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found enjoyment in playing with other children. The tot often tagged along when older brother, Ryan, went to Cub Scout meetings, only to separate himself from the crowd. He refused to engage in group activities and shrank away into the arms of his mother if another child touched him.
    “It was obvious to everyone that as a child, Adam was different,” recalled Marvin LaFontaine, who often helped out at Scout meetings. “There was a weirdness about him. He wasn’t a normal child. Nancy would tell me: ‘Don’t touch Adam, he doesn’t like being touched.’ We all just thought he would grow out of it. He never did.”
    There was, however, one child his age Adam did not seem to mind. Jordan LaFontaine, Marvin’s son, was one of Adam’s only friends. Nancy and Marvin would often take the two, along with Ryan, to a fifty-yard stretch Marvin had carved out on his property where they would shoot an aluminum Ruger 10/22 at paper bull’s-eyes and other targets in the shapes of woodchucks or crows. From an early age, Adam was comfortable with a firearm.
    “Adam was four at the time he shot his first gun,” Marvin remembered. “We enjoyed target shooting. We were safe . . . Nancy and I were very strict about it . . . She was very, very detail oriented and very, very strict with her kids about safety.”
    Nancy was always “fiercely protective” of her youngest son, checking and double-checking that he was wearing his safety goggles and earplugs before allowing him near the weapon.
    The aluminum Ruger 10/22 was Adam’s first gun. It was lightweight and easy to handle and, in Nancy’s opinion, the ideal weapon for her young child. Adam’s tiny face would tense up as he concentrated while his mother would patiently go over, step-by-step, the proper hold and technique for the small firearm.
    “From the beginning you could tell that Adam liked the feel of the gun in his hands and that he was a quick learner,” Marvin said. “When Adam was focused he could really focus and in no time he became a good shot.
    “He seemed to really enjoy himself on the range—and Nancy, too. She would enjoy watching Adam as he would practice with the little rifle.”
    Nancy was a country girl through and through. She grew up on a farm with her mother, Dorothy, a school nurse at the localelementary school; her father, Donald, who worked as a pilot for TWA; her two brothers, James and Donnie; a sister, Carol; and a dozen kittens, chickens, sheep, and cows. (She painstakingly gave each one its own unique name. One particular hen was her favorite; she named it Phyllis Diller because of the big plume of feathers that came out of the top of its head.)
    Nancy had developed a love of hunting from an early age and fancied herself one of the boys. As a young teen she would go out with her brothers in the lush acres of forest surrounding her hometown and hunt game. By the age of sixteen, she could skin her own deer. Her adolescent summers were spent playing in the great outdoors all day with her brothers, often with weapons.
    “She came from a culture of guns. That’s how she was raised in New Hampshire. Live free or die, that was the kind of woman Nancy Lanza was. She was an independent kind of woman,” said Russell Ford, a friend of Nancy’s. Dan Holmes, her landscaper, remembered, “Whenever I finished work she would invite me in for a drink; she spoke often about her fascination with firearms. She had an extensive gun collection, and she was really quite proud of it.
    “One day I was over and she asked me to wait, then brought this really nice case out, and when she opened it up, she pulled out this old rifle. It looked beautiful and old. She would just smile when she looked at it.”
    Although Nancy loved to hunt and target-shoot, as a young girl she couldn’t stand to see an animal in pain. When she was a kid, she told anyone who would listen that one day she was going to be a veterinarian. Once when her kittens looked unhappy, she