Monday, January 10th 2011, 4:00 AM
Miniature altar with human skull replica in backyard tent at Jared Lee Loughner's home.
Tent containing shrine in Jared Lee Loughner's
Tucson backyard.
Tucson backyard.
Hidden within a camouflage tent behind Jared Lee Loughner's home sits an alarming altar with a skull sitting atop a pot filled with shriveled oranges.
A row of ceremonial candles and a bag of potting soil lay nearby, photos reveal.
Experts on Sunday said the elements are featured in the ceremonies of a number of occult groups.
Investigators have focused on Loughner's online anti-government ramblings as the chief motivation for the shooting Saturday of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).
The discovery of the shrine raises the possibility that Loughner, 22, may have been driven by other forces. Students and faculty at Pima Community College, which he attended until his suspension last summer, said Loughner was clearly at odds with the world.
"He was one of the last kids tocome in, and he sat down and almost immediately started laughing to himself in a way that was just kind of creepy," a classmate, Alex Kotonias, 20, told USA Today.
"As soon as the teacher started going over the syllabus, he had this outburst out of nowhere, didn't even raise his hand, and started asking the teacher some sort of weird questions about whether he believed in mind control."
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| Inside Jared Lee Loughner's home (DAILY NEWS EXCLUSIVE). |
Lynda Sorenson, 52, who was in McGahee's basic algebra class with Loughner, expressed similar fears in emails to friends, The Washington Post reports.
On June 14, she wrote: "We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, 'Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird.' I sit by the door with my purse handy."
In September, college officials sent campus police officers to Loughner's home, where he lives with his parents, with a letter informing him he could not return without a mental health professional's written assurance that hispresence at college would "notpresent a danger to himself or others."
"It was obvious to everyone that Jared wasn't a normal guy,"said neighbor Anthony Woods, 19.
Loughner worked as a volunteer at the Pima Animal Care Center, where he walked dogs and cleaned cages. "He loved animals and was a good worker," said another volunteer.
Loughner had once tried to join the military but was deemed unsuitable, officials said.
mlysiak@nydailynews.com
BY Matthew Lysiak In Tucson and Lukas I. Alpert
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
What We Know About Alleged Attempted Giffords Assassin Jared Lee Loughner
Here's what we know so far: Loughner's classmates at his community college expressed worries about him, and he had at least five run ins with campus police which led to his suspension. Loughner dropped out of high school during his senior year. He was rejected from the Army, reportedly for failing a drug test. On YouTube and MySpace, he ranted against government "mind control" and illiteracy. We also know that Loughner's family were described as "loners" by neighbors.
In an interview with ABC News, Loughner's former classmate and friend Tong Shan described him as a "good person that just somehow changed so much."
In 2007, Shan and Loughner had a class together at Pima Community College, and would sometimes would spend time together outside of school. After the semester ended, they fell out of touch. When Shan next saw Loughner, in the summer of 2010, she says he acted like a completely different person.
"I don't know might have caused him to change, but from the way he was talking to me [online]... you can see. It was just questions and questions and random, weird questions that didn't go together," she said. "He would just trip out," she told ABC News. Shan described him as being 'anti-government' but said she never heard him talk about guns or violence.
Another student recalls Loughner's behavior at school as wildly inappropriate. According to the student, who took a poetry class with Loughner, Loughner made off-color statements after a girl read a poem about abortion, and mentioned terrorism.
A classmate of Loughner wrote in e-mails obtained by the Washington Post that he was a disturbed individual.
"We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I'm not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit," Lynda Sorenson, a 52-year-old wrote in an e-mail to friends on June 1. "Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon."
"We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me," Sorenson wrote in another e-mail on June 14. "He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon."
Loughner and his parents are loners who rarely spoke to their neighbors, those in the neighborhood told the Washington Post.
"You try to say something, they'd just ignore you and turn around and walk back into the house," Ron Johnson, a retiree who lives across the street from Loughner's home told the newspaper. "The kid - I never talked to him. He acted just like his parents and ignored you."
Steven Woods, another neighbor of the Loughner family, said he hadn't had an interaction with them in the seven years they lived near one another.
Poems written by Loughner, obtained by ABC News, give a glimpse into the mind of the young man. In one poem, called "Meat Head," Loughner describes making eye contact with attractive girls whom he believed were waiting for their boyfriends. "Confused look on my face of no idea what to do, deciding to copy other men's routines..." he writes. In another poem, he describes a full moon setting at a cemetery.
Pima Community College sent a letter to his parents on Oct. 7 telling them that if Loughner wished to return to the school, he would have to "obtain a mental health clearance indicating that, in the opinion of a mental health professional, his presence at the College does not present a danger to himself or others," the school said in a statement.
Loughner was suspended after college police discovered a YouTube video apparently created by Loughner in which he claimed the college was "illegal," and he dropped out, the school told ABC in a statement.
Loughner attended a "Congress In Your Corner" event in 2007 and received a letter from Giffords thanking him for attending, according to an affidavit by an FBI agent.
Fox News reported on a law enforcement memo which states that there is "no direct connection" between Loughner and the extremist American Renaissance group. But, the memo states, "strong suspicion is being directed at AmRen / American Renaissance. Suspect is possibly linked to this group. (through videos posted on his MySpace and YouTube account.). The group's ideology is anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), anti-Semitic."
Loughner, Politico points out, seems to have been influenced by David Wynn Miller, a conspiracy theorist who believes, as Loughner wrote in one of his videos, that "the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar."
But Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center writes that it's "hard to say" if Loughner is a right-wing extremist.
"When you look at the Internet material he purportedly produced, the first impression you get is that the 22-year-old now in custody for the shooting of 19 people in Tucson was completely out of his mind, or at least mildly deranged," Potok writes. "His writings will be virtually impossible for most people to understand, what with his references to unexplained numbers, his fondness for weird syllogisms, his unexplained references and his apparent semi-literacy."
"At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him," Potok writes. "Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target."
I was just advised by a friend:
"By the way, you should also report far and wide that the federal judge killed, John Roll, was a CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC George H.W. Bush appointee who was ruling against the Obama administration's federal power grab of Arizona's sovereignty. Only two days ago he ruled against their ridiculous anti-constitutional arguments, setting the stage for a complete reversal of their criminal behavior. It is true that he allowed a civil case brought by illegal aliens against a rancher to be certified but it's disingenuous for anyone to suggest he would have ruled in their favor. So when you hear idiots saying he was killed for being too pro-illegal aliens it holds no water. Gabby Giffords was a blue-dog Democrat on Obama's $%#t list. See a pattern here?"
Roll was described by his grief-stricken friend and colleague as "a conservative, values type Catholic who attended mass almost daily. When John and I first met, we discussed religion and culture at dinner. Just the two of us. I introduced him to Richard John Neuhaus's First Things, and he later subscribed."
Federal Judge: Liberal Sheriff, Media Exploiting Attack
By Jeffrey Lord on 1.10.11 @ 6:09AM
"He should be strung up."
The speaker: one very angry federal judge furious at the cynicism displayed by both Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik and the mainstream media in the shootings that took the life of one federal judge, wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and killed or wounded 17 others.
The judge, a personal friend of the murdered federal judge John Roll, declined to be cited by name but was brimming with anger at what he termed the "cynicism and downright evil" of the liberal media's "cynical attempt" to blame conservative talk radio and television for the murder of the only public official not to survive the shootings -- the conservative Catholic Roll, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush.
The judge, who assigned blame for the shootings to "a lone nut," was bitter over Dupnik's much televised departure from his job as sheriff to relate the facts of the shooting and instead start "grabbing the limelight for publicity."
Said the furious judge: "And though terribly tragic though all of this is, how ironic that the one constitutional officer to die was a conservative, Republican-appointed federal judge. Will anyone point out the hypocrisy of liberal media on that one? Or is it a fact that is just too inconvenient?"
It's not inconvenient here.
Roll was described by his grief-stricken friend and colleague as "a conservative, values type Catholic who attended mass almost daily. When John and I first met, we discussed religion and culture at dinner. Just the two of us. I introduced him to Richard John Neuhaus's First Things, and he later subscribed."
The judge's fury comes as both Sheriff Dupnik and the liberal media are trying to blame everyone from the Tea Party to Sarah Palin to, in Dupnik's words, "the crap that comes out on radio and TV" for the murders. Meaning, of course, conservative talk radio and Fox News. While Arizona Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva tries to say that Palin was responsible for the "political tone and tenor" that led to the rampage, the judge says that in fact federal judges receive threats all the time ranging from "disappointed litigants and prisoners" to "nuts." The judge believes the alleged Arizona killer, Jared Lee Loughner, repeatedly described by those who knew him as mentally unstable, was decidedly in the latter category and therefore the kind of person who poses a special threat to federal judges or any public official -- the "lone nut who doesn't make a specific threat."
The judge sees Dupnik, the man Politico identifies as "the liberal sheriff," disgracefully using his time in the tragedy's spotlight not to do his job but gain publicity by helping the liberal media exploit the killings by a "nut" to exploit a liberal political agenda -- gliding over the hard news fact that the only constitutional officer to die in the attack was a conservative Republican.
It was noted that during the controversy over the passage by Arizona of a bill enforcing federal immigration law, Dupnik sought out national media to essentially call the state's governor and legislature racists (here in the Wall Street Journal and here in the New York Daily News).
The judge's angry remarks mean one thing: it's time for plain talk.
LEFTIST POLITICAL philosophy -- whether at its Communist extremes or with its weakest American liberal strains -- is about one thing and one thing only: man's domination of other men. Control. And in the relentless drive to dominate, leftists have a brutal, well-on-the-record history of two things.
First, deliberately and willfully committing political violence in the name of a leftist cause.
Second, blaming that violence on others -- the "somebody else made me do it" defense. Or, if the violence was perpetrated by a non-political crazy -- a "lone nut" in the judge's words -- cynically ascribing this violence to the favorite leftist political target -- and yes, target is the word -- of the moment.
As far as the little 9yr old angel that was murdered:
The father of 9-year-old victim Christina made this courageous statement.
"We don't need any more restrictions put on our society."
Check it out, a TRUE patriot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Rj47lB1a-0Y
Christina recently celebrated her FIRST COMMUNION! She is surely in Heaven!
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