By Gary Stoller, USA TODAY

NEWTOWN, Conn. - The gunman in the mass murder at an elementary school here last week apparently attended the school in 2002.

Despite denials from relatives who said Adam Lanza never attended Sandy Hook Elementary School, Lanza apparently attended the school in fifth grade in fall 2002.

Lanza, 20, killed 20 children and six adults and wounded two others at the school Friday morning. Earlier, he had fatally shot his mother at their home.

The signatures of Lanza and his fifth-grade classmates are on a Sandy Hook Elementary T-shirt made by the school and given to each student. Lanza and other fifth graders attended the school in fall 2002 before moving in January 2003 to a newly built Reed Intermediate School for fifth- and sixth-graders.

The Sandy Hook School T-shirt says "2003," but Lanza and his classmates actually left Sandy Hook at the end of 2002.

Lanza was home-schooled for some of his early years.

Fifth-grade classmate Dan Lynch, now a junior at the University of Connecticut, remembers Lanza at Sandy Hook school.

"I was in class with him in fifth grade, and he was extremely introverted," Lynch says. "He was really skittish, always anxious and nervous."

Lynch says he remembers watching a sex-education movie, and Lanza saying he was about to throw up and needed to leave the room.

Lynch says Lanza was "a nice kid when he did talk to you," and "not a bad person."

Lanza "kept to himself, and everyone left him alone," Lynch says. "I can never recall him getting bullied."

USA TODAY