Gunman kills 28, mostly children, in Connecticut school

December 15, 2012 - 09:13 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 28 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday, Dec 14, The New York Times reported.

Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Hundreds of terrified parents arrived as their sobbing children were led out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in a wooded corner of Newtown, Conn. By then, all of the victims had been shot and most were dead, and the gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, had committed suicide. The children killed were said to be 5 to 10 years old.

Another person, found dead in a house in the town, was also believed to have been shot by Lanza. That victim, one law enforcement official said, was Lanza’s mother, Nancy Lanza, who worked at the school. She apparently owned the guns he used.

The rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a gunman killed 32 people and then himself.

Law enforcement officials said Lanza had grown up in Newtown, and he was remembered by high school classmates as smart, introverted and nervous. They said he had gone out of his way not to attract attention when he was younger.

The gunman was chillingly accurate. A spokesman for the State Police said he left only one wounded survivor at the school. All the others hit by the barrage of bullets from the guns Lanza carried — the rifle was similar to a weapon used widely by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq — died, suggesting that they were shot at point-blank range. One law enforcement official said the shootings occurred in two classrooms in a section of the single-story Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Law enforcement officials offered no hint of what had motivated Lanza.