US school shooting: In Connecticut, 28 dead

Mangalore Today/ NDTV

Newtown, Dec 14: A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with pistols and a semi-automatic rifle killed 26 people - 20 of them children - in an attack on Friday in an elementary school in wooded Connecticut. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two specific classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

 

Hundreds of terrified parents, fearing the worst, descended on the school in Newtown, about 65 miles north of New York City, after news of the shootings spread. Many arrived as their sobbing children were led out, each with a hand on the shoulder of the child in front. But by that time, all the victims were shot and most were dead, as was the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, who committed suicide. The children who were killed were said to be from five to 10 years old.

 

A 28th person was found dead in a house in the town and was also believed to have been shot by Lanza. That victim, one law enforcement official said, was Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, a teacher at the school, Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a gunman killed 32 people and then himself.

Law enforcement officials said Lanza had grown up in Newtown, and he was remembered by high school classmates as smart, introverted and nervous. They said he had gone out of his way to not attract attention when he was younger. Several said they believed he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.

The gunman was chillingly accurate. A spokesman for the state police said that only one person had been injured at the school. All the others hit by the barrage of bullets died, suggesting that they were shot at point-blank range. Lanza’s rifle was similar to a weapon widely used by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One law enforcement official said the shootings occurred in two classrooms in one portion of the school. The principal was among the dead.

Law enforcement officials offered no hint of what motivated Lanza. They were trying to determine if he suffered from a personality disorder. One official said that investigators were asking why - if Lanza’s rage was directed mainly toward his mother, as appeared to be the case - he had opened fire on other people’s children.

FBI agents interviewed his brother, Ryan Lanza, in Hoboken, N.J.; his father, Peter Lanza, who was divorced from Nancy Lanza, was also expected to be questioned, one official said.