Newtown: An American Tragedy (24 page)

O
n Friday, December 21, Governor Dan Malloy gathered with other officials on the steps of the town hall as the chiming of twenty-six bells reverberated throughout the state, one time for each victim, commemorating one week since the mass killing. The lives of
the twenty-six people murdered by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December were eulogized and celebrated after the tragedy.

Of the hundreds of makeshift memorials that had sprung up around Sandy Hook and Newtown, the twenty-six angels, twenty-six flags, twenty-six votive candles, only one could be found that mentioned Nancy Lanza. Scrolled on a yellow piece of paper and hammered to a piece of wood was a message from a friend: “Others now share pain for choices you faced alone. May the blameless among us throw the first stone.”

Mark Barden believes that Nancy Lanza bears some of the responsibility for the loss of his seven-year-old son, Daniel. He believes that Nancy could have chosen to go in a different direction instead of feeding her mentally disturbed son’s growing firearms obsession by taking him repeatedly to gun ranges and purchasing the high-powered weaponry that she kept in the house. “It all comes down to parenting,” said Barden.

Nancy Lanza could have prevented the tragedy if she simply followed the laws on the books in Connecticut requiring adults to keep their firearms safely out of the hands of anyone under the age of twenty-one. The state strictly prohibits anyone under that age to be in possession of a firearm. Adam not only had his own gun safe and access to his own firearms, but police believe his mother encouraged his passion for firearms by frequently taking him to the shooting range.

“Perhaps she could have made some other choices as to how to spend time with her son,” said Barden. “How about fishing?”

L
iza Long buried her head in her hands. She couldn’t stop sobbing. After hearing of the shooting at Sandy Hook, the tears kept coming, streaking down her cheeks. She cried for the victims, their families, their friends, their community, and then finally she cried again—this time for herself.

“When I looked at Nancy Lanza, I saw myself,” said Long. “I saw what my son was capable of doing if he didn’t get the proper treatment.”

That night, in Boise, Idaho, Liza took to her parenting blog, “The Anarchist Soccer Mom,” to share the personal day-to-day struggles she has endured in raising her mentally ill son, Michael. She began her post, “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.”

She went on to write about a violent episode that had happened shortly before the shooting in Sandy Hook, when her thirteen-year-old
suffered an outbreak over an argument about overdue library books. The mother of four tried every technique in her varied repertoire but still couldn’t manage to calm her raging son. His anger continued to escalate, culminating with his pulling a knife out and threatening to kill her. Long was forced to call the police.

“That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room,” she wrote. “The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.”

Long was out of answers. No one could seem to figure out what was wrong with Michael. After enduring years of watching her son go from doctor to doctor, and being diagnosed with a slew of different afflictions, each one coming with a new medication, and none of them working, it was hard for his struggling mother to feel anything but hopeless. “No one wants to send a thirteen-year-old genius who loves Harry Potter, and his snuggle-animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken health care system, does not provide us with other options,” she wrote.

She ended with a plea: “It’s time for a meaningful, nationwide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.”

Liza titled the piece “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.”

The post went viral. Since first posted on December 15, it has been viewed more than six million times, sparking a nationwide conversation that opened up the debate on the role of mental health in the shooting at Sandy Hook and of the condition of the mental
health system in the United States. While most of the feedback on her article was positive, Long also came under attack. Many were outraged by the post, believing that Long’s post attempted to justify the mass killings and was insulting to the memory of the victims. Others scoured her other online writings, attacking her parenting and questioning her decision to go public with her child’s mental illness.

“I have been under attack since I came out and opened up about my struggles with my son’s mental illness, but I think it’s a fight worth making,” said Long. “I just kept thinking, if I don’t stand up now, then when?”

Now Long finds herself front and center in the debate on mental health in this country. Suddenly in demand by the national media, she has trouble keeping up with all the requests for her to speak at different mental health groups. She is also writing a book on autism and the inadequate state of mental health care in America.

“I used to be in the shadows myself. What happened in Sandy Hook has been a transformative process for me. I knew I had to act. If a tragedy of this magnitude doesn’t open up the conversation, then I’m afraid nothing ever will,” said Long.

Her son Michael is in many ways brilliant. He has an encyclopedic mind when it comes to Greek mythology. He is caring and thoughtful of other people. If his mother or a friend needs help, he is quick to volunteer. In many ways he shows maturity well beyond his thirteen years. However, when his mental illness takes over, he can feel himself morphing into a person he barely recognizes. His mind goes blank and the violent impulses take over.

“I feel backed into a corner and I have to attack or get away.
I can’t think about anything else,” Michael said. “It’s kind of like a werewolf. When a werewolf turns into a werewolf, it doesn’t know who he is, it doesn’t know where he is, it just wants to hurt and fight people. You can’t control yourself when you’re like that, and no one else can.”

The list of diagnoses reads like a catalog: sensory integration disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, ADHD, anxiety, depression, autistic spectrum disorder, juvenile bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and dysgraphia.

The list of medications prescribed during his short thirteen-year life are equally troubling: Abilify, risperdone, clonidine, trazodone, Concerta, Ritalin, Daytrana patch, Celexa, guanfacine, Zyprexa, and currently Intuniv, Wellbutrin, lithium, and Trileptal. He sees a psychiatrist, an occupational therapist, a psychologist, has psychosocial rehabilitation once a week, and has a Department of Health and Welfare caseworker.

“For mothers of special needs children, the quest to find proper treatment can become all consuming,” Long said. She has good health insurance, but because of her son’s therapeutic care, medications, and babysitting costs, she typically spends one-third of her paycheck on Michael’s needs.

Still, Long is counting her blessings, knowing that despite the problems she has with her son, there are others who have it much worse. “I have it easy compared to some other parents I know whose kids are suffering from mental illness. My son isn’t burning things or killing animals.”

N
ancy Lanza spent the years when her son Adam was between nine and seventeen consumed by the search to help cure his affliction. As a young child Adam was in a constant state of struggle with the world around him. At the age of five, Adam Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and shortly afterward, a second condition, sensory processing disorder.

As Adam got older, he struggled to fit in and couldn’t relate to his peers, and as his condition worsened, he made the decision to spend less time in the outside world and instead sought comfort in the delusional fantasy world of violence and death he had created in his own mind. By the time Adam was nineteen, he had withdrawn almost completely and become a virtual shut-in, spending hours playing the first-person shooter game
Call of Duty
. In the months that preceded the shooting, Adam began to isolate himself in his bedroom, surrounded all day and all night by violent images.

Nancy Lanza had the financial resources to see any doctor in the state, but by 2008 she told a friend that finding adequate treatment for her son had become “a lost cause.”

“He’s so bright, but no one is willing to give him the time and attention he deserves,” she frequently told a family member.

M
arianne Kristiansson, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, published a recent study looking at the characteristics of violent offenders who also had autism. Kristiansson pointed out that the vast majority of those with autism are law-abiding citizens who will never commit any crimes but, out of the small sample of mass killers she looked at, a higher
representation of autism was found to be prevalent. Based on her knowledge of what is publicly known about Adam Lanza, she believes it was his inability to express his frustrations that ultimately led to the massacre.

“The behavior of Adam Lanza was quite typical of a subject with autism,” said Kristiansson. “This behavior is impossible to understand because it’s so horrible. The motive is different from what you would normally see in a criminal. You want to communicate on a very global level that people have treated you in a very bad way and you want revenge.

“Many of the offenders we have looked at wanted to communicate to other authorities that they are very offended and very frustrated, but due to their autistic traits, they didn’t have the ability to communicate that verbally, so instead they acted out in these bizarre and odd ways.”

After studying Peter Mangs, a forty-year-old with a diagnosis of Asperger’s who was charged with shooting more than a dozen people from 2009 to 2010, Kristiansson found that it was his inability to communicate his dissatisfaction with society that ultimately drove him to kill. “I’m quite sure that Adam Lanza was offended by the school, his community, his mother, and others but he wasn’t able to verbalize this dissatisfaction,” said Kristiansson. “Part of autistic traits is that people like Adam can’t think about how other people might feel, they can only think from their own perspective, so it all became about him making a statement saying that he was extremely offended by the school and wanted revenge.”

Still, most in the medical community believe there is no link between autism and acts of violence and that the accusations further
damage an already stigmatized and targeted group of people. Most autism groups dispute the science that links autism to violence. Most believe the studies are flawed and cite studies of their own that show there is no link.

“There is absolutely no evidence or any reliable research that suggests a linkage between autism and planned violence,” the Autism Society said in a statement. “To imply or suggest that some linkage exists is wrong and is harmful to more than 1.5 million law-abiding, nonviolent, and wonderful individuals who live with autism each day.”

Many children with autism already face enough societal challenges without being linked to mass shootings, according to Peter Bell of Autism Speaks. “Autism did not commit this horrible act. A man did,” said Bell, executive vice president for programs and services for the advocacy and research group. “We are an evidence-based organization and when you look at the scientific literature there really is no connection between autism and acts of violence,” explained Bell, who is also the father of a son with autism. “In fact, we find evidence that supports the fact that they are usually the victims.

“We were saddened to see the media jump on the idea that this was Asperger’s. There were a number of autistic victims involved in this tragedy and because of that we’ve been impacted emotionally.”

Bell believes that there is also a misperception that those with autism don’t feel empathy. “They are highly empathic and the research supports that,” says Bell.

Nicole Hockley, whose autistic son Dylan was one of the victims in the shooting, bristles at any suggestion that links her son’s
condition with violence. “It’s highly offensive and damaging to link autism and violence and it isn’t backed up by science,” Hockley said.

“We are talking about some of the most caring, compassionate people you would ever meet. He was very empathic. He loved to laugh and be tickled. Dylan was just so pure and full of love.”

Still, the medical community remains divided.

“The mental health community is extremely sensitive about linking violence with autism; many refuse to make the link but the facts tell a different story,” said Dr. Edward Shorter, a professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto who has published numerous books on the subject. “Autistic children often have trouble understanding the normal rules of society. They don’t understand the proper way to behave in social settings and can tend to seek isolation,” Dr. Shorter said. “This can lead to violent behavior.”