Deranged killer Adam Lanza went on a bizarre rant during a phone call to a radio station a year before the Sandy Hook school massacre in what is viewed as a warning that he was about to explode.
Using the name Greg and trying to disguise his voice, Lanza attempted to compare a "teenage mall shooter" to a chimpanzee named Travis that ripped off a woman's face in Connecticut,
New York's Daily News reports.
The audiotape was made to the University of Oregon college radio station KWVA 88.1 FM on Dec. 11, 2011. The voice was verified as Lanza's by two of his former friends, the reports says.
During a rambling seven-minute call on "Anarchy Radio" host John Zerzan's show, Lanza, then 19, appeared to show that his mind was unraveling.
Talking about the chimp, Lanza says, "His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week, committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation.
"I just ... don't think it would be such a stretch to say that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that."
Travis, who had appeared in several TV commercials, was shot dead in 2009 after he had
mauled his owner's friend Charla Nash in North Stamford, Conn., which is about an hour's drive from Newtown, where Lanza
killed 20 children and six staff members on December 14, 2012.
In the call, "'Greg" claimed that Travis "wasn't an untamed monster at all." He continued, "If Travis had been some nasty monster all his life it would have been widely reported. But, to the contrary, it seems like everyone who knew him said how shocked they were that Travis had been so savage, because they knew him as a sweet child."
Zerzan told the Daily News said that although the caller's voice was "robotic" there was no indication that he would turn out to be a demented mass killer.
"There's nothing there indicating he was considering something so heinous and inconceivable," Zerzan said."It was a year before Sandy Hook, so no one has any idea what he was thinking a year before. I don't see how anyone could have guessed that with what was said."
The day before the call, police said Lanza used the pseudonym "Smiggles" to go onto an online forum in which mass murder was being discussed and mentioned that he was planning to call into Zerzan's show and talk about the chimp attack.
"I'm really surprised that I haven't been able to find anything he's written or said about the incident, considering how often he brings up random acts of violence," Smiggles wrote about Zerzan. "It seems like Travis would be a poster-chimp of his philosophy."
The day after "Greg" called into the radio show, Smiggles posted another message on the website Shocked Beyond Belief, a fan web site for a video game based on the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
"It didn't go as horribly as I anticipated," he wrote. "I wish that I hadn't spoken nonstop about Travis for so long, but I didn't want to seem crazy by randomly bringing up a chimpanzee for unknown reasons. I at least sounded less incoherent than usual. I normally speak much softer and swifter, with less articulation, less inflection, and more mumbling."
Lanza had begun posting as Smiggles in December 2009, and in August 2011 he even praised Norwegian mass murderer
Anders Breivik for killing 77 people in the biggest mass shooting in history.
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