Emails: Newtown School Shooter's Mother Feared 'Self-Destruct' Genetic Illness
NEWTOWN, Conn. (CBSNewYork) -- New emails have surfaced from the mother of Newtown school shooter Adam Lanza, revealing her anxiety about health issues and her son's fascination with violence.
The messages from inside the Lanza home raise a huge red flag. In emails obtained by the Daily News, Nancy Lanza worried about a family health crisis.
On Monday, a shell-shocked Newtown community wasn't sure how to react.
"We're still just so hurt, you know what I mean? It's tough for us to hate anything. We're in such shock, I can't even say I hate the kid," resident Pete Muckell told CBS 2's Lou Young.
The emails reveal Nancy Lanza as a woman worried about health problems, specifically her family's genetic predisposition for early death, something she called "a time bomb."
"I am carrying the gene for this type of self-destruct," she wrote to a friend when she learned she had lesions on her brain similar to a condition that killed her grandfather.
Nancy Lanza also fired off a tirade when she heard about a school violence incident in New Hampshire.
"That kid should be expelled … [schools have] zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol, but go ahead and let a kid attack another with a weapon," she wrote.
People in Newtown were stunned by the irony from a woman who bought her disturbed son an arsenal and who reportedly confided to a friend that she found violent drawings Adam made weeks before the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, but didn't immediately confront him.
"I wish she did do more, because think of what could've been? Twenty-six lives; these angels would've been spared," resident Ingrid Bergquist said.
Others wondered if she did try to act too late and paid by becoming his first victim.
"Killing his mother says to me that they had a confrontation over something," resident Gail Lehmann said.
The only people who know for sure are dead. Their house remains empty, frozen in time, Christmas decorations still up, the door boarded shut and the horror still too fresh.
Eleven Newtown families have been invited to fly back to Washington with President Barack Obama on board Air Force One.
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