Peter Lanza speaks

Lengthy piece in the New Yorker this week in which Peter Lanza, the father of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, speaks publicly about the tragedy for the first time:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/17/140317fa_fact_solomon?currentPage=all

As the father of a young boy, like many of you, reading this one was an emotional beating, particularly passages like this:

(P)hotos show him looking cheerful. “Adam loved Sandy Hook school,” Peter said. “He stated, as he was growing older, how much he had liked being a little kid.” Adam’s brother, Ryan, four years older and now a tax accountant in New York, used to joke about how close Peter and Adam were. They’d spend hours playing at two Lego tables in the basement, making up stories for the little towns they built. Adam even invented his own board games. “Always thinking differently,” Peter said. “Just a normal little weird kid.”

The piece doesn't really offer the answers that we want, but will never receive. But I think it's valuable to go on this gut-wrenching journey with Peter Lanza, experiencing it with him as his son begins to change, and he and his ex-wife are left with no answers.

That's the frightening part. I don't know what they should have or could have done differently. A lot of the mistakes Nancy Lanza made are mistakes we would all make.

 

"I wish my son had never been born."

Can you imagine what it takes to say that?

 

What a sad penance, doing this interview must seem like for him.

 

I read it this morning and thought, overall, it was a pretty good read.
A couple of places did seem a bit jarring, however, in terms of the writer breaking up the story to offer his opinion. The top of page 5, for example, questioning Nancy's parenting decisions. Obviously the story is going to be a bit one-sided since Nancy is gone, and naturally there will be some resentment lingering for the dad in a case like this. But it reads to me like the writer makes some judgements on Nancy's parenting based on what her ex-husband said.

 

One line about Adam liking Ron Paul. I would have liked to have seen that expanded upon.

 

Yes, and I'm sure there is no other way to draw inferences about Nancy's parenting style based on other events or information.

Sheesh. You're trying too hard if that's your critique.

 

I stopped reading. I could not keep reading that self serving fucking shit that father was dishing out.

Adam was 13 before anyone mentioned Autism and Aspberger's? Really? And it was not the school, but an outside source? And how much is that bridge in Brooklyn?

This kid was a walking IEP at three. And the drawings are very, very, very abnormal for a child in elementary school. I have a hard time believing all the teachers he had over the years just kept calling him weird and never addressed this in an IEP or at a tri-annual.

Did this guy ever get around to saying why exactly he had not seen his kid for two years?

And Aspberger's makes it difficult for people to understand social norms and to have normal emotions.

 

I'd show this to my wife, but I don't want to hear her bitch for the next two weeks. She works at a children's hospital.

 

Oh, sure. Millions of parents collect guns and leave them all over the place with a certifiable nut job living with her.

 

Did she leave them "all over the place"?

I'd have to go back and get the detail out of it. I thought it was explained fairly well. There were not indications that he could turn violent, right? In fact, it is noted in the story that autism rarely leads to violence. He was into the military, but according to the piece - and Adam Solomon, the writer, is a psychiatrist, I believe - engaging him in an interest in that way was a common suggestion to deal with an autism case like him.

But even granting that she made some fatal mistakes at the end, they seemed to handle things as well as they could along the way. The other kid is a tax accountant. It's not like they raised a brood of nutjobs.

 

The drawings he did in elementary should have been a huge red flag for the sane.

 

There were guns in the house and he had access to them. And I only said one of the Lanza kids was a whacko.