- Nancy Lanza, 52, was planning to uproot her life and move with her son when he decided on a college in either Seattle or the Carolinas
- Ms Lanza had ‘total authority’ over son’s upbringing following 2009 divorce from boy’s father Peter
- She was killed by her son Adam Lanza as she lay in her bedroom in her pajamas on Friday morning
- Ex-husband will likely take care of Nancy’s funeral
- The bodies of she and Adam Lanza will not be released for another week
By
Daniel Bates In Newtown, Connecticut , Louise Boyle and Hayley Peterson
PUBLISHED:
00:00 EST, 15 December 2012
|
UPDATED:
10:57 EST, 18 December 2012
The mother of the Sandy Hook gunman who was shot four times in the face at close range by her son, suffered from multiple sclerosis, it was revealed today.
Nancy Lanza, 52, had dedicated her life to looking after her autistic son Adam, who, after killing his mother, took her car and three of her guns to Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday and shot dead 20 children and six adults. He then turned the gun on himself.
Her sister-in-law Marsha revealed today that Nancy had health problems as well as her son and would often go to new York for treatment for her MS.
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Murdered: Nancy Lanza, 52, was shot in the face by her ‘deeply disturbed’ son Adam while she lay in bed at her Connecticut home
She moved to Newtown with her husband
Peter in 1998. He would commute to the city for his job as vice
president of General Electric.
The couple divorced in 2009 after
their marriage ‘irretrievably broke down’. Peter made $445,000 a year
and agreed to pay $240,000 a year in alimony and child support,
according to court records.
As the once-peaceful New England town
continues today to bury the victims of Friday’s massacre, it was revealed the bodies of
Nancy and Adam Lanza are not being released by the medical examiner for
another week.
Marsha Lanza told the Washington Post her brother-in-law Peter will likely organize the funeral.
‘She was my friend,’ she said. ‘I said to my husband, “Who’s
going to bury Nancy?” He said, “Knowing my brother, he’ll take care of
it, because that’s the right thing to do”.’
Nancy’s family – her mother and three
adult siblings – have gathered at the family’s 1740s farmhouse in
Kingston where the 52-year-old had a charmed upbringing.
When she married her high school
sweetheart in 1981, the couple built a house next door to the home where they lived until they moved to Newtown.
Killer: Adam Lanza shot his mother in her bed before gunning down 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook elementary school on Friday
Mother: Fifty-two-year-old Nancy Lanza, pictured, was preparing for the collapse of the world economy by stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her son
Adam Lanza, 20, had lived his whole
life at the $1.4million home in Newtown where he killed his mother while
she lay in bed in her pajamas.
Nancy Lanza was described
as a ‘gun enthusiast’ who taught her son Adam, who had autism-related
Asperger’s Syndrome, how to shoot.
The
four weapons, including a Glock 10-mm handgun, a Sig Sauer 9-mm handgun
and a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, used in the mass shooting at the
elementary school all belonged to Nancy Lanza.
Friends of the mother-of-two told the Today show on Monday that she was not a ‘survivalist’ despite earlier reports that she had been stockpiling food because she thought the world economy was on the verge of collapse.
John
Bergquist said: ‘Shooting was one of her hobbies. It wasn’t her main
hobby. She loved the arts, culture. She loved the finer things in life.
She loved to go to Red Sox games, and that’s the Nancy I knew.’
Another friend Ellen Adriani said Nancy was devoted to her two sons and took care of all Adam’s needs.
Her other son, 24-year-old Ryan works for Ernst Young in Manhattan and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Nancy was believed to have been
planning a new life with her 20-year-old son Adam as he made plans to go to
college. She had been thinking about going wherever he decided to study engineering –
Seattle or one of the Carolinas – and live nearby, according to the New York Post.
Russ Hanoman told the Post: ‘They had recently gone to many different colleges looking for the right program for Adam, and the right living situation.’
The divorce papers of Nancy and Peter Lanza today revealed that Mrs Lanza was given the ‘final decision’ when it came to Adam’s best interests.
The couple ended their marriage in 2009 however the legal documents offer no hints of an acrimonious split and make no mention of any lingering mental health or medical issues for their son, then aged 17.
Nancy and Peter Lanza had joint legal custody of Adam but he lived with his mother. Under the terms of the divorce, Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, received $289,800 in alimony this year.
There is no evidence of bitterness in the court file, no exchange of accusations or drawn out custody disputes.
Murdered in her own bed: Adam Lanza brutally shot his mother in the face before taking her car and driving to an elementary school in Newtown to go on a shooting rampage
The couple married in June 1981 in Kingston, New Hampshire. The divorce file said the marriage ‘has broken down irretrievably and there is no possibility of getting back together’.
As part of the divorce, Nancy Lanza was ordered to attend a parenting education program. The provider, Family Centers Inc., certified that she completed the program on June 3 and June 10, 2009.
The document says only that Lanza ‘satisfactorily completed the program’.
Adam Lanza’s father had divorced Nancy because of
‘irreconcilable differences,’ and now lives in Stamford, Connecticut
with his new wife Shelley.
A reporter for the Stamford Advocate broke the news to
him that his son had allegedly shot and killed 26 people, including his
ex-wife.
Shock: Peter Lanza, 52, lives with his new wife Shelley in Stamford, Connecticut. He divorced Adam’s mother in 2009 citing ‘irreconcilable differences’
Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting 26 people including 20 children
He works as the vice president of taxes for GE Energy Financial
Services, and lives on a sprawling street of
multimillion-dollar homes. The couple apparently married in 2011.
In an interview the killer’s aunt said Nancy Lanza was ‘self-reliant’ and indicated she was a ‘prepper’, or a person who prepares for Doomsday by learning essential survival skills – like how to shoot a gun.
Speaking
from her home near Chicago, Marsha Lanza, 57, said: ‘She was
stockpiling food. We talked about prepping a lot. She was getting ready
for the economic collapse. I think she had the guns for self-defense because she lived alone.’
She added that Nancy was ‘meticulous’ and would ‘never leave the guns out’. Her friends today reiterated that she was a responsible woman and would have kept the guns under lock and key.
Nancy Lanza had taken Adam to a shooting range and taught him how to use a firearm. She had legally purchased five firearms, all registered in Connecticut, according to police records.
Killer: Adam Lanza is believed to have spent hours playing Call of Duty before carrying out the massacre at Sandy Hook
‘She said she would often go target shooting with her kids,’ Dan Holmes, owner of the landscaping firm Holmes Fine Gardens said.
He recalled that she once showed him a ‘high-end rifle’ that she had purchased.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, it was widely reported that Nancy Lanza was a kindergarten teacher at the elementary school.
But Newtown Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson said Saturday that she had ‘never met’ Miss Lanza and that she was not in the school database as a staff member.
Some reports alleged that Nancy had
retired from working as an educator many years ago to take care of her
son, Adam, who allegedly had behavioral and personality issues.
Nancy and Adam lived in a well-to-do part of Newtown, a
prosperous community of 27,000 people about 60 miles northeast of New
York City.
A man several houses down, who said he was friends with the couple,
declined to give his name, saying only that they are ‘great people’ and
‘my heart bleeds for them’.
Holmes said he had just last week decorated Nancy Lanza’s yard with Christmas garlands and lights.
She was ‘very nice, very pleasant and always very appreciative of our work,’ Holmes said.
Jim Leff, a musician who knew Nancy through a local bar and music spot that she frequented, called her a ‘lovely person.’
Connecticut shooting
Nancy Lanza’s home in Newtown, Connecticut, was raided after 2 pm on Friday and she was found shot dead from an apparent gunshot wound to the face
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VIDEO: Police statement on behalf of Nancy Lanza’s family…
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But he said he never became close friends with her because she was ‘high-strung.’
‘What held me back was my impression that she was a little high-strung,’ Leff wrote on his blog. ‘But now that I’ve been filled in by friends about how difficult her troubled son (the shooter) was making things for her, I understand that it wasn’t that Nancy was overwrought about the trivialities of everyday life, but that she was handling a very difficult situation with uncommon grace.’
Former classmates of Adam Lanza recall him as a shy and extremely intelligent student.
In Newtown High School, he dressed more formally than other students and
carried a black briefcase to his classes, which stuck out to some as
most other students wore backpacks.
Classmate Tim Arnone, 20, who graduated with Lanza in 2010, told Reuters that the boy was ‘driven hard’ to succeed academically by his parents,
particularly his mother. ‘She pushed him really hard to be smarter and
work harder in school,’ Arnone said.
NBC Connecticut also reported that Adam Lanza tried to buy a rifle at a Dick’s Sporting Goods in Danbury, Connecticut, on Tuesday but was rebuffed because the state has a waiting period for gun sales.
Traumatized students were seen being led out of the school crying and holding hands
Quoting
a ‘family insider,’ the New York Daily News reported that Adam was a
‘deeply disturbed kid’ who ‘certainly had major issues’ and was ‘subject
to outbursts.’
A former classmate said Adam has been ‘a weird kid since we were five years old.’ Tim Dalton wrote on Twitter: ‘As horrible as this was, I can’t say I am surprised…. Burn in hell, Adam.’
Catherine Urso, who was attending a
vigil on Friday evening in Newtown said her college-age son knew the killer
and remembered him for his alternative style.
‘He just said he was very thin, very remote and was one of the goths,’ she said.
Adam
Lanza belonged to a technology club at Newtown High School that held
‘LAN parties’ – short for local area network – in which students would
gather at a member’s home, hook up their computers into a small network
and play games. Gloria Milas, whose son Joshua was in the club with Lanza, hosted one of the parties once.
She
recalled a school meeting in 2008 organized by the gunman’s mother to
try to save the job of the club’s adviser. At the meeting, Milas said,
Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan said a few words in support of the adviser,
who he said had taken his brother under his wing.
‘My brother has always been a nerd,’ Ryan Lanza said then, according to Milas. ‘He still wears a pocket protector.’
Joshua
Milas, who graduated from Newtown High School in 2009, said Adam Lanza
was generally a happy person but that he hadn’t seen him in a few years.
‘We would hang out, and he was a good
kid. He was smart,’ Joshua Milas told the AP. ‘He was probably one of
the smartest kids I know. He was probably a genius.’
He
graduated high school in 2010, but was not pictured in the school
yearbook. Rather, a block reading ‘camera shy’ is the entire imprint he
left.
A neighbor in
Newtown, Rhonda Cullens, said she knew Nancy Lanza from monthly
get-togethers the neighborhood women had a few years back for games of
bunco, a dice game.
‘She was
a very nice lady,’ Ms Cullens said. ‘She was just like all the
rest of us in the neighborhood, just a regular person.’
Ms
Cullens recalled that Mrs Lanza liked to garden and to make her house
look nice for the holidays. Lanza joked, though, that no one noticed
because the house was out of view, up a hill, she said.
Sandeep
Kapur, who lives two doors down from the Lanza family in Newtown, said
he did not know them and was unaware of any disturbances at the Lanza
house in the three years that he and his family have been in the
neighborhood.
He described
the area as a subdivision of well-tended, 15-year-old homes on lots of
an acre or more, where many people work at companies like General
Electric, Pepsi and IBM. Some are doctors, and his next-door neighbor is
a bank CEO, said Kapur, a project manager at an information technology
firm.
‘The neighborhood’s
great. We have young kids, and they have lots of friends,’ he said. ‘If
you drive past this neighborhood, it gives you a really warm feeling.’
The
shooting is the latest in a series of high-profile gun crimes in
American schools and colleges, that is especially shocking given the
age of the students involved.
Mayor Bloomberg said Friday that immediate action must be taken over gun laws in the U.S.
He
said: ‘We heard after Columbine that it was too soon to talk about gun
laws. We heard it after Virginia Tech. After Tucson and Aurora and Oak
Creek. And now we are hearing it again.
‘For
every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many
of them were five-year olds. President Obama rightly sent his heartfelt
condolences to the families in Newtown.
‘But
the country needs him to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem.
Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate
action.’
SECURITY MEASURES CAN’T PREVENT ANOTHER U.S. SCHOOL SHOOTING
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American public schools use a variety of security measures
to protect students and staff.
Almost 94 per cent of U.S. elementary schools lock their
doors during the school day to restrict access to campuses.
Some 84 per cent of high schools, 73 per cent of middle
schools, and 51 per cent of elementary schools use security cameras to monitor
their schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Increasing numbers of security guards are in place at U.S.
public schools as a result of gun crime with metal detectors also in use across
the country.
Yet despite security measures school shootings in America
are still common place.
On February 10 2012 a 14-year-old from New Hampshire called
Hunter Mack shot himself in the face at Walpole Elementary School cafeteria.
Two weeks later student T.J. Lane, 17, allegedly opened fire
at Chardon High School, Ohio, killing two and injuring three.
Seven were killed and 10 injured at a shooting at Oikos
University, in Oakland, California on 2 April. One L. Goh, 43, a Korean
national surrendered to police.
Police arrested 15-year-old Robert Gladden and charged him
as an adult after a student opened fire on the first day of school, at Perry
Hall High School, Baltimore, in August. The 15-year-old allegedly opened fire
before being rushed by teachers.
Teachers again stopped a shooter on September 7 when a
14-year-old was tackled to the floor after shooting at the ceiling at Normal
Community High School, Illinois.
On September 26 eight grader Cade Poulos killed himself at
Stillwater Junior High School in Oklahoma.
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