On January 7, 2011, at 11:35 p.m., a young man with a shaved head walked into a Walgreens in Tucson, Ariz., and dropped off a roll of film.
The roll could have been pictures of the man on vacation with his family. It could have been pictures of a car he was trying to sell. But as the Walgreens employees would soon learn, the roll of film was much weirder than that.
As it was later revealed, the pictures were of the man, Jared Lee Loughner, posing with a Glock 19 gun held next to his bare buttocks. But that roll would take a few hours to process and it would be a full day before people would have a reason to care.
After dropping off the film, Loughner drove down the street to a Circle K and picked up a few things before stopping at a Motel 6 on the same street at which he was spending the night, even though he lived with his parents just a few miles away.
It was the beginning of a long night before a shocking morning culminating in the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that left six others dead, including a federal judge, and many more injured, including Giffords herself.
Before the shooting, there were so many missed opportunities to have thwarted Loughner’s mission.
After a few hours at the Motel 6, according to the Associated Press, Loughner called old friends, and ran into another old friend, Michelle Martinez, while stopping back at his parent’s house at around two in the morning. At 2:34 a.m., according to a police timeline, Loughner returned to the Walgreens and picked up his developed film,
Finally, after a stop at a Chevron gas station, he retired to his room at the Motel Six and logged into his MySpace account at 4:12 a.m.
“Goodbye friends,” he wrote. He posted one of his Walgreens pictures. Web caches show that it was a picture of the same Glock on top of a U. S. history textbook.
The post concluded: “Dear friends … Please don’t be mad at me. The literacy rate is below 5%. I haven’t talked to one person who is literate.”
Apparently unable to sleep, Loughner spent the early morning hours shopping. First, he went to the Walmart in the Foothills Mall in Tucson, then he went to a Circle K, and then back to the Walmart where he attempted buy bullets for his Glock. Here, Loughner was initially thwarted because the store didn’t sell ammunition before 7 a.m.
Less than a half hour later, after 7 a.m., he drove to another Walmart a few miles away and completed his mission.
With the new ammunition in his bag, Loughner was pulled over just three minutes after his purchase by an officer from the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Loughner had run a red light.
It was one of several moments that could’ve tripped up Loughner that day.
Twice, three times even, he came into contact with people who could have stopped him from carrying out his crime, and in each case, he eluded them. It was the same dumb luck that he’d enjoyed for several years.
Since at least 2007, according to reports, Loughner had gotten pass after pass. He’d gotten in trouble with the law and with his community college: he’d freaked out other students in his classes; he’d acted strangely and inappropriately, and had been on the radar of police, school authorities, neighbors, and community members. And yet, no one believed he needed to be stopped — until it was too late.
With the bullets in a black diaper bag, Loughner returned home, where allegedly he got into a confrontation with his father. Angry, he left the house on foot and caught a cab at the local Circle K. It was 9:41 a.m..
The cab driver unknowingly shuttled Loughner to the scene of his crime, the parking lot of a Safeway grocery store at which Giffords was holding a town meeting. The driver was seen on video and was briefly a person of interest to police investigating the shooting, but, police later determined, he was not involved. The driver went into the Safeway to get change for Loughner’s $20 bill.
In a just a few minutes everything would change.
For Gabrielle Giffords, her “Congress on Your Corner” event was just like many she had held before to meet with constituents. With a table situated in between the American and the Arizona State flags, Giffords would meet her constituents in front of the Safeway, starting around nine that morning. The Democratic Congresswoman had just been sworn in for the third time a few days before, following a close election. Giffords was in the midst of a conversation when Loughner walked up and allegedly opened fire, aiming directly at her.
The prosaic gathering at the supermarket of a moment before was turned into a killing zone with bodies scattered around the parking lot.
Loughner didn’t stop shooting until his gun’s magazine was empty. As he was attempting to load another clip, several eyewitnesses, including Patricia Maisch, Bill Badger, Roger Sulzgeber and Joseph Zamudio, were able to wrestle him down and put an end to the slaughter.
After Loughner was named a suspect, friends and former girlfriends came forward to attempt to make sense of his actions.
One of those friends, Caitie Parker, Tweeted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that Loughner had met Giffords before, three years earlier in 2007.
“He was a political radical and met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question and he told me she was ‘stupid and unintelligent,’” she Tweeted.
Court documents detail that during the execution of a search warrant on his house later the day of the shooting, authorities seized a letter in a safe addressed to “Mr. Jared Loughney” from Giffords’ office. Dated August 30, 2007, the letter thanked him for attending a Congress on your Corner event at the Foothills Mall in Tucson, the same type of event at which the shooting had occurred. Also recovered from the safe was an envelope with handwriting including phrases such as “I planned ahead,” “My assassination,” and the name “Giffords,” along with what appeared to be Loughner’s signature.”
For authorities, the letter would serve as direct evidence of Loughner’s premeditated intent to kill Giffords.
Though Giffords was the most high-profile victim of the shooting, she in fact survived a point-blank gunshot wound to the head. While she and the other wounded struggled to recover, six funerals for less fortunate victims were being planned. Perhaps the most poignant death was that of Christina Green, 9, who had been born on September 11, 2001.
According to The New York Times, the slender girl was participating in her school’s student government and wanted to see real government in action. She went with a friend of her mother’s to the meeting, and was fatally wounded when Loughner opened fire.
Another notable government figure, federal judge John Roll, was there to talk to Giffords about overcrowded courts. Roll, a George W. Bush appointee to the bench, was, like all the victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the wake of Roll’s death, a judicial emergency was declared in the federal judicial district of Arizona. Roll’s sudden death greatly disrupted the already-congested dockets, which had prompted Roll’s attendance at the meeting with Giffords in the first place.
Other victims killed included Dorothy Morris, Dorwan Stoddard and Phyllis Schneck. They were at the meet and greet specifically for Giffords; they were older, concerned and involved citizens. The sixth victim killed, Gabriel Zimmerman, was a member of Giffords’ staff, and worked as her outreach director.
Online, reports of the shooting were unfolding in real time — like a live blog gone horribly wrong. At 9:54 a.m., Loughner arrived on the scene.
When Loughner opened fire, reports began to spread almost immediately on Twitter.
One of the first Tweets by user @bigvic came at 10:10 a.m.: “Giffords got shot?”
Not a second later, another user wrote: “Just heard Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 10 other people shot and killed at Oracle and Ina Safeway.”
The rumors and ever-changing information shifted so quickly, it was hard to keep up.
Another user, @onJustice wrote at 10:08: “My sources tell me (Completely unconfirmed) that Giffords was stuck in the head by gunman at Safeway Oracle and Ina.”
Shortly thereafter, NPR reported on the shooting, and people Tweeted the link.
Soon Twitter was linking to another NPR update, one that turned out to be wrong, incorrectly reporting that Giffords was dead.
By 11 a.m., news organizations were following NPR’s lead and reporting that Giffords was dead.
In the echo chamber of the Internet, Giffords’ death was assumed to be all-but-certain. Even her husband, Mark Kelly, started to grieve.
Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, random bits of data, some true, some false began to accumulate about a crazed gunman who had assassinated a Democratic congresswoman.
At 10:26 a.m., not even a half hour after the shooting had occurred —but a lifetime on Twitter— @crispix49 asked: “How long until the Democrats try blame the #teaparty for Giffordshooting?”
Indeed, in the absence of confirmed fact, the news reports often indulged in speculation on right-wing rhetoric, with the assumption that since Giffords was a Democrat, that the gunman was presumably a far-right Republican, and possibly an exponent of Tea Party activism.
In fact, Giffords was a member of the “Blue Dog” caucus of moderate Democrats, and called herself a “former Republican.” In a moderately conservative area, she was well-aligned with her constituents on most issues. Some of her policies, like her support of gun rights, would have alienated or even angered the far-left.
Very little was known about Loughner at that point, and the media hadn’t yet zeroed in on the details of Giffords’ policies. People were looking to point a finger, and the media were quick to look to the right. In particular, former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was swiftly made a focus. The 2008 Vice Presidential candidate and former Alaskan governor, now a commentator on Fox News, found herself at the center of a controversy because she had employed battle-ready language —commonly used by many politicians, both Democrats and Republicans —on her website, SarahPAC.
The website included a map, with gunsight crosshairs over “targeted” congressional districts—because politicians in those generally conservative areas had supported the 2008 health care reform bill. Among them was Gabrielle Giffords. By 10:30 a.m., almost as soon as it was publicized in connection with the shooting by left-leaning bloggers, the map was gone.
At noon on her Facebook page, Palin issued a statement: “My sincere condolences are offered to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.”
Palin stopped short, though, of addressing her website’s “targeted list,” and later issued a video statement that drew the ire of critics and put her again on the defensive for the controversial use of the phrase “blood libel.”
She said, in part: “But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible. There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal.”
Meanwhile, political commentators were having a field day.
The Giffords shooting was quickly incorporated into existing narratives—with liberal and right wing media mouthpieces both shouting into their microphones about the need for civil, rational discussion, while doing exactly the opposite by linking the shooting, in the absence of any evidence, to political personalities other than the victims.
Keith Olbermann, the left’s mouthpiece on MSNBC (who left the channel shortly thereafter), said of Palin and the right’s rhetoric: “It is essential tonight not to demand revenge, but to demand justice; to insist not upon payback against those politicians and commentators who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism, but to work to change the minds of them and their supporters. If Sarah Palin, whose website put —and today scrubbed— bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics.”
On the right, right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves on his show, and said: “I find it fascinating that the media and many in the Democrat Party want to blame people that don’t know this kid, that the kid never knew, the kid never heard of, the kid was never exposed to. They want to try to blame people genuinely who are ancillary, who are irrelevant to this for what the kid did, for pure, political reasons. And there are political reasons for this.” He continued: “Their first objective and their first priority was to try to make an association between this nut and Sarah Palin.”
Barbara Walters wouldn’t join the fray of blaming Palin. “To blame Sarah Palin as some are doing, I think, is very unfair to her,” said Walters on her talkshow, The View.
The rhetoric got so heated, that even the President had something to say about it.
***
On January 12, President Obama visited Tucson and gave a speech at the McKale Memorial Center at the University of Tucson. It was an emotional speech, more so than the State of the Union address he gave less than a week later. During the speech, the President addressed the fiery political rhetoric that continued to dominate the political spectrum:
“You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations —to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. …But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized —at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do— it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
And at the State of the Union, the shooting was on the mind of everyone present. Giffords’ seat remained empty, and many lawmakers wore black and white ribbons to mourn the shooting. The guests of First Lady Michelle Obama were people affected directly by the shooting and included the parents of Christina Taylor Green, as well as her brother; the University Medical Center’s chief of trauma, Peter Rhee; and Daniel Hernandez, an intern at Giffords’ office, who was credited with saving her life by minimizing her loss of blood.
As the media scrambled to find Loughner’s motive for the shooting, the thing they wanted the to know most was his political affiliation. In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, a Tweet from Caitie Parker, a high school friend who had once been in a band with Loughner, had seemed to indicate that he might in fact be a far-left extremist, which would have flown in the face of the liberal blogosphere’s prefabricated denunciation of him.
“As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy,” Parker Tweeted.
Parker admitted she hadn’t seen him since 2007. Still, Parker’s portrait of the young man was that of someone who had once been a normal teen but who had become an alienated recluse resonated, and proved closer to the truth.
She mentioned that he had been a pothead and listened to artists like the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Loughner, Parker related, had been a social person until 2006, when, in an unclear incident, he had suffered alcohol poisoning. After that, she wrote, “He was very reclusive.”
The truth, it seemed, was that while Loughner could broadly be described as having political concerns, his politics, as such, made no coherent sense. As gathered from his internet activity, he was anti-government, and believed that NASA had faked the moon landings. Upon examination, Loughner’s online track record revealed neither a far-right winger, nor the left-wing nut for which conservative talk radio had been hoping. Instead, he seemed delusional and paranoid, weirder and more extreme than even the most hardcore of conspiracy theorists at either end of the political spectrum.
Throughout his adolescence and much of his teens, he was a regular if somewhat gawky guy. Sporting longish curly hair, he played the saxophone and was a member of the Arizona Jazz Academy.
A report by The New York Times described the young Loughner as being compared to Harry Potter in appearance, with short hair and glasses. Later, as he became more immersed in band, his teachers suspected he might be using pot the Times reported. In this sense, and others, Loughner was like any a number of socially awkward and somewhat alienated teens. He liked fantasy games, he dabbled in hallucinogenic drugs, and, later, he would go out into the desert to target shoot with guns.
His list of favorite books on his MySpace page contains so many titles common to a certain adolescent mode of formulaic, shock-the-bourgeois nonconformity as to be cliché: Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 share the bill with Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto.
In 2004, he had his first major run-in with authorities. It was an inauspicious beginning.
According to police report, on September 23, 2004, Loughner, then still a student at Mountain View High School, had been in the cafeteria when, he told police, he had been poked with something sharp. He said he thought that a student had jabbed him. The student was identified as Anthony “Tony” Kurz. After being poked, Loughner became “pale, got dizzy, could not stand and had to be helped to a nurse’s office by another friend,” according to the report. Though Kurz admitted that he had fashioned a needle inside a regular ballpoint pen, he said he couldn’t remember if he had struck Loughner, who didn’t press charges.
In the first case, Loughner was the bullied victim. But the next time police were called‚ it was because of Loughner’s own misbehavior. According to a police report, on May 12, 2006, Loughner again showed up at the nurse’s office at Mountain View High School, drunk from vodka. According to the report, “she advised that he was so extremely intoxicated that he had to be transported to Northwest Hospital to the Emergency Room.”
Loughner had drunk 350 milliliters of vodka between 1:30 a.m. and 8 a.m the morning before school. He had stolen the vodka from his father’s liquor cabinet. According to the report, “He was very upset as his father yelled at him.”
Since the shooting, multiple news reports have painted a picture of a strained home life in the Loughner household, one in which the parents were described as “not normal neighbors,” by one person living in the area.
Though his mother Amy was described as “doting,” his father, Randy, who installed carpets for a living and tinkered with cars in his spare time, in particular seemed to be a source of tension.
According to The New York Times, “As a member of one neighboring family suggested: if your child’s ball came to rest in the Loughners’ yard, you left it there.”
Another report said that the Loughners were known as “isolated” around the neighborhood.
After the shooting, the Loughners were quiet, but eventually issued a statement: “This is a very difficult time for us. We ask the media to respect our privacy. There are no words that can possibly express how we feel. We wish that there were so we could make you feel better. We don’t understand why this happened. It may not make any difference, but we wish that we could change the heinous events of Saturday. We care very deeply about the victims and their families. We are so very sorry for their loss.”
On September 10, 2007, police were called to a “suspicious vehicle” which was parked near a wall in Tucson. It was a large white van and it turned out to belong to Bryce Tierney. After following the van driving through town, the officer pulled the van over and “was able to detect a strong odor of burnt marijuana.” In the passenger’s seat police found Loughner. After police searched the van and found marijuana, Loughner was cited for possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor. The charge was dismissed after Loughner completed a diversion program.
This scrape with drugs was evidently not his last. A year later, Time.com reported, when Loughner applied to join the army, despite testing clean on his drug test, he responded a little too truthfully to Question 17i on DD Form 2807-1. The official told Time: “He admitted that he smoked marijuana to such an extent that we said, ‘No, thank you.’”
Friends of Loughner have told the press that he liked hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and salvia. A salvia high produces dissociative effects and has a much shorter duration than LSD or hallucinogenic mushrooms —from a few minutes to a few hours. On the other hand, the man with whom Loughner had been found by police in the white van, Bryce Tierney, maintained that Loughner had stopped using all drugs by 2008.
In the summer of 2007, Loughner, then 18, enrolled in Pima Community College. He didn’t have a major, and took a wide variety of classes —including Pilates. But throughout 2010, Loughner’s behavior became increasingly disturbing and disruptive to his classmates. After the shootings, the school released 51 pages of documents that depicted Loughner’s increasingly disruptive behavior.
The string of incidents began in February 2010. Campus police were notified after Loughner behaved strangely during the reading of a student’s poem in class. In a detailed report given by Patricia Houston, the Division Dean of the school, “the teacher had said Loughner had made comments in class after the poem that were a huge leap,” including, “Why don’t just you strap bombs to babies?”
The officer who filed the report wrote that campus police also had “received an email from another student in the class who thought Loughner might have a knife in his possession.”
Dr. Aubrey Conover, the Advanced Program Manager, wrote later in a document summarizing meetings with Loughner, “I asked Jared to help me understand his comment. He said that the class had been talking about abortion, which made him think of death, which made him think of suicide bombers, which made him think of babies as suicide bombers.”
While his behavior was enough to raise a red flag, it wasn’t yet enough for him to be kicked off campus.
On April 6, 2010, campus police were called again: Loughner caused a disturbance while using the library’s computers. Listening to music on his headphones, he began making loud noises and singing along in the library. The officers told him he could not do so in a public library, and left, satisfied that he understood and would comply.
On May 17, 2010, Loughner’s Pilates instructor became frightened after passing out grades. Though Loughner received a B, according to the report, he became “very hostile” and “threw his work down” and “said the grade was ‘unacceptable.’”
The instructor, Patricia Curry, told campus police she felt “intimidated” by him —so much so that she requested officers monitor her next class.
Again, while Loughner’s behavior troubled school officials, he stopped just short of causing them to expel him.
On June 2, 2010, campus police were again called to the scene. This time, Loughner had disrupted a math class, challenging the instructor over the use of a number in a way that made no logical sense.
In an email exchange between school officials, Delisa Siddall, a counselor, relayed to staff what happened. “[Loughner] said, ‘My instructor said he called a number 6 and I said I call it 18.’ He also asked the instructor to explain, ‘How can you deny my math instead of accept it?’”
According to Siddall, Loughner construed not being able to call the number 6 something else as an infringement on his freedom of speech, and was the same as telling him he couldn’t speak his mind.
She wrote: “I asked him to explain how this was pertinent to the subject at hand? He said these questions caused students to think. I asked him to describe his views on time and place. He said he paid $200 for the class so he should have the right to speak. He added that he has taken other courses and was scammed so he was going to do everything to ensure that he passed this class.”
As he did in every situation, after being chided, Loughner appeared contrite and said he would behave.
Siddall closed her letter, writing: “This student was informed that the formal code would go into effect if this should happen again. This student was warned. He has extreme views and frequently meanders from the point. He seems to have difficultly understanding how his actions impact others, yet very attuned to his unique ideology that is not always homogenous. Since his resolution was to remain silent in class and successfully complete the course, I had no grounds to keep him out of class.”
At least one student was disturbed enough to email friends and family about her erratic classmate. Lynda Sorensen provided The Washington Post with a series of emails that gave more insight to Loughner’s behavior in school. They read:
“June 1: One day down and nineteen to go. We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I’m not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit. The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon.
“June 14: We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast…”
But because he hadn’t done anything in direct violation of the code of conduct, yet again, Loughner was free to come back to school.
A few months later, on Sept. 23, campus police were called again. It was Loughner, again, ranting about how his “freedom of speech” was being threatened because he was getting a lesser grade because he turned the assignment in late. A belligerent Loughner “continued to cause the start of the class to be delayed.”
One of the responding officers wrote that “Loughner could not verbalize what the problem was and kept referring back to the freedom of speech. I noticed during my questioning that Loughner’s head was constantly tilted to the left and his eyes were jittery and looking up and to the left.”
Though Loughner repeated that he wanted to stay in school, officials decided that he would not return to class that day, and they would have a follow up meeting a few days later to discuss his future at the school.
On Sept. 27, the instructor and Jared met with Dr. Aubrey Conover about the most recent incident. The meeting revealed some of Loughner’s odd thinking. In Conover’s report, she wrote: “He then stated that he had paid for his courses illegally. When question as to why he said, ‘I did not pay with gold and silver.’” The meeting ended with the agreement that Loughner would bring his parents to the next discussion, the next night.
But another, final, incident got him booted.
Unbeknownst to officers, the same day that he had had his latest meltdown in class, Loughner had posted a video on YouTube, titled, “Pima Community College School—Genocide/Scam-Free Education-Broken United States Constitution.” The video has since been removed.
The video showed images of the campus while Loughner narrated a series of statements, each more incoherent than the last.
“We are examining the torture of students.”
“The war that we are in right now is currently illegal under the constitution.”
“This is my genocide school where I’m going to be homeless because of this school.”
“I haven’t forgotten the teacher that gave me a B for freedom of speech.”
“This is Pima Community College, one of the biggest scams in America.”
“This is genocide in America.”
The video was the final straw for the officers and school administrators. The officer who viewed it confirmed it was Loughner, called Dr. Conover and notified the school. The officer submitted a request for a subpoena from the Pima Country Grand Jury for YouTube records.
That night, campus police officers were dispatched to his home, where they met with Jared’s father in the garage to serve his Immediate Suspension letter. Mattocks wrote that Loughner sustained a “constant trance of staring.” At the end of the meeting, Loughner said, “I realize now that this is all a scam.”
By this point, it was clear to everyone that Loughner had strange beliefs. And a brief Internet search would show that the Pima County YouTube video was just one of many bizarre online fingerprints left by Jared Loughner in the months leading up to the shooting.
People now knew that Loughner wasn’t right-wing or left, or moderate or extreme. He existed in a different solar system entirely.
As Megan McArdle wrote in The Atlantic: “The guy was so disjointed that people on the UFO conspiracy theory message boards were saying, “Dude, this sounds craaaazy. You need to get help for your delusions”.”
Within hours of his name being released to the press, Loughner’s internet footprint was exposed. His MySpace page and his YouTube account were all posted online, the strange ramblings and odd photos and videos, reverberating on blogs and websites. In one video, he takes five minutes to burn an American flag somewhere in the desert. Midway through, he enters the picture looking like the Grim Reaper before he sets fire to the flag.
But perhaps the biggest find were his postings on Above Top Secret, a website that describes itself as “the largest and most popular web site for ‘alternative’ topics”—”dedicated to the intelligent exchange of ideas and debate on a wide range of ‘alternative topics’ such as conspiracies, UFO’s, paranormal, secret societies, political scandals, new world order, terrorism, and dozens of related topics with a diverse mix of users from all over the world.”
After it was deduced that the postings were from Loughner, the site’s owners decided to put his contributions—normally unable to be seen by non-members—up for the public’s perusal, with a brief introduction:
“As is often typical, recent analysis in the media is rampant with all manner of conclusions, second-guesses, exaggerations, distortions, and missing information. The opinion of the staff and owners of AboveTopSecret.com is that it serves the public interest to provide an easy method to access every post made here by erad3 (normally, visitors must be logged-in to view such information).”
The postings on Above Top Secret purported to be written by Jared Loughner reveal an odd mind, with a strange, disjointed and illogical way of seeing the world. Questions would be asked, but because Loughner’s logic was circular or his syntax incoherent, they were often unanswerable. In one post in July 2010 he asked, “Is it possible for an infinite source of currency?”
In a post riddled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, he attempts to explain himself:
“If a member of the treasury creates 5 new currency’s then the new currency replaces the previous currency. If the new currency replaces the previous currency then the previous currency is no longer in use. A members of the treasury creates 5 new currency’s. Therefore, the previous currency is no longer in use.”
The thread evolves into a discussion of the gold standard, but because Loughner is unable to demonstrate a grasp of simple concepts, the thread’s followers become frustrated with his posts. Loughner’s attempts to elaborate with nonsensical graphs and pictures only make the discussion more incoherent, and his responses get more confusing:
Finally, a user named “mordant1” responds:
“I think you’re frankly schizophrenic, and no that’s not an amateur opinion and not intended as an uninformed or insulting remark, you clearly make no sense and are unable to communicate. I really do care. Seek help before you hurt yourself or others or start taking your medications again, please.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t.
Though the early media discussion centered on whether or not Loughner was a right-wing extremist or had been influenced by political rhetoric, by the end of the day people were discussing whether or not Loughner’s mental health was an issue. Internet postings seemed to indicate that perhaps he had some psychiatric problems, and the attention shifted from blaming politicians to looking at whether or not there were enough clues in Loughner’s daily behavior to have tipped off authorities.
Loughner’s troubled tenure as a student was enough for his community college to enact a program aimed at disruptive students. Around the time of Loughner expulsion in September, The New York Times reported, Pima Community College introduced a Student Behavior Assessment Committee. “The team meets as needed to respond to students who have acted violently or threatened violence, or who may pose a threat to themselves or others.”
Perhaps the best thing to come out of Loughner’s high-profile crime was a national discussion of mental health issues, with an a renewed focus on recognizing troubled people like Loughner before they go too far.
While the media circus around Loughner continued, Giffords was on the mend. By the end of January, Giffords had made tremendous progress in her recovery. She had been transferred out of the hospital to a rehabilitation center in Houston, Texas. Her condition had been upgraded to good after weeks in critical, and she had been responsive to simple questions and able to hold up her hands. Still, it would be months before she could make what was hoped to be a full recovery. She faced months of occupational and speech therapy. Since she was expected to recover, though, her seat in Congress remained secure.
With the crime and its details so widely publicized, getting an unprejudiced jury for Loughner in Tucson was thought possibly to be a challenge, given that both a U. S. Representative and a federal judge had been shot and killed. After federal trial judges in Arizona recused themselves from the case, there was talk of moving the case to San Diego, Calif., a neighboring judicial district, where federal judge Larry Burns would preside over the case. This remained uncertain, though, as prosecutors vowed to keep the case in Arizona.
(Mugshot)
Loughner entered a not guilty plea on January 24 represented by Judy Clarke, a lawyer well known for her defense of unpopular defendants in highly charged cases, including Ted Kaczynski — the Unabomber, and Susan Smith, who killed her children by drowning them in a car.
Those looking for a quick ending will be disappointed as it might take more than a year to bring the case to trial; reports indicate that the defense may contest whether Loughner was competent to stand trial — and then, perhaps, court watchers speculated — whether or not an insanity defense could be mounted. Even with a trial and with the thousands of words written analyzing and attempting to understand why someone would do something so savage, it may never become clear what truly motivated Jared Loughner.