 Investigators have not managed to retrieve any data from a computer they took from the house where the gunman in the Newtown, Conn., school shootings lived with his mother because he had all but destroyed the hard drive, a senior law enforcement official said Monday. He began at his own house, shooting his mother, Nancy Lanza, with one of the five weapons that were registered to her there, and then moved to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where he killed 20 first graders and 6 school employees with a semiautomatic assault rifle. Lanza, who lived in his mother's Newtown, Conn. home, shot his mother in the head with a rifle early Friday, according to police. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have determined that Mr. Lanza and his mother had visited firing ranges, sometimes together, sometimes separately, according to a federal law enforcement official. The agents have been interviewing firearm dealers in Connecticut to “get a clear picture of what activities took place” before the shooting, said the official, who would not identify the shooting ranges. Officials in Monroe, less than 10 miles from Newtown, say the building could be ready for students by the end of the week, but have not yet set a date to resume classes. The women have not been identified and police did not give details on their injuries.
– A computer found at Adam Lanza's home had been smashed and the hard drive damaged with a hammer or screwdriver, and investigators now say they have been unable to recover data from it that could shed light on the motive for the Connecticut school shooting, reports the New York Times. The computer was among large amounts of evidence seized from the home Lanza shared with his mother as part of a painstaking investigation that is expected to take months, ABC reports. Experts had earlier told ComputerWorld that the recovery effort would depend on whether Lanza knew enough to break, scratch, or puncture the drive platters. "If the drive's platters aren't smashed they can put them into another drive and read them," the CEO of forensics data recovery firm Kessler International says. "But if he broke the platters, the likelihood of data recovery is slim to none." "It looked like he took steps to damage it—he smashed it," confirmed an official to the Times.