The young man charged with the shooting of a congresswoman that stunned the United States posted essays that were barely coherent but focused ruthlessly on his goal of meeting her, officials said on Sunday.
As Americans asked if 22-year-old Jared Loughner had a political motive for Saturday’s bloodbath, early accounts from officials and acquaintances depicted a troubled and lonely man who may have suffered from mental problems.
A picture in the yearbook of his high school in Tucson, Arizona showed a shaggy-haired boy allowing a small smile. Classmates recounted a steady downward spiral until last year he was kicked out of a community college.
“I think he slowly descended in a psychotic break. Something in him snapped. He wasn’t always like this,” Caitie Parker, who went to high school with Mr Loughner, wrote on the micro-blogging service Twitter.
Ms Parker remembered Mr Loughner agreeing with left-wing views and enjoying the punk band Anti-Flag. But she said he knew him several years ago and recalled that he had become fond of discussing prophecies about 2012 when, according to some interpretations of Mayan prophecy, the world will end.
Mr Loughner’s postings on the internet reveal a fascination with hardline ideology as he listed Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf among his favourite books.
His statements often took the form of logic exercises, posing an idea and then offering a conclusion. He frequently spoke of creating a new currency.
“You’re not distributing your new currency lethally to people. Thus, you’re distributing your new currency non-lethally to people,” he wrote on the micro-blogging site YouTube.
In another posting, he wrote: “The majority of people who reside in District 8 are illiterate – hilarious. I don’t control your English grammar structure, but you control your English grammar structure.”
He said that his favourite activity is “conscience dreaming” and declared: “My ambition is for informing conscience dreamers about a new currency. In a few days, you know I’m conscience dreaming!”
Prosecutors said Mr Loughner, armed with a Glock automatic pistol, shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head on Saturday as she met her constituents at a routine meet-and-greet at a suburban supermarket. Six others died, including a nine-year-old girl and a federal judge.
It was not the first time he sought out Ms Giffords, a centrist lawmaker from President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.
Investigators searched Mr Loughner’s modest family home in the desert city and found a letter from Ms Giffords dating from August 2007 thanking him for attending a public meet-ing similar to Saturday’s one, according to the charge sheet.
Found in a safe along with the letter was an envelope marked “I planned ahead,” “My assassination” and “Giffords” written by hand, as well as what appeared to be Mr Loughner’s signature, the affidavit said.
In a later interview with Fox News, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik quoted from another letter Mr Loughner wrote in which “he indicated that he was going to kill that ‘bleeping’ lady.”