Special Education: An Overlooked Factor to the Newtown Tragedy

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38. Deal with the facts. He was a very disturbed child from an early age, and in school for years.

Andrew Lapple sat next to Lanza in homeroom in their senior year at Newtown High.

Lapple described him as a skinny, reserved kid "who never really talked at all."

Lanza tried his hand at Little League baseball but wasn't very good. He was more of a "tech-geek," Lapple said.

"He was always carrying around his laptop holding onto it real tight,'' Lapple said. "He walked down the halls against the wall almost like he was afraid of people. He was definitely kind of strange but you'd never think he'd do something like this."

Rebecca Jaroszewski said she was in the same first- and third-grade classes with Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary. She said the memory that stands out most is Lanza standing alone while other children played at recess, straining himself to make his face turn red and making animal-like noises.

He did this often, Jaroszewski said. "He would seem really angry, but he wouldn't tell people why," she said.

When she heard the news about the shootings, "It clicked for me when I realized who it was," Jaroszewski said.

Another former classmate of Lanza's remembered him as quiet and shy and socially awkward.

Kateleen Foy, now an undergraduate at Hofstra University in New York, said she was in Lanza's seventh-grade class at St. Rose of Lima School in Newtown.

http://articles.courant.com/2012-12-15/news/hc-adam-lanza-newtown-shooting-1216-20121215_1_law-officers-asperger-semiautomatic-rifle