TUCSON, Ariz.—In high school, Jared Lee Loughner was a scrawny kid with a bushy mop of curly hair under the hood of a gray sweatshirt, a saxophone player at football games who jammed with a friend’s garage band.
More recently, in a series of videos he posted on YouTube, Mr. Loughner, now 22 years old, rages against the government and the constitution and refers to himself as a “terrorist.”
Jared Lee Loughner, the man suspected of a shooting spree that killed a Federal Judge and critically wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, had left a trail of online videos in which he railed against the government. WSJ’s Neil Hickey reports.
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Then, a few minutes after 10 a.m. Saturday morning, authorities say Mr. Loughner, armed with a semiautomatic pistol fitted with an extended magazine, shot 19 people, killing six, in the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket a few miles from his parents’ home just north of this desert city.
Among the severely wounded was his apparent target, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a 40-year-old Tucson Democrat in her third term.
Interviews with Mr. Loughner’s friends and former classmates, as well as a review of his copious and bizarre online activity, describe a young man who fell into disturbing and erratic behavior.
