Adam Lanza, the young man who opened fire inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in December of 2012 and killed 26 people, may have called in to a radio show in 2011 to comment on the killing of a chimp who had attacked and mauled someone. A newly-surfaced recording features a monotone voice that reportedly belonged to Lanza, according to friends.
The call was made to an Oregon-based radio show called “AnarchyRadio” and is remembered by the host as “odd”.
“The voice was kind of odd … sort of robotic … and maybe he was trying to disguise his voice or something. I don’t know,” John Zerzan said.
Lanza dealt with various mental and emotional problems from childhood, according to a police report released after the shooting, and he was fascinated with the behavior of chimpanzees because of their capacity for human emotion, like empathy.
“In preschool his conduct included repetitive behaviors, temper tantrums, smelling things that were not there, excessive hand washing and eating idiosyncrasies,” prosecutors said in the report.
“Immediately before his attack, he had desperately been wanting his owner to drive him somewhere, and the best reason I can think of for why he would want that, looking at his entire life, is some little thing he experienced was the last straw, and he was overwhelmed by the life he had and he wanted to get out of it by changing his environment,” the caller, who identified himself as “Greg”, said. “And the best way he knew how to deal with that was by getting his owner to drive him somewhere else. And so when his owner’s friend arrived, he knew that she was trying to coax him back into his life of domestication, and he couldn’t handle that, so he attacked her and anyone else who approached him. And dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best. His attacks can be parallel to the attacks, the random acts of violence, that you see on your show every week, committed by humans which the mainstream also has no explanation for. An actual human, I don’t think it would be such a stretch. He very well could be a teenage mall shooter or something like that. …”
While the voice on the recording hasn’t been officially verified as belonging to Lanza, the New York Daily News says a friend of Lanza’s came forward to confirm it.
“It’s him,” said Kyle Kromberg, who shared a Latin class with Lanza. “I talked to him every day for about an hour each day from freshman to junior year, so I know his voice. He’s a very soft-spoken kid, but very articulate.”
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