Do you remember that spine-chilling mass killing that happened in Dec 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary school? Everybody thought Ryan Lanza was responsible for it, but in reality, it was his brother, Adam Lanza’s doing.
Born in April 1992, Adam Lanza is the killer of 26 people, of which 20 were children, and the rest were staff members. He entered the elementary school with his fully loaded Glock 20SF handgun, Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle, and 22LR Savar Mark UU bolt-action rifle and began mass shooting from 1st grade students, before heading to the rest, killing 26 people unmercifully. The shooter later committed suicide, as per the sources.
Below is an in-depth detail about Ryan and Adam Lanza, including who they were, where they are from and how Adam ended up like this.
About Ryan Lanza
Born on April 10, 1988, to parents Nancy Lanza and Peter Lanza, Ryan Lanza reached 34 this year. He was just 24 when his cousin brother, Adam Lanza, committed a mass shooting in an elementary school back in 2012 while the wrongly accused gunman was on his job in New York.
Ryan used to live in Hoboken, New Jersey, and had not been in touch with his brother Adam since 2010. When the mass shooting incident happened, numerous claims and misinformation circulated on the news channels regarding Ryan Lanza as nobody knew he was innocent at that time.
Why and how was Ryan wrongly accused of the mass shooting?
Ryan Lanza is the elder brother of the actual shooter, Adam Lanza who brutally killed 26 people wearing his brother, Ryan’s ID card at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, the United States, on Dec 14, 2012.
Later, the shooter suicide by shooting himself to death with a Glock 20SF handgun in classroom 10. When authorities rushed to the killer’s dead body to check his ID card, they found his brother Ryan Lanza’s ID card, which led to the misidentification of the killer.
The New Jersey State Police and Federal Bureau of Investigation did their job and proceeded with their investigation with Ryan Lanza, asking him multiple incident-related questions. He cooperated with the officials as they told him he was not the suspect in the case.
What happened when Ryan was mistaken for his killer brother?
When people thought it was Ryan, not Adam, who was involved in the mass shooting, he took to social media to defend himself.
“F*ck you CNN it wasn’t me,” he wrote furiously while the entire world was cursing him for the crime he had not committed. “Everyone shut the f*ck up it wasn’t me.”
Unfortunately, nobody could listen to his words except for his few friends who knew it was not him.
Ryan’s Facebook friend Matt Bors never met him but knew his friend loved his comics. Since Lanza followed Bors on Facebook, he was able to see everything happening on his friend’s profile.
When Lanza was heavily posting on Facebook that he had not committed the crime, nobody could read that due to his account’s privacy. However, Bros helped Lanza by taking screenshots of his updates and posting them on Twitter to save the 24-year-old Ernst & Young employee at that time.
There was chaos all over the web. The universe was against Lanza as his friend, who was just trying to help the poor soul, got severe public backlash after he Tweeted in support of Lanza. Bros wrote in his blog,
After his blog, Bros indeed received some apologies and kind words, but nothing that softened that tragic day’s blows.
After everything was sorted out and Adam was identified as the mass shooter, Ryan Lanza opted for a low-key life. While he often catches the media’s attention, nobody currently knows how he is doing. Many even wonder if the shooter’s brother is still alive or married. Last it was 2017 when the media learned he had moved to Long Branch, New Jersey. Since then, nobody has heard anything about him.
