Mass shootings Police were told of Adam Lanza’s plan to carry out school mass shooting -- 4 years before he did

Published 26 October 2017

In 2008, four years before Adam Lanza went on a shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the local police were told that he planned to carry out a massacre. The local police at the time, and legal experts since, say it is unclear what officials could have done to stop the attack at the point they were alerted to Lanza violent musings. All firearms in the Lanza home had been legally purchased by Nancy Lanza, whom Lanza shot and killed in her bed the morning of 14 December before going to the school and fatally shooting twenty children and six staff members. In response to a FOIA request, the FBI release a batch of heavily redacted documents – 1,500 pages in all – which also show Lanza’s interest in pedophilia, and his obsession with mass shooting.

Adam Lanza (inset) and Sandy Hook Elementary School // Source: yahoo.com

Four years before Adam Lanza killed twenty children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the local police were told that he planned to carry out a massacre.

The revelations appear in a heavily redacted batch of documents the FBI released earlier this week.

The New York Times reports that roughly 1,500 pages of documents show that in 2008, a man told the Newtown police that he had heard Lanza say he planned to kill students at Sandy Hook, and that he would kill his mother first.

The police told the man that “Lanza’s mother owned the guns and that there was nothing NPD could do about it,” according to an FBI file.

Lanza was already on the radar of the Newtown police when he committed the killing. In an interview conducted two days after the shooting, Lanza’s neighbors told the FBI that Nancy Lanza once told them that her son had hacked into a government computer when he was a high school freshman. USA Today reports that Lanza’s mother told the neighbors that agents from the FBI and CIA came to their house after the hack, and that she had to convince them her son was simply a bright “nerd” — that he was “challenging himself to see if he could hack into a government system.”

“The authorities told Nancy that if her son was that smart he could have a job with them one day,” the FBI document reads, according to CNN. The run-in occurred four years before the Sandy Hook massacre, when Lanza was 16.

The AP reports that the FBI files also show that Lanza expressed ideas supporting pedophilia. One released document says that a woman who communicated with Lanza online told the FBI he had once said sexual relationships between children and adults could be “possibly beneficial to both parties.” She also told the FBI that Lanza said he felt “pity for children” who he believed were “brainwashed” by adults.

A 48-page report released in 2013 by the state’s attorney in Danbury, Conn., Stephen J. Sedensky III, stated that Mr. Lanza had “materials regarding the topic of pedophilia and advocating for the rights for pedophiles.” The report noted, however, that the materials were not child pornography.

Additionally, the woman told the FBI that Lanza admitted to her he was fascinated by mass shootings and killings. CNN reports that the released documents show he used screen names referring to infamous school shooters, and “devoted almost all of his Internet activity to researching and discussing” mass murders.

According to one FBI document, “Lanza was working on a list, or spreadsheet, meticulously documenting the details of hundreds of spree killings and mass murders.”

The FBI report states that in November 2012, Lanza’s mother “was concerned about him and said that he hadn’t gone anywhere in three months and would only communicate with her by email, though they were living in the same house.” But she never expressed fear that her son posed a threat.

The FBI documents, which were released after a Freedom of Information Act requests were filed, offer a glimpse into the psyche of Lanza – but also help refute a persistent conspiracy theory, advanced by alt-right radio talk show personalities, that there was never any massacre at Sandy Hook, and that the whole incident was staged by the Obama administration in order to advance the cause of tighter gun safety regulations.