Gunman was ready for war

Connecticut shooter had ammo to kill all 450 pupils

Names of victims hang on a U.S. flag on a makeshift memorial in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Conn., as the town mourns victims killed in a school shooting, Monday, Dec. 17, 2012. Authorities say a gunman killed his mother at their home and then opened fire inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, killing 26 people, including 20 children, before taking his own life, on Friday.

Names of victims hang on a U.S. flag on a makeshift memorial in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Conn., as the town mourns victims killed in a school shooting, Monday, Dec. 17, 2012. Authorities say a gunman killed his mother at their home and then opened fire inside the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, killing 26 people, including 20 children, before taking his own life, on Friday.

Monday, December 17, 2012

— The gunman in the Connecticut shooting rampage was carrying hundreds of rounds of especially deadly ammunition - enough to kill just about every student in Sandy Hook Elementary School if given enough time, authorities said Sunday, raising the specter that the bloodbath could have been even worse.

Hours later, President Barack Obama told mourners at a vigil that the nation is failing to keep its children safe. He pledged to seek change in memory of the 26 teachers and schoolchildren who were killed in the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

“What choice do we have?” Obama said. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?”

The gunman, Adam Lanza, shot himself in the head just as he heard police drawing near to the classroom where he was slaughtering helpless children, but he had more ammunition at the ready in the form of multiple, high capacity clips each capable of holding 30 bullets.

The disclosure Sunday sent chills throughout this picturesque New England community as families sought to comfort one another during church services and vigils devoted to impossible questions like that of a 6-year-old girl who asked her mother: “The little children, are they with the angels?”

With so much grieving left to do, many of Newtown’s 27,000 people wondered whether life could ever return to normal. And as the workweek was set to begin, parents pondered whether to send their own children back to school.

Gov. Dannel Malloy said the shooter decided to kill himself when he heard police closing in about 10 minutes into the attack.

“We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that decided to take his own life,” Malloy said on ABC’s This Week.

Police said they found hundreds of unused bullets at the school, which enrolled about 450 students in kindergarten through fourth grade.

“There was a lot of ammo, a lot of clips,” said state police Lt. Paul Vance. “Certainly a lot of lives were potentially saved.”

Some of the deadliest school shootings in the U.S. (AP)

  • Dec. 14, 2012: 20-year-old Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where he killed 20 children and six adults with a high-power rifle before taking his own life. The investigation revealed that Lanza had also killed his mother shortly before the shooting at the school.
  • April 2, 2012: A gunman killed seven people in a rampage at a California Christian university. Jongjin Kim, the Oikos University, said the suspect, One Goh, was angry because administrators refused to grant him a full tuition refund after he dropped out of the nursing program.
  • Feb. 27, 2012: Three students were killed and two wounded in a shooting spree that started in a school cafeteria in Chardon, Ohio, as students waited for buses to other schools. Police have charged T.J. Lane, who was 17 at the time, as an adult.
  • Feb. 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., fatally shooting five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
  • April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, fatally shot 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then killed himself.
  • Oct. 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, shot to death five girls at West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, then killed himself.
  • March 21, 2005: Jeffrey Weise, 16, shot and killed five schoolmates, a teacher and an unarmed guard at a high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota before taking his own life. Weise had earlier killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s companion.
  • Oct. 28, 2002: Robert Flores Jr., 41, who was flunking out of the University of Arizona nursing school, shot and killed three of his professors before killing himself.
  • March 5, 2001: Charles “Andy” Williams, 15, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.
  • April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.
  • May 21, 1998: Two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people hurt when Kip Kinkel, 17, opened fire at a high school in Springfield, Ore., after killing his parents.
  • March 24, 1998: Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, killed four girls and a teacher at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school. Ten others were wounded in the shooting.
  • Dec. 1, 1997: Three students were killed and five wounded at a high school in West Paducah, Ky. Michael Carneal, then 14, later pleaded guilty but mentally ill to murder and is serving life in prison.
  • Oct. 1, 1997: Luke Woodham, 16, of Pearl, Miss., fatally shot two students and wounded seven others after stabbing his mother to death. He was sentenced the following year to three life sentences.

The chief medical examiner said the ammunition was the type designed to break up inside a victim’s body and inflict the maximum amount of damage, tearing apart bone and tissue.

The sorrowful interfaith service was stark and spare, with a stage that held only a small table covered with a black cloth, candles and the presidential podium.

The newly re-elected president said that in the coming weeks, he would use “whatever power this office holds” to engage with law enforcement, mental-health professionals, parents and educators in an effort to prevent more tragedies like Newtown.

Obama closed his remarks by slowly reading the first names of each of the 26 victims.

“God has called them all home,” he said. “For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory.”

Obama conceded that none of his words would ease the sorrow. But he declared to the community of Newtown: “You are not alone.”

Privately, Obama told the governor that Friday was the most difficult day of his presidency.

Newtown officials couldn’t say whether Sandy Hook Elementary, where the shooter killed 20 children and six adults, would ever reopen.

“We’re just now getting ready to talk to our son about who was killed,” said Robert Licata, the father of a boy who was at the school during the shooting but escaped harm. “He’s not even there yet.”

Jim Agostine, superintendent of schools in nearby Monroe, said plans were being made for students from Sandy Hook to attend classes in his town this week.

The road ahead for Newtown was clouded with grief.

“I feel like we have to get back to normal, but I don’t know if there is normal anymore,” said Kim Camputo, mother of two children, ages 5 and 10, who attend a different school. “I’ll definitely be dropping them off and picking them up myself for a while.”

Also Sunday, a Connecticut official said the gunman’s mother was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. The killer then went to the school with guns he took from his mother, got inside by breaking a window and began blasting his way through the building.

Federal agents have concluded that Lanza visited an area shooting range, but they do not know whether he actually practiced shooting there.

Ginger Colburn, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, would not identify the range or say how recently he was there.

Malloy, the governor, offered no possible motive for the shooting, and police have found no letters or diaries that could shed light on it. And Janet Robinson, the Newtown school superintendent, said they had found no connection between Lanza’s mother and the school, in contrast to accounts from the authorities Friday that said she had worked there.

School officials were discussing how to send survivors back to class, but Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said he “would find it very difficult” for students to return to the school. But, he added: “We want to keep these kids together. They need to support each other.”

Jennifer Waters, who at 6 is the same age as many of the dead but attends another school, went to Mass at St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church with lots of questions.

“The little children, are they with the angels?” she asked her mother.

Joan Waters assured her daughter that they were, then hushed the child as services continued with boxes of tissues placed in each pew and window sill.

An overflow crowd of more than 800 people packed the church where services will be held for eight children this week. Lanza and his mother also attended the church. Spokesman Brian Wallace said the diocese has yet to be asked to provide funerals for either.

In his homily, the Rev. Jerald Doyle tried to answer the question of how parishioners could find joy in the Christmas season with so much sorrow.

“You won’t remember what I say, and it will become unimportant,” he said. “But you will really hear deep down that word that will finally and ultimately bring peace and joy. That is the word by which we live. That is the word by which we hope. That is the word by which we love.”

At a later Mass at St. Rose of Lima, the priest stopped midway through the service and told worshippers to leave, because someone had phoned in a threat. Police searched the church and the rectory but found nothing dangerous.

Amid the confusion and sorrow, stories of heroism emerged, including an account of Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, who rushed toward Lanza in an attempt to stop him. Both were killed.

There was also 27-year-old teacher Victoria Soto, whose name has been invoked as a portrait of selflessness. Investigators told relatives she was killed while shielding her first graders. She hid some students in a bathroom or closet, ensuring they were safe, a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, told ABC News.

“She put those children first. That’s all she ever talked about,” a friend, Andrea Crowell, said. “She wanted to do her best for them, to teach them something new every day.”

The rifle used was a Bushmaster .223-caliber, a civilian version of the military’s M16 and a model commonly seen at marksmanship competitions. It’s similar to the weapon used in the 2002 sniper killings in the Washington, D.C., area and in a recent shopping-mall shooting in Oregon.

Lanza tried to buy at least one gun before the shooting, said a federal law-enforcement official who asked for anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the United States under the 1994 assault-weapons ban. That law expired in 2004, and Congress, in a nod to the political clout of the gun-rights lobby, did not renew it.

Investigators have said they believe Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook many years ago,but they couldn’t explain why he went there Friday.

Authorities said Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job.

A law-enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the unfolding investigation, has said Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, a mild form of autism often characterized by social awkwardness.

People with the disorder are often highly intelligent. While they can become frustrated more easily, there is no evidence of a link between Asperger’s and violent behavior, experts say.

Information for this article was contributed by Matt Apuzzo, John Christoffersen, Michael Melia, Pat Eaton-Rob, Brian Skoloff, Allen G. Breed, Christopher Sullivan and James Martinez of The Associated Press; by Esmi E. Deprez, Freeman Klopott, Michelle Jamrisko, Laura Marcinek, Brian Chappatta, Carter Dougherty, Michael McDonald, William Selway, Phil Mattingly, Roger Runningen, Kathleen Hunter and Elise Young of Bloomberg News; and by Randy Leonard, James Barron and Michael Schwirtz of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/17/2012