After an 11-month investigation into the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., state police said that they still aren’t sure what motivated 20-year-old Adam Lanza to open fire and kill 20 children and six school staffers. However, they did find that he had an obsession with the 1999 Columbine shootings.
The 48-page report came out on Monday and was released by state attorney Stephen J. Sedensky III of Danbury, reports The New York Times. Law enforcement officials confirmed that the full investigation into the shootings was over 2,000 pages. It goes into detail on what Lanza did in the days before the shooting on Dec. 14, 2012.
Just four days before the shooting, his mother, Nancy, took him on a trip to New Hampshire. The day before the shooting, he drove around the school, according to data from his GPS.
Dec. 14 started with Lanza suing a .22-caliber rifle to shoot his mother, a teacher, at close range and left the rifle by her bed. He then took a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle and other weapons to the school, shooting through the front entrance to get in. It took him just five minutes to shoot at the children and adults. Then, he used a pistol to shoot himself in the head.
According to the Boston Herald, the report confirmed that he “acted alone.”
NBC News notes that the report did state that Lanza blogged about mass shootings, particularly Columbine.
“He had a familiarity with and access to firearms and ammunition and an obsession with mass murders, in particular the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado,” Sedensky noted. "Investigators however, have not discovered any evidence that the shooter voiced or gave any indication to others that he intended to commit such a crime himself.”
The report notes that authorities don’t have a clear idea why Lanza did what he did and there may never be an answer. “The obvious question that remains is: 'Why did the shooter murder twenty-seven people, including twenty children? Unfortunately, that question may never be answered conclusively,” Sedensky wrote.
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