The Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting: Ten Minutes of Cruelty

Just a minute after the first police patrol on that Friday morning, December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook When the gunman arrives at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, he is dead. He has committed suicide. In classroom number 10. That’s what it says later in the final report from the public prosecutor’s office for the Danbury judicial district. Before he set off for school, he fired four bullets from a rifle at close range into the head of his mother as she lay in bed. They both live in the same house on Yogananda Street in Newtown, a tranquil town with a population of 30,000.

What Adam Lanza What drove him to commit the heinous act that morning is something he won’t be able to tell later. The fact is: it takes the 20-year-old around ten minutes to get to school in his car. This is located in the middle of a wooded area. At around 9:30 a.m. he parks his black Honda Civic directly in front of it in the no-parking zone. He is dressed entirely in black – except for a light green vest with pockets. Black polo shirt, black cargo pants with black belt, black socks, black sneakers and black fingerless gloves. To protect himself from the noise and mischief that he will soon bring to the school, he has put yellow earplugs in his ears. He has an empty holster pulled over his right thigh.

Sandy Hook: Gunman shoots 20 first graders and six teachers

He carries two pistols: a Glock and a Sig Sauer. He also had a semi-automatic assault rifle, a Bushmaster, .223 caliber. Three days earlier he had tried to buy a gun at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Danbury, but without success. He didn’t want to accept the background check required in Connecticut or wait 14 days for the gun to be delivered. This period is required by law and should be School shootings impede. He leaves a shotgun and another shotgun on the passenger seat. His mother legally purchased all of the weapons and the corresponding cartridges. During a later house search, the police officers found several more firearms as well as knives, swords and spears.

Because the doors are already locked due to security measures, he shoots his way through the large window to the right of the entrance door. He walks down the hallway and starts shooting. At the same time, principal Dawn Hochsprung, school psychologist Mary Sherlach and several other employees are sitting in a conference room at the end of the hallway. You hear loud bangs. The 47-year-old director and the 56-year-old psychologist want to check and go out into the hallway. An employee follows them. He suddenly sees both women collapse in front of him. He himself is hit in the foot by a bullet. At first he lies still. Since he can’t see anyone, he crawls back into the conference room and closes the door. Two other employees who were in the hallway were also hit by the gunman – they survived with serious injuries.

Because someone activated the school’s loudspeaker system, the shots and screams echo through every room. “You could hear the hysteria,” a fourth-grade teacher later testified, “but that warned everyone.

After shooting the two women, Lanza goes into the main office, but apparently ignores the staff who are hiding there. Then he enters classrooms 8 and 10. Two first graders are currently having lessons here. He coldly shoots four teachers and 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7. As shots echo through the school, some of the staff flee outside through windows. Finally, the shooter puts the Glock to his head and pulls the trigger. It’s 9:40 a.m. there. The second largest school massacre in American history took Adam Lanza less than ten minutes.

Adam Lanza had a fascination with mass shootings

The first emergency call reached the police at 9:35 a.m. Less than four minutes later, the first police officer arrived on the scene. But by then it is already too late. The emergency services are faced with a horrific scene. In Classroom 10, a 52-year-old teacher lies halfway over a child. Of the five children lying lifeless on the floor, only one is still alive. He dies a short time later in a hospital. The second teacher lies dead next to a bunch of keys. Nine children ran out of the room and survived the massacre. Two children cowered in fear in the classroom toilet.

The question of why preoccupied the investigating authorities in the weeks and months that followed. And even if the majority of those around him who were later interviewed had no explanation for his actions, an evaluation of his digital media provided a clearer picture. Lanza appears to have been fascinated by mass shootings. He listed mass murders in a table and wrote down information about them. He seemed particularly interested in the Columbine High School shooting in April 1999. Investigators also found many first-person shooter video games in his room, where the windows were covered with black garbage bags. He apparently destroyed a computer hard drive so badly before the rampage that it was no longer possible to restore the data on it. On other storage media, investigators found images of him holding a gun to his head. Also many materials on the subject of firearms, videos of suicides with firearms and documents about weapons and magazine capacity.

Adam Lanza also visited Sandy Hook as a child

As a child, Lanza attended Sandy Hook Elementary School. He hardly has any friends. After his parents divorced in 2001, he and his brother, who was four years older, stayed with their mother. He meets his father regularly until he turns 18. The two of them saw each other for the last time in 2010 after the relationship had increasingly deteriorated. Since then he has stopped responding to his father’s emails and letters. He rarely uses his cell phone anyway. Although his mother doesn’t go to work and cleans and cooks for him, she is not allowed into his room. They mainly communicate with each other via email. He hates Christmas, birthdays and holidays. He doesn’t even allow his mother to put up a Christmas tree. She is also said to have given away a cat because of him. To do this, she attends safety courses with him at the National Rifle Association (NRA). Since she grew up with guns herself and has a pistol license, she wants her son to also learn to use them responsibly. But he never gets a firearms license.

Although Lanza is considered intelligent, he has significant psychological problems. At school he is initially a sociable playmate, but as the years go by he becomes more and more isolated. Since he eventually becomes overwhelmed by the noise and the higher demands, he is being taught at home more and more often. Even in high school, he is not considered particularly communicative or social. In 2005 he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He finds physical contact unpleasant.

Investigators note in their final report: “It is clear that the shooter planned his crimes in advance and was not under extreme emotional distress for which there was a reasonable explanation or excuse.” However, his mental health issues affected his ability to “lead a normal life and interact with others – including those he should have been close to.”

After the rampage, the entire nation is in shock. President Barack Obama meets with the bereaved. However, his proposal in January 2013 to ban privately owned semi-automatic rifles and to vet all gun buyers did not find a majority in Congress. In April 2013, the Connecticut Senate passed the strictest gun laws in the United States to date. Among other things, it bans 100 makes of assault rifles and limits the maximum number of cartridges per magazine to ten. In addition, the minimum age for gun buyers will be raised from 18 to 21. The school building will be demolished and a new building will open on the same site in 2016. A year earlier, the gunman’s home was also razed to the ground.

Some victims’ families are successfully suing the gun company, which, after years of litigation, finally pays $73 million in compensation in 2022.

Today, a memorial near the new school building commemorates the victims of the rampage: a water container made of granite with the names of the victims engraved on the edge. A planter in the middle of the pool contains a young plane tree – symbolizing the young age of the victims.

See the video: Shots, tears and blood – these are the ingredients the anti-gun NGO Sandy Hook Promise uses to stage its new educational video. The dramatic clip has a clear message: Prevention is more important than school shootings in US schools.

Sources: Final report from the public prosecutor’s office, ABC News, New York Times