Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza ‘very, very angry at plans to commit him’

Adam Lanza may have snapped because he thought his mother was going to have him committed as she struggled to cope with him on her own, it was revealed today.

And he may have turned his murderous rage on the children at Sandy Hook elementary school because he thought she loved them more than him.

Nancy Lanza, 52, is said to have been at her “wits’ end” over her 20-year-old son who had Asperger’s syndrome and other unspecified mental and emotional problems.

She is understood to have begun filing the formal paperwork to enable to have her son committed, which made him “very, very angry,” friends said.

Last Friday Lanza shot his mother dead as she lay in bed with firearms she legally owned. He then took her assault rifle and two handguns and killed 20 children aged six and seven and six adults at the school in Newtown, Connecticut. He killed himself as police approached.

Mrs Lanza is understood to have been good friends with the headmistress and school psychologist — both of whom were among Lanza’s victims. She is thought to have been a volunteer at Sandy Hook.

US marine Joshua Flashman, son of a church pastor who has helped console many of the families and is familiar with the Lanzas, said she could not take care of her son on her own any more.

Mr Flashman, 25, told Fox News: “Adam Lanza believed she cared more for the children than she did for him, and the reason he probably thought this was the fact that she was petitioning for conservatorship and wanted to have him committed. Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.

“I could understand how he might perceive that — that his mom loved him less than she loved the kids, loved the school. But she did love him. He was a troubled kid and she probably just couldn’t take care of him by herself any more.” Mrs Lanza, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, was her son’s full-time carer but had told friends she needed help.

Her sister-in-law Marsha revealed she had travelled to nine cities because she wanted to downsize from their £860,000 Connecticut home and encourage Lanza to go to college, planning to move from Newtown to wherever he chose to go. She had apparently found a school in Washington she thought could help him. Police sources in Newtown confirmed that Lanza’s anger at his mother’s plans for “his future mental health treatment” was being investigated as a trigger.