On the morning of Friday, December 14, 2012, 27 people were killed in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty were first-grade children and six were women on the staff of an elementary school in the town. The first death that morning, before he went to the school, was that of his mother, in the family residence a few miles away in the same town. Adam Lanza was 20. He died by suicide at the school that morning, and he was never charged, tried or convicted of anything.
Responsibility was settled instead by a long state investigation. On November 25, 2013, the State's Attorney for the Judicial District of Danbury, the prosecutor responsible for Newtown, issued a 44-page report concluding that Lanza "acted alone and was solely criminally responsible for his actions of that day." It found that the crime of Murder under Special Circumstances had been committed 26 times at the school, that Attempted Murder under Special Circumstances had been committed twice against two staff members who survived, and that the crime of Murder had been committed in the earlier death. No one else had conspired with him or helped him, the report found, and there would be no state prosecution of anyone. The investigation was declared closed. A second official inquiry, by Connecticut's Office of the Child Advocate, followed in November 2014. Both reports arrived at the same place on the question most people wanted answered. Neither could say why.
Adam Lanza was born on April 22, 1992, in Exeter, New Hampshire. The Child Advocate's report, which traced his developmental, educational and medical history from birth onward, describes a very active small child who slept badly, avoided being touched and was slow to speak. In late 1994, when he was almost three, he was evaluated by New Hampshire's early intervention program, Birth to Three, because of his communication delays. The evaluators found that he fell well below expectations in social and personal development and that his speech and expressive language were significantly delayed. They also noted a good attention span, creative play and an ability to follow directions, and they recommended speech and language services and regular preschool.
He began preschool in Kingston, New Hampshire, in 1995, with special education support that included speech help and occupational therapy. At one point late in preschool those speech services were withdrawn on the view that his difficulties were not affecting his learning. An independent evaluation at a hospital in April 1997 described him as friendly and bright, with a good sense of humor, and noted many rituals in his behavior and a possible sensory integration disorder; special education support was restored. Records from these years, the State's Attorney's report adds, show speech and language needs, medical follow-up for seizure activity, repetitive behaviors, temper tantrums, excessive hand washing and unusual eating habits.
The family moved from New Hampshire to Newtown in 1998. Lanza went through the Newtown public schools, except for parts of seventh and eighth grade spent at St. Rose of Lima School in the town. From 1998 to 2003, first through fifth grade, he attended the same elementary school. The Newtown schools gave him some special education services there, but the Child Advocate found those services limited and noted that his providers did not identify communication or social and emotional deficits at the time.
The picture drawn by those who taught him is mixed, and the State's Attorney's report warns that it can look inconsistent because people knew him at different ages and from different vantage points. A fifth-grade teacher remembered a quiet, reluctant, very bright boy with good ideas in creative writing, who would not start a conversation but would not ignore one either. A sixth-grade teacher described an average student with A's and B's who never caused trouble and had friends. He played the saxophone and took part in school concerts. Some people recalled him being bullied; many teachers saw nothing of the kind.
The Child Advocate counted his early, extremely violent writings among the warning signs that appear to have gone largely unaddressed by the schools. His social and emotional difficulties increased after fourth grade, the Child Advocate found. By seventh grade a teacher saw an intelligent boy with antisocial difficulties who barely spoke, did not want to take part in anything and filled his writing assignments with battles, destruction and war, far beyond what others his age wrote. The same teacher remembered that when he was asked to write a poem, he wrote a fine one and presented it in public.
As he moved through middle school, noise, confusion and the walk between classes became harder for him to bear. In eighth grade his education plan took him out of school altogether, under a placement meant for children too disabled, even with supports, to attend school, and it lasted an entire school year with, in the Child Advocate's assessment, little oversight by the district. A community psychiatrist who saw him several times between the ages of 13 and 15 supported his withdrawal from the school setting.
In 2005 he was diagnosed with Asperger's Disorder. The evaluation described significant social impairments, extreme anxiety, a lack of empathy, very rigid thinking and a literal reading of written and spoken language. Testing in 2006 put his overall IQ in the average range, with no learning disability. His school difficulties were tied to his anxiety, his Asperger's characteristics, obsessive-compulsive concerns and sensory problems, which together limited how much of the general curriculum he could take part in. Tutoring, desensitization and medication were recommended. He refused the medication and did not take up the behavioral therapies that were suggested.
An evaluation at the Yale Child Study Center at age 14, in his ninth-grade year, stands out in the Child Advocate's account. Its recommendations, the report found, warned that withdrawing him from school and accommodating him, rather than addressing his underlying needs, would lead to a deteriorating life of dysfunction and isolation, and it proposed extensive special education support, ongoing expert consultation and therapy built into his daily life. Those recommendations went largely unheeded. Of the few providers who saw him over his life, the Child Advocate concluded, only the Yale clinic seemed to grasp how serious his condition was.
In tenth grade a plan to return him gradually to class brought early progress, but by spring he had again withdrawn from most classes and was working alone or with tutors. He finished at Newtown High School, where he was classed as a special education student, through a mix of independent study, tutoring, classes at the high school and courses at Western Connecticut State University. In 2007 and 2008 he belonged to the high school's technology club, where he was remembered as quiet and smart, as a student who wore the same clothing again and again and would pull his sleeves over his hand to touch things, and as someone who never spoke of violence. Teachers in those years saw no sign of violence in him; one judged him more likely to be victimized than to hurt anyone. He graduated in 2009, early, at 17, and went on taking classes at the university afterward.
The Child Advocate found that the schools cared about his success but unwittingly enabled a strategy of accommodation, through a plan that paid little attention to his social and emotional needs. No sustained input from any mental health provider appears in his educational or medical records after 2006, and he did not appear to seek or take part in any mental health treatment after 2008. His adult medical records show no awareness or diagnosis of ongoing mental health problems.
After high school his world narrowed. He received a driver's license in July 2010 and worked briefly at a computer repair shop. Over the years his interests had included building computers, writing poetry and hiking, and he spent long hours on video games. In 2011 and through most of 2012 he went almost every weekend to the lobby of a movie theater to play a music dance game for four to ten hours at a time. After a snowstorm in 2011 he stayed away from the theater until about February 2012, and when he returned he seemed more withdrawn and no longer played with others.
The Child Advocate described a young man who deteriorated progressively in his last years and ended in virtual social isolation. By November 2012, the State's Attorney's report records, he had not gone anywhere in three months and communicated within the household only by e-mail. Plans were under way for the household to leave Newtown and move to Washington State or North Carolina, where he might attend a special school or find computer work. The Child Advocate linked the timing of what followed to that planned move, which may have stirred fears of leaving the familiar setting he had confined himself to.
Over the same period he became increasingly preoccupied with mass murder. The Child Advocate found that this interest was encouraged by a small online community of people with the same fixation, with whom he exchanged e-mails. The State's Attorney's investigators examined those contacts and found that none of the messages concerned the school or suggested that he meant to commit such a crime, and investigators found no evidence that he ever voiced or hinted at the intention to anyone. His communications in these years, the Child Advocate found, suggested depression and at times suicidal thinking, but not psychosis.
The State's Attorney concluded that he planned his actions, including his own death.
The killings took place on a school-day morning, in one town, within a short span of time. The first death came in Newtown, before he went to the school. At the elementary school he then killed 20 first-grade children, 12 girls and eight boys, and six adults, all women: the principal, the school psychologist, two teachers, a behavioral therapist and a member of the special education staff. Two other staff members were injured and survived.
The State's Attorney found no evidence that he had any particular reason to choose the school or any person in it. As far as could be determined, he had no prior contact with anyone who was there that day, and apart from having attended it as a child he had no continuing connection with it.
Because Lanza died that morning, there was no defendant, no charge and no court. The legal findings in the case therefore come from the prosecutor's report rather than from a verdict. Under Article IV, Section 27 of the Connecticut Constitution and section 51-276 of the General Statutes, the Division of Criminal Justice, made up of the chief state's attorney and the state's attorneys for each judicial district, is responsible for the investigation and prosecution of all criminal matters. Newtown lies in the Judicial District of Danbury, which is why the Danbury State's Attorney led the review.
The report applied the statutes as a court would have been asked to apply them. Murder with special circumstances under section 53a-54b covers, among other things, the murder of two or more persons at the same time or in the course of a single transaction, and the murder of a person under 16. The report found both grounds met at the school. Attempted murder under section 53a-49 requires a substantial step toward the crime with the mental state the crime requires. The single death earlier that morning fell under the general murder statute, section 53a-54a.
The report also addressed the two defenses that Connecticut law makes available on a murder charge. Under section 53a-13 a defendant may show that, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to control it within the law. The report concluded that this defense was not available: the evidence showed that he knew his conduct was against the law and that he was able to control his behavior to obtain the results he wanted, including his own death. It pointed to his collection of material about mass murders and to the planning his conduct showed. The second defense, extreme emotional disturbance for which there is a reasonable explanation or excuse, which under section 53a-54a can reduce murder to manslaughter, was also found absent, because he had planned the crimes in advance. On intent, the report relied on the principle stated by the Connecticut Supreme Court in State v. Otto (2012), that intent to kill may be inferred from circumstantial evidence, including the events before and after a death and a person's intending the natural consequences of his voluntary acts.
A separate inquiry began on January 30, 2013, when the State Child Fatality Review Panel, the panel charged under Connecticut law with reviewing the sudden and unexpected deaths of children, directed the Office of the Child Advocate to investigate the circumstances leading to the deaths of the 20 children. The panel narrowed the work to Lanza himself and to any public health lessons his history might hold. The office used its subpoena power to collect his medical, mental health and education records, along with unredacted state police and law enforcement records, reviewed thousands of pages, consulted law enforcement and the panel, and conducted interviews. Its primary authors were the state's Child Advocate, an assistant child advocate, a psychologist from the University of Connecticut Health Center, a trauma specialist, the psychiatrist-in-chief of the Institute of Living at Hartford Hospital, and the dean of the School of Education at Pace University.
The 114-page report was released on November 21, 2014. It described a life in which minimal mental health evaluation and treatment had been obtained relative to his apparent need, and in which he was completely untreated in the years before December 2012.
The authors were careful about the limits of what they had found. Only he was responsible for his murderous actions, they wrote, and no direct line could be drawn between any person's or institution's actions and the crime. The report could not and did not answer the question of why he committed murder. Its authors did not conclude that the predisposing factors and stresses in his life added up to an inevitable path toward mass murder. They wrote that Autism Spectrum Disorder and his other psychiatric problems neither caused nor led to his acts, and that people with those conditions are far more likely to turn distress inward than to harm others. What set his case apart, they found, was the combination of severe and worsening internal mental health problems with an atypical preoccupation with violence, evident since childhood and deepened by the online world he had entered. Whether better mental health and educational services would have prevented the killings was a question the report raised but could not answer. In the end, it concluded, only he, and he alone, bore responsibility.
No motive was ever established. The State's Attorney's report said the question of why might never be answered conclusively and the Child Advocate's report said it could not answer it. Investigators found nothing to show that he had told anyone what he intended.
The contribution of his mental health to the crimes remains unknown. The State's Attorney found that his mental health problems were real and significant but that their contribution, if any, could not be determined, and that they did not provide a legal defense; the Child Advocate found that his diagnoses neither caused nor led to his acts.
Accounts of his childhood differ. Some people recalled him being bullied, while many teachers saw no sign of it. Some described a gifted student; testing by the school district in high school placed his cognitive abilities in the average range.
The finding that he acted alone rests on the evidence as it stood in November 2013. The State's Attorney stated that the investigation would be reopened if reliable information about accessories or co-conspirators emerged, and the state's case file was released the following month under the same terms.
April 22, 1992: Adam Lanza is born in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Late 1994: He is evaluated by New Hampshire's Birth to Three program for communication delays.
1995: He begins preschool with special education support in Kingston, New Hampshire.
1998: The family moves to Newtown, Connecticut.
1998 to 2003: He attends the elementary school, first through fifth grade.
Eighth grade: His education plan takes him out of school for a full school year.
2005: He is diagnosed with Asperger's Disorder.
Ninth grade, age 14: He is evaluated at the Yale Child Study Center; its recommendations go largely unheeded.
2007 to 2008: He is a member of the technology club at Newtown High School.
2009: He graduates from Newtown High School and continues classes at Western Connecticut State University.
July 2010: He receives a driver's license.
November 2012: He has not left the household in three months; plans are under way to move out of state.
December 14, 2012: Twenty-seven people are killed in Newtown, 26 of them at the elementary school; two staff members are injured and survive; he dies by suicide at the school.
December 15 and 16, 2012: The medical examiner conducts the autopsies.
January 30, 2013: The State Child Fatality Review Panel directs the Office of the Child Advocate to investigate.
November 25, 2013: The State's Attorney for the Judicial District of Danbury issues his report, finding that Lanza acted alone and closing the investigation.
December 27, 2013: The Connecticut State Police release their case file.
November 21, 2014: The Office of the Child Advocate releases its report.