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elementary school, where she tried to spend as much time as possible watching over her son. The faculty enjoyed her presence, even offering her a volunteer job.
    “We had Field Day at the school on Tuesday . . . I was in charge of the Tug-of-War . . . the kids showed up in groups of 40!!! At the end of the day, the gym teacher came over and offered me a job! She said that I was a natural for organizing large groups of children. Too funny!!! Naturally, I declined . . . but I was flattered,” she wrote to a friend.
    Spring in the Lanza household also meant birthdays for Ryan and Adam. Nancy planned a total of seven parties for her two sons in an effort to use the occasion to help her children better acclimate.“Ryan and Adam’s birthdays are coming up,” Nancy wrote to a friend on March 31, 1999. “It is making for a very busy month! Ryan is having an ‘Old Friend’ party and a ‘New Friend’ party . . . Adam is having only a ‘New Friend’ party . . . but he has 26 new friends!!! They will both have a family party and a school party.”
    While outwardly brimming with confidence, privately Nancy had already begun voicing concerns to friends that Adam’s condition might be more serious than she had previously suspected. During Adam’s sixth birthday party at Danbury Duckpin Lanes, a bowling center in nearby Danbury, Nancy confided to Wendy Wipprecht, the mother of one of Adam’s classmates who also had special needs, that she worried about her son possibly suffering from a neurobiological condition.
    “He’s getting worse, not better. He needs help,” she told friends. “He is remarkably intelligent but he struggles in so many ways.”
    The long-suspected diagnoses of Asperger’s and sensory perception disorder (SPD) came soon after. Adam displayed all of the symptoms commonly associated with avoidant SPD; he flinched at sudden movements, recoiled from touch, sought seclusion, and preferred the dark.
    The diagnoses made sense to Nancy, who for years had been struggling to identify what was wrong with her son. Adam was bright, with an uncanny ability to process information quickly, but the sound of running bathwater could drive him mad. Still, she told friends, Adam had been diagnosed with “borderline autism” and that it was “not severe.”
    In many ways, Adam seemed to prosper during his first-gradeyear at Sandy Hook Elementary. He got great grades and attended normal classes with the rest of the children, but to fellow classmates Adam came across as an odd, aloof child who could never quite fit in. Adam stood alone at recess making animal noises, straining himself until his cheeks turned red. Others described him as someone who “scared the other kids.” Another classmate remembered simply that “he always seemed so angry.”
    His second-grade teacher, Carole MacInnes, saw Adam as a quiet, intelligent child who did well academically and needed no special attention. “He was a frail little fellow and rarely spoke. There was a quiet depth to him that I couldn’t penetrate, but there were no problems,” she later recalled.
    As a third-grader, Adam tried his hand at Little League baseball where his differences soon became apparent to his teammates. He would often stand at the plate with the bat on his shoulders as the pitcher threw strike after strike across the heart of the plate. Adam rarely swung, usually striking out and slumping back to the dugout where he sat off to the side by himself.
    Nancy attended every game and practice, always keeping a close eye on her boy. To some of the other parents, her protective nature sometimes came off as extreme and overbearing. In one instance, as Adam was walking back to the dugout after striking out at the plate, another child passing by said, “Nice try.”
    Hearing the compliment, Adam looked nervous and quickly scampered to the dugout. After the game Nancy confronted the coach and demanded to know what the boy had said to her son. “She