How Jared Loughner Changed: The View from His Schools

If Jared Lee Loughner suffers from mental illness, there was probably no single moment when things went wrong, when something snapped. The precise inception of the pathology would not have been discernible; rather, psychoses (and most other serious mental illnesses) tend to grow and evolve, noticeable only in freeze-frames of a person’s life. Indeed, the image of Loughner perceived by friends and associates would vary depending on the moment in time they came in contact with him.

Kylie Smith is one of the few people in Tucson, Ariz., to see the arc of Loughner’s life, from preschool to prison. The two became friends at the age of 4, when they would sit in the police cruiser her father drove (he was a sheriff’s deputy) and play with all the buttons: the radio, the flashing lights, even the siren. Smith, now 22 and working at Sears, says she lost touch with Loughner after he dropped out of high school in 2006. But they reconnected at a party in 2008, and she was stunned by how much he had changed. “He seemed out of it, like he was somewhere else,” she recalls. “I could tell he wasn’t just drunk, and he wasn’t just high.”

(See the six warning signs of Jared Loughner that people missed.)

“The Jared that I know is the most kindhearted, well-behaved human being who just seems to have gotten lost,” Smith tells TIME. “I don’t know who he is anymore. I saw his mug shot today, and I don’t know who that person is.”

(See the face of Jared Loughner on the day he appeared in court.)

Smith and Loughner met as children, and she says she found him to be “very quiet,” adding, “He kept to himself and didn’t have very many friends. But he seemed pretty normal.” He joined the band, playing saxophone, something he would do in elementary and junior high school and for his first two years at Mountain View High School. “He was still this nice, quiet kid until then,” Smith says. “He kept to himself, but when you’d talk to him, he was really funny and normal. He was a really smart kid — we all thought he was the nerdy guy.”

(See TIME’s complete coverage of the Tucson massacre.)

Loughner was social in a big school — the graduating class at Mountain View had more than 500 students, although Loughner wouldn’t be in it — where most kids were “either popular or not,” says Ashley Beager, 21, another classmate. Loughner was one of the few who fell in between those two cohorts, neither popular nor a loner. He ate with the same knot of male friends during lunch. “He was always really nice to me,” Beager says. “We would always joke around and laugh — he never came off negative at all.”

But things took a turn, Smith remembers, when their sophomore year came to an end and his circle of friends seemed to change. “He used to hang out with the band geeks, or whatever you want to call them,” she says. “Then all of a sudden, he’s hanging out with the potheads at our school inside the tunnel at Mountain View.” The tunnel was an outdoor corridor off the main courtyard where the local goth kids would gather whenever they had a chance. “We called them the goth kids because a lot of them wore black,” she says, adding that Loughner became “borderline goth.”

In fact, even though he and his pals wore baggy pants and T-shirts to class, he never did go fully goth. “He was like gothic, but not completely, because he didn’t wear the black makeup,” Beager says. “And he’d participate in class — he wasn’t quiet, just sitting in the corner.” But there were mood swings. “There were times when he would just hang out by himself, and you could tell he didn’t want to be bothered by people,” she says. And one more thing: “He never talked about his family life, at all.”

Smith noticed more changes. “He got involved with marijuana, and he was really into psychedelics — hard drugs like mushrooms, acid — probably at the end of his junior year,” she remembers. Then one day he simply stopped going to school, allegedly after drinking himself into a stupor. “He had gotten into the party scene, and I remember he got alcohol poisoning,” she says. “I don’t know if he was partying or if he was drinking by himself — I just remember one day he wasn’t at school, and I never saw him again in high school.” That was in 2006. The changes in Loughner didn’t especially spook Smith. “I thought it was a normal part of growing up,” she says. “I mean, everybody was changing at the time. Everybody was trying to find their little niche.” Beager agrees. “He’d always talk about South Park, and about smoking weed and partying and getting drunk,” she says. “But in high school, that was kind of what everyone talked about.”

See TIME’s photo-essay “Mourning the Victims of the Arizona Shooting.”

Smith reconnected with Loughner at a not-terribly-wild house party in 2008. “The music wasn’t too loud — we were trying to keep the cops away because we were all underage,” says Smith. “I was so surprised to see him, so I went up to him and gave him a hug. I asked him how he’d been — just small talk. But he seemed really out of it. He said he was trying to get his life back on track, but from the way he looked and the way he acted, it really didn’t seem that he was.” She recalls thinking that there was something else going on. “He was really thinking about something else — he wouldn’t really look at me, and when he did, it was maybe for a couple of seconds, and then he’d look somewhere else,” she says. “It looked like he was always thinking about something.”

She saw him several more times after the party, including at their local YMCA gym. “It was really weird to see him at the gym,” Smith says. “He’d be on the treadmill, running forever. I just figured he wanted to be fit to join the military.” Smith last spoke with Loughner last summer. She knew he had been trying to join the Army (and she was interested in his experience because she wants to become a combat medic), so she asked him about the enlistment process. “He told me he couldn’t get in,” she says, “because his eyes were really bad.” Loughner, in fact, had been rejected in December 2008 after admitting to marijuana use.

(See Jared Loughner’s experience with marijuana and the military.)

The fall of 2010 saw a dramatic downturn in Loughner’s behavior. He was enrolled in Pima Community College but was no longer a quiet presence in class. Mathematics professor Ben McGahee says Loughner was the strangest student he ever taught. “It was the first time I ever had a student like Jared in the classroom,” McGahee tells TIME. “It shocked me. On the surface, at first, he seemed like a normal guy, until he started making some disruptive comments that were pretty random and senseless — he’d talk about denying math instead of accepting it. But he started making students feel uncomfortable from the first day. He had this hysterical kind of laugh, laughing to himself, and had this bright red complexion and kind of shaking and trembling, as if he was under the influence of drugs.”

Loughner’s actions unnerved up to a third of McGahee’s 15 to 20 students, so much so that they complained to the professor following the opening class in basic algebra. “The students were very concerned after the first day,” he says. “I must have had three to five students come up to me after class saying, ‘Jared concerns me a lot.’ One lady in the back of the classroom said she was scared for her life, literally.”

Loughner attended 10 or 11 of the first 12 class meetings, McGahee says. “About the fourth week, he was officially kicked out,” he says. “The straw that broke the camel’s back was him talking about the First Amendment rights: ‘Hey — you see that thing on the wall?’ ” McGahee quotes Loughner as saying in one outburst. ” ‘That’s the U.S. Constitution, and you’ve broken my First Amendment rights.’ He felt very offended because of that.” But that gave McGahee a legitimate reason to throw Loughner out of class. “Rules are rules, and they are listed on my syllabus. I told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about anything outside of math. Since it was a math class, I told him, ‘You cannot do your inane ramblings here.’ “

It wouldn’t be too long before he left the college completely. Says McGahee: “I wish the timeline had been a little bit earlier — that he had gotten kicked out earlier — but policy is policy, and since he didn’t violate any rules, didn’t bring any weapons to class, he didn’t hurt anybody, nor himself, that meant [school administrators] couldn’t take any further action to kick him out.” But Loughner’s actions had become so troublesome — combined with an online video in which he described the school as illegal — that, on Sept. 29, a pair of police officers delivered a letter suspending him to the home he shared with his parents. Instead of fighting the suspension, the school says, Loughner simply dropped out.

In November, he legally bought a Glock 19 9mm. And on Jan. 8, he took a taxi to the Safeway at La Toscana mall, where Representative Gabrielle Giffords was holding a town-hall meeting. Ashley Buysman, 22, who was a classmate of Loughner’s from the first grade until he dropped out of Mountain View, heard about the shooting when she got a phone call from her mother about noon on Jan. 8. “She told me that [the shooter] was my age, and told me his name, and asked me if I knew him,” Buysman says quietly at the recollection. “I said, ‘Yes — we went to school together since elementary school,’ and it just blew my mind.”

Loughner’s rise and fall has upset Smith. “It’s a lot to take in when you grow up with somebody and you find out that they’re a mass murderer — it’s really scary,” she says. “I never would have thought, sitting in my dad’s cop car with him playing with the siren, that he’d try to kill somebody.”

See environmental influences on violent psychotics.

See pictures of Jared Loughner’s world.