Peter Lanza speaks

The pictures were obviously disturbing, but he hadn't shown any violent tendencies and was in treatment.

What bothered me was that the father simply stepped away from his life completely the last 2 years and seems to have been content letting the mother figure it out. He blames her for not telling him that she wasn't even talking with Adam yet he couldn't be bothered to make even one visit to his troubled son.

 

Did the article ever say why?

How do even run that without asking that question? At worst, you say the father did not respond to that question. Heck, this thing read like a PR piece.

 

Did you actually read the piece?

Earlier that year, Nancy had written, “He does not want to see you. I have been trying to reason with him to no avail. I don’t know what to do.” An e-mail that Adam sent Peter to get out of another meeting sounded innocuous—“I apologize for not wanting to go today. I have not been feeling well for the last couple of days”—but Nancy’s updates painted a more fraught picture. “He is despondent and crying a lot and just can’t continue. . . . I have been trying to get him to see you and he refuses and every time I’ve brought the subject up it just makes him worse,” she wrote. Nancy surmised that Adam resented Peter’s warning about the heavy course load.

Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.” Peter tried to remain conciliatory, and never introduced Adam to Shelley, suspecting that it would be more than he could handle. (He did introduce her to Ryan, who had moved to New Jersey after graduating college.) He considered hiring a private investigator “to try to figure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.”

 

Have you been reading the thread?

I said I stopped reading the piece at a certain point.

 

Why would you comment on an article you haven't even read?

 

What are the grounds for a lawsuit, and is there a similar successful lawsuit you can point to that makes you think there might be one here?

 

+1

 

When you make arguments based on emotion, there's no reason to be acquainted with the facts.

 

There is no lawsuit potential here.

Reading the article, I got the feeling that the father thought his kid was weird, but figured that he would let him work things out for himself (as it appears that his parents with him). Once he got divorced and started a new life, it was easier to tell himself that because his son didn't want to see him, he shouldn't interfere.

 

I don't think we can equate the Lanza family's plight with that of the 26 families who lost kids and adult relatives at Sandy Hook. Those kids were sitting in a classroom. A psychopath busted in and killed them. That he later turned the gun on himself in no way makes their families' losses anything close to his family.

 

I'm not sure I'd say it was "anything close," but I certainly empathize with the prolonged pain of watching your little boy who used to build Lego towns in the basement devolve to the point that he committed perhaps the most heinous non-war-related mass murder in modern world history.

 

You get the sense from the article that the family was living in
denial until the son hit age 13 and they started to come around to
the idea that he had Aspergers Syndrome.

With "No Child Left Behind Laws" in place, clearly the school would have
been alerting the parents to possible issues with the kid from kindergarten on.
Teachers want to get kids with learning disabilities identified so poor performance
does not count against them in district testing.

With the disability and privacy laws in place schools are a bit hampered in how forceful
they can be in having parents get help for their kid. Clearly a lot of time
was lost.