In September of his eighth-grade year, Adam Lanza was wracked by anxiety, his mother told doctors.

So intense were the feelings that Nancy Lanza drove him to the emergency room at Danbury Hospital for an evaluation.

Lanza, then 13, was asked the standard queries by physicians: Was he suicidal? Would he hurt others? His answer to each was “no.”

The 2005 episode, detailed in medical records, suggests what some investigators, family members and friends see as a shift in his middle school years to a more perilous emotional footing for a boy diagnosed with a sensory disorder and what a family member has described as Asperger’s syndrome. Seven years later, Lanza would kill his mother and then go on a murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

The Courant obtained exclusive information from medical and school records that have for months been kept secret by agencies investigating the shootings. The documents span Lanza’s life from birth to age 18, including a September 2005 medical summary of the Danbury Hospital emergency room visit.

The information sheds more light on Lanza’s childhood and adolescence, which, up to the point of the Danbury Hospital visit, had appeared free of documented crises, including four and a half apparently stable years as a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he would return as a 20-year-old and massacre 20 first-graders and six adults, and then kill himself.

Read the full story from The Hartford Courant.

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