NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Police in Connecticut released thousands of pages Friday from the investigation into the Newtown school shootings, providing the most detailed picture yet of the rampage, Adam Lanza’s fascination with murder and school employees’ efforts to protect the children.
Included in the file were photographs of the home the 20-year-old Lanza shared with his mother. They show rounds of ammunition, gun magazines, shot-up paper targets, gun cases, shooting earplugs and a gun safe with a rifle in it.
A former teacher of Lanza’s was quoted as telling investigators that Lanza exhibited anti-social behavior, rarely interacted with other students and obsessed in writings “about battles, destruction and war.”
“In all my years of experience, I have known [redacted] grade boys to talk about things like this, but Adam’s level of violence was disturbing,” the teacher told investigators.
The documents’ release marks the end of the investigation into the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead.
Lanza went to the school after killing his mother, Nancy, inside their home. He committed suicide with a handgun as police arrived at the school.
The documents also fill in details about how the shooting unfolded.
Teachers heard janitor Rick Thorne try to get Lanza to leave the school. One teacher, who was hiding in a closet in the math lab, heard Thorne yell, “Put the gun down!” Anaide said she heard gunfire, and Thorne told her to close her door. Thorne survived.
Teacher Kaitlin Roig told police she heard “rapid-fire shooting” outside the school, near her classroom. She rushed her pupils into the classroom’s bathroom, pulled a rolling storage unit in front of the door as a barricade and then closed and locked the door.
Eventually, police officers slid their badges under the bathroom door. Roig refused to come out and told them that if they were truly police, they should be able to get the key to the door - which they did.
The paperwork, photos and videos were heavily blacked out to protect the names of children and to withhold the more grisly details of the crime.
In a letter accompanying the files, Reuben Bradford, commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, wrote that much of the report was disturbing but showed teachers trying to protect their children, law-enforcement officials putting themselves in harm’s way and dispatchers working calmly and efficiently.
“In the midst of the darkness of that day, we also saw remarkable heroism and glimpses of grace,” he wrote.
Lanza was diagnosed in 2006 with “profound autism spectrum disorder, with rigidity, isolation and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications” while also displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, said Robert King, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center.
But King told investigators that he observed nothing in Lanza’s behavior that would have predicted he would become a mass killer.
Kathleen Koenig, a nurse at the Yale Child Study Center who met with Lanza in 2006 and 2007, said Lanza’s mother declined to give him prescribed antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication after she reported he had trouble raising his arm.
Koenig unsuccessfully tried to convince Nancy Lanza that the drug was not responsible, and the mother failed to schedule a follow-up visit after her son missed an appointment, police said.
In the documents, a friend told police Nancy Lanza reported that her son had hit his head several days before the shootings. And an ex-boyfriend told police that Nancy Lanza canceled a trip to London on the week of the shooting because of “a couple last-minute problems on the home front.”
Prosecutors issued a summary of the investigation last month that portrayed Lanza as obsessed with mass murders, but the report concluded that Lanza’s motives might never be known.
The documents indicate investigators were gentle in their questioning of children, interviewing youngsters only if they or their parents requested it.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 12/28/2013