A mom can never walk away from her kid, especially a sick kid, but a dad always can. Again if roles were reversed society would parade around her head on a stake. But this dad can send a few emails and hope all is okay and we generally shrug. I think for the most part he abdicated his parental responsibilities to his ex wife because he didn't want to deal or couldn't deal. Guess what? She clearly couldn't deal either. And now a bunch of babies are dead. So yeah. I'm mad at the dad.
I agree that if the roles were reversed, the absent mother would be getting more blame than the absent father is getting now. Bullshit societal expectations of parental roles aside, though, I still think most people would put the majority of the blame on the parent who supplied the killer with the weapons, mother or father.
I agree that if the roles were reversed, the absent mother would be getting more blame than the absent father is getting now. Bullshit societal expectations of parental roles aside, though, I still think most people would put the majority of the blame on the parent who supplied the killer with the weapons, mother or father.
Oh yes. Her actions are most certainly unforgivable. Perhaps she had her own mental health issues, but nothing can excuse her choice to arm her son. FFS.
The one thing I have trouble forgiving Nancy Lanza for is the arsenal she had in the home of a clearly mentally ill child. But I just can't bring myself to judge her. We have NO idea what went on in that house, what level of manipulation went on, what her own mental state was (the whole thing about thinking she had MS is just odd).
According to him there was pushback on contact from the mother and refusal from Adam. He even talks here about the idea of just showing up at the house. He is the only one able to talk about what went down and I don't presume that his word should be taken as the truth but he has at least cooperated in the Yale examination per the OP's referenced article and made the emails available including his own presumably
Peter took Adam to visit Norwich University, which has a military program, but they concluded that Adam should take classes at Norwalk Community College, near Stamford, before attempting campus life anywhere. Adam wanted to take five classes, but Peter said it was more than he could cope with, and suggested two classes that they could work on together. Peter went to pick him up for a weekend visit, and Adam refused to go. Peter said, “Adam, we’ve got to figure out a system so I can work with you.” Adam was angry. “I hardly ever saw him pissed, but he was pissed,” Peter recalled. “And it was, like, ‘I’m taking the five classes. I’m taking them.’ ” It was September, 2010: the last time Peter saw his son.
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.” If he had, he might have discovered that Adam went regularly to a local movie house to play a game called Dance Dance Revolution, spending up to ten hours at a stretch listening to music and trying to keep up with complex dance moves on an illuminated platform. He was still doing so a month before the shootings.
I wondered how Peter had felt through this period. “Sad,” he said. “I was hurt. I never expected that I would never talk to him again. I thought it was a matter of when.” He asked, “How much do you accommodate the demands and how much do you not? Nancy tended to, as did I.” Peter added, “But I think he saw that he could control her more than he could control me.” Adam had also cut off communication with Ryan, whom he last saw two Christmases before the shootings. According to Peter, Ryan reached out several times, but Adam never responded. Peter and Shelley now suspect that Adam deliberately shut them out to hide his psychological decay. Peter said, “I didn’t understand that Adam was drifting away.”
By 2011, Nancy’s messages had grown terse. Peter attributed this to his remarriage rather than to a change in Adam’s condition. That October, a little more than a year before the shootings, she related that Adam “has been doing very well and has become quite independent over the last year. He is starting to talk about going back to school which would be nice.” But the state’s attorney’s report notes that people who worked on the property couldn’t enter the house and were warned never even to ring the doorbell.
In early 2012, Nancy said that Adam had agreed to see Peter in the spring, but nothing came of it. Nine months later, Peter protested that Adam never even acknowledged his e-mails. Nancy wrote, “I will talk to him about that but I don’t want to harass him. He has had a bad summer and actually stopped going out.” She said that his car had sat unused for so long that its battery was dead. She played down the significance of Adam’s failure to answer his father’s e-mails: “He stopped emailing me a year ago or so, but I assumed it was because he actually started talking to me more.” However, the state’s attorney’s report suggests that Nancy’s account was misleading: Adam had stopped speaking to his mother and communicated only through e-mail. “It bothers me that she was telling me he doesn’t use e-mail at the same time she was e-mailing him,” Peter told me. He thinks Nancy’s pride prevented her from asking for help. “She wanted everyone to think everything was O.K.”
Well good he did something short of nothing.
Wasn't he over 18, though? You can't force your adult children to talk to you... and it takes more than a diagnosis to be forced into treatment. The moment any one turns 18, it becomes nigh impossible to force them to get help unless they are an immediate and documented danger to themselves or others. If his mother never sought treatment, even having a dx wouldn't be much help in getting treatment.
I don't see what could have been done, unless help was forced on Adam Lanza. with all that being said, I do not have sympathy for this family. The family dropped the ball, but worse than that, seemingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored a huge problem.
Wasn't he over 18, though? You can't force your adult children to talk to you... and it takes more than a diagnosis to be forced into treatment. The moment any one turns 18, it becomes nigh impossible to force them to get help unless they are an immediate and documented danger to themselves or others. If his mother never sought treatment, even having a dx wouldn't be much help in getting treatment.
I don't see what could have been done, unless help was forced on Adam Lanza. with all that being said, I do not have sympathy for this family. The family dropped the ball, but worse than that, seemingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored a huge problem.
His eval was when he was in 9th grade so presumably under 18. that said, you can't make a 14-16 yr old actually take meds, talk to a therapist, etc. You can get the meds and give them to them, you can drive them to the appointments, etc but that's it.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
I can say from experience that there is minimal, if any, insurance coverage for treatment related to ASD. Our insurance will not cover anything for DS after age 6. Apparently he should be magically cured by then.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
I can say from experience that there is minimal, if any, insurance coverage for treatment related to ASD. Our insurance will not cover anything for DS after age 6. Apparently he should be magically cured by then.
yep, we get 30 speech and 30 OT sessions a year and that is it.
Post by jillboston on Nov 22, 2014 23:02:53 GMT -5
I think the situation was horribly difficult and awful as folks with children dealing with some of Adam's challenges can attest. But in my opinion the fucking guns added to the equation is the unforgivable portion that is attributed solely to Nancy.
I want to know more about this anorexia business and does anyone know if it's presumed Nancy had her own mental illness?
I just finished reading the full report. There is a section early on that indicates that she told people, and possibly believed, that she had MS and was going to die -- she told at least one person that she expected to die within months, back in 1999, but didn't want to cause her family "worry" or whatever, and asked that person to keep it "confidential". She apparently told some doctors and not others, some people and not others, but didn't indicate there was a family history of MS in her son's evaluations or when it was time to provide health documentation for insurance.
There's no indication that she was ever diagnosed with MS. And her autopsy showed no signs of MS. Apparently even her husband believed she had been diagnosed with MS until they showed him the lack of medical documentation.
That's so strange; MS is not a terminal disease. I wonder if she self-diagnosed and really didn't understand it, or what that was about. Some people (like my mom's cousin) do die from MS-related complications but it's not common. Our average life expectancy is only 2 years shorter than the average person's.
I've wondered about how the guns factor into this.
One possibility is that Nancy was a high functioning person with ASD herself and that the guns were her "restricted" interest. It's not an uncommon special interest for those with an Aspergers presentation. The 114 report suggested that perhaps Nancy wasn't made aware of her son's violent ideation- either she didn't know about the projects he produced or wasn't told how atypical they were. This kind of fits because often kids on spectrum have a parent who either is or has many of the same traits.
The other possibility is that she used the guns as a mutual interest to try to connect with her son. It seems as though she had previously been Adam's preferred person and that he kind of cut her off around 17 or so- spending days in his room alone. They may have been a carrot to try to engage him and get him out in the world.
There was a PBS show not long after the shooting that interviewed people who had known Nancy and Adam. Most of those who talked described her as an engaged mother and him as an odd, shy child but not aggressive. It seems like he was a kid who came unglued around puberty and the time when his older brother left for college.
Is there any evidence Nancy Lanza had mental illness of her own? With all the scrutiny of this case, I feel like that would have come out already.
I don't know if it should be considered mental illness but according to her ex SIL she was "prepping" for the world's economic collapse and that's why she was stockpiling guns
While Newtown residents say that "there are many gun enthusiasts" in the area, the origins of Nancy's interest was a bit troubling. Her former sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza, told reporters that Nancy was part of the Doomsday Preppers movement, whose members believe they need to prepare for the end of the world.
Marsha said [Nancy] had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense.
‘She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.’
Finding blame has its place. Nancy is to blame. I actually think she is more to blame than AL.
I agree. Even if she did have some sort of mental illness or other impairment, I think it took years to develop and in the meantime, she helped isolate her son, refused to accept his diagnoses or get him appropriate treatment or any treatment really AND then supplied him with guns and basically existed as his echo chamber. Could she have known he'd shoot a bunch of kindergartners? No but I can't believe she didn't think he might shoot himself if not go through with a murder suicide.
At minimum, she was living out some kind of doomsday prophecy all up in her house while her son starved and burrowed deeper and deeper into his mental illnesses.
But he couldn't force his adult child to have contact with him.
I have never read anywhere that adult Adam Lanza wanted never to have contact with his dad. Even so, what parent stops attempting a relationship with a sick child?
I have. He refused to talk/see both his brother and his father.