In the aftermath of Saturday's deadly shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which six were killed and 14 others wounded during an apparent assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, police and media outlets have been scrambling to learn more about the accused shooter, Jared Lee Loughner. And if that means dragging his high school girlfriend into the burning hot eye of the media, then so be it.
Kelsey Hawkes, 21, who dated Loughner when she was a high school freshman, has been making the rounds, giving interviews about her short-lived but sweetly-remembered "ordinary high school relationship" with the accused gunman. She told the Daily Mail, "My breaking up with him was not the cause of him going off the rails, but it was definitely the start of it...I remember his face clearly -- he just looked like he had nothing to live for." In an interview with USA Today, she said, "I've always known him as the sweet, caring Jared." And she reiterated that he, and his reportedly dysfunctional family, were "great" when she knew them, in a TV interview with CBS this morning.
Police continue to sift through the remnants of Loughner's life, discovering more unnerving details about the unstable young man. Their attention has turned to 51-pages of records on Loughner from Pima Community College, who finally kicked him out last September, after he made a video denouncing the suburban school as a death camp and put it on his YouTube channel. Among other incidents, Loughner allegedly stopped one lecture in its tracks by obsessively insisting the number 6 was really 18, and disrupted a poetry class by suggesting that dynamite should be attached to babies. In the report, various instructors, classmates and security guards described Loughner as "creepy," "very hostile," "suspicious," "mentally ill" and having a "dark personality." The questions remains whether anyone tried to get him any mental help.
