Evidence found in Adam Lanza's home may reveal a motive for the Connecticut elementary school massacre, police said.
State police spokesman Paul Vance declined to release details about the evidence, but said "we hope to get the full picture," the Associated Press reported.
The tragedy shocked the country, which has become accustomed to mass murders, but not with such young victims.
The young man who terrified the USA was a genius with numerous mental problems>>>
What do psychologists say about the increasingly frequent massacres in schools>>>
Police said 20-year-old Lanza killed his mother in their home Friday morning, then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he forced his way in and used her gun to commit one of the worst bloodbaths in United States history. shook the town of Newtown. Children aged five to ten attend the school.
Armed with two semi-automatic rifles, Lanza fired a hail of bullets into the hallways and classrooms.
Twenty children and six school employees lost their lives. Lanza killed himself before the police got to him.
The AP reported that a janitor ran through the corridors, warning of the attacker, and someone turned on the sound system, which may have saved many lives.
Robert Likata said that his six-year-old son was in the act when the assailant burst in and killed the teacher. "At that moment, my son grabbed a few of his friends and ran outside. He was very brave. He was waiting for his friends.”
Police said all bodies were removed from the school overnight, and the names of the victims were to be released later yesterday.
Family and friends identified principal Dawn Hochsprung, 47, and first-grade teacher Vicki Soto.
The AP writes that investigators will need two more days to examine evidence from the crime scene, where Lanza is believed to have fired as many as XNUMX rounds.
"It's going to be a slow, painful process," Vance said.
Yale-New Haven Hospital opened a crisis intervention center in a wealthy community of 27 people, about 130 km from New York City.
Citizens gathered for a service near the town of Sandy Hook, in honor of the victims.
"Evil is a choice. It does not come from God," said Rev. Mark Moore. "Evil can overcome us, but not God."
Mary Fellows, 49, said she came to the church to try to find peace while she waits to hear if she knows any of the victims.
Newtown was once the fifth safest city in the US.
"This wonderful town that we all love for its peace and beauty and great schools has become Columbine," said teacher Julie Maxwell Shull, referring to the Colorado high school where the 1999 shooting took place.
Meanwhile, police in Oklahoma arrested a high school student on suspicion of planning a massacre at his school, local newspaper "Tulsa World" reported yesterday.
Sammy Eagle Chavez
Sammy Eagle Chavez, 18, was arrested Friday at his home in Bartlesville.
Police say Chavez tried to recruit other Bartlesville High School students to help him lure other students into the school hall, where he planned to block the door and start shooting at them.
Chavez told his schoolmates that he would plant bombs near the hall door and detonate them when the police arrived. He is accused of planning an act of violence, and the bail for his release is one million dollars.
Unlike the Columbine massacre, where two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher, the attacker in Newtown was not a student, but a grown man.
US schools have spent millions of dollars on metal detectors, surveillance cameras and detailed emergency plans since Columbine in 1999, but what happened at a Connecticut elementary school could hardly have been prevented.
"The school could not have stopped the attacker without prior knowledge of his arrival," Bill Bond, a school security expert and former high school principal who has a similar case on his shift, told Reuters.
Unlike the Columbine massacre, where two students killed 12 schoolmates and one teacher, the attacker in Newtown was not a student, but an adult man.
"This is going to go down as a school shooting, but it's really the same thing that happened in Aurora," Bond said, referring to the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, cemetery that left 12 dead and 58 injured. That was a cinema, this was a school," he added.
Bond was the principal of Heath High School in Kentucky, where on December 1, 1997, a participant opened fire on morning prayer participants, killing three people.
He retired in 2000 and has since worked with other principals and students as a secondary school safety specialist for the US Association of Secondary Principals.
Bond emphasizes that there was no way to protect the participants and teachers when someone started shooting. Not even a security guard or a locked door would have stopped the killer, he added.
Kenneth Trump, director of an educational security consulting firm, emphasized that schools must "expect these lone wolves."
"As a parent, I would like to have a 100 percent guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen at my children's school, but as a professional in my line of work, I know that no one can give me that kind of guarantee of safety," Trump said.
Mother is a gun collector
Adam Lanza's life will be torn apart and reassembled in the days to come as investigators dig into the past of the 20-year-old killer, who returned to his elementary school and opened fire. Intelligent, but shy and nervous - these are the words used by former schoolmates to describe Lanza most often.
--Adam Lanza
Adam's photo is not even in his high school yearbook. Underneath his name it just said, "Camera shy."
"Adam dressed more formally than other students at Newtown High School, often wearing beige pants and shirts," 20-year-old Tim Arnon, who met Lanza in elementary school, told Reuters.
Arnon points out that his parents, and above all his mother, put pressure on Lanza to get good grades. "She really put a lot of pressure on him to study more." But his aunt, Marsha Lanza, told The Associated Press that Adam was raised by nice and caring parents who wouldn't hesitate to ask for help for their son if they felt it was necessary.
Adam Lanza's older brother, Ryan, 24, moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, after graduating from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. Ryan Lanza is assisting the police in the investigation and told the American media that he has not heard from his brother, who is believed to suffer from a personality disorder, since 2010.
Ryan Lanza
The parents divorced in 2009, but separated at least three years earlier. His father, Peter Lanza, moved to Stamford, Connecticut and remarried three years later. Dan Holmes, owner of the landscaping business, described Nancy Lanza as a big gun collector who once showed him an "expensive rifle" she had just bought.
Nancy was licensed to carry Sig Sauer and Glock pistols, models commonly used by police, and an M4 .223 Bushmaster rifle, police said. Adam is believed to have used a glock and a bushmaster M4.
"I said that he often goes with his children to shoot targets," said Holmes.
Another former schoolmate, who wished to remain anonymous, described Lanza as a smart guy but without many friends. He said he met Lanza when they both joined the Boy Scouts.
At the time, according to a Reuters source, Lanza was a big fan of Japanese culture, collecting figurines of characters from the cartoon "Pokemon" and playing the fighting video game "Dynasty Warriors" on the PlayStation.
"He was a very calm and well-mannered child. I was his only friend in elementary school."
Heroes among the victims
One of Adam Lanza's victims was a first grade teacher who threw herself in front of the attacker to protect her students. The other was a beloved high school principal.
Teacher Vicki Soto loved her job, her cousin Jim Wiltsey said. The safety of the students was one of her priorities, which is why this 27-year-old teacher lost her life trying to protect them.
"The family was informed that they tried to get the children out of the way, to hide them in a closet and protect them from harm, and in doing so put themselves between the attackers and the children," Wiltsi said.
"I am very proud to have known Vicki. Her lifelong dream was to be a teacher. It brings us peace with the fact that Viki was doing what she loved, protecting these children," he added.
"And in our eyes, she is a hero". And about Donna Hochsprung, the director of "Sandy Hook", only words of praise could be heard.
She, along with school psychologist Mary Scharlach, confronted the attacker in the hallway and tried to stop him. However, he shot them both.
A timid announcement of stricter laws
The tragedy in Connecticut has reignited the gun control debate in a country where carrying guns is part of everyday life and has a strong gun rights lobby, discouraging many politicians from taking the issue of firearms more seriously.
Americans believe they have a right to own guns, not just for sport or hunting, but for self-defense. That right is guaranteed to them by the constitution. In his radio address, Obama repeated a message from Friday about the need to put politics aside and take "significant" action to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
Obama, however, did not go beyond that and again avoided calling for stricter gun control laws, immediately facing criticism that he was speaking too cautiously and timidly.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday that the president should push the issue even though he is likely to face resistance from Republicans, who control the US House of Representatives.
Michael Bloomberg
"We have heard such statements before. What we have not seen is leadership - neither from the White House nor from Congress. That must end today," said a statement from Bloomberg, the leader of a group of mayors who fight against illegal gun ownership.
Obama largely avoided the topic of gun laws during his re-election campaign last year, and it remains to be seen whether his emotional speech will translate into action. After the shooting of Congresswoman Gabriella Giffords in 2011 in Tucson, Arizona, when 13 people were wounded and six were killed, Obama said:
"We cannot and will not be passive in the face of this kind of violence. We should be ready to change established attitudes in order to reduce the likelihood of future violence."
Nothing happened and there was not even a proposal for any change, reminds the BBC. However, since then the election has happened and Obama is now showing signs that he will pursue the issues he really believes in with more strength and confidence.
Barak Obama
Recalling some of the shooting sprees, Obama said in his address:
"As a nation, we have survived too many such tragedies in recent years."
"This weekend, Michelle and I are doing what I'm sure any parent would do – we hug our kids as tight as we can and remind them how much we love them," he said.
"Some families in Connecticut can't do that today. And they all need us. Each of us can reach out to those in need, to remind them that we are here for them, that we are praying for them."
Obama could not control his emotions during the address from the White House, when he lost his voice and wiped away tears. The political tussle in Washington between Republicans and Democrats over the so-called "fiscal cliff", tax increases and spending cuts, was interrupted by the tragedy in Connecticut.
The gun control debate is likely to center on the type of weapon found on the suspect in Connecticut, a Glock pistol and an M4 .223 Bushmaster rifle similar to the one used in mass shootings in Oregon and Colorado.
The New York Times writes that both types of weapons are popular for target shooting and self-defense, and advocates of stricter gun control specifically point to them because they can fire multiple rounds in rapid succession and can hold large cartridges.
However, Republicans believe that tightening gun control measures would be a misstep.
"I hope that doesn't happen," said House Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and former FBI agent.
“That's probably the lowest common denominator. Is it more realistic to discuss how do we detect people with mental illness who use firearms?'
With the prospect of tougher laws unlikely, some advocates say Obama should, as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did, ban the importation of automatic rifles like AKs, which have been used in massacres. The New York Times".
The newspaper adds that a more ambitious action would be the adoption of a law on more detailed background checks, which is currently not required if weapons are purchased from private sellers who do not have a license.
Gallery
See more:
Download the app and follow the news
FOLLOW US ON
