The Tucson Shootings: Who Was Jared Loughner?
Jared Lee Loughner was a portrait of isolation, a nobody, a “nowhere man.” Only his parents and a small circle of old friends ever knew him. Then, on the otherwise unremarkable day of January 8, 2011, he strode into a crowd with a semiautomatic pistol in his hand. That day became a headline. Loughner was there to kill Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who he believed had disregarded his pleas for help against a world he called a “sham.”73 When Loughner approached Giffords at point-blank range, he fired and put a round through her brain. He continued firing, killing a young girl and a federal judge, among others. By then, his gun ran out of bullets and he was assured of exploding into the public’s consciousness. Yet little is known about Loughner’s activities in the three months between his ouster from Pima Community College to his visits to stores and a motel starting late on January 7. He had purchased a gun and got two tattoos of bullets in November 2010.74 Otherwise, investigative records show that he rarely ventured far outside his ZIP code. He was repeatedly kicked out of his home and from school for disruptive behavior. In response to his difficulties, Loughner posted on the Internet, “My sleeping bag is an interstate wash from Tucson to Phoenix.” His Internet posts revealed more of his consuming thoughts. “His videos and online rants, plus new scraps of investigative evidence, portrays a young man at the end of a road, in his childhood room, tapping out messages to an indifferent world.” One of these postings foretold the inevitable: “I’ll see you on national TV. Why doesn’t anyone want to talk to me? You’re going to regret not talking to me.”
And indeed we did. In fact, on Christmas Eve before the mass murder in Tucson, Loughner was hardly imbued with holiday spirit. Instead, he was busy posting a picture of the extended magazine for a 9mm Glock pistol on MySpace. Loughner, as if he were the Antichrist, titled his picture “My Countdown.” Then he posted the portrait of insanity to MySpace for the whole world to see, along with the words, “Wow! With every day on torture, the hours are painful isolation: these dreams, which are realistic, vehemence feeling of greatness—finally! Dear reader, I’m searching. With every concern, my shot is now ready for aim. The hunt, a mighty thought of mine.”75
Like many mass murderers, Loughner had a target in mind, and it was Representative Giffords from the Congressional district encompassing Tucson. Loughner might have had a passing fancy for the pretty representative, and like many deeply psychotic individuals, he might have felt burned that Giffords had not responded personally or empathically to one of his fantasy complaints. He had actually communicated with her during a personal encounter in 2007. But the impersonal response he received from her office turned his anger to a low boil. She had rebuffed his attempt at a dialogue.
Loughner had prepared himself in response to what he perceived to be Giffords’s impersonal reply. The brief public encounter at that 2007 town hall meeting became intractably entangled in the scrambled web of neurocircuitry that was Jared Loughner’s deteriorating mind. Representative Giffords certainly would not have remembered that encounter because his question to her was an expression from the interior of psychic chaos, not the language of a sane man.
“What’s government if words don’t have meaning?” he had asked her in that 2007 townhouse meeting.76 The question seemed reasonable to him. Reportedly, she appeared caught off balance and had no facile reply—at least not to Loughner’s need for an answer—to a question from a mind that was losing all sense of meaning. His question was one for which there was no answer from any sane person not engaging in a philosophical debate. These tilting-at-windmills encounters and nonsensical talk in public were nothing new; his high school career had just ended early, as did his attempted soapbox career in politics.
At Pima Community College, Loughner’s behavior, like Cho Seung-Hui’s on the Virginia Tech campus, was becoming increasingly bizarre. This behavior could no longer be ignored or denied in its potential dangerousness for college authorities. At night, Loughner would carry a video camera around the college campus, railing about the “genocide school” he was attending and about which he said, “It’s a terrible place” because “it’s a genocide school” and one of the biggest scams in America.”77 Genocide. What could he possibly have meant by that? The voices of auditory hallucinations most likely had captured his mental life to the exclusion of reality: the signature trait of insanity. “We’re examining the torture of students,” he exclaimed to students and faculty, who assumed he either was a madman or on drugs. Arizona Republic reporter Sean Holstege described Loughner’s facial expression as “deadpan.”78 What Holstege thought was “deadpan” was really the flat emotional expression of the devastating schizophrenia enveloping Loughner’s persona.
Loughner was not just being glib in his postings and videos. For whatever reason, however, experienced counseling and clinical staff did not take him for treatment, as would be expected at a large academic institution, especially one that constructively acted in loco parentis. Instead, Loughner was suspended from the college. Two months later, he would make the final YouTube video that shocked the world that frightful day at the Tucson Safeway. He would soon go berserk, killing six and wounding twelve, including Giffords, who is recovering remarkably well from Loughner’s gunshot wound to her brain.
Jared Loughner’s State of Mind as a Student
Most of us dream and wake up wondering if those familiar people from our past and current lives, along with some unfamiliar ones, are really entangled with us in those bizarre plots. We wake up fast and realize it was just a dream. But why the plot? Why the sensation of present and past? Sometimes the dream is so real that it is scary or maybe joyful. But it does not make any sense. “I knew those people, but they have no connections in my life to be entangled in such a complex plot,” we might say to ourselves while groping to shut off the alarm clock. Then we go about our day and may continue to think about an especially powerful dream. Then we forget the dream. We forget dreams unless we can afford to spend thousands of dollars every week for a psychoanalyst who awaits the “aha” moment of his interpretation as he makes us remember through free association. Of course, as Freud said, dreams are meaningful.79 In psychoanalytic terms, they are known as “primary process thinking.” That is, dreams both emotionally drive and determine drama that defies the organizing cognitive abilities of our brains to suppress powerful emotions and adapt to the realities of our daily lives. Imagine if you could not suppress such primary process thinking and your entire waking life is that dream. No other reality exists. Consciously, you are awake, but you cannot shut the dream off. Then, imagine yourself also trying to get through the day with two people with different stories talking into your ears. If you can imagine yourself in such a state of mind for even an hour of your normal day, then you get a sense of what it is like to be in that state of mind for the rest of your life: the fate of untreated schizophrenia. This was the fate of Jared Loughner at Pima Community College, Adam Lanza at Newtown, and James Holmes at the University of Colorado. It was also the fate of Ross Ashley at Radford University, who had tried and failed to get into Virginia Tech and murdered a police officer there before committing suicide on campus as Cho Seung-Hui did. We still do not know how much ammunition was found at the site of his suicide, a fact withheld by the police that have informed us of Ashley’s motivation. Was this a revenge murder—could suicide or suicidal mass murder have been aborted by campus police?
Loughner’s psychologist and attending psychiatrist at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, have both testified in preliminary competency hearings that their patient manifested early signs and symptoms of serious psychiatric illness as far back as 2006 and that he was blatantly schizophrenic by 2008. They said in their repeated examinations that he could not distinguish reality from hallucinations. In other words, his daily life was like that imagined hour you spent with two people talking simultaneously in each of your ears, while you could not suppress the last dream of your night’s sleep. How could you focus on your environment to make sense of it or know reality from what you were constantly being told? Then consider being unable to stop those two people from talking into your ears. That is the state of mind dominated by auditory hallucinations: totally out of conscious control, in a dream state, and under the control of others who talk to you in alien voices. That is what it is like to be in Loughner’s confused state of mind—the psychosis of schizophrenia.
Loughner said that he could manipulate his own dreams. He referred to the concept known as “lucid dreaming.” If you are constantly in a dream state, that might be your last sense of control over a world of perceived utter confusion. Loughner was correct, although just for himself and not everyone else, when he said, “The line between the inner self and the outer universe is meaningless.”80 It was so for untreated schizophrenic patients such as Loughner, Lanza, and Holmes.
Speaking of his mangled version of conscious or lucid dreaming, Loughner wrote that “conscious dreaming” was his favorite pastime. Only the naïve would believe that. It was no pastime. It was what Steven Stahl describes as the diabolical learning of the brain’s neurocircuitry, preventing the schizophrenic patient from waking up and turning off his primary process dream state.81 Loughner could not turn it off, so he may have thought it a pastime. “What is the universe?” he asked the paranormal conspiracy website forum, Above Top Secret. He communicated on the Internet, drew a diagram of the universe with him leaving it, pondered alternate universes, and challenged that day’s date and asserting that the year could be infinite.
Reality for the schizophrenic can be completely illusory. For example, when you analyze your dream after waking up, it might seem as if your deceased mother is in your living room, vividly talking with a friend you met recently but she had never known. It seemed so real. You may ruminate over it for a while just to try to fathom the connections that do not really exist. Then you forget it. In Loughner’s schizophrenic mind, however, such disconnections of chronological events and dramatic interactions cannot be dismissed and forgotten. They dominate the schizophrenic mind, as they dominated Loughner’s mind for years and made him question the very nature of reality.
Language is distorted beyond comprehension in schizophrenia to the point of “verbigeration,” the compulsion or inability to stop repeating meaningless words or sounds in clanging or echoic associations: “blue, due, you, Lou.” Would it be surprising if such forced repetition of words related only by sound suddenly took on meaning: “Lou who is blue and due?” Loughner wrote that he could create new words, numbers, and symbols. He did not actually have that special power. He was describing the verbigeration of schizophrenia forced upon him by diabolical rewiring of his brain’s neurocircuitry. Like Anders Breivik, who spoke in terms only meaningful to him, called “neologisms” by state examining psychiatrists in Norway, Loughner seemed to have his own internal semantic connections. Imagine the World War II Japanese radiomen trying to comprehend our Navajo Code Talkers and talking like them without any understanding of what they were saying. They could say the words in Navajo sequence, but their language was meaningless, at least to them. Their neurocircuitry was scrambled by excessive concentration on words and syntax for which they had no template established in the centers of language in their brains. There were no linguistic deep structures for the Navajo language among the Japanese radio operators. Thus they could become victims of diabolical learning in their own brains. No doubt, this happened to a few of them who were prepsychotic themselves. So it is with the diabolical learning of neurocircuitry for language in schizophrenia—a symptom that Loughner manifested.
Logic and language are impaired for schizophrenics. Schizophrenic neurocircuitry causes thought blocking and disruptions in the train of thought and resulting communication. Loughner’s tangled rant, the product of one Internet session, was documented. He wrote about mainline freight trains passing his home and used more expletives than we can print in this book. Sure, some of the anger was frustration with his inability to filter out extraneous noise, whether real or hallucinatory, from reality. But most of it was the emotional dyscontrol of schizophrenia—the splitting between what he was thinking—exciting thoughts—and what he was feeling—dying. The split, or schism, in schizophrenia is not, however, of multiple personalities, as commonly misinterpreted.
Multiple personality disorder is a split between separate personalities that do not know of each other’s existence. The split in schizophrenia is between thinking and emotion. Such a split is most often seen in this disease, which was Loughner’s crazed portrait of enigmatic emotion. We look at his smiling, almost frightening mug shot. What was he thinking? What he may have been thinking in that photograph shown around the world could have been far different from what the viewer interpreted as threat. He was smiling. He may have been thinking of going to bed early because he felt tired, but expressed the emotion of a madman through his smile. Perhaps he really was a madman. It was enigmatic, indeed, only because others could interpret that smile differently. Loughner was certainly unable to express how he felt; his emotional control was completely split from his thoughts.
He constantly displayed such splitting in public, showing the core defect long known in schizophrenia. Those who knew him from school or from the world of online gaming commented on Loughner’s casual demeanor during his online campus rant about genocide, a complete disconnect from reality. People posting online were right about Loughner, but they did not know why. Tragically, nor did counselors, nurses, security, parents, teachers, or administration during Loughner’s psychotic break while his schizophrenia was still responsive to early intervention and prevention of the malignancy of duration of untreated psychosis, the condition apparent in Cho Seung-Hui. The condition went untreated by professionals both in court and on campus who should have known how to identify such a diseased mind and take responsibility for its treatment. Would they similarly avoid doing something for a man with labored breathing, nausea, and chest pain? Of course not, because that is real disease: a likely heart attack. Loughner, like Holmes, Lanza, and Cho, was just a “weirdo,” as far as most staff saw him. Had these young men been diagnosed as seriously ill—as with a heart attack—someone would have taken responsibility for getting them treatment. In the case of Loughner, what a difference that could have made! Loughner even said so himself.82 But Loughner’s condition went undiagnosed and untreated. After presumably being tranquilized with an antipsychotic, possibly Risperdal, Loughner told his therapist that he would not have perpetrated the Tucson shooting—he referred to it as “all of this”—had he been given the same medication years before. That would have been 2006, which his federal prison treatment team establishes as the beginning of his unremitting progression into schizophrenia and inevitable march toward madness that culminated in the horrors and national tragedy of January 8, 2011.
In Clan of the Cave Bear, we can see the ingenious use of weeds, probably heavy in plant sterols, selected by cavemen for treatment of congestive heart failure. But that was thousands of years ago, before written language. Loughner grew up in Tucson, Arizona, a highly educated and progressive city, the seat of the state’s first university and college of medicine. Tucson was the home of one of the largest community colleges in the nation, where Loughner was a student. Tucson was also a modern city with superior health facilities. But Loughner might have been living in a cave in northern Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago for all the good that modern society did for him.
The Pima Community College administration, possibly informed by the Virginia Tech massacre, was simply intent on getting a troubled and confrontational Jared Loughner off campus and keeping him off. The shock of the Cho Seung-Hui murders and the lawsuit making its way through the court were clear warnings to college administrators everywhere. That is probably why lawyers in Virginia decided to attack college security in their lawsuits, rather than failures of Cho’s psychiatric treatment. Thus, because it was security first, the Pima Community College campus police came to Loughner’s home to make certain he was gone. Did nobody know that his family had failed to pick up on his psychosis long before he had shown up at Pima Community College? That the family would likely miss it again? The college security personnel certainly did not miss Loughner’s insane comment about the situation: “Now, I realize this has all been a scam,” he said. A “scam,” he told them! Campus police certainly thought that verbal response to a traumatic suspension was very strange. Such inappropriate emotional response is another hallmark of schizophrenia. Security personnel were face-to-face with the pathological splitting between emotion and reality that defines schizophrenia. Where was Loughner’s rational reaction to the reality confronting him? He had no rational reaction because he was wallowing, totally distracted from chaotic signals of his decompensating brain, in his own delusion.
Normally, a forced suspension from college is certainly traumatic for a young student, but Loughner simply uttered the word “scam.” He had used the term before. What did he mean by it, if anything? Perhaps all life seemed a scam to him by now because reality was rapidly disappearing from his internal world. Or he may have been too far gone in the disease process to attach any cognitive comprehension to the word. He had posted his intent to “commit “suicide again” on MySpace, emphasizing it with his further admonition, “notice the again.” Just before the shooting, his final words to those on the Internet who were still tuned in to him were, “Goodbye Friends.” Recall James Holmes’s peculiar statement that proved so prescient: “After I die, I want to kill a lot of people.” Are these not signs of impending failure of college students’ minds, rather than academic failure or disciplinary matters? Holmes, Loughner, and Cho were dumped on the streets by their colleges, presumably expected to fend for themselves and stay away, which Cho did not. What did the Virginia Tech massacre and the Commonwealth of Virginia’s multimillion dollar investigative report inform university and college administrators and trustees of? Tragically, in the wake of so many tragic suicidal catastrophes either brewing or exploding on campuses nationwide, the answer to date may well be a frantic “call the attorneys,” “say nothing to the press,” and “hunker down” to let lawyers solve the problem, even when hundreds are dead and thousands of lives are ruined. Did anyone think to ask what was going on with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who had been a part-time accounting student at Bunker Hill Community College before he dropped out? He was studying to become an engineer and had been there for three semesters and had dropped out three times without any explanation.
There is no record of Loughner’s clinical encounters at Pima College, and it appears, from the behavior of the campus police who visited his home, that he was administratively sequestered into a security-only protocol. The public still does not know the details of Loughner’s aborted college career. Loughner had been expelled from Pima Community College, and campus security had left its own jurisdiction on campus to deliver Loughner the message that not only was he off campus but he had better stay away. Was this the method by which Pima had promised the public that it was committed to public safety: keeping problem students off campus? As set forth in the catalog statement to prospective students and their families, Pima’s administrators wrote:
Families of Students: Families play an important role in the academic success of our students. See why Pima is the right place for your student and learn how you can help them succeed. Why Pima Services for your Student Health & Safety? We understand the importance of knowing that your student will be safe and secure at Pima. With thousands of students spread out across multiple campuses, we take our health and safety responsibilities seriously. Pima Community College’s Department of Public Safety serves each of our six campuses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pima Community College Police is a full-time, fully certified law enforcement agency. Counselors to provide referrals to community agencies Community Health Clinics at two campuses.
Technically this very large college of more than fifty thousand students entered the commercial market in delivering clinical services. The question then arises: Why was such an obviously psychotic student not referred to the “community agencies” advertised to parents and prospective attendees?
One such agency every counselor certainly knew in the Tucson community is the Kino campus of the University of Arizona Hospital. It has ease of access for psychiatric care, whether voluntary or involuntary, second to no other facility in the nation that we know of. It should be favorably compared to similar public psychiatric hospitals in California, Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Washington state. California public psychiatric hospitals, for example, are defensively administered, attuned more to be responsive to the implied rights of the seriously mentally ill and due process rights that protect people from being involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment facilities. In Tucson, Arizona, Loughner could have easily been held involuntarily and admitted for treatment. Involuntary commitment in Arizona, although monitored by the courts, is not the adversarial training ground for young trial attorneys that it is in California, Washington state, and Wisconsin. Arizona is far from ideal and does not have assisted treatment requiring committed patients to take prescribed medications, but it works relatively well. It also has acute and persistent disability as grounds for long-term involuntary commitment with case management. That is based on relapses of psychosis, not dangerousness nor suicidality. Pima Community College advertises its knowledge of such resources in its Tucson neighborhood. Did no one—and there were plenty of professionals and clinicians involved with Loughner—know what could be done with Loughner besides forcing him off campus? What they did in forcing him off campus flies in the face of their own testimonials of health and counseling services with adequate community resources for care of psychotic students, likely 1 percent of 55,000 students, equaling hundreds on their campuses. Had no one heard of the Kino campus, one of the largest and most accessible acute care psychiatric hospitals in the nation?
Months and years too late, after having finally been medicated on an emergency basis at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in the wake of his shooting rampage, Loughner was reported by an attending psychologist at a formal court hearing to have told her, “Had I taken this medication years ago, I would not have done this.” By then, of course, it was too late. He had committed his crimes and effectively forced Giffords out of Congress, disabled, possibly in some capacity for life. The left and the right pounced on the political winds blowing in Arizona. Tucson liberals were quick to blame the strident “self-reliant” rhetoric of new Arizona resident Sarah Palin, who had screamed, “Don’t retreat; reload;” for the massacre, while the right-wing gun lobby circled its wagons. Right-wing commentators, sensitive to near-incitement speech by Tea Party politicians, were mounting their counter-offensive. Who was left to answer for the victims? Certainly not Loughner, who was awash in delusion.
In March 2012, a Virginia jury returned a verdict in favor of two plaintiff victims’ families, who had opted out of the original settlement in the case, and awarded each family $4 million, an award reduced to $100,000 for each family and which is now under appeal to the state’s supreme court, which must decide whether the commonwealth had a duty to protect students from third parties.83 In the wake of that verdict and looking at what lawyers do in wrongful death cases, we must become curious about what Pima Community College knew about Loughner, why they decided to merely suspend such an obviously deranged individual, and what actions they took in response to his recurrently bizarre and threatening behaviors on campus. By then, of course, Pima Community College Chancellor Roy Flores knew from the Virginia Tech debacle the dire consequences of allowing such a potentially dangerous mentally ill patient to remain on campus without any clinical intervention. What he did not know at that time, however, was the latest jury verdict in the case of Cho’s ultimate suicidal mass murder on campus. This verdict sent a strong statement to the public and university administrators that the presence of students on campus was greatly different from shoppers at malls.
It is unlikely that two surviving victims and loved ones of the nine killed by suicidal mass murderer Robert Hawkins at the Westroads Mall in Omaha would claim to hold the owners and management responsible and liable for the rampage. The success of any such claim would rest on how the court interpreted the mall’s duty of care to its patrons. Not so with a college or university. The Virginia jury, finding that the university had a duty to protect its students, recently decided in favor of the two plaintiff families of the students that Cho killed. Trustees and administration of Virginia Tech were held to a higher standard of responsibility for the health and safety of their students than visitors at a commercial shopping mall because, under the doctrine of in loco parentis, college and university campuses had a special duty of care. And, as in Pima Community College’s catalog, such special protection is promised as a benefit of choosing this college. Hence, the college placed itself into the market of providing special care, under which students are not merely consumers of courses on campus as if they were shoppers in a mall, but residents entitled to a higher standard of protection against violence perpetrated on campus. Reading the Pima Community College catalog statement, families of students and students alike could be led to believe that they should feel safer with ease of access to health-care facilities in the event of illness, whether a physical (medical/surgical) or psychiatric illness. Of course, that was not the case in the Virginia Tech massacre.
Chancellor Flores made a special effort to keep Loughner, who was recognized as being seriously mentally ill and called out for behaving strangely by members of the Pima College faculty in whose classes he acted out, off campus by suspending him and presumably making efforts to keep him from returning until it was safe for him to be on campus. We have no knowledge, however, whether any efforts like those advertised in the college catalog were made to refer him for diagnosis and treatment, despite what might be constructively implied as knowledge that he was suffering from serious mental illness. In the authors’ opinion, Pima administration had to know, or should have known, that the Kino campus of the University of Arizona Hospital had ease of access for the most seriously mentally ill patient. Students and faculty of this school had to have been rotating through this hospital for their training. It was no remote “loony bin” in the Sonoran Desert but a significant Pima County health-care institution that recently completed a high-profile transformation from a county hospital to an integral teaching hospital for the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.
As Linda Valdez succinctly said,
A young man’s strange behavior raises concerns on his college campus, but he does not get needed mental-health care. Later, he goes on a deadly shooting rampage in Tucson. It’s not Jared Loughner. This isn’t last year’s shooting. The young man in this story was 41-year-old nursing student, Robert S. Flores, who killed three University of Arizona professors before killing himself—in 2002. Then, as now, Arizona failed to have the very uncomfortable conversation about the consequences of untreated mental illness. Then, as now, Arizona missed an important opportunity. Advocates for the mentally ill have tried for years to end the stigma associated with diseases of the mind [brain]. Linking the massacres in Tucson to mental illness assumes that mental illness caused the traged(ies). It furthers one of the ugliest stereotypes about people with mental illness. Nobody wants Jared Loughner for a poster boy. But we need to talk about this. Last year’s shooting near Tucson led to a great deal of discussion about civility.
It also led to a thinly disguised, politicized memorial uncomfortably led by President Obama, as if Loughner were a Lee Harvey Oswald hatched by Arizona’s right-wing extremists with a political agenda that pandered to the gun manufacturing lobby. When Sarah Palin screeches into a microphone, “Don’t retreat; reload,” what about that should an at-risk, potentially violent individual not understand? However, it was not a politically motivated murder. It was a public suicide attempt. As Ed Montini put it, “But while memorials help us remember those who die, they don’t help us understand the reason for a tragedy. We remember the ‘who’ but rarely the ‘why.’ And in this case the ‘why’ is muddled.” This horrific event at the Tucson Safeway will remain muddled as it snakes through a maze of legal proceedings from Phoenix and Tucson to California—then to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Missouri and back for years to come. Will Loughner’s moments of lucidity that allowed the presiding federal judge to determine him competent to cop a plea in exchange for life in prison be the end? It is doubtful that this high-profile case will go quietly into the night, as politicians on both sides would prefer. After all, conspiracies fuel politics during these polarized times. But once the word “schizophrenia” came out of the mouths of a federal prison psychiatrist and a psychologist, it is almost like politicians do not know where to turn to exploit this tragedy for their own careers.
The destruction of public psychiatric services and disabling of involuntary commitment in the name of protecting innocent eccentrics from the hands of psychiatrists hungry for control and treatment fees is hardly the stuff of headlines. Most Arizonans—most Americans—do not believe in this anyway. Thus, the deal is made. The ceremonies are over. The politicians had their day. That is the intention of life sentence without parole. It closes the case without further investigation instead of examining a crisis about which politicians know little or nothing. Nor do they appear to care to know, as long as it goes away. There is no political hay to be made off Loughner. In fact, there is nothing but liability all around, from Phoenix to Tucson.
Occasionally, the proceedings have given interested clinicians and the public a glimpse of what really happened that horrific day at the Tucson Safeway. But for the most part, the sporadic hearings led by the US attorney general and federal judiciary are deliberately obfuscated by advocacy processes designed to punish the bad while protecting their rights in our society. Such proceedings are not meant to exorcise emotions over events as apocalyptic as the Tucson shooting, in which the public only gets glimpses of adversarial hearings with agendas that dissect events and strip them of the palpable human flesh of blood, horror, and lost or shattered lives. Legal proceedings are methodical and just that: a process. They have little meaning to anyone other than law practitioners and professors-in-the-making who will build their law notes and sometimes entire courses around the proceedings and outcome that nobody but they can begin to comprehend.
If we thought, however, that everyone would have simply forgotten what really happened at the Safeway on January 8, 2011, because of the Aurora or Newtown shootings, we would have been wrong. Even the churning of the news cycle, which has brought us more horrible atrocities, did numb us to the immediacy of mass murder in our shopping malls, our movie theaters, our elementary schools, or even at the finish line of a marathon. We now know that the justice department has brought legal closure to the Tucson shootings.
We now know that Jared Loughner was no simple case of attempted political assassination, despite the bombastic efforts on all sides of the media to make it so. No, Jared Loughner was not Arizona’s resident surrogate political assassin. Nor was the gunman even mentally fit enough to comprehend the nuances of right-wing political rhetoric in Arizona. Nor was he mentally competent enough to have purchased a gun legally, which is at issue not only in Congress as it wrestles with new gun legislation, but in the individual states, where measures to require background checks for mental illness and criminal convictions are making their way through legislatures. From the Loughner case, specifically, Gabrielle Giffords, now in rehabilitation therapy and now gaining back her mobility and ability to speak in public, has become an advocate for gun control measures that would keep firearms out of the hands of mentally ill individuals like Jared Loughner.
Issues still swirl around the Loughner case even years later, however. After the shootings occurred, the Pima County sheriff attributed the crime to rancorous political debate. Seemingly incognizant of the role of undiagnosed and untreated serious mental illness as a major factor in the massacre, the sheriff was in part responsible for managing and investigating it. But could it have been both? Loughner had passed through his court on misdemeanors but was never given consideration for a psychiatric examination. Are at-risk, potentially violent individuals particularly prone not only to the blood and gore of video gaming but to political incitement speech as well? Have our own First and Second Amendment guarantees become fuzzy in the face of new technology and new understandings about the neurological intricacies of the human brain? In the instance of someone acting strangely, especially on a college or school campus, is there a point when the court should have the authority to allow police to monitor the person’s social networking sites? The vast majority of gamers and social media posters are not known to the police and courts for disruptive behaviors or behavioral emergencies. However, in cases like those of Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and the Brothers Tsarnaev, where parents, teachers, or authorities notice extremely strange behavior, should not a warrant arise, upon reasonable cause, that a student’s privacy be trumped by public safety concerns and concerns for that student’s own health?
In August 2012, Jared Loughner was judged competent to stand trial. His forensic psychologist, Dr. Christina Pietz, testified that her patient had been medicated with antipsychotics for a year and that he recognized what he had done, felt remorse over his murders and the injuries he caused, and was competent to stand trial. Loughner pleaded guilty to nineteen murders and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a sentence mandated by law. Loughner’s victims, including Gabrielle Giffords, approved of the guilty plea and plea bargain that spared Loughner from the death penalty. While the guilty plea and sentence might have brought an end to the Loughner case, questions still lingered. These questions can be applied to Holmes, Lanza, Eddie Ray Routh, ex-LAPD officer Christopher Dorner, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, along with scores of other mass murder suicides or attempted suicides. Were Jared Loughner’s warning signs red-flagged at Pima Community College to the point where when the shooting occurred, anyone believed it might have been Loughner pulling the trigger? Loughner’s parents certainly noticed the warning signs. His mother had said that she could hear Jared having a conversation with himself in his room and knew something was dramatically wrong, and Loughner’s father, Randy, even took away his shotgun and disabled his car so that he couldn’t drive away.84 The Pima Community College nurse seemed to believe that Loughner might have been responsible for the shooting when she publicly voiced concern hoping that the perpetrator was not Loughner. Others in the college community might have thought the same thing even though they did not express it publicly.
After the sounds of gunfire had stopped at the Tucson Safeway while Loughner reached for his next ammunition clip and was held by intervening witness Patricia Maisch, first responders rushed in to care for the wounded. Nobody questions their effectiveness and that of the University of Arizona Medical School Trauma Center. But how did they know for sure that there was only one shooter? How well did the Pima County Sheriff’s Department know Loughner, and what was their anticipation of what he would ultimately do? Tucson is not a small town, but it is not that large, either, particularly for the ratio of police officers per citizen and its close proximity to the Mexican border. Like Anders Breivik in Oslo, Loughner was known by authorities in Tucson—or he certainly should have been.
Veteran Phoenix police officer Nick Margiotta provided some background for the question of whether Loughner was known to authorities. Describing his years dealing with psychiatric patients on the streets, he estimated that at least half of his calls were “psych.” Maricopa county attorney Bill Montgomery, who supported Margiotta, asserted with respect to the Newtown massacre, “Currently, and even for us in Arizona, the criminal justice system becomes the default mental health provider.”85 Our justice system was never intended to be a mental health system, at which it functions badly and at an extraordinary cost to the taxpayer. In fact, it costs twice as much per capita to incarcerate a mentally ill person than to treat that person medically as a matter of public health. Incarceration neither protects the private citizen from the delusional and suicidal crimes of the mentally ill nor does it protect the mentally ill from themselves. It fails on every level, which is ironic in the city of Tucson, where access to care for the seriously mentally ill is among the easiest in the nation.
In Loughner’s case, a seriously mentally ill man with multiple encounters with law enforcement and the Tucson criminal justice system was always repeatedly released into diversionary programs without any consideration of motivations for the disruptive behaviors that signaled fulminating and progressive schizophrenia. He, like Anders Breivik, was also rejected for military service, but we don’t know why. Tragically, his disease was belatedly diagnosed in federal prison after too many lives of consequence were extinguished and many more damaged forever. In fact, Loughner posted his opinion about his target victim on MySpace just days before his suicidal mass murder: “I can’t stand to look at a [f’n] pig without thinking about murdering that [f’n #%&##])f***!”86 He would continue to post increasingly violent wrath toward the police, including specific threats to kill police officers. Nobody noticed? Or maybe Pima County law enforcement was simply waiting for the inevitable chance for a felony arrest, which is perhaps why they suspected the Safeway Plaza shooting was the work of a lone gunman whose identity was not a mystery.
In Arizona, had Loughner been a couple of shades darker, he might have been detained for a minor crime and asked, “Papers, please.” But he managed to get out of any real societal intervention with his own mental state time and again until he created his own ultimate confrontation, leaving it to opposing counsels to argue over whether he could even be brought into a courtroom to answer for what he did.
Loughner may have had erotomania for Representative Giffords, as John Hinckley had for Jodie Foster. The attractive image of female power provided some cohesiveness to otherwise volcanic mix of erotic and violent forces inside Loughner. With grandiose beliefs, he saw himself as not only in control of evil, but able to destroy it wherever he perceived it, such as in political campaigning.
His political tirades had no theme, merely fragmented targets of his omnipotent powers as a god cemented together only with hatred and aggression, not logical political belief. His parents described him as getting “weirder and weirder” over time.87 They would find him facing a wall inside the home and talking to it. He was arguing with threatening voices of auditory hallucinations, which had completely taken him over. Not only was Loughner incapable of comporting himself to the logic of social reality, he was almost a robot, a zombie provocateur preconditioned to respond to any stimulus that created a delusional reality for him. He had become suspended in time, waiting for his stimulus. That stimulus came in the form of a line of assembler code to a microprocessor sitting on a circuit board embedded within a remote computer somewhere miles away on a server farm that fired up an autodial program at 3:40 p.m. on January 7, 2011. This program transmitted the announcement of Giffords’s “Congress on Your Corner” event to Loughner’s home phone the next morning. It was literally the switch that set him into motion.
Loughner would soon become one of America’s most notorious assassins, one from the Internet Age that provided him a worldwide audience for his hypergrandiose paranoid aggression that targeted the very human heart of American politics and its up close and personal encounters between representatives and their constituencies. American politics would change dramatically for the worse that day. In Newtown, Connecticut, less than two years later, and in Boston less than six months after that, it would change again.
73 Becker, Jo, Serge F. Lovaleski, Michael Luo, and Dan Barry. “Looking Behind the Mug Shot Grin.” New York Times, January 16, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16loughner.html.
74 Ibid.
75 Pitkin, James. “Local Blogger Posts Arizona Shooter Jared Loughner’s MySpace Rants.” Willamette Week, January 10, 2011. http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-25438-local_blogger_posts_arizona_shooter_jared_loughners_myspace_rants.html (accessed December 11, 2013).
76 Berzon, Alexandra, and Charles Forelle. “Suspect Showed Signs of Imbalance/” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2011. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703667904576073002519837620.
77 Wall Street Journal. “Jared Loughner Gives Tour of ‘Genocide School.’” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2011. http://live.wsj.com/video/jared-loughner-gives-tour-of-genocide-school/BA7DA718-99CF-4A65-8422-C73A230C21E5.html.
78 Holstege, Sean. “Jared Loughner’s Lonely World before Attack.” The Arizona Republic, January 5, 2012. www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2011/12/2320111223jared-loughner.
79 Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. 1899. Reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2010.
80 Wright, David. “U.S. Did Alleged Arizona Shooter Jared Loughner Think He Was Dreaming During Attack?” ABC News, January 11, 2011. http://abcnews.go.com/US/jared-lee-loughner-lucid-dreams-alleged-arizona-shooter/story?id=12585475 (accessed December 11, 2013).
81 Balt, MD, Steve. Thought Broadcast, “The Carlat Psychiatry Blog.” Last modified October 2, 2011. http://thoughtbroadcast.com/tag/stephen-stahl/ (accessed December 11, 2013).
82 Kiefer, Michael, Michelle Lee, and Joe Dana. “Psychologist: Loughner Competent, Feels Badly about Shooting.” AZ Central, August 7, 2012. http://www.azcentral.com/news/20120806arizona-shootings-change-plea-hearing-set-loughner.html (accessed December 11, 2013).
83 Vieth, Peter. “State Gets Appeal in Va. Tech Lawsuit, Plaintiffs Shut Out.” Virginia Lawyers Weekly, February 26, 2013. http://valawyersweekly.com/2013/02/26/state-gets-appeal-in-va-tech-lawsuit-plaintiffs-shut-out/ (accessed December 11, 2013).
84 Wagner, Dennis. “Tucson Shooting Records Shed Light on January 2011 Rampage.” AZ Central, March 27, 2013. http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130327loughner-records-release.html?nclick_check=1 (accessed December 11, 2013).
85 Gratehouse, Donna. “You Are Not the Boss of Me, Bill Montgomery.” Arizona Politics, December 15, 2012. azcvoices.com/politics/2012/12/15/you-are-not-the-boss-of-me-bill-montgomery/.
86 Berzon, Alexandra, John R. Emshwiller, and Robert A. Guth. “Postings of a Troubled Mind.” Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2011. online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703791904576075851892478.
87 Wagner, Dennis. “Tucson Shooting Records Shed Light on January 2011 Rampage.” AZ Central, March 27, 2013. http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130327loughner-records-release.html?nclick_check=1 (accessed December 11, 2013).