From the article: Novia [a teacher/administrator who worked with Adam Lanza] left the Newtown school district after 15 years of service in July 2008. He established a private-investigations company in Spring Hill, Tenn. He said he was stunned to learn after the shootings at Sandy Hook that Nancy Lanza had removed Adam from high school following the boy’s sophomore year.
“So suddenly, when she pulls him out of there, he loses all those support groups,” Novia said. “He loses the tech club team he was involved in. He loses friends that he had made to a limited degree. He loses his special ed, he loses his school psychologist, he loses the devoted school administrators.”
... Novia said he was also surprised that Nancy exposed her son to firearms.
“It’s a serious mistake, first of all,” he said. “If you have a child in the home with mental disorders, or learning disabilities, to have involved him with guns in the first place would be bad.”
Novia owns several firearms and has taught shooting classes, and he carries a concealed pistol at certain times. He said that even shooting with Adam in the controlled environment of a shooting range was a mistake for his mother, given Adam’s psychological conditions.
“For healthy people, this is a perfectly fun activity,” Novia said of activities at the range.
He said the guns and the violent video games Adam played may well have been an unhealthful combination for a troubled boy.
During a search of the Lanza home after the deadly school shootings, police found thousands of dollars worth of graphically violent video games.
And detectives working the scene of the massacre are exploring whether Adam Lanza might have been emulating the shooting range or a video-game scenario as he moved from room to room at Sandy Hook, spewing bullets, law enforcement sources have told The Courant.
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As a homeschooling mom myself now, reading that she took him away from his whole peer support system, without replacing it with something else, makes my eyes cross. EVERYONE needs friends, or at least people that they hang out with (if, like Adam, your definition of “friend” is going to be different from most people’s). That plus his innate issues plus guns plus lots and lots of violent videos ... oy. Sigh. Well, at least she doesn’t have to live on with the knowledge of her own mistakes.
maybe everyone “needs friends” but everyone doesn’t have friends and it is devastatingly frustrating and lonely to be the sinlge parent of a kid who cannot make friends and probably never will have friends
as parent of an aspie with SID (and a homeschooler for probably many of the same reasons as Nancy Lanza) this story just hit me in the gut