Nancy Lanza doted on her son — and he repaid her by fatally blasting her four times in the head and killing 26 others with a gun she taught him to use.
In the weeks leading up to Adam Lanza’s rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, his mom was focused on helping the troubled but brilliant 20-year-old build a life for himself. He was mulling a move to a new town for college — and she was ready to go with him, her friends told The Post.
“She doted on that child. She loved him more than anything. Nancy’s life revolved around him,” said Russ Hanoman, who knew Nancy for seven years and had spent time with Adam.
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BETRAYED: Nancy Lanza, mother of the gunman, had “loved him more than anything,” a friend says.
Nancy, 52, was dedicated to her youngest son — described as “a near-genius” who suffered from the autism-related Asperger’s syndrome — and she had spent months going over his options for engineering schools, Hanoman said.
“They had recently gone to many different colleges looking for the right program for Adam, and the right living situation,” he said.
“He wanted to study engineering. Nancy was going to move wherever he was going to go. Not to live with him but to live near him.
“They were looking at schools in Seattle and one of the Carolinas. “It was his goal to be independent.”
Another friend, Rich Collins, said Nancy had a hard time dealing with her son’s difficulties — especially his inability to express love.
“She would get very upset that he wouldn’t let her hug him,” said Collins, who himself has a son with autism and would often commiserate with Nancy when the two would meet at a local bar.
“She was proud of the boys, but she would get upset about Adam not being affectionate,” he said.
Nancy would take Adam to a nearby shooting range to try to forge a bond with him, he said.
“This was something she could do to connect with her son, who couldn’t show emotions toward her,” Collins, 54, told The Post.
But that gun training turned deadly Friday, when Lanza shot his mother multiple times as she lay in her bed in their $1.6 million Newtown, Conn., home.
Sources said Nancy was shot in the head four times at close range, leaving her nearly unrecognizable. She was wearing her pajamas when she was slain, The Washington Post reported.
Adam — who had learned to drive only last summer — then took her black Honda to nearby Sandy Hook Elementary, where he unleashed the slaughter, opening fire in two classrooms and gunning down 20 first-graders and six educators before blowing his brains out with a single shot to the head.
Adam had attended Sandy Hook as a child, then the St. Rose of Lima Church’s Catholic school. He was later home-schooled and graduated from the local high school early, Nancy’s friends said.
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Mother devoted her life to him – then he ended it
