Sandy Hook Shooter Age: How Old Is Adam Lanza?

Adam Lanza was only 20 years old when he attacked the Sandy Hook Elementary School killing 26 people on December 14, 2012.

Twenty of the victims were children aged six to seven, and six were adult members of the staff. Lanza shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home earlier that day, before heading to the school. Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head as first responders arrived at the school.

Lanza had Asperger syndrome and suffered melancholy, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder as a teenager, according to a report released by the Office of the Child Advocate in November 2014, but they “neither caused nor contributed to his deadly crimes.”

“His significant and deteriorating internalised mental health problems mixed with an abnormal fascination with violence and access to lethal weapons constituted a prescription for disaster,” the study continued.

Newtown, Connecticut, is about 60 miles from New York City. In the ten years leading up to the school shooting, violent crime had been uncommon in the town of 28,000 citizens, with only one homicide.