“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.” Peter and Nancy were confident enough in the Asperger’s diagnosis that they didn’t look for other explanations for Adam’s behavior. In that sense, Asperger’s may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. “If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.” Still, Peter and Nancy sought professional support repeatedly, and none of the doctors they saw detected troubling violence in Adam’s disposition. According to the state’s attorney’s report, “Those mental health professionals who saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future behavior.” Peter said, “Here we are near New York, one of the best locations for mental-health care, and nobody saw this.”
When I visited Peter, he produced four binders of printouts of his e-mails with Nancy and Adam since 2007.
Nancy regularly asked Peter not to come when Adam was having a “bad day,”
Peter never worried about Adam’s breaking [motor vehicle] rules of any kind. He did feel that Adam was losing interest in him, but the estrangement didn’t strike Peter as ominous; he, too, had become alienated from his parents in late adolescence. “I had to give him space,” Peter explained. “He’ll get more mature; I’ll just keep doing what I can, staying involved.”
Nancy wanted to take him to a tutor, but, she wrote, “Even ten minutes before we should leave he was getting ready to go, but then had a meltdown and began to cry and couldn’t go. He said things like it’s pointless, and he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know.” In early 2010, when Nancy told Peter that Adam had been crying hysterically on the bathroom floor, Peter responded with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Adam needs to communicate the source of his sorrow. We have less than three months to help him before he is 18. I am convinced that when he turns 18 he will either try to enlist or just leave the house to become homeless.” Nancy replied, “I just spent 2 hours sitting outside his door, talking to him about why he is so upset. He failed every single test during that class, yet he thought he knew the material.” Later that day, she wrote, “I have the feeling when he said he would rather be homeless than to take any more tests, he really meant it.”
Adam wanted to take five classes, but Peter said it was more than he could cope with, and suggested two classes that they could work on together. Peter went to pick him up for a weekend visit, and Adam refused to go. Peter said, “Adam, we’ve got to figure out a system so I can work with you.” Adam was angry. “I hardly ever saw him pissed, but he was pissed,” Peter recalled. “And it was, like, ‘I’m taking the five classes. I’m taking them.’ ” It was September, 2010: the last time Peter saw his son.
Earlier that year, Nancy had written, “He does not want to see you. I have been trying to reason with him to no avail. I don’t know what to do.” An e-mail that Adam sent Peter to get out of another meeting sounded innocuous—“I apologize for not wanting to go today. I have not been feeling well for the last couple of days”—but Nancy’s updates painted a more fraught picture. “He is despondent and crying a lot and just can’t continue. . . . I have been trying to get him to see you and he refuses and every time I’ve brought the subject up it just makes him worse,” she wrote. Nancy surmised that Adam resented Peter’s warning about the heavy course load.
Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, [Nancy would] say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.” Peter tried to remain conciliatory, and never introduced Adam to Shelley, suspecting that it would be more than he could handle. (He did introduce her to Ryan, who had moved to New Jersey after graduating college.) He considered hiring a private investigator “to try to figure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.”
In early 2012, Nancy said that Adam had agreed to see Peter in the spring, but nothing came of it. Nine months later, Peter protested that Adam never even acknowledged his e-mails. Nancy wrote, “I will talk to him about that but I don’t want to harass him. He has had a bad summer and actually stopped going out.” She said that his car had sat unused for so long that its battery was dead. She played down the significance of Adam’s failure to answer his father’s e-mails: “He stopped emailing me a year ago or so, but I assumed it was because he actually started talking to me more.” However, the state’s attorney’s report suggests that Nancy’s account was misleading: Adam had stopped speaking to his mother and communicated only through e-mail. “It bothers me that she was telling me he doesn’t use e-mail at the same time she was e-mailing him,”
Peter’s final communication from Nancy, the month before the shootings, was about buying Adam a new computer. Peter wanted to give it to Adam personally. Nancy said she’d discuss it with Adam after Thanksgiving. “I was doing everything I could,” Peter said. “She was doing way more. I just feel sad for her.”
