I en profil av mördaren Loughner som Washington Post publicerar idag kommer det fram fler detaljer om vem han var och vad som kanske låg bakom.
Many teenagers try on different identities, experiment with new friends, and explore intellectual and emotional frontiers. Friends say Loughner’s sophomore year was a whirlwind of change. He left behind his passion of the past few years – he stopped playing sax. He found a new love – his first real girlfriend. He lost that love, changed his look, switched friends, discovered new interests and seemed to drift off into a world of ideas that friends found odd, irrational, disturbing.
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In the spring of his junior year, police were called to school again when Loughner showed up ”extremely intoxicated” after drinking about a third of a bottle of vodka. ”He drank the alcohol because he was very upset as his father yelled at him,” the police report said.
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During his late high school years and thereafter, Loughner moved through a blur of entry-level jobs at chain stores and restaurants – Red Robin, Mandarin Grill, Quiznos, Eddie Bauer.
”He absolutely hated Red Robin,” recalled Montanaro, who also worked there. ”He couldn’t stand the people who worked there or the customers.” One night, Loughner, then busing tables, walked off the job. ”He just told me he couldn’t take it anymore,” Montanaro said.
In an online forum, Loughner called his time at Red Robin a ”terrible situation. Mental breakdown.”
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Loughner was arrested twice on minor charges, in 2007 for possession of a small amount of marijuana and a pipe, and a year later, for defacing a stop sign. Both cases were dismissed after Loughner completed a diversion program, but the arrests proved a lasting stain.
Military officials say the drug charge was the reason they rejected Loughner’s enlistment application. And Loughner complained that employers wanted nothing to do with him because of it.
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By this time, Loughner had a growing fascination with dreams and alternative realities. He believed in lucid or conscious dreaming, the idea that you could consciously enter your own dream and change the path of its characters. He loved the 2001 movie ”Waking Life,” in which a young man walks in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity.
Loughner’s favorite writer was Philip K. Dick, whose science-fiction tales travel a mystical path in which omnipotent governments and businesses are the bad guys and the average man is often lost in an identity-shattering swirl of paranoia, schizophrenia and questions about whether the universe and the individual are real or part of some vast conspiracy.