The young man who shot a congresswoman

TUSCON, Arizona - On Saturday morning, Jared Lee Loughner loaded 30 bullets into the magazine of a Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol. Then he drove to a branch of Safeway in the Catalina Foothills, a prosperous Tucson neighbourhood five miles from the family home he shared with his parents, Amy and Randy.

Shortly after 10am, Loughner walked up to a crowd meeting their Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, and opened fire. Within minutes, six bystanders lay dead or dying, and 12 others had been wounded. Giffords, his intended target, was rushed to hospital, barely clinging to life.

If everything had gone to plan, Loughner would no longer be around. His MySpace page, updated hours earlier, included a "goodbye friends" message, which implored readers, "Please don't be mad at me." But Loughner never did turn that 9mm handgun on himself. Instead, two bystanders tackled the skinny 22-year-old and held him on the pavement until police arrived. He was last night at the Pima County Sheriff's Office, refusing to speak with interrogators who were trying to find what motivated his awful killing spree, and who - if anyone - helped him carry it out.

The events which led to that Safeway car park are still being investigated, and its twists and turns remain unmapped. But we know, already, that Loughner's profile threw up many red flags. An unemployed loner with a drug habit and what police call "a mental issue", he is reported to have previously made death threats and had entered paranoid postings on social networking sites.

Neighbours on Soledad Avenue, an unremarkable street populated by blue-collar workers and small-business owners, describe the Loughner family as the local "hippies", who would sit on folded chairs on the porch. Their untidy habits had led to fallings-out, and at least one neighbour moved away in protest.

"There'd often be three or four people sitting out there smoking. It's not the kind of thing you'd like to see in your neighbourhood, " Roger Whithed told The Independent, adding that Randy would spend evenings repairing old Chevy Camaro sports cars on the lawn.

"Since getting out of high school, you could tell that Jared had become disillusioned with life and having to take on responsibility, " added Whithed, 52, who has lived three doors away for six years. "He never looked like the sort of person who could hold down a job. You'd see him walking around the neighbourhood and think, 'That's not someone I really want to know.' He was just a little rough around the edges. "

Younger neighbours knew Jared, who lived on Soledad Avenue his entire life. He attended nearby Thornydale Elementary and Mountain View High, and was occasionally bullied. "My sister Jessica was in his chemistry class, and says he was a creep," Jake Richardson, 18, told The Independent. "He'd sit there and stare at people, and occasionally say weird, quite opinionated stuff. You'd see him walking dogs around the neighbourhood, muttering to himself. "

He was a heavy smoker of marijuana and was rumoured to have sampled LSD. "His parents were very laid-back, like hippies, " said Jesse Martinez, 17. "They were live-and-let-live people, but not exactly in a good way. " After leaving school, Loughner attempted to join the military, but was turned down by recruiters. He took some classes at local community colleges, but never graduated. And in 2007, he was arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia. Two years later, he faced an unspecified "local charge". Both times, charges were eventually dropped after he completed diversion programmes.

The crucial question is now whether Loughner's killing spree was a random act by a paranoid madman, or whether he was in any way motivated by the hostile tone of contemporary politics.

The videos he uploaded to YouTube on 15 December, two weeks after purchasing his Glock from the local gun shop, tell a mixed story, but certainly feature anti-government rhetoric such as is often spouted by elements within the Tea Party movement; his fretting about the US constitution, and hostility to federal control of education, also mirror two of the right-wing movement's obsessions.

Yet Loughner may ultimately be impossible to pigeon hole. He was, after all, hostile to organised religion, and in one YouTube video burned a US flag (which would hardly sit well among the Tea Party faithful). The political allegiances of the 50-year-old male second suspect - rumoured to be an uncle of Loughner - remain unknown. And given the apparent ease with which this psychologically disturbed young man was able to purchase his deadly weapon, many will wonder if his killing spree was in any case just an accident waiting to happen.

- INDEPENDENT