Olivia DeVivo remembers Adam Lanza as well as most. "You could tell that he felt uncomfortable about being put on the spot. I think that maybe he wasn’t given the right kind of attention or help. I think he went so unnoticed that people didn’t even stop to realize that maybe there’s actually something else going on here; that maybe he needs to be talking or getting some kind of mental help." She added her feeling that, "In high school, no one really takes the time to look and think, 'Why is he acting this way?'" She remembers the boy from sixth grade and even earlier who talked, as many prepubescent boys do, about aliens, and blowing things up. But, once again oddly, DeVivo said that she “wasn’t surprised” at the shooting of teachers and very young children. She said people in Newtown weren’t surprised. “They said he always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he just didn’t really connect with our high school, and didn’t really connect with our town.”
Adam Lanza didn’t appear for yearbook pictures; he wore a similiar stylized uniform every day: khakis, a shirt buttoned to the neck, pens lined in his shirt pocket. He carried a black briefcase.
Adam was dressed in military style, in combat gear, on Friday when he shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School where he had to pull and re-pull a trigger
as he hailed bullets into 20 young children and six adults. This was one of the deadliest shootings in the nation’s history. He then turned the Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle on himself, and died. Earlier that morning he had killed his mother at the home in which the two lived. (One has to wonder, as an afterthought, if the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used by the shooter may have been modified for automatic operation. One young victim, six-year-old Noah Pozner, was shot no less than 11 times during the brief assault on the first grade classrooms. Noah leaves behind a twin sister, who was sheltered in another classroom.)
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