Teddy bears left at a memorial for the child victims of the Sandy Hook massacre
The massacre of 20 children and 7 adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday was one more in a long line of atrocious mass murders committed in the USA. By now, four days later, an official version of events has more or less solidified to explain the chain of events. The familiar 'lone gunman' narrative has once more stoked the hot-button issue of gun control and left the general population as clueless as ever as to why people suddenly 'go postal' and target the most vulnerable members of society.
On closer inspection, however, there is clearly more to many of these mass shootings than meets the eye. Very often the earliest reports present information that directly contradicts key foundations of the final 'official' analysis of events. Granted, confusion is natural when a story breaks, but some of the initial reports conflict so completely with the lone gunman narrative that I'm going to compile them here and then try to put this tragedy in a more objective context. In his speech at the Sandy Hook Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut on Sunday night, President Obama quoted the following biblical passage:
"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
~ 2 Corinthians 4:18
The traumatised Newtown community deserves the facts without the spin. Everyone touched by this brutal event deserves to know what really happened, so let's fix our eyes on what remains unseen...
A 20-year-old 'tech geek' named Adam Lanza is supposed to have snapped early last Friday, December 14th, shot dead his mother Nancy Lanza, loaded her car up with her guns and ammo, then driven it across town to his former school, the Sandy Hook Elementary School, shot dead 27 people in two classrooms and an adjoining hallway, then turned one of his guns on himself.
That's how most will now remember the shooting, but is that actually what happened?
All the child victims were first-graders between the ages of 6 and 7. If there's any saving grace to be found in this event, it's that it was all over within minutes. Police were reportedly on the scene "instantaneously" and by then the shooting had ended. Listed among the slain school teachers and administrative staff was the school principal, 47-year-old Dawn Hochsprung. Right here we encounter our first problem:
The Newtown Bee
December 14, 2012
Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung told The Bee that a masked man entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shots - more than she could count - that went "on and on."
© The Newtown Bee
How could the principal have survived to give this statement to local press describing what happened ...
if she was one of the first to be killed? Incidentally,
The Newtown Bee's article was taken down yesterday. Of course, a plausible explanation is that a reporter mistook another teacher for the principal.
We were initially told that two handguns - a Glock and a Sig Sauer - were found next to the body of the dead shooter, while a third weapon, a .223-caliber rifle was also recovered "in the trunk of a car" later, in the school's parking lot. All of the weapons were allegedly legally bought and registered in Nancy Lanza's name. The car was later identified as a black Honda, also registered in her name. More weapons have since been introduced to the story but we'll get back to those later on.
Besides anonymous 'law enforcement officials' telling the media that Adam Lanza was a former pupil at the school, they also said his mother was currently
a teacher there, that she was found among the dead and that her son had specifically sought out her classroom first. But when it emerged that teaching staff at the school had
never heard of a Nancy Lanza, it was suggested that she was a substitute teacher whose name therefore mightn't appear on staff lists.
But this claim too has disappeared down the memory hole because it's now known that
neither Nancy nor her son had any connection with the school whatsoever. Adam Lanza was in fact home-schooled. Nancy Lanza has since been painted as a "survivalist" who loved firearms, taught her sons how to shoot and was "stockpiling" because she was "worried about economic collapse."
Daily Mail, UK
December 16, 2012
Last night it also emerged Nancy was a member of the Doomsday Preppers movement, which believes people should prepare for end of the world.
Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home 'into a fortress'. She added: 'Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense.
'She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.'
It's not difficult to see that their efforts to insinuate that Nancy Lanza was somehow responsible for this massacre by being an irresponsible mother also serve to rile the large contingent of gun owners in the country, particularly the far right who see a conspiracy on the government's part to "take back our guns." More on that later, but for now I just want to note that all of the Lanza family members seemed to live more or less normal middle-class lives. Yes, the parents were divorced but it was
apparently amicable and both put their own needs second to those of their children (and anyway, divorce in the US these days is decidedly 'normal middle class').
Despite "
family insiders" claiming that he was a "deeply disturbed kid", Adam Lanza, like so many other alleged 'lone(r) gunmen' before him, does not fit the profile of a mass-murdering maniac. His 24-year-old brother, Ryan Lanza, said he hadn't seen his brother
since 2010. This fact brings into question Ryan's claim that his younger brother may have had his identity card on his person at the school shooting. Although perhaps the question that needs to be asked here is, why would a person bother to carry identification with them after going to the trouble of dressing up in a bullet-proof vest, mask and black camouflage gear and going on a killing spree ...
The live emergency services audio feed from the scene reveals some interesting observations from first responders that have been completely overlooked by the mainstream media. Note that the
unedited version lasts over two hours, so the
abridged version I'm going to quote from has a compressed sequence of events that are not in real time. In this abridged version, we hear at 1.38' a report that gunfire is still being heard,
even though the shooting was supposed to have ended by the time police arrived. The next report at 2.35' says that the shooting has stopped and the school is "in lockdown". At 3.23', the police relay a teacher's report that she saw
"two shadows running past the gym" [not "two shooters", as we
previously reported on SOTT.net]. This is followed by another officer on the scene who says,
"Yeh, we got 'em, they're coming at me! ... [inaudible] ...
Coming up the driveway real slowly!" That same officer at 5.40' says he has them
"proned out", which presumably means he has apprehended them and they are laid out on the ground, before another officer comes on to say,
"be aware that we do have a second [inaudible] ..."
Later on, at 19.10', an officer who sounds out of breath, like he's just given chase, reports what I think sounds like "these guys" followed certainly by
"multiple weapons, including long rifles and shotgun". If these were found so early on, why were they not included in the initial press reports which stated that three firearms had been found - the above mentioned Glock, Sig Sauer and Bushmaster AR-15 rifle? Further conflicting, and possibly planted evidence was thrown into the mix by 'law enforcement officials' when they published
video footage of a long weapon being retrieved from the trunk of a car. Look closely and you'll see that it's a shotgun, not a rifle. In addition, this 'discovery' was made late in the day (it's dark outside), while the Bushmaster rifle was first reported found in the trunk of a car much earlier in the day.
Besides the above two suspects "proned out" in front of the school, another suspected gunman was apprehended after he gave chase, this time in the woods next to the school:
The police are clearly chasing someone whom they appear to apprehend in the middle of the woods next to the school, a fact confirmed by several eyewitnesses:
This fleeing suspect, wearing camouflage gear, a
bulletproof vest and armed with four guns, has since disappeared from media coverage. Who was this person and how did he know what "it" was when he protested that "I didn't do it"?
Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced
here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.
Ryan Lanza was actually at work in Hoboken, New Jersey, that morning when his name and photo began circulating in the media. And so, for most of Friday, the 'lone shooter' was erroneously reported as "Ryan Lanza, confirmed dead." At the same time, we were being told that Ryan's girlfriend and a room-mate were reported missing, also from Hoboken, New Jersey.
So this isn't just a case of mistaken identity, as later claimed when it was suggested that Adam had a piece of identification belonging to his brother on his person. Not one, but BOTH Lanza brothers were being placed by 'law enforcement officials'
at the scene of the shooting. It could be that Ryan's quick reflexes to leave his workplace to get on a bus to go back to his apartment while protesting innocence via his Facebook page may have saved his life.
Now remember, all of this confusion somehow resulted from a single guy going into a school and shooting children and teachers and then shooting himself, all within three minutes. Surely it should have been fairly easy to rapidly and concretely identify the details of such a crime and the scene.
What it's starting to look like is that the Lanzas were framed for this mass shooting in advance. Long before any suspects were named, and even as we were being told that Nancy Lanza was among the dead at the school, we were told that police were investigating a murder in ... Hoboken, New Jersey, where a body had been found at the home of ... Ryan Lanza! An older "
confirmed" version of events had RYAN, not Adam, travelling to Hoboken that morning to murder his
father before going to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. Other variants had Ryan OR Adam going to
both their divorced parents' homes and killing them before going to the school.
The narrative has now settled on the younger brother killing his mother in Newtown then going to the school. So what about the rest of it? Do we just put it down to 'keen' journalism that was having a field day last Friday as media outlets sought to bring us the latest 'breaking news'? Confusion and 'Chinese whispers' undoubtedly play a part in the early stages of national media events, but I think back to those news anchors reading scripts about Osama Bin Laden within minutes of the first plane being hit on 9/11 and I think, 'Wait a minute!' All these misleading reports had to have been issued by someone or some people "confirming" to Associated Press and other media outlets that the Ryans's father had been murdered [he wasn't even aware that the shooting at the school had taken place until journalists turned up on his doorstep], or that Ryan's girlfriend had gone missing from Hoboken, or that either Ryan or Adam were pulled out of the adjacent woods in handcuffs yelling "I DIDN'T DO IT" to assembled parents. These aren't just 'little details' that can be confused for other details, these are detailed narratives. So how, or why, would any member of the press come up with such details? They strike me as a set of alternative scenarios that might have found their way into the official narrative had facts on the ground turned out differently.
Most of the initial mainstream media reports have since been rewritten to fit 'new' facts proclaimed by 'law enforcement officials'. Here's an example from
Business Insider. The following excerpts are the opening paragraphs from the 'same' article, one
earlier original version, followed by the
later revised version:
The massacre [...] was reportedly perpetrated with a .233 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol.
The Bushmaster rifle was found in the trunk of the shooter's car. The Sig Sauer and Glock pistols were the only weapons used in the shooting, according to CBS. Now the question is what kind of magazine would allow a shooter to fire "100" rounds in such a short period.
Indeed, I was wondering the same thing. How could two pistols do so much damage? The report was updated as follows:
The massacre in Connecticut that's taken the lives of at least 26 people was reportedly perpetrated with a .223 caliber rifle, a Glock pistol and a Sig Sauer pistol, according to NBC:
The shooter was using one Sig Sauer and one Glock pistol, according to CNN. Later details emerged that the primary weapon was the Bushmaster "assault-style" rifle.
Altogether, though, it doesn't matter what type of weapon the shooter used. The bottom line is that it was likely a magazine fed, semi-automatic, with enough rounds to shoot "100 shots" in a matter of minutes, as quoted in USA Today.
What
actually happened may not matter to some, but surely a journalist's role is to at least
try to find out?
This Associated Press/Newsday article on Saturday, December 15th, reported that
"Only the rifle was used on the victims", a statement that is supported by Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut state's chief medical examiner. Of the seven autopsies he personally performed on Sandy Hook victims,
all of them had "three to 11 wounds apiece". He also said that the 'gunman' used a
military-style rifle rigged to quickly reload, and that the 'shooter' was able to reload so quickly because he had "
taped two magazines together." Even before the State Chief Medical Examiner had given these statements, it had been stated that spent shell casings from .233-caliber (rifle) bullets were
found inside the school.
So all the victims' wounds were the result of rifle-fire, specifically from "
the rifle", the one we were told in early reports was found in the trunk of a car in the parking lot! This is simply not credible.
© New York Daily News
The three guns Adam Lanza is supposed to have brought to the school with him. The rifle was left in the trunk, leaving him just the two handguns to let off "hundreds of rounds"... firing .233 caliber bullets that belonged to the rifle... which was left in the car
Remember that only "the rifle" was used on all the victims. If
only this rifle was used, and if we try to make this claim fit into the (admittedly fluid) official version of events, then the alleged lone gunman would have had to leave the school, place the rifle back in his trunk, then return inside the school and shoot himself. No one reported any such maneuver on the part of any gunman or gunmen. What we
do have, however, is live emergency services radio feed in which we hear that two men have been apprehended and are "proned out" AND live video footage supported by eyewitness testimony showing what appears to be a THIRD man being arrested by police in the woods.
We can see how the authorities' hands are tied because they need to fit all the facts into the usual 'lone gunman' narrative. For that, there can only be ONE rifle and a couple of handguns. The problem is that they have already claimed to find that solitary Bushmaster rifle in the trunk of a car in the school parking lot, so the earliest police reports of a cache of long arms being found inside the school will no longer fit with the lone gunman narrative, especially as they're now saying that he had already opened fire as he burst into the school.
Could "scrawny" 20-year-old Adam Lanza have stormed the school, solo Rambo-style, while carrying "multiple long arms, including rifles and shotguns"? Only one person was wounded. Everyone else who was shot was killed. How could Adam Lanza achieve such deadly accuracy, in such a short length of recorded time?
Similarly heavily armed men wearing black combat gear from head to toe... their job is to kill 'terrorists' to keep us safe, which they do by terrorising us all
Initial reports put the beginning of the shooting in the school administrators' office, where someone, reportedly the school principal, had a row with the gunman(men). We know this because someone supposedly turned on the school intercom system, alerting the teaching staff to the loud swearing and commotion in the principal's office and probably saving many more children from being gunned down as teachers took measures to hide the children in closets.
One brave teacher, Kaitlin Roig, bundled a bunch of children into a bathroom and locked the door. What's interesting about her testimony to ABC News is that when police arrived and asked her to open the door,
she refused, saying that "if they were really cops, they'd know where to find keys to open the door." In addition, she requested that they slide their badges under the door.
Now, this is generally a smart thing to do in
any and all interactions with the police, especially in the U.S. But to have the wherewithal to do so under such traumatic circumstances strongly suggests that Ms. Roig had logically deduced by that point that multiple perpetrators were involved, and that they were either impersonating police officers or were
indistinguishable from SWAT team police commandos, either in the way they dressed or the way they behaved upon entering the building. It also reminds us just how narrow the time window of the actual shooting was. The shooting appears to have barely ended when men knocked on that bathroom door and told Ms. Roig they were police.
