A one-time close friend of Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner is baffled that everyone around the college dropout looked the other way as his behaviour grew increasingly bizarre last year
Zane Gutierrez, 22, said he was among Loughner's best pals until Loughner cut himself off from his social circle in March 2010, some 10 months before the rampage for which he is charged with trying to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
And Gutierrez laments the fact that no one sought psychiatric help for a young man who rambled about alternate realities, kept himself awake for days in a quest to achieve a conscious-dream state, and once insisted, quite emphatically, that trees were blue and grass was yellow.
"If a counsellor got him, just at the time when we knew him and heard him the way he talked, they would put him up for a mandatory evaluation," said Gutierrez, who met Loughner in 2008 and spent considerable time in his company during the six months ending last March.
The gradual escalation of paranoia and erratic behavior, none of it violent or threatening, manifested itself despite Loughner's apparent lack of indulgence in drugs or alcohol, Gutierrez said.
The transformation seemed all the more remarkable for someone who once seemed so straight-laced, so grounded, that Gutierrez says he had boasted of his friendship with Loughner to his own parents.
Although the two shared an interest in guns, and occasionally ventured into the desert together to shoot at cactus, Gutierrez insists Loughner's enthusiasm for firearms was merely a hobby, and that he never spoke of or fantasized about shooting anyone.
At the time, he said, Loughner had a 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol that was smaller than the Glock he is charged with later using to gun down Giffords and 18 others.
"When I knew him, he was saving to buy that gun," said Gutierrez, who is a fine arts major with a focus in painting at Pima Community College, where Loughner was a student.
Loughner, 22, is accused of methodically opening fire with a semi-automatic pistol at a crowded political gathering outside a Tucson supermarket on January 8. Six people were killed, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl. Thirteen others were wounded, among them Giffords, who authorities say was his principal target.
She is recovering from a single bullet wound to the head at a Houston, Texas, rehabilitation hospital.
Loughner appeared in a Phoenix court on Monday and pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.
ADRIFT IN PARANOIA, DETACHMENT
Between the fall 2009 and last spring, Loughner grew increasingly detached from and suspicious of the people around him, including friends, Gutierrez recalled.
"He started thinking we were plotting against him, scamming against him. One time he called me at like 2 in the morning, and he was like, 'Are you in front of my house?' I was like, 'Dude, I'm at home. You just woke me up,'" Gutierrez said.
The unassuming Loughner started forcing himself to stay awake in an effort to experience "lucid dreaming," a trance-like state in which a person goes directly from waking to dreaming with no lapse in consciousness.
A timeline of Loughner's behaviour the night before the shooting -- when he crisscrossed Tucson's northwest side, stopping at two Wal-Marts, a Walgreens pharmacy and three convenience stores between midnight and sunrise -- is typical of the way Gutierrez remembers him.
"He got really into depriving himself of sleep ... It had to be natural. He explained this. If you use an amphetamine or something like that, as soon as it's completely out of your system, you can crash, and you're also not getting the true lucid dreaming state, because you're under the influence of a chemical or substance," he said.
Loughner is alleged to have been involved later in a series of disruptions at Pima Community College between February and September 2010 that led school administrators to bar him from campus until he could be examined and cleared to return by a psychiatric professional.
According to school officials, he chose instead to withdraw from college.
His friends knew he was having some kind of trouble, but they assumed he was going through a hard time at home and didn't want to talk about it, so they gave him what support they could, Gutierrez said.
"We'd just be here to hang out with him when he wanted to. You know, you really can't offer much, if you're not a professional or anything like that. There's not a lot you can offer as a friend besides, 'Yo, here's a place you can come chill and hang out, and no one's going to bother you.' It got to the point where he didn't even want that," he said.
In a widely distributed YouTube video narrated by Loughner, he is heard rambling about the "genocide college" that was controlling grammar and would leave him homeless.
Such talk became typical for Loughner, and friends would sometimes challenge him when he spoke that way.
"He kind of got tired of us, like, checking him on things he was trying to say and being weird and stuff. I think he just got tired of hearing it from us, and he just cut us off," Gutierrez said.
When Gutierrez last had contact with him, Loughner still appeared clean-cut, well-groomed and dressed in Eddie Bauer.
Then in July, Gutierrez saw him in a grocery store parking lot. He was wearing camouflage pants and combat boots and his head was shaved.
"Jared was a good kid who was sick, and he just went crazy. That's what happened, and if there's going to be any fingers pointed anywhere, it's that someone didn't haul his ass in and get him evaluated. Whether that responsibility lies on the parents, the school on the state, whatever it may be, it didn't happen," he said.
Shooting suspect's disturbing decline
A one-time close friend of Arizona shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner is baffled that everyone around the college dropout looked the other way as his behaviour grew increasingly bizarre last year
Zane Gutierrez, 22, said he was among Loughner's best pals until Loughner cut himself off from his social circle in March 2010, some 10 months before the rampage for which he is charged with trying to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
And Gutierrez laments the fact that no one sought psychiatric help for a young man who rambled about alternate realities, kept himself awake for days in a quest to achieve a conscious-dream state, and once insisted, quite emphatically, that trees were blue and grass was yellow.
"If a counsellor got him, just at the time when we knew him and heard him the way he talked, they would put him up for a mandatory evaluation," said Gutierrez, who met Loughner in 2008 and spent considerable time in his company during the six months ending last March.
The gradual escalation of paranoia and erratic behavior, none of it violent or threatening, manifested itself despite Loughner's apparent lack of indulgence in drugs or alcohol, Gutierrez said.
The transformation seemed all the more remarkable for someone who once seemed so straight-laced, so grounded, that Gutierrez says he had boasted of his friendship with Loughner to his own parents.
Although the two shared an interest in guns, and occasionally ventured into the desert together to shoot at cactus, Gutierrez insists Loughner's enthusiasm for firearms was merely a hobby, and that he never spoke of or fantasized about shooting anyone.
At the time, he said, Loughner had a 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol that was smaller than the Glock he is charged with later using to gun down Giffords and 18 others.
"When I knew him, he was saving to buy that gun," said Gutierrez, who is a fine arts major with a focus in painting at Pima Community College, where Loughner was a student.
Loughner, 22, is accused of methodically opening fire with a semi-automatic pistol at a crowded political gathering outside a Tucson supermarket on January 8. Six people were killed, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl. Thirteen others were wounded, among them Giffords, who authorities say was his principal target.
She is recovering from a single bullet wound to the head at a Houston, Texas, rehabilitation hospital.
Loughner appeared in a Phoenix court on Monday and pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.
ADRIFT IN PARANOIA, DETACHMENT
Between the fall 2009 and last spring, Loughner grew increasingly detached from and suspicious of the people around him, including friends, Gutierrez recalled.
"He started thinking we were plotting against him, scamming against him. One time he called me at like 2 in the morning, and he was like, 'Are you in front of my house?' I was like, 'Dude, I'm at home. You just woke me up,'" Gutierrez said.
The unassuming Loughner started forcing himself to stay awake in an effort to experience "lucid dreaming," a trance-like state in which a person goes directly from waking to dreaming with no lapse in consciousness.
A timeline of Loughner's behaviour the night before the shooting -- when he crisscrossed Tucson's northwest side, stopping at two Wal-Marts, a Walgreens pharmacy and three convenience stores between midnight and sunrise -- is typical of the way Gutierrez remembers him.
"He got really into depriving himself of sleep ... It had to be natural. He explained this. If you use an amphetamine or something like that, as soon as it's completely out of your system, you can crash, and you're also not getting the true lucid dreaming state, because you're under the influence of a chemical or substance," he said.
Loughner is alleged to have been involved later in a series of disruptions at Pima Community College between February and September 2010 that led school administrators to bar him from campus until he could be examined and cleared to return by a psychiatric professional.
According to school officials, he chose instead to withdraw from college.
His friends knew he was having some kind of trouble, but they assumed he was going through a hard time at home and didn't want to talk about it, so they gave him what support they could, Gutierrez said.
"We'd just be here to hang out with him when he wanted to. You know, you really can't offer much, if you're not a professional or anything like that. There's not a lot you can offer as a friend besides, 'Yo, here's a place you can come chill and hang out, and no one's going to bother you.' It got to the point where he didn't even want that," he said.
In a widely distributed YouTube video narrated by Loughner, he is heard rambling about the "genocide college" that was controlling grammar and would leave him homeless.
Such talk became typical for Loughner, and friends would sometimes challenge him when he spoke that way.
"He kind of got tired of us, like, checking him on things he was trying to say and being weird and stuff. I think he just got tired of hearing it from us, and he just cut us off," Gutierrez said.
When Gutierrez last had contact with him, Loughner still appeared clean-cut, well-groomed and dressed in Eddie Bauer.
Then in July, Gutierrez saw him in a grocery store parking lot. He was wearing camouflage pants and combat boots and his head was shaved.
"Jared was a good kid who was sick, and he just went crazy. That's what happened, and if there's going to be any fingers pointed anywhere, it's that someone didn't haul his ass in and get him evaluated. Whether that responsibility lies on the parents, the school on the state, whatever it may be, it didn't happen," he said.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Register (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
Trending
Latest Videos