Found Interview of one of Adam's former college classmates!

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I am not sure if someone already found this interview and posted it before. This information was new to me and was quite eye opening. The first hand accounts made by Adam Lanza's former college classmate seems to suggest that Adam was not necessarily as quiet always as some information suggests. If this interview is legit it would mean many things. First off Adam Lanza asking for a cigarette is unusual since he supposedly was against using any drugs of any kind but this seems to suggest that he may have opened himself up to the idea of using some drugs later down the road. Also his behavior seemed to be getting more verbally aggressive in his later years closer to the shooting.

Everyone please let me know your thoughts of this newish information.

There are a lot of reasons that I doubt this story is anything but a fabrication (or a misremembrance at the very least) starting, as you mentioned, with the cigarette story that is so out of line with Lanza's character.

I would point you to this article where his German professor spoke about him. It seems to be much more in line with what we've heard of Lanza in the past.
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Quote :

His German professor, Renate Ludanyi, said she barely remembered him, though her records showed she gave him a “repeat” at the end of his time there — just short of failing. “I must have had some hope that he was smart and could do it again, instead of really flunking him,” she said.

She said Lanza took one test, in which he was “not outstanding,” and then failed to take the final.

“Probably he didn’t come to class very often,” she said. “He must have been a quiet kid, coming in, going out,” she said. “You get so many students, they come and go. Some speak with you, some are outstanding, some you remember for a long time. Some you barely remember when the semester’s over.”

Lanza fit into that last category, she said.

“He never talked to me. He came in, sat down and left," she said. "He was just there.”

I feel that if Adam was having outbursts that were so outrageous and he made at least one student so uncomfortable that he dropped the class because of it, then the German teacher would have known and would have some recollection of this.

And even the other student mentioned in this story, Dot Stasny, mentions nothing about these supposed outbursts when she is interviewed. She also remembered him as a quiet, seemingly normal kid.

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Quote :

He participated when called on by the teacher in his evening course on introductory German, according to Dot Stasny, who was one of about a dozen other students in the class in the spring of 2009. She said she and a classmate once invited him out to a bar but he declined, saying he was only 17.

"We attributed him being quiet to him being so much younger than the rest of us," said Stasny, 30. "I assumed he was this super smart kid who was just doing extra course work."

Stasny said she saw him later when he came in as a customer at a video game store where she was working. She said she shared a laugh with him about how difficult the German class was. She told him she failed one of the exams, and he mentioned he got a D.

"I just remember him as a nice, quiet kid," she said.

It's interesting to note that this is one course that caused Adam a lot of grief, with his mother saying that he was in tears because he could not comprehend the worksheets. Without perspective, it comes across as though Adam may not have been intellectually capable of completing the course. With this added information, that a typical college student who was at least 4 years older than him failed a test that he managed to get a D on, we might come to a different conclusion. It seems that the class really was exceptionally difficult and it was Adam's emotional incapacity to handle anything less than perfection that caused him to feel like a complete failure when in reality, he was a meticulous 17 year old who was crippled much more by his emotional immaturity than his lack of intellectual ability.

Also interesting, Adam took this class around the time that his interest in firearms and mass shootings seemed to be on the rise. I can't help but wonder if the pressure of trying his best and failing anyway was something that led to depression and hopelessness and increased his obsessive interest in mass murder. That June (in the same period of time that he registered the Wikipedia account which he used to edit mass shooting articles a couple of months later), his mother wrote in an e-mail that he was having difficulty concentrating, lethargic and on the verge of tears, all of which can indicate that his depression (and anxiety) may have been intensifying. She also said that he stated that in relation to his difficulties with school, he "has been wondering why he is ‘such a loser’ and if there is anything he can do about it," which shows that his self-image was excessively negative, given that he was actually attending advanced classes for his age and graduating high school a year earlier than his peers at the time.

Investigators believed that the fact that his mass murder spreadsheet was ranked by number of kills indicated that he was hoping to top the list. I wonder if his difficulties with school could have contributed to his mass murder aspirations, in the sense that he felt (most likely wrongly, assuming that he was eventually able to get treatment for his emotional issues) that he would never succeed in life so he came up with the idea of pulling off the "perfect" mass murder in a twisted attempt to prove that he was capable of "achievement" in some way. Mixed with his suicidal depression and the anger he later expressed toward societal standards, maybe it eventually turned into an obsessive fantasy goal for which he was willing to die.

(Or maybe I'm reading too much into this and it was just another small drop in the bucket! I wouldn't be surprised but the timing is still interesting to me. )

Thank you for your input on the interview I found sscc. I concur that I was suspicious about the interview's legitimacy considering the description of Adam given by the supposed class mate at this college was not matching with the other information we had on Adam especially during this time period after high school. Since it seems that the interviewer never seemed to verify whether or not that this person was actually ever Adam's classmate certainly brings some things into question. Adam used to be a talkative person up until middle school according to his father but after that became much more quiet and reclusive.

I certainly have no doubt that his difficulties in his German language class added to his already existing mental distress since he was a perfectionist when it came to academics and cared deeply about doing well. I myself was a big perfectionist back when I was in school and remember feeling emotionally distressed when not doing as well as I wanted. I would not think that academic difficulties on their own would have been enough to push him to do a mass shooting, but probably pushed him more into that direction as time went on.

Many many people are psychologically capable of mass violence but it takes a perfect storm of factors so to speak to make such an event occur. The first obviously is usually some form of alienation from mainstream society usually in the form of being bullied. The second is usually family problems of which Adam definitely had tensions with his father and his mother.  The third factor is of course the mental capacity to make a detailed plan. The fourth is simply having to many stressors going on in ones life at once that outweighs the given individual's ability to cope. This process typically is much faster when someone is isolated and has no meaningful close relationships with people who they can relate to.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] I agree that there must be a combination of factors that come together to create these sorts of situations. External events can be involved in pushing a person toward hopelessness, but I believe that what separates an alienated and depressed person who never harms another person from a mass murderer must be their internal reactions to those external events, shaped by their personality, ideals and philosophy on life. Adam may have been failing a class but his own perception of the situation was nearly hysterical. His mother referred to him weeping and withdrawing because he felt anxiety and hopelessness over schoolwork on a regular basis. I seem to remember that he even said at one point that he would rather be homeless than take another test. His perfectionism was extreme, which is why I believe it could have had such a negative impact on his psychological state.

Of course, you are 100% right that his academic difficulties were not the root of his obsession with mass murder or his eventual plan to carry one out himself because he became interested in the subject by 2006 at the latest. Still, the timing of the German class coincided with expectations that he should now be moving on with his life, planning for his future and preparing to become an independent adult and I believe that this failure may have significantly compounded his distress at dealing with these major life changes. It may not have been the deciding factor, but I do think it could have been one more nail in the coffin.