Newtown: An American Tragedy (20 page)

Roberts fired at least thirteen rounds from his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, shooting five girls, between the ages of six and thirteen, in the head execution style, before killing himself.

• Steven P. Kazmierczak, who shot twenty-one people, killing five, at Northern Illinois University on February 14, 2008.

Kazmierczak walked into Cole Hall wearing dark
brown boots, jeans, and a black T-shirt reading
TERRORIST
, imposed over an image of a rifle. His arsenal included three handguns, a 9-millimeter Glock 19, a 9-millimeter Kurz Sig Sauer P232, and a .380 Hi-Point CF380; a 12-gauge Remington Sportsman 48 shotgun concealed in a guitar case; eight loaded magazines; and a knife.

He walked up and down the aisle, firing fifty-four shots into the lecture hall as students scrambled for the exits. Kazmierczak turned the gun on himself before police were able to arrive.

• Jared Loughner, who shot eighteen people, killing twelve, and severely injuring Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a constituents’ meeting in a grocery store parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, on January 8, 2011.

Loughner walked into the “Congress at Your Corner” event sponsored by the congresswoman armed with a 9-millimeter Glock 19 pistol with a 33-round magazine before he opened fire on Giffords from close range, as well as numerous bystanders, including a nine-year-old girl.

Loughner was tackled by bystanders as he tried to flee the scene.

• John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who killed ten people and wounded three others in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia during their October 2002 terror spree.

Over the course of twenty-three days, ten people were randomly gunned down by a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle
while doing random everyday tasks such as reading a book, mowing the lawn, shopping, or pumping gas.

After an exhaustive manhunt, both were later apprehended by law enforcement.

S
till, of all the mass killers Adam studied, investigators believed it was the name on the top of his list of killers, the Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik, who proved the most influential. Over the course of his research on mass killers, it was believed that Adam had become obsessed with Breivik’s killing spree in July 2011.

“We believe Adam studied him closely and may have tried to imitate some of his techniques,” said one official familiar with the investigation. “They both used the same video games to train and prepare and they were both obsessed with other mass killers.”

After setting off a series of bombs in downtown Oslo that killed eight people, Breivik made his way to Utøya Island where, dressed as a police officer and carrying an arsenal of weapons, he systematically hunted down and shot dead sixty-nine others, most of them young people attending a summer camp. When an armed police SWAT unit from Oslo arrived on the island and confronted him, he surrendered without resistance.

Breivik left behind a fifteen-hundred page manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” In the pages, Adam found detailed instructions on how to prepare for the solitary journey and eventual gratification that encompassed one’s preparations for a mass killing. Investigators believed Adam may have been able to
relate to Breivik, who thought of himself as a loner on a one-man crusade to educate the world through his destructive means.

Breivik wrote: “You are normally required to plan absolutely everything alone; fight alone to see your mission through and you are likely to die alone with half of your city’s system protectors hunting you. However, I have never in my life felt that I have done anything more meaningful than what I am doing now regardless of the lack of moral support from my founding brothers or other armed resistance fighters. Support from our extremely distributed and anonymous ‘non-hierarchy’ out there would be nice but I have managed to cope through mental discipline to become what I am today; a self-driven and highly effective manifestation of an independent resistance cell. I have managed to stay focused and highly motivated for a duration of more than 9 years now. I feel really happy about my current course.”

Investigators also turned up evidence that led them to believe that Adam, like Breivik, used his violent video games to prepare for his killing spree. In the video game
Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2,
Breivik believed he had found the perfect tool to hone his killing skills.

“I just bought
Modern Warfare 2,
the game. It is probably the best military simulator out there and it’s one of the hottest games this year,” wrote Breivik. “I see
MW2
more as a part of my training-simulation than anything else. I’ve still learned to love it though and especially the multiplayer part is amazing. You can more or less completely simulate actual operations.”

At the subsequent trial, Breivik expanded on the video game’s usefulness in his preparations for the slaughter. The thirty-three-year-old
said he practiced his shot using a “holographic aiming device” on the war-simulation game, which he said is used by armies around the world for training.

“You develop target acquisition,” he said. “It consists of many hundreds of different tasks and some of these tasks can be compared with an attack, for real. That’s why it’s used by many armies throughout the world. It’s very good for acquiring experience related to sights systems.”

Breivik added: “If you are familiar with a holographic sight, it’s built up in such a way that you could have given it to your grandmother and she would have been a super marksman. It’s designed to be used by anyone. In reality it requires very little training to use it in an optimal way. But of course it does help if you’ve practiced using a simulator.”

I
nside the Lanza’s Colonial-style home investigators also discovered a stockpile of disparate weaponry: several firearms, ammunition, and knives, along with macabre pictures. In addition to the rifle found at the foot of Nancy’s bed, investigators also discovered an Enfield bolt-action rifle, a WW II–era rifle long obsolete for military purposes because of its slow rate of fire; another rifle; a BB gun; a starter pistol; and 1,600 rounds of ammunition scattered around the house, some of them housed in a Planters peanut can and a Nike shoe box in different closet spaces. There was no sign that the gun locker, which was open when investigators arrived, had been broken into or tampered with.

Along with the firearms, they also discovered a cache of bladed
weapons inside the house, including a Panther brand brown-handled folding knife with a 3.75-inch blade, a 6-foot 10-inch wood-handled two-sided pole with a blade on one side and a spear on the opposite side, a samurai sword with a canvas-wrapped handle and a 28-inch blade with a sheath, a samurai sword with a canvas-wrapped handle and a 21-inch blade with a sheath, and a samurai sword with a canvas-wrapped handle and a 13-inch blade with a sheath.

As they sorted through Adam’s belongings in his upstairs bedrooms, they made several more disturbing discoveries. A photograph of Adam holding a gun to his head along with three photographs of what appeared to be dead bodies covered in plastic and blood. They also recovered seven personal memoirs; notes and drawings by Adam, several with violent images; a military uniform; and his first-grade report card from Sandy Hook Elementary.

Other items law enforcement bagged as evidence included an NRA certificate for Nancy and Adam Lanza; paper and cardboard targets; school records; medical prescriptions; psychiatric records; and subscriptions, along with a holiday card made out to Adam Lanza from his mother, Nancy, that contained a Bank of America check that specified that the money was to buy a “C183,” which investigators believe was for the purchase of a handgun.

Along with all the mass-killer study sheets, violent images, and the weaponry found inside the home, investigators also came across two books, both connected to autism:
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
written by John Elder Robison, a first-person account of a man living with Asperger’s who wasn’t diagnosed until the age of forty; and
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary
Mind of an Autistic Savant
written by Daniel Tammet, who, according to the publisher, “is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head. He sees numbers as shapes, colors, and textures, and he can perform extraordinary calculations in his head. He can learn to speak new languages fluently, from scratch, in a week. In 2004, he memorized and recited more than 22,000 digits of pi, setting a record. He has savant syndrome, an extremely rare condition that gives him the most unimaginable mental powers, much like those portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film
Rain Man
.”

A third book,
Train Your Brain to Get Happy,
had pages tabbed off and the subtitle promised readers “joy, optimism, and serenity.”

A
t 8:37
P.M.
on December 17, President Barack Obama stepped up to the podium at the Newtown High School auditorium—the same stage where only seventy-two hours earlier the fourth-graders had performed the Winter Concert—in an attempt to provide comfort for a community and nation still searching for answers.

“We gather here in memory of twenty beautiful children and six remarkable adults. They lost their lives in a school that could have been any school; in a quiet town full of good and decent people that could be any town in America,” the president began.

The room was packed. A hundred more crowded near speakers in the school’s gym, while others huddled outside in a cold drizzle, holding candles and weeping at times. The president went on to speak of the acts of bravery and heroism from the teachers and first responders and of how the community had pulled together as one during these trying times before making a broader call on the
country as a whole to meet our collective obligation to protect our children.

And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children—all of them—safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know that they are loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.

Since I’ve been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by a mass shooting. The fourth time we’ve hugged survivors. The fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims. And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and big cities all across America—victims whose, much of the time, their only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is 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 this. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that—then surely we have an obligation to try.

He ended the speech by reading the names of the twenty children whose lives were lost. Before leaving the podium to a standing ovation, he added: “Let us make this country worthy of their memory.”

I
n the hour before his speech, the president had gathered inside the school with the families of the victims and first responders. At several points, he became overwhelmed with emotion. His eyes filled with moisture and a single tear trickled down his cheek as he repeatedly offered his prayers.

After meeting with the families, he went to a classroom set up as his staging area where he spotted a message on the whiteboard from Steve George, a Newtown High School teacher and football coach, and Bobby Pattison, a teacher: “The Newtown community is so thankful that you are coming to help us heal,” the two teachers had written. “In times of adversity it is reassuring to know that we have a strong leader to help us recover.”

The president picked up a marker and wrote, “You’re in our thoughts and prayers.”

A
s Barack Obama left town, many locals began to wish he would take all the tourists and out-of-town media along with him. Tensions were beginning to boil over.

“Go home!” locals could be heard shouting at television trucks or anyone seen holding a notepad.