With each passing day, more tidbits of infornation is coming out about the Arizona mass murderer, Jared Lee Loughner. The latest is from a former sweetie.The Daily Mail reports that high school sweetheart of the Arizona gunman has said his descent into madness began after she broke up with him.
Kelsey Hawkes described how Jared Loughner, whom she dated for a year in 2005 when she was 15, turned from a normal person into a ‘psycho’ when she ended their relationship.
The student claimed Loughner ‘fell apart’ when she said she wanted to move on and looked like he had ‘nothing to live for’.
Over the following months she watched in dismay as her former love began drinking and taking drugs before cutting himself off from their mutual friends.
His warped journey is said to have reached its terrible climax last week when he opened fire at a meeting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, seriously injuring her and killing six others.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Miss Hawkes, 21, said: ‘My breaking up with him was not the cause of him going off the rails but it was definitely the start of it.
‘Something changed in him, he was not the same person when I told him it was over.
'I remember his face clearly – he just looked like he had nothing to live for. It was my first relationship and it was his first relationship.
‘He was definitely in love with me but I’m not sure if I could say I was in love with him – it was typical teenage stuff.
‘Jared used to care about everything, his grades, school, his friends. That was when Jared was a normal person. It all stopped when we broke up.’
She added: ‘There was never any sign of that when we were going out, I would not have dated a weirdo.’
Miss Hawkes said the couple met in 2004 – when she was 15 and he was 16 – at a college American football game while both were studying at Mountain View High School in Tucson, Arizona.
Although he was in the year above, the pair bonded over shared interests such as rock music.
She said: ‘We clicked and we hung out, we did our homework together, we went to the movies. Typical teenage romance stuff.’
Miss Hawkes, who lives in Tucson, near the site where Loughner carried out his plot, said she learned her ex-boyfriend was the mass killer when she got a call from her sister.
‘I had to go home from work and I cried for the rest of the day,’ she said. ‘We had such an ordinary high school relationship that to think of him like that just blows my mind.’
Meanwhile, police revealed today that 22-year-old Loughner was stopped by a wildlife officer at 7.30am - under three hours before he allegedly opened fire.
The officer took Loughner's driver's license and vehicle registration information but found no outstanding warrants on Loughner or his vehicle, the Arizona Game and Fishing Department said. He was let off without a warning.
It's the latest evidence of Loughner's busy morning before police say he shot and killed six and wounded more than a dozen at a Tucson grocery store.
More details here
