New information into the mind of Adam Lanza, the Newtown massacre shooter, has been released. Nearly a year before Lanza went on a rampage through Sandy Hook Elementary School, Lanza allegedly called in on an Oregon college radio station AnarchyRadio, and rambled on about a chimp named Travis that mauled a woman’s face in 2009.
During the very strange call, Lanza, who refers to himself as Greg, can be heard speaking in a low monotone voice, comparing Travis, the monkey, to a “teenage mall shooter.” The radio show’s host John Zerzan says that he remembers the call well. “The voice was kind of odd … sort of robotic … and maybe he was trying to disguise his voice or something. I don’t know,” Zerzan said.
Below is the full excerpt from Lanza’s call:
Immediately before his attack, he had desperately been wanting his owner to drive him somewhere, and the best reason I can think of for why he would want that, looking at his entire life, is some little thing he experienced was the last straw, and he was overwhelmed by the life he had and he wanted to get out of it by changing his environment. And the best way he knew how to deal with that was by getting his owner to drive him somewhere else.
And so when his owner’s friend arrived, he knew that she was trying to coax him back into his life of domestication, and he couldn’t handle that, so he attacked her and anyone else who approached him.
And dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best.
His attacks can be parallel to the attacks, the random acts of violence, that you see on your show every week, committed by humans which the mainstream also has no explanation for. An actual human, I don’t think it would be such a stretch. He very well could be a teenage mall shooter or something like that. …
If the voice is, in fact, Lanza’s, it seems obvious that he is drawing parallels to Travis and himself. “I think the subtext of what he is saying is that violence is innate and instinctual to humans and really should not be punished because it is their natural basis. That’s the message he’s trying to get across, and the parallel to himself is obvious,” Criminologist Casey Jordan said. “He feels possessed by this need this compulsion to commit violence.”
On December 14, 2012, Lanza shot and killed his mother before driving to the Sandy Hook Elementary School and opening fire. During what is now known as the Newtown Massacre, 20 children and six teachers lost their lives, before Lanza turned the gun on himself.
Image via NDN