Sandy Hook

 On a cold December morning the serene town of Newtown, Connecticut, was torn apart by an act of unspeakable horror. The name Adam Lanza would soon become synonymous with tragedy. Plagued by severe mental health struggles and gripped by a dark obsession, Lanza's descent into madness culminated in a massacre that forever changed countless lives. December 14, 2012, he stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School and, in a matter of minutes, extinguished the bright futures of 20 innocent children and six courageous educators. The echoes of gunfire that day shattered families, a community, and a nation. In this episode, we delve into the haunting history of Adam Lanza, recount the devastating events of that fateful day, and explore the profound impact on a town left grappling with unimaginable loss. Join us as we navigate this heart-wrenching story, seeking to understand the depths of this tragedy and the scars it left behind. Things are about to get strange. 

Transcript

**Maturity Warning: The following episode contains graphic and heart-wrenching content. Listener discretion is advised.**

On a cold December morning in 2012, the serene town of Newtown, Connecticut, was torn apart by an act of unspeakable horror. The name Adam Lanza would soon become synonymous with tragedy. Plagued by severe mental health struggles and gripped by a dark obsession, Lanza's descent into madness culminated in a massacre that forever changed countless lives. On December 14, 2012, he stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School and, in a matter of minutes, extinguished the bright futures of 20 innocent children and six courageous educators. The echoes of gunfire that day shattered families, a community, and a nation. In this episode, we delve into the haunting history of Adam Lanza, recount the devastating events of that fateful day, and explore the profound impact on a town left grappling with unimaginable loss. Join us as we navigate this heart-wrenching story, seeking to understand the depths of this tragedy and the scars it left behind. Things are about to get strange.

SNACK TIME/ PATREON

Let’s go into some of the history of the shooter. Adam Lanza was born on April 22, 1992 and he lived with his mother, Nancy Lanza. Nancy was described as a “gun enthusiast who owned at least a dozen firearms.”  She often took Adam and his brother to shooting ranges. Adam did not have a criminal record. He did have access to guns through his mother. Lanza’s father stated that he doesn’t believe that Nancy feared Adam at all. Adam attended Sandy Hook for 4 ½ years and started at Newton Middle School in 2004. Nancy told friend that Adam was “wracked by anxiety” and started to become upset because of the constant changes in the day. At one point, his anxiety got so intense that he was brought to the emergency room. Nancy decided to move him to a parochial school, St. Rosa of Lima because of the smaller class sizes. At the age of 14, he started high school. Even though he made the honor roll, teachers and students described him as “intelligent but nervous and fidgety.” When he turned 16, he was barely going to school. The intense anxiety he experienced at the time suggested that his autism might have been exacerbated by hormonal changes. He was home-schooled to different degrees by his mom and dad. He earned his high school diploma from Newton High School through a combination of tutoring, independent learning, and college classes. 

Let’s get into some of his developmental and mental health issues. Adam showed developmental challenges before the age of 3. These challenges included communication and sensory difficulties, socialization delays, and repetitive behaviors. He was referred to special education preschool services. He was then diagnosed with a sensory-integration disorder once in elementary school. The sensory-processing disorder doesn’t have an official status by the medical community, as a formal diagnosis, but is a common characteristic of autism. His anxiety affected his ability to go to school in 8th grade, and he was placed on “homebound” status. This is reserved for kids who are too disabled, even with accommodations and support, to attend school. When Adam was 13, he was diagnosed with Asburger’s by a psychiatrist. He was also diagnosed with OCD when his parents took him to Yale’s Child Study Center. His OCD got to a point where he washed his hand frequently and changed his socks 20 times a day to the point where his mom would do 3 loads of laundry a day. Peter Lanza, Adam’s dad, stated in an interview in 2013 that he thought that Adam might have undiagnosed schizophrenia in addition to his other conditions. Peter stated that family members may have missed signs of onset schizophrenia due to his odd behavior and his isolation. The violence Adam showed in the shootings is generally not seen in the autistic community, and none of the psychiatrists he saw detected troubling signs of his violence in his disposition. Adam appeared to have no contact with any mental health providers after 2006. In a report from the Office of the Child Advocate, it stated “In the course of Lanza’s entire life, minimal mental health evaluation and treatment (in relation to his apparent need) was obtained. Of the couple of providers that saw him, only one- the Yale Child Study Center- seemed to appreciate the gravity of (his) presentation, his need for extensive mental health and special education support, and the critical need for medication to ease his obsessive-compulsive symptoms.” According to the Office of Child Advocate in Connecticut, Adam may have had anorexia. It was noted that at the time of his death, Adam was 6 feet tall and weighed 112 pounds, to the point of malnutrition and resultant brain damage. Adam was living in almost total isolation in his room. He was spending most of his time playing World of Warcraft as well as other video games. It also was found by investigators that Adam was fascinated with mass shootings. Among the clippings found in his room, there was an article from The New York Times about a man who shot school children in 1891. His computer contained pictures of Adam holding a gun to his dead, movies that showed school shootings, and videos of gunshot suicides, This only came to light after Adam died. He never let anyone into his room, including his mother. Adam had also taped black plastic garbage bags over his windows in hisroom to keep out sunlight. He cut off contact with his dad and brother in the two years before the shooting. At one point, he would only contact his mother by email, and that is only because he lived with her. 

Let’s get to that horrible day. It all occurred on December 14, 2012. It happened in Newton, Connecticut. It all started sometime before 9:30 am. 20 year old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy with a .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle at their home. Investigators later found her body, still in bed in her pajamas. She had four gunshot wounds to her head.  Adam then took Nancy’s car and drove to Sandy Hook. A little after 9:35, Adam shot his way through a glass panel next to the locked front doors of the school. He was wearing black clothing, a black hat, an olive green utility vest, yellow earplugs, and sunglasses. Some of the initial gunshots were heard on the intercom system for the school, which was being used for the morning announcements. Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach were talking with other staff members when they heard gunshots, even though she didn’t realize it was that. Hochsprung, Sherlach, and lead teacher Natalie Hammond went out to the hall to see what the sound was and ran into Adam. A faculty member who was in the meeting stated that the three women yelled out “Shooter! Stay put!” This alerted their coworkers to the danger and saved their lives. An aide heard gunshots, and a teacher hiding in the math lab heard the janitor, Rick Thorne, yell “Put the gun down.” Adam killed both Hochsprung and Sherlach. Hammond was hit first, She was shot twice. She laid still in the hallway and then crawled back to the conference room and pressed her body against the door to keep it closed. This was after not hearing any more noise. She survived. A nine year old boy stated that he heard Adam say “Put your hands up” and that someone else said “Don’t shoot!” He also heard several people yelling and gunshots over the intercom while he, his teacher, and his class hid in a closet in the gym. Diane Day, a therapist at the school who had been at the meeting, was heard screaming followed by more gunshots. A second teacher who was a substitute, was wounded as well. While she was closing a door down the hall, she was hit in the foot by a bullet that ricocheted. Adam never entered her class. After killing Hochsprug and Sherlach, Adam entered the main office but did not see anyone else hiding there apparently.He returned to the hallway. Sarah Cox, who also goes by Sally, hid under a desk in her office. She later described Adam’s boots and legs facing her desk about 20 feet away. He remained there for a few seconds before walking away. She and the school secretary, Barbra Halstead, called 911 and hid in the first aid closet for upwards of 4 hours. Janitor Rick Thorne ran through the hall, alerting classrooms of what was happening. Adam entered room 8, which is a first grade class. Lauren Rousseau, a substitute teacher, had herded her class to the back of the room, and was trying to hide them in a bathroom. Adam forced his way into the class. Rachel D’Avino, a behavioral therapist who was just employed by the school for a week to work with special needs students was also in the class.Rousseau, D’Avino, and 15 students in this class were killed. 14 of the kids were dead at the scene. One injured child was taken to the hospital for treatment, but they did not make it. The sole survivor from that class, a 6 year old girl, was found in the class by police after the shooting. She hid in a corner of the class’s bathroom during the shooting. She apparently survived by playing dead. When she finally reached her mother, she stated “Mommy, I’m ok, but all my friends are dead.” She described Adam as a “very angry man.” A different  girl hiding in a bathroom with two teachers told police that she heard a boy in a classroom. He was screaming, “Help me! I don’t want to be here!” Adam said back, “Well, you’re here” followed by “hammering” sounds. Adam also went to room 10, which was another 1st grade class nearby. At this point, there are conflicting reports of the order of events. In some reports, Victoria Leigh Soto, the teacher, had hid some students in a closet or bathroom, and other kids were hiding under desks. Soto was walking back to the class door to lock it when Adam entered the class. He walked to the back of the class, saw the kids under the desk, and shot them. 1st grader Jesse Lewis yelled at his classmates to run for safety, and several of them did. Lewis was looking at Adam when he fatally shot him. In another account given by a surviving child’s father stated that Soto had moved the kids to the back of the class, and that they were seated on the floor when Adam entered. According to this account, Adam and the other occupants of this class didn’t talk. Adam stared at the people on the floor, pointed the gun at a boy, but didn’t fire. The boy ran out of the class. The final report into the shooting concluded that the sequence of events in rooms 8 and 10 were “indeterminate”. A Hartford Courant report said that six of the kids who escaped did so when Adam stopped shooting. This was either because his weapon jammed or he was reloading it.

Earlier reports stated that Soto told Adam when he entered the class that the kids were in the auditorium. When the kids came out of their hiding spots and tried to run for safety, Adam shot them. Soto put herself between Adam and the kids, and he shot and killed her. Ann Marie Murphy, who was the special ed teacher who worked in her class, was found covering 6 year old Dylan Hockley, who also died. Soto and 4 kids were found dead in the class. One child was taken to the hospital ,but was pronounced dead. Sic surviving kids from the class and a school bus driver ran to a nearby home to seek shelter. According to the official report released by the state’s attorney, 9 kids ran from Soto’s class, and police found 2 hiding in a class bathroom. 5 of Soto’s students were killed. First grade teacher Kaitlin Roig hid 15 students in a bathroom and barricaded the door. He told them to be completely quiet to remain safe. It is believed that Adam bypassed her class. Following a lockdown drill weeks earlier, Roig failed to remove a black construction paper sheet covering the window in her c;assroom door. Adam may have assumed that the class was empty because the door was closed and the window was covered. Music teacher Maryrose Krisopik barricaded her fourth graders in a tiny closet during the shooting, One of her students later stated that Adam arrived moments later. He pounded on the door, yelling “Let me in.” The students remained hidden inside. The first call to 911 was around 9:35. Newton police dispatch first broadcast that there was a shooting at 9:36, about 30 seconds after they received the first call. The Connecticut State Police were dispatched at 9:37. Newton police arrived at the school at 9:39. The police heard the final shot at 9:40 am. Newton police first entered the school at 9:54, about 9 minutes after the first 911 call. They believed that Adam showed himself in the lower portion of his head in classroom 10. The Newton Police and the Connecticut State Police mobilized local police dog and tactical units, a bomb squad, and a state police helicopter. The police locked down the scroll and started to evacuate the survivors, room by room. The New York City medical examiner dispatched a portable morgue to assist the authorities. The victim’s bodies were removed from the school and formally identified. A state trooper was assigned to each victim’s family to protect their privacy and provide them with information. 

Let’s go into the investigation. Investigators didn’t find a suicide note or anything referring to the attack. There was no connection between Adam’s mom and the school, even though the news reports initially said there was. Police sources initially stated that Adam’s brother, Ryan, was the shooter. This thought was because Adam was carrying Ryan’s id. Ryan was working at is job in New York City at the time of the shooting, and voluntarily submitted to questioning by New Jersey State Police, Connecticut State Police, and the FBI. He was not considered a suspect and wasn’t taken into custody. Ryan did state that he hadn’t been in touch with Adam since 2010. When he was asked why, Ryan said that his brother was sick, that he doesn’t talk to anyone anymore, and that he didn’t know Adam anymore. While doing an investigation of the school after the shooting, a large quantity of unused ammunition was recovered along with three semi-automatic firearms with Adam. The firearms found with Adam were a .223-caliber Bushmaster XM15-E2s rifle, a 10mm Glock 20SFhandgun, and a 9mm SIG Sauer P226 handgun. Outside the school, an Izhmash Saiga-12 shotgun was found in the trunk of the car that Adam drove to school. Police announced that Adam used the rifle for the shooting at the school shortly after it happened. On March 28, 2013, court documents released from the investigation showed that the shooting had occurred in the space  of less than five minutes. In that five minutes, 156 shots were fired. This consisted of 154 shots from the rifle, and two from the 10mm pistol. Adam fired one shot from the Glock in the hallway and shot himself in the head with the other. Investigators also evaluated Adam’s body. They were looking for evidence of drugs or medication through toxicology tests. DNA testing was utilized in this case, which is unusual for an investigation of this type. The toxicology report was published in October 2013, and there were no drugs or alcohol in his system. Adam’s autopsy showed that there were no tumors or gross deformities in his brain. Before the shooting, Adam removed the hard drive from his computer and intentionally damaged it. This created a challenge for investigators to recover data. Recovering data from the damaged drive had proven unsuccessful. Details of the investigation were reported by law enforcement officials at a meeting of the International Association of Police Chiefs and Colonels. It was held during the week of March 11,2013. An article published in the New York Daily News on March 17, 2013 provided details of this report by an anonymous law enforcement veteran who attended that meeting. The source stated that the investigation had found out that Adam had created a 7x14 foot sized spreadsheet. That spreadsheet listed around 500 mass murderers and the weapons that they used, It was considred to have taken years of work and have been used by Adam as a “score sheet.” The March 28 documents also provided details on items found at Adam’s home. This included three samurai swords, a newspaper article about a shooting that happened at Northern Illinois University, and a National Rifle Association. The NRA stated that neither Adam or Nancy Lanza were members. A gun safe was found in a bedroom and investigators found more than 1400 rounds of ammunition and other firearms. The final report of the State Attorney summarizing the investigation into the shooting was published on November 25, 2013. It was concluded that Adam had acted alone. The case was closed. The report noted that Adam, “had a familiarity with and access to firearms and ammunition and an obsession with mass murders, in particular the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.” The report didn’t specify a motive for the shooting. It stated, “The evidence clearly shows that the shooter planned his actions, including the taking of his own life, but there is no clear indication why he did so, or why he targeted Sandy Hook elementary school.”

So let’s get into the conspiracy theories surrounding this horrible event. The one that got attention was with radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Alex stated that the Sandy Hook shooting was “completely fake” and a “giant hoax” that was perpetrated by opponents of the Second Amendment. He stated that the murders were a “false flag” attack perpetrated by the government. He made a new conspiracy theory that no one died at Sandy Hook because the Uniform Crime Reports showed no murders for Newtown for 2012. He also stated that the victims were “child actors.” This claim is false and misrepresents the FBI report. In reality, because the Connecticut State Police was the lead investigator after the attack, the Sandy Hook victims were included in Connecticut’s statewide records rather than under the Newtown statistics. On April 16, 2018, parents of two of the shooting victims sued Jones in Travis County, Texas. That is where Jone’s company is based. They sued for $1 million each. The trial was expected to be scheduled by the end of 2020. On May 23, 2018, six families of the shooting, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the attack, filed a defamation lawsuit in Bridgeport Superior Court of Connecticut against Jones for his role in spreading conspiracy theories about the shooting. In a disposition in the last week of March 2019, Jones acknowledged the deaths were real. He stated that he had “almost like a form of psychosis”, where he “basically thought everything was staged.” By 2021, Jones didn’t provide information to support his claims. This means that the case defaulted in favor of the plaintiffs. Jones acknowledged in 2022 that the shooting was “100% real” and that it was “absolutely irresponsible” to call it a hoax. On August 4,2922, Jones was ordered to pay $4.1 million compensatory damages to Sandy Hook parents. On August 5, 2022, he was ordered to pay a further $45.2 million in damages to the families of Sandy Hook families. On October 12, 2022, Jones was ordered to pay $965 million in damages to the families of Sandy Hook Families. There are other theories as well. Lawyer and dentist Orly Taitz was quoted as asking, “Was Adam Lanza drugged and hypnotized by his handlers to make him into a killing machine as an excuse as the regime is itching to take all means of self defense from the populus before the economic collapse?” People have claimed that the shooting was a classified training exercise modeled after Operation Closed Campus-that was a school shooting drill that included the Department of Homeland Security, Iowa emergency-management agencies, state and local police, emergency radio operators, prosecuting attorneys, local doctors and hospitals, the Red Cross, emergency medical personnel, medical examiners, news reporters, and crisis actors. It was canceled in 2011 amid public outcries and threats.

NOT-SO-FUN FACTS AND FINDINGS

• The incident is the deadliest mass shooting in Connecticut history and the deadliest at an elementary school in US history.
• Adam and Nancy lived only 5 miles from Sandy Hook.  
• The students that passed away in the shooting would have graduated from high school this year, 2024.
• Websites and Computer Files on Lanza’s Computer About Guns, Murder, Deathtext:
  1. Bookmarks pertaining to firearms, military, politics, mass murder, video games, music, books, Army Ranger, computers and programs, ammunition, candy, economic books
  2. Two videos showing suicide by gunshot
  3. Commercial movies depicting mass shootings
  4. The computer game titled "School Shooting" where the player controls a character who enters a school and shoots at students
  5. Screen shots (172) of the online game "Combat Arms"
  6. Images of the shooter holding a handgun to his head
  7. Images of the shooter holding a rifle to his head
  8. Five-second video (dramatization) depicting children being shot
  9. Images of Lanza with a rifle, shotgun and numerous magazines in his pockets
  10. Documents on weapons and magazine capacity
  11. A document showing the prerequisites for a mass murder spreadsheet
  12. A spreadsheet listing mass murders by name and information about the incident
  13. Large amount of materials relating to Columbine shootings and documents on mass murders
  14. Large amount of materials on firearms media

NAMES OF THE VICTIMS:

- Jessica Rekos, 6

- Olivia Engel, 6

- Avielle Richman, 6

- Jesse Lewis, 6

- Noah Pozner, 6

- Ana marquez-Greene, 6

- Emilie Parker, 6

- Charlotte Bacon, 6

- Catherine Hubbard, 6

- James “J” Mattioli, 6

- Caroline Previdi, 6

- Allison Wyatt, 6

- Dylan Hockley, 6

- Madeline Hsu, 6

- Jack Pinto, 6

- Benjamin Wheeler, 6

- Josephine Gay, 7

- Grace Audrey McDonnell, 7

- Daniel Barden, 7

- Chase Kowalski, 7

- Victoria Soto, 27

- Rachel Davino, 29

- Lauren Rousseau, 30

- Dawn Hochsprung, 47

- Anne Marie Murphy, 52

- Nancy Lanza, 52

- Mary Sherlach,56

QUESTIONS

1. Do you remember Columbine?
2. Did you ever have to do an active shooter drill at school?
3. Have you ever had any active shooter training?
4. Do you believe any of the conspiracy theories surrounding this event?

We did this episode to honor those families and bring awareness to people in hopes we can better help one another emotionally, psychologically, before it’s too late. We should never have to bear witness to such a tragedy again. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims' families. We Love You. Stay Weird Ya'll.