Latter-day Saint Life

"I Saw Him as a Human": Sandy Hook Mom Opens Up About Meeting with the Dad of the Man Who Killed Her Little Girl

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On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Peter Lanza changed Alissa Parker's life forever when he entered Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and fatally shot 26 people and then himself. Among those killed was Parker's 6-year-old daughter. 

"I knew that something was wrong," Parker says on Fox News, remembering waiting five hours before finding out her daughter had been killed. "For the longest time, I just kept hoping that if she was shot that she was just injured."

After Parker found out her daughter had been killed, she says it wasn't easy to work through all of the emotions she had about her daughter's killer.

But slowly, Parker says she began to humanize her daughter's killer, but it was when she met with the man's father and talked about his life before the shootings that she saw him in a different light. 

"I saw him as a human," she shares on Fox News. "I saw him as this child who was not a monster at that time."

Feeling compelled to do so, Parkers says she shared a message to Lanza's father in return. 

"I wanted to tell him that there was some good that could come out of this," she shared on Fox News. "And he held the keys to really make a difference to be able to take his medical records, take the information that he did know, and turn it over to someone who could give us helpful information to learn from what happened."

Watch Alissa Parker's full interview with Fox News below.

Lead image from Fox News

When Alissa Parker lost her daughter Emilie in the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shooting, she started a life-changing journey to answer soul-searching questions about faith, hope, and healing. As she sought for the peace and comfort that could help mend her broken heart, she learned, step by step, how to open her heart to God's Grace and will.

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