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Two years ago today Adam Lanza carried out a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. By the first anniversary, the official report on the attack had been released. In the year since then a man named Reed Coleman tracked down Lanza’s online presence as well as a call he made to a radio show, and just a few weeks ago the Office of the Child Advocate released its report on Lanza’s contacts with medical and mental health professionals. (All these materials are available at schoolshooters.info.) Though these resources provide new information, Lanza’s motives for his attack remain obscure. In my book due out next month, School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, I speculate that Lanza had undiagnosed schizophrenia, but even if he did, this does not explain his actions. The overwhelming majority of schizophrenics do not commit violence.
And yet, if he were psychotic as a result of schizophrenia, it would be important to know this. With every school shooting there is a desperate search for the answer to the question “Why?” In some cases, the perpetrators gunned down girls who rejected them, teachers who failed them, administrators who disciplined them, and surprisingly rarely, kids who picked on them (see the document “Intended and Targeted Victims” for details). As morally abhorrent as these attacks are, we can understand the logic of revenge. In the case of a 20-year-old man gunning down 6-year-old children, the logic of his motivation eludes us. We are, perhaps, mistaken in looking for a rational cause. In the case of psychotic shooters, the “rationale” may be irrational.
Though the recent report by the Office of the Child Advocate concluded that Lanza was “not obviously psychotic,” comments within the report provide evidence that he might have been. The report states, “It is possible that he increasingly lost touch with reality as a result of this profound isolation and immersion in violence-filled fantasy worlds that he shared with others.” It also said that he coped by “withdrawing into a detached private inner world,” and “When distressed, he also became immersed in hostility-dominated fantasies that blurred the boundaries between inner experience and outer reality.”1 Since the report earlier noted that psychosis refers to the “loss of contact with reality,” the authors recognized that Lanza may have been psychotic. In addition, the report describes him as feeling unsafe even at home, easily feeling threatened, and being suspicious. In the context of what we know, this description suggests possible paranoia.
The report also notes that when Lanza was a teenager he met with a nurse at the Yale Child Study Center and asked her about the symptoms of schizophrenia. After she described them, she asked him if he had any of them, but he refused to answer. At one point, his mother wondered “whether her son had outgrown what had previously been diagnosed as borderline autism into something much more extreme.”2 Might this have been schizophrenia? Similarly, Lanza’s father questioned the diagnosis of Asperger’s: “I was thinking it [the Asperger’s diagnosis] could mask schizophrenia.”3 In addition, Lanza’s lack of emotional expression, minimal speaking, and periods of withdrawal (that may have been catatonic episodes) all suggest the possibility of schizophrenia.
Where does this leave us in terms of understanding his attack? Might his attack have been the result of a delusion? For example, we know that he was obsessed with the military, longed to be a marine, wore military clothing for months before his attack, and was dressed in military gear when he carried out his massacre. Did he believe he was a commando?
Alternatively, police found on his computer a file or document called “babies” that “contains two fictional writings of being attacked by babies and attempts to defend against them.”4 Did Lanza have paranoid delusions about children? Was he attacking kids at school out of some bizarre belief that they were a danger to him? This is apparently what Seung Hui Cho did at Virginia Tech: he had paranoid delusions that people were going to kill him so he struck out in what he believed was self-defense.
Lanza’s choice to kill children is particularly striking because of a story he co-wrote in fifth grade in which a character says, “I like hurting people … especially children.”5 Did an early antipathy toward, or fear of, children evolve into paranoid delusions about them?
Of course, there are other possibilities. Evidence from both Lanza’s computer and his online postings indicate an interest in pedophilia. This includes a "document written advocating pedophiles' rights and the liberation of children," a "script describing a relationship between a 10 year old boy and a 30 year old man," a "profile of a pedophile," and a "movie depicting a man/boy relationship."6 Online, Lanza wrote, "I don't think there should be any age of consent."7 Was Lanza sexually attracted to children? If so, did he kill those he desired but was unable to have?
Another possibility: Lanza was a very depressed person who wrote about “lying on the floor, numbly perplexed over the foreign concept of loving life,” and said, “I'm content to mope on the floor 24/7.”8 He had been a profoundly impaired child and now childhood was over and he was a profoundly impaired adult. He apparently had nothing to look forward to and was alienated from the world, all alone, and miserable. Perhaps Lanza saw the children at Sandy Hook as happy, well-adjusted kids who would succeed in life in a way he never could. Perhaps, like many other shooters, particularly those who were psychotic, Lanza killed the people he most envied.
1. Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School: Report of the Office of the Child Advocate, pp. 104, 105. http://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/sandyhook11212014_0.pdf.
2. Matthew Lysiak, Newtown: An American Tragedy, New York: Gallery, 2013, p. 23.
3. Andrew Solomon, “The Reckoning: The father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers,” The New Yorker, March 17, 2014.
4. "Appendix to the Report on the Shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School," p. A215. http://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/Appendix_to_Sandy_Hook_Official_Report.pdf
5. "Appendix to the Report on the Shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School," p. A221.
6. "Appendix to the Report on the Shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School," pp. A215-216.
7. “Adam Lanza’s ‘Shocked Beyond Belief’ Posts,” Version 1.1, p. 35. http://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/lanza_posts_1.0_1.pdf.
