Only twenty-seven..?
But the authors, in investigating her medical records, found no evidence that Nancy was suffering from a terminal illness. The report suggests that Adam might have been affected by his mother's preoccupation with her own health.
The authors describe a symbiotic relationship between mother and son, with Nancy going to excessive lengths to protect him from stress, which had the damaging effect of isolating him from the outside world. She treated him as a close confidant, but "that may have been well beyond his relatively immature emotional capacities," the authors said.
Adam also played the role of counselor to his mother, part of a "dynamic of mutual dependency," the authors wrote. They cite a 2008 email from Adam to his mother as an example. After Nancy had revealed to him that she thought she had wasted her life, Adam wrote:
"You do not seem to understand that I was attempting to comfort you with what I consider to be a maxim with which to live. You unfortunately probably still do not understand what I mean. As a disclaimer: I type nothing in this that is in a tone that is condescending, vindictive, malicious, snide, malignant, or any synonym that you can think of. I mean well.
"If you believe that you wasted your life, as you seem to have insinuated, you will gain nothing from regretting it and will only depress yourself; you cannot change anything from the past. There is something I can assure you of that will always be true: It does not matter if you live for the next one year … or even 100 years, the day before you die, you will regret ever worrying about your life instead of thinking of what you want to do.
"I am glad that I was born, and I appreciate your having taken care of me."Although Nancy obviously loved her son and was dedicated to him, her "hypervigilance" and habit of micromanaging his life, coupled with her rejection of psychiatric advice for Adam and her objections to putting him on medication, might have unwittingly sabotaged opportunities for her son to get better, the report found.
The report also raises the question of what role the Lanza family's socioeconomic status in the community played in how school and health care professionals responded to Nancy Lanza's ability to care and meet Adam's needs.
Nancy Lanza lived with Adam in an affluent neighborhood in the east end of town. She did not have a job but, in 2012, according to divorce records on file at Superior Court, received $289,800 in alimony from Peter Lanza.
"Is the community more reluctant to intervene and more likely to provide deference to the parental judgment and decision-making of white, affluent parents than those caregivers who are poor or minority?" the report asked. Would Nancy Lanza's reluctance to keep him in school or maintain a treatment program "have gone under the radar if he were a child of color?"Back home, in cyberspace, Adam shared dark obsessions about mass killings with a small community of like-minded murder enthusiasts.
In an email that he sent to one of his cyber friends three days before the Dec. 14, 2012, massacre, he mentioned a half-dozen mass killings and opined that;
"the mystery to me isn't how there are massacres,
but, rather,
how there aren't 100,000 of them every year."
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