Family Friend: Lanza May Have 'Snapped' Over Mom Wanting Him to Get Out More

A friend of Adam Lanza’s mother said after the mother of the Sandy Hook Elementary School murderer pushed “her loner son to leave the Newtown home that provided his refuge from reality,” Adam “rejected the idea and stopped speaking to his mother” in the days before the shooting. 

She postulated this tension may have caused Adam to snap, leading to the massacre of 20 children and six adults last Friday.

Nancy Lanza’s friend told the New York Daily News that though Nancy had not set a “hard deadline” for Adam to move out of the home and get a job or enroll in college, “that was the source of any stress between the two.”

“I’m not sure that’s the reason he snapped, but it’s my best guess,” the friend said, noting that Adam would “act like a child when he got mad” and “start yelling and stuff like that.” She said Adam “would never hit” his mother. 

In the two days leading up to the massacre, Nancy Lanza took a two-day mini-vacation to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, leaving Adam home alone in the $1.6 million home. 

“He sat in his room playing video games for hours and hours,” the friend said. “She thought the best thing was for him to get out of the house and into the world. To interact with people a little bit.”

According to the friend, “Nancy Lanza had brought her son to a psychiatrist as he became increasingly anti-social — spending endless hours in his room by himself.” She reportedly considered taking Adam to Washington to enroll him in a special school. The friend “rejected a report that Nancy was planning to have her son committed to a psychiatric facility.”

The friend said when Nancy Lanza suggested moving away, Adam “didn’t want to leave” and “didn’t understand why she wanted him to go out into the world. She told me she couldn’t reach him — and she was worried.”

The friend noted a “recent attempt to take Adam on a southern vacation ended with his refusal to accompany his mom.” Nancy Lanza believed, according to the friend, that Adam “was slipping into himself, and that it was time for him to move forward,” but Adam was not receptive to this. 

“He was pushing back against this idea,” the friend said.