Friends, teachers tell of Loughner's
descent into world of fantasy
By Amy Gardner, David A. Fahrenthold and Marc Fisher - Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 13, 2011; 12:00 AM
He played late-night marathon games of Monopoly with his buddies. He went with friends on family vacations. He would hang with pals at IHOP on Fridays. He had a girlfriend. He laughed and he loved and he knew things - about jazz, cars, fantasy games.
From his elementary years through middle school, Jared Loughner lived a life that his friends saw as little different from their own. There was something awkward about him, and he was teased more than most, but he had friends and they were often among the smarter kids in his grade. There were sleepovers and hikes and long games of Starcraft and Earth Empires.
Mick Burton, a friend who played with Loughner in the Tortolita Middle School band and on the basketball team, recalled that he "sort of got picked on a little bit. He had a sort of bowl cut of curly hair. He wore glasses. I just remember people on the basketball team calling him Harry Potter."
"It was pretty messed up," said Nasser Rey, 21, a friend from elementary and middle school. "Somebody taped a sticker on his back and it said, 'Kick me,' and people started kicking him. They just started trying to trip him. But he wasn't being bullied. He didn't start crying or nothing."
Rey remembered Loughner as quiet and not popular in high school, but not a recluse, either. They would work on assignments together and hang out, talking about hip-hop songs. "We would get into conversations about regular stuff," Rey said. "He was a normal dude."
In those years, Loughner's music was at the center of his life. "His parents spent thousands on musical instruments for him," said Alex Montanaro, one of Loughner's best friends from seventh through 10th grades.
Loughner started on the saxophone around the fifth grade. By late middle school, he was a serious jazz buff, keeping lots of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on his iPod.
Burton, who played gigs with Loughner at restaurants, recalled that Loughner beat him out in the eighth grade for first chair in the band's tenor saxophone section. "He was a really good player," Burton said. "I feel that he could have gone pretty far if he'd stuck with it."
Loughner took lessons at the Arizona Jazz Academy, a now-defunct school that his mother took him to each week, a 10-mile drive that impressed one teacher as a sign of commitment. The teacher, Doug Tidaback, recalled Loughner as a good student, though at the time, Tidaback thought the boy was using drugs. Still, the teacher sensed that Amy Loughner was eager for her son to have a "good, positive experience. She was quiet, but she was very clear in stating what she wanted for her son," Tidaback said. "I definitely got the impression that she cared."
Teachers and students who knew Loughner in middle school recall a boy with long, curly hair who was by no means part of the cool crowd but was an interesting kid. He could talk current events. He wanted to be a writer.
Montanaro went with the Loughners to New Mexico for a New Year's vacation one year and remembers everyone getting along well. "All I saw was a normal, loving relationship," he said. "They'd have us over for sleepovers where they'd order too much pizza. We even went to concerts together as a family."
Loughner started on the saxophone around the fifth grade. By late middle school, he was a serious jazz buff, keeping lots of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker on his iPod.
Burton, who played gigs with Loughner at restaurants, recalled that Loughner beat him out in the eighth grade for first chair in the band's tenor saxophone section. "He was a really good player," Burton said. "I feel that he could have gone pretty far if he'd stuck with it."
Loughner took lessons at the Arizona Jazz Academy, a now-defunct school that his mother took him to each week, a 10-mile drive that impressed one teacher as a sign of commitment. The teacher, Doug Tidaback, recalled Loughner as a good student, though at the time, Tidaback thought the boy was using drugs. Still, the teacher sensed that Amy Loughner was eager for her son to have a "good, positive experience. She was quiet, but she was very clear in stating what she wanted for her son," Tidaback said. "I definitely got the impression that she cared."
Teachers and students who knew Loughner in middle school recall a boy with long, curly hair who was by no means part of the cool crowd but was an interesting kid. He could talk current events. He wanted to be a writer.
Montanaro went with the Loughners to New Mexico for a New Year's vacation one year and remembers everyone getting along well. "All I saw was a normal, loving relationship," he said. "They'd have us over for sleepovers where they'd order too much pizza. We even went to concerts together as a family."
'Mental breakdown'
Many teenagers try on different identities, experiment with new friends, and explore intellectual and emotional frontiers. Friends say Loughner's sophomore year was a whirlwind of change. He left behind his passion of the past few years - he stopped playing sax. He found a new love - his first real girlfriend. [see below] He lost that love, changed his look, switched friends, discovered new interests and seemed to drift off into a world of ideas that friends found odd, irrational, disturbing.
What Montanaro calls Loughner's "mental downfall" seemed to start after his breakup with the girlfriend, who did not respond to a request for an interview. Until that relationship blossomed, Loughner "actually had many friends," Montanaro said. "Jared really became an outcast," he said. "We allowed him around us for a while, but he started acting nutty. His friends changed from people like us to more drug-oriented people."
That year, Loughner "hung out with a different crowd," Burton said, and started dressing in "goth" styles. "I remember cargo shorts and fingernails painted black. Maybe a couple of fingernails painted. It was never really extreme."Montanaro remembers Loughner's relationship with his parents fraying during that period, especially with his father, "because Jared began disrespecting them."
That fall, Pima County police were called to Mountain View High School after Loughner reported that a student had stuck him with a needle crafted from an ink pen. According to a police report, Loughner said he became pale and dizzy after the pen prick, but he declined to press charges.
In the spring of his junior year, police were called to school again when Loughner showed up "extremely intoxicated" after drinking about a third of a bottle of vodka. "He drank the alcohol because he was very upset as his father yelled at him," the police report said.
In 2006, Loughner dropped out after his junior year. That summer, he enrolled in an alternative high school, Aztec Middle College, and earned his diploma that December.
During his late high school years and thereafter, Loughner moved through a blur of entry-level jobs at chain stores and restaurants - Red Robin, Mandarin Grill, Quiznos, Eddie Bauer.
"He absolutely hated Red Robin," recalled Montanaro, who also worked there. "He couldn't stand the people who worked there or the customers." One night, Loughner, then busing tables, walked off the job. "He just told me he couldn't take it anymore," Montanaro said.
In an online forum, Loughner called his time at Red Robin a "terrible situation. Mental breakdown."
The year after high school, Rey worked with Loughner at a Mandarin Grill. To Rey's surprise, he said, Loughner talked a lot about smoking marijuana and taking mushrooms.
That year, Loughner "hung out with a different crowd," Burton said, and started dressing in "goth" styles. "I remember cargo shorts and fingernails painted black. Maybe a couple of fingernails painted. It was never really extreme."Montanaro remembers Loughner's relationship with his parents fraying during that period, especially with his father, "because Jared began disrespecting them."
That fall, Pima County police were called to Mountain View High School after Loughner reported that a student had stuck him with a needle crafted from an ink pen. According to a police report, Loughner said he became pale and dizzy after the pen prick, but he declined to press charges.
In the spring of his junior year, police were called to school again when Loughner showed up "extremely intoxicated" after drinking about a third of a bottle of vodka. "He drank the alcohol because he was very upset as his father yelled at him," the police report said.
In 2006, Loughner dropped out after his junior year. That summer, he enrolled in an alternative high school, Aztec Middle College, and earned his diploma that December.
During his late high school years and thereafter, Loughner moved through a blur of entry-level jobs at chain stores and restaurants - Red Robin, Mandarin Grill, Quiznos, Eddie Bauer.
"He absolutely hated Red Robin," recalled Montanaro, who also worked there. "He couldn't stand the people who worked there or the customers." One night, Loughner, then busing tables, walked off the job. "He just told me he couldn't take it anymore," Montanaro said.
In an online forum, Loughner called his time at Red Robin a "terrible situation. Mental breakdown."
The year after high school, Rey worked with Loughner at a Mandarin Grill. To Rey's surprise, he said, Loughner talked a lot about smoking marijuana and taking mushrooms.
"I just never thought he'd be the type who would be getting high," Rey said. "I thought he was like a goody-good. He was pretty smart in school. I was more of a partyer."
Loughner was arrested twice on minor charges, in 2007 for possession of a small amount of marijuana and a pipe, and a year later, for defacing a stop sign. Both cases were dismissed after Loughner completed a diversion program, but the arrests proved a lasting stain. Military officials say the drug charge was the reason they rejected Loughner's enlistment application. And Loughner complained that employers wanted nothing to do with him because of it.
After high school, Loughner again shifted passions. He cut his hair short, switched from hip-hop to heavy-metal, and wore metal band T-shirts. He spent a lot of time at the home of his friend Zachary Osler, sometimes staying the night. One night when Loughner was not there, his parents came looking for him, saying that Jared had "run away from home." Osler told the parents that their son was at a motel, said Osler's father, George.
By this time, Loughner had a growing fascination with dreams and alternative realities. He believed in lucid or conscious dreaming, the idea that you could consciously enter your own dream and change the path of its characters. He loved the 2001 movie "Waking Life,"
in which a young man walks in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity.
Loughner "focused all his energy into understanding the mystery of man's existence on Earth," George Osler said. "He was desperately trying to escape from all the chaos and suffering in his world."
Loughner's favorite writer was Philip K. Dick
, whose science-fiction tales travel a mystical path in which omnipotent governments and businesses are the bad guys and the average man is often lost in an identity-shattering swirl of paranoia, schizophrenia and questions about whether the universe and the individual are real or part of some vast conspiracy.
Two years ago, Loughner texted his old friend Zach Osler: "I don't want to be your friend anymore."
"What Jared did was wrong," said Roxanne Osler, Zach's mother, referring to his alleged shootings. "But . . . I feel bad for the kid. . . . I wish people would have taken a better notice of him and gotten him help.
"He had friends, but then all of a sudden . . . he had nobody, and that's not a nice place to be."
'That evil stare'
In the past year or so, the crumbling of what was once Loughner was clear to anyone who bothered to look. Teachers, fellow students, even the anonymous e-buddies who substituted for the real friends he had lost - many suspected mental illness and said so, to one another, to Loughner, even to people who might have taken action. But no one did.
After high school, Loughner again shifted passions. He cut his hair short, switched from hip-hop to heavy-metal, and wore metal band T-shirts. He spent a lot of time at the home of his friend Zachary Osler, sometimes staying the night. One night when Loughner was not there, his parents came looking for him, saying that Jared had "run away from home." Osler told the parents that their son was at a motel, said Osler's father, George.
By this time, Loughner had a growing fascination with dreams and alternative realities. He believed in lucid or conscious dreaming, the idea that you could consciously enter your own dream and change the path of its characters. He loved the 2001 movie "Waking Life,"
in which a young man walks in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity. Loughner "focused all his energy into understanding the mystery of man's existence on Earth," George Osler said. "He was desperately trying to escape from all the chaos and suffering in his world."
Loughner's favorite writer was Philip K. Dick
, whose science-fiction tales travel a mystical path in which omnipotent governments and businesses are the bad guys and the average man is often lost in an identity-shattering swirl of paranoia, schizophrenia and questions about whether the universe and the individual are real or part of some vast conspiracy.Two years ago, Loughner texted his old friend Zach Osler: "I don't want to be your friend anymore."
"What Jared did was wrong," said Roxanne Osler, Zach's mother, referring to his alleged shootings. "But . . . I feel bad for the kid. . . . I wish people would have taken a better notice of him and gotten him help.
"He had friends, but then all of a sudden . . . he had nobody, and that's not a nice place to be."
'That evil stare'
In the past year or so, the crumbling of what was once Loughner was clear to anyone who bothered to look. Teachers, fellow students, even the anonymous e-buddies who substituted for the real friends he had lost - many suspected mental illness and said so, to one another, to Loughner, even to people who might have taken action. But no one did.
A student in Loughner's math class at Pima Community College usually sat near the classroom door for fear that he might turn violent, said her professor, Ben McGahee. The student recently moved out of her home and the new occupant left this note on the door Wednesday: "Both my husband and I had an experience where someone resembling the shooter came to our property and spent some time with a bit of a strange face-off between us. This person gave me the creeps and gave my husband the creeps." She declined to comment further.
Within minutes of the start of McGahee's eight-week course on algebra last June, he knew Loughner would be a problem. Loughner, who had already failed the same course, called the remedial class a "scam" and the teacher a "fraud." Asked to quiet down, Loughner calmly replied, "How can you deny math and not accept math?"
The next day, McGahee sent Loughner to see a school counselor, Delisa Siddall, who spoke to him in the hall for a few minutes. The counselor told Loughner to stop disrupting class, and he promised to do so.
"He gave me that evil stare," McGahee said. "When I turned my back to write something down on the board, I'd look out of the corner of my eye to make sure he had not hurt anyone."
That Friday, on his first quiz, Loughner doodled in the margins, drew cartoon figures, and wrote nonsensical equations such as "Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math" and the words "MAYHEM FEST." McGahee showed the quiz to Siddall, who looked up Loughner's record and saw that he had had several run-ins with campus police. Students and teachers had reported his odd comments and inappropriate behavior. At first, according to police reports, officers decided only to "document the faculty's concern." One report was marked "No Bonafide Incident."
When Siddall asked Loughner about what had happened in class, he said his comments were only about math, according to a memo she wrote. For example, he said, "My instructor said he called a number 6 and I said I call it 18." The counselor concluded that the student had a "unique ideology that is not always homogeneous."
McGahee asked police to send an officer to his class every day. Several students asked that Loughner be given treatment or psychological testing. McGahee said he asked the counselor to "do something, but they kept telling me, 'He hasn't brought a weapon to class. He promised he'd be quiet. It doesn't look like he's hurting anybody.' "
After three weeks of class - and after other incidents, including one that led an officer to conclude that "there might be a mental health concern" - the professor asked the dean to remove Loughner for good. On Sept. 29, a campus police officer visited Loughner at home and read him a letter of immediate suspension. At the end of an hour-long exchange in which Loughner "held a constant trance of staring," he told the officer, "I realize now that this is all a scam."
McGahee said he never felt much relief, even after the suspension. "I was always worried that he could come back," he said.
Over the past two years, Loughner "was desperate to hang out with people," Montanaro said. "He'd just show up at our houses, call us constantly and would even pay for us just to get us to chill with him. It was rather annoying." By last summer, evidence of Loughner's increasingly deteriorating mental state was littered across the electronic worlds he inhabited.
On one site, Above Top Secret, Loughner left dozens of posts with bizarre theories about U.S. currency, the Constitution and grammar. Finally, another regular on the site wrote back that "I think you're frankly schizophrenic, and no that's not an amateur opinion and not intended as an uninformed or insulting remark. I really do care. Seek help before you hurt yourself or others or start taking your medications again, please."
Loughner, known on the site as "erad3," responded, "Thank you for the concern."
gardnera@washpost.com fahrenthold@washpost.com marcfisher@washpost.com
Gardner reported from Tucson. Staff writers Brigid Schulte in Washington and Clarence Williams in Tucson and staff researchers Alice Crites and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Associated Press
Thursday, January 13, 2011; 8:03 AM
TUCSON, Ariz. -- An ex-girlfriend of the suspect in Saturday's mass shooting in Tucson says he was a lot different than when they dated six years ago when both were in high school. Kelsey Hawkes was interviewed Thursday on CBS' "The Early Show" about Jared Loughner, whom she hasn't spoken to in five years.
Hawkes says he was caring, sweet and kind when they went out, and she remembers his parents as being great. She says she never saw any violent tendencies in Loughner.
Hawkes says it was upsetting when she learned that he had been arrested for the shootings and she could only imagine what had been going on with him.
Loughner has been charged in federal court for killing a judge and another federal employee and attempting to kill Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and two others.
Hawkes says it was upsetting when she learned that he had been arrested for the shootings and she could only imagine what had been going on with him.
Loughner has been charged in federal court for killing a judge and another federal employee and attempting to kill Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and two others.
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