Doug Stanglin and Michael Winter

USA TODAY

Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012

The purported call by Lanza to an Oregon radio station lasted more than 7 minutes

Call was made one year before Newtown%2C Conn.%2C massacre

A year before the Sandy Hook school massacre, Adam Lanza, the shooter, apparently called in to an Oregon college radio station to talk about a chimpanzee that had gone on a rampage in Connecticut, comparing the animal to "a teenage mall shooter."

The (New York) Daily Newsobtained the audio and said in an exclusive report that the voice of the caller, who identified himself as Greg, had been identified by two old friends as that of Lanza.

The newspaper said evidence found by state police at Lanza's home after the school shooting also strongly indicates Lanza had called the radio station the year before.

The purported call by Lanza lasted more than seven minutes, his voice very soft-spoken and almost robotic.

He appeared to be obsessed with the 2009 case of a chimpanzee in Connecticut named Travis that had gone berserk and ripped the face off a friend of the chimp's owner before being shot dead by police.

The caller spoke with John Zerzan, host of Anarchy Radio on KWVA-FM, the campus radio station at the University of Oregon, in Eugene.

"His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation," Lanza said of Travis.

"I just ... don't think it would be such a stretch to say that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that."

The call was made on Dec. 11, 2011, almost exactly one year before the 20-year-old Lanza went on a shooting spree at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., killing 26 people, including 20 children.

Lanza, who had shot and killed his mother that morning, committed suicide in the school as police closed in.

Zerzan told The News that he remembers the call to his program, noting that the speaker "seemed kind of robotic ... but what he was saying made sense."

The News said Kyle Kromberg, who attended classes with Lanza at Newtown High School, recognized his taped voice instantly.

The Daily News also reported that Lanza, apparently using the name Smiggles, posted a link to his appearance on the radio show and wrote the next day that it "didn't go as horribly as anticipated."

"I wish that I hadn't spoken non-stop about Travis for so long, but I didn't want to seem crazy by randomly bringing up a chimpanzee for unknown reasons," Smiggles wrote on Shocked Beyond Belief.

"And despite my failed attempt at having a normal voice, I at least sounded less incoherent than usual," Smiggles added. "I normally speak much softer and swifter, with less articulation, less inflection and more mumbling."

Zerzan said Thursday that Lanza's call "didn't stand out at the time" and that the chimpanzee attack "didn't come to mind' as he and his co-host listened to what they considered "a very cogent analysis" of the underlying problems in contemporary American society, a longtime theme of his weekly show.

"He was pointing out the pressures in a mass society and drawing parallels" with a chimpanzee that was treated like a human, Zerzan told USA TODAY. "It was not just some raving about this or that."

He said the tragic irony is that Lanza became another notorious symbol of an increasingly violent — and disconnected — nation.

"Why is this going on almost every day? You just can't talk about it," Zerzan said. "There has to be some public dialogue, some discussion.

"We didn't used to have these freakouts where 20 people are killed, and it's stupid to blame it all on guns. We've had guns for a long time. It drives me nuts."

Zerzan points to a breakdown in community, and doesn't believe that the proliferation of social media and other digital linking has filled the gaps.

"Mass society has eradicated community," he said. "People have become unmoored; they don't have bonds.

"People are not more connected, despite the billions in ads from the IT companies," Zerzan said. "Why call it community? It's just technology. The machines are connected, not the people."