Some churches in Newtown had previously commemorated the victims by ringing twenty-eight times, but a popular narrative had taken hold in which Nancy-a gun enthusiast who had taught Adam to shoot-was an accessory to the crime, rather than its victim. On the anniversary of the shootings, President Obama referred to “six dedicated school workers and twenty beautiful children” who had been killed, and the governor of Connecticut asked churches to ring their bells twenty-six times. There are twenty-six stars on the local firehouse roof. It’s twenty-six if you count only those who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School twenty-seven if you include Nancy Lanza twenty-eight if you judge Adam’s suicide a loss. Another time, he said, “You can’t get any more evil,” and added, “How much do I beat up on myself about the fact that he’s my son? A lot.”ĭepending on whom you ask, there were twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight victims in Newtown. “Any variation on what I did and how my relationship was had to be good, because no outcome could be worse,” he said. But he constantly thinks about what he could have done differently and wishes he had pushed harder to see Adam.

Peter hadn’t seen his son for two years at the time of the Sandy Hook killings, and, even with hindsight, he doesn’t think that the catastrophe could have been predicted. He is not by nature given to self-examination, and often it was Shelley who underlined the emotional ramifications of what he said. An accountant who is a vice-president for taxes at a General Electric subsidiary, he maintains a nearly fanatical insistence on facts, and nothing annoyed him more in our conversations than speculation-by me, the media, or anyone else. He is an affable man with a poise that often hides his despair. When Peter speaks, you can still hear a strong trace of rural Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, where he and his first wife-Nancy, Adam’s mother-grew up. Sometimes we played with their German shepherd. Shelley, a librarian at the University of Connecticut, usually joined us and made soup or chili or salads for lunch. We met six times, for interviews lasting as long as seven hours. Since the shootings, Peter has avoided the press, but in September, as the first anniversary of his son’s rampage approached, he contacted me to say that he was ready to tell his story. Later, he added, “You can’t mourn for the little boy he once was. He used to display them, he told me, but now he couldn’t look at Adam, and it seemed strange to put up photos of his older son, Ryan, without Adam’s. Downstairs, in Peter’s home office, I spotted a box of family photographs. There was no way to be sure it wasn’t poisoned. But he said, “I was wary about eating anything,” and he didn’t let Shelley Lanza-his second wife-eat any of the candy, either. He had not wanted to throw away anything that people sent. People sent candy, too, and when I visited Peter, last fall, he showed me a bag of year-old caramels. In Peter Lanza’s new house, on a secluded private road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is an attic room overflowing with shipping crates of what he calls “the stuff.” Since the day in December, 2012, when his son Adam killed his own mother, himself, and twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, strangers from across the world have sent thousands upon thousands of letters and other keepsakes: prayer shawls, Bibles, Teddy bears, homemade toys stories with titles such as “My First Christmas in Heaven” crosses, including one made by prison inmates. As a child, Peter says, Adam was “just a normal little weird kid.” Background photograph from AP / Western Connecticut State University family photograph courtesy Peter Lanza Adam and Peter Lanza on a hike when Adam was about ten.

Peter answer