Accused described as ‘troubled and disturbed’ loner

AN initial portrait of the man accused of shooting congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killing six others began to emerge yesterday.

Authorities in Arizona described a young man with a troubled past and neighbours recalled a loner.

One former classmate said the accused gunman, Jared Loughner, 22, often did his own thing. Another described him as a student who disrupted class with occasional outbursts.

Neighbours said Loughner was not hostile, but did not warm up to anyone either.

“He was a guy in high school who definitely had his opinions on stuff and didn’t seem to care what people thought of him,” said Grant Wiens, 22, a former classmate at Pima Community College.

Loughner was in custody yesterday after authorities said he opened fire outside a grocery store as Democrat Giffords met with voters in Tuscon. The congresswoman was shot in the head and Arizona’s chief federal judge, a nine-year-old girl and four others were killed.

Authorities said the accused gunman targeted the three-term congresswoman, but the exact motivation was not immediately known. Many questioned whether America’s polarised political climate had played a role, even as Loughner’s political views remained unclear.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described the gunman as mentally unstable and said he possibly acted with an accomplice. Investigators were poring over versions of a MySpace page that belonged to Loughner and over a YouTube video published weeks ago under an account “Classitup10” and linked to him.

The MySpace page, which was removed within minutes of the gunman being identified by officials, included a mysterious “Goodbye friends” message published hours before the shooting and exhorted people to “Please don’t be mad at me”.

On his MySpace page, Loughner spoke of how he liked to read and he wrote repeatedly about literacy, complaining that the rate was especially low in the congressional district where he lived.

In a December 15 YouTube video, Loughner describes himself as a US military recruit, but the army released a statement indicating Loughner was not accepted.