Killing spree suspect was ‘creepy and very hostile’

FOR four years Jared Loughner was an unremarkable college student, commuting to classes near his home where he studied yoga and algebra, business management and poetry.

But last year, his classroom conduct began to change.

In February, Loughner stunned a teacher by talking about blowing up babies, a bizarre outburst that marked the start of a rapid unravelling for the 22-year-old, who is accused of killing six people and wounding 14, including Gabrielle Giffords.

After his first flare-up, campus police decided not to intervene.

“I suggested they keep an eye on him,” an officer wrote.

Loughner’s on-campus behaviour grew increasingly erratic, menacing, even delusional.

Fifty-one pages of newly released police reports provide a chilling portrait of Loughner’s last school year, which ended in September when he was judged mentally unhinged and suspended by Pima Community College.

As Tucson and the rest of the country remembered the victims, new details surfaced about the busy morning Loughner had in the hours before the shooting.

According to authorities, Loughner hustled to Walmart twice, was caught by police driving through a red light, but was let go with a warning, and later grabbed a black bag from the boot of a family car before fleeing into the desert on foot with his suspicious father giving chase.

Eventually, he took a cab to the grocery store where he opened fire on Giffords and a line of people waiting to speak to her.

Just three months earlier, he had been kicked out of school.

In a September 23 campus police report, days before his suspension, an officer called to quiet another one of Loughner’s outbursts described him as incomprehensible, his eyes jittery, his head awkwardly tilted.

“He very slowly began telling me in a low and mumbled voice that under the Constitution, which had been written on the wall for all to see, he had the right to his ‘freedom of thought’ and whatever he thought in his head he could also put on paper. . . His teacher ‘must be required to accept it’ as a passing grade,” the officer wrote.

The school reports provide the most detailed accounts so far of Loughner’s troubles at the college, and he is depicted at times as “creepy,” “very hostile”, and “having difficulty understanding what he had done wrong in the classroom.” School officials have not said if the reports were shared with any authorities beyond campus.

On November 30, the day he bought the gun authorities said was used in the shooting, Loughner posted a YouTube video, seething about campus police and the college.

School officials told Loughner and his parents that to return to classes he would need to undergo a mental health exam to show he was not a danger. He never returned.