Adam Lanza’s Father, in First Public Comments, Says ‘You Can’t Get Any More Evil’
Peter Lanza had not seen his son Adam for two years before the day Adam walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and murdered 20 schoolchildren and six adults.
Since that morning, Mr. Lanza cannot go an hour without thinking about his child. And now, he says, he wishes his son had never been born.
You cant get any more evil, he said in his first public comments since the shooting. How much do I beat up on myself about the fact that hes my son? A lot.
In a series of emotionally wrenching interviews with the writer Andrew Solomon, Mr. Lanza detailed his sons medical history and increasing isolation, his ex-wifes struggle to deal with their troubled child, and his own role as the father of the person who committed one of the worst mass shootings in the nations history. Mr. Solomon, the author of the book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, recounts the interviews in an article in this weeks issue of The New Yorker magazine. . .
In preschool and at Sandy Hook, where he was a pupil till the beginning of sixth grade, he sometimes smelled things that werent there and washed his hands excessively, Mr. Solomon writes. A doctor diagnosed sensory-integration disorder, and Adam underwent speech therapy and occupational therapy in kindergarten and first grade. Teachers were told to watch for seizures.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/nyregion/adam-lanzas-father-in-first-public-comments-says-you-cant-get-any-more-evil.html?hp&_r=0
skamaria
(334 posts)It seems thinking your desperately mentally ill son was evil might be evil itself.
elleng
(135,777 posts)'evil' or not.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)When you read the whole published interview, you get a sense that both parents recognized a problem and took it to experts...multiple times.
Granted the survivors have motivation to protect themselves, but, to me, this looks more like expressed embitterment against self.