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 can’t 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 he’s my son? A lot.”

In a series of emotionally wrenching interviews with the writer Andrew Solomon, Mr. Lanza detailed his son’s medical history and increasing isolation, his ex-wife’s 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 nation’s 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 week’s 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 weren’t 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