Newtown: An American Tragedy by Matthew Lysiak Read Free Book Online

was paranoid that the other kids were bullying him but thatjust wasn’t the case, at least in this instance,” one parent recalled. “Most of the kids just ignored Adam.”
    One former teammate had a different recollection of Adam’s time in Little League, remembering him as “not a good player.”
    “Some kids picked on him, making fun of him. He’d always get put in the outfield where he wouldn’t see a lot of action. I remember one time he was hit by a pitch that knocked him over. Someone said he couldn’t feel any pain so what’s it matter anyways and everyone kind of laughed. I felt kind of bad but he didn’t even try to fit in. He ignored all of us.”
    If he struggled with sports, he appeared to persevere. On May 18, 2001, a short blurb appeared in the Newtown Bee , the town’s local weekly newspaper, after Adam’s Little League team, Taunton Press, defeated Bob Tendler Real Estate 11–4. It described Adam’s performance as “stellar in the field.”
    As he grew up, Adam seemed uninterested in forging any human relationships outside his immediate family. And even within the family home, the only person he felt truly comfortable around was his mother. He always wanted her near him but still managed to keep her at arm’s length.
    One night when Adam had a fever, Nancy slept on the floor all night outside his closed door. Periodically he would call out, “Are you there? Are you there?”
    “Yes, I’m here,” Nancy always responded.
    The older Adam became, the more his unusual behavior made him a target for the class bullies, and as he approached middle school, Nancy told friends that Sandy Hook wasn’t doing enough to stop the taunting.
    “They picked on his quietness; they knew he wouldn’t fight back,” Nancy told Marvin during a phone conversation. “The poor kid was an easy target.”
    Adam sometimes came home from the third grade with bruises on his body, another sign his mother believed he was being picked on. When questioned, Adam withdrew.
    “She once told me she was so upset that teachers weren’t protecting him against bullies that she went with him like a bodyguard,” Marvin said. “Nancy would do anything to protect her son. She spoke to the teachers and said, ‘I’m going to be sitting in the back of the school’ . . . I remember that Nancy went to his class and nothing would happen.”
    Nancy had a zero-tolerance policy toward violence of any type, not just concerning her son. While she felt at ease with a high-powered rifle aimed at a target for sport, the country girl was by nature a pacifist. After being told in March 1999 of an incident in New Hampshire involving a student attacking another with a nail, an outraged Nancy hinted at her growing frustration over Adam’s troubles.
    “I was shocked when I read about the nail incident. I agree . . . that kid [with the nail] should be expelled from school,” she wrote in an email that month. “[Schools] go on and on about their great ‘zero tolerance’ regarding drugs and alcohol . . . but go ahead and let a kid attack another with a weapon!
    “They will spend THOUSANDS of dollars on that child to keep an aide sitting with him . . . and then they say they don’t have money for one hour a week of speech therapy for a smart, quiet child with a speech impairment. I am totally disgusted with that school!” she wrote, referring to Adam.
    Adam’s need for space extended to the school bus, where he would often sit in the back, usually alone. “He didn’t sit with the other kids and didn’t seem to have any friends,” said Marsha Moskowitz, who drove Adam on the bus for three years. “He was quiet, a very shy and reserved kid,” she said, noting that Adam “did little to reach out and make friends. I never saw him try.”
    Still, despite her many grievances, overall Nancy was pleased with her son’s progress during his first few years at Sandy Hook Elementary, and everything appeared to be looking up. He sat