doctor, you’re h patient. And he’s married!

But her daughter wasn’t listening anymore. “Why can’t we be friends? Just
because society doesn’t accept it!?”

589
 62. Anarchy

September 18, 2010

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door was closed.

He got an email from his father.

I am very happy to hear from your mother that you

are enjoying your classes. I hope that we can
spend some time together soon, just let me know
when you are available (even if only for a short
period of time).

He closed the message.

He wasn’t attending any classes. He would have been, had he enrolled at the
community college like he threatened to. But when the start of the term came
around, he just stayed up in his cave. And Nancy’s handwritten plans — of how to
construct another protective bubble around her son, so that he could survive
when she sent him o f to live on-campus — were on hold; it might be easier, she
thought, if she just moved along with him to whatever town he needed. But
selling 36 Yogananda, and leaving Newtown, was a major decision. She needed
time.

***
Two days later, he was on the Columbine forum. There was a thread about
“favorite foods,” which had already drif ed o f into a debate over what the best
regional cuisines were. Everyone, naturally, voted for the dishes they grew up
eating. He hated that.

Smiggles: Why would you be proud that you were

born in a random place and sycophantically

590
 accepted being indoctrinated by the arbitrary
beliefs your society imposed onto you? I have a
lot of animosity for the notion of geographical
culture.

He was still sending PMs, leaking little bits of his real-life existence. One user
remembers that he “portrayed himself as someone who lived an isolated life in
which he was always in discomfort,” and that he “believed he had issues with his
sensory inputs.” Foods in general were “unappealing in terms of taste and
texture,” and he complained that he “could not nd clothing that t him
comfortably.”

In correspondence with another user, he talked about life inside the black plastic
cave:

Smiggles: Those drapes haven’t been opened in the

last five years, and the drapes in the room I’m
in right now have actually been taped shut (to
block the gaps from allowing sunlight through)
for the same amount of time. I absolutely hate
sunlight, along with any artificial light which
resembles it.

The few times I see an extremely bleak, dark, and

dreary day outside during the morning or
afternoon with thick gray clouds covering the
entire sky, I get into a good mood and think
about how wonderfully beautiful it is outside.
Bright, sunny, “cheerful” days are depressing.
Nearly every afternoon is miserable for me.
Beyond just the normal animosity I have for
sunlight, I get exhausted between noon and sunset
when I’m in a room which allows the slightest
amount of afternoon light in.

I hate having my skin exposed to sunlight, so I

always wear a hooded sweatshirt and full-length
pants, even in the hottest weather. The
sunglasses I wear are gigantic and almost
completely prevent me from seeing any direct
sunlight when I’m looking in any direction. I
would also wear a full balaclava if it wouldn’t
get me profiled as a criminal. They need to make
a fashion come-back...

591
 I intend on eventually living in northwest
Washington (probably Seattle.) It’s among the
most consistently overcast regions in the
mainland US. I always get disappointed when I
check the UV index for the day and see how low it
is compared to my state’s level.

He kept the sunglasses in the center console of his black Civic, down in the garage.
(They were a “Cocoon” model — meant to be worn over a pair of prescription
glasses, and “completely isolating the eyes in a cocoon of ltered light,” as the
manufacturer boasts.)

He talked about his still-growing obsession with old horror movies. It led to a
discussion of fear itself — the sensation of it, when it got intense. He likened the
way he felt at those times, when the fear came, to a scene late in the 1972 movie
Terror House, in which a woman is surrounded in a moonlit forest by knife-
wielding attackers — suddenly, the lm cuts to a rapid sequence of their faces, as
seen through her eyes.

Smiggles: When I first saw the scene, I mentally

flinched for a moment because of its similarity
to what I have imagined in the past. When it
happens and I get slightly paranoid over them, I
usually go straight to my bedroom and try to
sleep; I don’t even bother to brush my teeth
first because the bathroom’s window only has
partial drapes and I don’t like being around
exposed windows during it. It sounds pathetic,
but when I get into my bedroom after it happens,
I search it to determine that there’s no one in
there with me, and then feel better knowing that
the only route someone could take is through the
closed door...

Getting back to the subject of paranoia — those

images were the worst “hallucinations” I had
experienced until a couple of weeks ago late one
night when I was getting very tired. The incident
was so surreal that I only remember a small
amount of the details. Basically, I began to
“see” many different things. Although I knew that
none of it was actually real, it came as close to
being real as it could for me without it being
physically tangible. I heard screaming around me,
and I had an overwhelming sense that there was

592
 someone dead behind me. I kept seeing silhouettes
of flickering people everywhere. I felt like I
had to cry. The entire ordeal persisted for about
fifteen minutes and sort of faded away. Prior to
it happening, I had never had that sort of
delusional hysteria before. It was possibly the
strangest thing I’ve ever experienced.

***
In some of his public postings, users remember that he shared some of his view of
the world outside his cave. They remember that he was “angry and resentful
about society’s structure,” and “believed that those in positions of authority were
inappropriately controlling children and young adults,” and that “teachers and
parents, too, were improperly controlling, smothering, and intentionally molding
their students and children.” He viewed teachers, especially, as “an extension of
parents’ control over children.”

But even worse than teachers, were doctors. He saved a special loathing for the
physicians he had seen throughout his life, and the role that society a forded them.
In one of the documents on the external hard drive (among those later released
due to the Courant lawsuit) he wrote why:

I was molested at least a dozen times by a few

different adults when I was a child. It wasn't my
decision at all: I was coerced into it. They felt
me all over my body, and it usually culminated in
the fondling of my penis. What do each of the
adults have in common? They were doctors, and
each of them were sanctioned by my parents to do
it. This happens to virtually every child without
their input into the matter: Their parents
sanction it.

I don't see how I and every child was not raped

by doctors: We did not consent to it. We only did
it because our parents made us. Which is another
point: If we as a society taught children that
they are independent of their parents and that
they should not blindly follow them, they would
not be abused by their parents in the way they
often are.

593
October 2010
“My Place” Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut
Nancy was drinking wine, chatting with the bartender. She had known him for
years now, and would open up now and then, when it got late and the bar was
empty — sometimes, about her son back at the house. “I really hope he gets to the
point where he can take care of himself and I don’t have to be there all the time.”

On better days, she spoke with pride about her ever-expanding rearms collection.
A local landscaper, Dan, was another My Place regular, and could vouch for it: he
was doing some work at 36 Yogananda recently, when Nancy showed him her
latest purchase. He couldn’t go in the house, so she brought it down to show him:
a Lee-En eld .303 ri e. It was a bolt-action piece from the rst world war, in
excellent condition; her eye for antiques was still strong. “She was really proud of
that one,” Dan would tell the New York Post.

Another bar patron, John, remembers a night at My Place when Nancy got a text
from a friend in town; it turned out they were having trouble getting their turkey
back in its coop. Nancy and John got in the car and drove over, he would tell the
Los Angel Tim , and he remembers watching the owner struggle to corral the
bird, when suddenly Nancy, the old girl from the farm — “who was elegantly
dressed” — simply picked up the bird by its feet, said, “This is how you do it,”
and deposited the animal back in its cage.

November 2010
Newtown High School
NHS’s school newspaper was called the Hawkeye — to match their school mascot,
the Nighthawks. But back in 1996, when the school mascot was still the Newtown
Indian, the newspaper was called Smoke Signals. And although separated by only
fourteen years, by 2010 these older editions already seemed to have come from a
di ferent society. In a way, they did: the last time Smoke Signals was printed, there
were only four computers in the entire school — and only one of them had access
to the “world wide web.”

To give an idea of how much society had changed in that short time, the
Nighthawk in 2010 reprinted a “technology” article from the April 1996 edition of
Smoke Signals, in which one student Editor-in-Chief at the time predicted how
the internet could change their culture in profound ways, in the near future.
“This non-discriminatory device allows people to travel around the globe, looking
and talking about things they’re interested in. [...] All your desires are at the touch
of a button,” he wrote. But, he had reservations. “Have we gone too far? When
the rst color televisions were introduced, people began to stop going to the

594
movies. Now that everyone can get the world at their computer, will we become a
sheltered society?”

The senior went on to predict that “the web” — mostly populated by users of
dial-up AOL and Prodigy connections at the time — would be a catastrophe for
the journalism market. “Now that all the news anyone could handle is right there
on the screen, the paper will become a thing of the past.” And with the advent of
Instant Messaging and Chat Rooms, there was suddenly “a way to meet people
without having physical appearance be any sort of factor… There are obvious
bene ts to having certain things run on the internet, but let’s all be sure not to get
carried away.”

November 12, 2010

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door was closed.

He went to the Columbine forum. There was a thread where people were talking
about pedophilia, saying that “pedos” should be thrown in jail — or simply
executed.

Smiggles posted a comment to the thread, hinting that he had something to say
on the topic, but that he was holding back because he thought it would get
misinterpreted.

One of his contacts sent him a PM, asking what he was holding back. What they
got in reply was rather lengthy, they recall, and “described adult/child sexual
relationships as possibly bene cial to both parties.”

The recipient saw why the essay might o fend people — it was pretty o fensive.
But they were quite certain that "Smiggles", whoever he was, “did not express any
sexual interest of his own in children.” In fact, he didn’t seem to have a sexual
aspect to his personality at all. “He wrote that he was sexually attracted to maybe
only one or two people in his entire life and it was not really a factor for him.”

The long swathes of text he was sending to his acquaintances online were all
copied (or possibly condensed) from a le on his hard drive — the “pbear” Word
doc — which the Child Advocate would later examine. They found that the text
“advocated pedophiles’ rights and the liberation of children,” by referencing
“varying cultural norms across the span of time to support a premise that our
modern day attitudes about pedophilia are arbitrarily constructed.” The
investigators determined that it was originally to have been an essay for a college
application — one that required only 500 words. But apparently, he just kept

595
writing, and writing. It was 34 pages long by the time he was done. He had never
sent the application to the college, but clearly, his essay topic was still on his mind.

Another user who talked to Smiggles saved some of it; the essay’s argument
centered on a total rejection of any concept of “age of consent,” in harmony with
the logic behind his loathing for doctors:

Smiggles: I’ve had these thoughts for years and

haven’t spoken to anyone about them... Why is
this society so adamantly opposed to pedophilia?
Children deserve all of the rights and respects
that an adult should receive, yet this is not the
case to any extent. The inexorable battery of
children (“spanking”) is fully legal in the
United States. Children’s free will is suppressed
and annihilated in every conceivable manner
within families. Beyond having their
associations, location, and every action subject
to their parents’ wills, they are denied their
own thoughts, opinions, values, and religion, and
instead are coerced into adopting their
parents’... if an adult wants to force any
medical procedures or treatments onto a child,
the child does not have any choice in the matter.

...The children who choose to engage in sexual

relationships with adults are invariably severed
from their loving relationships and are
indoctrinated into believing that they have been
abused, being labeled as “victims” and being
subjected to the genuinely abusive will of
psychiatrists (the most immoral profession I can
imagine) who “treat” (coerce) them into believing
that they can overcome their “abuse”.

The Child Advocate would determine that despite the obsessive length of the
essay, “There are no other writings that speak to a preoccupation he may or may
not have had with pedophilia." And of its writer: "There are no records and there
is no evidence that he had pedophiliac tendencies.”

He had given his own disclaimer, when he shared his thoughts on this subject in a
PM:

Smiggles: All of the sexuality which is rampant

in this society in general is as disgusting to me

596
 as pedophilia is, but that isn’t sufficient
reason for me to desire the violent persecution
of anyone over it because of personal
perspective. I’m pretty confused when it comes to
my sexuality, but I’m certain that I’m not a
pedophile.

In one other document, he imagined how he would raise a child, and do things
di ferently than his own parents had:

I'm certain that I would be a phenomenal father

because I would foster a free environment for my
child. S/he would never do anything "because I
said so." Instead of treating her/him like a pet
that can talk, I would treat her/him like a
little person who doesn't know very much. I would
not subject my child to my opinions: I would
encourage them to think for her/himself.

As for the person with whom this family would ideally be formed, at least in this
thought exercise, he imagined a female:

She needs to be contemplative, introverted,

introspective, insubordinate, non-
confrontational, able to communicate with me, and
engage in banter. And I think I want her to be at
least vegetarian.

***
Five days af er the pedophilia debate, he sent an email to a friend. The Child
Advocate would identify the recipient only as a “Cyber-Acquaintance” — from
the context, it appears likely that they were the same person he had once played
Combat Arms with, his love for whom he had so strenuously renounced three
months before:

Nov. 17, 2010

It’s amazing how fast time passes. It’s hard to

believe that it’s already been this long. I’m
sorry about my mood over the summer. I was more
depressed than I had ever been before. When I
apologized for it, you said that I wasn’t
behaving disrespectfully and that I never had

597
 been, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as kind
toward you as you deserve. I don’t know how much
it ever seemed like it, but I’ve always really
appreciated your friendship. I’ve pretty much
been a complete loner throughout my life but I’m
sure that even if I had more friends, you’d still
be my favorite person I’ve met. I’d like it if we
could do something together again sometime...
Please email back and we could figure out
something amazing.

***
He got another email from his father, on December 2nd. “I miss seeing you. I
hope all is well with you. Let me know if and when you would like to shooting or
go on a hike.”

No response.

***
Later that month, a doctor’s o ce in the area got an angry phone call from Nancy
Lanza. They had recently done some tests for her son, and he was 18 now — so,
when they sent out the results (which showed “increased liver functions,” but
nothing serious), it was addressed in his name this time, instead of his mother’s.
They noted that Nancy was “very upset” about this.

The o ce's record of the call indicates that they o fered to change the addressee
back to Nancy, but explained they would need her to put her son the phone, so
that he could request it himself; Nancy advised them that her son did not use the
phone. If they had to communicate, they had to talk to him in-person.

The next day, he came in for a visit. He indicated that he “felt well generally.” He
weighed 120 pounds, and was still 5 feet 10 inches. The doctor recorded that he
was “alert,” “well-nourished,” and “well developed.”

***
Ryan visited his family for Christmas in 2010. The exact details of how the Lanzas
spent the holiday that year are not known, although certainly Nancy’s younger
son would have been reluctant to participate, as usual. Whatever took place, the
holiday break of 2010 was the last time Ryan Lanza ever saw his kid brother.

598
 63. Of Rulers

January 8, 2011
Tucson, Arizona
Randy worked at Walmart, in the sporting goods section. The store had just
opened for the morning — and already, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a
customer approaching. Male, white, early 20’s, wearing a black hat and a black
hooded sweatshirt. He looked like he was in a hurry, as he stepped up to the
counter. “Hey, uh, are you available? Are you open?”

“Yeah, what do you need?”

“I need some bullets.”

Something about the way the kid said it made the hair on Randy’s neck stand on
end. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but he had sold a ton of guns and tons of
bullets to a ton of people, and none of them ever made him feel like this. Th
bad.

Still, he followed his sales script. “What kind of bullets?”

“I need some nine millimeters.”

Randy unlocked the ammo case, and was relieved when he saw inside. “Sorry,
we’re all out of 9mm.”

The kid immediately got frustrated. “Well, do you have ‘em in the back? Can you
go look?!”

Randy knew there were plenty more boxes of 9mm in the stockroom. But he only
pretended to go look for them. No way was he selling anything to this kid. He
walked to the back, waited a couple seconds, then hollered from the doorway,
“There’s nothing!”

599
The kid lef , angry. There was another Walmart, in the next town.

***
Less than an hour later, he was opening a box in his car. One by one, he loaded the
9mm bullets into two extended magazines for his Glock 19 pistol. 33 rounds each.
Then he started his car, and headed back to Tucson.

He stopped at a yellow light. Pulling in behind him in the lane, there was a state
wildlife o cer, in his duty vehicle. As the o cer came to a stop, he could swear
that the guy in the black hat in front of him saw him in his rearview mirror, and in
fact was even making eye contact with him, when suddenly, the guy just hit the
gas, and drove right through the red light. Bizarre.

The o cer pulled him over, and asked what he was doing. “Just kinda driving
around,” he replied.

The o cer chastised him for not paying attention, but ultimately said he was
going to let him go without a ticket. “When I said that to him,” the o cer
remembers, “his face got kinda screwed up and he started to cry. And that struck
me as a little odd.” The o cer asked if he was OK.

“Yeah, I’m OK, I’ve just had a-a-a rough time, and I really thought I was gonna get
a ticket.”

“So you’re OK?” the o cer repeated.

“Yeah. I’m going home.” Then he shook the o cer’s hand, and drove o f. The
o cer didn’t see any guns in the car. Just a black bag.

***
His parents were waiting for him at home. He wasn’t supposed to take the car
without permission. In fact, his dad had even been disabling it at night,
disconnecting the battery and then plugging it back in when they got up in the
morning — they didn’t want him going out at af er dark. He was acting too weird
lately. Talking to himself. And they were still pissed about him getting thrown out
of community college; the school actually said he was dangero . Something about
videos he put on the internet, rambling about mind control. (They didn’t know
about the Glock — but he had bought it legally. NICS said he was okay.)

A car pulled into the driveway. They rushed outside to confront their son, who
was getting out of the car with a black bag in his hands, nodding to his dad,
"What's up?"

600
His father started asking him about the bag, and where he’d been all morning. “I
need to talk to you.”

The young man paused, then suddenly turned, and sprinted away down the
street. His father tried to follow, but he couldn’t catch up. Last he saw, his son was
heading north on foot, with the black bag over his shoulder.

La Toscana Village Shopping Center — Tucson, Arizona

The cab stopped in front of the Safeway store. There was a big banner in the
parking lot: “CONGRESS ON YOUR CORNER.” Emails and phone calls had
been going out all week about the event, an opportunity for the people of Tucson
to meet the representative from their district, face-to-face.

The young man in the black hat went over and talked to one of the
congresswoman’s sta f members. Said he needed to talk to her. They told him he
just needed to get in line, and he would have the opportunity in a minute. So he
did.

He and the congresswoman had actually met once before, in 2007 — at another
“Congress On Your Corner” event, very much like this one. He had attended the
Q&A forum then, and even asked her a question, a bizarre sort of query that he
would pose to nearly anyone who would listen (especially on the internet) over
the years since: “What is government if words have no meaning?”

Her response was essentially just to politely thank him, and move on to the next
question — what could you possibly reply with, af er all? — and he had been
incensed by the “fake” congresswoman ever since. He still had the thank-you letter
her o ce had sent him (and everyone else who attended), secured in a safe in his
bedroom. He had written four sets of words across the outside of the envelope:
“MY ASSASSINATION” — and then her name. “I PLANNED AHEAD” —
and then his own.

The line started to move. The congresswoman had arrived. Someone started to
hand a clipboard, with a sign-in sheet, to the young man in the black hat. Instead,
he put in earplugs, shoved his way to the front of the line, pulled the Glock with
the giant magazine sticking out of it from his backpack, and shot the
congresswoman right in the forehead. Mission accomplished.

But he still had 32 more bullets in the magazine. So he turned the gun on the
stunned crowd, and just continued shooting, for no real reason at all. A judge. A
pastor. A campaign worker. A nine-year-old girl. He didn’t care. He red every
shot.

601
One of the witnesses in the crowd had a concealed weapon on him at the time,
but the whole thing was over so fast, there was no chance to use it.

When the gunman went to reload, a bystander hit him with a folding chair, while
another, a Vietnam vet, put him in a choke-hold, forcing him to let go of the gun.
When the veteran then picked up the Glock, its fresh magazine fell out, not yet
locked into place. A woman picked that up.

The man with the Glock looked over to her, and said, “Give me the clips, I’m
gonna shoot the son of a bitch.”

She refused. “Put that gun down, and step on it, and keep your foot there.” He
did. (Later, he told investigators he had experienced a “combat reaction.”)

The crowd had the shooter pinned to the ground. The woman with the clips
went over to see his face. “How could you do this?" she cried. "How could you
hate so much?” But he said nothing. There was no expression on his face at all.

***
The police were there six minutes later, and they took the shooter away. He was
soon diagnosed with schizophrenia. The jail had to force him to take anti-
psychotic medication, but eventually, his mental state did seem to stabilize
somewhat. Enough that he could stand trial.

However, when he found out that the congresswoman had ultimately survived his
attack, he refused to believe it. Even af er he saw her speaking on TV. “I swear to
you that’s not the woman I shot. The woman I shot in the head died instantly. No
one could survive that.”

Other times, he was more forthcoming about where this denial came from — and
why, despite the fact that he had killed so many, it was the senator’s survival that
was so tied to his own existence: “It means I failed. That I’m not an assassin. That
I ruined my life for nothing.”

January 10, 2011

Hartford, Connecticut
In one of his very rst acts in-o ce, Connecticut’s new governor ordered the ags
to be own at half-sta f, in recognition of the tragedy that had just unfolded in
Tucson. He, in turn, was following a directive from President Obama, who in his
immediate response to the shooting said that the “Congress On Your Corner”
program was “the essence of what our democracy is all about. That is why this is

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more than a tragedy for those involved. It is a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy
for our entire country.”

The newly sworn-in governor of Connecticut, Dannel P. Malloy, had been vying
for the o ce for years, while serving as the mayor of Stamford from 1999 to 2009
— a role that had already provided him a wealth of experience. He was there in
2003, when a Stamford woman’s pet chimp escaped from her SUV and brought
downtown to a standstill, while the city cheered. (And he was still in o ce six
years later, when the animal’s life ended in a horrifying scene out on Rock
Rimmon Road.)

Af er observing a moment of silence for Tucson, Malloy told reporters that the
attack should present the country with “an opportunity to re ect on our
dialogue.” For his part, like many, he had already seen the shooter's bizarre online
writings in the wake of the attack, and found that the situation “[causes] me to
wonder whether we're doing enough in our society for the mentally ill.”

“The Daily Show” — New York, New York

It was a Monday, which meant the week’s rst lming of an episode of The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart. The tongue-in-cheek “news” program had become a
central source of information for many, many Americans — especially young
adults. And ever since 9/11, a signi cant portion of them found themselves
looking to the show's host, for clarity in times of chaos.

It had already been a long weekend, with bitter political rivals blaming each other
for what the gunman in Tucson had done. One narrative that had gained traction
(despite it being completely false) was that the recently-resigned governor of
Alaska — the NRA-friendly running mate of Obama’s opponent in 2008 — had
in uenced the gunman’s choice of target, because her PAC had published a map
of the United States with crosshairs over a few dozen politically-vulnerable
congressional districts. Tucson had been one of them.

The show’s rousing opening theme hit, and the camera panned to Stewart’s face,
nodding thank-yous to the crowd. As their applause faded, he struggled to crack a
smile, and went through the awkward motions of introducing the evening’s
program, before reality came back. “We live in a complex ecosystem of in uences
and motivations, and I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric any more than I
would blame heavy metal music for Columbine,” he said. But he also admitted
that he did not know it was even possible at all to “make sense” of mass shootings:

Boy, would it be nice to be able to draw a straight line of causation from

th horror to something tangible, because then we could convince

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 ourselv that if we just stop th , the horrors will end. You know, to have
the feeling, however fleeting, that th type of event can be prevented
forever. But it’s hard not to feel like you can’t [draw that line.] You
cannot outsmart crazy. You don’t know what a troubled mind will get
caught on. Crazy always seems to find a way. It always h .

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The door was closed.

Someone on the Columbine forum posted that evening’s episode of The Daily
Show. He watched the clip, but wasn’t at all impressed with Stewart’s words, and
he was particularly irked that the overlapping of categories — mass shooting and
political assassination — was what was increasing the shooter’s notoriety:

Smiggles: ...Like everyone, he advises to treat

the symptoms rather than determining whatever
causes there may be. Overall, he was fumbling
around not saying anything meaningful. The way
which this particular incident is being treated
is frustrating to me. [The 2009 Binghamton
shooter] inflicted a similar number of casualties
with more than double the deaths not too long
ago, and he was virtually ignored compared to
this. I hate how the lives of state-sanctioned
thugs are treated as if they’re more valuable
than that of anyone else.

***
The next day, he logged in at the Columbine forum again. He was stunned at
what he saw there, but not for anything having to do with Tucson: overnight, the
forum’s total “article counter” had dropped, from just over 50,000, down to 22,585.
Huge chunks of conversation — amateur research that he had been browsing
freely since 2006 — were suddenly gone, without warning.

He posted a new thread, and asked what was going on. Danny, the Columbine
game’s designer, replied. “Unfortunately I have to pay for bandwidth and storage
and had to activate pruning on posts older than 90 days.”

Danny didn’t really care about Columbine much anymore, anyway; the
“conversation” he wanted to start with his game had long since run its course.

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The user at 36 Yogananda was surely upset about the event — what some forum
users would remember as “The Purge.” Many of his own posts were among those
erased, including “Comprehensive list of mass murderers and their attributes,” the
very spot that had marked his arrival af er years of silent lurking. The topic was lef
neglected by everyone on the forum months ago, and now it was gone for good.
His life’s work, rejected by his peers. Nobody cared.

Still, he decided to stay on the Columbine forum. It was better than leaving the
house.

***
In a thread titled “body mods?” users were talking about their piercings and
tattoos. He one-upped them.

Smiggles: I castrated myself when I was 15 to

rebel against society.

It wasn’t true, but nobody was really sure when Smiggles was serious or not. And
he was starting to develop a reputation for saying outrageous things.

In another thread, they were talking about the ATF, and its latest political scandal,
“Gunwalker.” Nobody in the conversation had even mentioned rampage attacks;
he just brought it up.

Smiggles: I’m still waiting for a mass shooter

who eschews 9mm pistols and instead buys an AK-47
pistol, 30 30-round magazines, and 1000 hollow
points...

Everyone ignored him, and went on talking politics.

January 11, 2011

KWVA Campus Radio — University of Oregon, Eugene
It was Tuesday evening. At seven o’clock, the “ON THE AIR” sign lit up, and
Anarchy Radio was beamed out all over the university town of Eugene, carrying
the sof , deep voice of anarchist philosopher John Zerzan. He had been a
recognizable gure at the Unabomber’s trial in the 1990s — in fact, he had
expressed support for the ideals in Industrial Society and its Future even before
the ghost was dragged out of his cabin and identi ed in 1996 — but their views
were not quite identical. He didn’t advocate violence against human beings, for
one. “Will there be other Kaczynskis?” Zerzan asked rhetorically, in an interview
with The Guardian in 2001. “I hope not. I think that activity came out of

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isolation and desperation, and I hope that isn’t going to be something that people
feel they have to take up because they have no other way to express their
opposition to the brave new world.”

The intro music faded. Zerzan liked to start his show with the latest headlines, and
that meant Tucson. “People were shot outside of a Safeway, by… well, somebody
who is probably pretty emotionally disturbed,” he said. “Reminds one of the
fellow at Virginia Tech a few years ago.” He dismissed the political explanation, as
Jon Stewart had, but he didn’t balk at o fering a better one. “It really has so much
more to do with this huge syndrome...the techno-culture is so beref , it’s just a
malignancy. And everything is possible now.” And the root problem was
fundamental to the post-Industrial culture trying to study it. “Any opportunity to
avoid the more basic reality is taken, then, to stay on this sort of wavelength of
denial. You look for a way out, instead of contending with that.”

Zerzan had been at this for a long time. He was used to his ideas being dismissed;
“They say: ‘Oh, you want to be a caveman,’” the New York Tim once quoted
him. “Well, maybe that’s somewhat true.” Meanwhile, the supposedly-
inexplicable incidents of mass violence just kept coming.

As radio shows go, Anarchy Radio was small, just broadcasting on a local college
station in Oregon. But for years now, the signal had been going out over the
internet, too, where practically anyone could listen.

O ce of Dr. Paul Fox, MD — Brook eld, Connecticut

Dr. Fox started scheduling the Patient’s visits in the evenings — the last session of
the day, so that they could go out to dinner af erward. There was a pizza place just
down the road, and their meals together were part of the treatment for her eating
disorder, so they told each other. But they would talk over dinner, and laugh, and
she had fun.

One night, he suggested they order out. The Patient went to pick up the pizza.

She had been thinking about him more than ever. How could she not? “The three
little words as you describe them are bursting into myself,” he had emailed her
that month. “My sense and my soul, whatever that is.”

According to her diary, they had kissed, not long af er he said the words. It
happened several times. They would both swear o f doing it, then relapse, then
swear it o f again. He would tell her about the lack of intimacy he felt with his
wife, and how di ferent things were with her, his Patient.

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And they were still growing closer. She knew, because he had called on her once,
saying he needed her help: there was a former patient of his whom he was
concerned about — the young woman was threatening to le a malpractice suit
against him, or something like that — and the Patient was Facebook friends with
her. Dr. Fox said he needed evidence from her pro le. “The more information we
get about her that shows she’s doing OK, the more protected I am,” he said in a
voicemail.

The Patient did as he asked. It meant he trusted her even more. That he wouldn’t
leave.

Suddenly, she realized she was going too fast for the turn, and hit the brakes. Her
car went o f the road, and rolled over, coming to rest in a clearing. The car was
totaled, but somehow, she didn’t have a scratch.

She called Dr. Fox, and he came and picked her up. He drove them back up to his
o ce. As soon as he opened the door, though, the Patient noticed something was
di ferent: the lights were dimmed, and there was the scent of burnt wax, waf ing
from candles that had been extinguished all around the room when her doctor got
her call. He'd had plans.

February 18, 2011

SHOOTERS Pistol Range — New Milford, Connecticut
Nancy took her son to an indoor shooting range in New Milford, about 13 miles
upstream on the Housatonic. SHOOTERS specialized in pistol rentals, and
advertised itself as “a safe & fun activity for the whole family!”

There was a sign-in sheet. Nancy signed, then her son — in print that looked just
like the shopping list for the guns and ammunition, in the closet back home.

They stayed at SHOOTERS for 35 minutes, according to Nancy’s sign-out time.

There’s a good chance they rented a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol during their session: the
P226. It was the sidearm of the US Navy Seals, and ve days later, Nancy bought
one. It was her latest purchase from Riverview Gun Sales, and another addition to
the family gun safe, in the computer room.

March 13, 2011

Phoenix, Arizona
The Arizona Daily Star published an op-ed column, written by President
Obama. “Now, like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second
Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms,” he wrote. “And the

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courts have settled that as the law of the land.” But since the shooting in Tucson
just two months before, he continued, “We have lost perhaps another 2,000
members of our American family to gun violence. Thousands more have been
wounded. We lose the same number of young people to guns every day and a half
as we did at Columbine, and every four days as we did at Virginia Tech.”

Despite the fears of a “gun grab” that greeted his election, President Obama had
only signed two gun laws since taking o ce: one to allow Amtrak passengers to
carry guns in their checked baggage, and one to let visitors to national parks
possess concealed weapons. The op-ed was the rst hint that his administration
was even considering attempting to restrict gun sales. And his stated goal was a
modest one: nish the job of xing the NICS background check system, as was
supposed to have been done af er Virginia Tech. “We must do better,” he said.
“Most gun owners know that the word ‘commonsense’ isn’t a code word for
‘con scation.’ And none of us should be willing to remain passive in the face of
violence or resigned to watching helplessly as another rampage unfolds on
television.”

April 2011
AMC Loews Danbury 16 Theater — Danbury, Connecticut
Dave worked at the movie theater, o f US Route 6 near WCSU. It was a big 16-
screen corporate multiplex, at one end of a huge parking lot that it shared with a
couple big-box retailers. Dave tore tickets, and sometimes worked the concession
stand. The upside of working at the Danbury 16 was, it featured a big video arcade
in the lobby. Where else could a guy play Dance Dance Revolution on his breaks?

His schedule got changed that month. Dave didn’t usually work weekends. So
when he went for his usual DDR session, he didn’t recognize the teenager in the
hoodie who was already playing. “That’s DDR guy,” a passing coworker said.
“He’s here every weekend.” (Such trips to the arcade were, so far, the most
signi cant result of Nancy and Peter Lanza getting their son to obtain a driver’s
license, and purchasing him a car.)

Dave waited for the song to end, so he could board the other platform — but then
he watched DDR guy immediately queue up another song, and keep right on
hopping to the rhythm, pouring sweat but not slowing down.

Dave nodded to his co-worker at the concession stand. “How long does he play
like that?”

“Hours. Sometimes he’s here all day. Nonstop.”

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“That’s crazy.” When the next song was about to come up again, Dave walked
over to the cabinet, and put a token on the rim of the screen — the universal
arcade-gamer’s signal for “I got next.”

DDR guy paused for a breath, and saw him waiting. “Are you going to play?”

Dave said yes, and then they played a match together — jumping back and forth
on their respective platforms to the same song, but not really interacting. When
they were done, Dave introduced himself, and asked his dance partner's name —
but DDR guy didn’t respond. He didn’t even acknowledge the question, actually.
It was really awkward.

Dave had to work the next day, too. A ve hour shif . DDR guy was there when
he got there, and was still playing when he lef . He also appeared to be wearing the
same clothes as the day before — or maybe just an identical hoodie, and pair of
khakis.

May 3, 2011
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
With the AR-15 in the house, the Ruger must have seemed obsolete. Nancy put it
on Gunbroker, and someone bought it for $400; she packed up the old Mini-14,
and shipped it o f. The buyer lef her an A+ review: “Nancy was great to deal
with, new seller with a great attitude. Highly recommended, will work hard to
make transaction smooth. A+”

***
Upstairs, the door was closed.

His 19th birthday had just passed, and it had been a long time since he posted
anything at GameFAQs. But he found that his old “Blarvink” login still worked.

It had also been awhile since he had played his all-time favorite PC game, too. He
missed World of Warcra , but starting yet another new character just didn’t have
the same appeal anymore. There was only the void, where Azeroth used to be.

He found GameFAQs’ WoW sub-forum, and started a new topic — “"O

?” — in which he tried to explain to the other users just what
appealed to him about the game in the rst place, and the atypical way he
navigated its worlds:

Blarvink: I played it often because I greatly

enjoyed the game’s atmosphere. In addition to its

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 endearing graphics, I liked how you could go
anywhere you wanted to at any level, and you
could appreciate the design of the environments
in the way you wanted. ...A game like Minecraft
might be recommended, but that feels unbearably
and depressingly empty to me. The environment
itself wasn’t the only aspect I enjoyed about
World of Warcraft’s atmosphere: I also liked how
the world was filled with outposts, towns, and
cities which had many non-playable characters you
could talk to. One of my characters was played
for over a couple hundred hours without ever even
reaching Level 10 because I just roleplayed in
Stormwind City.

A few days later, Blarvink logged back in. There were a few replies to his message,
but it was just people talking about how great Minecraf was, ignoring what he
said about about the game’s emptiness.

He logged out.

He went to the Columbine forum, logged in, and deleted all of his posts.

***
The outgoing signal from the user at 36 Yogananda went silent, and stayed that
way for months. But the download stream owing in continued, busier than ever;
aside from his regular DDR trips, he still spent nearly all of his time in his room,
online. Absorbing, and sorting.

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 64. In the Abyss

22 July, 2011
Island of Utøya — Buskerud, Norway
It was a tiny, green island, shaped like a heart, in the middle of a cold, blue lake.
There was a summer camp being held there that week, for the Workers’ Youth
League — some of Norway’s most politically ambitious teens and young adults.
Everything had been going wonderfully, until just that morning, when some of
the campers heard the news: there had been a terrorist attack back on the
mainland, in Oslo. Someone had detonated a car bomb outside the Prime
Minister’s o ce.

Many of the young people attending the camp had parents and family members
in government, and they were concerned. They wanted updates, desperately. So,
none of them were surprised when they saw a motorboat approaching the island
from the lake shore, with what looked like a policeman aboard.

The uniformed man tied up his boat and stepped onto the dock. He had a ri e in
a sling over his shoulder, a pistol on his hip, and a badge on his chest. He waved
for all of the students within earshot to come to him, for some news on the
situation in Oslo.

As they got close, some of them noticed something strange — it was his police
uniform. It was a bit o f. It looked like a Halloween costume. But by then, it was
too late; he brought the ri e to his shoulder, aimed into the crowd, and opened
re.

There was nowhere to run. He attacked them for more than an hour, chasing
them all over the island. Finally, the SWAT team arrived, on shore and by
helicopter, and almost the second that they did, the shooter surrendered.

***

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Earlier that morning, a document had appeared online: 2083: A European
Declaration of Independence. It was over 1,500 pages long, and it — very, very
clearly — explained the gunman’s motives: he wanted to stop the spread of Islam
in Europe, and he blamed Norway’s liberal immigration policies for enabling the
country’s cultural shif . So he targeted his nation’s liberal political party, at a camp
for its most valuable future members.

But the attack itself was secondary, he would say in court; spreading 2083 was his
true goal. And that voice wouldn’t go away when they locked him in a cell; the
shooter/bomber reasoned that with the way the internet had grown, anyone
could go read his “manifesto,” whenever they wanted. And indeed, they could.
Probably forever.

In the text, he had documented each step he took, even explaining how he legally
acquired his guns without raising suspicion: “I have now sent an application for a
Ruger Mini 14 semi-automatic ri e… It is the most ‘army like’ ri e allowed in
Norway, although it is considered a ‘poor man’s’ AR-15. I envy our European
American brothers as the gun laws in Europe sucks ass in comparison.”

In another section, he showed exactly how to make the explosives for the car-
bomb.

Nearly every bit of instruction came with a link to where he had learned it online
(usually, a YouTube video, demonstrating some benign-by-itself step in a complex
process). It was exactly the sort of document that Ted Kaczynski’s brother was
dreading when the internet was still blinking to life back in the 1990s: a bomb-
making manual that would allow “every troubled kid out there to become the
next Tim McVeigh.”

In fact, David Kaczynski’s notorious brother was quoted extensively by the

Norway shooter: 2083 was actually a “compendium,” with large portions of the
text adapted from other authors. Industrial Society and its Future was in there,
with just some simple word-replacement changes: “lef ism” was replaced with
“multiculturalism,” while “Modern Lef ist” became “cultural Marxist.”

Just before the bomb went o f in Oslo, the shooter-bomber had emailed the
compendium to 1,000 of his “patriotic Facebook friends,” along with a link to his
YouTube channel — where he had produced a 10-minute video summary,
focusing on how to become a “Justiciar Knight,” exactly the transformation he
had undergone himself in order to pull o f his attack. He said that by absorbing
2083’s lessons, one could “function as a soldier is supposed to function: Without
mercy, without hesitation, without compassion and without remorse. All war

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depends upon it. Fear is poison in combat, something everyone feels, but try to
suppress it. If you allow fear to paralyze you, you will fail.”

August 10, 2011

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door at the top of the stairs was closed.

He had stopped updating the spreadsheet months ago. But surely, if only
mentally, he saw a new row inserted. Right at the top.

The attack in Norway was not just the deadliest mass shooting in Norwegian
history, or even European history. It was the worst mass shooting by a single
gunman anywhere, ever. The berserk policeman from Korea in 1982 had nally
been dethroned.

It was enough to make Smiggles come back to the Columbine forum. There was
already a thread about the Norway gunman, of course, and in it, one user was
saying that while they didn’t endorse the attack, they couldn’t help but be
impressed by its scale. They said it was an achievement.

He knew just what they meant. He had been reading 2083: A European
Declaration of Independence for days now — and in his reply, also con rmed that
by then, he had already been studying the Unabomber for some time:

Smiggles: I’m normally not interested in non-

Kaczinsky bombers, but the format and
organization of everything involved was such an
impressive instance of mass murder self-
actualization that it seemed fictional. I
wouldn’t call it encouraging, but it seemed
motivational enough in some sense that it was the
kind of thing you would find in a particularly
macabre self-improvement book. Probably owing to
watching too many mass murder movies, reading
excerpts like [a journal entry where the Norway
bomber thought his farm was going to be raided by
police] almost had me at the edge of my seat in
anticipation...

***
He checked in on some of the conversations he had fallen behind on. There was a
long-running thread about “C .” He made an obscure

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recommendation — one that also highlighted just how long he’d been reading the
forum:

Smiggles: For anyone who doesn’t know, Sabratha

(a member who used to post here) was part of a
group which created an excellent school shooting
movie... More of you really should see it.

He included the YouTube link to the movie, Bullet Time. This was a zero-budget
student lm, in Polish (with subtitles), and its style was like a found-footage
pseudo-documentary, but in the spirit of the Columbine “Basement Tapes”: two
shooters prepping for Judgment Day, in between classes at the University of
Warsaw.

As Smiggles had mentioned, the forum user “Sabratha” had been a member of the
artists’ collective that made the lm. (It so happens that they were also studying
psychology at the university at the time; the lm's production had been part of
their research into how the Columbine phenomenon seemed to be spreading
internationally.) Bullet Time even featured a scene where the shooters browsed the
real-life Columbine forum from their dorm room, and encouraged the viewer to
create an account. “You are not yourselves. This is the Internet. Anonymity
reigns, so… log in through a proxy, install a rewall, and create a new persona for
yourselves.” (This may even have been where the person behind Smiggles got the
motivation to do just that, and nally register their own pro le — but he never
indicated so.)

Later in Bullet Time, the lm’s shooter-characters go out for a night of clubbing,
and one of them sports a white t-shirt with “NATURAL SELECTION” across
the front. He explains that this sort of brazen display of Columbine fandom must
be done with great care: “I understand, sometimes it’s worthwhile to…how should
I put this… add something interesting. Exceed, stand on that edge. Just remember
that in each country that edge is placed somewhat di ferently. Don’t wear this in
the States and in Canada, in countries where some kind of operational history for
this kind of entertainment exists. There, just don’t do anything stupid.”

The user at 36 Yogananda liked that scene. When he saw a thread “H

C ,” in which users were boasting about dressing up like the Columbine
shooters, he lef a link to it, as if to remind them: You're drawing attention to
yourselv .

***
He had another YouTube clip he wanted to share. He started a new thread:
“E / -’90 .”

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It was footage dubbed from someone’s dusty old VHS tape, one that had been in
the VCR on an evening in 1996 when they recorded an episode of the TV
documentary series The 20th Century with Mike Wallace o f of A&E. This
episode focused on mass murderers. “One individual killing another is almost as
old as mankind itself,” Wallace opened the show. “But in the late 20th century a
new phenomenon appeared: attacks, without warning, by men intent on killing as
many people as they could.”

Like The Killing of America before it, the Mike Wallace episode identi ed the rise
of mass violence in America as beginning in the mid-to-late 1960s — when the
homicide rate started to increase at an alarming rate, coinciding a series of high-
pro le political assassinations. And both productions identi ed the rst modern
mass shooter as one who appeared on August 1, 1966, in Texas: a 24-year-old
former Marine, sniping with a hunting ri e from the observation tower at the
University of Texas, in Austin.

The user at 36 Yogananda had liked The Killing of America, a lot. But it had one
major shortcoming: since it was released in 1982, it didn’t have anything about the
McDonald’s shooter from San Ysidro, in 1984. It ended right when things were
about to go over the edge. This more-recent production lled in the gap.

***
The gunman in 1984 had been a 41-year-old security guard. He had called his local
Community Mental Health Center the day before the attack, seeking to make an
appointment for an “unexplained problem.” They ran him through the typical
triage questions, determined he was not an immediate danger, and said someone
would call him back within 72 hours — apparently, this was not soon enough.

The next morning, he took his family to the zoo. As he stared out at the animals
in their cages, his wife heard him say, “Society had their chance.” Later that
af ernoon, she saw him one last time, on his way out the door in a black t-shirt and
camou age pants, with guns strapped all over his body. She asked where he was
going; he replied, “I’m hunting humans.”

***
The recording from the VHS tape rolled on, chronicling many of the tragedies
that had unfolded since then, crime scenes that the user at 36 Yogananda had
studied, and imagined, over and over. It showed the Stockton shooter’s Norinco
ri e from 1989, lying on the pavement outside Cleveland Elementary School, with
“FREEDOM” painted on its expanded magazine.

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 Smiggles: It even shows some of [the Stockton
shooter’s] fabled army men!

There was a segment on the Long Island train shooter from 1993, the one that
claimed a nurse’s husband. (Dr. Park Dietz, the doctor from the trial of Reagan's
almost-assassin, told the viewers that the train gunman “blamed other people for
his becoming a failure.”) There was Luby’s Cafeteria, with the gaping hole in the
front window, and the sparking blue pickup truck parked in the dining area. Then
a white van, parked next to a phone pole outside of a primary school in Dunblane,
Scotland; in le photos, fading over each other in sequence, the Scoutmaster’s face
stared back from the computer screen, illuminating the walls of the black plastic
cave.

September 2011
O ce of Dr. Paul Fox, MD — Brook eld, Connecticut
Dr. Fox knew that there were rumors circulating, by then. About him and his
Patient. “I can anticipate conversations with peers that would be overt
declarations of condemnation sprinkled with insulting metaphors describing this
writer as pedophile,” he wrote to her in one email. The rumors hadn't yet made it
to his wife, but it seemed inevitable. “As I search my emotional consciousness I
nd a surprising absence of guilt, anxiety, or regret. Even though I would hurt the
ones I love so profoundly… My wife has stated multiple times in our quarter of a
century of life together that she would be devastated if I cheated on her… you deal
with these facts by not thinking about them.”

The transition to being “friends” had not gone smoothly. They kept swearing o f
intimacy, but then Dr. Fox would schedule her for another session. The cycle
started over again. There was only one threshold they hadn’t crossed.

Then, one evening, he invited her out on his sailboat.

He sent her a message, af erward. “I am still merged with you. I am feeling strange
things and having some strange comprehensions…” He knew that she had been
depressed lately. And now he was, too. “We are so connected even when you are in
the abyss.”

***
The Patient would later write about what happened with her and Dr. Fox, one
day in that fall of 2011: “I went back to his o ce for another session. We were
touching and kissing and I remember being in a vulnerable, strange and almost
psychotic state of mind.” Suddenly, she asked him, “If you love me, why don’t
you tell your wife about me?”

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He replied that his wife “didn’t deserve that pain.”

“But you’re causing me pain.”

She got up and ran out of the o ce, past the sycamore trees, and into tra c —
“having a complete emotional and psychotic breakdown.” Cars screeched to a halt
all around, and Dr. Fox ran af er her. “He grabbed me out of the street. Af er I
calmed down, we told each other we loved each other, kissed and drove away.
That was the last time I saw him.”

The next day, outside her dorm building, she tried to run into tra c again. The
campus police took her to the Danbury ER. Soon af er, she dropped out of
WCSU, and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in New York.

“My Place” Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut

Nancy was out at the bar late one night, when she saw Jackie come in — the
young woman who used to cut her sons’ hair for all those years. Jackie had
changed salons awhile back, and Nancy hadn’t seen her since; Nancy ran up and
gave her a big hug.

Jackie could tell Nancy was pretty loaded. But she knew she meant well. Jackie
asked her about her sons; she noticed Nancy only gave half an answer. She only
talked about Ryan.

Nancy asked Jackie what she’d been up to. It turned out that her new salon was
right next door to My Place; she would end up crossing paths with Nancy on
many evenings, af er a shif . She remembers Nancy would always be sitting on the
same stool — her spot — at the bar with the other regulars, usually until midnight
or so.

Jackie liked Nancy, and liked talking to her. She had a dry sense of humor, and she
was generous. But Jackie also got the feeling Nancy rubbed some people the
wrong way; she could sometimes come o f as “snooty.” Luxury had a downside.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The door was still closed.

Someone had started a new thread on the forum: “G .” They asked

“does anyone have any experience with guns? Do you or your family own a gun,
or did you in the past?”

He gave a joking reply.

617
 Smiggles: Guns? I’ve got all the guns I need.
*Flexes 9" biceps*

Someone posted a comment, arguing that gun laws were pointless, because they
can’t prevent mass shootings anyway. He mocked them for it.

Smiggles: “But if you outlaw guns, only outlaws

will have guns!”

Conservatives really piss me off. Actually,

everyone does.

The fall of 2011 appears to have been his most active period on the forum; perhaps
the months away had lef his thoughts bottled up. He posted nearly every day, on
a variety of topics.

There was a thread “A ?” He clicked it, and found that several

users were expressing disinterest in ever having a sexual experience of any kind.

Smiggles: Are you underweight? I used to think

that I was asexual, but the primary reason why I
thought that was because my BMI was 14.

There was a thread “I …”

Smiggles: All of them... I hate every facet of

language, along with the entire concept of
aesthetics.

In a thread “F ,” one user was saying he or she was depressed,

and they were soliciting advice for what they should do. Some responses suggested
medication. Others endorsed seeing a therapist. The user from 36 Yogananda took
issue with that — even with the word itself:

Smiggles: TheRapists!...Therapists are secular

priests who assert that they have some “truth”,
and if your values deviate, then you are “wrong”.
Hence, TheRapist. They impose their values onto
you through their mindfucking.

Then, a thread about family, and marriage. Someone was arguing against gay
unions, saying they weren’t “natural.”

Smiggles: Eek, marriage and natural in the same

sentence makes me cringe... Marriage is a

618
 mutually destructive cultural delusion.

Years before, the child psychology nurse from Yale had asked him his thoughts on
the same subject face-to-face, as it pertained to his own parents. He was less
inclined to communicate then, but her notes shows that the 14-year-old
“attributed his parents’ divorce to the fact that they must have ‘irritated’ each
other as much as they irritated him.”

Many of his comments on the forum likely re ected trains of thought that he had
already pursued to their end point, having typed them out in private writings
around this time, as he had with with the pedophilia essay. Also among these les
on the external drive were (as summarized by the Connecticut State Police)
“Selfish - Word document explaining why females are sel sh” and “umm - Word
document detailing how marriage is abusive and negative to people in a
relationship.”

***
If there was one le that stood apart from all the other texts in his “Writing”
folder, it was the one titled “Lovebound.” The document itself explained where
the name came from:

"Love by any other name"

LBAON

Lovebound

Or, what about "Boundless Love", to mean that

their love is not restrictively bound by
relationships (like what marriage does)?

The beauty in the romantic relationship between a

ten-year-old-boy and a thirty-year-old-man.

It was the outline of a script for a movie, one that would primarily tell its story
through the eyes of the ten-year-old boy, and his friends. He rattled o f a list of
ideas for scenes:

10-year-old hears about his friend who ran away.

The kid tried doing something that an adult would
have done, but was unable to because he was a
kid. Eventually, the kid is found frozen to
death, or something like that. Kids are playing
together in some place.

619
 Kid either goes to place where pedophile is, or
happens to come across him in public. Scenes
where the kid talks to the pedo many times about
his life. The pedo helps him. The pedophile
either gets killed or goes to prison.

Kid with the pistol laying back on his bed while

cocking and clicking his pistol while listening
to his father yelling condemning his sister who's
in a relationship with a boy. Scene where the kid
finds out about a familicide.

What if the child has a "loving" family instead

of an abusive one, but that still means that he's
being abused?

He didn’t have an ending yet, but felt, “It's contrived for the ending to be lled
with death. The ending should end on a perfunctory note. That's in nitely more
depressing than death.”

Included in the document were guidelines on how the movie would have to be
produced. It described as sparse an aesthetic as one could get. “My script is a slow
downbeat drama with a genuine social commentary,” and so “it would be very
inexpensive to produce.” He wanted no music, and no text on the screen at any
time. Everything was one-note. “There will be no humor. This should be
completely solemn.”

He did have some concept of how the idea would be received, if he ever sent the
message. “No, it's not at all pornographic,” he emphasized. “And it isn’t satirical.
Nor metaphorical. Take it for what it is.”

The document also cited the life story of an Austrian psychoanalyst, Heinz
Kohut, who had something of an intellectual-mentor relationship with his adult
tutor when he was about ten years old, which included romantic elements — a
relationship that the psychoanalyst would insist long into adulthood was healthy,
despite the sexual contact between child and adult.

Saved in the same folder as the “Lovebound” outline was a video le containing
the 1992 Dutch lm Voor Een Verloren Soldaat (“For a Lost Soldier”) —
portraying a real-life relationship between a 12-year-old boy, and an adult soldier
during World War II. It was based on an autobiographical novel, written by the
boy af er he grew up; another historical analogue for “Lovebound.”

620
One paragraph in the document, apparently explaining the philosophy that was
to be expressed in the lm, can be heard as an echo of a communication that the
author from 36 Yogananda had once written to his mother, three years before —
telling her not to dwell on the things she regrets, and to instead focus on “what
you want to do”:

Real Rebellion involves eliminating the notion of

identity: you don't bind yourself by an identity.
You do what you want when you want to do it at
that time, independent of whatever you've thought
in the past.

All of his writings on the theme of pedophilia — the “pedobear” essay, the private
message exchanges, the compiling of historical analogues, all of it — may indeed
have represented what he wanted, on some level, to do; but even if so, it is
unknown which role in the “Lovebound” relationship he envisioned for himself.
He was, af er all, closer in age to the ten-year-old than he was the thirty-year-old.
And he'd been having such thoughts for years.

***
As always, most of the things he said online — the signals that actually escaped the
cave — had nothing to do with himself. More of en, he talked about shooters:
school shooters, church shooters, workplace shooters, mall shooters… everything
in between. He seemed to know every single detail, about every single one: a
massacre in the village of Aramoana, New Zealand in 1990. Another at a night
club in Brazil, in 1997. Another at a mall in upstate New York, in 2005. Most were
events that nobody outside of the place where they happened would have any clue
about, even a few days af er... but he had gone back and documented every detail.
And he knew the numbers, too, from every conceivable angle:

Smiggles: ...according to the best information

that I have available, around 75% of American
<25-year-old mass shooters used firearms which
they didn’t legally own, compared to around 25%
of American >24-year-old mass shooters.

...Females generally kill in a more personal

context than males do... There have been a lot of
mass murders committed by females, but they
almost always take the form of familicide. At
least 98% of indiscriminate rampage killers are
male.

A user asked if anyone had ever heard of Dunblane.

621
He responded with a link to the full transcript of the Cullen Inquiry's proceedings
— calling it “Dunblane’s 11k”, af er the internet’s name for the Columbine
investigation le. (He had copies of both, of course, on his hard drive.)

Another user replied, having just now read about the Scoutmaster for the rst
time: "Everyone thought he was a creepy pedophile and that's why he kept getting
red/losing his business. So he shot up a bunch of little kids because he was tired
of being punished for acting like a creepy pedophile. That has to be the biggest
bullshit excuse for a mass-murder spree I've ever read."

"I've heard of stranger scenarios," Smiggles replied, and gave the example of a
schizophrenic gunman who attacked a restaurant in Berkeley in 1990 "because the
'government owed him $16 trillion for mental telepathy work and this was his way
of getting it back.'" He added links to several other shooter-candidates too, all of
them quite obscure.

His spreadsheet was very, very long by the time he nished adding to it. But that
was probably the only thing that made it special — there were lists just like it, all
over the internet. It was 2011. The modern phenomenon of the mass shooting had
become impossible to ignore — and the data would re ect the same truths, to
anyone who looked closely enough.

622
 65. Legacy

The Secret Service had seen it as soon as they laid out the data for their Safe School
Initiative, clear as day: Columbine was not where the phenomenon started. Even
Frontier Middle School, in Moses Lake, where the trench coat rst appeared,
wasn’t where it started. That had only marked the beginning of the then-latest
wave of school violence. Other waves had preceded it.

Going back through the years, the investigators saw that the last time the data had
shown a rise was in 1988, and that time, it started at Hubbard Woods Elementary
School, in Winnetka, Illinois. The shooter was a 30-year-old woman known for
having severe OCD, and emotional problems. On the morning of May 20th, she
made a number of unannounced deliveries to families she had babysat for over the
last year, surprising them with homemade Rice Krispy treats and juice — secretly
laced with arsenic (which thankfully proved too weak to cause serious harm.) At
her last stop, she knocked on the door, concocted a story to get the family inside
to lead her down into their basement, then locked the door behind them, and set
the house on re. (Fortunately, the captives all managed to escape.)

A few minutes later, she arrived at the elementary school, one she had no known
connection to. She shot several students, but then a teacher tackled her, and she
ran from the scene. She broke into a home near the school, shot the owner, went
upstairs into a child’s empty bedroom, and shot herself.

When the next month’s issue of People magazine hit the newsstands, her face was
on the cover, under the headline “MURDER OF INNOCENCE.”

A vortex started to form.

Four months later, just af er the start of the new school year, it happened again:
September 26, 1988, in Greenwood, South Carolina. He was a 19-year-old “jobless
recluse,” who had been in a mental institution until recently. (He was discharged
when he no longer quali ed for his father’s health insurance.) That morning, he

623
drove to his grandmother’s house, stole her .22 LR revolver, loaded it with hollow
point bullets, and drove to nearby Oakland Elementary School — an institution
he had no connection to at all. He walked into the cafeteria where the children
were eating, took out the gun, and opened re. He reloaded, and made his way to
the nearest classroom. But when a teacher confronted him as he was trying to
open the classroom door, he surrendered.

The Greenwood gunman was almost incoherent when police took him in,
muttering something about how he “thought some of the students in the school
were af er [him].” But when investigators searched his bedroom, they found a
more pedestrian explanation: a copy of the People magazine article, about the
Illinois school shooter. The Greenwood gunman said he had “clipped out the
article and read it every day for several months before the shootings.” He was a
copycat.

Five months later, a thin man in California raised a Norinco to his shoulder, and
rained bullets down on the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in
Stockton. At the time the shooter purchased his ri e, the Kansas attacker’s face
was all over the newsstands (and, he had already been sympathizing with the
“postal” shooters for years). But once a specimen as grotesque as the thin man
washed up on the shore, people tended to forget the wave that brought him in.
His attack seemed unprecedented, all over again.

***
But the Secret Service found there had been at least one more wave, even before
Winnetka; this one could be traced back to its origin in 1974, in the small town of
Olean, New York, about an hour south of Bu falo.

It was December 30, and Olean High School was closed for holiday break. But
around 3:00pm, the re department got word that an alarm had been pulled on
the third oor of the school. When re ghters arrived on the scene, they heard
gun re — someone was up on the third oor of the school, shooting at everyone
down on the street that came near: a meter reader from the gas company, a
woman who just happened to be driving by with her kids, and now, the rst
responders. The sniper held them at bay for almost two hours, until the sun went
down. By then, around 50 police had surrounded the school. Finally, a National
Guard armored personnel carrier arrived on the scene, to provide a shield for the
entry team as gun re cracked overhead.

When they got inside and rushed up to the third oor, they found that the doors
to the student council o ce there were tied shut, from the inside. In the hallway
were a series of homemade re bombs — “chemistry beakers with rags stu fed in

624
them” — that had apparently triggered the alarm before zzling out. And then
there was the body of a janitor, whom the gunman had shot on his way in.

The police blasted out the glass pane in the o ce door with a shotgun, tossed in a
tear gas grenade, and waited as the gun re came to a halt. Then they stormed in,
to confront the mysterious sniper: they found him lying unconscious on the oor,
next to at least three high powered ri es. (The young man was wearing a gas mask,
but it apparently was defective.) “We got him!” the team shouted down to the
street.

A district security o cer was standing guard outside the school when the entry
team came down the stairs, carrying the unconscious gunman on a stretcher: he
was wearing a t-shirt and “combat fatigues camou aged for jungle warfare.” Then
they took his gas mask o f; the guard was stunned to see that he recognized the
young man: “My God, that’s my nephew! He’s an ‘A’ student! Why would he do
it? Why would he do it?!”

Indeed, the 17-year-old, a senior at the school, was ranked 8th in his class of 292.
He was a member of the National Honor Society, and just the week before, had
been awarded a college scholarship. He was a “brain” who played chess, and he
had never been in any sort of trouble in his whole life. Nobody in the school, in
the town, could believe it. His English teacher gave an interview to the New York
Tim the next day. “All night long I kept asking myself was there something in his
behavior I missed,” she said. “And the answer kept coming back — nothing,
nothing, nothing... a perfect student, kind and considerate. An altar boy.”

Even the mayor of Olean agreed. “The boy is not an outsider. He’s one of our own
and his family are very reputable people. In a small town everyone knows
everyone else.”

The teen had been “more of a loner than not” — everyone said he was quiet, and
kept to himself. He was never known to have a girlfriend. He w the head of the
school’s ri e team, though. “A real good shot,” the principal remembered; indeed,
several of the plaques in the school’s trophy case bore the gunman’s name. And he
did have at least one friend in the neighborhood, a boy who would tell reporters
that he had been in the gunman’s bedroom, and saw there were guns displayed
prominently. In fact, whenever his friend struck up a conversation with him, it
was usually about shooting, or hunting. “Guns were his life.”

But although he was the rst “school shooter” the Secret Service found, the Olean
gunman was likely inspired by still another shooting — just not one that
happened at a high school. The year before his attack, in January, there was a high-
pro le news story about a sniper in New Orleans, a black revolutionary who shot

625
at police from the roof of a hotel. He held the whole city in terror, and society’s
forces at bay, for more than ten hours before being shot by police. Later that year
at Olean High School, the eventual shooter mentioned to his friend “how funny
it must feel to be a sniper holding o f people.”

The wave rose from Olean, and spread north, just across the Canadian border, to
the town of Brampton, Ontario. On May 28, 1975, a “quiet” 16-year-old boy
brought two ri es to Brampton Centennial Secondary School, and while a
copycat of Olean, he added to the emerging “school shooting” scenario, pushing it
further into the realm of nightmare: he attacked while school was in session, and
targeted his classmates, in the halls. Then he turned the ri e on himself. And
while his yearbook photo would show a grinning teenage boy with long hair, in
the weeks just before the attack, “he had shaved his head, become
uncommunicative, and started dressing in military fatigues.” He would be
wearing them during the rampage.

Five months later, the wave passed over Ottawa, and St. Pius X High School. The
18-year-old gunman — who had won the “Briefcase of the Year” award for being
one of the “really studious types” — brought a shotgun to class. He shot his
classmates, then himself.

That same day, back in New York, the Olean sniper who rst started the wave was
just going on trial. Two psychiatrists had assessed his mental state, and found him
to be competent to stand accused. But he would plead “innocent by reason of
insanity,” with his defense counsel saying in opening arguments that their client
was “su fering from a serious, deep-rooted mental illness that precluded his
conviction.”

Countering this, the prosecutor promised the jury he would “o fer as evidence in
the trial a diary in which [the defendant] had detailed plans for a shooting spree at
the school.”

The next weekend, during a morning headcount, prison guards found the Olean
shooter in his cell, hanging from a bed sheet that was knotted tightly around his
neck. He had lef behind three notes, all in a similar vein; they revealed that the
attack itself had just been an attempt at suicide-by-cop, all along.

I wanted to die, but I couldn’t do it, so I had to get someone to do it for

me. It didn’t work out… Someone might think it selfish or cowardly to
take one’s own life. Maybe so, but it’s the only free choice I have… The
way I figure, I lose either way. If I’m found not guilty, I won’t survive
the pain I’ve caused — my guilt. If I’m convicted, I won’t survive the
mental and physical punishment of my life in prison.

626
 ...Some will always ask, ‘Why?’ I don’t know — no one will. What h
been, can’t be changed. I’m sorry... I regret the foods I’ll never taste, the
music I’ll never hear, the sit I’ll never see, the accomplishments I’ll
never accomplish. In other words, I regret my life.

The wave curled back stateside the next year. July 2, 1976, at California State
University, Fullerton. This time it was the college’s 37-year-old custodian, armed
with a ri e he bought at K Mart (and although the “Black Panther” law had been
passed by then, which banned open-carry of rearms in state buildings, this of
course did nothing to stop the determined shooter.) He was a diagnosed
schizophrenic, who said he believed his co-workers were forcing his wife to
perform in pornographic lms. He was arrested, and eventually con ned to a
mental institution.

Two and a half years later, still in California, the end of the wave came crashing
down. On Monday, January 29, 1979, a 16-year-old girl who lived across the street
from Grover Cleveland Elementary School, in San Diego, pointed her father’s
hunting ri e out the window, and started shooting. Another sniper. She shot at
the principal, the custodian, and then the students. She surrendered when police
showed up, famously telling them, when they asked why she did it, “I don’t like
Mondays.”

***
The phenomenon of shootings at schools seems to have split o f from a greater
nexus of violence: the mass shooter. A being outside the Secret Service’s data set.
Most of en, this tradition of indiscriminate mass violence in America is traced
back to August 1, 1966, and the observation tower high over the University of
Austin. That was where the vortex rst appeared.

It was thirty stories to the top of the tower. An elevator took the shooter up 27 of
those ights, but then he had to haul his gear the rest of the way up on a dolly: “4
ri es, 3 pistols, enough ammunition for an extended siege, and supplies to sustain
himself for several days,” as a CBS newsman reported when it was all over.

When he got to the top, he barricaded the door behind him, and started laying
out his weapons.

He had reached some level of national prominence once already, at age 12, when
he became the youngest Boy Scout ever to have reached the rank of Eagle Scout.
He had earned many marksmanship badges on his path to that title... but he really
learned to shoot in the United States Marine Corp.

627
He rst opened re on the students just below him — thus technically, the rst
widely-known mass shooting actually started as the rst school shooting — but
then he turned the ri e, with its powerful scope, out onto the surrounding town,
shooting at pedestrians and bicyclists, and even a customer at a barber shop, in
mid-haircut. The siege nally ended when police stormed the barricade at the top
of the stairs, and gunned him down as he turned to them, with his shotgun almost
at the ready.

But shortly af er they identi ed the shooter, the death toll increased again: the
police found he had killed his wife in her sleep, back home. He lef a note nearby,
in his typewriter:

I don’t quite understand what it that compels me to type th letter.

Perhaps it to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently
performed. I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to
be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I
can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and
irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requir a
tremendo mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.

In March when my parents made a physical break I noted a great deal

of stress. I consulted a Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center
and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about
some psychiatric disorders I felt I had. I talked with a Doctor once for
about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt some
overwhelming violent impuls . A er one session I never saw the Doctor
again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone,
and seemingly to no avail.

A er my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see

if there any physical disorder. I have had some tremendo headach
in the past and have consumed two large bottl of Excedrin the past
three months.

He lef for the tower the next day. First, he made a detour to his mother’s home,
and killed her too.

The tower sniper had indeed visited a doctor, as he claimed. During that session,
he had made what the doctor’s notes show was a “vivid reference” to “thinking
about going up on the tower with a deer ri e and shooting people.” The doctor
had determined that he was “not dangerous enough for involuntary

628
commitment,” and instead prescribed him some Valium, telling him to come back
for weekly visits. The gunman didn’t follow through, on either.

The state did an autopsy on the shooter, as he had requested. The medical
examiner found that he actually had brain cancer — but concluded that “the
relationship between the brain tumor and [the shooter’s] actions on the last day
of his life cannot be established with clarity.” The gunman had also been taking
amphetamines to aid in long study sessions, and was under “signi cant personal
stress” over his nances. But most observers would look to the explanation he
outlined in his nal letter, just af er killing his mother: “I cannot rationally
pinpoint any speci c reason for doing this...the prominent reason in my mind is
that I truly do not consider this world worth living in, and am prepared to die...”

***
The Austin attack was a massive news story. In 1966, such a thing truly seemed
unprecedented. And in many ways, it was.

But the year before, there was an event in California with characteristics that
seemed to foreshadow what was coming: on April 25, 1965, a 16-year-old in Long
Beach took his father’s hunting ri e, stole the family car, and for some reason
drove 200 miles north on US Highway 101, to the town of Orcutt. He pulled o f
to the shoulder, and walked up the long, sloping hill looking down on the
highway. He started sniping at the cars passing by. When a motorist stopped to
help the injured, he shot them too. The police arrived, and he shot at them. It
went on for two hours. Finally, as dozens of o cers closed in on his position on
the hillside, he stood up, shouted something unintelligible at them, and then
turned the ri e on himself.

The teenage gunman from Long Beach was known by his teachers as “such a quiet
fellow…. he never caused trouble, and he had perfect attendance. An A student
and real ne boy.” The New York Tim story on the event reads just like the
school-shooter stories that would follow in the 1970s: an unassuming young man
suddenly shooting people at random, with no intention of getting away, and no
clear motive. It just wasn’t in a school — yet.

When some of the victims tried to sue the highway shooter's parents, noting that
they had failed to keep their hunting ri e out of his hands, a judge dismissed the
case. “Is this tragic event of such a nature that one could say it was probably the
result of negligence of the parents in bringing up the child?”, the judge posed the
question. “Appellants argue that human experience and common knowledge
suggest that this sort of tragedy does not customarily occur if a child is carefully
observed and managed by its parents. But such tragedies do not customarily occur

629
at all.” And at the time, way back in 1965, that was true; statistically, it’s still true.
It’s the impact that has changed.

***
If it all indeed started on a hillside in California, a fundamental mystery still
remained: where did the will to be a shooter come from? What made them able to
kill, and of en die, for a title that should bring them only infamy? What made
them evil?

Dr. Park Dietz, the forensic psychologist whom Reagan’s would-be assassin
mouthed curses at from his defense table, gave an interview in 2003 in which he
talked about a notorious case from 1957, in Nebraska — the teenage gunman who
went on multi-state killing spree with his girlfriend, shooting people at random.
Dietz o fered an explanation for why they did it... and perhaps, why they all do it.
“When somebody has so little to lose, so that it all seems meaningless to them,
then they’re likely to consider revenge as having considerable value,” he observed.
“They may think of suicide as an escape from it all... That’s a terrible
combination, being suicidal and wanting revenge. That’s at the heart of most of
the workplace and school mass murders of the last 20 years.”

The interviewer asked if this meant there was a “universal lethality” in people.

“I think people are born with the inherent ability to be cruel and harmful and
destructive and sel sh and acquisitive,” the doctor replied. “It’s the function of
many of the institutions of society to train us out of that.”

***
As for what awakened the savagery then, in America, in 1965, one likely
contributor was that the country’s military involvement in Vietnam, simmering
for years, was just starting to boil over into all-out (but never declared) war. Draf
notices were being printed by the thousands, and suddenly young men all over the
country were confronted with the reality that they, too, could die in combat, or
could nd themselves having to take the lives of total strangers, over little more
than a powerful man’s whim.

Meanwhile, they all knew, even on some subconscious level, that the man who was
potentially sending them o f to the battle eld, President Johnson, was only in the
Oval O ce because of some nobody in Dallas who had a cheap ri e, and a
telescopic sight. One sniper was all it took; the illusion that anyone was truly in
control of their society, and the sense that anything they did had meaning, was
never weaker.

630
 66. Savage

September 11, 2011

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door at the top of the stairs was closed.

He was on YouTube, and had just found a “tribute” video. A common genre of
user-created clip, it was really just a slideshow set to music, like the ones that
routinely surface online in the wake of a celebrity death — or more
controversially, a high-pro le shooting. But this one was di ferent.

He surely knew about "Travis the Chimp" already — the violent incident down in
Stamford was a huge story nationwide when it happened in 2009, but especially
there in Connecticut. And he had already expressed an interest in primates two
years before even that, when the Yale doctor tried to explain the value of reading
facial expressions — “Some primates smile when they are frightened,” he had
replied. But seeing Travis in the context of a tribute video, and especially the way
the other YouTube users responded to it, must have made the di ference.
Something clicked.

He went to the Columbine forum, and started a new thread.

SUBJECT: RIP Travis the Chimp!

Smiggles: This is among the most hilarious things

I’ve seen in my life. It’s a tribute video to a
chimpanzee who snapped and went on a biting spree
a couple of years ago. The humor that I find in
this is the way the video itself and its comments
are parallel to the kind of tributes you can find
on YouTube for murderers...

631
He copied-and-pasted some of of the comments from YouTube, showing the full
range of responses:

* “This video is a homage to a MURDERER. Fucking

monkey, I’m glad you’re DEAD.”

* “That’s a beautiful tribute to Travis I cried!

Thanks so much for making it and sharing it. We
love you Travis!”

* “The true murderer is the zanax travis was on.

If that can do bad things to humans than its
worse for chimps.”

* “Travis belonged to the jungle with his fellow

chimps ! HE is the victim of human egotism and
exploitation ! RIP in Heaven’s Jungle...”

***
A few days passed, and then he came back to the thread. There were no replies —
but the “Views” counter showed that people were, indeed, reading what he was
typing.

He added another comment, containing only a link to another YouTube video: it

showed a few seconds of Travis’s owner, Sandy, when she appeared on the Today
show in 2009: “How many people go crazy and kill other people?...”

Sandy had since passed away, in May of 2010. (She was buried with two urns, one
under each arm: the rst containing her daughter’s ashes, and in the other,
Travis’s.) History was already forgetting the whole thing. But the 19-year-old at 36
Yogananda just kept thinking about them, and the events that led to the incident
on Rock Rimmon Road.

***
He continued browsing threads on the Columbine forum, commenting on the
topics of the day. He found one thread, in particular, that irritated him: someone
said the lyrics to the pop song “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People were in
reference to the 2007 Westroads Mall shooter from Nebraska. Smiggles replied
that he hated that myth, partly because the Westroads gunman was one of his
“favorites”:

632
 Smiggles: I can’t stop thinking about how much
this song annoys me. Even if it wasn’t so lame,
it would still bother me that they used the
name... Now one of my favorite mass shooters has
been turned into a trendy stereotypical poster
child of school shootings just because of his
age, despite having nothing to do with the school
shooter archetype... I cannot see anything which
indicated that [he] had been significantly
affected by (the conventional interpretation of)
bullying nor peer rejection.

He kept going on ranting about the song, for pages and pages. Some of the other
users had a hint as to an additional reason why it vexed him so: the person they
knew only as Smiggles would of en “show some interest in music, but only if it
related in some way to spree killing or mass murder.” Indeed, he had compiled
hours and hours of music, from many genres, into one big YouTube playlist —
every song he could nd that showed even a remote connection to the data in his
spreadsheet. (Just like he had been doing with movies, too, in between his usual
psycho-horror icks.) So, when the shooter that this pop song supposedly referred
to was misidenti ed, then both the shooter and the song would correlate to a
completely di ferent shooter-archetype. It made his carefully structured lists,
whether mental or digital, look disorganized, and all just because people couldn't
pay attention to important details.

***
On October 29, a freak “autumn Nor’easter” storm hit, and dumped 13 inches of
snow on Newtown. Ninety-seven percent of the town lost power, but 36
Yogananda did not (the internet user there kept right on complaining about
"Pumped Up Kicks" all throughout it.) There was some damage to the pale yellow
house's roof, though; the repairs took a couple days, and Nancy told her My Place
friends that she went and slept at an inn while the crew did their work, but would
go back to the house during the day to stay with her son. She said he slept in the
basement during those few nights.

***
The incident on Rock Rimmon Road was still on his mind more than anything
else. He went to the “Favorite lm” thread and lef another YouTube URL, to a
trailer for the 1986 British horror lm, Link — a horror movie about a killer
chimp.

Smiggles: Despite the main "chimp" being an

orangutan, I wonder if Travis ever stayed up late

633
 to watch this.

The Link lmmakers had indeed used an orangutan with its hair dyed black in
most of the “chimp” sequences, but a genuine chimpanzee w featured in the
lm’s opening, a scene that surely made the user at 36 Yogananda sit up: a college
professor speaks to his class in a lecture hall, with the chimp in a cage next to him
on the stage, and asks them, “What is the real di ference between man and
chimp?”

One student raises their hand. Hair?

The professor shakes his head. “Something more signi cant. A sociological
di ference.”

Another hand raises. Intelligence?

No, the chimp on the stage had an IQ of 85. “Well within the human norm.”

A more thoughtful answer: Man the only speci that mak war on its own
kind.

Still, wrong. “It used to be fashionable to think that,” the professor nods. “It was
another way we had of torturing ourselves. Except, in 1979, in Tanzania, Jane
Goodall observed chimps hunting in groups: kidnapping, murdering, and even
eating their own babies. And when a group of renegade males broke away from
the tribe, they were pursued relentlessly, and killed one by one. How’s that for
ancient tribal war?”

Finally, the lm’s protagonist, from the back of the class (a young Elisabeth Shue
in one of her earliest roles), provides her answer: “Civilization?”

The professor looks up, and nods with pride. “Thank you.”

***
Later that week, he watched the 1968 Peter Bogdanovich thriller Targets. It
depicted a rampaging sniper — clearly inspired by the Texas tower shooter of
1966, but also shown in one scene picking o f random motorists along a California
highway — and was one of the earliest lms to explore the psychology of mass
murderers. He found that he liked the movie, for the most part:

Smiggles: I think it’s the most pleasurable movie

about a mass shooting that I’ve seen... I
recommend skipping any scene which doesn’t

634
 include the [Austin sniper] clone; at best,
you’ll only be missing some pretentious pseudo-
philosophizing about aesthetics.

Perhaps the signi cance of the sub-plot went over his head: these scenes feature
Boris Karlo f as an aging monster-movie actor, at the end of a career not unlike
Karlo ’s own (being a veteran of classic horror lms like The Mummy and
Frankenstein.) In one scene, when his lm-industry colleagues try to convince him
to make a comeback, Karlo ’s character brushes them o f, handing one of his
showbiz friends a newspaper and saying, “My kind of horror isn’t horror
anymore. No one’s afraid of a painted monster.” The paper’s headline reads
“Y K S S —H S D .” The
new American monster.

“Smiggles” asked if anyone knew of any “shooter” movies that came out in the
wake of the 1974 wave that sprang from Olean. But nobody did.

***
There was a thread “ ”, where someone had lef a link
to a website that was making the rounds on social media around then, one that
asked you to put in some basic information about yourself, and in return you’d
get an estimated date when you were supposedly due to expire. Users were sharing
their respective dates.

One user commented about psychics, suggesting they would be able to know such
a date with more precision. Then another user replied: “I know mine. I must be a
psychic.”

The board knew what this particular user was trying to imply; it had long been a
sort of sub-genre of posts on the forum, made by a certain subset of users: not just
overt fanboys of the Columbine shooters — as there were plenty of those — but
ones who actively sought out the label of “aspiring school shooter,” and
essentially trolled the board by making it look like they were “leaking,” while just
barely stopping short of any ban-worthy behavior. And the user who wrote “I
must be psychic” already had a reputation as one of these. They’d been talking big
for a long time. (Another iteration of this routine came when a thread set up a
poll asking “What would you do if there was a shooting at your school?” They
responded with something to the e fect of “I’d reload.”)

The user at 36 Yogananda probably didn’t click the “death clock” link (if he did,
he didn’t share the date he got), but he did click the discussion thread about it. He
saw the edgelord's comment, and saw that other users were already mocking them
for it. He joined in.

635
 Smiggles: Don't leave us hangin', bro! Make sure
you upload your basement tapes before you pull a
Travis!

This had become something of a past-time for Smiggles: goading the posers. He
seemed to have a particular resentment for them, and he remembered which
usernames he perceived as falling into this category, when he saw them pop up in
other topics; not long af er the "death date" discussion, there was another thread,
where a forum user was complaining belligerently about how the forum was in
decline, and had been for years. Smiggles responded, sarcastically calling them out:

Smiggles: How about how [forum user] has been

here for three years and he still hasn't gone on
a rampage? I thought he would've been on my
catalog of mass murderers by now. [“confused”
emoji]

***
He came back to his “Travis the Chimp” thread. He posted a Wikipedia article
about another animal: a trained elephant, named “Tyke.” In the middle of a circus
performance in Honolulu in 1994, Tyke trampled her trainer to death, injured
several more people, and then charged out of the arena. The 8,000-pound beast
ran uncontrolled through the city streets for more than 30 minutes before a hail of
police gun re ended her life.

Smiggles: I must have forgotten about Tyke

because I spend most of my time thinking about
primates, but I just remembered that I saw her
video several years ago. The revolution
transcends taxonomic order!

***
Downstairs, Nancy was on Gunbroker again. The latest addition to the gun safe
would arrive on October 26, 2011: a Savage Arms Mark II .22 ri e. It had a bolt-
action, and was chambered for little rim re bullets, the sort meant for plinking, or
hunting small game. It wasn’t the fanciest or most powerful gun at 36 Yogananda
— but it was the least conspicuous. It sounded just like the ones that hunters
would use out in the surrounding woods, when the season came.

The merchant who sold the ri e to Nancy lef feedback for the transaction:
“Good customer. Fast pay and fast email. Thank you for your business. Enjoy

636
your Savage!”

November 2011
Kingston, New Hampshire
When Nancy arrived, the parking lot of the restaurant was packed with police
cruisers: her baby brother Jimmy — O cer Champion, around Kingston — was
o cially retiring from the force. He wasn’t going to stop serving and protecting
(he would stay on to help train the next generation of Kingston o cers), but
Nancy’s kid brother had nonetheless crossed a major milestone. She wasn’t about
to miss the party.

Kingston’s longtime Chief of Police, and partner of “Uncle Jimmy’s” from the old
days, remembers running into Nancy at the get-together that day; he hadn’t seen
“Beanie” in a long time, but the girl from the farm hadn’t changed. “She was a
wonderful, caring, bubbly person,” he remembers. “Heart of gold.”

Nancy came alone; the chief hadn’t seen her sons since they drove o f the family
plot in 1998.

***
Peter had written to Nancy sometime that October. Their son still hadn’t been
responding to his emails, and he just wanted to know that he was okay.

Nancy wrote back, saying their youngest “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, she said, their son had told her that
he did not want to see his father anymore.

Peter wasn’t sure if he believed that. Maybe Nancy was making it up. But 36
Yogananda was a big, opaque, box, and Nancy’s word was his only view inside. He
wrote back to her. “I think you should tell him that he should plan to see me once
per month to do something (hike, cross country ski, shooting etc.)”

If she brought up the notion at all, it didn’t change anything. Perhaps it was no
coincidence, that the ght over college credits, when Peter's son had cut o f
contact, had come almost immediately af er the boy turned eighteen — the point
when, as the same now-adult put it to his old Combat Arms teammate, he knew
he could "dismiss" anyone from his life that he wanted.

637
AMC Loews Danbury 16 Theater — Danbury, Connecticut
Dave got so used to seeing “DDR guy” when he came to work, he was like part of
the scenery. He was there practically every weekend, usually for Dave’s entire shif ,
hopping back and forth on the squares, over and over and over. Their only
interaction was when DDR guy needed tokens for the machine.

One day, the pattern suddenly changed: DDR guy told Dave his real name. The
name wasn’t anything unusual, but hearing him say it was a shock all unto itself.

It coincided with another intriguing development over the summer, one that
Dave had observed from his post at the concession stand: DDR guy seemed to
have actually made a friend.

The friend was an Asian fellow, older than DDR guy, who came to the theater
regularly to watch movies in the evening — but more and more, he was seen
playing DDR, right alongside the skinny kid in the grey hoodie. The new guy had
even been seen talking to him — and DDR guy actually talked back.

***
The new friend was from New York, just over the border from Fair eld County.
He remembers he found it tough to keep up with his new dance partner; the
skinny kid’s stamina for the game was incredible. “One quirk was that physical
exhaustion only seemed to a fect him when he was really oored,” the friend
would tell investigators. He noticed that when DDR guy did get exhausted, he
would go to the theater’s bathroom and wipe down his face. “Whenever he came
back he would use the window as a mirror and adjust his hair. From this, it
seemed like he was aware of, and did pay attention to, his own appearance.”

Sometimes they danced for so long that DDR guy’s hoodie would be soaking in
sweat; he would go out to his car in the parking lot — where he always kept a
spare hoodie — and change out.

It started out as just playing the game together, but they did start to chat in
between songs. The skinny kid mentioned his mother, and how his relationship
with her was “strained,” because he felt he was “unable to communicate with her
because her behavior was not rational and she was unwilling to talk about certain
topics that he felt were important.”

The friend from New York was immediately aware that his new friend from
Sandy Hook wasn’t quite “normal.” Neither was he. But they weren’t robots.
“Emotion wasn’t something expressed in particularly verbose or grandiose fashion

638
but it was expressed,” he said of their conversations. “He was capable of laughing,
smiling, and making jokes, though always in a dry fashion.”

Sometimes, when they met at the movie theater, it was to actually watch a lm.
They had similar tastes:

Any sort of horror-type film we watched always had some sort of

psychological aspect to it… [he] seemed to really be into these films but
also not in any sadistic or strange sense. He had a wide knowledge of
those films from that era of 80s to 90s b-typeish horror films... I’m not
sure where th knowledge came from but it appeared to be self-
cultivated. There w a real quaintness to it since these movi that he
w interested in were about old he w , and it appealed to me
because they were in a way nostalgic.

They talked about going hiking together sometime, or of visiting another arcade
to play DDR. They exchanged phone numbers, and email addresses. And they
would meet at the Danbury theater regularly. For the rst time since elementary
school — and possibly ever — the young man from 36 Yogananda had made a
genuine, real-life, in-person connection with another human being.

December 7, 2011
Silver Hill Hospital — New Canaan, Connecticut
The Patient’s mother came to the psychiatric facility to visit her. She had been very
worried about her daughter, even before the girl stopped seeing Dr. Fox. She had
been contacting WCSU regularly, trying to get an answer as to why their supposed
sta f doctor wasn’t listed on their website. She wanted to know what his
credentials were, and make sure he really worked there.

Finally, they told her: Dr. Fox had been red for an “ethics violation,” months
ago.

When her daughter had come home for Spring Break earlier in the year, she tried
to avoid the topic of Dr. Fox entirely. She didn’t want another ght. But then,
when her daughter said she was going hiking with Dr. Fox — in the remote forests
around Bull Bridge in Kent — she couldn’t help but ask. “Are other students
going on the hike with him too?”

“No, just the two of us.”

She kept the rest of the questions to herself. But she would later write of how, “A
feeling of fear came over me... what might he do to, or with, my daughter out in

639
the middle of the woods somewhere? My mind went to the worst case scenario
where she could be lef for dead and no one would ever know or be able to prove
what really happened to her.”

The hospital orderlies led the woman into the dormitory, and she gave her
daughter a big hug. As they talked, she again tried to avoid one subject, but her
daughter eventually brought it up: she said that her new doctor at Silver Hill had
advised her not to contact Dr. Fox anymore, and she had held out for a whole
month — but she just had to know how if he was okay. So she had called him one
day. And though their phone conversation was brief, she said that Dr. Fox told
her, “I really don’t want to admit this, but I still love you.”

Shortly af er, the Patient experienced what the hospital sta f described as a
“complete meltdown.” She was only just now starting to recover from that. She
was making progress again.

Her mother comforted her, and assured her that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

The Patient started to explain to her mother some of what had happened, and
how she got to where she was. But she wouldn’t tell her about what happened on
the sailboat. She needed to protect Dr. Fox.

Just then, an orderly came in, with a letter addressed to the Patient. It was from
Dr. Fox, and it read in part:

I know that we westerners share a collective foolishness of obsessing over

the future in a most obtuse way; we believe that with future thought we
can prepare and be secure. Yet th obsession tends to be a significant bas
of our insecurity...

It went on like that for several paragraphs, trying to cushion the blow, but ve
words on the page were all the Patient could see — the thing she never, ever
wanted to hear from him: “Please do not contact me.”

She went numb, “dissociative with pain and confusion.” She had been
abandoned, again.

***
A few weeks af er the visit from her mother, the Patient was back at it, seeing yet
another therapist. This time at Yale. She started to tell her story again, in pieces.
The therapist could tell that her new patient was still holding something back...
but they made progress, and then, one day, the Patient brought in the letter that

640
Dr. Fox had sent her. The one that broke her heart. And she said that she had
heard rumors that he was involved with other patients, too.

The Yale therapist then wrote a letter of her own, to the Connecticut Department
of Health. She wanted him investigated... but she knew that would only work if
the Patient was willing to go on the record, against Dr. Fox. And she still loved
him.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The door was closed.

Some users on the Columbine forum noticed that the mood of the person behind
the name “Smiggles” seemed to darken signi cantly — even by his usual standards
— as the end of 2011 approached. Gone was the sarcasm, and aloofness, replaced
with overt despair. One of the rst places it became evident was a thread on
“Existentialism”:

Smiggles: ‘Self’ is a delusion and life cannot be

anything other than suffering.

Another thread polled the forum “"W ?,” supposing the

user could choose any location or era:

Smiggles: Any place and any time before language

infected humans.

He started his own thread.

SUBJECT: Psychopathy?

Smiggles: Serious question: Is there any

distinction between the usage of ‘He had the
devil in him’ and the marginally more nuanced ‘He
was afflicted by psychopathy’?

Nobody had a good answer. Few even clicked the topic.

One of the longest threads on the board was “Y I !?!?” —

an extension to the lists that the Columbine shooters put on their AOL site over a
decade before. Users would post whatever was ticking them o f that day.

Smiggles: Culture. I’ve been pissed out of my

mind all night thinking about it. I should have

641
 been born a chimp. I would even settle for a
post-language hunter-gatherer society.

He came back a few hours later.

I spent all day ruminating over how much I hate

culture. Now I’ve calmed down and am left lying
on the floor, numbly perplexed over the foreign
concept of loving life.

He expanded on “culture” in another of the text documents on his hard drive. His
criticisms, as they so of en were, were based in themes of force, and coercion:

[Culture] inflicts arbitrary prejudiced

perspectives onto people. It dismisses the
differences between individuals to contrive an
artificial group, to which people are coerced
into submission. It enables baseless bigotry
between other arbitrary cultural groups and
cohesion among people in the group for which
there is no reason to associate.

He regarded religion with similar disdain, though here, he framed his argument
around the act of taking life: “In conventional Christianity,” he wrote, “killing
yourself would intuitively be desirable because you would be able to go to
heaven.” The same should hold true in Buddhism, he continued, “and yet in
both, suicide is arbitrarily forbidden for contrived reasons.” Even decoupled from
religion, the more abstract “morality” argument still didn’t wash for him, because
dying “would intuitively be moral because you would not have the capacity to
commit immoral deeds, which you innately do through being alive.”

As for taking someone else’s life, there was just never any consistency. “It's okay to
kill an animal, but it's not okay to kill a human. Killing one person to save many
people is wrong, killing one person to save many people is right,” he wrote. “The
common factor is that ‘immoral’ behavior is permitted to be treated with force.
That's all morality is: the application of force.”

***
Back on the forum, in the thread “W ?”, he answered “In
the Shadow of Man” — Jane Goodall’s groundbreaking 1971 book on the
chimpanzees of Gombe, Tanzania. (It could well have been something he picked
up in his WCSU days; Jane Goodall had close ties to the college, and the Goodall
Center was just one oor up from the Introduction to Ethical Theory class he
took, in White Hall.)

642
Finally, he went back to his “Travis the Chimp” thread:

Smiggles: Enculturing human children is already

terrifying enough, but enculturing other apes is
something out of the cruelest nightmare. I don’t
know of anything more worthy of crying over. Rest
in peace, little buddy. You’re free from the rape
of civilization now.

Then, on December 10th, he had an idea.

Smiggles: I should call in on John Zerzan’s radio

program about Travis. I’m really surprised that I
haven’t been able to find anything he’s written
or said about the incident, considering how often
he brings up random acts of violence. It seems
like Travis would be a poster-chimp of his
philosophy.

But when the next episode of Anarchy Radio was broadcast, on December 13th, it
was with a guest host. They said John Zerzan would be back the following week.

***
There had been a discussion about the age of consent on the forum before, and
users remember “Smiggles” weighing in — being very particular about the
medical de nition of “pedophile,” as opposed to “ephebophile.” It was enough to
earn him a reputation (even though it appears he had kept his essay on the topic
mostly a secret). But then, on the morning of December 20, 2011, he cemented
that reputation.

The topic was ostensibly about iPads, and video game consoles; users were arguing
over whether consumer culture was something redeemable. Some said no — but
made one exception, that being for literary novels.

Smiggles disagreed.

Smiggles: Literature is simply another coping

mechanism for children who’ve been mindfucked by
culturapists. They’re carried to other worlds in
the stream of semen.

He surely knew the reaction this would engender. He might even have been
seeking it out.

643
“Doesn’t anybody else notice that Smiggles sometimes sends huge ‘I AM A
PEDOPHILE’ signals?” one user asked the board in reply. “No o fense buddy but
children in a semen stream? What the hell did you smoke?”

The user at 36 Yogananda didn’t write back. The 20th was a Tuesday, and he
probably spent all day getting ready; just af er 10:30pm, Connecticut time, he
picked up the phone, and dialed a number in Oregon.

644
 67. Emerald Dream

December 20, 2011

KWVA Campus Radio — University of Oregon
The caller from Connecticut told the producer his name was “Greg.”

The sign inside the broadcast booth was lit — “ON THE AIR” — and as a
Beethoven concerto began to fade, John Zerzan welcomed his listeners back to
Anarchy Radio. His producer patched-in the call.

“Greg! How’s it going?”

The voice answering was faint at rst, almost a whisper. “Hi, good. Um, I’m a fan
of your writing.”

“Thank you.”

KWVA boosted the caller’s volume, and his voice became more clear. “I’m sorry to
bring up such an old news story, but I couldn’t nd anything that you said about
the topic, and it seems relevant to your interests, so I thought I would bring up
Travis the Chimp. Do you remember him?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, um, he was a highly domesticated chimpanzee, who lived in a suburban

home in Stamford, Connecticut.”

The caller’s voice was almost monotone, and slightly robotic, the words
pronounced with exaggerated precision — Con-nect-i-cut. He might have been
reading from a prepared script (the details he gave showed he was familiar with a
feature story from the January 2011 issue of New York magazine, “Travis the
Menace,” at the very least.)

645
“He was raised just like a human child, starting from the week he was born,” the
voice continued. “By the time that he was fourteen years old, which would be
somewhere around age twenty in human years, um… he slept in a bed, he took his
own baths, he dressed himself, he brushed his teeth with an electric toothbrush…”

Zerzan laughed. “Really? When was this?” (It was one of the host’s few
interjections; for the most part, he just listened to his caller’s story.)

“Um... well... this happened in early two-thousand-and-nine...” he answered, and

then continued with his story. “[Travis] ate his meals at a table, and he enjoyed
human foods like ice cream, and used a remote control to watch television, and
liked baseball games... and he even used a computer to look at pictures on the
internet.”

The caller chuckled. “It goes without saying that Travis was very overweight; he
was two hundred pounds when he should have been around the low hundreds.
And he was actually taking Xanax.”

“Amazing!”

“...I couldn’t nd any information about why he was taking it, but it just seems to
say a lot that he was given it at all. And… basically, I think Travis wasn’t any
di ferent than a mentally handicapped human child.”

“Hmmm…”

“But, anyway, one day in February 2009, he was acting very agitated....”

The caller told Zerzan the story of what happened at the house on Rock Rimmon
Road (though leaving out any mention of the wildlife o cer's e forts to extricate
the animal from its environment, a thread the caller was most certainly conscious
o ). He told of how Sandy had fought to subdue her rampaging chimp. “She said
that af er she stabbed him, he looked at her as if to say ‘why’d you do that to me,
mom?’ — because apparently that was what their relationship was like: no
di ferent than between a human mother and child.”

Wrapping up the tale with another nervous chuckle, he then got to his point. “I’m
bringing it up because af erward, everyone was condemning his owner, or saying
how irresponsible she was for raising a chimp like it was a child, and that she
should have known that something like this would happen, because chimps aren’t
supposed to be living in civilization, they’re supposed to be living in the wild,
among each other. But, their criticism stops there —”

“Mmm-hmm.” Zerzan de nitely got it.

646
“—and the implication is that there’s no way that anything could have gone
wrong in his life if he were living in this civilization as a human, rather than a
chimp.”

“Ah, indeed.”

"Because, uh, he brings up questions about this whole process of child-raising,”

the caller continued.

“Yeah.”

“Civilization isn’t something which just happens to gently exist without us having
to do anything, because every newborn child — human child — is born in a
chimp-like state, and civilization is only sustained by conditioning them for years
on end, so that they’ll accept it for what it is, and since we’ve gone through this
conditioning, we can observe a human family raising a human child — and I’m
sure that even you have trouble intuitively seeing it as something unnatural — but
when we see a chimp in that position, we immediately know that there’s
something profoundly wrong with the situation. And it’s easy to say there’s
something wrong with it simply because it’s a chimp, but what’s the real di ference
between us and our closest relatives?”

The voice identifying itself as “Greg” continued on, though his nerves seemed to
start getting to him: “Travis wasn’t an untamed monster at all. Um, he wasn’t just
feigning domestication, he w civilized. Um, he was able to integrate into
society... it seems like everyone who knew him said how shocked they were that
Travis had been so savage, because they knew him as a sweet child.”

The caller acknowledged there had been some incident in downtown Stamford in
2003, but that was nothing: “He didn’t really act any di ferently than a human
child would, and the people who would use that as an indictment against having
chimps live as humans do wouldn’t apply the same thing to humans, so it’s just
kind of irrelevant.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But anyway, look what civilization did to him: it had the same exact e fect on him
as it has on humans. He was profoundly sick, in every sense of the term, and he
had to resort to these surrogate activities like watching baseball, and looking at
pictures on a computer screen, and taking Xanax. He was a complete mess.”

The monotone caller turned to the subject of motive — such as there could be
one in the Travis case — and curiously, he did not even mention the explanation
given by most observers (that the chimp did not recognize the person he was

647
attacking, and was just defending Sandy from an intruder). Instead, he focused on
a moment just before Travis’s victim arrived on the scene, when the chimp was
jingling his master’s car keys and jumping from vehicle to vehicle in the driveway.
“He had desperately been wanting his owner to drive him somewhere, and the
best reason I can think of for why he would want that, looking at his entire life,
would be that... some little thing he experienced was the last straw, and he was
overwhelmed at the life that he had, and he wanted to get out of it by changing his
environment, and the best way that he knew how to deal with that was getting his
owner to drive him somewhere else.”

“Yeah…”

“And when his owner’s... owner’s friend, arrived, he knew that she was trying to
coax him back into his place of domestication, and he couldn’t handle that, so he
attacked her, and anyone else who approached them.”

Then came the nal layer. The darkest. “Dismissing his attack as simply being the
senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful
thinking at best. His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random
acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by
humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation for...”

“No,” Zerzan echoed. They sure don’t.

“And, actual humans… I just- just don’t think it would be such a stretch to say
that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that.”

“Yeah. Yeah, wow,” Zerzan said, in what sounded like genuine wonder. “Thank
you, Greg. That’s quite a story. That’s really apropos, isn’t it? Travis the chimp...”

Greg laughed awkwardly one more time. “Maybe I’m just seeing connections
where there aren’t any, but—”

“No, I think not,” Zerzan replied. In fact, the host was surprised that he had
apparently missed such a story — “Maybe I was out of the country or something,
I don’t know” — and thanked him very much for the call. “Wow.”

“Thank you, bye,” the caller from Connecticut said. Click.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The door at top the stairs was closed. Firmly.

648
He put down the phone, and turned to his keyboard. He had a browser tab with
the “Travis the Chimp” thread open. No one had commented since the week
before, when he suggested he might call Anarchy Radio. Barely one minute af er
“Greg” hung up the phone, he posted an update.

Smiggles: Well, I feel schizophrenic.

The remark seems to have been a gure of speech. Af er all, he had just spoken to,
interacted with, a voice he had listened to on the radio many times. And his own
words, his own voice, had just gone out on the radio, too; not only had a pure
signal nally escaped the shell, it had been broadcast. For a near-mute recluse, it
perhaps did feel like something akin to schizophrenia.

It was just before 11pm in Connecticut.

***
Eight hours later, he came back to the thread. Still, no one had commented. For all
he knew, nobody had even listened to the show.

He posted another comment, with a link to an MP3 of the show, once Anarchy
Radio uploaded it to the Online Archive (as they did every week, the day af er a
broadcast). He also gave some commentary on his performance, likely with
memories from years of language-therapy sessions weighing on his pride:

Smiggles: It didn’t go as horribly as I

anticipated. I wish that I hadn’t spoken nonstop
about Travis for so long, but I didn’t want to
seem crazy by randomly bringing up a chimpanzee
for unknown reasons. And despite my failed
attempt at having a normal voice, I at least
sounded less incoherent than usual. I normally
speak much softer and swifter, with less
articulation, less inflection, and more mumbling.

Still, nobody on the forum commented. Nobody cared. Just like his spreadsheet.
Finally, he let the “Travis” case drop... but he kept on thinking about it.

***
He went away for two days, and when he came back, he sounded more
despondent than ever. He returned to the “Y I !?!?” topic,
and gave another answer:

Smiggles: Value is such a crazy thing.

649
It was likely a reference to a John Zerzan essay he was reading around the same
time, The Mass Psycholo of Misery, in which the anarcho-primitivist wrote:
“The angry longing for autonomy and self-worth brings to mind another clash of
values that relates to value itself. In each of us lives a narcissist who wants to be
loved for himself or herself and not for his or her abilities, or even qualities. Value,
per se, intrinsic.”

He posted again, less than an hour later.

Smiggles: I hate going through these extremely

rare instances of wild mood swings that I have. I
think this was the only time this year for me. I
was as depressed as I get during my last post,
and I’m fine with the interminable depression
that I normally have, but now I’m incoherently
giddy with glee. Well, relative to my baseline...
Except now that I’m giddy, I can’t really say
that I hate it because I think everything is
delightful.

If depressives cut themselves to feel better, I

wonder what cutting a happy-go-lucker would do.
Santa’s supposed to be jolly. I hope he visits me
tonight so I can find out.

A few days later, he came back to “Y I !?!?” again. He

almost sounded like he was replying to something another user had posted — but
he wasn’t. Instead he was, in all likelihood, responding to something a doctor or
nurse from Yale had said to him when he was fourteen, and that still loomed in his
psyche, now ve years later:

Smiggles: What is "chemical imbalance" even

supposed to mean? Why don’t hunter-gatherers need
antidepressants? I swear, a psychiatrist could
take a perfectly fine chimpanzee away from its
jungle, confine it in captivity, and when the
chimp gets depressed, they would say, "This
chimpanzee has a chemical imbalance. What? A
correlation between enculturation and depression?
But culture brings us meaning and beauty. Get out
of my way, caveman-wannabe. I need to prescribe
this chimp some Xanax".

The next day was New Year’s Eve, and then, it was 2012.

650
 ***
On January 5th, Nancy came home from the Connecticut Gun Exchange in
nearby Monroe, and she was carrying what looked like a suitcase molded from
black plastic. Inside was the latest addition to the safe: 36 Yogananda was now a
Glock household.

Af er she completed the sale, Nancy gathered up all the documents related to the
transaction — rearms transfer forms, a receipt for $638.05, her son’s handwritten
note that listed “di ferent types of ammunition and rearm magazines” — and
put them in a folder, with his name on it.

It wasn’t just any Glock, either: it was a 10mm, the “Glock 20 SF.” The larger
round meant it would pack of a hell of kickback — but this gun just needed to re
one shot, and one shot only.

651
 68. Fading

January 13, 2012

Private Residence — Milford, Connecticut
The Patient was living with her mother again, trying to get her life back together.

She was on her laptop, and she opened Facebook; she saw that an old
acquaintance was online — one of the few people on earth who might
understand. She sent her friend a message, and they soon got to talking about Dr.
Fox.

THE PATIENT: do you think he’ll call me?

FRIEND: I honestly don’t know. He never called me

again, and [that] may be part of his... Well
whatever he does. But also, since he got kicked
out of his house and is living in his office and
going through a divorce he might try to rope you
back in.

THE PATIENT: What was the last thing he said to

you? Like did he leave it off like he would
contact you again “someday”
Because that’s what he said to me but so far its
been over a month and i don’t know if i should
keep waiting for him like this anymore its taking
a toll on my mind

FRIEND: Well, what would you do if he did call

you? do you want to go back to him?

THE PATIENT: i loved him as naive as that sounds.

But i really dont want to go back to him after
the pain he’s caused me. like, if i talked to

652
 him, i just wonder what his excuse would be for
leaving me hanging like the way he left me. what
the hell would he say to justify himself?
i have such a weak side for people though, like
when they breakdown and melt, i breakdown and
melt and feel bad for them and give them the
benefit of the doubt but this time, i don’t want
to break down

The Patient’s friend told her what to expect, and it was the last thing she wanted
to hear: that when she herself and Dr. Fox had parted ways, she asked him if they
would never see each other again, and he said, ambiguously, “At least not for a
very long time.” The Patient's friend had held out hope for months and months
af erward, but that goodbye was over a year ago, “and now I swear if he tries to call
me he’s gonna die.”

The Patient could have felt the world drop out from under her. A year.

THE PATIENT: it just hurts so much because he

said he loved me over and over again and i never
felt love like that before
and then he just slams the door in my face
but leave it open just a crack, like a tease,
like a MIND FUCK
i can’t believe what he did to us

They consoled each other. The Patient said she was sorry for burdening her with
all of it — but her friend, who was further along in the pain, gave her hope.

FRIEND: Keep crying for help. because thus far

it’s whats keeping you going. if you need it, do
it.

Finally, the Patient found the nerve to ask.

THE PATIENT: i just wanted to know, if he told

you he loved you... like flat out said, i love
you, or what did he say...

FRIEND: Yes. he said that. like straight up those

three words.

THE PATIENT: When?

653
The friend said he had told her over the phone, on November 26, 2010; she
remembered the date exactly, because she had just gotten home from Black Friday
shopping.

The Patient compared this against her own relationship with Dr. Fox, turning
back the pages of her mental diary; he had just kissed her for the rst time, one
month before that. He had just told her the three words.

The Patient started saying that she wanted to die.

FRIEND: no. no. stop. You’re in a very difficult

place right now. I am okay. I really am. It’s
very painful, but it does get better. when you
get more time away from your relationship with
him, it starts to fall under a different light...
it will be okay.

The Patient said she was just so sad, and so devastated, she begged her friend to
tell her he was lying when he said the words. “I honestly felt the same way,” she
replied, “and I found out that it was all lies.”

***
Two weeks later, the patient’s mother was calling 9-1-1, and reporting that her
daughter was su fering a “psychotic episode.” She would later recall that as the
police o cers came to take her daughter away, the teenager yelled out, “My doctor
fucked me!” By the time they got her in the squad car, she was screaming, and
crying, “Why did he leave me? Why did he leave me?”

Wooster Mountain Shooting Range — Danbury, Connecticut

The retired cop who was a regular at My Place had talked guns with Nancy Lanza
before. So he wasn’t all that surprised to see her at the outdoor shooting range one
day. What surprised him was that she wasn’t alone: she had her younger son with
her. The one he had never met, and whom she rarely even talked about.

Nancy recognized her friend from the bar, and introduced him to her son. The ex-
cop doesn’t remember if they shook hands, but he does remember that the Lanza
family had two guns with them at the verdant outdoor range that day: a Glock
pistol, and a Bushmaster AR-15.

Nancy brought up her friend’s police experience, and then asked him: could he
maybe give her son some shooting tips?

654
“Sure,” he said, and he gave the thin young man in the grey hoodie “a quick lesson
in controlling his breathing and proper aiming techniques,” to improve his
performance with the AR-15. Nancy’s son listened respectfully, and followed the
instructions well. But he never said a word.

February 28, 2012

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door was closed.

He was back at the Columbine forum again, this time af er an absence of two full
months. He complained about some more things, and added dozens of new
entries to the thread “T C - /
,” many of them extremely obscure, or containing only the vaguest
reference to school shootings. (For instance, he added episode seven from season
two of The Gilmore Girls to the list, noting "several references in the beginning to
trench-coated loners with du fel bags.")

Scrolling down the list of topics he'd missed, he saw a thread entitled “A
A : .” This topic may even have been
what caused him to start posting again in the rst place (with his updates to the
movies/TV lists more of a sign of what he was up to while away); in it, a user was
sharing his outlook on Columbine, expressing that they had come to believe it was
not an isolated incident, but instead “a telling example of what the alienation,
loneliness, fear, and social disintegration in American society can breed.” The user
continued, “The future doesn’t look good. It will take many devoted people to
help change and reshape our society in a way that somehow bene ts all and harms
none (sounds utopian, I know...).”

A second user had already chimed in, arguing that the original poster had it all
wrong: “Fact is: school shootings are not common occasions, and have steadily
decreased from their peak.” And as far as Columbine, “I see it as two teenagers
who were not well in any sense of the word acting for little to no reason
whatsoever.” Crazy finds a way.

The user at 36 Yogananda clicked the REPLY button. This was his eld of study,
and he had something to say.

Smiggles: Columbine wasn’t an isolated incident:

it was the apex of a string of school shootings
which began increasing [in] the early 1990s.
Despite American students committing fewer school
shootings in 2000-2009 than they did in 1990-
1999, the rate of attempts actually increased

655
 beyond their pre-Columbine level. Columbine
caused Americans to begin taking the potential
for school shootings seriously, and thus many
attempts which were expected to have been carried
out have instead been prevented. And since 1999,
there has been an increase in foreign school
massacres committed in countries where, as
Sabratha’s Bullet Time phrases it, there isn’t
the "operational history" of Columbine.

In any event, it’s myopic to telescope on school

shootings when they’ve comprised a small
percentage of the larger trend of mass murders,
which are carried out in all sorts of contexts;
but they always occur in contexts which involve
some permutation of alienation, which has been
part and parcel with societal "progress". This
relationship can be seen with the Chinese mass
stabbings. There were some sparse incidents
throughout the 20th century, but the rate began
to rise in the 1990s and erupted in the early
2000s, corresponding to China’s rapid "economic
development", culminating in the infamous spate
of elementary school stabbings of 2010.

Apparently, the user who started the thread had the right idea, in Smiggles’s view;
the only problem was, they weren’t taking it far enough. Their assessment had
implied that reaching "utopia" might require winding the clocks back, culturally,
70 years or so; Smiggles wanted something more like 17,000 years.

He then addressed the naysayer who had commented before:

Smiggles: Thinking of this society as the default

state of existence is the reason why you think
that humans would be "not well" for "no reason
whatsoever". Civilization has not been present
for 99% of the existence of hominids, and the
only way that it’s ever sustained is by
indoctrinating each new child for years on end.
The "wellness" that you speak of is solely
defined by a child’s submission to this process
and their subsequent capacity to propagate
civilization themselves. When civilization exists
in a form where all forms of alienation (among
many other things) are rampant, new children will

656
 end up "not well" in all sorts of ways. You don’t
even have to touch a topic as cryptic as mass
murder to see an indication of this: you can look
at a single symptom as egregious as the
proliferation of antidepressants. And look in
your own life. You’ve said that you’re afflicted
by unrelenting anxiety and that you’re afraid to
leave your house. Do you really think that the
way you feel is not symptomatic of anything other
than your own inexplicable defectiveness?

At the very end, he pasted a link to the 1994 essay by John Zerzan, The Mass
Psycholo of Misery. Then, “Smiggles” signed out of the Columbine forum, and
never came back.

***
Around this same time, he ejected the external hard drive from his computer’s
USB port, and unplugged it from the wall's power outlet. He wrapped the cord
around the Storjet, and put it in his closet, tucked back behind some old Pokemon
cartridges. The drive had some horror movie reviews he had written stored on it,
along with his spreadsheet of mass murderers, and all the “11k’s” he had scraped o f
the internet over the years. There were some video clips of him playing Dance
Dance Revolution, lmed by his friend, and some of his favorite World of Warcra
scenes. Then in one folder, labeled “Fun”, there were some photos of his car, and
some he had taken of himself: posing, and (as police would later describe)
“holding a ri e and shotgun and numerous magazines contained within his
pockets.” In another snapshot, he posed with just the Glock, in his computer
room, holding the barrel to his own head.

April 25, 2012

AMC Loews Danbury 16 Theatre — Danbury, Connecticut
He turned 20 years old on April 22nd. Three days later, he went for a drive; Nancy
had given her son one of the family’s old GPS units at some point, and the data
from it shows that he would mostly use it to guide him to one of two places: a
Whole Foods in nearby Westport to shop for groceries, or more of en, to the
movie theater in Danbury. His DDR trips, to see his older friend.

On the night of the 25th, they arrived just in time to see an evening showing of the
new Disney documentary that was playing there at the time, Chimpanzee. The
older friend knew all about the chimp thing. “He was very speci c about chimps,
and not monkeys or orangutans,” he recalls. “I believe he once sent me some
videos of how chimps solved problems in their own societies.” It was the same

657
footage that he had posted to the Columbine forum, in the Travis thread (though
he never mentioned any Columbine forum to his friend, or to anyone from his
real life at all; they were totally separate existences.)

Another time, he brought up “how chimps were able to show more empathy to
members of their group than humans were at times.” When the man eventually
learned that his friend had once been diagnosed with Asperger’s, he would think
back to interactions like that — and feel skeptical about the diagnosis.

“We discussed just how much of those things were in our nature and how much
was learned or part of environment.” They would explore “the view of humans as
glori ed animals,” and wind up talking about “wild child” cases — like an inverse
of Travis the Chimp, these were humans raised like animals (such as “Genie,” the
girl from California whose father locked her in a room, in total isolation, from
infancy to age 13, never having taught her to speak). An upbringing without any
language or cultural presence at all, the two friends theorized, might actually have
been a blessing.

They didn’t talk about their own childhoods much. But it came up now and then.
“He told me that when he was young he looked a lot bulkier (in proportion to his
height) and had fat cheeks.” His younger friend once sent him a video clip as
alleged evidence of this, which showed him playing in a musical recital (placing the
video sometime before the 7th grade.) The man thought the young-DDR guy
looked “spaced out” in the video, but certainly not overweight. “It is di cult to
tell whether or not [his] view of himself as fat when he was a child was ever a
serious one…Obviously from his diet and his stature one can immediately tell that
he was not fat.”

In fact, the man recalls that his friend’s malnourished appearance became a cause
of concern, “because at times he did not seem to properly hydrate or really seem to
maintain the diet that would [hold up] his body for all the physical activity [of
DDR].” And when his younger friend eventually did stop for a drink of water, he
noticed, “It was water with a certain amount of salt added to it… his tastes were
peculiar and he had once mentioned that at times he would just consume the salt
directly.”

His young friend never mentioned anything about being bullied. He never talked
about owning guns, or going to gun ranges. In one conversation, he did indicate
“that he had an interest in mass murders and serial killing,” but it didn’t sound
like anything beyond what one might see in a true-crime documentary, or
ctionalized in the horror movies they were both watching; lots of people were
interested in that stu f.

658
He did mention being online a lot, though he was vague about some of the
details:

He would tell me about the discussions he had on YouTube, and how he

had expressed h opinion on an internet blog that pedophilia w a
disease that needed to be treated and not looked at evil, [which
would] cause others to make snap judgments about him an apologist...
I recall telling him that since they were taboo subjects they were very
polarizing.

When the man brought it up again later, his friend from Sandy Hook claimed he
had deleted all the comments, and that it had all been “a waste of time.”

There were times when his younger friend suddenly stopped coming out to the
arcade. Weeks would go by, with total radio silence. The man from New York
would send an email, to check in, and eventually, he would get reply back from
DDR guy, saying that he had just been “moping around.”

They were still circling around making plans to go hiking together. His younger
friend also suggested that they go explore some abandoned urban areas —
speci cally, he mentioned an old mental hospital, somewhere near his house. “I do
not recall who he said he had been to the hospital with before, it may have been
one of his parents or something.”

But making plans, outside of their weekends-at-the-theater schedule, was proving

di cult. Not that his younger friend was busy — apparently it was more that
plans, no matter how simple, just meant another social transaction for him to
navigate. Another expectation to fall short of. And meanwhile, staying inside 36
Yogananda would o fer him one of the few things that eased his anxieties:
certainty.

May 1, 2012
Forum on Global Violence Prevention — Washington, D.C.
Four times a year, the Institute of Medicine would hold a conference for select
doctors and scientists, from a variety of elds, to collaborate on violence
prevention. This time, their focus was “The Contagion of Violence” — the
various speakers, and the papers they presented, all approached violence as a
public health problem, from an epidemiological standpoint.

The standard-bearer for this kind of epidemiological research was a 1974 study by
a Dr. Phillips of the State University of New York, which identi ed the “Suicide
Contagion” — showing that a highly-publicized suicide of en resulted in a series

659
of copycat suicides, in the locality where the story had spread. As a result of that
study, in the late 1970s, the Centers for Disease Control began issuing guidance to
news outlets on how to report responsibly about suicides: o f of the front page,
with no smiling photos of the deceased. No detailed description of the method
they chose, no photos of the location, and nally, never presenting suicide as “the
inexplicable act of an otherwise healthy or high-achieving person,” as it “may
encourage identi cation with the victim.”

At the 2012 forum on violence, one presenter argued that school shootings were
spreading by a similar vector as the suicides once had, before the press had self-
regulated their coverage. Unfortunately, the presenter noted, nding a solution
was not going to be as easy as simply following in the footsteps of Dr. Phillips
anymore — 1974 was a long time ago, and practically a di ferent society altogether
from life in 2012:

The difficulty that electronic media so ubiquito ; it would be

difficult to design a study Phillips did when we only had to contend
with local print media. We need a consens meeting to discuss these
issu and figure out how to responsibly report on “suicid preceded by
mass murders,” or the hypothesized contagion will likely continue.

As the Jokela and Virginia Tech and Norway shooters had already demonstrated,
individuals could now be both the perpetrators of a high-pro le crime, and their
own publicists. The phenomenon was spreading, and soon there might not be
any way to contain it.

May 22, 2012

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook Connecticut
At 9:09am, the GPS unit in the black Honda turned on, and logged a trip. The
driver pulled out of the garage at 36 Yogananda, turned lef out of the driveway,
and drove down Bresson Farm Road to Bennett’s Bridge, then north, up State
Route 34.

Newtown High School passed by his driver’s-side window as he proceeded north,

into old-town Sandy Hook. He was following his old school bus route, from
when he was a boy.

At the “T” intersection, the vehicle turned right, onto Riverside Road, and
proceeded until it was practically on school property, passing slowly by the old
wooden sign on the right side of the road: SANDY HOOK SCHOOL.

660
He kept driving, past the turn-o f and the rehouse, never quite venturing up to
the school itself. He continued for another half-mile into a residential area, turned
around, and went back toward the intersection.

From here, a lef turn would bring him back home. But instead he went straight,
leaving Sandy Hook and going into Newtown proper.

The GPS pinged the black car, as it slowly drove past St. Rose of Lima, and the
tiny school the driver had attended for just a fraction of the 7th grade. He
stopped.

Af er a few seconds, he turned around, and drove back home.

Stamford, Connecticut
Peter hadn’t seen his son in almost two years. Nothing had worked. The 20-year-
old hadn’t respond to emails in over half that time, and he never answered his
phone even before that. In April, Peter had sent a birthday card to him in the
mail, asking gently if they could see each other — nothing. And while he had no
direct knowledge of his son’s social life, the last he heard, it was the same it had
been since junior high: sealed up inside 36 Yogananda, playing World of Warcra .
Nancy was Peter’s only avenue inside the chamber, and she had shut him out.

For a moment, he considered just showing up one day, and ringing the doorbell
up at the old house on the hill. Confront the situation head-on. But that was no
good; he knew very well how fragile his son’s temperament was, and how much he
loathed surprises. “It would have been a ght, the last thing I’d want to be doing,”
Peter would later say.

He even considered hiring a private eye to follow his son, if he ever lef the house,
“to try to gure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.” But that
seemed extreme. And according to Nancy, their son was doing ne now.

June 2, 2012
AMC Loews Danbury 16 Theatre — Danbury, Connecticut
Dave came into work for his weekend shif . DDR guy was there, of course. But he
was playing solo again, taking up both platforms; his friend was nowhere to be
seen. DDR guy seemed less social now, too — like back when he rst started
appearing in the arcade.

***

661
The man from New York had kept in touch with his younger friend throughout
the spring, but there had been more and more quiet periods. When they re-
established contact the last time, the young man in Sandy Hook told him he was
“having an existential crisis.”

The friend tried to ask about whatever he was going through, but, “I don’t believe
he wanted to talk about it so the topic was always dropped.”

They were both computer nerds, and had talked hardware before. His younger
friend had mentioned reformatting his hard drive frequently, and generally
“staying o f the grid.” But recently, he had mentioned going a step further,
“taking a hammer to one of his hard disks,” or something like that. The friend
remembers this was in May or June of 2012 — the same time period as all the talk
of an existential crisis.

When they had disputes over making plans, it of en came back to those existential
issues — “reconciling the knowledge that your own judgment and impression of
people was always going to be subjective” — and how di cult that made it to
genuinely “understand” anyone else. If it was even possible at all.

Then, sometime in June, his friend from Sandy Hook severed ties. “In the end I
believe it was primarily problems with coordinating plans and then the frustration
that came along with feeling like neither of us were understanding each other that
ended up leading to his conclusion.”

There wasn’t much of a ght or anything; the younger friend just told him
something to the e fect that “it wasn’t worth the trouble to ask him to do
anything,” and that he “should not expect him to participate in anymore activities
with him.” He wanted to go back to just dancing alone.

***
A young man from Newtown, named James, was passing through the movie
theater lobby that June evening, around 7pm, when he recognized the local xture
at the DDR cabinet, hopping away. Jimmy had the Facebook app on his
smartphone; he tapped the icon, and started recording the virtuoso performance.
Jimmy’s voice could even be heard on the clip, identifying “DDR guy” by his real
name — in apparent awe.

Jimmy uploaded the clip to his own pro le, with the caption “this kid is sick.”
One of Jimmy’s friends commented about DDR guy: “I’ve seen him there on
probably 4 di ferent occasions…” Another friend replied: “ya he’s always there.”

***
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One evening, DDR guy stopped dancing. Dave asked him if he was okay; he
replied that he had run out of money, but, “I just don’t want to go home now.”

Feeling pity, Dave handed him twenty bucks he had found sweeping the theaters.
On his way out the door for the night, Dave heard the game starting back up.

The next day, when Dave came in for his shif , his boss told him DDR guy had
kept playing the game all the way until closing. He actually had to unplug the
machine, just to get the guy to nally leave.

June 19, 2012

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door was closed.

He had lef the Columbine forum months ago, but his interests remained the
same. He came back to the spreadsheet, and the place where he had gathered so
much of the data he had plugged into it as part of his research project, two years
before: Wikipedia.

There was a particular Wikipedia user whose account name he recognized very
well; he had seen it dozens of times over the years, on this shooter’s page or that,
making edits — another life force, out there in the void, following the same paths,
sorting through the same data. The other user had even created, and for years
maintained, Wikipedia’s main “List of rampage killers.” And he or she had been
there in August of 2009, too, on the “Talk” page for the L.A. Fitness shooter,
where “Kaynbred” had rst emerged.

Whoever it was, they were one of the few people online that might know even
more about mass shootings than he did. Maybe they could appreciate his hard
work.

On June 20th, a message appeared on the stranger's “User Talk” page —

Wikipedia’s equivalent of a public user-pro le. The message was written by a new
user, “Knavesmig,” under the subject line “Hark”:

Knavesmig: Compared to the legions of people who

focus solely on serial killers, it’s almost
impossible to find anyone who’s interested in
mass murderers, so I thought that I might as well
introduce myself. I’ve been researching this
topic since 2006 and I started compiling a formal
list at the beginning of 2010...

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“Knavesmig” said his own list was speci cally focused on “answering statistical
questions,” more so than capturing every single incident. But he thanked the
stranger for all the helpful information he had put on Wikipedia; Knavesmig gave
a link to his spreadsheet (hosted on the le-sharing website Rapidshare) and then
tried to temper expectations, likely wounded by its reception on the Columbine
forum. “The whole thing really isn’t much of anything to be excited about; but if
you want to see it, here it is in all its mediocrity...”

Twenty- ve minutes later, Knavesmig returned, and apologized for a mistake on

the spreadsheet: “What an appropriate testament to my incompetency.” He also
attached a playlist of all the songs about school shootings he had bookmarked on
YouTube. It was sixteen hours long, and he included a link to a zip- le he had
made of it in .mp3 form, for convenience. “If my mass murderer list is useless to
you, at least you might be able to enjoy some relevant songs!~”

Those were the only two Wikipedia contributions that the user “Knavesmig” ever
made. He never got a reply; the other user was inactive at the time, and didn't
return to Wikipedia until 2013.

July 16, 2012

O ce of Dr. Paul Fox, MD — Brook eld, Connecticut
There was an empty spot in the lobby directory, where the stone slate that had
read “PAUL FOX MD” had been unmounted, and put away.

There was an empty place on Dr. Fox’s right hand, where the ring had been.

There was a blank spot at the bottom of an a davit, one prepared by the State of
Connecticut’s Department of Public Health. There was a list of 14 statements he
would be acknowledging, once he signed in his name there. One loomed the
largest: “I hereby voluntarily surrender my license to practice medicine in the State
of Connecticut.”

It was an administrative process, nothing criminal. And the document explicitly

stated that he was not admitting any wrongdoing. But still, he was nished.

The nal complaint included the Patient’s sworn statement, along with one from
her mother, re ecting on why she and her daughter had chosen to come forward
— to willingly re-open the wounds, in order to expose the one who in icted
them. “Is it justice? I suppose, although the concept of justice becomes lost in the
same way that victims of violent crime will never really known justice,” the
Patient’s mother wrote. “[My daughter] was 18 at the time, just a child. She

664
needed help. Instead, she had the horri c misfortune of being placed in the care of
a predator.”

The Patient herself said that what she was doing was something bigger than just
revenge: “I’m starting to realize that I must reveal the truth in order to protect
other patients. I must come forward now to protect another vulnerable, hurting
girl because that was just what I was myself. I was a 18-year-old, vulnerable and
hurting girl when our a fair started. He was 59.”

His bags were already packed.

He took up the pen, and signed his name in the blank; with that, his career in the
United States was over.

The last anyone in Connecticut could remember seeing of Paul Fox, he was
boarding a plane to New Zealand. And he had been in such a rush, he lef most of
his archived patient les behind; some of his documents were unique, too — in
the simple sense that no other copies of them existed, anywhere.

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 69. Aurora

July 20, 2012

Century 16 Theater — Aurora, Colorado
There was a young, white man in a black hat, sitting in the theater’s front row. He
was there alone, sitting next to strangers for a midnight screening of the brand-
new Batman movie. It was a full house.

At 12:20am, just as the previews were nishing and the feature was about to start,
he got a phone call on his cell — or pretended to, anyway. He got up, and lef
through the darkened theater’s side exit; nobody noticed him sliding a small,
plastic clip under the door, to keep it from locking shut behind him.

Three miles across Aurora, a phone at the University of Colorado Hospital started
ringing: not an emergency line, but the one that could connect callers to the
hospital’s sta f. “How can I help you?” the administrator answered.

A few seconds of staticky silence, then the call ended.

The man in the black hat put away his phone, and went to his car, in the parking
lot. He got in, and put a sun-shade under the windshield, to block anyone from
seeing him while he changed. He had everything he needed, waiting in the back
seat.

***
He was a failed brain researcher. He had been excited about his career path in his
application letter the year before, writing to the neuroscience program at the
University of Colorado that, for as long as he could remember, he had been
“fascinated by the complexities of long lost thought seemingly arising out of
nowhere and into a stream of awareness.” The vastness of existence itself
fascinated him. “This is why I have chosen to study the primary source of all
things, our own minds.”

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But that was before he came to Colorado — and as soon as the program actually
got started, he fell apart. “Lack of interest, duties too social,” he had put on his
unemployment application. “Attempted to change demeanor to act more socially
and be more articulate. However, was unable to change shy/reserved personality.”

That was closer to the real reason he had chosen to study the mind in the rst
place, the reason he wrote about in his private notebook over the last few months:
that he was obsessed with the in nite complexity of the world because it terrified
him.

He was afraid, and nothing made the fear worse than having to interact with other
humans. Socializing. He wrote in his journal that he was in the neuroscience eld
speci cally to try and gure out just what was wrong with his own mind; maybe
even x it. But it wasn’t working.

***
Six months before, he had complained to a colleague over instant message:
“Science appears to have shif ed from guys working alone in a dark room to some
huge interactome,” he wrote, using the term that encompasses all of the frenzied
molecular activity that occurs inside a living cell.

His chat partner recommended he go to the campus Student Wellness Center —

and he did just that, in March. He told the therapist there about the thoughts he’d
been having, things that had been going through his mind for years: at rst, these
were fantasies “not of actually killing people, rather of wishing them dead to
escape from awkward social situations,” as her colleague (another doctor who
participated in that session) put it, adding that “he wasn’t talking about a vengeful
hatred...He was talking about an aversion to mankind. Being around much of
mankind was uncomfortable to him and it wasn’t very rewarding to him so he
wanted to avoid it.”

At some point over the years, the relief these passive fantasies gave him didn’t cut
it anymore, and he started thinking about reducing humanity himself. Now, as he
told his therapist in their rst visit, he had the urge to “kill as many people as
possible.”

It didn’t sound like a credible threat to the doctor, or really even like a threat at all;
he didn’t say how he’d do it, or who he would harm. There was nothing concrete.
Besides, the doctor wanted him to be honest, and she wanted his trust.

She prescribed him sertraline — an SSRI, also sold under the trade name Zolof .
She started him at 50mg, and asked him to come back af er it took e fect.

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A few days later, he wrote in his journal about what he said was the impact the
medication had on his thoughts: “Anxiety and fear disappears. No more fear, no
more fear of failure. Fear of failure drove determination to improve, better and
succeed in life. No fear of consequences.”

He wrote to his chat partner again. He said he wanted to kill someone “when his
life was over.” His friend said that was stupid.

FRIEND: What would taking a life give you?

SCIENTIST: Human capital. Some people may make 1

million dollars, others 100,000. But life is
priceless. You take away life and your human
capital is limitless.

FRIEND: What would you do with the human capital?

SCIENTIST: Have a more meaningful life.

He went back to the campus therapist a few days later. He didn’t tell her about his
“human capital” concept, but he said the urges weren’t going away.

She upped the dosage. A few weeks later, still nothing. She upped it again.

In her notes, she wrote that she was concerned her patient had a social phobia —
Asperger’s, possibly, but her primary theory was schizoid personality disorder.
One thing he’d said really stuck out, and supported that theory: “I don’t have
relationships with people; they have relationships with me.” And another, about
his idea of extinguishing the human race: “I like thinking about it.”

He seemed to get worse as the weeks went by. He came to sessions, but was
disinterested. The therapist urged him to take an anti-psychotic (a step further
than the Zolof ), but he refused. He seemed angrier, and more distant.

In May, he told her he had failed his nal exams; he hadn’t even bothered studying
for them. Instead, he’d spent weeks playing video games, and the night before the
exams, chose instead to “read up on Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.”

His Zolof prescription had run out around then. The therapist didn’t prescribe
him any more. Going o f the meds, her patient didn’t get any better.

He started buying things online — the supplies he’d load up in his car before he
headed out to the movies. Along with some he would leave behind at his
apartment, carefully arranged.

668
In June, he failed his oral exams, which spelled the end of his enrollment at the
University of Colorado. They deactivated his key card, and he wasn’t allowed on
campus anymore. That didn’t matter much by then; he had told his therapist in
one of their last sessions that, “He didn’t think he would make a mark on the
world with science, [but] he could blow people up and become famous.”

***
He sent his secret notebook to his therapist in the mail, just before heading to the
movie theater for his “mission.” He had lled its pages over the same period of
time as his visits with her, and it con rmed how he had been actively trying to
resist her e forts at treating him: “Prevent building false sense of rapport … de ect
incriminating questions … can’t tell the mind rapists plan…. If plan is disturbed
both ‘normal’ life and ideal enactment on hatred [are] foiled.”

The notebook also contained his more evolved attempt to convey the “human
capital” theory: scribbled pages of what looked like scienti c equations, but
incorporating stick gures, and the variables LIFE and DEATH. The in nity
symbol, and then a zero — over and over and over. He was obsessed with
establishing a value of human life, just to quantify the transaction of a murder —
or his own nal end. The cost of an exit from his existential crisis.

Later in the notebook, there was a section entitled “Self Diagnosis of broken
mind,” where he meticulously cataloged everything he suspected was wrong with
himself — in essence, o fering his therapist the answers she had been seeking
about him. The list included everything from “restless leg syndrome” and
“Asperger syndrome/Autism” to the more prominent entries:

Dysphoric mania

Generalized anxiety disorder / social anxiety disorder OCD / PTSD

(chronic)

Schizophrenia

Body dysmorphic disorder

Borderline, narcissistic, anxio , avoidant and obsessive compulsive

personality disorder

Psychos

669
He listed his symptoms next. One was “Obsession to kill,” and he explained how
it rst reared its head: “I was a kid. With age became more ...started [with] the
entire world, with nuclear bombs. Then shif ed to biological agent that destroys
the mind. Most recently serial murder [in] national forests...”

Af er his doctor prescribed the Zolof , he again described how it had removed his
fear of consequences, and why as a result, his “primary drive” was shif ing, from
“fear of failure” to something else, something further down inside: “Hatred of
mankind. Intense aversion of people, cause unknown. Began long ago, suppressed
by greater fear of others. No more fear, hatred unchecked.”

He drew closer to “the mission,” and how he chose it. First, the method:
biological warfare was the most e fective way to do what he wanted, but it was too
hard. He only had a few grand in the bank, and he was in a hurry. Meanwhile,
bombs were too “regulated” and “suspicious” (the stu f he lef back at his
apartment was more of an af erthought. It would add a few more to the tally, if he
was lucky.)

He also took mod operandi into account. Serial murder, initially up for
consideration, he now saw as too risk-prone, and too “personal.” The better
approach was “Mass murder/spree,” as it promised “maximum casualties, easily
performed w/ rearms although primitive in nature.”

It was to be a mass shooting, then. That was within his reach.

Finally, the “venue”; he considered striking an airport, but that was no good. “Too
much of a terrorist history. Terrorism isn’t the message. The message is, there is no
message. The [cause was] my state of mind for the past 15 years.”

A movie theater would be better: the Cinemark 16 just down the street. It was big,
and “isolated.” Perfect.

As for victims, they’d be random. Victims of “fate,” he wrote — somehow, not

victims of what he was about to do, willfully.

He bought the AR-15 on the same day he failed his oral exams. “Attempted to see
if can pass exams as myself and not by fear,” he wrote in the notebook. “Fail. I was
fear incarnate.” All he had lef was his plan:

Finally, the last escape, mass murder at the

movies. 1st obsession onset >10 years ago. So
anyways, that’s my mind. It is broken. I tried to
fix it. I made it my sole conviction but using
something that’s broken to fix itself proved

670
 insurmountable. Neuroscience seemed like the way
to go but it didn’t pan out. In order to
rehabilitate the broken mind my soul must be
eviscerated. I could not sacrifice my soul to
have a “normal” mind. Despite my biological
shortcomings I have fought and fought. Always
defending against predetermination and the
fallibility of man. There is one more battle to
fight with life. To face death, embrace the
longstanding hatred of mankind and overcome all
fear in certain death.

***
In the darkened theater, few noticed him come back in. Their rst indication that
something was amiss was the tear gas canister, sailing across the theater with a
blooming cloud tracing its arc. The superhero lm’s projected scenes glowed
through the clouds of gas lling the air, and then, there was gun re. In the
ensuing chaos, some in the audience looked up and saw it: a gure coming,
marching through the haze, dressed in black body armor and a gas mask, ring an
AR-15. The American monster.

For a few in the theater, it was a like a nightmare returning: they had witnessed the
monster once 13 years before, when they were students at Columbine High
School.

He had extra AR-15 magazines strapped all over his body, and the one in his gun
was a gigantic “double drum” — 100 rounds. But it jammed. For some reason, he
seemed to lose interest af er that. The cops arrived at the scene in less than four
minutes, and he was already out in the parking lot: just standing there, vacant, in
his black suit of armor, silently running his calculations.

Harborside Events Center — Fort Myers, Florida

President Obama was just getting ready for an appearance as part of his re-election
campaign, when his counter-terrorism adviser came into the room, and informed
him of what had happened in Colorado during the night. 2012 was an election
year, but such a tragedy required a president to respond — not a candidate. “If
there’ s anything to take away from this tragedy, it’s the reminder that life is very
fragile,” the president said in his remarks that night. “Our time here is limited,
and it is precious. And what matters at the end of the day is not the small things.
It’s not the trivial things, which so of en consume us and our daily lives.

671
Ultimately, it’s how we choose to treat one another and how we love one
another.”

He said that it was not a day for politics, but prayer. His opponent agreed. Their
contest for the Oval O ce, ultimately, would focus more on the still-struggling
economy, and the A fordable Care Act, and the country’s foreign policy.

President Obama would be reelected that year, and the Aurora shooting, and the
policy questions it might have garnered, were never a signi cant factor in the bid
for the White House.

Congress was another story. In the House, some even suggested bringing back
Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban that had expired in 2004 — sparking debate over
whether it would have made any di ference in the Aurora case anyway. A
congressional study was called to settle just that issue, applying the old law to the
gunman’s Smith & Wesson-made AR-15; the researchers saw that the ban’s rst
layer “speci cally named the Colt AR-15 as prohibited, but it did not prohibit any
Smith & Wesson rearm speci cally.” So it wouldn’t have made any di ference.
And the ri e was sold with a pistol grip, and a detachable magazine — “arguably
the two hallmarks of a Semiautomatic Assault Weapon” — but not any of the
other banned features. So if the ban hadn’t expired, Aurora still would have
happened. The drum-magazine he used would have to have been manufactured
before 1994; that was the only di ference.

***
The morning af er the shooting, a radio show interviewed a congressman from the
district of Tyler, Texas — the man who had eulogized Mark Wilson on the House
oor, and who had and fought so hard to pass the PLCAA, to shield the gun
industry. He reminded the listeners of the courthouse shooting, and Luby’s, and
of Suzanna Gratia's story. “With all those people in the theater,” he said of the
Aurora victims, “was there nobody that was carrying? That could have stopped
this guy more quickly?”

There was signi cant backlash to his comments. The representative complained
that his words were being taken out of context, and clari ed that he never meant
them as an explanation for what happened: “This tragedy is not only
heartbreaking — it is incomprehensible. We should unite together as
compassionate Americans to comfort those who are mourning.”

Meanwhile, surviving victims of the attack were racking up medical bills, and
reviewing their legal options. They would nd the PLCAA to be a signi cant
obstacle to suing Smith & Wesson, and the online dealer from whom the gunman

672
had purchased the copious ammunition he brought to the theater. But they
would sue, regardless.

***
One week af er the attack in Aurora, the Washington Post published a joint op-ed,
entitled "W ’
.” It was co-written by James Dickey (for whom the CDC-blocking
“Dickey Amendment” was named) and Mark Rosenberg, the former director of
the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control — the very target
of the 1996 budget amendment that blocked gun research. “We were on opposite
sides of the heated battle 16 years ago,” the two wrote, “but we are in strong
agreement now that scienti c research should be conducted into preventing
rearm injuries and that ways to prevent rearm deaths can be found without
encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners.” Gun violence like what
happened in Aurora was not “senseless” they wrote, but rather, awaiting scienti c
research that could potentially make sense of it:

The same evidence-based approach that saving millions of liv from

motor-vehicle crash , well from smoking, cancer and HIV/AIDS,
can help reduce the toll of deaths and injuri from gun violence.

Most politicians fear talking about guns almost much they would
being confronted by one, but these fears are senseless. We must learn
what we can do to save liv . It like the answer to the question ‘When
the best time to plant a tree?’ The best time to start w 20 years ago;
the second-best time now.

But the blocking language in the annual budget stayed right where it was. And so,
despite what happened in Aurora, the CDC would continue to stay far away from
guns.

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 70. Calm

July 23, 2012

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The door at the top of the stairs was closed.

He got an email, from one of his contacts back at the Columbine forum; any
reaction to the Aurora shooting?

He wrote back:

My interest in mass murdered [sic] has been

perfunctory for such a long time. The enthusiasm
I had back when Virginia Tech happened feels like
it’s been gone for a hundred billion years. I
don’t care about anything. I’m just done with it
all.

The forum itself had been approaching a sort of crossroads when he lef back in
February, with the discussions sti ed by in ghting, and the original site owner,
Danny, having little interest in policing it. Danny ended up transferring all the
data to one of the forum's longtime users, who moved the forum to a di ferent
host. (As an indirect result, if “Smiggles” ever tried to come back, to erase the last
of his postings, it might have looked to him like they were already gone.)

Many defectors from the forum were setting up shop at a more modern website,
Tumblr — a popular blogging platform built for customization and glossy visuals,
and known for its anti-censorship stance. The mass-murderer fandom community
there was thriving.

***
The GPS unit had not logged any trips in ve weeks. But on July 28th, it turned
on, and the black Honda lef the garage. It drove toward the Danbury theater, like

674
it had on so many trips that preceded marathon DDR sessions earlier that year —
but this time, the driver took an exit that was one too early, and then had to turn
around and get back on I-84, to get the next one.

When the car nally got to the theater, it didn’t stop. It just did a U-turn, and
headed all the way back to the 36 Yogananda, like the driver had changed his mind
about leaving the house af er all.

He went upstairs and closed the door. The GPS didn’t turn on again for months.

October 2012
Unknown Location — United States
She had been on the Columbine forum for years. Now, she was on Tumblr.

She hadn’t heard from the user known as “Smiggles” in awhile. They didn’t know
each other in real life, but they had exchanged emails and PMs regularly over the
past two years or so; from this, she was con dent that whoever her online
acquaintance was, he probably knew more about mass shootings than anyone,
anywhere.

Browsing through “school shooter” tags on Tumblr one day, she found an
account she had never seen before; this Tumblr user had posted a map of the
United States, with red dots marking where attacks had occurred, and made a joke
about it looking like an acne outbreak. Whoever it was, they seemed to be drawing
on a deep well of information about mass shooters, many of them quite obscure;
the user shared a collage of crime-scene photos, showing all the dead shooters
sprawled on the oor of whatever school or mall or church they made their last
stand in, most of the wounds self-in icted: there was the Luby’s shooter, the
Dawson shooter, Texas tower sniper, Virginia Tech, Columbine... it went on and
on. He also posted video montages of shooters (clips he had apparently edited
together himsel ), and their wannabe-basement tapes. Even their username was a
tongue-in-cheek reference to the Dawson College shooter, from back in 2006. It
all seemed so familiar.

***
One day, this mysterious Tumblr user started recounting what he said were
“nightmares” that he had experienced. In one, he was at school when someone in
his class “shoved” him; a teacher responded, but punished him, instead of the
bully. So it ended with him storming out of the classroom, “screaming at the
teacher.”

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In another nightmare, she remembers that he said he “was in school when he saw
some kids bullying another kid. The bullies were dumping out the backpack of
the victim kid. The victim then took a gun out and started shooting the bullies.”
Witnessing this, in the dream, the user started trying to “help the shooter,” by
“telling him to watch out for people behind him who would try to stop him.”

In a third nightmare, he said he was in a mall, when a shooting started. He “was in

a shoe store and found himself with the shooter,” and started talking to the
gunman, “trying to convince the shooter to commit suicide before the police were
able to arrest him.”

Finally, the user posted an audio le. It was an .mp3 of “Greg,” calling Anarchy
Radio to talk about Travis the Chimp. That was when she put it all together.

She sent the user a message on Tumblr — her old acquaintance had told her
months ago that he was done with the whole mass-shooter scene online, so in a
way, she was calling him out: Is that you?

He came clean. Yes, it was him.

The user once known as “Smiggles” said that he had tried committing something
he called “online suicide” that summer: he had “destroyed the hard drive of his
computer and lost all of his virtual identities.” Apparently, what he really wanted
was not a permanent break from the internet, but just to push “reset” — or
perhaps he really did try to leave entirely, and found he just couldn’t stay away
from the portal.

With a vital component of his computer destroyed, she wasn’t sure how her
acquaintance was getting online now — maybe his parents had another computer
in the house, she gured. Or maybe he just got a new hard drive. She didn’t ask.

She noticed that the Tumblr accounts (there were several, all with the same
naming format) were active until at least October of 2012. But then, one day that
fall, she logged in and saw that he had deleted everything. And she never heard
from the person she knew as “Smiggles” ever again.

October 6, 2012
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Downstairs, Nancy’s iPhone buzzed. She had installed the Facebook app, and had
been reaching out to old friends lately; she had even stumbled across Marvin
Lafontaine’s pro le earlier that year, and reached out to him — “Just saying hello”

676
— but it seemed he wasn’t online much. It would be months before Marvin saw
her message.

She tapped her noti cations; it was a message from her old sister-in-law (Peter’s
brother’s wife) Marsha — just checking in, and sharing an update on their family.
Nancy was happy to hear from her. They always got along.

“I am still in CT and all is well,” Nancy wrote back. Marsha had said something
about wanting to move, but holding back until the housing market recovered, and
her kids were older. Nancy could sympathize. “I hear you there...no sense selling
at a loss! Best to keep stability in the kid’s lives. Moves are so tough at that age...I
am still in the same place but getting to the point where I may want a smaller
house...”

About her own life, Nancy didn’t go into much detail. “I travel a lot, spend time
with friends, work with a couple of charities. Low key life and very happy…. Ryan
works in Manhattan.” Her other son was “still at home. Yes, they do grow up too
fast.”

Marsha asked where she’d been traveling to.

“A little bit of everywhere... Boston, New York, Maine, Toronto, London, San
Francisco, Nantucket, Charlotte, Baltimore...that covers this year.” And Nancy
did share one bit of juicy family gossip: “I discovered I have a half sister in
Ohio...apparently my father was married previously and actually lived in
Ohio...secret life and all. Weird.”

Marsha asked for details, but there weren’t many to share. “Her mother is dead,
our father is dead, and my mother won’t say. It’s a mystery. We will never have
answers...just have to deal with what is….Story TOO long to text o f my little
iPhone... But yes, life is funny and strange. Lies people tell and try to live inside
those lies....”

***
In the study, just to the lef af er entering the front door at 36 Yogananda, Nancy
had a stack of books she had recently picked up: on the top was How to Find Out
Anything. It was like a manual for investigating people online — she was probably
planning on tracking down more information about her father’s secret family.

Under that book, in the stack, there was a guide on manners. Under that,
Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal
Meaning. That one was special: she had bought two copies.

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And nally, upstairs, her bedtime reading: Train Your Brain to Get Happy.

Garner Correctional Institution — Newtown, Connecticut

There was a re one day at the prison. It wasn’t very big, and the sta f were able to
put it out quickly, but it was nonetheless a major emergency, for one reason: it
took the computer system o ine. In the early days, that might not have been a big
deal, but the 2006 tech upgrade had been a major one. It remotely controlled all
the locks on all the prison’s doors; until the system was back online, everything
had to be done manually. And they didn’t have the sta ng to sustain that for
long.

By 2010, one out of every ve prisoners entering Connecticut’s Department of

Corrections would need mental health treatment. Garner housed the most serious
cases. The violent o fenders. But there were more and more of those, and they had
high recidivism rates; it seemed there were never enough cells. As one state o cial
put it, “The more mental health beds you put in the prison system, the more
mentally ill prisoners you’ll end up with...sure, it’s good that we have a big mental
health prison with state-of-the-art services, but it’s also become kind of a magnet.”
And while isolating all those prisoners in one place was an e cient use of
resources, it also meant that that same place could suddenly become very
dangerous, if the system for keeping them contained was o ine for very long.

A specialist from the security company ew in from Ohio the day af er the re,
and got everything working again. The magnetic door locks clicked back on, and
the security monitors came back to life. Emergency over. The town barely felt it;
few people even signed up for the text message alerts anymore. “They are a good
neighbor, and the institution has not been a problem to the town,” First
Selectman Pat Llodra told the News-Tim in 2011. “And we wouldn’t want to lose
that revenue.”

A previous rst selectman, who had been in o ce during Garner’s rough-and-

tumble early years, now agreed. “There have been no more escapes and no more
riots... People have come to realize it is well managed, and they feel it’s a lot safer
having the prisoners inside rather than roaming the streets.”

Former Campus of Fair eld Hills Hospital

The old mental hospital up the hill was still struggling to nd its next phase of
existence. The new Town Hall was open, and humming with activity, and the new
ball elds where Fair eld House once stood were already well in-use; but the rest
of the campus was still mostly dormant. A shell that time lef behind.

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That fall, the Newtown Bee ran a series of stories it called “Tales from Fair eld
Hills,” featuring interviews with sta f who worked at the hospital. One of them
was Donna, a Registered Nurse who was hired in 1969. She saw everything at
Fair eld Hills, working in the geriatric ward and then a detox and alcohol
program in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she was assigned to Canaan House, where they
put the patients with chronic mental illnesses. “They all made me sad,” she told
the Bee. “You gave them what you could, and your time, when you could. But one
nurse could be responsible for 90 patients. It was understa fed.”

Donna remembered how her last assignment at Fair eld Hills was in the
adolescent unit. “It was a wonderful place, with a wonderful sta f. A lot of the
young people were there for depression, or because they were trying to hurt
themselves.” She retired when the hospital closed in 1995, but she would still run
into her old patients around town, all grown up. Usually, they were doing well.
They would thank her.

Those were the good stories. The bad ones were the patients who could never get
by “in the community” — without Fair eld Hills, society had no place for them.
“[Some] became homeless, others turned to crime, or became violent and ended
up at Garner Prison.”

Donna still found herself thinking back on how it all happened, whenever she
drove past the old asylum, still empty up on the hill. “Why just open or closed?”
she re ected, mourning the new era of mental health that never came. “Why did it
have to be all or nothing?

October 16, 2012

Intersection of Church Hill Road and Main Street — Newtown,
Connecticut
It was around 4:25pm on a Tuesday af ernoon, when a truck driver from
California began to maneuver his Peterbilt tractor-trailer around the town’s iconic
agpole. He didn’t quite make the arc, and ended up hitting the pole instead.

The base of the pole wasn’t damaged much — the town had installed some steel
reinforcements around it af er the accident in 1993 — but for the rst time since
that collision, the pole was hit hard enough to snap the tiny stem at its top, and
the decorative gold ball normally perched there, 16 inches in diameter, went sailing
o f again.

A witness said they saw the golden sphere y o f east, “toward Trinity Church.”
But the townspeople searched the area, as well as all around the intersection, up
Main Street and down Church Hill Road, and it was nowhere to be found. Some

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thought it might have landed in the bed of the passing truck, and was now en
route to wherever that driver had been headed.

The uno cial caretaker of the agpole was a retired Newtown Police lieutenant.
He resolved to try and track down the golden sphere — or, failing that, gure out
where to buy a new one. The town would have to dip into the funds that the
Lion’s Club donated every year for the agpole’s maintenance, but they could bear
it. In the meantime, throughout the coming winter, Newtown’s treasured
landmark would be incomplete.

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 71. Vortex

October 22, 2012

Caribbean Sea, o the coast of Nicaragua
The waters of the Caribbean had been unusually warm over the last week, due to
a tropical wave that had blown across the Atlantic from the coast of Africa. At
some point on that particular Monday, the air over the surface of the waves here
began to move, forming a cyclone — small, at rst, but growing quickly, as the
strength of its winds built to 40 miles per hour. The United States’ National
Weather Service had been monitoring the disturbance, and now gave it a name:
Tropical Storm Sandy.

As the phenomenon moved steadily north, soaking Jamaica, and triggering

mudslides in Haiti, its strength continued to grow. On October 24th, the swirling
vortex that was now inching its way toward Florida was o cially re-christened:
Hurricane Sandy.

Passing along the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas, its outer bands dragged
thunderstorms over the mainland United States, but at rst, Sandy’s eye remained
well o fshore. Its strength waned — so much that it technically wasn’t a hurricane
at all anymore, as it moved up the coast on the 27th. But meteorologists began to
grow concerned about a rare set of circumstances at play that could still bring
disaster: what Sandy lacked in strength, it made up for in reach. The storm was
huge, its winds covering an area of over 1,000 miles — the second-largest Atlantic
storm on record. And at the same time, there was a full moon: the surge of water
brought in by Sandy was going to rise just a bit higher, cresting levels it wouldn’t
have on other days. Worst of all, there was an anomalous area of cold, high-
pressure air lying right in its path, in the North Atlantic. Projections showed that
if the storm did not change course, the two zones would collide — and then
Sandy would be diverted Northwest, regaining intensity as it passed over the gulf
stream, just before making landfall somewhere in the Northeast United States.

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Newtown, Connecticut
The heavens churned. Workers pulled in the oating docks on Lake Zoar, and
opened the oodgates at Shepaug Dam. Downstream on the Housatonic, at the
south end of Sandy Hook, Stevenson Dam opened up too — lowering the Lake
Zoar reservoir as far down as Connecticut could allow, in preparation for the
coming storm.

On the morning of Monday the 29th, the governor ordered all non-emergency
tra c o f of the highways, as the rst sounds of snapping tree branches, the
weakest among them, began to swell all over Connecticut.

At 1:30pm, Newtown’s rst selectman issued a “CODE RED” broadcast to the

townspeople: the storm was going to be bad. The emergency shelter would be set
up at Newtown High School as soon as it passed. Power outages were expected,
and with the size of Sandy, and the damage it was expected to in ict statewide, it
could be days before electricity was restored.

***
Just before midnight, Superstorm Sandy made landfall, 150 miles south of Sandy
Hook, near Atlantic City, in the town of Brigantine, New Jersey. The cyclone then
drif ed north, and inland, its eye curving around the western border of
Connecticut — with strong winds thoroughly battering Fair eld County.

At Main Street and Church Hill Road, Newtown’s rooster weather vane swung
north, and the agpole shook violently in the gale — absent its gold sphere on
top, yet standing against forces that would likely have felled each of its previous
incarnations. The agpole did not break.

The larger tree branches began to snap, and then whole trees — a great cracking
sound that pierced over the swirling winds. At the west end of town, a woman
narrowly avoided being crushed by a thick pine trunk as it fell through the roof of
her mobile home. At the Newtown Country Club, a 40-foot branch plowed into
the green on the 8th hole. Across town, where Berkshire Road leads west through
Sandy Hook, a bolt of lightning struck; an underground wire there became
energized, and on the street above, steam began to rise from where the rain fell on
a 100-foot section of pavement that was beginning to melt. Up the road, a re
engine was pulling out of the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire Department’s
substation when a heavy log came crashing through its windshield. The
re ghters had ducked just in time — above them, the truck’s cab was pulverized.

All over town, the power lines began to fall, pulling connecting poles down with
them. Street by street, the lights went out, a wave of black spreading over
Newtown. Garner Correctional Facility went into emergency lockdown, with

682
every prisoner shut in their cell until the lights were restored. Every house in
Newtown and Sandy Hook went dark that night, as the storm raged outside.

Superstorm Sandy continued north, its vortex slowing as it crossed Pennsylvania,

until the rain and winds nally dissipated, somewhere in the skies over upstate
New York.

October 30, 2012

The sun rose over a wounded Newtown. Most roads were inaccessible, with
debris scattered everywhere and power poles listing to one side. Every tra c light
was dead, and many roofs had been stripped bare.

At 3:00pm on the 30th, Pat Llodra sent out another CODE RED alert: they were
opening the Municipal Center at Fair eld Hills, as both a backup shelter and
emergency command post. Anyone was welcome to come down and use the
generators to charge their phones, or log onto the WiFi to check in with family.
Meanwhile, she assured the town that “thousands” of workers were being
dispatched to methodically clear the roads, one by one, and restore power to
places like Newtown. But it was going to take time; for some customers of
Connecticut Light & Power, it could be days.

And, they had to prioritize; when 97 percent of the town lost power in the 2011
storm, Pat Llodra said it was only "divine intervention" that had somehow kept
the power on at Garner prison... but they hadn't been so lucky this time.
Generators would power its emergency lights for a time, and the locks could be
operated manually, but there was no way they could sustain the daily operations
of the prison without electricity. If the security system there wasn’t back online
soon, the town knew, they could nd themselves dealing with two disasters.

When the repair trucks came, everyone else would have to wait.

The temperature sank to the low 30’s during the dark nights af er Sandy, before
the modern luxuries ickered back to life. Governor Malloy had already requested
that President Obama declare a state of emergency, which was granted, and when
Obama asked Malloy to invite local representatives to participate in a conference
call on the morning of November 1st, the governor invited Newtown's rst
selectman. During the call, Pat Llodra took the opportunity to express frustration
at the fact that so many roads were still blocked, and so many homes still in the
dark. “We’re here on day four,” she told the president, from her o ce in the xed-
up old hospital ward. “This is inexcusable.”

***

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By the 5th, power was restored to most of the town. The roads were cleared, and
the tra c lights were back on. The everyday hum of modern civilization returned,
and things soon felt like they were back to normal. And as scary as it was, the
storm could have been worse; the property damage was extensive, but the
townspeople themselves had all been spared any serious harm.

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 72. High Ground

November 15, 2012

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy picked up her son’s laundry from his bathroom at the top of the stairs. It
was the only part of his territory she was allowed to enter; he would leave the
basket in the bathroom for her, under the counter. Mostly socks, like she’d been
hauling up and down the stairs for years.

The two doors at the end of the hall were closed. Like always, there was a white
network cable threaded through the gap under the computer room’s door, and
winding along the inside wall of the staircase. Nancy followed the cord's path back
downstairs, carrying the basket.

There were full-length mirrors positioned over each of the windows in the living
rooms downstairs, facing inward. No sunlight. It had been just her and her son in
the house for so long, and he was so particular about changes in his environment,
that there was a sense of stasis in the house. Even the family photos stayed the
same. Life frozen in a ashback.

Only the situation back at the top of the stairs seemed to have changed. Maybe it
had just taken that long for Nancy to recognize it — or accept it. But slowly, word
began to leak from the sealed chamber of 36 Yogananda, to the outside world:
Nancy now realized that her son wasn’t getting better. He was getting worse. She
even started mentioning it to some friends at the bar; for years, she’d played things
close to the chest, but around that time, several of the regulars remember her
saying something about her adult son — still living at home, physically, while at
the same time, “slipping away.” And then, the storm came.

The winds were bad, but it was the af ermath that really scared her. When the
power was out. First thing when the roads were clear, she went into town and
bought a gas-powered generator. God forbid it ever happened again, the lights at
36 Yogananda would stay on.

685
Nancy rounded through the kitchen with her laundry basket, and went down
into the basement, where the cord from upstairs plugged into their modem. The
small, rectangular, black-plastic box sat o f in a dark corner, its lights blinking
steadily. Like always.

They had been 14 years in the pale yellow house on Yogananda street. Their life
was so di ferent when they rst moved in; Nancy was 37 years old then, still going
through the motions of marriage when she rst laid eyes on the house of her
dreams. And it didn’t seem so long ago that she was standing with her two boys at
her side, watching the backhoe dig up the soil, and designing her perfect garden in
her mind.

Now she was 52, and they were the family that splintered. The house was already
big, and then, the life inside shrank.

The basement was still mostly empty, just the footprint her older son had lef
behind. There were some ashes of her younger son mixed in: video game discs
scattered around, probably there since the LAN party four years before. One
night, one hint of a di ferent life that never quite came into view.

The next room was her shop, with her old workbench where she once restored her
antiques, now cluttered with junk. And then, the laundry room, around the
corner. One upgrade she’d added over the years: a fridge next to the dryer, so she
could enjoy some cheese and wine while she folded clothes. Her son’s daily
wardrobe had barely changed since she rst picked it up for him at St. Rose of
Lima. Only one di ference: the color of the big polo shirts had shif ed, from light-
blue, to black.

Nancy’s iPhone buzzed. It was her ex-husband.

Peter was upset about their son again, who was still not responding to him. Nancy
had mentioned something about the 20-year-old’s computer being “broken,” and
Peter said he wanted to get him a new one as a gif — and to present it to him
personally. A break in radio silence. Nancy wrote back:

I will talk to him about that but I didn’t want

to harass him. He has had a bad summer and
actually stopped going out. He wouldn’t even go
to the grocery store, so it’s been pretty
stressful. Yesterday was the first time in months
I’ve been able to talk him into going to do his
own shopping and his car battery was actually
dead because it sat so long. I ended up spending
most of the day getting it fixed and now I am

686
 going to have to start pressuring him to go out
all over again.

The GPS unit in the black Honda did indeed show a trip the day before, its rst
since July. He drove to the “Big Y” supermarket; not as fancy as the Whole Foods
he usually went to, but much closer, and he didn't have to get on the freeway.

Peter decided to back o f Nancy. She was in control, and as far as he could tell, she
was already doing all she could for their son. He’d try again, maybe around
Christmas.

November 22, 2012

Kingston, New Hampshire
Nancy drove back home for Thanksgiving, to see the family. The old homestead
on Depot Road. When she arrived, she didn’t have her younger son with her;
nobody was surprised. Though they had been practically inseparable ever since
she brought him home from Exeter Hospital, they all knew about his “issues,” and
how he thought holidays were “stupid” anyway. It was more likely that Nancy
would stay home, than she would drag her son out with her.

They asked her about the big storm. The only messages known to have come from
the house during those few days were about Ryan: “The water is three-feet deep
outside his apartment. He is OK on the second oor”, Nancy’s texts read, just af er
landfall. But there had been nothing about the other son, with her at 36
Yogananda.

Nancy told them what happened: as they knew, he never liked to leave his room.
He was always on his computer, or playing video games. So she went to check on
him on the night of the storm — but when the lights went out, somehow, he
seemed to “shut down,” too.

She had scrambled to nd a hotel, where the power was still on. Against all odds,
she managed to nd a room — but then, her son refused to leave 36 Yogananda.
He would not budge. Nancy said she wasn’t willing to just leave him there. So
they both sat in the darkened house, a wall between them, while the storm raged
outside, and through the cold, dark nights that followed.

Something changed, behind the closed doors at the top of the stairs. Even for a
while af er the storm passed, and the lights came back on, he seemed really
“freaked out” by the experience, she said. It even scared Nancy. She was never
afraid of her son, she explained... but she was afraid for him, especially if anything
ever happened to her.

687
She told them about a time when she asked her son if he would miss her, if she
died. “No, not really,” was his response. That had really upset her. She was pretty
sure that was sometime in 2010 or so.

***
Though the family back in Kingston all knew her son, this was their rst real
update in a very long time. It lled in some of the blanks in their concept of what
he became, af er the family had pulled o f the Depot Road lot for the nal time:
the boy who never spoke, and who never lef his mother’s orbit. She had told them
once that he “had no emotions or feelings.” And none of them remembered him
having any friends, at all. De nitely no girlfriends. He was the kid who, when they
broke out the board games, might ruin the fun. “No one could joke around or
ignore the rules of the game when [he] was playing.”

They thought back to the sparse transmissions from Newtown over the years —
sometime around when he hit puberty, Nancy had taken him out of school
“because she was nervous about him.” But most of them never knew he had been
diagnosed with Asperger’s. Now, she admitted she was always afraid that if people
“knew of his diagnosis they would think of him as weird.”

The way Nancy told it, none of the witnesses got any impression she felt one way
or the other about the diagnosis. It was a long time ago.

Nancy tried to sof en her story. She said her son was “getting better” at one point.
He was done with school, and he nally got his driver’s license, and a car. It was
just that something seemed to have gone wrong earlier in the year. He didn’t leave
his bedroom for three months, and yet, despite her just being on the other side of
the door, she had only been able to communicate with him by email. Sometimes
she “worried that he did not care about her at all.”

Later, one family member apparently took her aside, and asked if she was okay.
Nancy said there wasn’t any emergency, but something had to change. She saw
that, now. Her son had “become despondent” and “wanted to move to Seattle,
where it was dark and gloomy.”

She had decided to grant his wish; when the spring came next year, Nancy was
going to put 36 Yogananda up for sale, and they were going to leave Sandy Hook
behind.

AMC Loews Danbury 16 Theatre — Danbury, Connecticut

Dave was at the concession stand, not long af er the storm. He was surprised to see
that “DDR guy” was back; he hadn’t been there in months. And he was back to

688
being totally silent, too.

***
He had played the game so many times. The same songs, the same patterns,
hopping along the same squares in the same sequences, over and over and over.
There had been value in the repetition — he always knew what would happen
next, when he stood on the platform. A bu fer of predictability, between him and
the world. Perhaps it paci ed him. But it wasn’t enough anymore.

***
Dave heard the game come to a stop, nally. DDR guy went back out to his black
Honda, and drove away.

“My Place” Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut

Nancy came in. The regulars greeted her with good cheer, like always. She
assumed her spot at the bar, and there was already a glass of chardonnay waiting.
They picked up the good times right where they lef o f. “You could get her to
snort if she laughed hard enough,” one of them would remember.

The bar had been her rst roots in town. When her marriage was falling apart, and
she felt surrounded by strangers, it became home. Even more so, through her years
of tribulation — scratching and clawing to get her youngest through the school
system — they helped keep her spirits up. And she didn’t want to leave her life
behind, again. But it was time.

There was one problem with selling 36 Yogananda, one she had been going over in
her mind: how w she supposed to show the place, if her son wouldn’t leave h
comfort zone?

She told friends she thought she nally had it gured out: rent an RV. Put the
sealed chamber on wheels. Her son could stay in the portable pod, in the
driveway, while she got the house ready. Once they closed escrow, Nancy would
hop in the driver’s seat, and her and her son would begin the great journey
westward, to start the next chapter of their lives.

It wasn’t some pie-in-the-sky plan; she was talking soon. She said she was even
putting her Red Sox tickets up for sale — that was when they all knew just how
serious she was. Nancy Lanza really would do anything for her son.

Nancy got up from her stool to go home for the night, and she said her goodbyes.
They’d see her again soon. She wasn’t leaving Newtown for good just yet. But she
did need a vacation.

689
December 5, 2012
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Nancy got an email. It was one of her old boyfriends — now just a friend. He’d
had some DUIs on his record, and every now and then, he needed a ride to this
place or that. Nancy was one of his most dependable friends.

She had told him before that she would be traveling that week, in London, but he
wanted to know if she’d be available to take him to an appointment two Fridays
away — on the 14th.

In another browser window, Nancy was making a purchase: reservations for one,
at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A
palace of luxury. She clicked CONFIRM at 1:08pm.

Twenty minutes later, she went back to her email, and hit REPLY, answering back
to her friend about London:

Sadly, that trip had to be rescheduled due to a

couple of last minute problems on the home
front...I won’t make London until after
Christmas, but at least I can console myself by
hitting the after Christmas sales on Bond Street.
Next week I am going up to Mt. Washington Resort
to have a few day visit with my Aunt...I won’t
get back until later in the evening.

They went back and forth for a bit; Nancy played loose with some of the details of
her itinerary. She was looking to get away.

She started packing a suitcase.

It is not known what, speci cally, she was referring to as “problems on the home
front.” However, the day before, her younger son’s cell phone, an old ip-model,
had logged the second of only two calls in its call history — to the downstairs
phone, at 36 Yogananda Street.

***
Two days later, Nancy’s contractor friend came out to decorate 36 Yogananda for
the holidays. It was a quick job, just some Christmas decorations: pine boughs
that corkscrewed around the pillars on either side of the front entrance,
interweaved with Christmas lights. A wreath over the door, with a red bow in the
center.

690
Some of her friends had wondered over the years, why she even bothered with
decorating the pale yellow house for the holidays. No one ever visited. And the
house was all the way back on the lot, at the top of the hill.

December 9, 2012
Sanborn High School — Kingston, New Hampshire
O cer James Champion was in the middle of training a new recruit, when the
radio squawked. He picked up the handset, and reported in. Dispatch said there
was an emergency: a possible cardiac episode at the old Sanborn High School,
down on the track. A man was running laps when he had suddenly fallen to the
turf, clutching his chest.

Uncle Jimmy whipped the cruiser around, and oored the gas.

When he arrived on the scene, the cardiac victim was at on his back. An o f-duty
cop was already delivering CPR, but she looked panicked about his chances.

O cer Champion reached down, and checked the man’s wrist: no pulse.

His trainee popped the trunk of the cruiser, and brought around a special piece of
equipment, just recently acquired by the Kingston PD: an Automated External
De brillator.

A few moments later, there was a jolt. The dying man opened his eyes, and saw
O cer Champion kneeling over him. Strong, gentle, and with the badge on his
chest shining bright.

Uncle Jimmy was in the local newspaper the next day, the Union Leader. A
photographer came out, and O cer Champion posed proudly, the grizzled
veteran with the crow’s feet and grey mustache, standing next to his trainee. Both
heroes. “He’s really fortunate that everything fell into place,” O cer Champion
said of the stranger he’d rescued. “To have this work and to have him back, it’s a
miracle... His family is going to have him for Christmas. Talk about a second
chance.”

691
 The End

Monday
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Just before noon on December 10th, Nancy’s iPhone buzzed. It was a text from
the guy she had been dating recently, asking how her morning was going.

She tapped a message back, saying something had happened with her son:

I was off to a rough start. [He] bumped his head

(really badly) and we were dealing with blood at
5:30 in the morning :-(

The boyfriend apparently asked how it looked, or if it was really that bad. Nancy
texted back:

bloody, bloody, bloody.

He is ok... It looked worse than it actually is

She didn’t elaborate. And she never told anybody else about any mishap.
(Though she did have an entry written in her planner for that day, something
ending with “(AM)”, that she had scribbled out.)

The boyfriend wrote back, wanting to see her before she lef . Nancy replied:

I REALLY wish I could but I have so much to do

and want to spend a little extra time with him
before I go. Also, lots of cooking to do because
I like to leave him with all his favorites.

Nothing else is known about what either resident of 36 Yogananda did that day.

692
Tuesday
Omni Mount Washington Resort — Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire
Nancy checked in at ten minutes af er noon. If she didn’t stop in Kingston on the
way, she would have had to leave Sandy Hook by about 7:30am that morning.

A grand, crystal chandelier hung over the lobby where Nancy checked in. The
Mount Washington is a luxury skiing resort, nestled in the New Hampshire
mountains, and advertised as "a favorite New England retreat of presidents, poets
and celebrities." In 1944, it hosted the Bretton Woods Conference, where the
Allies met to establish what would be the nancial structure of the post-war
world.

But Nancy wasn't there to take in its historical signi cance; she wanted to be
pampered. The porter brought her luggage up to her room, H265.

At 8:19pm that night, Nancy went for dinner at Stickney’s, a restaurant in the
hotel. By all appearances, Nancy ate alone; she ordered the mussels and sausage,
some crab cakes, bread pudding for dessert, and three glasses of Kendall Jackson
chardonnay. She closed her tab at 9:43pm, tipping $20, and her room was billed
$107.20.

9:56pm
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The user at 36 Yogananda sent an email. It was in reply to an online acquaintance,
one who had apparently asked him something about the Aurora shooter,
sometime back.

I didn’t really look at the emails you sent

earlier, so I guess I ought to respond now. About
the Chinese mass stabbers, they blend together in
my mind too much for me to say much. Although I
guess that should make it even easier to talk
about them... I don’t know. Who am I to even say
anything on the topic? The inexplicable mystery
to me isn’t how there are massacres, but rather
how there aren’t 100,000 of them every year. So
when it comes to rates and such, causes and
consequences, domestic or forging (sic), in
whatever context, I’m just going to be completely
making things up because I apparently don’t
understand any of it.

693
Regarding the Aurora shooter (whose grad school application had leaked online,
and included a photo of himself posing next to a llama) he was similarly detached.
The precedent had been set way back at the McDonald’s in San Ysidro:

Well, the .gif of him dancing on a llama was

cute. I guess that’s all I can say about the
whole [fandom] thing since I can’t really relate
to it. I don’t understand why there weren’t the
“he’s just a poor misunderstood puppy who needs
help” type flocking around [the 2011 Safeway
shooter] since that spiel ostensibly applied to
him more. And speaking more generally, I don’t
really understand why [the Aurora shooting] was
considered such a big deal all-around, as if such
a thing had never happened before. It’s not like
its 1984.

Wednesday
North Conway, New Hampshire
Nancy went shopping on the 12th. She’d been visiting North Conway for this dose
of retail therapy since the 90’s, and she still loved it. Her credit card activity shows
her shopping at the Polo store, and then at the Coach outlet, and nally at Brooks
Brothers just before 6pm.

She was back at Stickney’s for dinner at 7:30pm. A salmon salad, chocolate mousse
for dessert, and two glasses of chardonnay. Again, it appears she ate alone.

Her iPhone buzzed. Facebook noti cation. It was her friend Josh from My Place,
the one who had gone with her to get the turkey back in its coop, and he was
asking how the retreat was going. Nancy tapped a reply back:

I am sitting at dinner at a place that requires

formal attire, the young couple next to me
dressed to kill but covered in tattoos. Too
funny!

A shimmery evening dress looks less formal with

daggers and skulls peeking out.

Josh said he and Nancy should get together for dinner during the coming
holidays.

694
 That would be fun. Let me know. Just be
forewarned: tattoo girl has talked me into a
dragon tattoo.

Josh laughed. Nancy’s sense of humor.

She settled her bill at 9:43pm, tipping the waiter ten dollars, and went back to
room H265.

***
The actions of the individual at 36 Yogananda on this day are not known. If he lef
the house, he didn’t turn on the GPS.

Thursday
36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The GPS unit came on at 9:09am on December 13th, and logged a trip. It was very
much like the one it had taken back on May 22nd: it lef the garage at 36
Yogananda at precisely the same time of day, and turned lef out of the driveway,
down into Sandy Hook, turned right at the T, and headed up Riverside Drive.
The driver passed the sign for Sandy Hook Elementary School, but did not turn
up the driveway at the rehouse; they continued past the turn-o f a ways, then
pulled over in the same spot where they had back in May.

The car turned around, and went back to 36 Yogananda. This time, it didn’t take
the detour past St. Rose of Lima on the way.

When he got back home, the driver removed the GPS unit from his car — along
with the Honda’s paperwork from the glove box, some burned CDs, and
“handwritten notes regarding addresses to local gun shops” — and put them in a
white plastic garbage bag. He lef the bag in the gun safe, in the computer room
upstairs.

10:25am
Omni Mount Washington Resort — Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire
Nancy called for room service to bring her a mu n. She paid four dollars, plus a
$1.50 service charge.

She may have been listening to a podcast while she re-packed her suitcase; her
iPhone recorded her opening the “notepad” app sometime before 1pm that day.
She made a number of notes in that le — apparently, things to look up later:

695
 Haber nitrogen gas
Chlorine gas German Jew
On radio lab

Her notes indicate that she had listened to — or perhaps spoke to someone who
had listened to — a segment from WNYC’s Radiolab podcast. Speci cally, it was
an episode called “The Bad Show,” where the show’s hosts “wrestle with the dark
side of human nature, and ask whether it’s something we can ever really
understand, or fully escape.” The episode begins with "a chilling statistic: 91% of
men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone.” (A later
segment concerned German chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Peace prize
for Chemistry in 1918 for his research on nitrogen xation. The process enabled
the production of a new fertilizer, saving untold lives from famine. But, af er
Haber died, the state he served used the same research to create Zyklon B, which
claimed millions of lives in Nazi concentration camps. The hosts posed the
question: w it fair to consider Haber responsible? For something h creation did,
but that he w not even alive to see?)

Nancy headed downstairs, and checked out. She had plans for lunch (though not
with her aunt, and there’s no indication that Nancy met with any family members
during this trip, despite what she told her friend back in Newtown.)

1:10pm
Three Tomatoes Restaurant — Lebanon, New Hampshire
Nancy drove south, to an Italian restaurant about an hour outside of Kingston.
Strolling into the dining area, she scanned the room for an old, familiar face; the
identity of her lunch companion that day has never been released, but it was a
male, and he later told investigators he had known Nancy since sometime in the
late 1970’s, when she was still in high school. The man was also friends with
Nancy’s mother Dorothy at that time. But Nancy and her guest had not seen each
other in more than thirty years; she had contacted him out of the blue that
summer, online, and they had agreed to catch up sometime. That Thursday was
the day.

They talked over lunch. Nancy told him how she had ended up marrying her high
school boyfriend, but it hadn’t worked out. She spoke of her two sons, one of
whom was living in New Jersey; the younger one had “disabilities,” and still lived
at home. “Some sort of autism,” he remembers her saying.

Nancy added that she was very proud of her youngest son’s accomplishments; he
had even helped her plan the trip that brought her back to New Hampshire that
week. She said it was an “experiment” between the two, to see how he fared with

696
the house to himself for a few days. (She thus lef out the many such strips she had
bragged to other friends about taking over the course of the past year or two —
then again, she had thirty years to cover in one lunch conversation; some
condensing was inevitable.)

As they dined, Nancy’s companion could tell that her life had seen trials since
moving from Kingston. But, he also got the impression that she was courageous,
and “handling everything.” Nancy “accepted the obligations” of caring for her
son, and had no intentions of ever remarrying. And Nancy didn’t express any
plans to leave Newtown; she only talked about how happy she was to be living
there.

Nancy and her old contact then parted ways, with tentative plans for him to
someday come visit her in Newtown, along with his wife. Nancy lef the
restaurant at about 2:30pm, heading south.

***
On her way home, she stopped at a liquor store in Claremont, New Hampshire,
and purchased ve bottles of wine. She got back on the road, and continued
south.

Returning to Connecticut around 7:30 in the evening, she stopped at a Whole

Foods in Hartford, and bought some groceries.

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

It appears the downstairs was clean and empty of activity when she came home.
Nothing out of the ordinary.

Nancy brought her suitcases upstairs to her bedroom. The shopping bags and
groceries and wine boxes she brought into the kitchen, and lef on the oor.

She took the receipts from her trip — Brooks Brothers, Whole Foods, etc. — into
the study, and lef them on her desk, next to her laptop.

At approximately 10:22pm, Nancy called her boyfriend. Just a brief check-in

before bed. She said she had gotten home okay, and they made plans to see each
other soon. She lef her iPhone on the ottoman in the living room, and went
upstairs.

She took a shower.

There was only one event in her daily planner for the 14th: a 2:00pm appointment
with her friend the dressmaker, for a tting.

697
In another of her notebooks, where she listed her around-the-house tasks, she
wrote that she needed to get the rst quarter of her Christmas cards lled out and
sent, clean her room, unpack, and “balance checkbook.”

Her checkbook was downstairs in the kitchen, where she had lef her purse. Check
#462 was already lled out, written to her son: the amount has not been released,
but in the memo section, she wrote “CZ83” — a model of 9mm semiautomatic
pistol. In the date eld, she wrote “Christmas Day.”

Nancy dried her hair with a green-and-orange striped bath towel, and put on a set
of Victoria’s Secret silk pajamas. Pink with black polka dots. She got under the
covers.

Her bedtime reading was Train Your Brain to Get Happy. Her last bookmark was
in the chapter “Think Your Way to Happiness,” on a page that began, “We all lead
incredibly busy lives, and multitasking has become essential when it comes to
coping with all the complex details that ll our lives. Living in this state can
overload our brain, with negative thoughts drowning out positive thoughts.” The
book recommended staring into a candle’s ame, in order to focus one’s mind.

She lef the book on the oor, next to her black slippers, and turned out the light,
lying face-up, with the green and orange bath towel spread out between her hair
and the pillow. Then, Nancy fell asleep.

***
The next morning, sometime before 9:00am, a neighbor who lived on Yogananda
street heard what sounded like three or four ri e shots, one right af er another.
The shots did sound unusually close; he gured it was just a hunter, out in the
woods, who had lost their way.

698
 December 14, 2012

Sandy Hook Elementary School — Sandy Hook, Connecticut

The shooter dressed in black: a black polo shirt over a black t-shirt, black cargo
pants, black shoes, black ngerless gloves on his hands, and a black boonie hat on
his head. Over this, he put on a green Eddie Bauer vest. He had a “drop” holster
strapped to his thigh, with a Glock 20 pistol in it. He put the 9mm Sig Sauer
pistol in the lef -front pocket of his trousers.

The vest had four big pockets at the front, and all of them were full of
ammunition: in the upper lef pocket, there were two 20-round magazines, and
one 18-round magazine, all for the 9mm pistol. In the upper-right pocket, there
were two more 20-round 9mm magazines, and one 15-round 10mm magazine, for
the Glock.

In the lower-right pocket, there were two 30-round magazines for the AR-15.

The lower-lef pocket was empty, when found. But it's evident that there were two
more AR-15 magazines in it, when he lef the house.

In the back pockets of his pants, he had four 15-round magazines for the Glock.

699
The lef cargo pocket of his pants held a single round of 5.56, for the AR-15. In the
right cargo pocket, he put one shotgun shell. Likely, these were fail-safes, in case he
ran out of ammunition before the last shot. He also carried four more 30-round
magazines for the AR-15 on his person; presumably, two in each cargo pocket.

***
He lef his home on Yogananda Street shortly af er 9:00am, driving a black 2010
Honda civic. It was his car, but it belonged to his mother on paper. He closed the
garage door behind him, and followed the route he had driven before. At the “T”
intersection, he turned right, and then right again. This brought him up
Dickenson drive, to his old elementary school. He parked in the re lane — along
the front curb, but just outside of the view from the school’s front desk.

It was a clear, bright day, so he likely had his Cocoon sunglasses on for the drive.
They would be found in the Honda’s console. He lef the Saiga shotgun in the
back seat, along with two extra magazines, each holding ten 12-gauge shotgun
shells. (For some reason, he had decided to leave the drum magazines for it at
home.)

Getting out of the car, he dropped two black, hooded sweatshirts on the
pavement. He was probably wearing one for the drive. And he always kept a spare
in the car.

He inserted earplugs, and approached the entrance of his old elementary school.
He pulled back the charging handle on the AR-15 — ejecting a single live round
onto the pavement, and giving him certainty that the magazine was inserted
properly. The 30-round mag had another just like itself, duct-taped to it upside-
down.

School had started at 9:05 am; it was now just af er 9:30 am, which meant that the
front entrance was locked. He knew that, because he had visited the the school’s
website recently. Multiple times.

He came to a halt in front of the full-length glass window, immediately next to the
school’s entrance. Aiming across the small landscape area where the school's
agpole stood, he pulled the trigger on his Bushmaster:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8

He had arrayed the shots in a circle, blasting a hole in the glass. Inside the school,
the bullets struck a display case, and some artwork hanging on the tiled walls.

700
The school's secretary was at the front desk. She looked up, and saw a man with a
ri e coming through a hole in the glass. She ducked down, taking cover behind
her desk, and frantically pawed for the phone.

The shooter pushed some furniture out the way as he passed through the small
lobby of the school. Immediately to the lef of the front desk was Room 9, where
a Planning and Placement Team meeting had been in session. Suddenly the door
opened, and the school’s principal emerged, telling others behind her to, “Stay
put!” Nonetheless, she was followed by the school’s psychiatrist, and the lead
teacher.

It appears the shooter was about to enter the front desk area when he saw them
coming down the hall on his lef . He turned, and aimed.

9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24-25

The shooter turned back to the front o ce, and opened the door. He may have
been looking for the secretary; she was still hiding behind her desk.

In the next room, the school nurse was hiding behind her own desk; through the
gap, she saw the shooter’s black shoes enter the room, pause for a moment, and
then leave again. He shut the door behind him.

The shooter came back out of the o ce, into the hall. He may have noticed that
there was one less casualty lying in the hallway now — the lead teacher had been
hit in the foot, played dead for a few seconds, and then crawled back into the
conference room and shut the door. If he did notice, he didn’t follow her.

The closest classroom to the entrance of the school was Room 12, immediately on
the lef . But he walked right past it; there was piece of dark-colored paper covering
the door’s circular glass pane from the inside, lef behind by accident af er a recent
lockdown drill. Uncertainty over who or what was on the other side of this door
may have been the only reason he didn’t open it.

The next door on his lef was Room 10, and its window was not fully covered.
Inside, there was a rst grade class, and two teachers, still reacting to the sounds in
the hall. One of them was a personal aid. She grabbed her student, and tried to
shield him.

The shooter opened the door to Room 10. He aimed for the teachers rst.

26-27-28-29-CLICK! CLICK!

701
The shooting stopped.

Some witnesses from Room 10 would tell police that the man with the gun
became angry suddenly. Likely, it was because he had forgotten to reload before
entering a room, when his clip was almost empty. The very thing his video games
had trained him to never do, and he did it rst thing — then threw a tantrum over
it.

One of the students, seeing this, shouted “run!” and a handful of his classmates
listened — escaping out the front entrance, and running down Dickenson Drive
toward the rehouse.

The shooter’s plan was falling apart. He ejected the duct-taped magazine, ipped
it over, inserted the second magazine, and pulled back the charging handle,
ejecting another live round. Not everyone had escaped room 10, and the distance
was nil.

30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-
55-56-57-58-59-CLICK!

Gun smoke was beginning to ll the air.

With his earplugs in, the shooter might not have heard it, but in between his
volleys of gun re, the school was lled with the singular sound of a woman
sobbing — the secretary he had walked right past at the front desk had,
apparently, in her panic, hit the "intercom" button. Now her static-y, mu ed
pleas were being broadcast in every room and every hall, as the classrooms went
about their lockdown procedures, over the sound of gun re.

The shooter ejected the double-magazine onto the oor of Room 10, inserted a
new one from his pocket, and ejected a live round. He lef Room 10, going back
into the hallway.

At some point during his trips through this hallway, it appears he wanted to be
certain that the Glock would work — he knew he would need it soon. He drew it
from the holster, and red one shot, into the door frame of Conference Room 9.
It worked, but the handgun’s legendary kickback, combined with his limp wrist,
kept the next round from cycling into the chamber. And he would have had to
drop the AR-15 to x the jam — at some point, the sling on his ri e had broken.

He dropped the Glock back in the holster. Again, he did not enter the conference
room (which still contained the wounded teacher, and several of her colleagues).

702
He turned back down the hall, to the third door on his lef . Room 8. Another rst
grade class. He opened the door. It was not locked.

Inside, the two teachers (one of them was a substitute; whether or not she had
been made aware of lockdown procedures, or given keys to lock the door, would
be a matter of some dispute) had been trying to t their entire class of students
into the bathroom, a space of only 16 square feet. And the door’s hinge swung into
the bathroom, not out, making the task even more daunting.

Ballistics evidence suggests the group had not quite gotten the door closed, at the
moment the shooter came around the corner. They were powerless. He couldn’t
miss.

61-62-63-64-65-66-67-68-69-70-71-72-73-74-75-76-77-78-79-80-81-82-83-84-
85-86-87-88-89-CLICK!

He ejected the spent 30-round magazine, and loaded another from his lef vest
pocket, once again ejecting a single live round.

90-91-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100-101-102-103-104-105-106-107-108

He ejected the magazine, with 13 rounds still in it. The gun might have jammed.
He loaded another 30-round magazine.

109-110-111-112-113-114-115-116-117-118-119-120-121-122-123

The gun stopped ring, again. It had likely overheated; a white powder, from all
the shattered bathroom tile and cinder blocks, was already baking into a lm on
the outside of the hot compensator. He ejected the magazine, and loaded yet
another.

124-125-126-127-128-129-130-131-132-133-134-135-136-137-138-139-140

The gun stopped working again. At any rate, he had accomplished what he
wanted in Room 8.

The shooter emerged back into the hallway, pulling back on the Bushmaster’s
charge handle — trying to get the poorly-maintained weapon to cycle, and
ejecting four more live rounds in the process. He gave up, and dumped the
magazine in the hallway, with 11 rounds still in it. He took another magazine from
his pocket, and loaded it.

703
He might have lost track of which rooms he had already entered, because he went
back into Room 10. About six minutes had passed since he rst crawled through
the glass; by now, he could hear police sirens, as Newtown Police Department
squad cars were pulling up outside. He might even have seen them through the
window, running toward the school. He aimed out at the parking lot.

141-142-143-144-145-146-147-148-149-150-151-152-153-154-155

He stopped ring, or the gun stopped working. Finally, he dropped the AR-15 on
the oor — still with a round in the chamber, and fourteen more in the magazine.

The shooter drew the Glock from its holster, still jammed from the test- re. He
started racking the slide back, ejecting one, two, three, four rounds onto the oor
of Room 10, trying to get some degree of certainty that the last shot, the most
important one, wouldn’t fail. The police were practically at the door.

He put the barrel of the Glock to the back-right of his head, aiming upward, and
pulled the trigger.

156.

704
 Part VI

Still Waters

705
 73. Af er

Sandy Hook Elementary School

A parent arrived at the school around 9:35am. She was supposed to help the classes
make gingerbread houses that day.

As her car was winding around the wide curve of Dickenson Drive, she saw a
group of children running past her, down the sidewalk toward the rehouse.
Unsure of what exactly was going on, she continued to the school’s parking lot,
and parked in one of the empty spaces.

Approaching the front entrance of the school, she saw that the glass next to the
doorway was shattered. And she heard what she thought might be gun re,
coming from inside. She took out her phone, and called 9-1-1 — right around the
same time that the secretary hiding behind the front desk, and a group of sta f
members and an injured teacher in Conference Room 9, were all doing the same.
The school janitor was soon on the phone with emergency dispatch as well, while
quickly locking classroom doors at the rear of the school.

At 9:37am, the rst transmission went out on the police radio: “Troop A to all A
cars, Troop A to all A cars, be advised Newtown has an active shooter … con rm,
active shooting … the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.”

O cers at their duty station in Newtown PD’s headquarters on Main Street

sprinted for their cruisers, and came speeding around the agpole, sirens
screaming, and catching air as they oored it down Church Hill Road. Units
already out in the eld converged, from every direction, on the square-shaped
school.

When the rst o cers arrived on the scene, shots were still being red. Some units
came on foot, crossing the playground from Crestwood Drive, and hopping over
the low fence. Another group came up Dickenson Drive, exiting their cars at the
edge of the parking lot, and crouching down as they ran for the front entrance.

706
Inside the school, the group in Conference Room 9 were still on the phone.
Through their connection, dispatch recorded the sound of the last volley of shots,
red out the front windows. Then, there was the sound of a single, isolated
gunshot. All the gun re stopped af er that.

One team entered from the school’s side door, breaking the window to unlock it,
while another came through the hole in the glass, into the front lobby. Chief of
Police Michael Kehoe was with the second team.

Gun smoke choked the air in the lobby. The only sound was the mu ed
whimpering still coming over the intercom. The cops encountered the school
janitor coming around the corner, who was still on the phone with 9-1-1, and
made him “prone out” at gunpoint, per procedure.

The o cers asked him how many casualties there were. He responded that he
only knew about the principal and the psychologist — both of whom the police
could see, motionless, further down the hallway, near the door to Conference
Room 9. There were no signs of life.

Just then, across and further down the hall, the doorway to classroom 8 opened.
The o cers readied their weapons, preparing to engage the shooter; but when a
small gure came out into the hallway, they saw that it was a rst-grade girl. And
they realized that now, she was standing right where the shooter w last reported
seen, outside the door to Conference Room 9. “Get back in the classroom!” one of
them shouted. And she did.

The other team came down the hallway then, in active shooter formation, and
entered Conference Room 9. A tactical medic appraised the wounded teacher:
breathing good, extremity wounds only. He told her he’d be right back. They
needed to nd the shooter.

Teams formed at the doorways to Classroom 8 and Classroom 10. They made
simultaneous entry, with armed o cers rushing into each room.

At 9:51, an o cer from Room 10 radioed dispatch: “92, We’ve got one suspect
down.”

He had found a white male, lying on the oor on his right side, with “massive
head trauma.” The o cer observed that he “appeared to be about nineteen years
of age but he seemed very small. He appeared to have the body size of a twelve-
year-old.” The o cer took stock of the rest of the room, observing that the
shooter was completely surrounded with bullet casings and magazines. “Be
advised, we should have multiple weapons, including long ri es and shotgun.”

707
The front entry team had made note of the Saiga shotgun lef in the parked black
Honda on their way in, but also of the two hooded sweatshirts spread out on the
pavement nearby; as far as they were concerned, there was still another shooter,
somewhere in the school. Maybe more.

They saw that one of the wounded victims in Room 10 looked like they might
have a chance. An o cer picked up the student, and sprinted out of the school,
begging her to stay alive. But she didn’t make it to Danbury Hospital.

Another o cer found two students, unharmed, hiding in the bathroom of Room
10. He made them close their eyes, and the o cers moved an easel out into the
hallway, positioned to block their sight of the fallen adults, just to be sure. Then
the students were handed o f to another o cer out front, who ran with them,
down to the rehouse.

Another team had entered Room 8 at the same moment. They found the girl who
had walked out into the hallway, waiting, and an o cer took her away. The rest of
the room almost looked empty — until they turned the corner, and saw what had
happened in the bathroom. The two o cers began searching through the scene of
horror, desperate to nd any survivors.

An o cer came running out Room 8 then, with another child in their hands who
seemed like they might make it to the hospital. But they didn’t.

Back in Conference Room 9, the medic bandaged up the injured teacher, and put
her on a wheeled o ce chair, pushing her on it until they were out in the parking
lot, where they moved her into a cruiser for the ride to the hospital. She would be
okay.

There was only one other injury at Sandy Hook that could be treated that day: at
the end of the front hall, at the east corner of the school, a teacher had been in her
classroom when the shooting rst started, and a bullet red down the hallway
apparently passed low through the wall of her room, grazing the arch of her foot.
A minor injury. It could wait.

Ambulances were pulling up at the perimeter then, the EMTs aboard asking
police if the scene was secure yet. It wasn’t. Then a sergeant, who had helped clear
Rooms 8 and 10, emerged back out front, and waved them o f. The seriously-
wounded had already been taken away, and he knew that there was nothing they
could do for any of the victims still in those two classrooms. They were just going
through the motions.

He grabbed two colleagues, who were certi ed tactical medics like he was, and
told them to follow him back into the school. “Get ready for the worst day of

708
your life.” Per emergency protocols, a doctor at Danbury Hospital had granted
them legal authority to declare death.

***
Outside, teams were securing the scene, still looking for the other shooter. Some
witnesses inside the school told them they had seen shadows running past,
outside, when the gun re was still going on; but these turned out to have been
sta f members who had climbed out a window, and ran down the hill to the
nearest structure in that direction: a Subway restaurant close to the T intersection.

Another unit, responding to the school’s entrance, had found two terri ed
parents crouched behind a dumpster, and escorted them to safety. Other civilians
came toward the danger; police had to tackle a man as he was running toward the
school, who then struggled to explain that he was not involved, but had just
gotten a “push” noti cation on the news app on his smartphone, and “happened
to be in the area.”

The scene began to stabilize somewhat, twenty minutes af er the shooting

stopped. There were surreal scenes, of armed o cers taking cover behind
playground equipment, while SWAT o cers poured into the school, preparing
for the evacuation. One of the o cers, who had taught D.A.R.E. classes there
before, explained “the school is a square” — and so they started going clockwise
around the loop, clearing and evacuating classrooms.

The doors of the school opened, and the classes came streaming down to the
rehouse, following their usual re-drill routine. Except this time, each class was
anked by armed o cers, on alert for any snipers.

Meanwhile, the children who had escaped from Room 10 were found by
townspeople down the hill — a bus driver, a parent, and a neighbor who lived in a
home next-door to the rehouse. The adults asked the frightened children what
had happened, and then struggled to understand, or comprehend, quite what
they said in response: that an angry man had come into their classroom, carrying a
big gun, and a brave classmate had yelled for them to “run.” They did. But the
boy whose warning saved them didn’t make it.

***
Chief Kehoe set up a command post down at the rehouse. Parents started to
arrive soon af er the evacuation, and as each found their family member and
headed back home, the crowd in the rehouse steadily began to thin. The same
parents who had been waiting, continued to wait, and waited more. Then, they
were all brought into a separate room together, and a common trait became

709
evident: all of them had children who were students in Classroom 8, or Classroom
10.

The door to the room opened, and then Governor Malloy walked in, a somber
expression on his face. Then, they knew.

***
It all happened so fast, by the time it hit the news (CNN: “reports of a shooting
in... Newton?”) it was already over. A swarm of TV cameras descended on
Newtown nonetheless, and as televisions and web browsers and smartphones all
tuned into whatever was going on in Sandy Hook, that was what they saw: a team
of medics standing by a multicolored triage tarp that they had spread out in the
parking lot of the elementary school, the tarp rippling from the steady pulse of the
helicopters hovering above, everyone waiting for the wounded that would never
come. And a black car, parked near the school's front door.

Before heading into the school, o cers responding to the scene had moved the
Saiga shotgun and the extra clip from the back seat of the Honda, popped the
trunk, and secured the gun there. Then, about an hour af er the shooting stopped
— once they were sure the scene was secure, and there was no second shooter
there — they came back to the car; the shooter didn’t have any identi cation on
him, but they at least had a license plate. “I need the address of the residence of
this Connecticut reg,” an o cer radioed. “Connecticut passenger Eight Seven
Two, Yankee-Echo-October.”

“Roger, standby” his radio squawked back. There was the clattering of some keys,
and then “it’s 36 Yogananda Street.”

“Roger. Give me a last name?”

“Lanza.”

710
 74. Darkness

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook , Connecticut

Houses were evacuated all along Yogananda Street, and snipers took up positions
atop the homes on either side of the pale yellow house. There was a police
checkpoint established at the turn-o f for Bresson Farms Road, to keep onlookers
at bay — and to watch for any follow-up attacks. They still weren’t quite sure
exactly what they were dealing with.

The police found a receipt in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. An oil
delivery, earlier that morning.

They peeked through the downstairs windows. One of the living rooms had large
mirrors blocking all the views inside. But there was nothing noteworthy to be seen
through the other windows. Just furniture.

An o cer called the house's listed number. No answer. He spoke through the
answering machine, urging whoever might be inside to pick up the phone.
Nothing.

The FBI arrived in their black SUV’s, and then the ATF came up the hill in an
RG-12 armored vehicle. They met up outside 36 Yogananda and sized up the
situation — the shooting back at the school was over. But the shooter could have
wired his place with explosives before he went on his attack, like the Aurora
shooter had.

The FBI said they had a robot they could use.

A squad member went over to one of the house's garage doors, and used a pry-bar
to loosen the bottom panel of the door. They carefully slid the robot inside.

***

711
The robot’s camera turned on, transmitting a video signal back to a monitor in the
tactical van. They could see there was a silver BMW in the garage, next to some
stacked rewood, and a generator o f to one side. The other space in the 2-car
garage was empty. The robot’s arm raised, and opened the door, into the kitchen.

The downstairs looked clear. Spotless, even, except for some shopping bags, and a
purse. The house was totally silent, and still.

The robot went up to the second oor, its conveyor belts rotating on their axis to
crest each hardwood-topped step. When it reached the top of the staircase, it
turned lef , to face the master bedroom.

The door was open. There was a long ri e of some kind, on the oor next to the
bed. And under the covers, what looked like a person sleeping. But they weren’t
breathing.

In the corner, there were some suitcases, not yet unpacked, next to a bookshelf
full of travel guides.

The robot rolled back out of the room.

On the right side of the hall was the open doorway to what was once a guest
room. Now it was full of junk — old Red Sox memorabilia, and boxes of
dinnerware and books. Someone might have been preparing for a move.

The robot turned back to the hall. It passed a bathroom on the lef . Empty.

The robot came to the south end of the hall. There were two doors.

The robot turned to the door on the right, and raised its mechanical claw. The
door opened, and the treads slowly revved forward.

Though the probe's pilot couldn't have known it, this was very likely the rst time
an outside observer had breached the environment of this room in years.

The pilot in the truck squinted into the screen. It was very dark inside the room.
The windows had heavy blinds over them that completely blocked all sunlight.

The pilot icked on the robot’s ashlight. Directly in its path, glinting on the
carpet, there was a single, unspent .22 round.

The pilot pressed the control stick forward.

712
In the center of the room was a black desk chair. It was empty, but whoever
normally occupied it had spent so much time there that the upholstery had frayed
open, where the backs of their knees had rested.

In front of the chair, on the oor, there was a computer tower. The side panel had
been removed. The hard drive was taken out.

The probe rolled forward across the carpeted oor, and shined its light around the
room. There was hardly anything in there — mostly bare shelves that had been
pushed all the way against the walls. But everything seemed positioned with one
purpose, directed around the computer monitor in the far corner; there was TV
tray there, with mouse and keyboard on it, next to a clean, white hand towel.
There were also two empty ceramic cereal bowls, and a half-consumed bottle of
water.

To the right of this position, there were two desks placed lengthwise against the
west wall, creating a long, nearly-empty desktop. There was a set of headphones
resting there within reach, and past that, most of the length of the joined desktops
was bare. It looked like someone’s makeshif workbench, scrupulously cleaned
af er their work was all done. At the far end was another half-empty bottle of
water, a set of keys, a small dumbbell, and the hard drive from the computer —
pulverized, and then scratched all over. Obliterated.

To the lef of the ratty faux-leather throne, against the south wall, there was an old
tube-TV with a built-in VHS deck, and some horror movie tapes spread out on
the oor, along with some old video game consoles. There was one VHS tape with
a handwritten label, lled out in ancient-looking pencil: “Ryan Lanza.”

In the lef corner of the room, folded up, there was a Dance Dance Revolution
mat.

The robot rolled over to the closet on the inside wall. It was open, and there was a
gun safe there, also open. There was a Lee-En eld .303 ri e set upright inside, but
other than that, the safe was empty space, like the bulk of its normal contents had
been removed. On top of the safe, positioned facing the computer, there was a
white, stu fed, teddy bear.

The robot backed out of the room, and swung its instruments 180 degrees, to the
bedroom across the hall.

This door had a dent in it, about knee-height.

Inside, this room was even more barren than the last. And all of the windows had
been covered over with black plastic sheeting, the edges taped tightly against the

713
wall. On the ceiling, the air vent had aluminum foil wrapped over it. There was a
wardrobe near the door, full of identical changes of clothing: tan cargo pants,
black polos, and grey hoodies. There was a bed, neatly made. And there was
another old TV, with a VCR under it. But everything else in the room had
apparently been crammed into the closet at some point, which was stu fed with
books and computer towers and boxes of old video games — and, near the
bottom of one stack, an old saxophone case.

There was not a single decoration on any of the walls, in either room.

His initial sweep complete, the bomb technician gave the signal — no traps, no
suspects — and the Connecticut State Police, downstairs, swung the battering ram.

***
The front door’s deadbolt ripped through the frame, and a column of o cers in
black body armor came charging across the threshold of the pale yellow house.
Simultaneously, another team entered through the garage door.

The rumble of rubber-soled boots came to a rest on the kitchen’s sanded-smooth

hardwood oors. The place was spotless, even the dishes in the sink. The sparkling
counters were platinum-granite, and there was a matching cutting board. The
indicator light on the dishwasher glowed blue: “sanitized and clean.”

An o cer checked under the sink. There were some pairs of disposable nitrile
gloves in the trash, along with some apple cores, sliced out neatly with a knife.

In the dining room, under one of the side tables, there was a cardboard box. It was
full of gun-cleaning patches, little bottles of gun oil, bore brushes, long Q-tips —
the elements of proper gun maintenance. But no actual guns. And the supplies
didn’t look well cared-for, either, or really like they had been used much at all; this
was the “gun kit” of a novice.

The living rooms each had big display shelves, lined with antiques and ne
pottery and glassware.

They found an iPhone in the south living room, sitting on an ottoman. It had
two unread text messages: one at 10:12 am, from a male contact-name: “Morning
QT :)”

The second message came from the same number, at 1:12 pm: “Ok?”

The team crept up the stairs, and paused at the top landing. The o cer in point-
position looked down the hall to his lef , into the master bedroom. He saw the

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gun on the oor, and the body, in bed. White, middle-aged female, lying face-up.
Head wound.

He called out to her. No response.

None of the SWAT o cers there were certi ed paramedics. Someone radioed for
one. But they knew the medic would just be going through the motions.

The bomb squad moved into the master bedroom rst, to physically search the all
nooks and crannies before anyone else entered. They found expensive clothing
(much of it custom-made by a tailor in Newtown, judging by the tag) and several
sets of ne jewelry, with large gemstones. Lots of shoes in the closet. No bombs.

They gave the signal, and then the tactical team moved in. Stepping around the
gun on the oor, they saw it was a .22 Savage Mk II. There was blood on the end
of the barrel, burnt and aking o f. There was a round in the chamber. An o cer
ejected it, and the ri e’s magazine, and set them on the oor nearby.

They checked the female lying in bed. It was obvious that she had been dead for
“several hours.” There was a striped green-and-orange bath towel under her head,
soaked in blood.

On the nightstand, the plug from the landline phone had been disconnected from
the wall jack. On the oor, next to the nightstand, were some black slippers, a self-
help book, and a spent .22 casing.

Downstairs, the phone rang. The answering machine picked up. It was someone
named Ryan, checking on his mom. He sounded distressed.

The team searched the master bedroom. There were three more .22 shell casings,
apparently red from the same position next to the bed: one lying against a
baseboard, one that rolled under the bed, and another that arced behind an
ottoman. The cushion of the ottoman lif ed up when they tried to move it,
revealing a storage compartment; there were copies of divorce papers inside.

In the closet, they found a stack of books on adolescent mental disorders. There
were bookmarks for sections on “OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER
(OCD)” and “DEPRESSIVE DISORDERS.” One section Nancy had marked,
about anxiety in children with Asperger’s, noted that they might experience
depression, and were “more likely to be irritable, cry, whine a lot, act hopeless and
gloomy about the future, and be pessimistic.”

Down the hall, bomb technicians were processing evidence, from the two dark
rooms.

715
In the computer room, just under the desktop where the obliterated hard drive
was found, there were two large desk drawers, one on top of the other. In the top
drawer, they found four ammunition magazines, loaded with shotguns shells —
clips that would t the Saiga shotgun they found in the car back at the school.
Some of them had duct tape wrapped around them, like the AR-15 magazines they
found on the oor of Room 10.

They opened the bottom drawer. Inside there was a dark-blue hardbound book:
Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. It told the story of the
Lancaster community in Nickel Mines, and how they had recovered from what
happened at the tiny schoolhouse there in 2006.

The bomb technician carefully extracted the book, and found there were objects
underneath: a handful of shotgun shells, some of them split down the middle to
expose the pellets inside, with the black powder from the primers scattered in the
bottom of the drawer. Apparently, the remnants of someone’s passing interest one
day in making an explosive device.

At the very bottom of the drawer, under the specks of gunpowder, there were
four pages of white paper: a print-out from a newspaper archive, of the April 9,
1891 edition of the Newburgh Daily Register. The article was entitled “I M
H B M .” It recorded the details about a crime that occurred in
the town of Newburgh, New York (about an hour’s drive east from Sandy Hook):
it involved a 70-year-old man, known around the neighborhood as “very
irritable,” who as a result was “the butt of ridicule for children on the street,” and
it was known that “when the annoyances occur he assaults or insults the rst child
or person he sees.” That day in 1891, he had taken a shotgun to the local
elementary school, and “ red into the group of boys and girls, none of whom
were more than 12 years of age”. The shooter then ran home, where he was soon
arrested:

It w fortunate indeed for the old scoundrel that none of the victims
were seriously injured, for it would have gone hard with him indeed
had it been otherwise. As it w , there w some talk of forming a
vigilance gang last night and giving to the gunner a dose of what he had
himself attempted — the administration of satisfaction without recourse
to law. Wiser counsels prevailed, however, and it w le for the courts
to give him what he so justly deserved.

The event was, very likely, and by the metrics of the person who lived in the
bedroom, the rst school shooting in history.

716
The team brought in a big cardboard box, and started lling it with everything
that had even the potential to be useful in the investigation. So far, it didn’t look
like there were any other perpetrators, but they still had no idea why any of it had
happened.

They went into the other bedroom, behind the door with the dent in it. On the
other side of the door, on the wall, someone had taped a few sheets of paper, as a
makeshif patch over the hole in the drywall where the doorknob hit (presumably,
a split-second af er the kick that dented the outside of the door). The police had
just rammed the exterior doors open — not this one. This was existing damage.

The search team at 36 Yogananda checked the drawers in the shooter’s wardrobe
cabinet. Inside were stacks and stacks of clean, white, bundled gym socks.

They opened the closet, and found it stu fed with the remnants of an abbreviated,
cloistered life: there was sheet music, a shoebox full of Game Boy cartridges, a Jane
Goodall book, and some paperback memoirs written by various soldiers. One
shelf contained fragments of an abandoned project to start a tech career: books on
network protocols, and bits of hardware strewn around; a modem, some ribbon
cables. Tucked o f in one corner, there was a 160-gig Storjet external hard drive.
They added it to the box.

Above, there were some clothes hangers, dangling various garments amid all the
clutter. One held a military uniform. Olive green, with gold stars on the epaulets.

In the adjoining bathroom, in the cupboard under the sink, they found a ip-style
cell-phone, some pocket change, a package of tissue papers, and an ID badge from
the “Newtown Technology Team,” showing a frightened young man with a bowl
haircut. Scattered amid the coins, were some tokens from an arcade.

They went back out in the hall, and pulled open the hatch up to the attic. There
were a number of boxes up there; in one, they found an old reading journal, with
notes inside on some old children’s book, about a man in a yellow suit, selling
immortality.

Somewhere in the house — redactions make the location unclear — they found a
book “bound in a black plastic spiral binding and covered on the front and back
with a clear plastic sheeting,” which featured a drawing on the cover, of a gure
holding a cane like it was a gun: the “Big Book of Granny.”

***
The medic arrived downstairs, and the SWAT team escorted him up to the master
bedroom. Photos from the dresser — a kid on a rocky shore with an oar in his

717
hands, a toddler in a red sweater with trains on it — looked on as the paramedic
peeled a layer of plastic o f an electrode, applied it to Nancy’s wrist, and pressed
the pads of an Automatic External De brillator to her chest, in a token attempt to
shock her heart back into beating.

Downstairs, the phone rang. The answering machine picked up. Nancy’s voice
again — “Hi, you have reached the Lanza residence. Please leave a message, and we
will get back to you as soon as possible.” *BEEP* — and then it was a stranger’s
voice, sending condolences. “Terribly sorry for everything you’re going through.”

The Lanza name was all over the news by then, and anyone could look up their
phone number.

Back upstairs, the paramedics ran another jolt through Nancy’s heart. Then the
formality was over; the paramedic pronounced Nancy dead at 2:25pm.

The phone rang again. It was a reporter from CNN, looking for a comment. They
lef their number.

Outside, the cops crowbarred open the bulkhead doors at the rear of the house,
and breached the deadbolted entrance to the basement. The area inside looked
like it had once been someone’s bedroom, and most of the documents scattered
around had the name “Ryan” on them. But as the o cers observed, “It does not
appear that someone sleeps in the room on a regular basis.”

O f in the corner, an internet router blinked. There was a color printer on the
desk next to it. Someone had printed a photo: “An unknown child and various
rearms.” The child looked to be innocently teething on the hammer-end of a
pistol. Somewhere nearby that was an article clipped from the New York Tim
almost ve years before, about a shooting at Northern Illinois University.

O cers gathered up everything from the basement that looked to be of

evidentiary value, and carried it out of 36 Yogananda in boxes, to be sent o f to the
FBI’s pro lers. As they passed by, the phone near the front door rang again, at
2:39pm, and an unidenti ed male voice lef a message: “Your son deserves to be
dead.”

718
 75. Strangers

Times Square — New York City

Ryan Lanza stopped for co fee at Dunkin Donuts on the way to work, and paid
with a debit card, his Bank of America account logging the transaction just af er
9:00am. As he swiped his purchase, he couldn’t have known that it would soon
prove very useful for making his case that he was nowhere near Newtown that
morning.

Ernst & Young’s o ces were in Times Square. Ryan got to his desk a little af er
9:30 am. There was a TV screen on the wall, with CNN on mute. One of the
international stories that morning was about an attack at a school in China —
someone with a knife, in the Henan province. No fatalities.

Shortly af er noon, Ryan looked up from his desk again, and saw something
unusual: his hometown on CNN. His old elementary school, lmed from a
helicopter, with emergency vehicles all around it. And then, in the scrolling text at
the bottom of the screen, he saw his own name — something about a school
shooting. All he knew for sure was, they had the wrong guy...

Mom.

He called home. No answer. He lef a message.

A work friend stopped at his desk asked what the hell was going on. Ryan’s reply,
as they would tell a Daily Mail reporter: “It was my brother. I think my mother is
dead. Oh my God.”

Ryan went into his boss’s o ce, and said, “I need to go.” He walked out of the
building, and boarded a bus back to his apartment in Hoboken.

Thirty minutes later, police stormed Ernst & Young, looking for him.

719
Ryan’s phone was vibrating non-stop. He opened his Facebook app, and posted a
new status: “Fuck you CNN it wasn’t me.” A few minutes later, “IT WASN’T
ME I WAS AT WORK IT WASN’T ME.”

One of his Facebook friends commented, “How the fuck do they jump to such a
conclusion with zero evidence?” Another friend: “Get yourself a lawyer and sue
them.”

Someone from back at work probably messaged Ryan by then, that the cops were
there looking for him. He posted another update. “I’m on the bus home now it
wasn’t me.”

As it turned out, with the massive level of attention suddenly diverted toward
Sandy Hook, and focused on a life about which almost no information was
available, the resulting news vacuum sucked up every possible detail: some right,
some exaggerated, some at-out made up. Nancy w a teacher at the school. Peter
w dead in Ryan’s apartment. There were two shooters, and Ryan w one of
them.

Exactly how the Connecticut State Police managed to misidentify the shooter is
still not clear: the gunman's real name wouldn’t be released by police until af er
5:00 pm on the 14th. Until then — and well af er — whatever the news outlets
were selling, that was what lled the void.

Hoboken, New Jersey

The Hoboken Police Department got a call from a Connecticut State Trooper,
who told them about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He said the
perpetrator was dead, had been identi ed as Ryan Lanza, and gave the suspect’s
address in Hoboken. They needed to secure the scene there as soon as possible.

The New Jersey police went out to the apartment building, and a sergeant
knocked on his door. No answer. They started setting up a perimeter around the
building, and distributing photos from Ryan Lanza’s driver’s license record, so
they could start canvassing.

The FBI and the bomb squad pulled up. They were just discussing their entry
strategy when, suddenly, the police saw the apartment door nally creek open.
There was a young woman inside — the girlfriend of Ryan’s roommate — and
the cops, very sternly, asked her why she didn’t open the door when they knocked.
She said she thought it was a FedEx delivery. They didn’t appear too impressed
with that... but they could tell the young woman was very scared. They asked for

720
permission to search the apartment, and she said yes. They came in and looked
around. No bombs, no guns. No suspects.

Downstairs, some o cers were just taping o f the entrance to the building, and
telling some painters who were working there to get clear, when another o cer
shouted, “Let me see your hands! Let me see your hands!”

There, stopped on the sidewalk, with his hands in the air, was the guy who was
supposedly dead in Connecticut.

Ryan dropped to his knees, hands on his head as instructed, while o cers quickly
surrounded him, their guns drawn and pointed right at him. He cried out: “Please
don’t kill me! It wasn’t me that killed all those people! You are looking for my
brother! It was my brother who murdered everybody! My brother just killed my
mom too!” Tears were streaming down his face.

An o cer searched him, and put him in handcu fs. He asked Ryan how he knew
his mother was dead. He said his dad had just called him, and told him.

General Electric Financial Services — Stamford, Connecticut

Peter had taken his lunch break around noon. Leaving his o ce, he found that all
his work colleagues were crowded around a television; there had been a shooting
at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “Both my kids went to that school…” he said,
mostly to himself. He went back to his o ce, but found he couldn’t focus on
work. The news was just unbelievable. Unreal. Who would do such a thing?

He headed home, to watch the news coverage.

He pulled into his driveway at around 1:30pm in his blue Mini Cooper. He
noticed that there was a woman he did not know, standing there on his porch. He
pushed a button on his car door, and the window slid down. “Is there something I
can do for you?”

The woman explained that she was a reporter for the Stamford Advocate — and
she expected that to register with him. But he was still puzzled. So she told him
she was covering the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and she had been
informed that someone at his address had been linked to it.

Her account of what happened next ran later that af ernoon in the Advocate,
under the headline “R B N F S ”:

H expression twisted from patient, to surprise to horror; it w obvio

that th moment, shortly a er 1:30 p.m. Friday, w the first time he

721
 had considered h family could have been involved. He quickly declined
to comment, rolled up the window, parked in the right side of the two-
car garage and closed the door.

Peter went to his living room, and turned on the television. CNN was saying it
was his son, Ryan. And that his ex-wife was dead. From his front lawn, the
journalist he had just spoken to saw him sitting at the table in the front of his
house, holding a phone to his ear with one hand, with his other palm against his
cheek. Peter would tell Andrew Solomon that the rst person he called was his
wife, who was at work. She answered. “It’s Peter,” he said. And he told her that it
wasn’t Ryan. He did think the shooter was his son... but it wasn’t Ryan.

Hoboken Police Department

The FBI brought Ryan to the Police Detective Bureau at the Hoboken station.
He was “rambling” in the car on the way there, but was cooperative. In the
interrogation room, they took the cu fs o f, and he put his phone on the table.

They asked him about his brother.

He said that his brother had been diagnosed with a form of autism in
“approximately the 8th grade,” af er which he lef school and “essentially became a
recluse, shutting himself in his bedroom, playing video games all day.” He had no
friends, no associates, no girlfriends. He had considered joining the military at one
point. Ryan said his little brother “of en became frustrated at not being able to
express himself,” but he was never violent. He had a “close relationship” with
their mother Nancy, because over time, she had become the only person he would
talk to.

Ryan's phone had been blinking on the table, constantly, but went ignored while
they talked. However, when the caller ID lit up “DAD,” the FBI agent in the
room motioned for the police to let Ryan answer. Af er a brief conversation, the
cops got on the phone; Peter told them he was “outside the Lincoln Tunnel trying
to get to Hoboken, sitting in tra c, and just wanted to get to his son, Ryan.” The
police called the Port Authority, to go provide Peter an escort.

***
At 3:15pm, news coverage of Sandy Hook shif ed to the White House, for a
statement from the President of the United States. It was a ve minute address,
delivered from the James S. Brady Press Brie ng Room:

...The majority of those who died today were children — beautiful little
kids between the ag of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire liv

722
 ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.
Among the fallen were also teachers — men and women who devoted
their liv to helping our children fulfill their dreams.

So our hearts are broken today — for the parents and grandparents,
sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the famili of the
adults who were lost. Our hearts are broken for the parents of the
survivors well, for blessed they are to have their children home
tonight, they know that their children’s innocence h been torn away
from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain.

As a country, we have been through th too many tim . Whether it’s

an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a
temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in
Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these
children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and
take meaningful action to prevent more tragedi like th , regardless of
the politics.

Th evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in

America will do, which hug our children a little tighter and we’ll tell
them that we love them, and we’ll remind each other how deeply we love
one another. But there are famili in Connecticut who cannot do that
tonight. And they need all of right now. In the hard days to come,
that community needs to be at our best Americans. And I will do
everything in my power President to help.

Because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of
can extend a hand to those in need — to remind them that we are
there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for
those they lost endur not just in their memori but also in ours. May
God bless the memory of the victims and, in the words of Scripture, heal
the brokenhearted, and bind up their wounds.

***
Peter arrived at the police station with his wife. The o cers led them down a
hallway, to the interrogation room. Father and son tearfully embraced; and amid
the surreal events still unfolding, the surviving Lanza family was whole again.

Peter and Ryan answered questions for hours, late into the evening. Peter dug
back in his memory, spotty as it was from his years working overtime at GE, and

723
told the investigators that he remembered Nancy had taken their son out of the
school system sometime in middle school, when “stresses over papers, classes,
pressure from grades and dealing with his disease” became too much. But his son
“never completely accepted that he had a disease, and therefore never took any of
his medication he was prescribed.”

The FBI asked if he ever heard about his son getting in ghts, or hurting animals.
Any history of violence at all. Peter said no.

They asked if he had any social networking accounts. None that he knew of, Peter
said, but he noted his son did use the Gmail account “Blarvink.” He didn't know
if he used it anymore, though; he had been e-mailing him every few months for
the better part of two years, with no response at all.

Around 8:30pm, the police told the Lanza family that they could go. Ryan and
Peter signed forms granting permission to search their residences, and agreed to
answer more questions in the coming days. But it was already evident that they
were nearly as ba ed as everybody else. It seemed the only person who ever really
knew Nancy’s youngest son was Nancy herself. And she was gone.

A crowd of reporters had amassed outside the police station. Peter gave an o cer
his keys, and the Mini Cooper rolled up outside the back exit. The media fell for
it, and ran around to the back of the building, while FBI agents escorted the
family out the front entrance, into an unmarked car. The two vehicles met up at a
gas station in Weehawken, and the Lanzas got in the Mini Cooper, and they drove
o f to Connecticut to stay in a series of safe houses, with a police canine unit
keeping guard over them until everything was sorted out.

The next day, Peter Lanza released a public statement.

Our hearts go out to the famili and friends who lost loved on and to
all those who were injured. Our family grieving along with all those
who have been affected by th enormo tragedy. No words can truly
express how heartbroken we are. We are in a state of disbelief and trying
to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why. We have
cooperated fully with law enforcement and will continue to do so. Like so
many of you, we are saddened, but stru ling to make sense of what h
transpired.

On the 17th, Peter met with ATF and police investigators at the o ce of his
personal attorney. One of the ATF agents asked if he knew where his son had
acquired all the ammunition he used, and Peter said he didn’t. He knew Nancy

724
was purchasing rearms in early 2010; his son had stopped responding to his
emails not long af er.

The o cer had him sign a written statement, and then, as the o cer would write
in his report, “I asked Peter Lanza to help us understand more about his son, and
what would cause him to carry out such a horri c event.”

Peter said his son had Asperger’s, “but that he clearly had some other medical
condition in order to carry out the events at Sandy Hook.” He didn’t know what
it was. He told them he had a box in his attic at home, full of records related to his
son’s care. They were welcome to it, and anything else that would be helpful.

***
Not long af er, as he would tell Andrew Solomon, Peter had the worst dream of
his life. There was a gure in a doorway, shaking, and emanating “the worst
possible evilness.” He realized who it was: his son, alive again. His fearful exterior
had been replaced with rage, transforming him completely; it was as if Peter had
encountered his son’s damned soul in a nightmare, unrecognizable without its
shell.

725
 76. Specimen

December 16, 2012

O ce of the Chief Medical Examiner — Farmington, Connecticut
The door to the morgue opened, and a woman stepped into the cold-room,
followed by her husband. She was a technician for the medical examiner — and he
was nobody. But when his wife had told him they were doing the autopsy on the
Sandy Hook shooter that day, he got her to sneak him in, for a peek at what was
on the slab.

She unzipped the black bag, and they saw. Saw how insigni cant the creature
really was — the almost-man who had created such immeasurable pain.

Later, the post-mortem examination recorded that the subject was a 20-year-old
male, six feet tall, and weighing 112 pounds. The medical examiner wrote that to
the right-rear of the shooter’s head was an “intraoral gunshot wound with
extensive injury to skull and brain.” He listed the manner of death: “Suicide.”

(There was apparently no sign of any “bump to the head,” as Nancy described it
— but then, any damaged area could easily have been obliterated by the nal
gunshot.)

The shooter was dissected, his organs inspected and weighed. But nothing the
examiner saw explained why it had happened. He would eventually reach out to
geneticists at the University of Connecticut, providing them with biological
samples from the shooter’s body, and asking them to look for any “abnormalities
or mutations.” Just to be sure. But the scientists found no such easy answers. As
far as anyone could tell, the beast was, physically, just a man.

The medical examiner knew what the shooter had been diagnosed with, but he
wasn’t buying it; Asperger’s “is simply not on the menu, in terms of what is
wrong with this kid,” he told a press conference. And even if the diagnosis had

726
been accurate, there simply was no research showing that Asperger’s made people
violent. It wasn’t the answer.

So the question came back, like it always did: Why?

Newtown, Connecticut
Reporters were all over town by the 16th, searching for the answer to the mystery.
The quality of their dispatches improved somewhat af er the initial wave, but
there were still falsehoods that bubbled to the top; one of the townspeople, who
claimed they knew Nancy, told a Fox News reporter that she had been considering
a conservatorship for her son, and the reporter ran with the story, unchecked —
resulting in a fresh theory for the motive. Maybe the gunman found out she w
going to have him committed, and that’s why he did it.

But the “witness” was just making it up, as they later admitted to police. There
was never any sign that Nancy was planning anything more for her son than
simply moving away with him, out of Newtown.

***
A writer for the New York Daily News, Mike Lupica, was at a ring range in
Danbury, talking to the owner. The man told him: “The guys from the ATF were
here late last night, wanting to see the sign-up sheets for the past two months.
Two agents. I gave them all of 2012. The lists were thoroughly scrutinized. That
name doesn’t show up.”

A few months later, the man was calling up the ATF, to make a correction; his was
the Wooster Mountain Shooting Range, the one out in the woods, and Nancy
and her son had both signed in for range time there in February. They had the
Bushmaster with them at the time.

***
Some testimonials would shine through as genuine. A 20-year-old woman from
Newtown, on Twitter, wrote of the shooter, “I used to have play dates with
[him]. In his house. In my neighborhood.” She went to Sandy Hook Elementary
School with him, and then saw him again, brie y, in high school. “I always saw
him walking alone, sitting on his own at a table or on the bus. Most of the time I
saw him he was alone.”

Her mother had a Twitter account too, and backed up the story. “We lived 6
houses away. He was troubled for sure for a long time.” She knew Nancy, too, of
course. “Such a kind woman.”

727
There was another neighbor, right next-door to 36 Yogananda. Reporters asked
him if he ever heard any signs of domestic disturbance coming from the pale
yellow house. “The house is barely 200 feet away, and I never heard anything,” he
said. “If something was happening, it was obviously behind closed doors.”

Peter’s sister-in-law Marsha, whom Nancy had been messaging on Facebook the
month before, told CNN of the shooter, “He was de nitely the challenge of the
family in that house. Every family has one… But never in trouble with the law,
never in trouble with anything.” She said that Nancy had “battled” with the local
school district to get him to graduation. “I’m not 100% certain if it was behavior
or learning disabilities, but he was a very, very bright boy. He was smart.”

Police found another young woman who had gone to elementary school with the
shooter. She lived on his block, and remembered his “Night El ” WiFi network
showing up on her computer. She told police she could imagine the boy from 36
Yogananda doing what he did “with a smile on his face.”

A few days later, o cers returned to her doorstep, to ask if she could clarify what
she meant; she told them it “wasn’t based upon any speci c reasoning, just
instinct.”

***
The reporters found Richard Novia, still in town af er losing his job at NHS. He
was struggling to make sense of the attack, too. But he knew the shooter, and he
knew the media were going about it all wrong. “Have you found his best friend?
Have you found a friend?,” Novia asked the San Diego Union Tribune, almost
taunting them from further down the hunting trail. “You’re not going to. He was
a loner.”

He immediately regretted even talking to most of them; he wanted to

communicate that the shooter’s shyness and tendency to withdraw was, in fact,
not special either. It might be the sign of something deeper under the surface, but
it couldn’t itself be the answer to the mystery, because he had seen so many
teenagers just like the shooter: withdrawn, anxious, alienated. He had started the
Tech Club just to try and help them. They weren’t killers. But all the media
wanted was a simple answer: Why?

Yale Child Study Center — New Haven, Connecticut

A subpoena arrived at the old collegiate school, from the Connecticut State Police.
The old le on the 14-year-old boy from 36 Yogananda Street, sitting in a drawer
and marked “draf ” since early 2007, saw the sunlight once again. Nurse Koenig
met with the investigators in person, and told them all about the nervous boy she

728
had met a handful of times, and how she had tried to medicate him... and about
his mother. She said there was another doctor that his mother preferred, and
remembered that, in general, Nancy was “not receptive to her reasoning.”

Waikato District Health Board — Hamilton, New Zealand

Investigators tracked down the shooter’s “primary psychiatrist.” He was living
abroad, in New Zealand, and had been hired as a psychiatrist for a state health and
addictions service there, back in July. The investigators reached a secretary at the
center, and lef their phone number.

A few days later, they got a return call from Dr. Fox. He con rmed that he had
heard about the shooting in Sandy Hook, and that he “vaguely recalls treating”
the shooter. But most of his records were in storage, back in Connecticut.

“Where in Connecticut?”

He declined to say. He said he’d “have an associate examine his les,” and then get
back to them.

Dr. Fox called back on December 18th. He said that “any medical records
pertaining to [the shooter] have been destroyed,” since the statutory ve years had
already passed since his treatment. (This timeframe was accurate, with the
exception of the isolated nal payment in May 2008.)

The investigators asked him if he simply remembered the patient.

Yes, he responded: the boy was about 15 years of age when he saw him (13-15,
actually) and he recalled the boy as having “aggression problems,” and “possibly
having been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.” The teen was “very rigid and
resistant to engagement.” That was all he remembered.

The investigators didn’t think that Dr. Fox was, in general, a credible witness.
When the Child Advocate contacted him, separately from police, in August of
2013, he told them that he “saw Mrs. Lanza 1 or 2 times alone, and saw [her son]
approximately 8 times,” but the Advocate had obtained billing records that
provided “a picture of a longer and more extensive relationship between the
community psychiatrist and [the shooter] than portrayed by this psychiatrist in
multiple interviews.”

Meanwhile, police in Connecticut, in the course of investigating the Sandy Hook

shooting, started to hear separate rumors about Dr. Fox, and his conduct with his
female patients. But they knew that when he surrendered his license, the

729
document he signed admitted “no guilt or wrongdoing” — and anyway, he was
well outside of Connecticut’s reach now.

December 17, 2012

AMC Loews Danbury 16 Theatre — Danbury, Connecticut
When Dave arrived at work in the morning, some co-workers approached him.
“Did you hear?” Dave didn’t know what they were talking about. “The Sandy
Hook shooting,” they said. Yeah, what about it?

They told him: the killer was “DDR guy.”

Dave couldn’t believe it. He went to the break room, and checked his phone. Sure
enough, the photo on the news (from the driver’s license that the shooter had
been so reluctant to obtain) was the same young man he had changed tokens for
so many times. With the same wide-eyed stare.

Homicide detectives came in a few hours later, and talked to every employee. Dave
told them what he knew, which wasn’t much; but he remembered that he had
seen “DDR guy” with an older male, several times over the summer. He didn’t
know the guy’s name, but he seemed like the shooter’s only friend.

December 18, 2012

KWVA Campus Radio — University of Oregon, Eugene
John Zerzan opened Anarchy Radio talking about a re ghter, from the “small
rural a uent town of Newtown,” who was reportedly heard saying, “No one in
this town could have imagined this.” Zerzan asked: “Why is that? How many
times does this have to occur, that nobody could have imagined this? ...It’s just
always senseless? Meaningless?”

Still, despite his relative lack of surprise at another school shooting having taken
place, even the jaded anarchist seemed taken aback by the sheer cruelty of what
had happened at Sandy Hook. He was uncharacteristically somber. And there was
a note of something else, perhaps resentment; because he couldn't feign a lack of
answers as to where these things came from. He'd been trying to communicate the
reasons, to answer "why?" for years. But the culture was as deep in denial as it was
in decline. That was why he was so critical of the media, for propping up the
illusion: for focusing on the individual, and retreating into unmeaning. “You hear
the word senseless over and over, and it’s not quite adequate.”

He didn’t know then that he had spoken to the Sandy Hook shooter himself, just
one year before. In 2015, when Zerzan released his book Why Hope?: The Stand

730
Against Civilization, he would write how the young man had called Anarchy
Radio from his cave, to share his theory on why the shooters snapped, and how
now, looking back, “The bitter irony was that [the shooter] himself snapped.”

Connecticut Forensic Science Laboratory — Meriden,

Connecticut
A forensic investigator took the grey Storjet hard drive out of a box, and plugged
it into a USB port on their workstation. They created a digital image of everything
on the drive, and started cataloging every le.

They saw references on the drive to “Blarvink,” the username reported by the
shooter’s father — but also, “Kaynbred.” Nobody had mentioned that one.

There was a folder of “screenshots” from a video game Combat Arms, and
Kaynbred was the player featured in them, racking up the kills. They found the
image le “kayntdlr”, the same that had been printed out in the basement of 36
Yogananda. They showed it to Peter’s lawyer, who said that his client “denied that
the child in the uncaptioned photograph was either son.” (The actual source of
the photo, though, remains unexplained. It does not appear that the image existed
anywhere online before it was released as part of this case. Of similarly mysterious
origin are three other photographs, never released to the public, showing “what
appears to be a deceased human covered in what appears to be blood, wrapped in
plastic.” These were found in the room full of junk on the second oor, along
with Nancy and her son’s NRA certi cates.)

They found the spreadsheet, in all its exhaustive detail. There were also gigabytes,
oceans of data on the individual shooters: the Columbine 11k, photos of the
Westroads Mall shooter aiming his AK-47, an audio clip of the Shangri-La shooter
telling police “I had no choice,” a full transcript of everything said about the
Scoutmaster at the Cullen Inquiry, and a full copy of the LA Fitness shooter’s
online diary, from just before the cops took it o ine. It went on, and on, and on.

There were several text les on the drive. One was a “document written showing
the prerequisites for mass murder spreadsheet.” Another was a “document
written reviewing horror lms.” There was the essay on pedophilia, and a typed
transcript of an interview with the widow of the 1984 McDonald’s killer. There
were even some creative writing pieces, including “a screenplay, presumably by the
shooter, in which four male characters have a delusional discussion and ultimately
all but one end up being killed.” And then, something titled “Lovebound.”

But there was no note lef behind about the shooting. No "manifesto," or
anything like that. There of en isn't.

731
The police brought Peter Lanza a new form to sign: “Consent to Assume Online
Identity.” His signature gave them access to the Gmail accounts.

They found correspondence in the mailbox, between the shooter and people he
apparently only knew online. Some of them called him “Smiggles,” a name found
on several of the text documents on the drive. From there, the FBI found the
Columbine forum, in its then-current manifestation, with the surviving posts
from “Smiggles” carried over from the old board. Suddenly, the investigation
changed.

Unknown Location — United States

A woman’s cell phone rang. It was the FBI. They said they were investigating the
school shooting in Newtown. She con rmed she’d heard of the event — everyone
in the country had — but what did it have to do with her?

The agents o fered to come to her house and explain, and she said okay. She didn’t
have to talk to them, but she wanted to help. They showed up, and she listened
patiently as they went through their routine about lawyers and what her rights
were — and eventually got to the point: they asked her what she knew about
“Smiggles.” Then it clicked.

She said that she had spent a great deal of her time online, over the years, and had
met a lot of people, but the person the feds were asking about was, without a
doubt, “the most xated and disturbed internet associate she had ever
encountered.”

They had corresponded once a month or so, always by email. She never knew his
real name, but whoever he was, he was “singularly focused and obsessed with
murders and spree killings.” He “devoted almost all of his internet activity to
researching and discussing” them. She got the impression he was “extremely
intelligent and serious,” but also “depressed and cynical regarding his view of life
and people.”

She said she had talked to him about that mindset before, and he described it as
“functional depression.” She said that as far as she knew, he had “no e fective
coping mechanism to deal with his depression,” and seemed to “wallow in it,” and
“ride out the low periods by hiding in his room and sleeping for 12 hours or more
at a time.” He “seemed to have no friends or people he could turn to for support
or assistance and did not appear to have any enjoyment of life.”

They had discussed dying, and suicide. He said he “did not consider death to be a
negative. He saw it as an escape from his joyless existence.” As for mass shootings,

732
she said that he saw them as “merely a symptom caused by a broken society,” and
framed them as “people striking back.”

She told them about Anarchy Radio, and the shooter's xation on the Travis
incident. How he believed that the chimp was “probably under great pressure and
did not have any ability to express it,” and “having no way to relieve the pressure
through expression, the monkey acted out in the only way it could.”

This person — who knew only the shooter’s digital manifestation — it turned
out, knew him better than just about anybody. Maybe even better than Nancy.
But when this person learned that the entity behind “Smiggles” was the same who
pulled the trigger 156 times at Sandy Hook, she said that he was, in words that
would likely have mirrored Nancy’s own, “more fucked up than I thought.”

***
When the Connecticut O ce of the Child Advocate nalized their report on the
shooter in November of 2014, having read much of the correspondence he had
sent to users from the Columbine forum, they would write that, “The emails
exchanged between [the shooter] and members of this macabre online
community o fer a rather breathtaking re ection of a negative micro-society
within our midst.”

Meanwhile, on Tumblr, some of the same users the shooter used to interact with,
and swap mass-murder memes with, were making memes about him now,
oblivious to the fact that he had once been in their fold himself. (In many cases,
when they eventually did nd out, it seemed to only enhance their fandom.)

Around this time, the police found the shooter’s DDR friend. He told them
everything he knew: about the shooter’s worldview, and his obsession with
chimpanzees and chimp culture. And they had found the recording of the radio
show call, connecting Travis with mass violence; they still didn’t have answers that
satis ed the scale of the questions that Sandy Hook lef behind. But they knew all
they were going to know.

FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit — Quantico, Virginia

The pro lers at the FBI had opened up all the boxes that the Connecticut Police
had sent from 36 Yogananda, and done their best to put the puzzle pieces
together. Their analysis ultimately amounted to seven distinct conclusions:

* The shooter had a complex background featuring many problematic

bio-psycho-social issu . Historical, clinical, and contextual factors
contributed to the shooter’s extremely rigid and inflexible world view.

733
 * The shooter did not “snap,” but instead engaged in careful, methodical
planning and preparation. There evidence that the shooter began
contemplating the attack early March of 2011.

* In the weeks and months immediately preceding the attack, the

shooter’s deteriorating relationship with h mother w a significant
challenge and stressor in h life.

* The shooter w fascinated with past shootings and researched them

thoroughly.

* The shooter shared many characteristics and behaviors with other

active shooters.

* There no evidence to su est that the shooter viewed the attack [a]
“video game” or a contest.

*There evidence to su est that the shooter had an interest in children

that could be categorized pedophilia. There no evidence that he ever
acted out on th interest.

The O ce of the Child Advocate would emphasize another of the Behavioral

Analysis Unit’s observations: that the feds in uantico had seen everything, mass
murderers and bombers and predators of every stripe, but, “Af er an exhaustive
review of [the Sandy Hook shooter’s] computer usage, the pro lers determined
that ‘his obsession and attention to detail with mass killing was unprecedented.’”

Kingston, New Hampshire

While the news vans were still swarming around Newtown, a smaller satellite-
cluster of reporters was in New Hampshire, looking into the Lanza family’s early
life. Channel 9 WMUR News out of Manchester tracked down Marvin
LaFontaine — who, despite never having heard the shooter speak, nor having seen
him in over a decade, had a surprisingly insightful answer to their inquiry: he said
he believed the shooter “was trying [to] come up with an act of revenge that was
so awful he would stab every American in the heart.”

December 31, 2012

Unknown Location
Peter Lanza began combing through the psychiatric literature, trying to gure out
how anyone could reach a point in their lives where they would choose to do what

734
his son had done. He probably did not know that his search was leading him
down some of the very same paths that his son had followed, sealed away in his
black plastic cocoon, hiding from him just a year before; in particular, Peter found
himself reading the work of a Dr. Park Dietz — the psychiatrist who had tried to
tell everyone that the man who shot Reagan was not insane.

Dietz had coined a term for the shooters, in a journal article published in the
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1986: pseudocommando. These
were killers who “are preoccupied by rearms and commit their raids af er long
deliberation, [and af er which] may force the police to kill them,” such as the
Austin tower sniper from 1966, or the McDonald’s shooter from 1984. And like
the man who shot Reagan, the pseudocomandos would “see headlines as one of
the predictable outcomes of their behavior, which they pursue in part for this
purpose.” Their acts did not occur in a vacuum, even to them. And also like the
man who shot Reagan, Dietz continued, mass shooters usually were not truly
insane:

Mass, serial and sensational homicid tend to elicit a premature

conclusion that the offender must have been mad. The tendency of the
press, public and public officials to regard such individuals mad solely
on the bas of their crim reflects widespread needs to attribute such
behavior to alien forc . As with the mythical werewolv and vampir
and the demons of the middle ag and of contemporary Pentecostals,
the attribution of unacceptable human conduct to possession by madness
reassur the believer that people like him are incapable of such evil.

At the time he wrote this, Dr. Dietz was observing the rising wave from 1986,
before the Stockton shooter had even purchased his almost-AK-47. “Given the
frequency with which the public is bombarded with sensational events of all
kinds,” he had continued, “one might wonder how anything remains emotionally
arousing. We should be thankful that even as so many of our cultural sensitivities
erode, we at least do not experience extinction of our aversion to cruelty...”

***
Peter claimed his son’s body from a funeral home, sometime around the end of
the year. What became of his son’s earthly remains, or their nal destination, was
something that Peter Lanza vowed never to tell anyone, for the rest of his days.

Town Hall — Newtown, Connecticut

One week af er the shooting, at a vigil held on the old Fair eld Hills campus, First
Selectman Pat Llodra caste the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School as “the

735
desperate act of a confused young man with violence in his heart.” It was about as
accurate a summation as any.

Many, many gif s made their way to Newtown in the weeks and months af er the
tragedy. Communities all over the country, even the world, felt the urge to ease the
townspeoples’ pain, and show their support.

One of the gif s stood apart. It was brought by nine representatives from the Red
Lake Nation, who had driven 1500 miles from Minnesota to bring it to Newtown:
a dreamcatcher. The native American object had been dispatched to Columbine
in 1999, and then passed on to their tribe in 2005. It had been hanging
prominently in the halls of Red Lake High School ever since, an inherited symbol
of strength and healing. That tribe had been through the nightmare. Now, the
survivors of the 2005 attack could see that Newtown needed it more, and they
presented the dreamcatcher to the school board as part of a ceremony, held in the
town hall, at Fair eld Hills.

The native woman from Michigan, who originally made the dreamcatcher, didn’t
know until Newtown that her gif had ever lef Columbine. “It’s one of those
memories that will sustain me for a lifetime, and brings me to tears when I look
through to the miles that it has traveled and of the sentiment behind it,” she said.
Speaking for her tribal organization, she added, “It is our hope that the
dreamcatcher will nd a nal home at Sandy Hook.”

736
 77. Winter

December 16, 2012

Newtown High School
It seemed like the whole town was there, for the interfaith vigil held in the
auditorium of Newtown High School. The governor took the stage rst, then he
introduced the President of the United States; in his remarks, Obama praised the
rst responders, and the students and sta f of Sandy Hook Elementary School, for
the strength they’d shown throughout their ordeal, and for the inspiring example
that all the townspeople set for the country. “In the face of indescribable
violence,” he said, “in the face of unconscionable evil, you’ve looked out for each
other, and you’ve cared for one another, and you’ve loved one another. This is
how Newtown will be remembered. And with time, and God’s grace, that love
will see you through.”

But the country had some hard questions to face, he explained. “Caring for
children is a civilization’s rst responsibility. If we don’t get that right, we don’t
get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged... and by that
measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations?” The
question lingered for a moment, up in the raf ers of NHS. “I’ve been re ecting on
this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is ‘no.’” The
nation itself would have to change, he explained, if anything of substance was
going to happen di ferently this time around:

We will be told that the caus of such violence are complex, and that
true. No single law — no set of laws — can eliminate evil from the
world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society. But that
can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than th ...

In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power th office holds to engage
my fellow citizens — from law enforcement to mental health
professionals to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing

737
 more tragedi like th . Because, what choice do we have? We can’t
accept events like th routine. Are we really prepared to say that we’re
powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are
we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year a er
year a er year somehow the price of our freedom?

The president read out the names of all the victims. “God has called them home.
For those of us who remain, let us nd the strength to carry on, and make our
country worthy of their memory.”

***
Later, a representative from Connecticut told his colleagues something else the
president had said, in a speech to a private gathering during his pass through
Newtown: “As winter approaches and snow begins to fall, I will always think of
these children as precious snow akes during this winter of events. But I am
heartened by the fact that every spring, when the owers bloom, we will think of
their precious memory as well.”

December 17, 2012

Hall of the House of Representatives — Washington, D.C.
One of Connecticut's representatives took to the oor of the House. “It’s hard to
witness such a senseless and evil act, and similar acts that some of my colleagues in
this Chamber have faced,” said the congressman from New Haven. “In Aurora
and Oakland, Tucson, Blacksburg, Littleton, you can’t help but feel a despairing
of the soul. But we in this institution cannot a ford that luxury.” They had a job
to do, he reminded the chamber. He then yielded the remainder of his time to a
representative from Hartford.

“Clio, the muse of history, used to sit above this Chamber,” the representative
said, referring to an 1810 marble statue from the Old Hall of the House — now
itself a hall of statues — where the gure of Clio stands atop a winged chariot,
with a clock-face as its wheel:

The muse of history’s responsibility w to sit there, with a book and

pen, recording the events of th Chamber. We are in a unique position
of responsibility. We have been sent here to perform a duty; and not only
the muse of history, but all the world watching the United Stat
Congress.

We have a responsibility to respond in the most comprehensive way. Th

an attack of terrorism. Th h happened all too o en and all too

738
 frequently all across th country. And in such an attack, we would do
everything within our power to make sure that no stone w le
unturned, to make sure that we provided every answer and every
opportunity that we can, to protect our children. That’s why we take an
oath of office here. That our God-given responsibility. We must act,
and act now.

He described what it was like driving to the airport that morning, along the back
roads of Connecticut; every school he passed had a police car parked right out
front. He said it was comforting to see; “But that is not an answer. To say that we
are going to turn our schools into fortresses is not where we should be as a nation.
We need to go deeper in terms of solving this problem of mass killings and of
violence that now, again, is striking at the most innocent in our society.”

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace

The representative from Texas, still stinging from his ga fe af er the Aurora
shooting, went on Fox News. He praised the sacri ce that the principal of Sandy
Hook Elementary had shown, confronting the shooter at the rst sign of danger.
He, too, was searching for how to stop the next tragedy. “I wish to God she had
had an M4 [ri e] in her o ce, locked up so when she heard gun re, she pulls it
out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically at him with nothing in her hands.”
Instead of nothing, he wanted the principal of the elementary school to have a
great, big, gun: essentially, another AR-15, just with a shorter barrel (unless he
meant the military version, which would also have either three-round-burst or
fully-automatic re modes). They went for about $700 apiece.

December 18, 2012

Cerberus Capital Management — Midtown Manhattan
Gun sales had never been better. Two million in one month, at this rate. Sandy
Hook had ignited panic buying like nothing since Stockton; it made the “Barack
Boom” look more like a bump. So, the executives at Cerberus Capital
Management had to ght every instinct in their being to make their decision. “It is
apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the
national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level,” the owners of
Bushmaster said in a statement. “It is not our role to take positions, or attempt to
shape or in uence the gun control policy debate. That is the job of our federal and
state legislators. There are, however, actions that we as a rm can take.
Accordingly, we have determined to immediately engage in a formal process to sell
our investment in Freedom Group.” It would be a complicated process, but they
said they’d be hiring a nancial adviser, who would then gure out how to sell o f

739
their interests in the rearms group, and return the capital to their investors. They
wanted no more of guns.

December 19, 2012

James S. Brady Press Brie ng Room — The White House
The press assembled again, ve days af er the tragedy. President Obama had not
yet made any speci c statements on what he was going to do about guns. But at
the press conference that day, he announced that his Vice President, Joe Biden,
would be heading up a new “Task Force On Gun Violence,” and that they would
have some recommendations ready af er the new year.

He took questions. One reporter asked simply, “What about the NRA?”

“Well, the NRA is an organization that has members who are mothers and
fathers,” the president said. “And I would expect that they’ve been impacted by
this as well. And hopefully they’ll do some self-re ection.” But he knew there was
going to be con ict. “What we’ve seen over the last 20 years, 15 years, is the sense
that anything related to guns is somehow an encroachment on the Second
Amendment. What we’re looking for here is a thoughtful approach that says we
can preserve our Second Amendment, we can make sure that responsible gun
owners are able to carry out their activities, but that we’re going to actually be
serious about the safety side of this; that we’re going to be serious about making
sure that something like Newtown or Aurora doesn’t happen again.”

December 20, 2012

Riverview Gun Sales — East Windsor, Connecticut
ATF agents raided the place just af er 5:00pm. They said it had nothing to do with
Sandy Hook — the bureau had been receiving reports about lax practices at the
store for years, from ignoring the NICS background check when it came back
“wait,” to failing to report multiple rearm thef s — but the timing was hard to
ignore. Fear spread in the industry.

December 21, 2012

Willard Hotel — Washington, D.C.
One week af er the attack, Wayne LaPierre scheduled a press conference. “While
some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully
silent,” he said from the podium, to a small crowd. “Now, we must speak, for the
safety of our nation’s children.” Wayne said that the problem was not guns, but
more likely, “Gun Free Zones,” like schools. The politicians who passed such laws,

740
he said, were simply telling “every insane killer in America that schools are the
safest place to in ict maximum mayhem, with minimum risk.”

“How have our nation’s priorities gotten so out of order?” Wayne continued.
“Think about it: we care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed
guards.” Airports, power plants, places of government, and sports stadiums, all
had armed guards, he observed. “Yet when it comes to our most beloved,
innocent, and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we
as a society leave them, every day, utterly defenseless. And the monsters and the
predators of the world know it, and exploit it.”

Suddenly a protester stood up in the audience, and unfurled a red banner that
read “NRA IS KILLING OUR KIDS.” They shouted the message, too, over and
over; Wayne trailed o f, and af er a few moments, a security guard snatched the
banner and dragged the man away — but his voice still echoed from down the
hotel's hallway: “We’ve got to stop the violence! And the violence starts with the
NRA!”

Wayne clenched his jaw, and returned to his prepared remarks. “The truth is that
our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People
that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no
sane person could ever possibly comprehend them. They walk among us every
single day.” A registry was indeed what was needed, Wayne said, but not of guns,
nor of gun owners — what the country needed was “a national database of the
mentally ill.”

Another protester interrupted — “The NRA has blood on its hands! Shame on
the NRA! Ban assault weapons now! BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS NOW!” —
and they too were dragged away.

Wayne waited patiently, again, but would not be silenced. He was sick of the
debate, too. “You know, ve years ago, af er Virginia Tech, when I said there
should be armed security in every school, the media called me crazy.” He
envisioned a di ferent America — one where the Sandy Hook shooter, af er
blasting his way through the front glass of the school, would have been
“confronted by quali ed, armed security," and asked, had that been the case, "Will
we at least admit that it’s possible, that [lives] might have been spared that day? Is
it so abhorrent to you, that you’d rather continue to risk the alternative?”

He had been in the gun rights advocacy game for a long time, and he knew he had
to sum up his message in a way people would remember. “The only way — the
only way — to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved,

741
and invested in a plan of absolute protection," he said. 'The only thing that stops a
bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”

December 29, 2012

Red Lake, Minnesota
An editorial ran in Minnesota’s Star Tribune, written by a retired FBI agent
named James Egelhof. Something was troubling him; he was an NRA member,
and he thought that Wayne was correct in saying there are monsters in America,
and that guns weren’t responsible for creating them. But he knew that also meant
that the shooters were going to keep coming. And it was going to get worse.
“Unfortunately, right now, even as you are reading this essay, at least several
people in this country are plotting new attacks,” he warned. “We don’t know who
they are. But we know what they are — members of a new cult of death that
worships the monsters who came before them and has but one goal: to exceed the
body count or the horror of the latest massacre and thus be remembered as the
worst of them all.”

The cult of Columbine. He knew all about it.

Agent Egelhof had been one of the rst law enforcement o cers, on the af ernoon
of March 21, 2005, to respond to reports of a shooting at Red Lake High School.
He was in the active-shooter formation that came down the corridor, and
exchanged re with the monster. He saw it die — but the nightmare kept coming
back, year af er year.

Working in law enforcement in Red Lake, Egelhof knew the shooter’s grandfather,
as well as the school's security guard, ex-tribal o cer Derek Brun. He missed them
both dearly. “I lost two friends, and for what? So an Internet-addicted kid could
try and make a name for himself… when each new mass killing is announced on
television, I can’t watch; I begin sweating, get sick to my stomach. My cup has
runneth over.”

But in the wake of the latest tragedy, Egelhof was not beyond self-re ection:

All that said, the NRA and we gun owners have tolerated an
intolerable situation: the profusion of assault weapons and large-capacity
magazin ; the ridiculo loophole of gun shows and private sal
evading the instant background check; the inability of the background
check to be integrated with the National Crime Information Center; the
lack of due diligence in transferring firearms to those who should not
have them; the lack of cooperation with law enforcement to report
problematic behavior; the selfishness of our desir to have more and

742
 more lethal weapons and technolo without concern for our terrified
fellow citizens who do not share the belief that such weapons better secure
….

He remembered the day he came out of the FBI Academy, in 1984: “I was issued a
six-shot revolver and 18 rounds of ammunition, and I felt well-armed. To this day
I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would want to own, much
less carry, a weapon with a magazine holding 15 rounds and more. If you need to
do that, join the Armed Forces.”

January 16, 2013

The White House — South Court Auditorium
“It’s literally been hard for the nation to comprehend, hard for the nation to
fathom,” the vice president said to the audience, gathered there for Obama’s
formal announcement. “No one can know for certain if this senseless act could
have been prevented, but we all know we have a moral obligation — a moral
obligation — to do everything in our power to diminish the prospect that
something like this could happen again.”

Joe Biden had been in the Senate for decades. He knew about the country’s legacy
of failure to pass meaningful gun legislation — he had been there for it, and so,
had been a part of it — but his task force had been hard at work over the past few
weeks, poring over draf legislation, and exploring what the president could
accomplish without congressional approval, if necessary.

Biden pointed out someone in the audience whom he had met at one of the
planning meetings: Colin Goddard, the survivor from Virginia Tech. “When I
asked Colin about what he thought we should be doing,” Biden recalled, “he said,
‘I’m not here because of what happened to me. I’m here because what happened
to me keeps happening to other people and we have to do something about it.’”

Biden looked him right in the eye. “Colin, we will. Colin, I promise you, we will.”

The president took the podium. 33 days had passed since the attack at Sandy
Hook, and he said that in that time, “More than nine hundred of our fellow
Americans have reportedly died at the end of a gun — nine hundred in the past
month. And every day we wait, that number will keep growing.”

He motioned to the desk next to him on the stage, where some papers and a pen
were waiting. He said they were the 23 “Executive Actions” he was about to sign,
each signature representing a step his administration would take, immediately,
toward reducing gun violence. They ranged from a Presidential Memorandum

743
requiring federal agencies to make their data available to NICS, to “directing the
Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun
violence.” Similarly — and touching on something that Wayne had brought up at
his NRA speech — “Congress should fund research into the e fects that violent
video games have on young minds.” In both cases, he emphasized, “We don’t
bene t from ignorance. We don’t bene t from not knowing the science of this
epidemic of violence.”

The 23 pieces of paper were of modest signi cance, in the grand scheme. They
represented the extent of his powers as president — acting without Congress. By
design, under the United States Constitution, that wasn't very much. And so in
the same speech, he called on the Senate and House to do two things: rst, pass
universal background checks. NRA members supported that move, he said — “So
there’s no reason we can’t do this.”

Second: Congress should restore the assault weapons ban, and institute a ten-
round limit on magazine capacities. He pointed out the Aurora gunman’s
obscenely huge “double-drum” magazine; “Weapons designed for the theater of
war have no place in a movie theater. A majority of Americans agree with us on
this.” And, “by the way, so did Ronald Reagan.”

January 28, 2013

National Shooting Sports Foundation — Newtown, Connecticut
Steve Sanetti would always remember being at the airport on the morning of
December 14th. He was about to board a ight to Europe when he saw it on the
news screens: “My jaw dropped open as everybody’s at the airport did, as
increasing information came in and kept coming in about this horrible
unspeakable incident. And I immediately canceled my trip and got back to the
o ce.”

Larry Keane was there, at headquarters. He had heard the police sirens ying by
out on Main Street, and then his co-workers crying, watching the news. He got up
and saw Sandy Hook Elementary School on the television screen, a place just two
miles away from where they were standing, its glass entrance area blasted away.
And reports about an AR-15 — one of the “modern sporting ri es” they’d spent
so long trying to exonerate in the minds of gun buyers. “There aren’t even words
to describe the unbelievable coincidence that this occurred where we happened to
be located,” he would tell The Hill. And though there were no lawsuits led yet, if
the victims’ families ever did try to sue Remington (who now owned Bushmaster,
under the Freedom Group), they’d be on a collision course with the NSSF’s pride
and joy, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The shield they had
spent so long, and sacri ced so much, just to build.

744
There was a photo on Larry Keane’s o ce wall, showing him in the Oval O ce
next to Wayne LaPierre, as President Bush signed the PLCAA into law. He knew
that some were now, already, calling for the shield to be taken down. “It’s not
going to happen,” he promised. “Suing law-abiding rearms manufacturers for
the criminal misuse by third parties of rearms that were lawfully sold amounts to
suing Ford for drunk-driving accidents.” (Were that true, as some legal scholars
observed, it still wouldn’t explain why Ford didn’t have, nor apparently need, a
law shielding them from such liability suits. The liquor industry, for that matter,
similarly thrives without any such blanket-protections.) The NSSF had fought a
long war against America’s mayors. They didn’t want to go back to that.

The NSSF said they were open to helping where they could. Connecticut had just
announced a “Gun Violence Prevention Working Group,” as it was now clear that
the state's 1993 ban was awed, since the Bushmaster ri e was not an illegal
weapon in Connecticut, despite all the long hours debating (and banning) a
practically identical weapon, the Colt Sporter. The NSSF sent a letter to the group
on January 28th, saying their organization was “deeply shaken and saddened by
the horrible events that took place in Newtown, Connecticut, our headquarters
and home.” They emphasized their record of support for NICS improvements,
and the millions of gun locks they’d donated through Project Childsafe. They
pledged to lend their rearms expertise to “any federal or other commission on
public safety and rearms to address the many issues that are part of this complex
situation.”

There was just one other thing the NSSF, being a trade group, wanted to
mention: “The rearms industry has contributed over $1.7 billion in economic
activity to Connecticut in 2012, employs close to 2,900 people in the state and
generates an additional 4,400 jobs in supplier industries.” And guns were selling
better than ever. “In these di cult economic times, the rearms industry is still
one of the few industries that has grown its pro ts while also contributing
increased tax revenues to the state (to the tune of $119 million.)”

***
The rst protests came in March, not long af er the series of funeral processions
nally disappeared from Church Hill Road. It could barely have been called a
crowd at rst — just a handful of high schoolers standing out in front of the gun
lobby’s headquarters, with homemade signs: “SHAME ON YOU NSSF.” And
they weren’t there every day, but — as the NSSF’s employees leaving work in the
af ernoons would witness — week over week, the gatherings seemed to be getting
bigger.

745
February 1, 2013
Bangor, Maine
Stephen King released a series of short essays, all about the exhausting cycle that he
and every other American now, once again, found themselves caught up in.

One was a list of 21 separate rituals he had identi ed, that it seemed the country
must complete, whenever this happened: from the shooter’s yearbook photo
appearing on TV, to interviews with people who knew him (“they all agree that he
was pretty weird, but no one expected him to do something like this.”) Then
there were the politicians, who would “decree a national dialogue about gun
control.” A routine sets in: The NRA stalls, then obstructs. A distraction comes
along. Then, another shooter. Start all over. The veteran of horror was sick of it.

In another essay, King told a story about what had become of what was, by then,
one of his more obscure books, Rage: it was never a best-selling title, but he had
worked hard on it, and it was still making money as of 1996. That was, until he
heard about the school shooting in Moses Lake, by a boy who read Rage. Then,
the following year, another. That had been enough for the author:

I didn’t pull Rage from publication because the law demanded it; I w
protected under the First Amendment, and the law couldn’t demand it.
I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that
made it the responsible thing to do. Assault weapons will remain readily
available to crazy people until the powerful pro-gun forc in th country
decide to do a similar turnaround. They must accept responsibility,
recognizing that responsibility not the same thing culpability. They
need to say, “We support these measur not because the law demands we
support them, but because it’s the sensible thing.”

March 1, 2013
Legislative O ce Building — Hartford, Connecticut
The Sandy Hook Advisory Committee was formed by Governor Malloy shortly
af er the attack. At their March 1st meeting, they hosted a group of police chiefs
from around the state. From Newtown, they invited Chief Michael Kehoe.

The session covered a wide range of topics, but one was whether or not their
committee should recommend a new national ban on assault weapons.

The chief of the Manchester Police Department spoke up. “I sense that some
common sense needs to be added to this equation,” he said. “Right now we’re in a

746
situation where if you add this or subtract that from seemingly identical weapons,
it makes it legal or illegal. We’re quickly approaching the point where as long as it’s
painted green, we’re good, and if it’s not, then it’s an assault weapon.” It was 1989
all over again. “We need a better working de nition of what an assault ri e is.”

Michael Kehoe spoke up, saying that when it came to assault weapons — like the
classic Supreme Court de nition on pornography — “I’ll know it when I see it.”
And he had seen one lying on the oor of Room 10. “It’s a killing machine and it
has no purpose, in my mind, in our society, other than to kill, okay? And I don’t
see the sportsman [needing] access to that. That’s just my feeling.”

April 10, 2013

National Ri e Association Headquarters — Fairfax, Virginia
The big vote was approaching. Senate Bill 649, the “Safe Communities, Safe
Schools Act of 2013,” would expand background checks — and, af er the senator
from California amended it, would purport to ban "assault weapons," too; it was
much like the legislation she had written back in 1994, upon which the sun had
since set.

With a week to go, the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action sent out a directive
to its allies in the Senate:

Th legislation would criminalize the private transfer of firearms by

honest citizens, requiring friends, neighbors and many family members
to get government permission to exercise a fundamental right or face
prosecution. The NRA unequivocally opposed to S. 649.

In addition, the NRA will oppose any amendments offered to S. 649

that restrict fundamental Second Amendment freedoms; including, but
not limited to, proposals that would ban commonly and lawfully owned
firearms and magazin or criminalize the private transfer of firearms
through an expansion of background checks. As we have noted
previously, expanding background checks, at gun shows or elsewhere, will
not reduce violent crime or keep our kids safe in their schools. Given the
importance of these issu , vot on all anti-gun amendments or proposals
will be considered in NRA’s future candidate evaluations.

The NRA said they would “enthusiastically” support measures that did not
restrict gun rights: school security, prosecution of violent criminals, and
“addressing mental health inadequacies.”

747
Wayne LaPierre later gave an even sterner warning against the bill Obama
supported, in a speech at a hunting and conservation awards show in Reno: “He
wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal
government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry.”

April 16, 2013

National Shooting Sports Foundation — Newtown, Connecticut
On the eve of the S. 649 vote, the NSSF sent out their alert to members. It turned
out that an amendment to the bill, in prioritizing background checks done at gun
shows to get them through NICS faster, was not to the NSSF’s liking:

Prioritizing gun show checks over storefront checks will harm firearms
retailers’ business . Weekends, when gun shows take place, are the
busiest time for storefront retailers who will not be able to run
background checks for their customers. The Second Amendment rights
of customers at gun shops are just important those of gun show
attende . Congress should provide adequate resourc to NICS so that
ALL background checks are done instantly.

The NSSF urged its members to call their senators, and to tell them to vote “No”
on the amendment — and “No” on S.649, if the amendment was adopted. They
supported another amendment, which mirrored the NRA’s priorities. It wouldn’t
ban assault weapons, and it wouldn’t expand background checks for gun buyers.
“Tell your senators not to put retailers’ livelihoods on the line.”

April 17, 2013

Senate Chamber — United States Capitol Building
The gun-control bill, the federal government’s response to the massacre at Sandy
Hook Elementary School, failed by a vote of 54-46. It did get 54 votes — but
under the rules of a sharply divided Senate, it needed 60 to pass.

As the votes were tallied, a woman shouted from the gallery above — “Shame on
you!” — and she was promptly escorted from the chamber by security. Two years
and three months before, she had been standing in a parking lot in Tucson,
holding a dropped 30-round Glock magazine in front of a shooter’s face, berating
him in the af ermath of his attack on Congress on Your Corner. Now, standing
outside the capitol building, she told reporters that the senators who had just
voted down the gun bill “have no soul.”

The amendments that the NSSF and the NRA had supported also failed. The
response to Sandy Hook, from Congress, was nothing at all.

748
The White House — Rose Garden
Grieving families from Newtown, joined by a recovering congresswoman from
Tucson, stood with the vice president next to the podium, outside the White
House. President Obama visibly struggled to contain his disgust toward the
Senate: “I’m going to speak plainly and honestly about what’s happened here
because the American people are trying to gure out how can something have 90
percent support and yet not happen.”

He ran down all the compromises they had made, and all the promises they had
heard. He was particularly angry about the false claim that Wayne LaPierre had
made:

Instead of supporting th compromise, the gun lobby and its alli

willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort
of ‘big brother’ gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. Th
legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there
in the text. But that didn’t matter.

And unfortunately, th pattern of spreading untruths about th

legislation served a purpose, because those li upset an intense minority
of gun owners, and that in turn intimidated a lot of senators.

In reality, a gun registry would have been illegal anyway — as well the NRA knew,
from supporting the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act, the legislation that
had already banned any such thing. It was part of why the country’s background
checks took so long: all those rows of les, stu fed in cardboard boxes, lining the
halls at NICS. The NRA was responsible for that, had fought hard for it, and
now, pretended it wasn't even there. And their act worked.

The president acknowledged that the bill had not been perfect. It was seen as a
pragmatic compromise. As he had said in the auditorium of Newtown High
School in the days af er the tragedy, their civilization had an obligation to act in
defense of its children. And so if they could nd a way to reduce gun deaths
without infringing on the 2nd Amendment, they had an obligation to try. “This
legislation met that test. And too many senators failed theirs.” He capped o f what
was likely the angriest speech of his administration. “All in all, this was a pretty
shameful day for Washington.”

749
Intersection of Church Hill Road and Main Street — Newtown,
Connecticut
A bullet-pocked rooster weather vane watched with glass eyes from the roof of the
meeting house, as a restoration company from Torrington brought a cherry-
picker out to the intersection, and raised the machine’s arm 100 feet into the sky.
The worker aboard was carrying a golden sphere in his arms; despite a lengthy
search, the decorative ball that had sailed o f the top of the agpole in October
2012 was never recovered. But the town had obtained a replacement.

The worker repaired the snapped stem, and a xed the new sphere in place, at the
top of the pole. The local icon nally restored, its stars and stripes were again
unfurled, rippling under a grey Newtown sky.

750
 78. Homecoming

June 1, 2013
My Place Restaurant — Newtown, Connecticut
The regulars all met early in the morning, for the long drive north.

Many in town had complicated feelings about Nancy Lanza, now that the initial
shock had faded somewhat, and more of the facts had come out. She was never a
doomsday prepper, nor was she a schoolteacher… nor was she ever as sick as she
sometimes claimed.

Of all the people she had deceived, the one who seems to have had the most
trouble accepting the reality — that she had been physically well, all along — was
her ex-husband. She and Peter had fought in their marriage, and even struggled
for power in the process of raising their son, but he had never dreamed that she
could have constructed such an elaborate fantasy, and maintained it for so long.
He told investigators he remembered her going for treatment, and her telling him
about her Multiple Sclerosis in detail. But nally, he went to the Child Advocate,
and “indicated that, af er further review of [Nancy’s] records,” it did not appear
that she was ever diagnosed with MS. The coroner didn’t nd any sign of it,
either.

Nancy was also the woman who had raised a monster, and armed him, and so
there were other townspeople who did not have complicated feelings about her
all: they were angry with her. Some hated her.

But those weren’t her My Place friends. The owners were planning on installing a
plaque on the back of Nancy’s old bar stool, in her memory. Her old friends
considered her the forgotten victim of that Friday morning six months before;
when President Obama spoke from Newtown High School in the days af er the
shooting, they turned on the television in the bar. A reporter from the Washington
Post was there, and when Obama said the number of victims, the reporter heard
some of the patrons correct the president, adding one; he had lef out Nancy.

751
Once they were all assembled that morning, they got in their cars and headed for
New Hampshire — for a town they’d seen in their mind’s eye so many times
before, listening to their friend talk about her old life on the farm.

First Congregational Church — Kingston, New Hampshire

The memorial service was closed to the public, but all who knew and loved Nancy
during her life were welcome. More than 100 came. The service was held in the
church where she attended Sunday school as a little girl. Ryan gave a speech,
sharing some memories of his mother; her siblings remembered how she used to
name the animals on their farm, and taste-test the cat food. There were bagpipes,
playing “Amazing Grace.” In the audience, her “My Place” friends wept.

At the end of the service, the doors to the old congregational church opened, and
a procession of Nancy’s family, and friends from throughout her life, began the
short walk to Greenwood Cemetery, just up the road. One of them held her
remains in an urn. The rest held roses — and one, in the other hand, carried a
violin; the woman played the instrument at Open Mic night at My Place, taking
requests, and she wanted to play Nancy’s song for her, one last time: “Here,
There, and Everywhere.”

Along the way, the mourners walked past what was once Sanborn Regional High
School. Its nal class had graduated years ago, and now the parking lot was
cracked and grown over with weeds. But one could still see, barely, the faded
outlines of the parking places, where the Volkswagen bugs lined up every morning
before the class bell, and where Nancy Champion stood one af ernoon, staring up
at a camera's lens, awaiting her grand adventure: with dreams of one day starting a
family, and with a spirit not yet tested by time.

752
 79. Fall

August 22, 2013

Riverview Gun Sales — East Windsor, Connecticut
“Federally licensed rearms dealers are our rst line of defense in making sure that
rearms don’t wind up in the wrong hands,” the acting U.S. Attorney told
reporters, before announcing the plea deal. As part of the day’s agreement,
Riverview — “one of Connecticut’s largest gun leaders” — was closing down. The
ATF’s investigation had uncovered hundreds of violations in the store’s record
keeping practices: some serial numbers corresponded to guns with dates-of-sale
from before NICS had given a “PROCEED”, while others weapons had been
stolen, and not reported so until months later.

But none of the serial numbers were L534858, the digits stamped on the barrel of a
Bushmaster XM15-E2S purchased three years before. That sale had been
completely above board — and apparently, even if it hadn’t been, there was a
decent chance it would have gone through anyway.

Fall 2013
Newtown, Connecticut
A father from Dunblane came down Church Hill Road in a rented car, passing
before the stone facade of Trinity Church. He was going to visit some families in
town. They were strangers — and yet, this man from across the Atlantic was one
of the most quali ed on earth to comprehend just what they were going through.

When he rst got the news of Sandy Hook, he was in a grocery store parking lot in
Scotland, with the radio on in his car. The bulletin came in: America. An
elementary school. A gunman. He turned it o f. He had decided to retire from gun
reform advocacy just the year before, and immediately knew this one was bad. But
eventually, despite his best e forts, he heard what happened in Newtown. “I had
this immediate fellow feeling with the people who were su fering.”

753
He attended a “Summit on Reducing Gun Violence in America” at Johns
Hopkins University, in Maryland, a few weeks af er it happened. More than 20 of
the world’s leading experts on gun policy were there, too. He gave them some
advice, and wished the Americans all the best in making meaningful changes to
their gun laws; but, as similar as the two tragedies were, he couldn’t help but
notice how much more modest the Americans were in their approach to
preventing the next one. Their recommendations — expanding background
checks, longer waiting periods, banning “assault weapons” — seemed ine fectual,
and, “I gradually felt that the discussion and the arguments were all being
hampered by having to say at the beginning of every speech, ‘Of course I believe in
the Second Amendment.’ That was restricting what anyone would say.”

Plus, there were 300 million guns in the country by that point. It wasn’t like the
UK in 1996. It wasn’t even like the US in 1996. The culture had changed.

He later went on CNN, not long af er Wayne LaPierre gave his “good guy with a
gun” speech at the hotel. The father from Dunblane wasn't impressed. He said he
didn’t see the logic in that approach. “The idea that because the problem is guns,
the answer is more guns, is simply ridiculous,” he said. “And I think it re ects
more that some people take every opportunity to expand the gun trade.”

September 16, 2013

Washington Navy Yard — Washington, D.C.
At 7:44am, the security gate at the front entrance raised, and a contractor drove
his car to his spot in the parking garage. Stepping out, he had a backpack over his
shoulder, and a security badge slung around his neck, with which he entered the
secure Building 197. He went up to the fourth oor, ducked into the men’s room,
and took a sawed-o f Remington 870 shotgun from his bag. When he came back
out, he opened re on everyone he saw; eventually, he was killed by police gun re.
They found that the shotgun in his hands had messages scratched into the stock:
“End to the torment!” and “My ELF weapon!” — but none of it made any sense.
He had purchased the shotgun legally.

President Obama spoke at a memorial service, at the Marine Barracks the

following week. “Alongside the accumulated outrage so many of us feel,
sometimes I fear there’s a creeping resignation that these tragedies are just
somehow the way it is, that this is somehow the new normal,” he said. “We can’t
accept this.”

754
October-December 2013
Sandy Hook, Connecticut
The demolition of Sandy Hook Elementary School began on October 25, 2013. It
was paid for by Connecticut. The erasing process was gradual, with the rubble
carried away in waves over a number of days, to be pulverized into dust.

***
On the rst anniversary of the tragedy, there would be a great blizzard falling as
re ghters went out to lower the ag at the crossroads to half-mast, in recognition
of the most di cult year in the village's history. Across town, where once a school
had stood, one would see nothing but a blank, white, plane, where a layer of
snow akes covered the ground.

December 13, 2013

Arapahoe High School — Centennial, Colorado
At approximately 12:33pm, an 18-year-old senior came running through the high
school’s lobby, wearing a black sweatshirt and carrying a Savage Arms 320
shotgun. He had a bandolier of shotgun shells strapped across his chest, another
around his waist, more shells in his backpack, and a molotov cocktail in his other
hand. He opened re on the students in the lobby, made his way into the library,
and threw the lit rebomb at a shelf full of books. Then he turned the shotgun on
himself. He had purchased it legally, one week before. The rst responders found
he had written a message on his lef forearm in black marker: Alea Iacta Est. “The
die has been cast.”

The school knew he had problems. They had even done a “threat assessment” on
him, but he was found to warrant only a “low level of concern.” Now, when the
police searched his computer at his home, they found he had googled Columbine
extensively, as well as Sandy Hook. (He apparently wanted to do it on the one-
year anniversary, but December 14th fell on a Saturday that year.) There was a le
entitled “diary of a madman.doc” on the hard drive, in which he had nalized his
plans — “I thought about shooting up the asylum or whatever the fuck it was that
my mother took me [to] for that psych evaluation” — plus some photos of him
posing with the gun and bandoliers. The whole attack lasted maybe a minute and
a half; he died a murderer in a burning school library just outside of Littleton, and
that was close enough to Columbine for him.

755
January 4, 2014
Honolulu, Hawaii
President Obama was on holiday vacation when he announced the new “executive
actions” he’d be taking on guns. He had already issued 25 such edicts, and the two
new ones were designed to improve background checks: the Department of
Justice was to propose a clari cation of the phrase “committed to a mental
institution,” to include involuntary outpatient commitments, and various
agencies would make changes to provide information about mental illness to
NICS more readily.

January 17, 2014

Cleveland Elementary School — Stockton, California
Some of the facilities around it were newer, fancier, but the old school still stood,
with the same basketball and tether-ball courts painted on the playground’s aging
pavement. It was the 25th anniversary of the Cleveland Elementary School
Shooting, and some of the surviving sta f and students were returning to the site
of the tragedy, so distant and yet still so clear in their memories. One man — who
had been just a child playing at recess that day — expressed his belief that, “These
crazy people targeted Cleveland School, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and other
places because schools are gun-free zones…. I rmly believe that if there had been a
police o cer on my campus that day or if there was somebody else trained to use a
rearm, that a lot of my classmates could have been saved because that incident
could have ended quickly.” He still had a bullet in his chest, from the Norinco
that the thin man red down on them from the tree line. Now 31, he had become
a policeman himself.

Meanwhile, the state senator who had championed the post-Stockton bill that
banned assault weapons in California, and spread the concept to more states in
the years af er, now re ected on the California legacy: “It has signi cantly reduced
gun violence, but obviously it hasn’t eliminated it all.”

February 2, 2014
Je erson County Sheri ’s O ce — Golden, Colorado
The sheri f was still getting the occasional disclosure request: when are you going
to release the footage? He had atly stated that the “basement tapes” were never
going to escape Je fco’s evidence locker, back when he released the Columbine
journals in 2006. But people just kept asking.

756
Finally, he decided to tell the whole story: that the basement tapes were no more.
Every copy of the toxic footage had already been destroyed. He told the Colorado
weekly newspaper Westword that he had simply decided to do all that he could to
“ensure the tapes don’t end up on YouTube.”

May 23, 2014

University of California — Santa Barbara
Another clip appeared on YouTube: “Well, this is my last video. It all has to come
to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day I will have my revenge against
humanity, against all of you.” The young man promised to invade “the hottest
sorority house at UCSB” and kill every college girl there.

He laughed, envisioning it. But the laughter came o f as forced; it was all a
performance. The video itself was really part of the attack.

He had posted disturbing videos before, if not quite like this one. Just a month
earlier, his mother had seen one and called police, who came to his apartment for a
wellness check. But he had told the deputies that he just “made the videos as a way
to express himself because he was lonely and did not have any friends.” He was
calm, and polite, and the deputies determined that he did not meet the criteria for
an involuntary 72-hour hold.

This “last video” he uploaded was di ferent. He had actually recorded it the day
before, having planned the events carefully: he had waited for his roommates to
come home that morning, separately, and then stabbed each of them to death, in
their bedrooms. (It didn't require any prowess as a warrior on his part, of course;
an organism as pathetic as he was always had the element of surprise.) He then
uploaded his video to YouTube from his laptop, with the title “My Retribution.”
Then he took his 9mm Glock 34 and Sig Sauer P226R pistols (both purchased
legally) and drove to a sorority house near the campus of UCSB.

Sorority members heard him pounding on the door, but they didn’t open it; af er
a few seconds, they heard gun re outside — him shooting at just whoever
happened to be around, totally impotent when faced with a simple, deadbolted
door. The shooter then gave up, and got in the BMW his parents had bought for
him, and sped through Isla Vista, periodically stopping to shoot at pedestrians, or
to swerve into bicyclists. The police gave chase, and he lost control, and crashed
his car. Then he took his own life.

Online, the shooter had been oating around the “Pick Up Artist” scene, traveling
much the same path that the “How to Date Young Women” sof ware engineer
had in 2009, before he drove to LA Fitness with his Glock. The Santa Barbara

757
shooter had even frequented the same bodybuilding forum, and he had his own
lengthy “manifesto” online, too — “Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals,
and they need to be treated as such” — a document which ABC News then re-
published, in its entirety.

It might not have even mattered anymore, that a national news service held an
un ltered bullhorn up to a mass murderer; it was 2014, and the internet would
never forget anything again, and so anyone could access the data the shooter lef
behind, anytime they wanted. Sure enough, before the sun had even set on Santa
Barbara, the creature had a growing community of fans: online, angry, and always
alone.

June 10, 2014

The White House — State Dining Room
President Obama hosted a special Q&A session on student loan debt: the host
was David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, and he was reading questions for the
president that were submitted by Tumblr users. One of them turned out to be an
RA from the building where the Santa Barbara shooter had lived; he was friends
with the roommates there, the rst victims. “What are you going to do?” he asked
the president. “What can we all do?”

Obama nodded, grimly. “People of en ask me, how has it been being President,
and what are my — what am I proudest of and what are my biggest
disappointments,” he said. “And I’ve got 2½ years lef . My biggest frustration so
far is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep
guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage. We’re the
only developed country on Earth where this happens, and it happens now once a
week. And it’s a 1-day story. There’s no place else like this.”

He talked about some of the things he had tried to do, and would continue trying
to do with guns. “A lot of people will say that, well, this is a mental health
problem, it’s not a gun problem... the United States does not have a monopoly on
crazy people.” The crowd chuckled. “It’s not the only country that has psychosis.
And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially
higher than anyplace else. Well, what’s the di ference? The di ference is, is that
these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses, and that’s sort of
par for the course.”

758
August 5, 2014
Centralia, Illinois
That summer, James Brady, the press secretary injured in the attempt on President
Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981, and the namesake of the Brady Bill that created
NICS, died at his home at the age of 73. When the coroner’s report came out, it
listed the cause of death as “homicide.”

Two years later, his killer would be released from Saint Elizabeths Hospital. He is
no longer considered a danger to society.

October 24, 2014

Marysville-Pilchuck High School — Marysville, Washington
State
Five of the 15-year-old’s closest friends had gotten text messages from him that
morning, telling them to meet him in the cafeteria. When he walked in, they were
all seated there, at a circular table. Suddenly, he drew a .40-caliber Beretta PX4
Storm handgun, and shot everyone at the table.

A social studies teacher heard the shots, and ran toward the gunman as he was
reloading, but before they could reach him, he turned the weapon on himself. (It
was his father’s gun; the man would tell police he usually kept it in his truck.)

The gunman was not an outcast, or a loner — he had been nominated

homecoming prince just weeks before — and he lef a note behind, explaining
that he was not even angry with his friends. “I didn’t want to go alone. I needed
them on the other side.”

The school reopened, a week-and-a-half later. News stories had reported on how
the school was located near tribal land, and that the victims were members of the
region’s Tulalip tribe; af er the school day was over, a short ceremony was held at
the school district’s headquarters, highlighted by a performance of drummers and
singers from the Red Lake Indian Reservation, all the way in Minnesota. They
joined hands with the town’s leaders, and danced in a circle. Then, a teacher from
Newtown Middle School came forward, with a special gif that some of the older
representatives from Red Lake surely recognized: the dreamcatcher that had come
to them from Columbine, and that they had in turn given to Newtown. Now
passing it on to Marysville, the teacher from Newtown told them, “It’s our hope
that you should never need to pass it on to another community.” The same hope
had been communicated to them, from Red Lake. But it didn't come true.

759
December 15, 2014
State Capitol Complex — Hartford, Connecticut
Two years af er the Sandy Hook shooting, just as the statute of limitations for
such actions was passing, a group of families from Newtown led their lawsuit:
against Bushmaster Firearms, Remington Arms, Freedom Group, Camfour, and
Riverview Gun Sales. Though the AR-15 used in the Sandy Hook shooting had
been purchased legally by the shooter’s mother, and though the Protection of
Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was in place to protect all of the defendants from
such liability actions, the families were suing under two of the six exceptions in
the law.

The rst was “negligent entrustment”: Such an exception typically applies in a

scenario where a gun buyer was known to be dangerous, to the person or business
involved in the sale, but the sale went through anyway. In this case, the families
would be arguing that it was negligent for each of the businesses to take a weapon
designed for the military, and entrust it to the public at large. The AR-15 was
irresponsible to sell, to any civilian.

The families were also suing under a second exception in the shield law, for cases
where a manufacturer or seller commits a violation "applicable to the sale or
marketing of the product, and the violation was a proximate cause of the harm for
which relief is sought." They wanted to hold Bushmaster responsible for the way
they sold the AR-15: all the talk of a "man card" one can only secure by owning one
of their ARs, or their advertising slogan, "Forces of opposition, bow down. You
are single-handedly outnumbered." These and other examples, the families
argued, showed that the weapon was marketed "in an unethical, oppressive,
immoral, and unscrupulous manner by extolling the militaristic and assaultive
qualities of the ri e and reinforcing the image of the ri e as a combat weapon that
is intended to be used for the purposes of waging war and killing human beings."

Immediately, the NSSF got to work on a legal brief — urging the court to dismiss
the case, and raising their shield to protect the businesses who pro ted from the
sale of L534858.

January 12, 2015

National Shooting Sports Foundation — Newtown, Connecticut
The crowd had grown. Two hundred people stood outside of NSSF headquarters,
holding signs and cheering at passing cars, who honked their horns back to show
support — but for which side, exactly, it was di cult to tell.

On one end of the street, the signs read “PROTECT KIDS NOT GUNS” and
“NOT ONE MORE!”

760
The signs on the other end of the street looked identical in style, but bore
countervailing messages: “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” and “BEEP IF YOU
LOVE GUNS.”

The organizer of the anti-NSSF side, a local political leader, was there. She had
been in Newtown a long time; when the townspeople assembled to consider the
purchase of the Fair eld Hills campus, fourteen years before, she had been the one
to step from the crowd, and nally call for the vote to be counted: “We don’t want
to be here all night.” Now, she wanted to spur another, much larger crowd, to take
much bigger actions. She knew it was going to take time. Two years had already
passed since Sandy Hook, and she wasn’t giving up. When the sun set, and the
crowd thinned, she was still at her post.

Behind her, most of the windows in the small o ce building were dark; she had
scheduled the protest to coincide with the NSSF’s annual SHOT show, then going
on in Las Vegas. The trade organization was busy; gun sales had fallen back down
from the post-Sandy Hook peak, but they would remain high under Obama.
There were deals to be made, and new guns and accessories to unveil.

Still, the woman holding the sign was determined. She had sent a letter to the
Newtown Bee that week: “The conversation has changed since the Sandy Hook
tragedy. We are on the right side of history.”

A car passed by. Their horn sounded.

***
Just around the corner, and at the end of a long meadow, there was an oval shape
that had been cleared from the farmland many years before. It had once been the
campus of a mental hospital, and now, it was mostly empty buildings, and empty
space — but at the east end of the property, still new and green, a baseball
diamond was groomed, and ready. Sign-up sheets had just been posted for the
coming season, and soon, the townspeople would be listening for an old, familiar
sound: the crack of the bat, and the start of another game.

761
 80. Light

March 24, 2015

36 Yogananda — Sandy Hook, Connecticut
A heavy industrial backhoe came rolling up Yogananda Street, on a clear, bright
morning. The machine let out a pu f of diesel exhaust, as its treads came to a stop
at the bottom of the long, winding, driveway that led up to the pale yellow house
with the forest-green shutters.

The house had been boarded up for months. There was a padlock on the door,
and yellow caution tape strung around the trunks of the trees that lined the
property’s edge. But otherwise, it looked much the same as it had before: a wreath
from two Christmases ago still hung over the doorway, and the lawn had been
freshly mowed every week, by landscapers paid from the estate’s co fers.

The family’s surviving son had been allowed inside, a few days af er it had all
happened, and af er the FBI and the forensics team had all completed their tasks
there. He took a few mementos from what was lef behind, and locked the door as
he lef . Not long af er, he agreed to give up the house for the price of $1, its deed
then passing on to Hudson Bank. The place had been empty ever since.

Every once in awhile, the neighbors would see drivers from out of town slowing
down on Yogananda Street, to gawk as they passed by. But the voyeurs always lef
with the same disappointment: there was little to see from the street, with the
house all the way at the back of the lot, at the top of the hill.

One night, the police came out because the burglar alarm detected a break-in at
the house; it didn’t appear that anything was taken.

Still, for those who lived in the neighborhood, and the rest of the townspeople,
the house was a constant reminder of the disaster that originated there, and of
everything taken from them in its path.

762
 ***
The demolition company had o fered to do the job for free. Workers had pulled
everything out earlier in the week — furniture, personal items, rugs, all of it —
and had the whole mess of it incinerated, so there would be no macabre souvenirs
lef out there in the world.

The wrecking machine reached the top of the hill. It raised its huge claw up, and
the treads revved forward, up to the northern face of the house. A lever was
shif ed, a hydraulic hissed, and the steel teeth came crashing down.

The machine ripped through the roof, and pulled the master bedroom down into
the garage. Its claw raised again, and plunged down through the main stairway.

The machine crept forward, into the chewed-away living room. The claw raised
again.

For a fraction of a second, in the darkness, it was just a single beam of light that
poured through. Then a great crashing sound, and nally, the sunlight burst in,
lling the darkened cave at the top of the stairs. The two rooms were cleaved in
half — then fell into splinters, and dust.

Finally, the last of the pale yellow house was ripped away, as the chimney came
tumbling down, the stacked bricks now collapsing onto the pile of rubble.

The mechanical jaws opened, and the machine’s arm carried the ruins, in pieces,
over to a waiting dump truck. When the pile was cleared, workers with
jackhammers pulverized the foundation, and then the last of the rubble was
loaded up; the truck rolled down the driveway, turned on Yogananda street, and
carried what was lef of the house out of sight, over the hill, to someplace far away
from Sandy Hook.

The lot had been a gif to Newtown, from the bank. It had been up to the
townspeople to decide what to do with it. And it was the town's rst selectman
who announced its fate: that af er the pale yellow house was nally gone, the two
acres under it would be leveled, and new grass planted where the house once
stood. But beyond this, the property would be lef untouched — so that someday,
with the passage of time, the land might return to its natural state.

763
THE END

764
 Epilogue: New Horizon

(Author's note: The following events occurred a er the rst dra s of The Sheltered
Storm were nished, in mid-2015 — when the story's timeline stopped.
Throughout the four years of additional research, editing, rewriting, and periodic
stretches of abandoning the project that followed, events continued to unfold in the
background. What follows here is not meant to be any sort of exhaustive list of the
attacks that occurred in that time, but simply re ects what the author observed of
the latest waves, as they passed overhead, along with developments in several of
the cases related to the Sandy Hook story, and other relevant events.)

***
June 15, 2015 — Charleston, SC: A 21-year-old male attacks worshipers at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church with a Glock 41 handgun, purchased legally.
He ees the scene, and is later arrested. Police learn that he is a white supremacist,
who had radicalized himself online. On his personal website, before the attack, he
announced that it was his intention to start a race war.

July 23, 2015 — Lafayette, LA: A 56-year-old male stands up during a showing of
the lm Trainwreck at the Grand 16 Multiplex, and begins ring into the audience
with a .40-caliber Hi-Point handgun. He then shoots himself. Authorities nd a
40-page journal he lef behind that describes his white supremacist beliefs, and
which includes a message to the Charleston shooter: “Thank you for the wake-up
call.” A review of the shooter's psychological history reveals that in 2008, a judge
had issued an order sending him to a psychiatric hospital — but for unknown
reasons, he was released from the facility before a judge could formally rule on his
mental competence, so he was still able to legally purchase a handgun.

July 30, 2015 — Denver, CO: A federal judge dismisses the lawsuit led by families
of the Aurora shooting victims, against the ammunition dealers that had sold
thousands of bullets to the shooter. The decision to dismiss cites the Protection of

765
Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The families are forced to pay $200,000 to the
ammunition company, for their attorneys’ fees.

August 25, 2015 — Moneta, VA: A disgruntled former WDBJ news reporter
attacks an anchor and cameraman (two of his former colleagues) during an
interview they are lming at the Bridgewater Marina near Roanoke. The attack is
broadcast on live television. Later, the gunman uploads a video to Facebook,
showing his rst-person view of the shooting. He eventually shoots himself, in his
car, af er running from police. He leaves behind a “manifesto” in which he
proudly states that he was “in uenced” by the Virginia Tech and Columbine
shooters. He describes his own emotional spiral, before concluding “and then,
af er the unthinkable happened in Charleston, THAT WAS IT!!!”

September 16, 2015 — Simi Valley, CA: During a televised presidential primary
debate at the Ronald Reagan Library, mass shootings are discussed. All candidates
express support for the 2nd Amendment. During an exchange later in the evening,
several candidates make reference to sensational claims then circulating on
YouTube, that abortion provider Planned Parenthood was “selling the body parts
of unborn children for pro t.”

October 1, 2015 — Roseburg, OR: A 26-year-old man enters Umpqua

Community College, where he was once a student, carrying six guns. He enters a
classroom and begins shooting. He asks some of his victims if they “believe in
god.” He exchanges re brie y with police before taking his own life. Online, he
had written about the news anchor shooter, “I have noticed that so many people
like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole
world knows who they are.” He also wrote that “I long ago realized that society
likes to deny people like me these things. People who are elite, people who stand
with the gods,” and he named others like him: the shooters from Virginia Tech,
Columbine, WDBJ, Santa Barbara, and Sandy Hook. He lived with his mother,
who had written online about her son supposedly having Asperger’s disorder, and
about their guns: “I keep two full mags in my Glock case. And the ARs & AKs all
have loaded mags. No one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without
acknowledgement.”

November 27, 2015 — Colorado Springs, CO: A 57-year-old man, wearing a

homemade ballistic vest fashioned out of layers of silver coins and duct tape,
enters a Planned Parenthood with a semi-automatic AK-47 ri e, and starts
shooting. When police arrive, he shoots at them (and at propane tanks that he had
placed in the parking lot, which do not explode). He eventually surrenders, telling
the arresting o cers, “No more baby parts.” He is later judged mentally
incompetent to stand trial, and is con ned to a state mental hospital. He
purchased his weapon legally.

766
December 2, 2015 - San Bernardino, CA: Two terrorists — a husband and wife —
attack an o ce building, the Inland Regional Center, where an event for
employees of the state's Environmental Health Department (of which the
husband was one) was being held. Both are armed with an AR-15. (Although
California's laws were by then supposed to ban such weapons, since ARs use a
detachable magazine, the two ARs in question actually were each equipped with a
"bullet button," in which the magazine release is recessed so that one can not press
it "by hand," and instead must use a simple tool, such as the tip of a bullet. This
distinction made the guns legal per the wording of the California law.) The
shooters are eventually killed in a shootout with police. They appeared to have
been inspired by the terrorist group Al aeda, though they were not directly
connected to any group, and were instead radicalized online.

December 18, 2015 — Manhattan, NY: Cerberus, the investment rm that owns
Bushmaster as part of its Freedom Group, announces that it will not be selling its
holdings in gun companies, af er all. They were unable to nd a buyer for the
price they wanted, and the companies were still very pro table.

December 31, 2015 — Washington, DC: On New Year’s Eve, faced with a
deadlocked Congress, President Obama announces his latest series of executive
measures against gun violence: strengthening background checks, hiring more
ATF agents to enforce existing laws, proposing a $500 million investment toward
improving access to mental health care, and declaring “Smart Gun” technology a
federal priority. “If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve
got the right ngerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?”

February 20, 2016 — Kalamazoo, MI: A series of seemingly-random shootings

scattered around the Kalamazoo area one af ernoon are found to be the actions of
an armed Uber driver, who is opening re on both his fares and random
pedestrians from his car, and then driving away. Once he is nally located and
arrested, he tells police that he did it because a "devil gure" had appeared in the
Uber app on his smartphone, and controlled him. He used two handguns in the
attack, and had 14 more guns at home. He purchased all of them legally. He pleads
insanity, but just when jury selection for his trial is about to begin, he changes his
plea to guilty, and accepts a sentence of life in prison.

***
As a direct result of the shooting, the State of Michigan introduces a new alert
system — similar to the AMBER alert for missing children — that can interrupt
TV and radio broadcasts and send noti cations to every mobile phone in a given
geographic area, to notify the public if a mass shooting is in progress.

767
March 12, 2016 — Dunblane, UK: As the 20th anniversary of the Dunblane
shooting approaches, a father from Dunblane grants an interview to the Daily
Record. The reporter asks him if he believes Sandy Hook will have a similar impact
on gun laws in the US. He answers no. “Their blinkered and uncritical support of
gun rights means that the problem will never go away.” He has resigned himself to
the belief that “the horror at the mass killing of children and teachers, the
sympathy for their families, were the same as we’d experienced. The legacy was
not.”

April 21, 2016 — Portland ME: Detectives from Brook eld, Connecticut arrest a
former psychologist, Paul Fox, at his home on Peaks Island. He is charged with
three counts of second-degree sexual assault, as a result of “a sexual relationship
with an adult patient while he was a practicing psychiatrist in Brook eld” in 2010
and 2011. He had lost his job in New Zealand in 2014, when the hospital he
worked at learned that he had surrendered his license in Connecticut — and why.
He eventually pleads guilty, and accepts a 7-year prison sentence (to be suspended
af er serving eighteen months, with good behavior.) As of this writing, Fox is
incarcerated at Cheshire Correctional Institution, a few towns east of Sandy
Hook. He will be required to register as sex o fender upon release.

June 20, 2016 — Orlando, FL: A 29-year-old man, radicalized online, pledges
allegiance to the terrorist group ISIS, and attacks Pulse, a gay nightclub in
Orlando, shortly af er midnight. He is armed with a SIG Sauer MCX ri e — a
variant of the AR-15 — and a Glock 17 handgun. It is the deadliest mass shooting
in American history.

***
In the hours af er the Pulse shooting, a series of gun control measures
coincidentally are before the United States Senate. One bill would expand
background checks, another would close the Gun Show Loophole, and another
would ban gun sales to anyone on the “Terrorist Watch List.” All of the measures
fail. One senator from Connecticut tells reporters, “I’m morti ed by today’s vote
but I’m not surprised by it. The NRA has a vice-like grip on this place.”

July 22, 2016 — Munich, Germany: An 18-year-old male is seated at a McDonald's

restaurant, waiting for people to respond to the Facebook invitations he'd sent
out (from a fake pro le) promising free food. Af er about an hour passes, with no
one showing up, he draws his Glock 17 pistol, shoots a table full of teenagers, goes
outside, and walks toward the nearby shopping mall, shooting pedestrians along
the way. He shoots more people inside the mall, and ultimately turns the gun on
himself when police confront him. Af er the authorities identify him and search
the home where he lived with his parents, they nd numerous writings obsessing

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over mass shootings, including a "scrapbook" of news stories. A review of his
psychological history shows he had been treated for depression, anxiety, and
PTSD, and spent two months in an inpatient mental health facility. He had been
bullied, verbally and physically, for years, and earlier on the day of the shooting,
wrote on his computer, "the bullying will be paid back today." It was also the f h
anniversary of the attack in Norway, which the shooter was particularly xated on.
Authorities could not de nitively state how he obtained the handgun he used —
which appeared to have been disabled and converted into a prop for a theater
production at some point, and then "reactivated" — but they believe he obtained
it online.

September 28, 2016 — Townville, SC: A fourteen-year-old boy brings a handgun

to his old elementary school, and opens re on the students on the playground.
He surrenders when a re ghter confronts him. He got the gun from his father's
nightstand, and shot his stepfather with it before driving to the school in the
man’s truck. The shooter later tells police he had been a member of a private
Instagram community dedicated to school shootings — especially Columbine,
which happened before he was even born — and that the other users there had
encouraged him to do it. A week before the shooting, he had posted about the
Sandy Hook shooter: “I HAVE TO BEAT HIM...”

A few weeks af er the attack, an object arrives from Marysville-Pilchuck High

School in Washington, with Townville now the latest stop on its journey: a
dreamcatcher.

October 14, 2016 — Hartford, CT: A state judge dismisses the lawsuit against
Remington and other companies associated with the sale of the AR-15 used at
Sandy Hook, citing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

November 8, 2016: Donald Trump is elected President of the United States.

January 20, 2017: The presidency of Barack Obama ends. No signi cant federal
gun legislation was signed into law during his administration.

March 1, 2017: The Sandy Hook families appeal their case against Remington to
the Connecticut State Supreme Court, seeking to have the lawsuit reinstated.

June 8, 2017, Eaton Township, PA: A 24-year-old male brings two (legally
purchased) shotguns to his night job, stocking shelves at a grocery store. He opens
re on his co-workers, then takes his own life. Af er police identify him, they
discover that he had been obsessed with Columbine and other mass shootings. He
had been an active user of the "Super Columbine Massacre RPG Discussion
Forum," in its then-current form, and on his social media accounts, he had posted

769
videos and journals documenting his plans in great detail, months ahead. Nobody
reported it; but it's not clear anyone was watching in the rst place.

June 14, 2017 — San Francisco, CA: During a morning meeting at a UPS facility, a
38-year-old male who had been an employee there for 18 years enters the meeting
room with two handguns, and opens re on his co-workers, before taking his own
life. The gunman had a DUI on his record, and so should not have been able to
pass a background check, but he never took one; the two guns he used were both
stolen, one from Utah and one from California, and the police are never able to
determine how he came into possession of either.

Later that day — Alexandria, VA: At a baseball park just across the Potomac River
from the capital, 24 congressmen (as well as others) are practicing for a charity
game scheduled for the following day, when a 66-year-old man opens re on them
from behind the third-base dugout with an SKS ri e (purchased legally). The
gunman exchanges re with police, before he is killed. A congressman, an aide, a
police o cer, and a lobbyist are wounded, but all survive. The gunman was an
unemployed man experiencing nancial trouble, and he had resented President
Trump's party, and their position against raising taxes on the rich, for years.

June 30, 2017 — The Bronx, NY: A 45-year-old former doctor, who had been
forced to resign from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital two years before due to sexual
harassment allegations, returns to the hospital with an AM-15 (a brand of AR-15)
hidden under his white lab coat. He goes up to the 16th oor nurse's station,
where he used to treat patients, and confronts a former co-worker, shouting,
"Why didn’t you help me out when I was getting in trouble?” as he raises his
weapon. He opens re on doctors, nurses, and patients alike. He then takes his
own life. He had purchased the gun legally; although charged with a handful of
crimes over the years (each stemming from his abusive behavior toward women),
he was never convicted, and so he passed a background check. It is later discovered
that he had e-mailed a local newspaper just before the attack, blaming the hospital
for his ring: "First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was
because of an altercation with a nurse.”

September 5, 2017 — Ivanteevka, Russia: A 15-year-old student brings an axe and

an air-powered ri e to school ( rearms are strictly controlled in Russia), and
attacks a teacher, and several classmates. All survive. He is arrested, and an
investigation nds that he had become xated on the Columbine shootings
(which occurred before he was born, on the other side of the planet) and had
frequently told his classmates that he wanted to attack the school. On social
media, he was a member of several groups dedicated to Columbine, and he had
changed his display name to match one of the Columbine shooters.

770
October 1, 2017 — Las Vegas, NV: A 64-year-old gambler books a luxury suite on
the 32nd oor of a golden hotel on the Las Vegas strip. The hotel sta f bring his
luggage up to his room, unaware that the stacks of suitcases contain fourteen AR-
15 ri es — most tted with 100-round magazines and “bump-stocks” to increase
their ring rate — along with several other rearms. He waits until a music festival
begins at the outdoor venue across the street, and then he knocks out the window
of his hotel room with a mallet, and res out at the packed concert crowd for
about ten minutes, before taking his own life as police close in. It is the deadliest
mass shooting American history. There is no known motive, but the FBI would
determine that among the likely factors in the shooter's decision were his declining
mental and physical health, his "desire to die by suicide" as well as his "desire to
attain a certain degree of infamy via a mass casualty attack," and the "minimal
empathy" he had displayed throughout his life.

***
As a result of the Las Vegas shooting, the Trump administration announces a
national ban on bump stocks, which eventually (af er the Supreme Court declined
to hear an appeal from manufacturers) goes into e fect in March 2019. All of the
other items used in the Las Vegas attack remain legal to sell.

November 5, 2017 — Sutherland Springs, TX: A 26-year-old male, dressed in

black body armor, with a black helmet on his head and a black visor over his face,
and with a well-documented history of violence, attacks the First Baptist Church
of Sutherland Springs. He is probably targeting his mother-in-law, who of en
worships there; he may not know that she is attending a di ferent church on that
particular day. Either way, he shoots everyone there he can. It is the worst mass
shooting in Texas state history — worse than the tower sniper in '66, worse than
Luby's in '92. It is also the worst church shooting in American history. The
gunman’s choice of weapon is a Ruger SR-556.

A former-NRA instructor named Stephen Willeford, who lived around the

corner from the church, hears the shots, and responds to the scene with his own
AR-15. When the shooter hears Stephen call out from the front of the church, he
stops his attack, and exits to confront the man. The two exchange gun re, and the
shooter is wounded, then ees back to his car, and takes o f.

Stephen looks over to a nearby intersection, and sees a man named Johnnie
Langendor f, a stranger to him, stopped in a pickup truck at a red light. Stephen
runs over and shouts, “That guy just shot up the church! We need to stop him.”
Langendor f obliges, Stephen hops in the truck, and they race af er the shooter,
updating police on the phone as to their position all the way. Soon, losing blood
and with police closing in, the shooter swerves o f the road into a ditch, and a few
seconds later, takes his own life.

771
The shooter had purchased his weapon at a gun store, and passed a background
check — but he shouldn’t have. He had been in the Air Force and was court-
martialed in 2013 for assaulting his wife and stepson. A later investigation nds
that the Air Force failed to transfer any of the disqualifying information found in
that investigation and conviction to the FBI, a violation of standard procedures.
The 2017 investigation also nds that when the gunman was in the brig, awaiting
sentencing, his commander had documented that he was “convinced” that the
accused was “dangerous and likely to harm someone if released.” He also noted
that the man had searched the internet for body armor, and rearms. The
shooter’s psychiatric les, from his one-year sentence, note that he had multiple
“homicidal and suicidal indicators.” Over the course of these and other
proceedings, the 2017 report found, there were six distinct points when the Air
Force ngerprinted (or should have ngerprinted) the shooter, and each time,
they were required to send the prints to the FBI. But they failed to do so all six
times.

In response to criticisms, however, the Pentagon counters that the dealer who sold
the gun was actually at fault, too: the gunman had bought the SR-556, with a
high-capacity magazine, in Texas. Such magazines were legal there, but the shooter
had presented a Colorado ID. High-capacity magazines were restricted in
Colorado, and the gun shop was supposed to abide by the laws of the state where
the buyer was a resident. But they forgot.

November 13, 2017 — Rancho Tehama Reserve, CA: A 44-year-old man drives a
stolen truck through the rural area where he lives, shooting random drivers and
pedestrians with a semi-automatic “ghost ri e” (assembled from parts, with no
actual model or serial number), before arriving at nearby Rancho Tehama
Elementary school, a place he had no connection to at all. He is wearing a load-
bearing vest stu fed with multiple high-capacity magazines, and also has two
handguns (one his, the other his wife’s, both purchased legally). He tries to open
the doors to the school — but the sta f had heard him coming, and put the school
on lockdown. He spends about six minutes riddling the outside of the school with
bullets, shooting at any adults that come near the scene, and struggling repeatedly
to open the door to the kindergarten, but he nally gives up, gets back in his
stolen vehicle, and drives around shooting more random people in town. He
crashes the truck, carjacks a sedan, and shoots more people, before police catch up
to him and ram his vehicle o f the road. Af er a brief shootout, he turns his gun on
himself.

When they identify him and search his house, the police nd his wife, whom he
had shot the night before. The neighbors down the street are also shot dead in
their homes. They had led a restraining order against him af er an incident earlier
in the year, when he shot at and punched one of them, then stabbed one of their

772
guests. He had been arrested, posted bail, and his trial was set to begin in two
months. The charges meant that he was supposed to have surrendered all of his
rearms. He had turned in one handgun, and said it was all he owned. And, in the
words of the Tehama County Sheri f, "The justice system relies on the honor
system."

Deputies had been called to his property 21 times over the years, and his neighbors
had called police to report he was still shooting on his property af er he was
supposed to have surrendered all of his guns. But he was not a felon (having only
been charged with a felony, not yet convicted) and they did not have a warrant, so
they could not search, and they never caught him in the act. “He was not law
enforcement friendly," the sheri f later explained. "He would not come to the
door. You have to understand we can’t anticipate what people are going to do. We
don’t have a crystal ball.”

His sister would tell the Sacramento Bee that he had "no business" owning guns,
and had "struggled with mental illness throughout his life and at times had a
violent temper.” In recent months, he seemed almost “possessed or demonic.” But
it does not appear that he had ever been diagnosed.

December 7, 2017 — Aztec, NM: A 21-year-old male enters Aztec High School,
where he was once a student, and opens re on students and sta f with a Glock
9mm handgun, which he had purchased legally the month before. He was known
for wearing a trench coat to school, and had been suspended in 2012 for
“memorializing the Columbine school shooting” by “writing a schedule of the
shooting on a classroom whiteboard.” He dropped out soon af er that. In the
years since, he had been living with his father, and working night shif s at a local
gas station. Mostly, he spent his time online, obsessing over mass shooters and
playing video games (of en under a username that was just the Sandy Hook
shooter’s full name, or “Future Mass Shooter”). One of his online posts —
something to the e fect of “ "If you're going to commit a mass shooting, does
anyone know about cheap assault ri es?" — was reported to the FBI in 2016, and
the bureau investigated him; he told the agents he was just trolling. They
ultimately closed the case, because “the man did not have a gun and did not
commit a crime.”

In other instances when he “leaked” his intentions online, the other users
encouraged him. Af er his shooting, investigators found he had even
communicated online with the 2016 Munich shooter, via Steam. Then, just before
he lef for the school on the morning of December 7, he had posted to a gaming
forum he frequented that he was going to "hold a class hostage and go apeshit,"
before turning the gun on himself. "Work sucks, school sucks, life sucks."

773
January 15, 2018 — Perm, Russia: A 10th-grade student at School No. 127, in a
frigid city on the eastern edge of Siberia, arrives at the campus joined by a friend, a
former student there who dropped out. They go to a 4th grade classroom, draw
knives, and start attacking students and teachers, then themselves. Everyone
survives. The attackers are later found to have been members, on social media, of
an “online community that published videos about armed attacks on schools,
made reposts, and posted photographs.” These were the same communities that
the axe attacker from the year before had followed, and their main focus, always,
was Columbine.

January 19, 2018 — Buryatia, Russia: Four days later, still another attack in Russia,
in a village in southern Siberia: this time, the attacker is a 9th grader, wearing a
KMFDM shirt, and they use molotov cocktails and an axe in the course of their
assault. Again, everyone survives. But the nation is rattled by the horri c week of
Columbine-inspired violence; it is announced that the country's federal internet
watchdog agency, Roskomnadzor, would begin monitoring "Columbine
Communities," and legislation would be draf ed that summer "banning access to
web communities that promote suicide or describe various ways of committing
suicide, as well as to groups that glorify perpetrators of school attacks and help
their members prepare and execute similar acts of violence."

January 23, 2018 — Benton, KY: A 15-year-old student at Marshall County High
School brings a Ruger .22 handgun (obtained from his stepfather’s unlocked gun
safe the night before) into the commons at his high school, and opens re on
random classmates. When he runs out of ammunition, he drops the gun and tries
to blend in with the crowd of eeing students, but he is soon identi ed, and
arrested. He later tells police that he committed the shooting as an “experiment,”
because he “wanted to see how students would respond, how police would
respond, how society at large would respond to it.” When asked why he would
even want to conduct such an experiment, he said “his life had no purpose and
other people’s lives also had no purpose.”

February 14, 2017 — Parkland, FL: On Valentine’s Day, an Uber drops o f a 19-
year-old male at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. As he approaches one
of the large school buildings on foot, he is carrying a long, black, bag.

The school had actually done a threat assessment on him, about a year and a half
before, when he was a student, but they determined he was not a threat; which
was odd, because the school district’s “disciplinary referral system” noted at least
55 incidents under his name. And the threat assessment process itself was initiated
because he had “threatened self-harm” right around the time of his 18th birthday.
Just six months before that, an acquaintance of his family had called the Broward
Sheri ’s O ce to report that he had posted a picture of himself with a gun,

774
accompanied by the caption “I am going to get this gun when I turn 18 and shoot
up the school.” The image was gone when a deputy went to verify the report,
though, so they just referred the report to MSD’s School Resource O cer.

The 19-year-old had dropped out shortly af er the threat assessment, and soon,
bought himself an AR-15.

In November 2018, just three months before the Uber dropped him o f back at
the school, his mother died; within weeks of that, two di ferent friends of hers had
contacted the Broward Sheri ’s O ce, expressing concern that the now-orphaned
teen “has weapons and wanted to joing the military to kill people,” and “might be
a Columbine in the making,” and was a suicide risk. But they didn’t know where
he was staying, and he hadn’t committed a crime, so the deputy didn’t do
anything with the information.

There had even been a tip sent to the FBI about him, by a total stranger who just
happened to see a comment from the young man on a YouTube video, saying
“I’m going to be the next school shooter.” He had written the comment under his
own, legal name. But the FBI only documented that they were not able to identify
the person who lef it, and they did not subpoena the information from
Google/YouTube.

Not only that, a second person contacted the FBI about the young man, just a
month before Valentine’s Day. He was another friend of the young man’s deceased
mother, and told the FBI he “had become increasingly concerned about postings
[he] was making on Instagram and feared he would actually follow through on
threats to harm others by perpetrating a school shooting.” He provided
information about the young man’s gun purchases, his anger issues, his Instagram
account names and the pictures he’d posted of animal mutilations, and nally, the
name, address and phone number of the family he was staying with. However,
despite this detailed report — and for reasons that have yet to be explained — the
FBI didn’t do anything with the information.

Theoretically, if the FBI had initiated surveillance on the young man who was just
brought to their attention, they would have seen cause for concern in his internet
activity during the months leading up to Valentine’s Day 2018, as later
documented in search warrants:

Searched “shooting people massacre”

Accessed the song “Pumped Up Kicks”
Searched “is killing people easy”
Visited website “Psychcentral.com: Homicidal
Thoughts and Urges”
Searched “reckloose (recluse)”

775
 Visited Wikipedia article: “Red Lake Senior High
School (MN)”
Viewed “Videos made by Virginia Tech shooter”
Searched “Columbine diary”
Visited website about “Columbine/Pumped Up Kicks”
Searched “How long does it take for a cop to show
up at a school shooting”

He had also searched for information about the Kentucky school shooter from
the month before — as well as one in Finland, from all the way back in 2009.

On his phone, he had recorded several videos of himself, talking about what he
was going to do, as was later played on the news: “I live a lone life, live in seclusion
and solitude. I hate everyone and everything. With the power of my AR you will
all know who I am.”

***
The school’s sta f, on Valentine’s Day 2018, don't know about all that. They have
only a tiny fraction of the full picture. However, one of the campus monitors,
patrolling the campus in a golf cart that af ernoon, does spot the 19-year-old,
making his way to one of the school buildings. And the monitor recognizes him as
“crazy boy,” the one they did the threat assessment on a year and a half before, one
that made him express to the rest of the sta f, “If there’s gonna be anybody who’s
gonna come to this school and shoot this school up, it’s gonna be that kid.” And
he knows that the same young man, who is now entering a school building, is no
longer a student at MSD, having been involuntarily transferred to an alternative
school one year before. The campus monitor also knows that when this teen was a
student, he had been banned from carrying a backpack on campus. And he sees
that the same young man is now carrying a long, black bag. But his response, at
seeing and realizing all of this, is only to radio one of the other campus monitors
about a “suspicious kid.” He does not pursue the young man inside the building.
Neither he, nor any of the other campus monitors, are armed.

The School Resource O cer, meanwhile, is on duty on that Valentine’s Day, and
he is the only armed o cer on campus. The only legal gun. And at that moment,
he is about 150 yards across the campus, going about his regular duties.

Stepping into the school building, the former student immediately ducks into a
stairwell. As he is taking his AR-15 out of the ri e bag, along with a vest stu fed
with loaded magazines, a male student happens to walk in on him. The gunman
tells him “you better get out of here, something bad is about to happen.” He tells
the student to run, which he does.

776
Back when the school was conducting a threat assessment on the gunman in 2016,
they even went so far as to initiate a “Baker Act” referral for him — essentially,
requesting he be evaluated for involuntary commitment to a mental institution.
But like their threat assessment, the Baker Act evaluation determined the teenager
was not a threat. And since there was only a referral on le, and not an actual
commitment, he passed his background check.

A few seconds af er dismissing the student who walked in on him, the gunman
exits the stairwell, and opens re on the students in the halls. He shoots into the
classrooms (which have glass windows facing the hall where he is) and at any
students or sta f he comes across, as he proceeds from one oor to the next,
reloading from his vest as needed. The attack lasts about ve and a half minutes,
from rst shot to last.

Within two minutes of the rst shots being red, one of the campus monitors
radios about possible “ recrackers” going o f in the building, and the armed
School Resource O cer responds to a spot just outside the building where the
attack is still in progress. He hears the sounds coming from inside, and realizes
they are gunshots. But he does not enter the building. He doesn’t even radio for a
lockdown.

The police arrive a few minutes later, hearing the last gunshots just as they enter
the building. But before they can reach the third oor, the gunman ducks back
into a stairwell, abandons his ri e and ammo vest, and ees the scene by blending
in with the waves of evacuating students (one of the students in the crowd even
recognizes the shooter, and tells him, “I’m surprised you weren’t the one who did
this.”) The shooter is soon arrested at a nearby mall.

***
The Parkland shooting re-ignites all of the smoldering debates from attacks past;
some of the students who were there that day would reach national prominence
when they organize a movement, March for Our Lives, to register young voters
and advocate for gun reform.

But it was a big school, and the tragedy touched many lives, eliciting diverse
responses. A man who lost his daughter in the attack made headlines when he got
on the mic at a White House town hall, just a few days af er the attack:

I am very angry that th happened. Because it keeps happening. 9/11

happened once, and they fixed everything. How many schools, how
many children have to get shot? It stops here, with th administration
and me. I'm not gonna sleep until it's fixed.

777
He would go on to express bitter anger at the school’s administration and security
teams, once the full extent of their incompetence, and cowardice, was revealed.

***
A month af er the man-made disaster struck Parkland, one thing did change.
Members of a student club at Marjory Stoneman-Douglas held a ceremony, and in
attendance were representatives from Townville Elementary School. Like
Marysville-Pilchuck High School had done for them, and like Sandy Hook
Elementary had done before them, and Red Lake High School before them, and
Columbine High School before them, they passed on the dreamcatcher to the
latest community to endure the man-made disaster. The Parkland students did
accept the object, ceremonially — holding onto it long enough for one second to
be counted, for each of the victims lost at their school — but then, they handed it
back. They asked that it end its journeys, and get a permanent home.

Af er some searching, Towneville found just the place: the dream catcher is now
located at the National Teachers Hall of Fame in Emporia, Kansas, as part of its
National Memorial to Fallen Educators.

April 3, 2018 — San Bruno, CA: At the headquarters of YouTube in Silicon Valley,
a 38-year-old woman res a handgun (purchased legally) at employees as they leave
their o ces at the end of the work day. She wounds several people, then takes her
own life. It later turns out that she had been mentally ill for some time, posting
deranged clips to the video sharing site and then attributing her low viewership to
a conspiracy within the company.

April 22, 2018 — Nashville, TN: Shortly af er 3:00am, a nude 29-year-old male
opens re on patrons standing outside of a Wa e House, with an AR-15 he
purchased legally (despite exhibiting signs of severe mental illness for years,
including paranoid delusions that pop star Taylor Swif was tapping his phone).
However, that gun and three others he owned were con scated in 2017, af er he
was detained for jumping a barrier at the White House, thinking he could get a
meeting with the president. The guns were given to the man’s father for safe
keeping; but af er a few weeks, he gave them back to his son.

Af er the attack in the parking lot, the shooter proceeds inside the restaurant and
attacks the diners there, before a brave young man named James Shaw Jr. springs
from his seat, and wrestles the ri e away from him. The gunman then ees the
scene, resulting in a manhunt that resolves the next af ernoon, when he is arrested
at his motel room — about to depart for an unknown location, carrying two more
guns and a backpack full of ammunition. He is expected to plead not-guilty by
reason of insanity.

778
April 23, 2018 — Toronto, Ontario, Canada: A promenade in Toronto's business
district is bustling with its typical, daytime pedestrian tra c, when suddenly, a van
driven by a 25-year-old male mounts the curb, and charges violently through the
crowds for about a mile and a half, until the vehicle becomes non-functional.
Exiting the van and seeing a police o cer approach him with gun drawn, the
driver gestures at them with his wallet, hoping it will look like a gun, and taunting
them "shoot me!" But they just arrest him instead.

The van driver had been diagnosed with Asperger's, and had tried to join the
Canadian Army, but washed out of basic training. He was known to spend most
of his time online, and/or playing video games. The day before launching his
attack, he had posted a message to his Facebook pro le, pledging ironic-allegiance
to the "supreme gentleman" behind the 2014 Santa Barbara attack, who in the
years since had not quite inspired the "incel" subculture that the van driver
identi ed with, so much as he became a mascot or meme that a population of
misanthropes could rally behind. (Af er his arrest, the van driver describes to an
interviewing homicide detective how the Santa Barbara shooter "used a gun as
well as a vehicle to um, convert the life status of certain individuals to, uhm, a
death status.") Like the Santa Barbara shooter, his motivations were misogynistic,
but his actual victims were just anyone who happened to be around, regardless of
gender. Any member of society.

May 18, 2018 — Santa Fe, TX: A 17-year-old male student, known for wearing a
black duster to school, brings a 12-gauge shotgun and revolver to his art class, and
opens re on his fellow students. According to initial reports, the gunman spares
certain students, so that he "could have his story told." Police respond, and the
shooter exchanges re with them, but is ultimately arrested.

The shooter is not a social outcast, in any traditional sense, but instead was on the
school's varsity football team (af er the event, some at the school would suggest
that he was the victim of bullying from adults at the school, in the form of athletic
coaches.) At a press conference, the governor says that police were nding
"information contained in journals on his computer, in his cellphone that said not
only did he want to commit the shooting but he wanted to commit suicide af er
the shooting. [He] planned on doing this for some time. He advertised his
intentions but somehow slipped through the cracks."

The shooter had obtained his guns from his father's bedroom closet; they were
not secured. Haunted with guilt, his father would give multiple interviews to local
press. “My son, to me, is not a criminal, he’s a victim,” he would tell one
newspaper. “The kid didn’t own guns. I owned guns.”

779
June 28, 2018 — Annapolis, MD: A 38-year-old man barricades the rear exit of the
building that houses the o ces of the Capital Gazette, a local newspaper for the
Washington DC area, then sets of a smoke bomb at the front entrance, where he
proceeds to blast through the glass doors with 12-gauge pump shotgun (purchased
legally). He shoots multiple employees inside before eventually surrendering to
police.

The newspaper had published a story about the man, seven years before,
reporting a court decision in which he had been found guilty of harassing an
acquaintance from high school, and given probation. He had sued the newspaper
for defamation, but the case was dismissed. He had reportedly sent threatening
letters to the newspaper multiple times in the years since.

In the hours af er the shooting, President Trump tweets about it: "I was briefed
on the shooting at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. My thoughts and
prayers are with the victims and their families. Thank you to all of the First
Responders who are currently on the scene."

Later that day, two of the survivors from the Capital Gazette give an interview to
CNN. One, reporter Phil Davis, relates how they had hidden under their desks as
the gunman passed by, and could hear him reload:

I w praying when he started reloading that shotgun, that there

wouldn't be more bodi . And you know what? If we're at a position in
our society, where all we can offer each other prayers? Then... where
are we? Where are we a society? Where people die, and... that's the
end of that story.

His colleague, Selene San Felice, agrees that their moment of the public's attention
will be brief:

Th gonna be a story for... how many days? Less than a week. People
will forget about a er a week. [...] I reported on Pulse, when Pulse
happened. I went to school in Florida. And, um, I remember being so
upset, hearing about the victims who were texting their famili . And
um, there I w , sitting under a desk, texting my parents, telling them
that I loved them. And... I just- I just don't know what I want right
now, right? But I'm gonna need more than a couple days of news
coverage, and some thoughts and prayers. Because it's... our whole liv
have been shattered. And so, thanks for your prayers, but I couldn't give
a fuck about them if there's nothing else.

780
No editions of the Capital Gazette are canceled or delayed as a result of the
shooting.

August 26, 2018 — Jacksonville, FL: About an hour af er losing a game of

Madden NFL 19 in a tournament, and refusing to shake his opponent's hand
af erward, a 24-year-old male returns to the video-gaming venue Good Luck Have
Fun, located inside a busy shopping center, and opens re on the other
tournament players with two semi-automatic handguns. As the tournament is
still in progress, the attack ends up live-streamed on YouTube. The attack ends
when the gunman takes his own life. He obtained both guns legally; although he
had a history of mental illness, had been committed to mental institutions
multiple times, and was prescribed anti-psychotic medications, it does not appear
that he was ever involuntarily committed, and none of his stays exceeded 30 days.
One of those two things would have to have happened in order for NICS to have
denied his background check.

October 17, 2018 — Kerch, Crimea: An 18-year-old male attacks Kerch Polytechnic
College, where he is a student. He had become xated on Columbine, and he is
dressed like the Right shooter during his attack, with "HATRED" printed across
his white t-shirt. It is at least the third Columbine-inspired school shooting to
have occurred in Russia in recent years, but unlike the previous ones, this gunman
had been able to obtain a real shotgun, and so the results are much, much worse:
he sets o f bombs in the commons area, shoots at his classmates in the halls, and
ultimately takes his own life in the school's library. He bought his gun legally: he
had to undergo a mental evaluation, as is required for a gun license in Russia, but
the evaluation apparently detected nothing disqualifying. Later, President
Vladimir Putin speaks on the attack, and the trend that led up to it: "It's a result of
globalization. On social media, on the internet, we see that there is a whole
community that has been created. Everything started with the tragic events in
schools in the US." He says that young men online are "reaching out for a
surrogate for heroism" and then become xated on school shooters. "We're not
creating healthy (internet) content for young people... which leads to tragedies of
this kind."

October 27, 2018 — Pittsburgh, PA: A 46-year-old male enters the Tree of Life
synagogue during morning Shabbat services, shouts "all Jews must die!", and
opens re on the worshipers with a Colt AR-15 and three Glock pistols (all of
which he purchased legally). Prior to his attack, he had posted a message on social
media (using a pro le with which he had already posted many anti-semetic
messages) accusing Jewish organizations of "bringing in invaders" through their
support of immigration reform. He concluded, "I can't sit by and watch my
people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

781
November 2, 2018 — Tallahassee, FL: A 40-year-old male pays for a yoga class at
the studio Hot Yoga Tallahassee, and af er waiting for the class to start, suddenly
stands up, puts on earmu fs, draws a 9mm Glock handgun, and opens re
indiscriminately on the class. The people there are mostly women, and the
gunman seems to target them, but he shoots at men too. Suddenly, a man named
Josh uick jumps up, and attempts to ght the gunman with a vacuum cleaner,
creating an opening for many to escape. The gunman eventually ghts him o f,
and then, takes his own life. When identi ed, he is revealed to have been a former
teacher, who had lost several substitute jobs due to his inappropriate behavior
around female students, and over the last few years he had spent most of his time
complaining about women online. He was vocal in the "incel" community, had
expressed support for the 2014 Santa Barbara shooter, and once predicted that
women who “abused their power” would be the cause of “the next Columbine.”
He did not have any connection with the yoga studio at all, he just knew the
tness class there was likely to have young women in attendance; his rst choice of
target had actually been a cheerleading camp.

November 7, 2018 — Thousand Oaks, CA: A 28-year-old man enters the

Borderline Bar and Grill, an establishment he had drank at before but which
otherwise does not appear to have had any special signi cance to him, and af er
rst throwing smoke bombs onto the small dance- oor, he opens re on the bar
patrons with a .45 Glock handgun. He had purchased the gun legally, along with
the seven 30-round magazines he is carrying for it (only two of which he actually
uses).

Af er the initial assault, and while waiting for law enforcement to arrive, he takes a
moment to post an update to his Instagram:

I hope people call me insane [laugh emoji]...

wouldn't that just be a big ball of irony?
Yeah... I'm insane, but the only thing you people
do after these shootings is "hopes and prayers"..
or "keep you in my thoughts" ...every time... and
wonder why these keep happening ...

He then ambushes the rst responders, before taking his own life. The gunman is
soon found to have been a former marine who served in Afghanistan, but
witnesses claim he displayed aggression problems well before enlisting, "especially
with women." Police had been called to his home for a crisis intervention earlier in
the year, and brought a mental-health specialist, who evaluated the eventual-
shooter and determined that while he was "somewhat irate, acting a little
irrationally," he was not a threat, and thus there was no grounds to involuntarily
commit him to a mental health facility.

782
January 23, 2019 — Sebring, FL: A 21-year-old male is seen pacing back-and-forth
in the lobby of a branch of the Suntrust Bank, when suddenly he pulls out a 9mm
handgun (purchased by him earlier that week, legally) and orders the bank's sta f,
and a customer, to get on the oor. (All of them are women, which may or may
not have been coincidence.) He shoots each of them, then calls 9-1-1 and confesses
what he's done, and eventually surrenders. The shooting was not part of a robbery
attempt; an examination of the gunman's background shows that he had a history
of psychiatric problems, and an obsession with death and killing. He had been
taken out of school and sent to a behavioral health center in 2014, af er multiple
witnesses reported that he was excitedly telling them about dreams he was having
in which he killed his classmates at school. When he got out a month later, the
center noti ed police, and "warned them to be prepared to respond immediately
if they received any calls, because of his psychiatric issues." In 2017, a woman
complained to police that they were receiving messages from him that suggested
he was "possibly thinking of suicide by cop and taking hostages."

March 15, 2019 — Christchurch, New Zealand: A 28-year-old Australian male

launches an attack against Al Noor Mosque, using an entire arsenal (which
includes at least two AR-15s, and a semi-automatic shotgun). Just before, he had
uploaded his anti-Islam “manifesto,” and strapped on a helmet-camera; he
livestreams the massacre to Facebook in rst-person. He then drives to Linwood
Mosque and attacks there. He is intercepted by police and arrested on his way to a
third potential target. His manifesto cites the Norway shooter as his inspiration
(and also claims that he was in contact with the imprisoned gunman, whom he
says gave his "blessing" for the New Zealand attack), and he expresses support for
several other mass shooters, including the 2015 Charleston shooter.

The gunman had obtained all of his guns legally (though he may have made illegal
modi cations to them later). Within one day of the attack, the country’s Prime
Minister pledges that “our gun laws will change,” and she soon introduces
legislation that bans all semi-automatic weapons (except .22 rim re ri es with
magazines of ten rounds or less, or shotguns with non-detachable magazines of
ve rounds or less). Parliament passes the bill into law less than a month af er the
attack.

March 19, 2019: The Connecticut Supreme Court issues a decision on the
Remington case, agreeing with the lower court's ruling that the Sandy Hook
victims could not sue under "negligent entrustment." However, the court
disagrees that the other aspect of the case - whether the marketing of the
Bushmaster ri e was in voilation of Connecticut's "Unfair Trade Practices Act" - is
invalid, and thus the suit is allowed to proceed.

783
April 27, 2019 — Poway, CA: A 19-year-old male enters Chabad of Poway
synagogue, and opens re on worshipers with an AR-15 (purchased by him
legally). It is the last day of Passover, and the service is well-attended, but his ri e
apparently jams before he can load a second magazine, of which he had several in
the tactical vest he was wearing. He ees the scene, calls 9-1-1, and surrenders. He
had posted his intentions to the internet before the attack, expressing the same
views as the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, and he attempted to livestream his
attack, as the New Zealand gunman had (though he apparently failed to set up the
stream correctly). He cites both shooters in his "manifesto."

April 30, 2019 — Charlotte, NC: On the last day of classes for the semester, a 22-
year-old male enters a classroom at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and
opens re on the students there with a 9mm Glock handgun (which he purchased
legally). He has several magazines for it in a bag with him, but only uses one,
before sitting on the oor and waiting to be arrested. He was a student at the
college until he dropped out earlier that year. He was known to spend most of his
time on the internet, and investigators nd that he was studying school shootings
extensively. His motive, though, was more pedestrian: fearing that he would be
unable to pay o f his student loan debt, he saw a life sentence in prison as a
preferable alternative. At trial, his defense team would tell the jury that the
gunman "has been living with autism [and] he was isolated and unable to
socialize."

May 7, 2019 — Highlands Ranch, CO: A 16-year old and 18-year-old male bring
three guns (obtained from a parent's gun safe) to STEM School Highlands
Ranch, where they were both students, and attack an English class. Students and a
security guard restrain the pair, and they are arrested. The 16-year old appears to
have masterminded the attack, which he tells authorities was in retaliation for
harassment he'd received over his gender identity (he was born biologically
female).

May 31, 2019 — Virginia Beach, VA: A 40-year-old male, who is employed by the
City of Virginia Beach as an engineer, sends an e-mail to his superiors, resigning
from his position due to "personal reasons." It is only his two-weeks' notice, and
so a few hours later, he is still in the municipal center building, and his access
badge still works. He goes to a break room, draws two handguns (both purchased
by him legally), and opens re on the employees there. He then works his way
through the building, attacking anyone he sees. One of his guns is equipped with
a suppressor, but law enforcement eventually locates him, resulting in a shootout
which the gunman does not survive. The shooter had been receiving warnings
over his job performance over the last year, and was recently divorced, but his
motive is unknown.

784
July 2019: Remington petitions the United States Supreme Court to overturn
Connecticut’s decision, and rule that the suit led by the Sandy Hook families
cannot proceed.

July 28, 2019 — Gilroy, CA: A 19-year-old male cuts through a security fence at the
Gilroy Garlic Festival, and enters the festival grounds armed with a semi-
automatic AK-47, which is equipped with a 75-round drum magazine (both of
which he had purchased legally, a few weeks before). He begins shooting at
random people, including children. One survivor would tell investigators that
they came face-to-face with the gunman at one point, and asked him why he was
doing it. The gunman replied "because I'm really angry." Police are stationed at the
event already; they respond to the scene quickly, and engage in a shootout with
the attacker. He is wounded, then takes his own life.

August 3, 2019 — El Paso, TX: A 21-year-old male in walks into a Walmart store,
and opens re on shoppers with a semi-automatic AK-47 (which he had
purchased legally). Af er stalking and shooting his victims in the store aisles for
several minutes, he exits the store, and eventually surrenders to police. He lived
with his parents in another Texas town, more than 600 miles away; he had driven
to El Paso because it was closer to the border, and he was targeting Mexicans and
Mexican-American immigrants. Before doing so, he had uploaded his "manifesto,"
which stated, "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.
This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas." In the prior
manifesto, the New Zealand shooter had speci cally cited Texas as a state that he
argued was soon going to shif politically due to immigration. One witness tells
reporters that the gunman "targeted people who appeared to be Hispanic, but let
white and black shoppers out of the building."

August 4, 2019 — Dayton, OH: Just 13 hours af er the attack in Texas, a 24-year
old male leaves the Ned Peppers Bar in a popular night-life area of Dayton, and
goes to his car. He had been out drinking with his sister, and her boyfriend. He
soon comes back to the area in front of the bar, now armed with a AM-15
(essentially a pistol con guration of an AR-15) which is equipped with a 100-
round drum magazine. He purchased both items legally (despite apparently
having juvenile violent-felony convictions, since these were expunged from his
record when he became an adult). He has also put on a mask and body armor. He
opens re on people in the area outside the bar, and is killed by police within one
minute of ring his rst shot, as he is about to re-enter Ned Peppers. His sister is
among his victims. (Authorities say it is not known if this was intentional on his
part, however it has been established that he had texted with her in-between
leaving the bar and his attack, and that he knew she would be at the taco stand
across the street at that time. He started the attack at that location.)

785
August 31, 2019 — Midland-Odessa, TX: A 36-year old male, who had been red
from his job earlier that day, suddenly begins shooting at state troopers with an
AR-15 when they attempt to pull him over for failing to signal a turn. He speeds
away and continues shooting, this time at random pedestrians and drivers. He
then hijacks a USPS truck, and continues his rampage, before being rammed by
police in the parking lot of a movie theater. He is killed in the resulting shootout.
An investigation nds that the shooter had been diagnosed with an undisclosed
mental condition, but refused to take the medication he had been provided. He
had been convicted for trespassing and evading arrest in 2002, when he tried to
break into a woman's bedroom, and in 2011, his mother told authorities that he
had "threatened to end his life in a police shootout," and the local SWAT team had
even reviewed oor plans of his home as a precaution, in case they ever had to raid
it. His convictions had resulted in him failing a background check when he
attempted to buy a gun in 2014. However, he was later able to obtain his AR-15 by
exploiting the "Gun Show Loophole," and buying from a private seller.

***
November 12, 2019: The United States Supreme Court declines to take up
Remington's request to dismiss the Sandy Hook lawsuit. In doing so, the court
does not make any comment on the suit’s validity, which is now permitted to go
forward. As of this writing, the state trial is set for September of 2021.

786
 Acknowledgments

This project originally began as a research blog, Sandy Hook Lighthouse, in 2013.
The blog’s primary purpose was to collect evidence of the shooter’s online
activities. During the years that it was active, a number of people wrote to
contribute tips, or enlightened my thinking on this case, and this phenomenon.
Others patiently gave feedback on draf s of this story, which was invaluable;
thanks are due to Jonas Rand, CW Wade, Peter Langman, AG, Patro, Sabratha,
Ashley, Dingo, Cole Scott, Carrie, Ryan, and JK.

Finally, there were a number of individuals who reached out to me over the years
— and of en contributed signi cantly to understanding the events that led to
12/14/2012 — but also declined to be named publicly. I remain grateful for their
help, and will continue to honor their wishes.

- Matthew Nolan

787
 Notes & Sources

On O cial and Primary Sources

There were several o cial investigations into the Sandy Hook shooting, the
records from which constitute most of the evidence this narrative relies upon: rst
is Connecticut's Report of the State's Attorney for the Judicial District of
Danbury on the shooting, which was based on the Connecticut State Police's
investigative les, and released in November 2013. This is generally cited below as
"The CSP O cial Report," or similar.

Next is the "Child Advocate Report," released by Connecticut's O ce of the Child

Advocate in November of 2014, under the title "SHOOTING AT SANDY
HOOK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL." This report focuses on the childhood
development of the Sandy Hook shooter, whereas the CSP report consists more
of witness interviews and physical and digital evidence collection, and thus
portrays the latter portion of the shooter's life.

Meanwhile, there were also a handful of journalism pieces published in the years
immediately af er attack that reported a great many of the events portrayed in this
story: "Raising Adam Lanza" by PBS Frontline and the Hartford Courant
(including the unedited supplemental interviews and the e-mails Nancy wrote to
Marvin LaFontaine) and Andrew Solomon's interview with Peter Lanza, "The
Reckoning," published in The New Yorker in March 2014.

More recently, there was the FBI's investigative les, from the support the bureau
lent to Connecticut for their 2013 report, and which were nally released more
fully in October of 2017. In addition to several entirely new revelations, these
pages also served to con rm the accuracy of much of the shooter's online
footprint, which had been circulating on the internet for years by that point.

Finally, there are the les released by Connecticut as a result of The Hartford
Courant's legal ght to obtain them through FOIA requests. These are mostly
school assignments and digital les from the Sandy Hook shooter, which were

788
redacted from the o cial CSP report. These are generally noted in-text as being
part of that release, and cite the Connecticut court decision requiring their release.

On the Shooter's Online Identities

As depicted in the last half of this story, the eventual Sandy Hook shooter
assumed a number of online identities over the course of his adolescence and adult
life. This writing of this story arose from an e fort to track those online identities.

There are three primary identities that the shooter used, which appear in Part IV
and Part V of this story: Blarvink and Kaynbred were both initially revealed in
stories published by the Hartford Courant in the summer of 2013, when the rst
details from the o cial investigation leaked.

The o cial report was nally released in late 2013, and the username Smiggles was
rst revealed in its supporting exhibits. By that time, I had started the research
blog Sandy Hook Lighthouse, and had submitted membership requests to a
number of "Columbine Forums" in an e fort to nd the one that the shooter had
allegedly used, according to the o cial investigation's summary report. In January
2014, I was granted access to the then-current version of the "Columbine
Discussion Forum" — two versions removed from the one that the shooter used
— and from a subject line in that forum, learned that a user "Smiggles" had posted
to something called a "SCMRPG discussion forum." I went looking for that
forum, learned about the RPG game and its associated forum, posted about it,
and didn't give the manner of my nding it any more thought.

Years later, second-hand, I would learn that the host of the “New” forum felt
slighted when I posted the “Smiggles” story without mentioning their
contribution; this user, “Jenn,” likely does deserve credit for having rst
connected “Smiggles” to the Sandy Hook shooter. I do not lay claim to having
done so; however, they would also contend with a New York Daily News reporter
who claims to have preceded us both. I’m not aware of any clear resolution to this
issue, but regardless, the FBI’s les would later show that none of us were “ rst” to
make the connection — the bureau found it just days af er the shooting.

SOURCES
Part I: Over the Horizon

789
Prologue: Friday
This scene portrays what happened at 36 Yogananda on 12/14 based on just the physical
evidence. The exact events and their order cannot be precisely known, as neither party
survived. Chapter 74 depicts the collection of the physical evidence. As noted by a rst
responder, in the CSP supplemental report, “It appeared that the female had been
ambushed and killed while sleeping in bed.”
He had taken the hard drive out...: CSP photo set "Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" 23-39;
...impossible to recover, even for the FBI: CSP summary, footnote 2 reads “potentially
important evidence, i.e., a computer hard drive recovered from the shooter's home, as of
this date remains unreadable. Additional insight could be gained should e forts to recover
data from the hard drive ever prove successful, which at this time appears highly
improbable.” Records note the hard drive was turned over to an FBI agent Warwick on
12/15/12; A single bullet arced through he air...: CSP photo set "Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" 35;
...she felt no pain: Nancy's wounds are described in CSP Report supplements titled
"Autopsy Observation Report" and "Body Survey" Later that day, Nancy's DNA...: CSP
Initial Narrative Report led 07-11-2013; Nancy kept childhood photos....: CSP photo set
“Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" 489-491; He le the rifle on the floor...:CSP Summary Report
notes "in the chamber of the ri e was a spent .22 cal. shell casing and three live rounds were
in the magazine."He turned le out of the driveway...: The driving route is assumed
because it is the route he rehearsed twice, as depicted in Chapter 68 and "The End".
The delivery driver...: CSP Supplemental Report, interview with witness Brian Karr dated
01-10-2013. Invoice is in photo set “Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" 235-238; The machine picked
up...: CSP O cial Report Supplement “Answering Machine Audio Recording Home
Phone of 36 Yogananda St. Sandy Hook, CT” lists the messages recorded. (Audio of
Nancy's greeting circulated online af er the shooting.); Then the SWAT team broke
through...: CSP O cial Report Supplement le 00168314, and photo set “Sec 5 - Back-up
Scene 1" 645. (The "pause" between the answering machine message and the battering ram
was actually about an hour, during which time a bomb-squad robot searched the home, as
depicted in Chapter 73.)

1. The Shooter
Main source: A Report to Attorney General John K. Van de Kamp on Patrick Purdy and
the Cleveland School Killings; October 1989, State of California (Nelson Jempsky, Chief
Deputy Attorney General, et al)
...when the Trading Post Store in Sandy, Oregon put it on display: "Af er Shooting, Horror
But Few Answers" — The New York Tim ; Reinhold, Robert 01/19/1989; “Obviously, he
had a....”: "A Military Hang-up" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Jan 19, 1989; “We'll never know
why”: quoted in “Escalating Hate Reportedly Consumed Gunman” — Los Angel Tim ;
Dan Morain and Louis Sahagun 01/19/1989; Then, they noticed the army men...: The press
conference scene and evidence is shown in TV documentary series “The 20th Century
with Mike Wallace” episode “Mass Murderers” (also depicted in Chapter 64)

2. Nancy
When the yearbooks came out...: Pages from the 1978 yearbook were published by PBS:
Frontline as part of the program "Raising Adam Lanza" - (Koughan, Frank, Joe
Beshenkovsky, John Marks, Mary Robertson, Alaine Gri n, Josh Kovner, and Matthew
Kau fman. 2013.)
The homestead had been in the family for decad ...: property records, Town of Kingston
Assessing O ce; ...recognized a historical site by the town: “Historic Preservation

790
Assistance Project” Survey #105 (Champion House) — Rockingham Regional Council
03/19/1980
Various details about Nancy Lanza's early life: "Connecticut gunman had New Hampshire
ties" New Hampshire Union Leader
(http://www.newhampshire.com/article/20121214/NEWS03/121219461); "For Lanza
family, son Adam’s di culties dominated" The Washington Post
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-lanza-family-son-adams-di culties-
dominated/2012/12/17/3c0e8eb0-4890-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html); "Solid
Upbringings for Lanza Parents" Wall Street Journal
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324461604578194054206944718) "Nancy
Lanza Remembered as Bubbly Caring Person" Moser, Douglas New Hampshire/Mass
Eagle Tribune 12/15/12 (http://www.eagletribune.com/news/nancy-champion-lanza-
remembered-as-a-bubbly-caring-person-by/article_6575d683-3336-54bb-8ab5-
0f4d068f6747.html); "Nancy Lanza Recalled with Kind Words" The Connecticut Post
(http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Nancy-Lanza-recalled-with-kind-words-not-as-
4568716.php)
"That w their food...":"Raising Adam Lanza" Hartford Courant/PBS Frontline, transcript
of interview with Marvin LaFontaine; Nancy started her own business...: Rockingham
County, NH Business records (revealed in interview with unknown family member or
friend, from FBI les released October 2017); ...her father-in-law, Peter S Lanza...: "Peter's
Story" Eagle-Tribune 12/7/2010 (http://obituaries.eagletribune.com/obituary/peter-lanza-
2010-770834931); She dropped out of college...: Nancy expresses her regret in an email
exchange between her and the shooter (from the Child Advocate report) as depicted in
Chapter 53. The university is noted in FBI interviews with family members (dated
12/28/2012).

3. Assault Ri e
The Los Angel Tim archives were the main source for coverage of the California assault
weapons ban. The law was generally referred to as the Roberti-Roos act in California at
the time.
More than 700 Californians were gathered...: This welcome-home rally is described in
President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime by Lou Cannon. Various details also from Los
Angel Tim stories 01/21/1989 and 01/22/1989; ...it w at th black-tie affair where he
gave h first public comments...: Los Angel Tim 02/12/1989
(http://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-12/news/mn-2865_1_gun-control/2)
President Bush w wrapping up…: "The Public Papers of the President" US GPO, 1989
(The "PPP" records are used throughout this book, and are almost always the source
whenever a president is speaking.)
“People are buying anything that’s ugly...": The Los Angel Tim 5/20/1989
(http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-20/news/mn-286_1_assault-weapons-owners-of-
such-weapons-gun-dealers); "Traders" history: TRADING IN DEATH – PROFILE OF
A ROGUE GUN DEALER 2006. Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence; (This source
obviously has a political objective, but I found the publication to be reliable as to the
relevant facts and events. The same is true of pro-gun partisan sources cited elsewhere.)
Other notes from PBS Frontline story "Hot Guns":
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/menace.html
...black residents in Oakland formed the Black Panther Party in 1966...: "ARMED
NEGROES PROTEST GUN BILL" The New York Times 05/03/1967; (For an overview
of the Panthers and their role in American history, Joshua Bloom's Black Against Empire
is recommended.)

791
Task Force on Assault Weapons: coverage from Los Angel Tim :
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-13/news/mn-160_1_machine-gun and
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-28/news/mn-911_1_assault-weapon and
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-27/news/mn-444_1_gun-control-bill; The Attorney
General entered the assembly chamber carrying an AK-47...:
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-02-14/news/mn-2181_1_assault-weapons; The senate
announced a series of public hearings...: The Los Angel Tim
(http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-05/news/mn-904_1_assault-weapon); ...trying to
tailor state law to specifically target Traders Sporting Goods… "BANNING THE
IMPORTATION OF ASSAULT WEAPONS AND CERTAIN ACCESSORIES INTO
THE UNITED STATES - Hearing before the Subcommittee on Trade of the Committee
on Ways and Means, House of Representatives - HR 1154 - April 10,1989" (Page 18) This
document is a source of many quotes in this chapter. Traders as a basis for the ban was also
cited by the LA Tim (http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-28/news/mn-911_1_assault-
weapon/3) and the 1989 ATF report on the Import Ban; ...assigned the Secretary of the
Treasury with the task...: The ATF outlined their authority and the process behind the
import ban in their o cial "REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION OF THE ATF
WORKING GROUP ON THE IMPORTABILITY OF CERTAIN
SEMIAUTOMATIC RIFLES" 07/06/1989; “As it became clear that the NRA w in
retreat...”: Knox, Neal The Gun Rights War (full text of the ATF letter has circulated
online); passed with a single vote to spare...: Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-05-19/news/mn-112_1_assault-weapons-ban-military-
style-assault-types-of-semiautomatic-ri es; “...a solution to the Stockton tragedy”: "E forts
to ban ri es wound lobbyists" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 02/20/1989; “These violent tim ...”:
Los Angeles Times 3/12/1989 (http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-12/opinion/op-
764_1_gun-control-act/2)
The “import ban,” it came to be known… "Assault-ri e Imports Temporarily Stopped"
(http://articles.philly.com/1989-03-15/news/26127883_1_assault-ri es-israeli-uzi-belgian-
fal); a barrel shroud...: The ATF’s particular list actually did not include this feature, but it
was on many later features lists that descended from the ATF’s, including the 1993 federal
assault weapons ban; ...because of the dramatic increase in the number of these weapons...:
"Permanent Import Ban on Assault Ri es" The Washington Post 7/8/1989; As far back
1982, advertisers...: Ads collected by Violence Policy Center ("That Was Then, This is
Now" 1998 and "Bullet Hoses" 2003); "To do anything about domestically manufactured
weapons...": "Weapon import ban expanded" The Day 04/06/1989
Colt Industri announced...: Los Angel Tim http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-
16/news/mn-2136_1_assault-ri es
Bill decided to send h response to each member...: HR 1154 report (above); The limitations
of California’s name-ban approach: "Republicans call gun ban ine fective" Lodi News-
Sentinel 06/02/1989; “The notorio AK-47, for example”: Bush actually named the AKS-
47, a common variant; The gun-related provisions of the 1990 crime bill...: H.R.2709 -
Comprehensive Violent Crime Control Act of 1989; Several stat ...quietly dropped the
issue…: "Wave of gun legislation begun But slowed to a ripple" Ellensburg Daily Record
01/02/1990 and "Clash of Arms - The Great American Gun Debate" State of Hawaii
O ce of Legislative Reference, 1991; ...gun provisions were stripped: House daily record,
Oct 4 1990 page H8865

4. Human Animal
Main source: Anatomy of a Massacre — Karpf, Jason & Elinor (a detailed account of
every aspect of the Luby's shooting.)
....any ammunition magazine that holds more than 15 rounds...: technically, the bill made
an exception for tubular magazines of .22 ammo. (S.1241 - Biden-Thurmond Violent

792
Crime Control Act of 1991); ...Congress w debating another crime bill in Washington....:
"ANNOUNCEMENT OF TRAGEDY IN KILLEEN, TX (House of Representatives -
October 16, 1991) [Page: H7970]"; ...during the next day’s sessions...: House Daily Record,
October 17 1991 [Page H8023] OMNIBUS CRIME CONTROL ACT OF 1991;
...President Bush granted a radio interview...: "Post-mortem on Killeen killings" Art
Buchwald, Bangor Daily News 10/25/91

5. Earth Day
Something w definitely wrong...: Nancy's di cult pregnancy, and the shooter's early
childhood, is documented in the Child Advocate Report, pgs 15-21 as well as Raising
Adam Lanza.
...a photo of the newborn...: Cresta, Joey “Seacoast historian: Connecticut shooter born in
Exeter” Seacoast Online 12/16/2012
(http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20121216/NEWS/121219808); ...when a child
between 27 and 32 months...: New Hampshire state rules, Section He-M 500; ...switched
from “Family Centered Early Intervention”….pdf document "Part H of the IDEA Comes
to NH" from dhhs.nh.gov; ...One document from the time… Kovner, Josh & Altimari,
Dave “Courant exclusive: More than 1,000 pages of documents reveal Sandy Hook
shooter Adam Lanza's dark descent into depravity” Hartford Courant 12/9/2018
...a woman named Suzanna entered...: this and later scenes featuring Suzanna are
documented in her memoir, From Luby’s to the Legislature (Scene actually occurred in
March 1995); ...signed into law by Governor George W. Bush: "Why Not Unconcealed
Guns" The New York Tim 09/03/1995

6. Frontier
Main source: Marvin LaFontaine granted an interview to PBS Frontline for "Raising
Adam Lanza". A full transcript of the interview was published, as a supplement to the
episode, under the title "Marvin LaFontaine: 'Those Kids Were Everything' to Nancy
Lanza." His home movie footage, showing O cer Champion interacting with the scouts
and the Lanzas, was also part of the episode. Many more details come from his interview
with the Connecticut State Police (Book 7 of the o cial report, le 00196017)
...she w filing a lawsuit...: Su folk County court records, cases 9584CV02884 Lanza et al v
John Hancock Distributors Inc and 9601CV044533 Lanza, Peter vs. John Hancock
Distributors Inc; ...a er returning from the Green Berets in 1993, Nancy's kid
brother..."Conn. killer's NH kin express sorrow" New Hampshire Union Leader
Cousineau, Michael & Schreiber, Jason 12/15/2012 (also see Town of Kingston, NH
Annual report years 1983 and 1995); Nancy sent a letter to the school district, beginning...:
Glorioso, Chris & Jorgensen, Erica & Stulberger, Evan "I Team: Childhood Documents
Reveal Sandy Hook Shooter's Descent Into Depravity" NBC4 New York 1/22/2019;
...masked the fact that expressive language...: Child Advocate Report, pg 20

7. Dawn
Connecticut w betting on Colt...: "Colt Unit Sold; Connecticut Among Buyers" The New
York Tim Mc uiston, John; 03/23/1990; ...a Belgian company, Fabrique Nationale...:
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/colt-s-manufacturing-company-
inc-history/; "The state treasurer h made th very clear...": "Critics say new Colt gun is an
assault weapon" The Milwaukee Journal 04/25/1990; In California, it had been enough...:
"Roberti Seeks State Ban on 'Copy Cat' Assault Ri es" Los Angel Tim ; Moran, Julio

793
02/24/1994 and "Debut of Colt's 'Sporter' Revives Assault-Ri e Debate" Jehl, Douglas
04/19/1990
"...a redesigned, renamed and renumbered version...": "Lungren Files Suit to Add
Semiautomatic Ri e to Banned List" Los Angel Tim 03/28/1991; ...called attention to
the gallery...: "Weicker Signs Bill to Forbid Assault Ri es" New York Tim ; Johnson, Kirk
06/09/1993; H vote put it over the top...: "Weapons Ban Is Approved by Connecticut
Senate" New York Tim ; Johnson, Kirk 05/28/1993 and "Gun Ban Squeaks Throught"
Hartford Courant Pazniokas, Mark 06/09/1993; It turned out the shooter had purchased...:
"NRA loses shootout in Congress" The Tim -News Dvorchack, Robert 07/08/91
...“the final war h begun”: "Terror in Oklahoma: Echoes of NRA" New York Tim
Butter eld, Fox 05/08/1995; "...h predecessors from the Oval Office...": "Ford, Carter,
Reagan Push for Gun Ban" Los Angel Tim ; Eaton, William J. 05/05/94; "Randy Weaver
at Ruby Ridge...": Ruby Ridge happened under Bush, not Clinton. The error is LaPierre’s;
...Suzanna Gratia spoke...: "Subcommittee on the [...] Judiciary, 103rd Congress, 2nd
Session on S.1882" (US Congress); "I w amazed to see the degree...": "Feinstein Faces Fight
for Diluted Gun Bill" Los Angel Tim ; Bunting, Glenn F. 11/09/93
NRA history: "The Secret History of Guns" The Atlantic; Winkler, Adam; September
2011; NRA 1977 Cincinnati coup: "Rifle Group ousts Most Leaders in Move to Bolster
Stand on Guns." New York Tim 05/23/77; "...He worried that if he didn’t fight back now,
the NRA might even die ":Birnbaum, Je frey H. "Under the Gun" Fortune; Dec 1999;
"...jack-booted thugs...": (https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-1995-04-27/html/CREC-
1995-04-27-pt1-PgS5745-2.htm); "Your broadside against federal agents...": "Letter of
Resignation Sent By Bush to Ri e Association" New York Tim ; 05/11/95

8. Shangri-La
Moses Lake main source: "Scarred By Killings, Moses Lake Asks: 'What Has This Town
Become?'" Seattle Tim 02/23/96 (Other details from coverage by The Spokesman: "How
Many Were Shot?’ Boy’s Murder Confession Played At Emotional Evidence Hearing"
04/18/96; "Bloody movie, random violence thrilled Loukaitis, classmates say" 08/28/97;
"Witnesses Say Loukaitis Vowed To Kill Prosecution Tries To Show Premeditation In
Rampage" 04/17/96)
Bethel High: "WHERE RAMPAGES BEGIN: A special report.; From Adolescent Angst
To Shooting Up Schools" The New York Tim 06/14/98
Pearl High School main source: United States District Court, S.D. Mississippi, Jackson
Division. Luke WOODHAM, Petitioner v. Michael WILSON and Jim Hood,
Respondents. Civil Action No. 3:04cv48-HTW JCS. Nov. 3, 2006. (Other details:
"Mississippi Gothic" Time 10/20/1997)
Heath High School and Westside Middle School main source: Rampage: The Social Roots
of School Shootings; Newman, Katherine
“Saint Paul reminds ...": Clinton referred to this bible passage more famously af er
Columbine, but this was the rst time.
Thurston High main source: "Of Arms And The Boy" Time 07/06/1998 and "The Killer
at Thurston High" PBS: Frontline 6/18/2000
"WE HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG...": "Where Rampages Begin" New York
Tim (see above)

Chapter 9: Grand Adventure

794
Main source: Child Advocate Report, pg 16-20
Nancy brought Adam to a pediatric neurologist...: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le
00003128; ...a fact which likely indicat that none were available...: The scarcity of support
options available is noted throughout the Child Advocate Report, ex: pg 89; ...there w
never any comprehensive clinical evaluation performed...: Child Advocate Report, pg 20
...Titanic, ...Casablanca: "Nancy Lanza In Her Own Words" and interview with Marvin
LaFontaine, PBS/Courant "Raising Adam Lanza"; Adam dressed up for Halloween in
1997...: "EXCLUSIVE: Adam Lanza's murder spree at Sandy Hook may have been 'act of
revenge'" New York Daily News Schapiro, Rich & Lysiak, Matthew 04/07/2013
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lanza-article-1.1309766); ...fired a gun,
likely for the first time...: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00196017; ...what Nancy called
their 'grand adventure.': "School Gunman's Downward Spiral" The Wall Street Journal
12/22/2012
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324731304578193890846892734)

10. Snowdrop
The primary basis for this chapter are the facts documented by the Cullen Inquiry,
released in two documents: "Transcript of Proceedings at the Public Inquiry into Incident
at Dunblane Primary School on 13th Match, 1996 within The Albert Halls, Dumbarton
Road, Stirling" - a 3,376 page transcript of the inquiry (and also a 193 page summary with
the same title, ISBN 0101338627.)
The latter portion of this chapter, dealing with the af ermath of the Dunblane shooting
and a grieving father's e forts with the Snowdrop Appeal, are from Mick North's book
Dunblane: Never Forget unless otherwise noted. (A great deal of Mr. North’s story deals
with the shortcomings, if not corruption, of the Scottish Police. This was not included, in
the interest of pacing. I highly recommend reading his book; similarly, there are facets to
the “Scoutmaster” that were not mentioned or explored here: key among them, that the
shooter had a history of nancial insolvency that was catching up with him around the
time of his attack.)
Sources from the Cullen Inquiry les are listed by name of witness giving testimony.
The surgeon: Brian David Fairgrieve; van incident: Robert Comrie Deuchars; (Note: the
"leadership badge" in real life was something called a ‘warrant book,’ but functioned as
depicted. Name changed for clarity.) rearms license renewals: Douglas McMurdo;
Ombudsman's Investigation: David Shelmerdine; Scoutmaster on family's doorstep:
George Robertson.
Hungerford details: "Arms dealer who sold ri e used in Hungerford massacre jailed for
tra cking deadly missiles" Evening Standard Cheston, Paul 7/20/2012
...British Shooting Sports Council announcing a $160,000 publicity campaign...: "A Second
Mass Killing in Britain Raises Call for Tighter Gun Laws" New York Tim 10/16/87
Island camp, letter from concerned o cer: George Gunn; Video from the camp: Joseph
Holden; Bucket of "rubbish": Janet Reilly (Note: Lord Cullen expressed doubt over several
aspects of this witness's testimony, but noted that the portions shown here had multiple
corroborating witnesses); CPS letter: William Gallagher; Constable visiting at: Anne
Anderson; Purchase of handgun: Gary Hyde (Note: The transaction for the murder
weapon was actually more involved, with the shooter trying to return it, and the gunsmith
tricking out the gun signi cantly to get him to accept it); Letter to Dunblane Primary
School: Ronald Taylor; Gunman pointed pistol: James O'Hanlon Gillespie; Letter to
Buckingham Palace: John Ogg; Van rental: Karen Gillies; friend on phone: Danny
McDonald; Dunblane shooting series of events: Malcolm Rodger Chisholm & Dunblane
Report summary, statement of David Duke Scott

795
"...Murder and mayhem are ineradicably part of what...": “Claiming a Right to Murder” -
Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator 30 March 1996
Naming of "Snowdrop Appeal": "The Parents, the Government and the Gun" The
Independent Castle, Stephen 10/20/1996 (Note: The launch of the “Snowdrop Appeal”
occurred before the Cullen Inquiry convened, as did Mick North’s editorial.)
Dunblane Inquiry outcome: House of Commons transcript, HC Deb 16 October 1996 vol
282 cc823-32
...the father from Dunblane found that he agreed more with what an editorial...:
Dunblane: Never Forget North, Mick pg 205; "Given the incidence of mental illness...": pg
170; "...No more worship of guns": pg 111; A month later, the m w torn down entirely...";
pg 267; "...classes were back in session...": "School takes small step on road back to
normality" The Irish Tim 03/23/96; "To be objective and detached to deny the
reality...": North, pg 146; "...The spectre of the most pernicio and evil legislation...": pg 183;
"In the absence of guns he will use arson, or a stolen lorry...": House of Commons
transcript, HL Deb 24 October 1996 vol 575 cc23-102; ...voice of actor Sean Connery...:
North, pg 189; Home Secretary statement on passage of SA: "Daily Hansard" UK
Parliament 10/16/1996; 1 year anniversary statement: North, pg 263

Part II: Tide & Season

11. The Village

Newtown geology/geography: "Natural Resource Inventory: Updating Newtown's Plan
of Conservation and Development" - Town of Newtown report, March 2002;
uanneapague settlement, early history: Historical Not and Maps - Newtown: 1705-1758
Boyl, John Neville (additional details: Newtown Historical Society,
http://www.newtownhistory.org/the-settlement.shtml and town report "Sandy Hook
Design District Guidelines" Newtown Design Advisory Board, Feb 2007); The nativ
were peaceful...: As noted, this is a drastic oversimpli cation; though the initial settlers
dealt peacefully with the natives, there were tensions between the natives and settlers,
sometimes escalating into violence, well into the 1800's. This is evident in Newtown's
BiCentennial and other texts.
THE MILL & THE MEETING HOUSE: Formation of intersection: Newtown's History
and Historian Ezra Levan Johnson with additional material by Jane Eliza Johnson; the
Historian's Life Companion, 1907; (other details: Newtown's BiCentennial – 1705-1905
edited by Ezra Johnson with Jam Hardin George and Allison Parish Smith 1905, and
1714-1914 The Story of Two Centuri Newtown Congregational Church, 1914);
Construction of mill: "The Mills Of Newtown––A Town Moves Forward On Waters
And Wheels" Howard, Jan The Newtown Bee 02/07/2003
THE CROWN: Rev. Toucey: The Tousey Family in America compiled by Theodore
Cuyler Rose, Elmira NY 1916
THE AWAKENING: Great Awakening: The Great Awakening of 1740 Frederic Leonard
Chapell, American Baptist Publication Society, 1903; John Beach: The Reverend John
Beach and h Descendants Rebecca Donaldson Beach and Rebecca Donaldson Gibbons,
1895; Pamphlet war: A Mosaic of Newtown History Cruson, Dan; Newtown Historical
Society (highly recommended; this book documents many of the local-history events
depicted in this chapter, and dozens more.)
THE REBELLION: Trinity Church: "Our History"
(http://www.trinitynewtownct.org/our-history.html); French soldiers: The Journal of
Claude Blanchard, Commissary of the French Auxiliary Army sent to the United States

796
during the American Revolution, 1780-1783 (translated by William Duane and edited by
Thomas Balch, 1876); First mass: "St Rose Ceremony Marks Newtown’s Link To Church
History" The Newtown Bee 11/27/1998 (https://www.newtownbee.com/08101999/date-
fri-27-nov-1998-23/)
THE FOUNDATION: To th day, the lan of West Street briefly split...: The split lanes
really mark the end of West Street, since the road changes to Church Hill Road on the east
side of the intersection.
THE LOCOMOTIVE: Irish immigrants, newspaper war: A Mosaic of Newtown History
Cruson, & Newtown's History and Historian, Johnson; Founding of the NRA: "Ri e
Practice" Army Navy Journal 04/01/1871; "Ri e-Shooting Association" 08/12/1871
THE FLAGPOLE: The Flagpole: A Mosaic of Newtown History Cruson, Dan &
Newtown Historical Society; Army maneuvers 1912: "Red Army Fording Way to New
York" New York Tim , 08/14/1912; "New York to Known War Danger To-Day"
08/17/1912; "Big War Game Ends, New York is Saved" 08/18/1912; and Imag of America:
Newtown 1900-1960 Cruson, Dan; Hawley School, academy re of 1920: "New Booklet Fills
In Some Gaps In The History Of Newtown’s Schools" Newtown Bee 1/10/2001
(https://www.newtownbee.com/01102001/new-booklet- lls-in-some-gaps-in-the-history-
of-newtowns-schools/); Edmond Town Hall: "In Newtown, Going to the Movies is Still a
Bargain" New York Tim 10/29/89 (naming of: "William Edmond is an Under-sung Hero
of Newtown" Patch.com Cruson, Dan 01/15/2010
[https://patch.com/connecticut/newtown/william-edmond-is-an-under-sung-hero-of-
newtown]); "Scrabble" development: A Mosaic of Newtown History Cruson, Dan &
Newtown Historical Society
THE SCHOOL: SHES construction: "The Last Time Newtown Built a School in Sandy
Hook" Silber, Alissa The Newtown Bee 11/07/2013; JFK plaque at SHES: "The Way We
Were" The Newtown Bee, 06/20/2014 (reprint of June 26, 1964 headlines)

12. Yogananda
...the Bressons sold their land...: "Francis J. Bresson" (Obituary) The Newtown Bee
06/10/2016; Yoganda property boundaries: property records with Newtown Town Clerk's
O ce, Map 20. 6891, various records associated with "Bennetts Farm" and Map No 6891;
Population growth: Newtown Population Projections 2000-2030, prepared for Town of
Newtown, Connecticut by H.C. Planning consulants, Inc. June 15, 2008
The nam of more recent paths...: "The People Behind the Names of Newtown's Roads"
The Newtown Bee Crevier, Nancy 03/28/2008; ...the damming of the Housatonic...:
National Park Service National Register of Historic Places: Ref. 00001073 Stevenson Dam
Hydroelectric Plant; Dr. Yogananda: "Across the Black Water - A Study of Two Hindu
Sects in North America" - Martin Shiels, 1978 (Master's Thesis, Simon Fraser University)
and A Short Life of Swami Vivekananda" By Swami Tejasananda, and "Crystal Reading"
Davenport Daily Leader, 5/22/1901 (Note: "Dr. Yogananda" aka Dr. Street is a very curious
gure, appearing in some historical records and various occult publications under the
name "JC Street" or "JB Street" - he appears to have been the same "John C Street" who
wrote "The Way Across the Threshold" in 1889, an occult/secret-society book that records
some of the same "crystal" rituals that Dr. Yogananda was known for. He later appears in a
New York Tim report of court hearings from 1903, "This 'Doctor' a 'Reader'" in which a
judge appears none too impressed with his credentials as either a doctor or psychic. At one
point, Dr. Yogananda protests that his magic crystals allow him to "foretell paralysis.");
Parahamansa Yogananda as likely namesake: "Yogananda Street: a killer's address" CT Post
Hutson, Nanci 10/13/2013 (life events: yogananda-srf.org "Chronology for web" and
Autobiography of a Yogi)

797
15 Lots on 132 acres: "Hearings Continue On Whispering Pines And Tamarack Woods"
The Newtown Bee Gorosko, Andy 07/12/1996; Scenic view: "P&Z Proposes Stricter Regs"
02/28/97
"Nothing out of the ordinary...": "World Exclusive: Inside Adam Lanza's Bunker of Death"
The National Enquirer (Note: this is a tabloid source, as sometimes overlaps with this case
due to its sensational qualities; the interview is nonetheless genuine.)
...looking for a "fresh start.": Child Advocate Report, pg.24; Nancy furnishing 36
Yogananda: "Nancy Lanza in Her Own Words" Frontline; (Items also pictured in CSP
photo set "Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" image 29, 105; and "Sec 4 Primary Scene" images 52-55)
Sandy Hook shooter's arrival at 1st grade: Child Advocate report, Pg. 27 (1st grade photo:
"Raising Adam Lanza"; Frontline Note: That the teachers in the shooter's class always
appear in group photos with the shooter positioned "within arms reach” is an observation
I rst heard of from blogger "Sandy Hook Facts" at sandyhookfacts.com); SHES Culture
Corner: "Dispelling Myths About Native Americans" Newtown Bee 12/04/98 and "Mexico
Comes To The Culture Corner" 02/12/1999 (Note: neither article speci cally mentions any
student by name, but the teacher and time period are the same as the class photo showing
the shooter, and shown in documents released af er the Courant's FOIA lawsuit)

13. The Ghost in the Cabin

McVeigh maintained regular correspondence...: "The Prison Letters of Timothy McVeigh"
Esquire Bacharach, Phil 06/11/2015
Unabomber main sources: The United Stat of America Vers Theodore John Kaczynski:
Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber Mello, Michael 1999 and "The
Unabomber Case" - FBI Archives, 4/24/2008, and "UNITED STATES v. KACZYNSKI"
2001

14. Promised Land

Arraignment of Thurston shooter: "Kinkel Arraigned For Shootings" CBS News
06/16/1998; Thurston shooter, various notes: "Oregon Teen Killer Drops Insanity Plea"
Los Angel Tim Murphy, Kim 09/25/1999 and "Lethal Fantasies of a 15-Year-Old
Became a Reality" New York Tim Terry, Don & Bruni, Frank 05/24/1998; "three voices":
"The Killer at Thurston High" PBS Frontline Dr. Orin Bolstad testimony
NRA/Metaksa on Thurston: "NRA hails shooting survivor a hero" Associated Press
06/09/1998; Heston speech: "NRA TV" Charlton Heston 1998 meetings Season 4 Episode
2; ..."A child issue, not a gun issue”: "New Voice of the NRA Sounds Familiar" Washington
Post Russako f, Dale 06/09/1998
Tobacco settlements inspired gun liability strategy: "Big Guns" Boyer, Peter J. The New
Yorker 05/17/199; New Orleans: "New Orleans is Expected to Sue Gun Manufacturers" Los
Angel Tim 10/30/1998 and: "Mayor Marc H Morial, and the City of New Orleans vs.
Smith & Wesson Corp., Sturm Ruger & Co, Colt et al"; Chicago: "Chicago Sues Gun-
makers And Retailers The Lawsuit Says Firearms Create A Deadly Public Nuisance" The
Philadelphia Inquirer 11/13/1998; Bridgeport: "Af er Tobacco, Handgun Lawsuits" New
York Tim 01/31/1999; SHOT show: "Heston shows at gun rally" Athens Banner-Herald
02/02/1999
NSSF founding, main source for most NSSF details throughout: The National Shooting
Sports Foundation: A History, 1961 to 2011 by Doug Painter; Notes from original NSSF
founding dinner:

798
http://web.archive.org/web/20130509213257/http://www.nssf.org/50/gunsandammo.cfm
(Re-publishing a Guns and Ammo article from November 1961)

15. Eagles Circle

Nancy's e-mails with Marvin LaFontaine: "Nancy Lanza In Her Own Words" (PBS
Frontline & the Hartford Courant)
"...the bare minimum far participation...": CSP Report, Book 7, le 00255780
Eagles of Shepaug dam: “All Eyes On The Eagles” Newtown Bee, 02/19/1999 (NOTE:
Nancy appears to have read this same story, or spoke to someone who had, given the
numbers of eagles she cites in her email to LaFontaine.)

16. Revolution
Most of the events depicted in this chapter are from the Je ferson County Sheri 's O ce
investigation le of the Columbine shooting, commonly referred to as "the 11k". (The
numbering expanded as more exhibits were released as depicted in Chapter 37.) These
sources are listed by their document number within the 11,000+ page le, with the pre x
"JC".
Chat conversation: JC-001-026574 (Note: the portrayal of this exchange omits one line, for
readability); “Know what I hate/love” lists: JC-001-010411; "Hitmen for hire" tape: JC-001-
026274 (NOTE: One of the shooters listed the day's lming in his planner as “trench coat
ma a hitmen”); Right w the more dedicated of the pair...: an observation based on
ballistics from the scene, as well as the dynamic apparent in rst-hand reports on the
"Basement Tapes," and the preparations evident in the journals; Lef 's journal: JC-001-
026385; “Man in Black” story: JC-001-010465; Brady Bill, "Shot themselves in the foot": JC-
001-026538; Ketchup Incident: A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the A ermath of Tragedy
by Sue Klebold, and "The Missing Motive" Westworld Pendergast, Alan 07/13/2000; Drug
search incident: No Easy Answers by Brooks Brown; Gun show: JC-001-010620; Farewell
video: JC-001-010376; Diversion bomb response: JC-001-007952; Propane receipts: JC-001-
025955; general timeline of attack: Columbine Review Commission, May 2001 Governor’s
Report; Library encounters: Various les throughout 11k, including JC-001-008798 and
JC-001-000075 and JC-001-000089; Car Bomb timers: A Mother's Reckoning (Klebold);
sprinkler in library: JC-001-007884

17. Cascade
"ONE BLEEDING TO DEATH....": (Note: the sign actually said “1” instead of the
spelled-out “one”); Early footage of Columbine: ABC News Archives, 04/20/1999
(http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/april-20-1999-columbine-shooting-9541833);
"Most kids didn't want them there...": "The Columbine Tapes" Time Gibbs, Nancy &
Roche, Timothy 12/20/1999; "The ultimate bulli ” https://youtu.be/AFAcUlUswmE
(clip from The New Ricki Lake Show, February 2013); National debate on bullying in
schools: "10 years alter, the real story behind Columbine" USA Today 04/14/2009
Tony Blair on Columbine: House of Commons transcript, 21 April 1999; "...how important
it w to ban handguns...": (NOTE: With relatively few details available yet on the arsenal
that the Columbine shooters used, many assumed at this time, incorrectly, that handguns
were their primary weapons. It is perhaps noteworthy, though, that the long-guns used at
Columbine would have been banned in the UK as well, af er the earlier post-Hungerford
rearms law.)

799
David Kaczynski, “more Tim McVeighs”: "Internet rms asked to keep bombmaking sites
o f Web" Associated Press 05/20/1999; ..."There are individuals, in our society, who claim
that we cannot exist without oppression and regulation...": The Anarchist Cookbook Powell,
William 1971
Dream Catcher: "From Columbine to Sandy Hook: Muskegon dream catcher reveals a
tearful journey" Muskegon News Moore, Lynn 10/11/2013
Newtown Bee on NHS ceremony: "Columbine Commemoration Will Be A Call For
Understanding" Bigham, Steve 05/14/1999 and "Adopting a Covenant of Understanding"
06/04/1999; town's parents concerned: "NPC Releases Findings on Violence, Hears
Suggestions" White, Je f 10/14/1999 and "Parents Express Their Worries About School"
08/10/1999
...at Duck Pin Bowling: “Raising Adam Lanza” (Frontline) ...she w actually very ill...:
Nancy's health concerns are also detailed in the Child Advocate Report, pgs 29-31;
"Thoughtful friend to peers" and other development notes: Child Advocate Report pgs
26-28; Thank-you card: CSP photos "Sec 4 Scene Search Day 3" images 72-75; “ uiet
depth,” 2nd grade notes: "A frustrating search for motive in Newtown shootings" The
Washington Post Fisher, Marc and O'Harrow, Robert and Finn, Peter 12/22/2012; Nancy at
birthday party: CSP report, Book 7, le 00256780

18. Wave of Evil

Lautenberg Amendment: S.Amdt.362 to S.254 / 106th Congress of the United States
(1999-2000); Clinton response to Dakota Ridge: Public Papers of the President
Heritage High School shooting: "Heritage shooting suspect wrote about Trench Coat
Ma a" Associated Press Pilcher, James 08/10/1999 and: "Ga. Boy Took Parents' Guns"
Washington Post 05/22/1999
“...nothing to do with Littleton or Georgia”: Congressional Record, US House,
06/07/1999; Columbine father quotes: US Congress, Testimony of Darrell Scott Father of
Two Victims of Columbine High School shootings Littleton, Colorado Before the
Subcommittee on crime 05/27/1999
Background on Rep. McCarthy (the nurse) and platform: "Widow in L.I.R.R. Massacre
Considers Race for Congress on Gun Ban" New York Tim 04/12/1996
NSSF on gun show amendment: "Newtown’s NSSF Steps Into The Spotlight Of The
Gun Control Debate" Newtown Bee 03/03/2000; "...nothing but a backdoor attempt at
gun control...”: "Legislators want to shoot down lawsuits against gun makers" Associated
Press 02/24/1999
Texas gun shield law: "Bush quietly signs NRA-backed gun bill" CNN.com 06/18/1999
Wedgewood Baptist Church shooting: Night of Tragedy, Dawning of Light Crawford,
Dan R. (other details from special coverage "Fort Worth Church Shooting" Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
Gore and Bush campaign quotes, “Wave of Evil”: "Texas shooting draws broad reaction
from presidential candidates" CNN.com 09/17/1999

19. Radar
Note: The Leesburg symposium actually happened in July. The NCAVC report is blended
in with the symposium’s operations more than may be accurate, as there is no available
transcript of the symposium.

800
Main source: The School Shooter: A THREAT ASSESSMENT PERSPECTIVE (FBI)
Various notes on "leakage": Newspaper of the American Psychiatric Association, Volume
XXXII Number 12 06/21/2002; Notes on Padukah shooter, structure of the family:
RAMPAGE: The Social Roots of School Shootings (Newman); "...an idea we've accepted...":
"Kip Kinkel: A Boy's Life" Rolling Stone Sullivan, Randall 10/01/1998
Secret Service study on assassinations: "Preventing Assassination: A Monograph" Fein,
Robert A. Ph.D. & Special Agent in Charge Bryan Vossekuil, Secret Service Case Study
Project, May 1997; "They put in a room”: "A Radical New Look at Mass Shooters. Why
They Do It and How to Stop Them" Critical Incident Analysis Group, University of
Virginia School of Medicine; Details of Reagan assassination attempt, various trial notes:
Prosecutive Report: John Warnock Hinckley, Jr. Attempted Assassination of Ronald
Reagan, President of the United Stat March 30 1981 - U.S. Department of Justice; Federal
Bureau of Investigation; >"Assassin of Rulers" pro le (quoted in Secret Service Report):
Arthur MacDonald, Assassins of Rulers, 2 J. Am. Inst. Crim. L. & Criminology 505 (May
1911 to March 1912); “We’re looking for different piec of the puzzle...": Chicago Sun-Tim
10/16/2000

20. Distortion
Emails are from "Nancy Lanza in her own words", Frontline
"Significant stress in her life...": Child Advocate Report, page 30

21. Basement Tapes

News conference: "H.S. KILLER TAPE MAY AIR BY JANUARY" New York Post
Kaplan, Don 12/22/1999
Basement Tapes: Columbine "11k" le JC-001-010376
Controversy over agreement with TIME: Columbine: A True Crime Story Kass, Je f
...no less than 130 students stayed home...: "High School Responds to Shooting Rumor"
Newtown Bee 03/22/2000
Shooter's education at SHES: Child Advocate Report pgs 26-28; ...she would spot him all
alone on the playground...: CSP report, Book 7, le 00256780

22. Smart Guns

Boston Agreement: White House Press Release 03/17/2000: “CLINTON
ADMINISTRATION REACHES HISTORIC AGREEMENT WITH SMITH AND
WESSON” and "Gun Group Sues To End Pact On Safety Devices" Chicago Tribune
04/27/2000
Million Mom March: White House Press Release 05/08/2000 "President Clinton Meets
With Million Mom March Organizers and Renews His Call”; Mick North at Million
Mom March: Dunblane: Never Forget (North); Suzanna Gratia, Second Amendment
Sisters: From Luby’s to the Legislature (Gratia-Hupp)
Project Homesafe: The National Shooting Sports Foundation: A History 1961 to 2011
(Painter); NSSF “Flag” ad: "U.S. mayors, Sheen take aim at gun ad" Variety McClintock,
Pamela 08/23/2000
Cucchiara on election: "Gore, Bush Split Over Guns; Other Justice Stands Similar
Oakland Tribune 10/03/2000; CA AWB expansion: California Department of Justice

801
Kasler v. Lockyer Assault Weapon List Monday, October 02, 2000; "Senate Bill 23 Assault
Weapon Characteristics"
Heston visits UK: "Heston attacks British gun laws BBC.co.uk 11/15/2000 and "Heston's
gun claims criticized" 11/15/2000

23. The Ghost in the Cage

Kaczynski on McVeigh: letter from Ted Kaczynski published in American Terrorist:
Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing Michel, Lou and Herbeck, Dan;
McVeigh on Kaczynski: CBS’s 60 Minut interview, 02/22/2001; Letter from "FC"
(Unabomber) about failed plane bombing: "Bomber says threat was hoax letter" Buffalo
News 06/28/1995
Santana High School shooter: "Killer recounts Santana High shooting" San Diego Tribune
Dickey, Fred 05/10/2013; Secretary of Education comments: "Rage blamed at Santana"
Associated Press 05/12/2001
Anthrax scare in Newtown: “As Threats Mount, So Does Fear” Gordon, Jane New York
Tim 10/21/01
Traders: “Gun Sales Jump in Days Since Attack” Los Angeles Times 9/20/2001
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-20-me-47714-story.html
Peter and Nancy's separation: Child Advocate Report page 48, CSP summary report pg
29; Box in attic: Scene photos set "Farr - house" image 26; >Anthrax comment from
Nancy: FBI les from Sandy Hook investigation, released October 2017; Little league:
"Berliner Insurance 11, Newtown Bee 2…" Newtown Bee; Harmon, Kim 05/24/2002; Ryan
Kraf account: "Adam Lanza was a loner who didn't feel pain either physically or
emotionally says former teacher" Associated Press 12/15/2012; "Hand poem" witness: CSP
Report, Book 7, le 00104343
The Exceptional Case Study Project finished their work later that year...: The 2000 release
was actually a draf report, but turned out to be signi cantly similar to their nal 2004
report; news coverage of the report mostly occurred in 2000; "It puts the burden on
adults...": Arizona Daily Star 03/09/2001

Part III: Thin Air

24. The Hospital (A brief history of Fair eld State Hospital)

The rst 40 years of the history of Fair eld State Hospital/Fair eld Hills Hospital is
primarily based on information from Chapter 7 of The Mentally Ill in Connecticut:
Changing Patterns of Care and the Evolution of Psychiatric Nursing 1636-1972, written by
Lois D Heck, R.N., B.S., a former Director of Nursing Education at Fair eld Hills.
Sections on the development of mental health policy on the national level, and on
Rosemary Kennedy, are primarily based on information from American Psychos : How
the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System by E. Fuller
Torrey.
FAIRFIELD HILLS: Dr. Desmond 1968 retirement: Legendary Locals of Newtown,
Daniel Cruson
THE ASSASSIN: De nition of De-Institutionalization: Report of the Governor's Blue
Ribbon Commission on Mental Health (State of Connecticut, 2000); Assassin's trial:
"Hinckley Described as Sane When He Shot Reagan" New York Tim 06/05/1982;

802
"Hinckley Refuses to Testify and 2 Sides Rest Cases" 06/17/1982; "Psychiatry Panel Takes
the Stand on Taking the Stand" 01/23/1983; "Report Concludes Hinckley Made Conscious
Choice in the Shootings" 06/10/1982; "Hinckley Treatments Termed 'Absolute Calamity'"
05/19/1982; "5 Hinckley Jurors Testify in Senate" 06/05/1982 Mother's testimony:
"Hinckley's Mother Calls Him 'Haunted,' in 'Total Despair'" Washington Post 05/07/1982;
Insanity defense reform: HJ Res 648 98th Congress; "Af er Hinckley, States Tightened
Use Of The Insanity Plea" National Public Radio Jacewicz, Natalie 06/28/2016; Reagan
o fers visit: "President O fered in '83 To Meet With Hinckley" Washington Post Cauvin,
Henri E. 06/12/2004
THE PENDULUM: Medicaid exception: "The Outdated Institution for Mental Disease
Exclusion" John Fergus Edwards, J.D., LL.M. 05/1997
(http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/imd/imd-legal-analysis.html); Lake case: Catherine Lake,
Appellant, v. Dale C. Cameron, Superintendent, Saint Elizabeths Hospital, Appellee, 364
F.2d 657 (D.C. Cir. 1966); Stickney case: "Ricky Wyatt, 57, Dies; Plainti f in Landmark
Mental Care Suit" New York Tim 11/03/2011; Rouse case: "Charles C. ROUSE, Appellant,
v. Dale C. CAMERON, Superintendent, Saint Elizabeths Hospital, 1967 Donaldson case:
"Supreme Court Mental Health Precedent and its Implications" Mary Ann Bernard, J.D.
1978 and United States Supreme Court O'CONNOR v. DONALDSON, (1975) No. 74-8
DOWNHILL: Escaped inmates, early 1970's shif : "Fair eld Hills State Hospital: 'Unsafe
for Patients, Workers'" Connecticut Sunday Herald Rose, Linda 11/12/1972; Constables,
“disguised calls”: "Fair eld Hills Security Guards Are Newtown Constables" Connecticut
Sunday Herald 09/24/1972
LAST DAYS: Newtown chosen for Garner: "Connecticut Picks Sites To Build 2 New
Prisons" New York Tim 08/01/1987; Protest against Garner Prison, “Michael” letter:
"Hundreds rally to ght new jail at Fair eld Hills" The Hour 11/02/1987; Ditch blocking
construction: "Maverick’s Battle Is Uniting His Enemies" New York Tim 09/27/1989;
Legal ght: "Was The June 6 Vote The Last Of The Big Town Meetings?" Newtown Bee
06/11/2001; “...hell hath no fury like the people of Newtown”: "A Feisty Community is
Taking On the State Again" New York Tim 12/27/1987; Police cars, sewers: “Living with
fear in the shadow of prisons” New York Tim 04/02/1992; $1 million in lieu of taxes:
"Prison closure directive recalls Newtown controversy" Tim -Union Pirro, John
11/08/2009
THE FUTURE OF NEWTOWN: Town Meeting of June 2001: "Town Finally Poised To
Act On Fair eld Hills" Newtown Bee 05/29/2001; "Managers Look Forward To
Refurbishing Edmond Town Hall" 01/22/2002; Reed plan: "Reed Sees Split Sessions If 5/6
School Isn’t Built" 08/10/1999; Columbine letter: "What About K-6 Schools" Leslie
Boehmer and Kirk Morrison 10/06/1999; Votes pass: "Town Approves Fair eld Hills And
5/6 School Projects" 06/07/2001

25. Treegap
T-shirt, sex ed, etc: "Classmate says Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook school"  USA
Today  Stoller, Gary and Dorell, Oren 12/18/2012; Contents of the reading journal: CSP
photo set "Meehan - suspect's house evidence" images 27-30
Richard Novia at NHS, new security system: "High Tech Security System Watches Over
Newtown High School" Newtown Bee Damon-Merrow, Tanjua 11/13/2002

26. Bushmaster
Main source: FBI SNIPEMUR case le, released by the "FBI Vault" at i.gov

803
The boy had been suspended from riding the school b for a week... Iran Brown story:
"Youngest Sniper Victim ID'd" ABC News 12/12/2002
"The sad thing the shooter, who sounds like a pretty deranged individual, got a hold of
our rifle...": "Seized rearm made in Maine" Bangor Daily News 10/25/2002
(https://archive.bdnblogs.com/2002/10/25/seized- rearm-made-in-maine/); "Bushmaster
deliberately continued to utilize Bull’s Eye a Bushmaster gun dealer..." and other
information from DC Sniper lawsuit: Johnson, Buchanan v Bull's Eye Shooter Supply;
Bushmaster Firearms, Inc

27. The Big Book of Granny

...Dr. John Reed toured the camp ...: "Dr Reed Tours His Namesake School" Newtown
Bee 12/30/2002; the man who would be replacing... : "Board Selects New Superintendent"
04/10/2002; ...named in h honor...: "Reed Intermediate School––5/6 School Named For
John Reed" 10/09/2002; ...two hous : "New School 95 Percent Complete, On Schedule"
11/06/2002
"Granny" co-author’s mom interview: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00194470;
Interview with co-author: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00232922; Contents of Granny
book: CSP O cial Report, Book 4, le 00180670; ...the creators had access to the same
kind of equipment...: Archives of Newtown schools websites show student assignments
done in the same format; “...class list had already been announced....” NOTE: from the
redacted interview with the book's co-author, it is evident that they never had classes
together again based on the context of the redacted sections.

28. Shield
“As we dedicate ourselv ...": archived NSSF video under heading "Legislative Action"
(https://web.archive.org/web/20040806011823/http://www.nssf.org/LL_idx.cfm?
AoI=LL); Testimony, Larry Keane, etc.: transcript, Committee of the Judiciary House of
Representatives 108th Congress Subcommittee on Commerical and Administrative Law
hearing on H.R. 1036, 04/02/2003
"We adjusted our business ...": "Assault weapons ban doesn't faze Bushmaster" Associated
Press 05/15/2003

29. On Time, On Budget

Snow delay, Pitko f badge: "The Reed Intermediate School was de nitely the place to be
on Monday morning" Newtown Bee
"...did not think highly of himself..." : CSP Summary report, pg 33; 5th grade teacher
comments: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00205944
Terror Alert system enacted: https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020312-5.html; Terror alert raised:
https://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-advisory-system ; Town Meeting on Iraq War:
"Local Forum Addresses an Impending War in Iraq" Hicks, Shannon Newtown Bee
2/7/2003; Plastic sheeting advisory:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030407170832/http://www.ready.gov/stay_or_go.html ;
Bee article on plastic sheeting sales: http://newtownbee.com/keeping-the-heat-in-and-the-
terror-out-residents-stock-up-on-duct-tape-plastic-sheeting/
Newtown adopting of Active Shooter protocol: "Police Panel Approves Policy on Use of
Force" Newtown Bee 5/2/03

804
"Never made trouble or distracted others....": CSP Summary report, pg 33; Observations of
SHES shooter in 6th grade: Child Advocate report, pg 36; Band teacher's recollections:
CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00223756; School band concerts: CSP Summary report,
page 33; Peter saw Adam as a "normal weird kid,” photo of him with father, etc: Andrew
Solomon, “The Reckoning”; DDR as recreational activity: Child Advocate report, page 98
Traders municipal lawsuit:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040404160754/http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?
id=1061487932131 ; ATF investigating Traders again: "Trading in Death" (Brady
publication
Chimp in intersection: "Travis the Menace" Lee, Dan P. New York Magazine
(http://nymag.com/news/features/70830/); Nancy’s mortgage on 36 Yogananda: "Nancy
Lanza Estate Estimated At $64,000" Altimari, Dave Hartford Courant 2/20/14 and Town
of Newtown property records
Reed delays into 2nd year: "Board Receives Updates On Reed School And
Transportation" Newtown Bee 2/7/03
“Bomb her” quote, other details from same witness: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le
00235748

30. Dusk
Bushmaster comments on settlement:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040911001123/http://www.bushmaster.com/ ; NSSF
comments on Bushmaster settlement: "Families of sniper victims reach settlement"
Washington Tim 9/9/04; Motley Fool quote: "Gun Maker Mis res, Hurts Industry"
9/14/2004 (https://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2004/09/14/gun-maker-mis res-
hurts-industry.aspx); Connecticut impact of AWB lapsing: "Expiration of law banning
assault weapons doesn't a fect state" Associated Press 9/14/04
Peter Lanza touring NMS: "The Reckoning" by Andrew Solomon; "It w almost too good
to be true...: (Note: Many of Peter's recollections seem to be about a year o f when
compared with other sources, and I suspect that he is actually thinking of Reed
Intermediate School, from a year and half before this scene is portrayed); Lunch room
scene: Newtown Middle School "The Lion’s Roar" - Counselor Comments - MacKinney,
Kate; February, 2005
"Climate" at the school...: Newtown Middle School "The Lion’s Roar" - Principal’s Corner -
Sherlock, Diane; April 2005

31. Nightmare
Main source: the Red Lake shooter's online footprint as cataloged extensively by Dr. Peter
Langman on schoolshooters.info
Insurance as reason for no gun: "Families settle lawsuit over Red Lake shootings" MPR
News 7/20/06 (http://www.mprnews.org/story/2006/07/20/redlakesettlement);
Recruitment of accomplices: "Recounting the horror in Red Lake shooting spree" MPR
News 3/22/05
(http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/03/22_gundersond_redlakeday2/)
; Post about suicide: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread33823/pg1; Red Lake
Detention Center: http://www.bemidjipioneer.com/news/region/3868223-waiting-serve-
af er-building-vacant-10-years-childrens-healing-center-red-lake and:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2012/04/26/red-lake-juvenile-center; Red Lake denied
mental health grant: "Mental-Health Aid Denied to Killer's School" New York Tim

805
4/22/05; "Safe schools" grant established af er Columbine: https://www.samhsa.gov/safe-
schools-healthy-students/about; Drawings, comment from Learning Center: "Shooter
Described As Deeply Disturbed" Connolly, Ceci and Hedgpet, Dana Washington Post
3/24/2005
Criticisms of Bush re: Schiavo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/articles/A64317-2005Mar24.html; (NOTE: Terri Schiavo died on March 31, 2005,
largely pushing Red Lake out of the news cycle. Two days later, Pope John Paul the II died
at the age 84. Af er that, most people never heard of the Red Lake High School shooting
again.); Dreamcatcher to Red Lake: "From Columbine to Sandy Hook: Muskegon dream
catcher travels a tearful journey" Moore, Lynn Michigan Live 10/11/13
(http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2013/10/from_columbine_to_sandy_
hook_m.html)

32. Fantasy
Decline of SHES shooter in early middle school: Child Advocate report, pg 36; Xeroxing
pages from textbook, Peter assuming his son was bullied, etc: "The Reckoning" by
Andrew Solomon; "Adam felt the same way...": Child Advocate Report, page 64; Framed
set of Red Sox photos: CSP scene photos, set "Sec 4 Primary Scene" image 234 ; "Red Sox
supper" print: CSP scene photos, set "Sec 5 Back-up Scene 1" image 382;
Richard Novia and the Tech Club: transcript of interview with Richard Novia, Raising
Adam Lanza; Origins of Tech Club: "NTV17 Sets Its Sights On A Larger Role In The
Community" Newtown Bee 2/28/03 ; Newtown Channel 17: "Lights, Camera, Action –
Students Tune Their Talents And Energy To Channel 17" 9/15/00
uote from Principal Maloney: Minutes of St. Rose of Lima Home and School
Association General Meeting, 5/10/05 7:00 p.m.; Descriptions of SHES shooter at St.
Rose: "A frustrating search for motive in Newtown shootings" Washington Post 12/22/12;
Teacher comments from St. Rose: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00004051
The Reed "Shooter": https://newtownbee.com/and-administrator-reassurances-student-
journal-threats-spark-parent-concerns/ and: https://newtownbee.com/when-
fantasybecomes-a-treat/ - Julia and Joseph Morris, Newtown CT; (NOTE: Note: The
“stolen item” was actually not; the search was a result of a series of index cards with steps
showing how to make a springloaded pistol, found on the playground, and lef behind by
a third student. Changed to avoid confusion)
"Blarvink" on GameFAQs: https://www.gamefaqs.com/community/Blarvink/bio ;
"Blarvink" on 2draw: https://2draw.net/view/46914/

33. Greater Love

Tyler, Texas shootout description: "Survivors remember deadly Downtown Tyler gun
battle" Dean, Kenneth Tyler Morning Telegraph 2/24/15 and: "Revisiting Images from
Courthouse Shooting" - KLTV 2/24/05
Representative from Texas comments on Mark Wilson: Congressional Record, House,
March 2, 2005

34. Emergency
Sock changes: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, File 00017458; he hated the light coming
through the blinds...: (Note) Sensitivity to light is noted frequently in the investigation,
and con rmed by the shooter as the reason for covering the windows in online

806
conversations, further supported by the FBI les released October 2018; H favorite
cinematic find w Killer Klowns from Outer Space: The shooter noted in several online
posts that it was his "favorite lm", and a VHS copy of it is visible in scene photos of his
bedroom. He was also acquired a copy of the soundtrack.
Haircut scene: CSP o cal report, book 7, le 00091417
Emergency room visit, various doctors notes: Child Advocate report, pgs 36-45
Dr. Fox professional history: licensing records in Connecticut and New York; marriage:
"Miss Schneiderman Weds Dr. P. L. Fox" New York Tim 4/10/1988

35. Protection
Judiciary committee quotes on PLCAA: COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY HOUSE
OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION
ON H.R. 800 MARCH 15, 2005; PLCAA text: Public Law 109–92 ; 109th Congress of the
United States; Amendments debated, Columbine amendment: 109TH CONGRESS
REPORT" HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 1st Session 109–124 PROTECTION OF
LAWFUL COMMERCE IN ARMS ACT - JUNE 14, 2005; Final vote: Congressional
Record - H8990 - October 20, 2005; Bill signing location: Weekly Compilation of
Presidential Documents 10/31/05 Volume 41—Number 43

36. Shelter in Place

...middle school students who had made the Honor Roll that quarter...: "The following
Newtown students have been named to rst and second honors for this past marking
period..." Newtown Bee 12/9/05; 10 hours tutoring required for homebound status: CT
Code, Sec. 10-76d-15.
Dunblane les: "Dunblane le con rms blunders, says father" Laville, Sandra The
Guardian 10/2/05; Original reason for classifying records: "Call to lif secrecy on Dunblane
murderer" The Telegraph 2/10/03 ; Mick North comments on Dunblane shooter: "It's 10
years since Dunblane but I still feel so empty without Sophie" Herald Scotland 2/9/06
NHS Lockdown: "Sandy Hook Man Fined For Gun re Conviction — Suspended
Sentence With Probation" Newtown Bee 7/14/06 and: "School Lockdown Tested Security
Reponses" Coney, Susan 4/7/06; Risk of losing accreditation: "Accrediting Panel Gives
NHS ‘Warning Status’" 5/19/06; Budget cuts to school: "Maintaining The uality Of Our
School System" 3/14/03
...a backhoe w excavating the soil around the foundation of Bridgeport Hall, Fair eld
Hills excavating: "Details Reveal Signs Of Progress At Fair eld Hills" Newtown Bee
4/28/06; Beginnings of Newtown tax revolt: "Redevelopment Plans Inch Forward At
Fair eld Hills" 1/4/08; Bridgeport Hall: "Town Dedicates Newtown Municipal Center At
Fair eld Hills" 11/24/09;
Peter and Nancy had bought him the home version of Dance Dance Revolution for h
Playstation 2...: CSP scene photos set "Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" image 19; (the timing of this
purchase is presumed based on the item's release date and the console generation)

37. Existences
Denver Post breaks journals story: "Columbine documents detail troubled lives" 5/8/16
(http://www.denverpost.com/2006/07/06/columbine-documents-detail-troubled-
lives/); Legal trail thru supreme court: "Ruling on Columbine items challenged" 12/13/05;

807
Supreme court decision:. No. 04SC133, Harris v. Denver Post Corp.; "Balancing" test,
checking with FBI Behavioral: "Killers’ tapes won’t be released" Denver Post 06/19/06
"Lef " journal: JC-001-026387 ; "Right" journal: JC-001-010465 ; "The shooter's thoughts
appear to have been informed...": NOTE: I rst learned of the signi cance of Hobbes'
philosophy in explaining some of the Columbine shooter's writings and views from an
article by Peter Langman, "In uences on the Ideology of Eric Harris" from
schoolshooters.info
Clinton speech at memorial: C SPAN archive footage "Columbine Memorial
Groundbreaking, Jun 16 2006"

Part IV: The Gathering Eye

38. The Prison

1990 Carl Robinson riot: STATE OF CONNECTICUT v. JULIO RIVERA Feb 2 1993;
1992 En eld riot: "Police Seeking Ringleaders Af er Destructive Prison Riot" Puleo, Tom
11/25/1992 Hartford Courant; Drug deal leads to riot: "11 Charged In 1992 En eld Prison
Riot" 11/10/1993; The prisons that lost control all had something in common...: "State Paying
Dearly For Cheap Prisons" Cullison, Alan Hartford Courant 7/29/1991; ...Connecticut’s
prison population had started growing in the late 1970’s...: DOC web page
"Accomplishments in 1968-1993" http://www.ct.gov/doc/cwp/view.asp?
a=1493&q=464726 ; ...he highest rate of inmate injuri ... and other details throughout:
"Prison Chief Fights Public Anger" Johnson, Kirk The New York Tim 11/8/1993; Naming
of Garner, rst to show movies: "Christmas Movies Delight Prisoners: Local Theater
Manager and Two Actors at State Prison" Hartford Courant 12/26/1914
CHAOS: ...the staff at Garner were in open revolt: "Newtown Prison Site Of Previous
Problems" Schmidt, Karen Hartford Courant 10/02/1993; Newtown residents who lived
near the prison...: "Living With Fear in the Shadow of Prisons" New York Tim 4/02/1992
Riot: "Stando f af er clash at prison" New York Tim 4/22/1993; "They weren't playing
basketball," other notes: "Calm Restored Af er Violence at New Prison Near Danbury":
New York Tim , 04/23/1993; Escapees incident in 1993: "New Escape Heightens Fears
About Prison" New York Tim 9/01/1993; ...a search warrant w served at a home in
New Haven...: "Connecticut Fugitive Seized in New Haven" New York Tim 9/17/1993
TRAN UILITY: Billion dollar spending plan, other notes: "Prison Chief Fights Public
Anger" New York Tim 11/08/1993; "Get tough on crime..." : "Meachum Snubs Panel
Looking Into En eld Prison Riot" Hartford Courant Mahoney, Edmund 8/03/1994; Close
custody program: "A Prison Blurs Colors of Gangs To Curb Violence Among Rivals"
Judson, George New York Tim 1/29/1996; ...staff began monitoring all of their phone
calls...: Ja fee vs. Redmond (1996); ...a loud disturbance in Cell Block D...: Rodriguez v.
Connecticut, 169 F. Supp. 2d 39 (D. Conn. 2001)
ECHOES: ...between 1999 and 2003, Garner’s “specialty” would instead shi ...: "Prison’s
Specialty is Now the Mentally Ill" Struzzi, Diane Hartford Courant 10/17/2004; 2000
expansion debate: "Newtown Vows to Fight Prison Expansion" The New York Tim
4/23/2000; "He w assaulting a staff member...": "Jury decides in favor of state in lawsuit
for death of inmate" Danbury News-Tim 6/28/2007; Town meeting, state backs down:
"Commissioner: No Plans For Garner Expansion" Newtown Bee 12/6/2000; Connecticut
State Prison polices under Ward A. Garner: Public Documents of the State of Connecticut
1916 Vol III — Part II; Prison work under Garner: Interstate Commerce in Convict-Made
Goods: Hearings before the Committee on Interstate Commerce United Stat Senate 63rd
Congress Second Session on S.2321, March 1914

808
NEW ERA: ...rocked by a massive lawsuit...: UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT Civil Action No. 3:03CV1352 (RNC) STATE OF
CONNECTICUT OFFICE OF PROTECTION AND ADVOCACY FOR PERSONS
WITH DISABILITIES; Act (V) CHOINSKI, GOMEZ LANTZ (defendants) March 8
2004 (and RULING ON PLAINTIFFS' MOTION dated 3/30/2007); ...the besieged
commissioner announced that he w taking an early retirement...: "Prisons Chief Calls It
uits" Hartford Courant 2/05/2003; CT DOC chief in Iraq: "Ex-prisons Chief Cited In
Scandal" D'Arcy, Janice Hartford Courant 3/21/2004; ...the former mayor of the town of
Waterbury stood trial...: "U.S. Sex-Abuse Trial of Former Waterbury Mayor Opens" New
York Tim 3/13/2003; Reason for mission statement change: CT DOC "Transitional
Services Overview" https://portal.ct.gov/DOC/Common-Elements/Common-
Elements/Transitional-Services-Overview ; Psych program, "The goal to keep them
busy...": "Garner Grapples With Transition — To Psychiatric Prison" Gorosko, Andrew
Newtown Bee 6/4/2004
NO ESCAPE: "The human mind the most difficult thing to comprehend...": "Prison
suicides rattle state" Ali, Karen Danbury News-Tim 4/21/2004; "...the way we’ve done
business in the past inappropriate with th new population...": "Garner treats inmates'
mental ills" Associated Press 10/18/2004; Pagers replaced with text messages, Kehoe quote:
"Prison installs phone alerts" Gold, Robert Danbury News-Tim 9/22/2005; Security
system upgraded: "Expanded Prison Surveillance System Nearing Completion" Newtown
Bee 12/22/2006; "The inmat I cared for at Garner are the same on I cared for at
Fairfield Hills...": "Treat, don't punish, state's mentally ill" Danbury News-Tim 8/8/2005

39. Role Playing Game

Main source: No. COA10-814 NORTH CAROLINA COURT OF APPEALS - STATE
OF NORTH CAROLINA v. ALVARO RAFAEL CASTILLO
Letter to news station, video: "Shooting Suspect Sent Video About Slaying, E Mailed
Columbine Principal" WRAL.com (http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/1092070/);
...the shooter’s father, under a sheet...": "Investigator: Castillo tried to copycat Columbine"
The News & Observer 8/5/2009; more Coverage from Chapel Hill News:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article10353917.html; Littleton
reactions: "N.C. shooting suspect wrote to Columbine" Schrader, Ann The Denver Post
8/31/2006

40. Daylight
Generally, IEP notes and developments during high school are from the Child Advocate
Report, pgs 48-73
Latin Teacher: "Jennifer Huettner, And the Adam Lanza She Knew" Woog, Dan
(http://06880danwoog.com/2012/12/21/jennifer-huettner-and-the-adam-lanza-she-
knew/);
...Newtown High School w a very crowded place...: "Board Of Ed Endured A Bumpy Ride
During 2006" Newtown Bee 12/29/06 and "What Went Wrong?" Johnson, Ruby K
9/15/06
Accounts from regulars at My Place: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00258015; Nancy
looking for "escape", Ryan bussing tables at My Place: "Nancy Lanza had considered
moving with her son to Wash. state, friend says" Maese, Rick & Hermann, Peter
Washington Post 12/17/12; various "My Place" notes: "Adam Lanza: Withdrawn teen a
mystery then and now" Leger, Donna & Alcindor, Yamiche USA Today 12/16/12; Peter
setting up Yale evaluation: "The Reckoning" Andrew Solomon

809
41. Solstice
Security at SHES upgrade: Sandy Hook Facts
(http://sandyhookanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/05/sandy-hook-camera-system-fully-
exposed.html); Red Lake settlement: "Families settle lawsuit over Red Lake shootings"
MPR News 7/20/06; Dawson College: "I got shot-I thought I was going to die" The Link,
4/13/10; Hostage: "James Santos’ story" The Concord 9/27/06
Platte Canyon: Colorado Bureau of Investigation Report, le 2006-002834 and: Park
County Sheri 's O ce case report 2006001845; Je fco role at Platte Canyon: Je ferson
County Sheri f incident report 06-37993 10/5/06
Nickel Mines: Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Donald B. Kraybill,
Steven M. Nolt, and David L. Weaver-Zercher; and, One Light Still Shin : My Life
Beyond the Shadow of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting Monville, Marie & Lambert,
Cindy (NOTE: The Nickel Mines shooter seemed to communicate a more clear motive to
his wife, in a note he lef behind; one of their own children had not lived long af er being
born, and he said he had always been angry at god for that.)
Reactions in Newtown: "School Shootings Prompt Local Vigilance" Newtown Bee
10/06/06; Bush conference on school violence: https://www.c-span.org/video/?194748-
4/school-safety and "Park County Sheri f At National School Violence Conference" The
Denver Channel 10/10/06 (https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/park-county-
sheri f-at-national-school-violence-conference)

42. Prosthetic Environment

New Town Hall meeting: "Bridgeport Hall—Plan Revamps Former Hospital Building
Into Municipal Suite" Newtown Bee 12/1/06 and: O&G Industries “Town of Newtown
Proposed Municipal O ce Building Project” & “Architectural Narrative” 10/06/2006
Dr. King: CSP O cial report, Book 8, 00179815; “he had no understanding of the
metaphors, and w quite disturbed by the fairy godmother scenario you gave him”:
(NOTE: it’s not clear if Nancy was referring to the “three wishes” questions, or another
line of questioning); Dr. Ridley testing: CSP O cial Report, Book 8, le 00179889; "One
day — in late 2006, he would later claim, to multiple witness ": NOTE: I base my belief
that the shooter was visiting the Columbine forum as of 2006 on six factors: 1.) The
shooter's claim that “I think I found it through Google toward the end of 2006. I didn’t
register for years because it seemed like the kind of website which would get you on a
terrorist watch-list” in a later SCMRPG thread; 2.) Af er another user commented that
they found the site around the same time, the Sandy Hook shooter asked “were they
talking about [Dawson College shooter] at the time?,” as many users indeed were; 3.) His
tendency to mention the Dawson College shooter very frequently af er joining the board,
way out of proportion to the other shooters he xates upon, for no explained reason, as
well as his later tumblr username that incorporated the Dawson shooter's name; 4.) The
shooter’s familiarity with Columbine forum users who had stopped posting well before
"Smiggles" was registered; 5.) His demonstrated knowledge of many forum threads that fell
to the bottom of the heap long before he registered, and that disappeared completely in
the “purge” which occurred in early 2011, and 6.) His comment on Wikipedia (as later
depicted in Chapter 68) "I’ve been researching this topic since 2006 and I started
compiling a formal list at the beginning of 2010" which is part of a communication with a
person who was entirely outside of the Columbine forum's community.
Forum thread "FBI TRACKING LIST": Web archive of URL
http://www.columbinegame.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?t=525 ; Nancy comments about
"hacking": CSP O cial Report, Book 7, les 00029051 and 00104343 (NOTE: One
unsourced media story would claim in 2014 that the FBI really did come to 36 Yogananda
af er some sort of computer hacking was detected. I don't consider the reporting credible,

810
based on reports from the same source that have been disproven or similarly gone
unsupported by later releases. Key is that the FBI les released in October 2017 make no
mention of any visit to 36 Yogananda prior to 12/14/12.)

43. Contagion
McCarthy (nurse) speaking on CDC: 109th Congress, 2nd Session — Issue: Vol. 152, No.
46 — Daily Edition (video: https://www.c-span.org/video/?191901-2/house-
session&start=3250); CDC report on injuries:
https://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/r060418.htm ; CDC History: "Historical
Perspectives" https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00042732.htm ; the
unconventional location of the agency’s headquarters...: "From Humble Beginnings: The
History of the CDC" Mahmood, Ahmed Premed Magazine 3/3/2015 and: MMWR
Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999 (Morbidity report July 1999); History of
preventing violence: Surgeon General's Workshop on Violence and Public Health Report
Leesburg, Virginia October 27-29, 1985; Seatbelts as public health initiative: Injury
Prevention Network
(https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm# g2 ); 1989 Suicide
Rates: Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide. Volume 3: Prevention and
Interventions in Youth Suicide. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN
SERVICES; New England Study: New England Journal of Medicine: Gun Ownership as
a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home 10/7/93; ; Other notes: "Gun violence research:
History of the federal funding freeze" American Psychological Association
(http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx); The NRA criticized
the “New England study” the day it came out...:
(https://www.nraila.org/articles/19990729/defunding-cdc-s-nat-l-center-for-injury)
The "Dickey Amendment": PUBLIC LAW 104–208—SEPT. 30, 1996 104th Congress (text
from Omnibus Appropriations); Precisely what w or w not permitted under the clause
w unclear...: Kellermann AL, Rivara FP. Silencing the Science on Gun Research.
JAMA. 2013;309(6):549–550. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.208207; Elaboration on Dickey
Amendment: "CDC O f-Center" US Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management,
Government Information and International Security; Senator Tom Coburn June 2007

44. The Fear That Paralyzes

Main source: Child Advocate Report, pgs 52-73
Professional background of APRN Koenig: Curriculum Vitae dated 2013, and transcript
"Testimony of Kathleen Koenig, MSN, APRN - Yale Child Study Center, March 7, 2008"
Notes from Koenig's interview with police af er 12/14/12: CSP O cial report, Book 7,
00017458

45. Blacksburg
The state review panel assigned to investigate the Virginia Tech attacks released two
documents that compile most of the known facts about the Virginia Tech attack: one
released in August 2007, "Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech April 16, 2007 Report of the
Review Panel" and a follow-up released November 2009 under the title "Shootings at
Virginia Tech: Addendum to the Report of the Review Panel"
Grad student moving table: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO-aFKWMdgs ; Nor
Easter impacts use of emergency helicopters: "Students Recount Shootings " Holley, Joe

811
Washington Post 4/16/07; Shooter had classes in Norris Hall: "Isolation De ned Cho's
Senior Year" Gardner, Amy & Cho, David Post 5/6/07

46. Caves
Wikipedia article changes: the edits are permanently documented in the respective
Wikipedia articles' histories; Two plays written by the shooter, published by AOL:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071119021846/http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/0
4/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/ ; Shooter's behavior in class, "mean": "The uestion Mark in
Harper Hall" Cloud, John Time 4/18/07; IM conversation: "Was Va. Tech shooter a
stalker?" MSNBC 4/26/07
(http://web.archive.org/web/20070428005326/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18332927
/); Giovanni speech:
http://www.remembrance.vt.edu/2007/archive/giovanni_transcript.html (NOTE: I
slightly shortened Giovanni’s remarks because I felt the reference to VT “hokies” [alumni]
might confuse the reader, while pacing wouldn't allow for an explanation of the term);
Shooter's press kit arrives at NBC: "Gunman sent package to NBC News" Johnson, Alex
M NBC News (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18195423/print/1/displaymode/1098);
Stephen King reaction to Virginia Tech: Entertainment Weekly
http://ew.com/article/2007/04/23/stephen-king-virginia-tech/ ; American Psychiatric
Association pleas to halt coverage: PRNewswire release dated April 27, 2007; "...he had
never been so excited in h whole life": This observation is based on his later statement, to
an online acquaintance with whom he had corresponded about mass shootings, "The
enthusiasm I had back when Virginia Tech happened feels like it’s been gone for a
hundred billion years" as well as his general fascination with the Virginia Tech shooting,
evident in many posts (such as one where he linked to "missing pages" from the Virginia
Tech shooter's manifesto, caught by an observant viewer pausing footage of NBC sta f
ipping through its pages.)

47. Lost in the Wild

Main source: Child Advocate report, page 58-73; "...not sat fied if information related to
me....": "The Reckoning" by Andrew Solomon; ...an essay on North Korean dictator Kim
Jong-il, and the country’s nuclear weapons program...: CSP O cial Report, Book 4, le
00177484
uotes from classmates: Alexander, Harriet and Barrett, David "Adam Lanza Described
As 'Very Very Bright And 'A Deeply Disturbed Kid'" Telegraph 12/16/2012 and "Searching
for Answers" Los Angel Tim 12/15/2012. Latin teacher memories of 10th grade:
“Jennifer Huettner, And the Adam Lanza She Knew” Woog, Dan
(http://06880danwoog.com/2012/12/21/jennifer-huettner-and-the-adam-lanza-she-
knew/);
Fair eld Hills baseball diamonds: "Demolition Marks Redevelopment Progress At
Fair eld Hills" Bobowick, Kendra Newtown Bee 8/3/07 and: "Tearing Down Fair eld
House" 8/10/07; Tunnel collapse imagery: archived Newtown site
(http://web.archive.org/web/20071007111706/http://www.newtown-
ct.gov/public_documents/NewtownCT_FFHills/index)
“He became convinced that humans had devolved into progressively inferior beings...":
originally reported by Debra Mckinney, quoted by Krakauer.

48. The Ghost in the Machine

812
Jokela shooting: "SUMMARY OF THE SHOOTING INCIDENT AT JOKELA HIGH
SCHOOL ON 7 NOVEMBER 2007" National Burea of Investigation (Finland) and:
"Jokela School Shooting on 7 November 2007 Report of the Investigation Commission"
"Ship of Fools" release: Baltimore Sun 8/29/1999 (http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-
08-29/entertainment/9909080384_1_kaczynski-manifesto- ction)
Emails between teachers: Child Advocate Report, pg 66 ; Peter owning books about OCD
in children: CSP O cial Report, Book 4, le 00183916 ; Richard Novia quotes: Frontline
"Raising Adam Lanza", and FBI interview transcript, CSP O cial Report supplement ;
LaFontaine on Nancy's claims about bullying: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00196017
Newtown bullying incident: "A davit details assault that led to arrest of Newtown High
students" Danbury News-Tim 7/11/08
(http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/A davit-details-assault-that-led-to-arrest-of-
228047.php) and: "Sixth Newtown teen charged in alleged YouTube assault" 6/25/08
LAN Party, tech club recollections: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, les 00003260 and
00003302 and 00256598 and 00006405; Nancy's email to Peter af er LAN Party: "The
Reckoning" by Andrew Solomon

49. Static
McCarthy (nurse) on NICS: Congressional Record, House of Representatives, December
19, 2007; NICS failure to prevent Virginia Tech: "Missing Records: Holes in Background
Check System Allow Illegal Buyers to Get Guns" Jim Kessler, The Third Way Culture
Project, May 2007; Details of police interactions with VT shooter: Virginia Tech Shooting
o cial report and its addendum; Veterans and background check con ict: "How the
NRA Undermined Congress’ 2007 Gun Control Push" Sapien, Joaquin Mother Jon
1/25/13; 1993 Virginia one gun a month law: "One Gun Per Month" New York Tim
2/4/93; TheGunSource quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK-ii7WV2D0 ;
Bush signs NICS improvement bill: "Bush signs bill geared to toughen screening of gun
buyers" Simon, Richard Los Angel Tim 1/8/08; Notes on how the NICS improvement
act unfolded af er passage: "What Happened to the $1/3 Billion Congress Approved to
Improve Federal Gun Background Checks?" Yablon, Alex The Trace
(https://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/nics-background-check-congress-spending/) and 2012
update: "GUN CONTROL: Sharing Promising Practices and Assessing Incentives Could
Better Position Justice to Assist States in Providing Records for Background Checks"
Government Accountability O ce

50. Trinity
Westroads Mall shooting: "Everyone Will Remember Me as Some Sort of Monster"
Rolling Stone, August 2008;
YWAM/New Life shooting: Arvada Police Department Summplemental Report OCA le
2007024972; YWAM/New Life shooter's online activity: "Computer opens window into
mind of reeling killer" Rocky Mountain News 3/27/08; "Sounds like one of the Nobodi
became a Somebody..." (Note: the comment was actually posted on the 7th, a day before
the rst attack. Also, the story of the New Life/YWAM shootings is signi cantly reduced
in detail. The shooter had talked to his father on the phone in between attacks, as well as
his cousin, and he visited other locations before YWAM, related to his interest in
Satanism.); New “I just said, ‘Holy Spirit, be with me...’" : "Guard’s hands 'didn’t even
shake' as she shot gunman" Denver Post 12/10/07
NIU shooting: "Report of the February 14, 2008 Shootings at Northern Illinois
University" NIU O ce of the President; NIU shooter's xation on Virginia Tech: Last

813
Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter by David Vann

51. Pressure Drop

....someone in the pale yellow house got a copy of [NYT]: "First on the Scene, Again, Is the
College Newspaper" New York Tim 2/18/08 (clipping photographed in CSP photo set
"Meehan - suspect's house evidence" image 56; Note: I presume that the article was clipped
shortly af er the issue was printed, given the actions immediately following: joining a
Glock forum, and editing the Obama wikipedia page)
Computer class witness, Counterstrike: "Assault ri e was Adam Lanza's weapon of choice
in violent video game, former classmate says" National Post 12/22/12
(https://nationalpost.com/news/assault-ri e-was-adam-lanzas-weapon-of-choice-in-
violent-video-game-former-classmate-says); Wikipedia comment on Obama: edit history
on page "Talk:Barack_Obama" timestamp 12:57 3/1/08; Novia meeting, Ryan quote: "20-
year-old Shooting Suspect Was A 'Smart But Shy Nerd' The Telegraph 12/15/12;
Gamecube, “nobody knows where he ”: "Nancy Lanza let Adam use guns to “teach him
responsibility” Daley, David Salon 12/23/12, also noted in CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le
00256598

52. Law of the Land

"NRA model" Mini-14: http://www.ruger.com/news/2008-06-12a.html ; Sanetti takes
over as NSSF head: 3/26/08 Press Release from Ruger titled "STURM, RUGER &
COMPANY, INC. ANNOUNCES DEPARTURE OF PRESIDENT STEPHEN
SANETTI TO BECOME CEO OF THE NATIONAL SHOOTING SPORTS
FOUNDATION"; He had started h career at Ruger in the 1970’s...: Gun Digest interview
with Steve Sanetti 5/23/13 (https://gundigest.com/reviews/the-gun-digest-interview-steve-
sanetti)
Obama "bitter clingers" ga fe:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080412194514/http://www.hu ngtonpost.com:80/mayhi
ll-fowler/obama-no-surprise-that-ha_b_96188.html
...attende were not actually allowed to come to the convention center armed that day...:
"With McCain on hand, knives won't cut it at massive NRA gunfest" Daly, Michael New
York Daily News 5/17/08; NSSF dissolves Heritage Fund:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070810112048/http://www.hsshf.org:80/ ; Obama plan to
ban guns per NRA: http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/nra-obama-
most-anti-gun-candidate-ever-will-ban-guns-010821 ; Obama on Assault Weapons Ban:
"Obama Bemoans 'Epidemic of Violence'" Washington Post 7/15/07; Obama’s opponent
that year wasn’t quite the hero of the NRA, either...: "NRA endorses McCain"
Washington Times 10/9/08 (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/09/nra-
endorses-mccain/); Amici Curiae brief for DC Heller: "Brief for Amici Curiae - 55
Members of United States Senate, The Present of the United States Senate, and 250
members of United States House of Representatives in Support of Respondent Stephen
P. Halbrook" US Congress
Dick Heller story: "He Won the Supreme Court Case That Transformed Gun Rights. But
Dick Heller Is a Hard Man to Please." Obbie, Mark The Trace 3/20/16
(https://www.thetrace.org/2016/03/dick-heller-second-amendment-hero-abolish-gun-
regulation/); DC/Heller decision text: SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
— DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ET AL . v. HELLER No. 07–290. Argued March 18,
2008—Decided June 26, 2008

814
53. Pale Yellow House
Emails between shooter and mother, general details: Child Advocate Report, pgs 74-78; "It
not though I mean...": The shooter actually wrote “it is not as though I do not mean
you are homeless and begging.” Context indicates that the double-negative was an error; I
corrected it to avoid confusion; Nancy sailing: "Family, friends shed light on lives of Nancy
and Adam Lanza" New Haven Register 12/17/12 (Note: Minor details, such as where the
witness was from, were changed in this scene.)
Second shooting in Finland: "Kauhajoki School Shooting on 23 September 2008 Report
of the Investigation Commission"; Kuahajoki shooter's xation on Virginia Tech shooter:
"Finnish shooter hailed Virginia Tech killer" The Brunei Tim 9/25/08
BBC on Youtube pulling Columbine videos af er Kuahajoki: "YouTube pulls Columbine
videos" Courtney, Sloban BBC News 11/14/08
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7730679.stm) (NOTE: in a later forum thread, the Sandy
Hook shooter recalls how a "Zero tolerance policy" for Columbine videos was adopted by
Youtube af er the rst Finland shooting; based on available news sources he appears to
have confused that attack with its copycat in 2008.) ...he had gotten diligent about saving
copi of videos...: (NOTE: this is evident in the shooter's propensity to save just about
everything, and he notes in multiple posts that he is in possession of various videos that
are no longer online, and he appears to deploy this archive in the "monologue" montages
mentioned in Chapter 70 -- there were two sets of these, " ctional monologues" was
seemingly every movie scene depicting a basement-tape-like video, and "monologues" was
made of examples of the real thing, including Virginia Tech. This archivist tendency was
also evident with the MP3 playlist downloaded from youtube, or a post where he talks
about a dream he supposedly had, where he ends the story, "I realized that I had been
watching a YouTube video, part 11/11. I thought, 'Wow, that was a pretty surreal movie. I'm
bookmarking this and I'll go back to look at the other parts later'. I woke up in real life and
realized that YouTube would remove the videos from their website along with all internet
references to them by the time that I managed to get online")
Lanza divorce records: State of Connecticut Superior Court records, Docket No:
FSTFA084015364S

54. Travis
Main source for details of Sandy raising Travis: "Travis the Menace" Lee, Dan P. New York
Magazine
Connecticut's e forts to address Travis situation prior to the attack: State hearing
transcript "House Joint Resolution Number 42, RESOLUTION CONFIRMING THE
DECISION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DISMISS THE CLAIM
AGAINST THE STATE OF STEVEN NASH, SUCCESSOR CONSERVATOR OF
CHARLA NASH"; The mayor would deny the conversation ever happened...: "Chimp
Owner, In Month Before She Died, Told Lawyer Of Her Odd Life With Travis" Lender,
John Hartford Courant 8/9/12; Charla w holding a plush Elmo doll in front of her...: "'I
Didn't Give Him Xanax' Chimp Owner Says" NBC Washington 2/19/09
(https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/archive/Chimp-Owner-I Didnt-Give-Him-
Xanax.html); He looked at me like, ‘Mom, what did you do?’”: "Owner describes chimp’s
terrifying rampage " Today Show 8/3/10 (https://www.today.com/news/owner-describes-
chimp-s-terrifying-rampage-wbna29255129); “What he did w essentially what they do in
the jungle...": "Chimp Attack First Responders Describe Horri c Scene" Fox News 2/21/09
(http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/02/21/chimp-attack- rst-responders-describe-
horri c-scene.html)

815
55. Undertow
Nancy's review for dress maker: Google Maps business reviews, user NJLanza1918, accessed
2015 (NOTE: Name of business lef out for privacy); Peter didn’t fight it; h attorney
remembers...: "Connecticut school shooting: troubled life of Adam Lanza, a ercely
intelligent killer" Alexander, Harriet; Barrett, David; Donnelly, Laura; Swaine, John The
Telegraph 12/15/12; U.S. History class, McVeigh quote: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le
00018285; "My Place" patron's computer repair: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le
00253797; ...she said she decided to move him to college cours because he w “brilliant...”:
"Nancy Lanza let Adam use guns to “teach him responsibility” Daley, David Salon 12/23/12
...it w only one job...: (NOTE: It does not appear that the shooter ever "Worked at a
computer store" like his family in New Hampshire believed [many other things Nancy
told them, or let them believe, were also not true.] However one possible explanation is
that the Tech Club did raise some of their funds through repairing computers brought in
by the public, and restoring old computers to then sell, though it's not clear if this was a
practice at the time he was a member. No person ever claims to have seen the shooter
working in a customer-contact setting, except for this single letter of recommendation.)
Binghamton shooting: Binghamton Police Department Case #90-7710
Peter hiking with son, GRASP: "The Reckoning" by Andrew Solomon; WCSU records,
"Mother came in" note: "CBS News obtains Adam Lanza's college records"
(https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/cbs-news-obtains-adam-lanzas-college-records/ )
(NOTE: the CSP O cial Report also documents recovering "a letter from the shooter
requesting to withdraw from a course in Data Modeling and Data Base Design" from 36
Yogananda [Book 4, le 00177484]); German classmate, Gamestop interactions:
"University: Newtown gunman took college courses at 16" CBS News 12/17/12
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/university-newtown-gunman-took-college-courses-at-
16/) and "Shooter's Persona Drew Concern at School" Audi, Tamara; Troianovski, Anton;
Dawsey, Josh Wall Street Journal 12/17/12

Part V: Landfall

56. The Void

"...solitary, middle-aged man stepped up to h bedroom mirror, and spoke into h
reflection....": The "Hide from Emotion" video is still available on Youtube, under the
shooter's username MOSB46PGH; LA Fitness shooter's online journal:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090808074908/http://www.georgesodini.com:80/liveord
ie.htm; ...he w lazy choosing h password — so much so that a stranger online could guess
it, one year later... This shooter's google history was posted to a Reddit thread
(https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/97wnt/reddit_exclusive_george_sodi
ni_documents_la/) (NOTE: Although never o cially con rmed as far as I'm aware, it
seems reasonably certain that this dump of the user's search history is genuine, given the
extremely short amount of time between the crime and when it was posted, and that the
information included [such as ammo purchase dates and vendors] match what police later
found); Sequence of shooter entering the gym: "George Sodini Sought Dating Help
Before Pennsylvania Gym Shooting" ABC News 4/7/09
(https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=8274254&page=1); uote from The Gun
Source: "Same dealer armed three mass killers: Pa. gym gunman, Va. Tech shooter, Ill.
student" Schapiro, Rich New York Daily News 8/7/09
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/dealer-armed-mass-killers-pa-gym-gunman-
va-tech-shooter-ill-student-article-1.400047)

816
57. Black Plastic
Wikipedia edits this chapter: contributions, User: "Kaynbred"; "The High Road" pro le:
https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?members/kaynbred.104285/ ; Bloody
Wednesday discussion on SCMRPG: web archive
(https://web.archive.org/web/20100726033419/http://columbinegame.com/discuss/view
topic.php?p=37682&sid=2 f7d148340967243b31465de9493a36)
Orange High School shooter's trial: STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA v. ALVARO
RAFAEL CASTILLO No. COA10-814 FIFTEEN B DISTRICT NORTH CAROLINA
COURT OF APPEALS; Trial footage: WRAL Youtube channel (Note: The Sandy Hook
shooter later states he watched the trial multiple times. He also comments about it on the
forum.)
Redding Roadhouse boyfriend: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00030249; Divorce
mediator: "Connecticut School Shooting Update: Divorce mediator says Nancy Lanza
didn't like to leave son Adam alone" CBS News "Crime Insider" 12/17/12
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/connecticut-school-shooting-update-divorce-mediator-
says-nancy-lanza-didnt-like-to-leave-son-adam-alone/); Nancy’s son signed up for one, last
college course in the fall of 2009...: CSP O cial Report lists a document seized from 36
Yogananda "Norwalk Community College registration for "A+ Computer Repair" course
(08/24/09)" (Book 4, le 00183916); Glocktalk thread about adding RAM to PC:
http://www.glocktalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1131818; about gaming mice
http://glocktalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1128715; Combat arms user activity:
http://combatarms.nexon.net/ClansRankings/PlayerPro le.aspx?user=kaynbred ; Mg14c
forum "enlistment":
http://web.archive.org/web/20091202055517/http:/mg14c.net/mg14c-members-please-
read-t16.html ; Explanation of "pedobear" meme: "California police warn parents of
pedophilia mascot" San Francisco Chronicle 9/14/10
(https://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2010/09/14/california-police-warn-parents-of-
pedophilia-mascot/); User from I.P. address changes to "Smiggles": Psychostats.com Play
History: Smiggles (STEAM_ID: 0:0:17907142)

58. Modern Sporting Ri e

Ruger SR 556: American Rifleman Sept 2009
(https://www.americanri eman.org/articles/2009/9/15/ruger-s-sr-556/)
Colin Goddard at gun show: Brady Campaign press release 11/18/09 "VA Tech Survivor
Tracks Shady Gun Sellers With Hidden Camera" and Youtube video "Guns for Cash! No
Background Check, no ID, AND IT'S ALL LEGAL!"
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baPgr_tw79 ); Colin Goddard speaking in DC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjLI0z9n68M
NSSF "Modern Sporting Ri e" campaign: Archived NSSF page
(http://web.archive.org/web/20091011071910/http://www.nssf.org/MSR/views.cfm);
NSSF Facts about MSRs:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090927184512/http://nssf.org:80/msr/facts.cfm
Traders closed: "What Should Go Where The Old Traders Sports Was" Patch.com 3/6/13
(https://patch.com/california/sanleandro/what-should-go-where-the-old-traders-sports-
was); Traders not selling guns: "San Leandro’s Trader Sports no longer selling guns, for
now" Brand William East Bay Tim 8/17/16
(http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2006/06/04/san-leandros-trader-sports-no-longer-
selling-guns-for-now/) and "Gun shop tries to keep U.S. from closing store" Bulwa,
Demian SF Gate 5/25/06 (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN LEANDRO-
Gun-shop-tries-to-keep-U S-from-2496163.php)

817
The state had determined not to bring any charg against the chimp’s owner, Sandy...,
other updates in Travis case: "Owner describes chimp’s terrifying rampage" Today 8/3/10
(https://www.today.com/news/owner-describes-chimp-s-terrifying-rampage-
wbna29255129); Responding o cer’s account: "Af er Shooting Chimp, a Police O cer’s
Descent" Wilson, Michael New York Tim 2/24/10
FBI NICS location: FBI website (https://www. i.gov/services/cjis/nics); Boxes of
background check records: "Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns" Laska,
Jeanne Marie GQ 8/30/16 (https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-
many-guns); Brady Bill text: 103rd Congress, HB 1025; FBI Multiple guns in one year
project: Fox News 7/1/16 (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/07/01/ i-considered-alerts-
on-buyers-multiple-guns-but-was-scrapped-over-legal-concerns.html)

59. Catalog
New municipal center: "Town Dedicates Newtown Municipal Center At Fair eld Hills"
Newtown Bee 11/24/09; Llodra sworn in: "Governor Swears In Llodra, Elected O cials In
Brief Ceremony" 11/24/09; Llodra and security fence: Howard, Jan "The Newtown Arts
Festival Will Open..." 8/17/2000
mG14C "pedobear" thread:
http://web.archive.org/web/20091217101427/http://mg14c.net:80/kayn-just-for-you-
t61.html ; Contents of USB drive: CSP O cial Report, Book 4, le 00194691 ; MG14C
"wanted to be in the military" discussion:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100210093459/http://mg14c.net:80/viewtopic.php?
f=11&t=148 ; MG14C "staying alive" discussion:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100127164308/http://mg14c.net/staying-alive-t121.html ;
Stack of albums in closet: CSP O cial Report scene photos set "Sec 5 - Back Up Scene 1"
image 351 ; MG14C Hiroo Onada:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100123182556/http://mg14c.net:80/host-a-asian-week-
t119.html ; Nancy tells Adam he won’t be a marine/army ranger: "Newtown shooter
dreamed of being Marine" Brown, MariAn Gail CT Post 12/20/12
(https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Newtown-shooter-dreamed-of-being-Marine-
4133287.php); Fair eld Indoor Range scene: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00029167 ;
NRA Certi cation: CSPS O cial Report scene photos, set "Meehan - Suspects house
evidence" image 9 ; CT Requiring NRA certi cation:
http://www.ct.gov/despp/cwp/view.asp?a=4213&q=494614

60. L534858
AR-15 history main source: Poyer, Joe The M16/AR15 Rifle - A Shooter's and Collector's
Guide
History of U.S. infantry weapons, M16 adoption: United States Department of the Army
"Report of the M16 Ri e Review Panel, 1 June 1963 (Declassi ed June 1988)"; M16s
suitable for Vietnamese soldiers: "U.S. Combat Instructors Learn As They Teach in South
Vietnam" New York Tim 7/8/62
Bushmaster history: Maine Department of the Secretary of State business records, and
"One of most versatile weapons on the planet made in Old Town, but good luck nding
where" McCrea, Nick Bangor Daily News 2/17/12 (
http://bangordailynews.com/2012/02/17/business/one-of-most-versatile-weapons-on-the-
planet-made-in-old-town-but-good-luck- nding-where/) and "Maine Vets" blog pro le
(https://blog.mainevets.org/mvh-bangor-veteran-month-mack-gwinn) and MGI arms
"History" page https://www.mgi-military.com/index.php?id=29

818
Production and shipment of Lf534858 ri e: DONNA L. SOTO, ADMINISTRATRIX
OF THE ESTATE OF VICTORIA L. SOTO et al. Plainti fs, v. BUSHMASTER
FIREARMS INTERNATIONAL, LLC, et al. Defendants (pg 17)
"Smiggles" posts on Columbine forum: No longer available online, I cataloged each of
these posts in 2014-2015, and later compiled them for the website schoolshooters.info
"Harry Potter" note: FBI les released October 2017 (the shooter also mentioned Harry
Potter or posted in topics related to Harry Potter on a few occasions); Note about
ammo/budget from closet: CSP O cial Report scene photos, set "Sec 5 - Back Up Scene 1"
image 516; Firearms transaction records: CSP O cial Report, book 4, le 00151485
NSSF survey: NSSF document "Harris Interactive uick uery / Fielding Period: March
16-18, 2010 /NSSF Weighted To The U.S. General Adult Population - Propensity" — pg 24
Nanping, China attack: "8 Kids Stabbed to Death at Chinese School" CBS News 3/23/10
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/8-kids-stabbed-to-death-at-chinese-school/);
Hanzhong attack: "Killer in China School Stabbing Knew His Victims" Wong, Edward
New York Tim 5/14/2010; Guangdong attack: "School knife attack suspect undergoing
psychiatric check" China Daily 4/29/10; Jiangsu attack: "Attacker Stabs 28 Chinese
Children" Wines, Michael New York Tim 4/29/10 and "Kindergarten attacker sentenced
to death" China Daily 5/17/10; CNN comment on China violence:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/02/china.attacks/index.html ;
Shangdong attack: "China school attacks leave 1 dead and 33 children burned or slashed"
Demick, Barbara and Hilgers, Lauren Los Angel Tim 4/29/10
(http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/29/world/la-fg-china-school-stabbings-20100430);
Shaanxi attack: "Nine killed in latest school stabbing" Huazhong, Wang and Lie, Ma and
Hongyan, Lu China Daily 5/13/10 (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010-
05/13/content_9842677.htm)
Wooster Mountain scene with Peter: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00006579
Cumbria shootings: "Operation Bridge: Peer Review into the Response of Cumbria
Constabulary Following the Actions of Derick Bird on 2nd June 2010. Final Report March
2011 Armed Police Working Group"; Mick North on Cumbria: "'Armed police would not
stop Dunblane' says father" Howarth, Angus The Scotsman 8/4/14
Norwich University ght: "The Reckoning" by Andrew Solomon
Private Messages from the shooter: These were shared with me by a forum user who
wished to remain anonymous. I was able to independently con rm that the same user had
interacted with "Smiggles" in public threads, but there is no way to verify the content of
their interactions, much like any other witness statement in this story that is absent third-
party veri cation. However, the information allegedly disclosed by the shooter in these
communications has since proven consistent with evidence that was not publicly available
at the time I received them (such as speci cally moving to Seattle because of low UV
radiation, as later quoted from an FBI witness in Chapter 76), and which was not part of
any o cial record until the FBI released its les in October 2017. I will be honoring this
person's wishes in keeping them anonymous.
Novelization of Crawlspace in the closet: NOTE: the same is true of The Pit (aka "Teddy"
in novel form - apparently a rare collector's item by the time he obtained it, based on
online merchant listings.)

61. The Patient

Primary source (for this chapter and all "Patient" scenes unless otherwise noted): State of
Connecticut Department of Public Health — Investigative File in Response to Petition

819
Number: 2012-241, RE: License No.: 029514 (released May 8 2014 to Sheila Matthews-
Gallo of Westport, CT)
(Note: The evidence and testimony quoted from this document were part of a state
investigation related to his medical license, as a result of which Fox agreed to surrender his
medical license, without admitting wrongdoing. However, as noted in Epilogue, he was
later charged criminally for the same actions depicted in the complaint, and eventually
pled guilty. The exhibits are thus presumed to be genuine.)

62. Anarchy
Private Messages: See Chapter 60 note; "Cocoon" sunglasses: CSP "Vehicle Survey" report
Report - Honda Civic license plate 872YEO; "They remember that he was angry and
resentful about society’s structure...": FBI les released October 2017; My Place quotes:
PBS/Courant "Raising Adam Lanza"; Landscaper and En eld ri e: "The children killed by
school massacre madman Adam Lanza were 6 and 7 years old; all 20 were shot more than
once" Rosario, Frank New York Post 12/15/12 (https://nypost.com/2012/12/15/the-
children-killed-by-school-massacre-madman-adam-lanza-were-6-and-7-years-old-all-20-
were-shot-more-than-once/); Turkey coop scene: "Connecticut shooter would 'just shut
down' in high school" Bengali, Shashank and Hennessy-Fiske, Molly and Murphy, Kim
Los Angel Tim 12/16/12 (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/16/nation/la-na-shooter-
lanza-20121217); NHS “Smoke Signals” reprint: Newtown Hawkeye, Nov 2010 issue
(https://issuu.com/nhshawkeye/docs/)
"Pedophile guide" story (NOTE: although not directly referenced in the story, this article
was the original topic in the thread about pedophilia): "There's A Guide For Pedophiles
On Amazon, Consumers Calling For Boycott" Saint, Nick Business Insider 11/10/10
(http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-is-selling-a-guide-for-pedophiles-consumers-
calling-for-boycott-2010-11); Essay on pedophilia: described in Child Advocate Report and
CSP o cial report; quoted version obtained from Columbine forum user; NOTE: the
shooter's (USB) hard drive also contained an article from a medical journal, regarding
pedophiles: "Pro le of Pedophilia: De nition, Characteristics of O fenders, Recidivism,
Treatment Outcomes, and Forensic Issues" Ryan C.W. Hall, MD and Richard C.W. Hall,
MD, PA

63. Of Rulers
Main source on Tucson shooting: case les United States of America v. Jared Lee
Loughner, District of Arizona case 11-0035M; Conversation with wildlife o cer: "Tucson
shooting: Last hours before rampage show Loughner unraveling" Arizona Daily Star
3/28/13; Timing of going to see Gi fords in 2007: "How Jared Loughner Changed: the
View from His Schools" Thompson, Mark Time 1/11/11
(http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2041878-2,00.html) Bystander
trying to shoot the shooter: "Records detail shooter's agitation before Ariz. rampage"
Wagner, Dennis USA Today 3/17/13 (
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/27/gabby-gi fords-shooting-
records/2024589/); Shooter insisting his target died: Case 4:11-cr-00187-LABU document
460, US Dept of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons, Forensic Update 4/24/2012
Malloy sworn in: "Conn. Joins Nation In Mourning Arizona Shooting Victims" Wilson,
Fran Hartford Guardian 1/10/11 (http://www.thehartfordguardian.com/2011/01/10/conn-
joins-nation-in-mourning-arizona-shooting-victims/) and "Malloy sworn in as Conn.
governor" High, Susan Boston.com 1/6/11
(http://archive.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2011/01/06/malloy_sworn_in_as_con
n_governor/)

820
"Daily Show" scene: 1/10/11 episode The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (transcript courtesy
Comedy Central); Shooter's connection with "Tea Party" inaccurate: "The bogus claim
that a map of crosshairs by Sarah Palin’s PAC incited Rep. Gabby Gi fords’s shooting" Ye
Hee Lee, Michelle Washington Post 1/15/17
"The purge": archived index pages show a pre-purge number of 49,441 posts, and
af erward, 22,585 posts; “It wasn’t true...”: Such a physical abormality is not reported
anywhere in the o cial report (which includes a medical examiner's report), nor by the
witnesses who saw the shooter's body without authorization as depicted in Chapter 76.
John Zerzan comments on Tucson shooting: 1/11/11 broadcast of Anarchy Radio, available
via Web Archive
Pistol range, sign-in sheets: CSP O cial Report, book 7, le 00222826
Obama editorial af er Tucson: "We must seek agreement on gun reforms" Arizona Daily
Star 3/13/11 (https://tucson.com/news/opinion/mailbag/president-obama-we-must-seek-
agreement-on-gun-reforms/article_011e7118-8951-5206-a878-39b c9dc89d.html)
AMC employee's interactions with the shooter: CSP O cial Report, Book 4, le 00190163
(Note: “Dave” is a sketch based on this witness interview. His job duties are imagined,
based on the author's experience.); Gunbroker feedback: gunbroker.com user feedback
pro le "NJL1918"

64. In the Abyss

Norway scene primary Source: "NOU: Rapport fra 22. juli-kommisjonen — Preliminary
English Version of Selected Chapters. Oslo, 13 August 2012"; Timing of events on Utoya:
"Timeline: Anders Breivik" Al Jazeera
(http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/08/201282314116683446.html);
...he had stopped updating the spreadsheet months ago...: The Courant story covering the
spreadsheet's release from the FOIA decision reads "The last entry on the spreadsheet was
from June 2, 2010."
McDonald's San Ysidro attack: No. D004619 Court of Appeals of California, 7/9/87
Cristian Toscano Lopez, a Minor, etc., et al., Plainti fs and Appellants, v. McDonald's
Corporation, et al. (NOTE: The corporation's defense team in this case made a thought-
provoking comparison between the mass shooting, and a meteor striking the restaurant);
“Society had their chance,” zoo story, waiting for callback: "James Huberty, the loner who
killed 21 people at..." Barabak, Mark Z UPI 7/20/1984
(https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/07/20/James-Huberty-the-loner-who-killed-21-
people-at/6288459144000/); other San Ysidro details: “Gunman is Termed a Hotheaded
Loner” New York Tim 7/20/84
Jackie from salon and Nancy: CSP O cial Report, book 7, le 00091417
Itemized hard drive contents: CSP O cial Report, book 4, le 00194691

65. Legacy
Note: omitted from this analysis of the earliest school attacks is the 1927 Bath Township
bombing — because it was a bombing, not a shooting. I felt that bringing it up, only to
dismiss it, was too distracting. Several other early school shootings were also omitted (such
as the February 1984 attack on 49th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles) because they
did not appear to be a result of, or trigger, a "wave."
Hubbard Woods Elementary attack: "Mad Enough to Kill" People 6/88; Oakland
Elementary School attack: James W. WILSON, Petitioner-Appellee, v. Jon E. OZMINT,

821
Director, South Carolina Department of Corrections; Olean attack: "Teen sniper kills
three, 11 wounded" Usiak, Richard The Bryan Tim 12/31/74 and and "Sniper at high
school kills 3 and wounds 11" and "Honor Student Held as Sniper" Ocala Star-Banner
12/31/74 and "Honor Student Charged With Sniper Shooting In New York" Madden,
Timothy J Kingman Daily Miner 12/30/74; Brampton Centennial attack: "School killer
'sought revenge'" Ocala Star-Banner 5/29/74; St. Pius X High School attack: "Two dead,
six wounded: High school horror" The Citizen 10/28/75; Olean suicide notes: "He
regretted his life" St. Petersburg Tim 11/5/75 and "Young man found dead in jail cell"
Eugene Register-Guard 11/2/75; CSU Fullerton attack: "Shootings recall CSUF ordeal 31
years ago" Orange County Register 5/20/06 (NOTE: This is a very unique story, in that it
portrays a family member of a victim interviewing the shooter in prison, thirty years af er
the crime); Grover Cleveland Elementary School attack: "Parole denied in school shooting"
USA Today 6/19/01 (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-18-
spencer.htm); University of Austin attack: "Austin, Texas September 8, 1966 - PRESS
CONFERENCE - Report to the Governor Medical Aspects Charles J Whitman
Catastrophe"; Orcutt highway sniper: "Young Sniper on California Hill Kills 2 Motorists,
Injures 12" Eugene Register-Guard - Apr 26, 1965 and California appeals court record
"William Eugene REIDA et al., Plainti fs and Appellants, v. Robert H. LUND et al.,
Defendants and Respondents. Civ. 36520."; Dr. Park Dietz on "Badlands" killers,
institutions and society: "Park Dietz: The killing expert who knows too much" Spaulding,
Willis The Hook 12/4/03 (http://www.readthehook.com/94375/cover-park-dietz-killing-
expert-who-knows-too-much)

66. Savage
Main source: Child Advocate Report, pgs 96-103
Uncle Jimmy retirement, notes from Chief Briggs: "Nancy Lanza Remembered as Bubbly
Caring Person" New Hampshire/Mass Eagle Tribune
DDR friend: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00109765
..asked if anyone knew of any 'shooter' movi that came out...: archived forum index pages
show the shooter had also started a thread “Earliest movie with a trench-coated shooter?”
that was probably focused on school shooters, but no copy of the thread was saved. He
later alludes to it in his “earliest mass shooting” thread, when he says: “As far as I know,
Thriller is still the earliest movie which portrays a trench-coated shooter,” referring to
1973’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture.
...slept in the basement...: Gri n, Alaine & Kovner, Josh "Raising Adam Lanza"
Frontline/Courant

67. Emerald Dream

Main source: December 20, 2011 broadcast of Anarchy Radio
...what looked like a suitcase molded from black plastic...: CSP O cial Report scene photos
set "Sec 5 Back-up Scene 1" image 380

68. Fading
...“several referenc in the beginning to trench-coated loners with duffel bags...": (NOTE: the
dialogue in the episode actually references a du fel bag and "long black leather Matrix coat"
as signs of being a "loner.")
Wooster Mountain scene #2: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00256256

822
The Institute of Medicine gathered a group of doctors and scientists...: "The Contagion of
Violence": "Violence: Contagion, Group Marginalization, and Resilience or Protective
Factors" Carl C. Bell, M.D. (https://www.nap.edu/read/13489/chapter/8?
term=Columbine#56); The "Werther E fect": The In uence of Suggestion on Suicide:
Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther E fect- David P. Phillips /
American Sociological Review Vol. 39, No. 3 (Jun., 1974), pp. 340-354 (NOTE: among the
pieces of evidence seized from the shooter's room, there was a copy of The Sorrows of
Young Werther); CDC Guidelines to media on suicide: Reporting on Suicide:
Recommendations for the Media — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National
Institute of Mental Health / O ce of the Surgeon General
GPS data: CSP o cial report, Book 3, le 00051670 (NOTE: the time zone setting the
police used was set for UTC [Coordinated Universal Time] and thus the conclusions they
drew are generally incorrect; the CSP supplemental report on the GPS unit gets this aspect
right). ...at the "T" intersection...": the layout of the area is simpli ed, both for clarity and
because there is another, functioning school at the real-life location now, and I don't desire
to write directions to it.
Dr. Fox surrenders license: "Lanza's psychiatrist lost license to practice" Dixon, Ken and
Duplantier, Wes Stamford Advocate 12/28/13
(http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Lanza-s-psychiatrist-lost-license-to-
practice-5099064.php)

69. Aurora
Aurora attack series of events: "James Holmes: Read timeline of his actions before and
af er Aurora theater shooting" Asmar, Melanie Westword 1/10/13
(https://www.westword.com/news/james-holmes-read-timeline-of-his-actions-before-
and-af er-aurora-theater-shooting-5880120); Various evidence exhibits "Aurora Theater
Shooting Trial: Documents" Denver Post 7/22/15
(http://extras.denverpost.com/trial/docs.html); Detail about wishing people dead over
social anxiety: "The Batman Killer - a prescription for murder?" Jofre, Shelley BBC News
7/26/17 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/aurora_shooting); College
entrance essay: https://www.scribd.com/document/102745224/James-Holmes-
Resume#fullscreen&from_embed
Obama statement on Aurora attack: American Presidency Project "Remarks on the
Shootings in Aurora, Colorado, From Fort Meyers, Florida" 7/20/12; Whether the AR-15
would have been banned: "Congressional Research Service: Gun Control Legislation
(William J. Krouse 11/14/12)"; Texas rep on Aurora: "Rep Gohmert: Did no one else in
Aurora theater have a gun?" ABC News 7/20/12
(http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/rep-gohmert-did-no-one-else-in-aurora-
theater-have-a-gun/); Persistence of Dickey Amendment: "Gun violence research: History
of the federal funding freeze" Jamieson, Christine American Psychological Association
(http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx); Op-ed from Dickey
and former opponent: “We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look for it”
Dickey, Jay and Rosenberg, Mark Washington Post 7/27/12

70. Calm
Main source: Child Advocate Report, pgs 98-104
GPS Data: CSP O cial report, Book 3, le 00051670 (plus supplement, see prev note);
"Unknown location" scene: FBI les, released October 2017; Videos posted by shooter to
tumblr: pro e "GFTK" on dailymotion.com, accessed October 2017 ( le names
"Monologues" and "Fictional Monologues" and "Publicly Available")

823
Nancy facebook messages with family member: "EXCLUSIVE: Revealed, the family secret
that haunted the tragic mother of Sandy Hook shooter..." Wynne-Jones, Jonathan and
Bates, Daniel Daily Mail 12/18/12
Llodra comment on Garner: "Garner Correctional in Newtown moves past opposition to
acceptance" Pirro, John Danbury News-Tim 2/2/10
(http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Garner-Correctional-in-Newtown-moves-past-
347620.php); Security system: "Expanded Prison Surveillance System Nearing
Completion" Newtown Bee 12/22/06 and "Computer Failure A fects Prison Door-Control
System" 4/21/06; Funding of mental health beds as "magnet": "Prisons Grappling With
More Mentally Ill Inmates" Chedekel, Lisa Connecticut Health I Team 3/28/11 (http://c-
hit.org/2011/03/28/state_prisons_grappling_with_more_mentally_ill_inmates/)
Fair eld Hills STEAP grant: "Gov. Malloy Announces STEAP Grants" O ce of the
Governor of CT, 12/30/2011; Former nurse on depressed youth at FFH: "Tales Of Fair eld
Hills: Taking The Bad With The Good" Newtown Bee 10/19/12
Flagpole crash, gold ball: "Ball From Main Street Flagpole Still Missing" Newtown Bee
10/26/12 (https://newtownbee.com/ball-from-main-street- agpole-still-missing/)

71. Vortex
Main source: "Tropical Cyclone Report Hurricane Sandy (AL182012) 22 – 29 October 2012
Eric S. Blake, Todd B. Kimberlain, Robert J. Berg, John P. Cangialosi and John L. Beven
II" National Hurricane Center 2/12/13; Path of storm: "Hurricane Sandy FEMA Af er-
Action Report July 1, 2013"; Sequence of events: "A Timeline of Hurricane Sandy’s Path of
Destruction" National Geographic 11/2/12
(https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2012/11/02/a-timeline-of-hurricane-sandys-path-
of-destruction/)
Timeline of Red Alerts in Newtown, shelters, Country Club damage: "Town Will Be
'Substantially Restored' By Noon Today" Patch.com 10/28/12
(https://patch.com/connecticut/newtown/newtown-braces-for-hurricane-sandy); Lake
Zoar docks: "State removes docks in advance of storm" Howard, Lee The Day 10/26/12
(http://www.theday.com/article/20121026/nws01/121029758); Details of town damage:
"Storm Sandy Leaves Damage And Darkness In Its Wake" Newtown Bee 11/2/12
(https://newtownbee.com/storm-sandy-leaves-damage-and-darkness-in-its-wakewind-
cuts-power/) and "Woman Injured In Her Mobile Home"
(https://newtownbee.com/woman-injured-in-her-mobile-home/) and "Fire Truck
Crushed, No Injuries" (https://newtownbee.com/storm-sandy-leaves-damage-and-
darkness-in-its-wake- re-truck-crushed-no-injuries/); Garner as priority in af ermath of
storm: "Llodra Sharply Criticizes CL&P Storm Response" 11/9/12
(https://newtownbee.com/llodra-sharply-criticizes-clp-storm-response/); ...Pat Llodra
said it w only “divine intervention” that had somehow kept the power on...: Clark, Kurt
"Utility Committed To 99 Percent Power Restoration By Saturday Midnight" Newtown
Bee11/04/2011

72. High Ground

Description of 36 Yogananda interior: CSP O cial Report scene photos (sets "Sec 4" and
"Sec 5"); Email exchange between Nancy and Peter: Child Advocate report, pg 97;
Extended family perceptions of Nancy & relationship with shooter: CSP O cial Report,
FBI supplement; Nancy RV scenario: CSP O cial Report, book 7, le 00002286; Nancy
e-mails with friend, planning of vacation: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00003101

824
Uncle Jimmy saves runner: "Cruiser de brillator credited with saving Danville man's life"
Schreiver, Jason New Hampshire Union Leader 12/13/12
(http://www.unionleader.com/article/20121214/NEWHAMPSHIRE09/121219524&sourc
e=RSS); Closure of Sanborn Seminary as high school: Ireland, Doug "Sanborn Seminary
alumni remember the good old days" Eagle-Tribune 6/23/15
(http://www.eagletribune.com/news/new_hampshire/sanborn-seminary-alumni-
remember-the-good-old-days/article_4c2a9d95-bba3-59fd-b48a-9c2ae8aed904.html)

The End
Nancy text messages: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00111580; “Bloody, bloody” text
message: (NOTE: It’s not actually clear to whom the “bloody bloody bloody” text was
sent to. The message appears in the Child Advocate report, but not in the o cial CSP
report. However the Child Advocate report presents it in the context of the "head bump" -
- so, apparently it is either omitted from the CSP report's transcript of exchanges with the
boyfriend, or Nancy told at least one other person about the head bump); If she didn’t
stop in Kingston on the way, she would have had to have le Sandy Hook by about
7:30am...: (NOTE: Some news outlets would later report that Nancy lef for her trip later
that evening, but her hotel reservation was not until the following day, and her check-in
was indeed logged on the 11th. It's possible she lef on the 10th and stayed with family or
friends on the rst night, but no witness claims so); Nancy's billing activity at resort: CSP
supplemental report, account of witness Stephen Hilliard, Managing Director, Omni
Hotels
Shooter's email to acquaintance: Child Advocate Report, pg 105; Nancy facebook
messages: PBS/Courant "Raising Adam Lanza"; Nancy iphone notes: CSP O cial Report,
Book 7, le 00111580; Radiolab episode: "The Bad Show" Radiolab podcast, WNYC
1/10/12 (NOTE: The same episode also contained a segment on the Green River killer,
exploring "why" he killed. But Nancy didn't write any notes about it, if she heard it.
Details on an earlier segment in the episode, about Stanley Milgram's experiments with
authority and punishment in the form of electric shocks, do appear in her notes.)
"CZ 83" check: CSP O cial Report summary; Purse location, wine etc – CSP O cial
Report photo set "Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1" images 153-161; Train Your Brain To Get Happy
bookmarks: CSP O cial Report photo set "Meehan - suspect's house evidence" images 12-
16; NOTE: the holiday card with the "CZ83" check in it was found in the downstairs o ce,
inside a holiday card.

December 14, 2012

Shooter's clothing: CSP O cial Report supplement, "Shooter's Clothing Processed";
Ballistics: CSP O cial Report supplement, le "Scene processing report" (NOTE: the
speci c series of events that unfolded between the rst and last shots red at Sandy Hook
are not laid out in any o cial report; the theory portrayed here was rst put together by
blogger "Sandy Hook Facts", in the video series "The Deadliest Minute." I went through
the available evidence from start to nish, but did not nd any signi cant fault with the
Deadliest Minute scenario; the events portrayed in this chapter have only minor
di ferences from that blogger's work [for example, the handgun shots into the door frame
of Conference Room 9 happen on a di ferent pass through the hallway.]) In general, the
sequence of shots and reloads can be mostly known based on ballistics data, the location of
shell casings and magazines in the school, and the 9-1-1 recordings.
Locations of ammunition found, etc: CSP O cial Report supplement, le REPORT
GUIDE (CFS-12-00704597) and subheading "SCENE REPORT" ; Glock jammed: CSP
O cial Report evidence records describe the Glock with "One (1) round partially loaded"

825
and the o cer cataloging it noted "this pistol appeared to be jammed with a partially open
ejection port"; Trajectory of nal shot: CT Medical Examiner's report, part of CSP report
supplement, notes the cause of death as "Intraoral gunshot wound with extensive injury to
skull and brain." A rst responder observed "an obvious injury to the right side and top
front portion of the shooter's head consistent with bullet holes.

Part VI: Still Waters

73. Af er
First Responder accounts: CSP O cial Report, Book 6, le 00026724 and 00073537 and
00002060; Tactical entry to SHES: CSP O cial Report, unlabeled accounts of Newtown
Patrol Police Sergeant David Kullgren; Transmission records, general timeline:
Connecticut State Police-Western District Major Crime Squad transcript of transmissions
(supplement to CSP Report); Injury in Room 9: CSP O cial Report, Book 5, le
00039326 (Kehoe in entry-team: timeline entry at 9:49:50 "The team of Newtown (Chief
Kehoe, Sgt Kullgren, O cer McGowan, and O cer Seabrook) O cers prone out Thorne
and the phone call becomes disconnected. Thorne is handcu fed by O cer McGowan.")

74. Darkness
Main source for tactical entry to 36 Yogananda, general timeline: CSP O cial Report le
00168314 (NOTE: The series of events constituting this scene are inferred from heavily-
redacted les; the October 2017 FBI les con rm that a bomb-defusing robot was used to
search the house before police entered the home, and the report roughly outlines the
timing of each oor being cleared, and the waves of di ferent units entering the home.
However, it is not possible to know the exact series of events. What's presented here is a
best-attempt at showing the evidence, as it would have been found by these teams, based
on the CSP report and scene photos.)
Location of Nancy’s phone: CSP O cial Report scene photos set "Sec 5 Back-up Scene 1"
image 116; “Morning QT :)” (NOTE: The emoticon in this text displays in the o cial
police le as an "L". This is due to CSP computers converting ":-)" into an emoticon, which
in the typeface Wingdings is an upper-case "L"); Damaged door: "Sec 5 - Back-up Scene 1"
image 339; Wardrobe contents: images 355-357; Damage behind door: image 359; Arcade
tokens: image 373; Frayed chair: image 542; Gun kit: CSP O cial Report photo set "Sec 4 -
Scene Search Day 3" images 21-30; Books in closet: images 80-86; Answering machine
messages: CSP O cial Report supplement le "Answering Machine Audio Recording
Home Phone of 36 Yogananda St. Sandy Hook, CT"; Nancy pronouncement of death:
Tactical entry timeline note "1414 Paramedic Dennis Posila of AMR going inside residence
with escort to make pronouncement"; Amish Grace in desk, Newburgh shooting article:
CSP O cial Report scene photos set "Sec 5 Back-up Scene 1" images 339-342; "Kayntdlr"
photo in basement: CSP O cial Report scene photos set "Sec 4 - Images of Items Seized"
images 5-7

75. Strangers
Timing of Dunkin Donuts purchase: FBI interview with Ryan Lanza, CSP report
supplements; Ryan learns of attack at work: "How Ryan Lanza Reacted When TV
Networks Incorrectly Named Him The Sandy Hook Shooter" Shontell, Alyson Business
Insider 12/17/12

826
(https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ryan-lanza-reacted-when-tv-networks-
incorrectly-named-him-the-sandy-hook-shooter-2012-12); Facebook posts: "'It was my
brother. I think my mother is dead. Oh my God'" Warren, Lydia and Stebner, Beth Daily
Mail 12/14/12 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248327/Ryan-Lanza-Moment-
brother-Adam-Lanza-saw-CNN-mistakenly-report-Sandy-Hook-shooter.html)Peter
informed of news: "Reporter broke news to father of suspect" Gordon, Maggie Stamford
Advocate 12/14/12 (http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Reporter-broke-
news-to-father-of-suspect-4119559.php)
Obama statement: "Statement by the President on the School Shooting in Newtown, CT"
(NOTE: Obama, apparently not yet aware of the exact details of the crime, actually said
“men and women” teachers.)
New Jersey police records: CSP Report supplements, Hoboken PD les; Peter's lawyer
with change of pants: "The Reckoning" by Andrew Solomon; Peter’s public statement:
"Connecticut School Shooting: Nancy Lanza had full authority over son Adam's
upbringing, according to divorce papers" CBS News 12/17/12
(https://www.cbsnews.com/news/connecticut-school-shooting-nancy-lanza-had-full-
authority-over-son-adams-upbringing-according-to-divorce-papers/)

76. Specimen
State employee at morgue: Lender, Jon "State Fires Worker Who Showed Lanza's Body To
Her Husband At Morgue" Hartford Courant 4/26/13 (http://articles.courant.com/2013-
04-26/news/hc-lender-column- ring-in-lanza-incident-0428-20130426_1_medical-
examiner-jean-henry-adam-lanza); Weight, height of shooter: CSP Final Report summary;
Carver shares the shooter's DNA with researchers: "DNA of Newtown Shooter Adam
Lanza to Be Studied by Geneticists" Walshe, Shushannah ABC News 12/27/12
(http://abcnews.go.com/US/dna-newtown-shooter-adam-lanza-studied-
geneticists/story?id=18069343); Conservatorship rumor: CSP O cial report Book 8, le
00012291 (NOTE: The police checked for any records or hints of a conservatorship, or any
records with a probate court related to the shooter or led by his mother, and found
nothing; see: CSP O cial report, Book 8, le 00001409)
Lupica at Wooster Mountain range: "Shooting ranges wrongfully fear Obama will take
away their guns" New York Daily News 12/16/12
(http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lupica-shooting-ranges-wrongfully-fear-
obama-guns-article-1.1221193)
Koenig interview with police: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00017458; Dr. Fox
interview with police: CSP O cial Report, Book 7, le 00260339; Dr. Fox in NZ:
" uestions remain over psychiatrist" New Zealand Herald 1/8/14
(http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11182747)
Peter denies "kayntdlr" photo is either of his sons: "Sandy Hook report reveals Lanza
children's early exposure to guns" Sherwell, Philip The Telegraph 12/28/13
(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10540688/Sandy-
Hook-report-reveals-Lanza-childrens-early-exposure-to-guns.html); Three photos of
deceased human: CSP o cial report, 36 Yogananda search, exhibit 608 (the photos
themselves are redacted; one evidence photo shows them lying face-down)
FBI interview with user who knew "Smiggles": FBI les from Sandy Hook investigation,
released October 2017 (File 2, page 365)
Marvin Lafontaine quote: "NH man recalls Newtown killer, re ects on massacre report"
Sexton, Adam WMUR9 11/26/13 (http://www.wmur.com/news/nh-news/nh-man-
recalls-newtown-killer-re ects-on-massacre-report/23161000); Novia quote: "School
adviser: Gunman a loner who felt no pain" Geller, Adam San Diego Union-Tribune

827
12/15/12 (http:///www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-school-adviser-gunman-a-loner-
who-felt-no-pain-2012dec15-story.html); Novia regretting speaking with media: CSP
o cial report interview
Dietz journal article, "pseudocommandos": Dietz PE. "Mass, serial and sensational
homicides" Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. 1986; 62(5):477-491
Shooter's remains: "Newtown gunman Adam Lanza's father claims body from funeral
home" Williams, Matt The Guardian 12/31/12
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/31/father-newtown-adam-lanza-body)
Fair eld Hills vigil, “violence in his heart”: "More than 2,000 attend candlelight vigil in
Newtown" Stoller, Gary and Stoller, Kristin USA Today 12/21/12
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/21/newtown-massacre-vigil-
children-lanza/1786129/); Dreamcatcher comes to Newtown: "From Columbine to Sandy
Hook: Muskegon dream catcher reveals a tearful journey" Muskegon News Moore, Lynn
10/11/2013 (NOTE: Footage of the ceremony where the dreamcatcher was delivered to
Newtown was once available on the Newtown local government website, as I viewed it in
February or March of 2014; by the time I began writing this book, the footage was no
longer online.)

77. Winter
Obama 12/16 speech at NHS: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
o ce/2012/12/16/remarks-president-sandy-hook-interfaith-prayer-vigil
House of Representatives quotes: Congressional Record, House of Representatives
12/17/12 "Condemning the horri c attacks in Newtown, Connecticut and expressing
support and prayers for all those impacted by this tragedy"
"I wish to God she had had an M4 [rifle] in her office, locked up so when she heard
gunfire...": It bears noting that if such a weapon were kept in her o ce, the principal
would have had to leave the conference room to go to her o ce to get it, and thus would
have encountered the gunman in exactly the same spot where she did, and so the M4
would have accomplished nothing. She would have had to bring the ri e along with her to
every meeting.
Cerberus to sell Freedom Group: "In Unusual Move, Cerberus to Sell Gun Company"
Lattman, Peter New York Tim 12/18/12
(https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/cerberus-to-sell-gunmaker-freedom-group/)
NRA press conference at hotel: https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-12-21/nra-holds-press-
conference-one-week-anniversary-sandy-hook-shooting-video ; Footage of NRA
protesters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUhb76o49d4
Agent Egelhof, “Cult of Columbine” op-ed: "What I learned at the Red Lake school
shooting" Star Tribune 12/29/12 (http://www.startribune.com/what-i-learned-at-the-red-
lake-school-shooting/185098771/); “Internet-addicted” quote: Enger, John "Feeling scars at
Red Lake, 10 years later" MPR News 3/18/15
(https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/18/red-lake-shooting-10-years);
Stephen King quotes: "Guns" January 2013 (Amazon.com, Kindle Single)
Obama Jan 16 speech: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
o ce/2013/01/16/remarks-president-and-vice-president-gun-violence ; Obama 23
directives: "Here Are The 23 Executive Orders On Gun Safety Signed Today By The
President" Ungar, Rick Forbes 1/16/13
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/01/16/here-are-the-23-executive-orders-on-
gun-safety-signed-today-by-the-president/#1d008ee23120)

828
The Firearms Owner's Protection Act...: the 1986 act reads "No such rule or regulation
prescribed af er the date of the enactment of the Firearms Owners' Protection Act may
require that records required to be maintained under this chapter or any portion of the
contents of such records, be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or
controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that
any system of registration of rearms, rearms owners, or rearms transactions or
dispositions be established."
Connecticut, Malloy announces Gun Violence Prevention Working Group: "Gov. Malloy
Creates Sandy Hook Advisory Commission to Address Key Policy Areas in Violence
Prevention" O ce of the Governor CT
(http://web.archive.org/web/20130115160647/http://www.governor.ct.gov/malloy/cwp/v
iew.asp?Q=516230&A=4010); NSSF letter to working group: National Shooting Sports
Foundation letter to Gun Violence Prevention working group 1/28/13, Jake McGuigan;
NSSF defends PLCAA af er Sandy Hook: "NRA-backed federal limits on gun lawsuits
frustrate victims, their attorneys" Washington Post 2/12/13; Michael Kehoe at Sandy Hook
Advisory Commission: O cial Commission Transcript, 3/1/13 9:30 AM Legislative O ce
Building Hartford, CT
Flagpole sphere restored: "A Golden Globe For The Flagpole" Crevier, Nancy K Newtown
Bee 4/16/13 (https://newtownbee.com/a-golden-globe-for-the- agpole/)

78. Homecoming
NOTE: There was already a small private ceremony for Nancy, sometime before the new
year; this scene depicts the more public memorial. News reports say Nancy's family
delayed her ceremony out of respect for the victims at Sandy Hook, and their funerals,
which came rst.
Details on memorial service: "Family, friends hold memorial service for Nancy Lanza"
Laurent, Suzanne Seacoast Online 6/2/2013
(http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20130602/NEWS/306020349); Comments at My
Place during Obama speech: "In Newtown, Nancy Lanza a subject of sympathy for some,
anger for others" Sullivan, Kevin Washington Post 12/19/12
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-newtown-nancy-lanza-a-subject-of-
sympathy-for-some-anger-for-others/2012/12/19/5a425f1c-4a1e-11e2-ad54-
580638ede391_story.html?utm_term=.0cf0c144c558); Last class graduated...: The old
seminary that functioned as Sanborn Regional High school since the 1970's closed af er a
new school was built in 2006 (New Hampshire Union-Leader)

79. Fall
Riverview Gun Sales settlement with DOJ: "East Windsor Gun Store Owner Admits
Multiple Federal Firearms Violations" (https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/east-windsor-
gun-store-owner-admits-multiple-federal- rearms-violations) Mick North was at Johns
Hopkins on January 15, 2013: "Information for Media" Gun policy Summit
Recommendations; Piers Morgan interviewed North on CNN, viewable on Youtube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_82Y7sRTiU ; North visits Newtown: "Dunblane
Massacre: How Grieving Father Mick North Worked To Change US Gun Laws Af er
Sandy Hook 'To No Avail'" Sommers, Jack Huffington Post UK 3/13/16
(https://www.hu ngtonpost.co.uk/2016/03/13/dunblane-sandy-hook-mick-
north_n_9290228.html)
Washington Navy Yard shooting: "Report of the Investigation into the Fatal Shooting
Incident at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16 2013 and Associated Security,
Personnel and Contracting Policies and Practices — Nov 8 2013" Department of the Navy

829
Demolition of SHES: "No trace of Sandy Hook Elementary School will be lef " Miller,
Robery and Hutson, Nanci G. Danbury News-Tim 10/29/13
(https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/No-trace-of-Sandy-Hook-Elementary-School-
will-be-4937150.php)
Arapahoe shooting: Investigative report Arapahoe High School Case # CT13-44545
Stockton Anniversary scene: "Stockton shooting: 25 years later, city can’t forget its worst
day" Emmons, Mark & Richman, Josh The Mercury News 1/16/14
(https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/16/stockton-shooting-25-years-later-city-cant-
forget-its-worst-day/)
Basement Tapes destroyed: "Columbine Killers' Basement Tapes Destroyed" Prendergast,
Alan Westword 2/2/15 (http://www.westword.com/news/columbine-killers-basement-
tapes-destroyed-6283043)
Isla Vista shooter: "Isla Vista Investigative Summary Report by Santa Barbara County
Sheri 's Department"; Tumblr CEO interviews Obama:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=105256 ; Jim Brady passing: "Why
was James Brady's death ruled a homicide?" Los Angel Tim 8/8/14
Marysville-Pilchuck shooting: "MPHS Shooting CASE #WP14-000004"; Dreamcatcher
passes from Newtown to Marysville: "Marysville students return amid grief, outpouring
of support" Todd, Leah and Broom, Jack Seattle Tim 11/3/14
(https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/marysville-students-return-amid-grief-
outpouring-of-support/)
Sandy Hook families sue Remington, et al: "Sandy Hook Families' Suit Against Gun
Maker Will Test Federal Law" Altimari, Dave Hartford Courant 12/15/14
(https://web.archive.org/web/20150215153851/http://www.courant.com/news/connecticu
t/hc-sandy-hook-gun-lawsuit-20141215-story.html)
Protests outside NSSF: "Newtown Action Alliance Planning Rally At NSSF
Headquarters" Newtown Bee 1/15/16 (https://newtownbee.com/newtown-action-alliance-
planning-rally-at-nssf-headquarters/); Photos of the protests were published in a
Newtown Bee gallery.

80. Light
History on how the house got to be slated for demolition: Newtown Board of Finance
budget meeting, 1/21/15; Destruction of items from the house: "Connecticut News Bank
Burned Lanza Items To Prevent Memorabilia Sales" Altimari, Dave Hartford Courant
12/14/14 (http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-adam-lanza-house-items-
burned-p-20141204-story.html)
Razing of 36 Yogananda: "Home Of Sandy Hook School Shooter Is Demolished"
Associated Press 3/24/15 (a photo of 36 Yogananda in mid-demolition was published by
SandyHookFacts.com); "nature might reclaim the land...": "Lanza home's rubble to be
handled with care" Burgeson, John Danbury News-Tim 1/30/15
(http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Lanza-home-s-rubble-to-be-handled-with-care-
6051782.php)

Epilogue: New Horizon

Emmanuel Baptist church shooting: "Evidence in the 'Emanuel 9' Charleston Church mass
killing released" Fox 5 News Baltimore 10/29/15 (http://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-
world/evidence-in-the-emanuel-9-charleston-church-mass-killing-released)

830
Lafayette theater shooting: "Theater gunman thanks man accused of S.C. black church
shooting" CBS News 1/13/16 (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/louisiana-theater-shooter-
thanks-man-accused-of-sc-black-church-shooting-dylann-roof/) and "Lafayette shooter
able to buy gun because he was never involuntarily committed" Brittain, Amy & Kovac Jr.,
Joe Washington Post 1/27/15 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/lafayette-
shooter-able-to-purchase-gun-despite-judge-ordering-him-to-mental-
hospital/2015/07/27/3e28ce6a-6ad5-4f89-ae9b- fa8b2a495dc_story.html?
utm_term=.9b689fdd6970)
WDBJ attack: https://abcnews.go.com/US/shooting-alleged-gunman-details-grievances-
suicide-notes/story?id=33336339
Aurora lawsuit: "Family to Pay Price for Trying to Sue Ammo Dealers" Brock, Sam and
Witte, Rachel and Burgess, David NBC Bay Area 7/30/15 (
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/Family-to-Pay-Price-for-
Trying-to-Sue-Ammo-Dealers-320224111.html)
Umpqua shooting: "'Here I am, 26, with no friends, no job, no girlfriend': Shooter's
manifesto o fers clues to 2015 Oregon college rampage" Anderson, Rick Los Angel Tim
9/23/17 (http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-school-shootings-2017-story.html)
Planned Parenthood shooting:
(https://www.courts.state.co.us/Courts/County/Case_Details.cfm?Case_ID=1421)
Cerberus decision to keep Freedom Group: "Cerberus investments is sticking to its guns"
Banerjee, Devin and Carey, David Bloomberg News 12/18/15
Obama NYE 2016 moves on guns: "Here Are Obama's New Executive Actions On Gun
Control" Sola, Katie Forb 1/6/16 (https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?
toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiesola/2016/01/06/obama-gun-
control/&refURL=&referrer=#5dfad0d87de7)
Kalamazoo: https://www.mlive.com/news/g66l-2019/01/5b4306f8af9592/jason-dalton-
trial-starts-near.html and
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/02/05/uber-jason-dalton-
kalamazoo-shootings/2779471002/
Dunblane notes: "Dunblane 20 years on: Victim's father slams Americans for 'blinkered'
gun support in wake of similar tragedies" Clements, Chris Daily Record 3/12/16
(https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/dunblane-20-years-on-victims-
7542264#uc2 StjKPDWi tz3.97)
Dr. Fox arrested: "Psychiatrist Who Treated Adam Lanza Charged With Sexually
Assaulting Patient" Hartford Courant 4/22/16 (http://www.courant.com/breaking-
news/hc-book eld-adam-lanza-psychiatrist-arrested-0423-20160422-story.html); Fired in
NZ: "Psychiatrist sacked for failing to disclose complaint" Johnston, Martin NZ Herald
7/26/16 (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11681068)
Post-Pulse shooting vote: "Senate rejects series of gun measures" LoBianco, Tom; Walsh,
Deirdre; Klein, Betsy and Raju, Manu CNN 6/20/16
(http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/20/politics/senate-gun-votes-congress/index.html)
Munich shooting: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/24/europe/germany-munich-
shooting/index.html
Townville shooting: "What Jesse Osborne told investigators the day of the Townville
Elementary School shooting" Mayo, Nikie Greenville News 2/13/18
(https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/2018/02/13/jesse-osborne-townville-
south-carolina-police-interview/332818002/) and "Inside an accused school shooter’s mind:
A plot to kill ‘50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.’" Cox, John Woodrow Washington Post
3/3/18 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/inside-a-teen-school-shooters-mind-a-
plot-to-kill-50-or-60-if-i-get-lucky-maybe-150/2018/03/03/68cc673c-1b27-11e8-ae5a-

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16e60e4605f3_story.html?utm_term=.e15d30c42ac5); Dreamcatcher to Townville:
"Townville Elementary healing a month af er Jacob Hall's death" Parrish, Frances
Independent Mail 10/27/16
(https://www.independentmail.com/story/news/local/2016/10/27/townville-elementary-
starts-healing-process-month-af er-shooting/92785388/)
Sandy Hook lawsuit dismissed: "Sandy Hook Families Lose Fight as Remington Gun Suit
Fails" Larson, Erik Bloomberg News 10/14/16
(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-14/remington-s-bushmaster-wins-
ruling-rejecting-sandy-hook-suit); Appeal: "Sandy Hook victims' families to argue case in
Connecticut Supreme Court" Bellon, Tina Reuters 11/14/17
(https://www.reuters.com/article/connecticut-shooting/sandy-hook-victims-families-to-
argue-case-in-connecticut-supreme-court-idUSL8N1NJ6BE)
Weis market attack, PA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/06/09/killer-in-supermarket-shooting-posted-chilling-videos-online-
lauding-columbine-massacre/
San Francisco UPS attack: http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/UPS-
killer-may-have-walked-through-metal-detector-11251496.php
Baseball attack on congress: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/us/politics/congress-
baseball-shooting-investigation.html
Bronx hospital shooting: https://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/bronx-hospital-
shooting-conditions-of-victims-improving-o cials-say-1.13777002 and
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/henry-bello-bronx-lebanon-hospital-
shooting-new-york-city-gunman-injuries/193120/
Ivaneetka attack: https://www.rt.com/news/402054-moscow-school-shooting-columbine-
sound/ (Note: sources are scarce in english)
Las Vegas attack: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation: “KEY
FINDINGS OF THE BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS UNIT’S LAS VEGAS REVIEW
PANEL (LVRP)
Sutherland Springs: Inspector General U.S. Department of Defense - Report No.
DODIG-2019-030 “Report of Investigation into the United States Air Force’s Failure to
Submit Devin Kelley’s Criminal History Information to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation” and https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/stephen-willeford-sutherland-
springs-mass-murder/
Rancho Tehama: https://www.redding.com/story/news/local/2017/12/08/rancho-
tehama-gunman-killed-himself-autopsy-says/935136001/ and
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2017/11/15/rancho-tehama-shooting-2/ and
https://www.redblu fdailynews.com/2018/11/19/victims-sue-sheri f-over-rancho-tehama-
shooting/ and https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tehama-shooter-guns-
20171121-story.html And https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/rancho-tehama-elementary-
school-shooting-spree/ and https://www.kcra.com/article/sheri f-s-department-lays-out-
timeline-of-tehama-co-shootings/13628824#
Aztec High School: https://apnews.com/0e9439c36d5afd75b277ed4e5568fece and
https://www.daily-times.com/story/news/crime/2018/04/17/aztec-high-school-shooting-
investigation-william-atchison/513013002/ and
https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/08/us/aztec-high-school-shooting-william-
atchison/index.html
Two russian attackers in Jan 2018: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-perm-knife-attack-two-
boys-charged/28980557.html And https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/327494-attacks-
russian-schools-columbine And (2nd attack) https://realnoevremya.com/articles/2100-
second-massacre-in-a-week-a-teen-attacked-kids-with-an-axe and

832
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5291597/Russia-probes-Columbine-link-three-
school-massacres.html; Internet watchdog bit: https://www.rt.com/russia/432491-russia-
children-columbine-bill/
Marshall County attack: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/police-teen-saw-
shooting-as-experiment-showed-no-remorse/; Gun: https://www.courier-
journal.com/story/news/crime/2019/01/17/marshall-county-high-school-kentucky-
shooting-a-year-later/2593728002/
Stoneman Douglas: O cial Report “MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS HIGH
SCHOOL PUBLIC SAFETY COMMISSION, Initial Report subitted to the Governor,
Speaker of the House of Representatives and Senate President January 2, 2019”, and
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/crime/ - orida-school-shooting-campus-monitor-
20180619-htmlstory.html; Father of victim:
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/andrew-pollack-on- ghting-to-stop-mass-
shootings-af er-losing-his-daughter-in-the-parkland-school-shooting ; Dreamcatcher
ceremony: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/07/19/the-story-behind-the-dream-
catcher-that.html
Youtube shooter April 2018: https://time.com/5226954/youtube-headquarters-shooter-
san-bruno/
Wa e House shooting: https://www.wsmv.com/news/where-we-are-one-year-af er-the-
antioch-wa e-house/article_0c9711ce-64e6-11e9-a 2-abc052c377fd.html
Toronto van attack: https://www.scribd.com/document/427612854/Alek-Minassian-
Interview
Santa Fe TX attack: https://www.thenationalherald.com/201504/dimitrios-pagourtzis-is-
said-to-have-used-fathers-guns/
Capital Gazette shooting: https://www.thedailybeast.com/capital-gazette-survivor-i-dont-
give-a-fck-about-your-thoughts-and-prayers and
https://www.capitalgazette.com/news/crime/ac-cn-capital-shooting-hearing-1028-
20191028-nkxc5ukn4nbzjdwoltewbmqx6u-story.html
Crimea shooting: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/18/putin-says-crimean-
school-shooting-result-globalisation/ (Note: Crimea being part of Russia is a matter of
signi cant dispute, but one well outside the scope of this story.)
Tallahassee yoga studio shooting:
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2019/02/12/tallahassee-yoga-studio-shooting-
scott-beierle-report-tpd- orida/2849736002/
Sebring bank shooting: https://www.w a.com/news/local-news/sheri fs-o ce-police-
zephen-xaver-bought-gun-days-before-sebring-bank-shooting/ and
https://www.wndu.com/content/news/He-didnt-like-people-at-all-Man-who-knew-
Florida-shooting-suspect-Zephen-Xaver--504874311.html; (NOTE: This incident bears
several similarities to an attack on Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona in 1966.)
Thousand Oaks shooting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/27/investigators-still-seeking-motive-
thousand-oaks-shooting/ and https://apnews.com/5133931a9d734dfcb38d44feec1ec9b6
New Zealand terrorist attacks: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/zealand-gun-
buyback-started-mosque-shootings-191220024828608.html and
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-shooting/new-zealands-pm-ardern-acts-
to-tighten-gun-laws-further-six-months-af er-attack-idUSKCN1VY092 and
https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/ rearms-and-safety/ rearm-law-changes-
prohibited- rearms

833
CT supreme court decision March 2019: https://reason.com/2019/03/14/lawsuit-against-
suppliers-of-the-ri e-u/
Poway shooter: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-20/accused-poway-
synagogue-shooter-to-face-trial-on-murder-other-charges
UNCC shooter: https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/suspected-uncc-shooter-expected-
to-plead-guilty-in-deal-with-prosecutors/987749091/ and
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/uncc-shooting/uncc-shooter-pleads-
guilty/275-a5271f4c-3ce3-45ac-9b2e-ecb7b8b7112c
STEM shooters: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/colorado-stem-
school-shooting and https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/20/stem-school-shooting-
a davit/
Virginia beach attack: The City of Virginia Beach: An Independent Review of the Tragic
Events of May 31, 2019 released 11/13/2019 by Hillard Heintze
Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/07/29/gilroy-
garlic-festival-mass-shooting-alleged-shooter-screamed-out-im-really-angry/
El Paso shooting: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspected-gunman-el-paso-
walmart-shooting-pleads-not-guilty-attack-n1064876
Dayton shooting: “Police Review Dayton Mass Shooting Video Evidence, Frame By
Frame” (NBC News) August 13, 2018
Midlands-Odessa attack:
https://www.gosanangelo.com/story/news/2020/01/09/midland-odessa-tx-texas-
shooter/4423883002/
Supreme court denies appeal request from Remington:
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/12/778487920/supreme-court-allows-sandy-hook-families-
case-against-remington-to-proceed

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Copyright © 2020 Matthew Nolan

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