Jared Lee Loughner -- The Rapid Decline

I was startled when I saw the mugshot today of accused mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner.  I knew he was 22 at the time of the shooting and had only seen his high school yearbook picture:

 

as well as another, more recent photo:

Those photos were significant just in how ordinary they were.  The first image was of a curly-haired teenager, no different from any other kid you'd see bagging your groceries or hanging out in a skate park. The second, a normal, indistinguishable twenty-something. 

This is what Jared Loughner looked like today:

This is the face of someone accused of killing six people, including a child.  How he went from the youth above to the frighteningly crazy-eyed man in the bottom photo in just a few short years, will be a cautionary tale for all of us. Because the signs of his rapid and extreme change were all there.  From his dropping out of high school, to run-ins at junior college, to a failed attempt to enlist in the draft, to authoring nonsensical yet vitriolic rants, he was a ticking timebomb.  

Why he wasn't helped, how he slipped through our fingers, how he was allowed to plunge deeper into whatever strange thoughts possessed him is something we need to face. Immediately after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the more than a dozen others, all the attention turned to the heated speech in our current political discord as having incited this shooting.  But it seems much more likely that what motivated and propelled the shooter will be much more mundane and less newsworthy than a Sarah Palin target map or the ravings of Glenn Beck.  It should be noted that Loughner's interest in the Congresswoman goes back to at least 2007 when he first saw her at a constituent meet-and-greet, a year before most of us had heard of Sarah Palin.

This is not one of those instances where after a suspect is named, those who knew him say, I never thought this could happen or this doesn't sound like the person I knew.  No, this is, sadly, one of those cases where someone's alleged connection with a horrific shooting is met not with shock but with acceptance.  A former classmate's emails about Loughner from last summer were reproduced in today's Washington Post.

June 1, the first day of class:


'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.'

From June 10:

'As for me, Thursday means the end to week two of algebra class. It seems to be going by quickly, but then I do have three weeks to go so we'll see how I feel by then. Class isn't dull as we have a seriously disturbed student in the class, and they are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can't do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by the door.'

From June 14:

'We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living cr** 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...'

Unfortunately, her emails, while prescient, did nothing to actually get Loughner whatever help he needed or protect the public from him before it was too late.

If Loughner is indeed the shooter, we can look closer to home for clues -- to his backyard with the makeshift shrine and plastic skull, to his rambling, incoherent thoughts and beliefs, to his drug use and to his presently uncooperative parents.  What we will find, ultimately, is that there is not one, easy explanation for such a horrific act of violence.  We will peel away at the many aspects of his personality and experiences and discover that it took a perfect storm of things going wrong for him to pick up that gun and aim it at his fellow human beings.  What is tragic is that the signs he was heading in that direction were apparently there, but no one knew what to do with them.