Lanza used a hammer or screwdriver to damage the drive, reports say

Dec 18, 2012 07:21 GMT  ·  By

Investigators trying to recover information from Adam Lanza's hard drive have come up short, reports say, as he destroyed it before heading it for Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As we reported, Lanza took his mother’s keys and guns and wound up killing 26 people and himself, in Newtown Connecticut.

Police have attempted to extract the data from Lanza's computer, in an effort to find out why the killer resorted to his desperate, gruesome gesture.

It “appeared to have been badly damaged with a hammer or screwdriver,” sources in law enforcement describe, according to The Atlantic Wire.

Investigators believe he knew what he was doing very well, and wanted to erase all browser histories, as well as records of private conversations.

“He was eliminating [investigators'] ability to figure out what websites he had gone to or who he might have been communicating with,” a source says.

Police already found out that Lanza was an avid gamer, inclined towards violent games. Even if more behavioral patterns would emerge from examining his hard drive, they most likely could not provide comprehensive information about the killer's psyche and motives.

“We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. [...] No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can't be an excuse for inaction,” president Obama said this weekend, in his statement on Sandy Hook.

Several politicians stress that the president should reinstate the ban on assault weapons, which he originally advocated in his 2008 campaign.

Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein is one of the advocates of imposing gun control regulations.

“The purpose of this bill is to get… weapons of war off the streets. […] It will ban the sale, the transfer, the importation and the possession, not retroactively, but prospectively,” she explains.