Arizona Congresswoman Shot dead at point-blank range moments ago~!

[Charles Drago]

Solidarity, Ed.

[Ed Jewett]

Arizona massacre suspect: 'I planned ahead'

By the CNN Wire Staff
January 9, 2011 -- Updated 2310 GMT (0710 HKT)




Who is Jared Loughner?



STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Jared Lee Loughner faces federal counts in Arizona slayings
  
• Loughner isn't talking with investigators, sheriff says
  
• A cab driver sought as a "person of interest" has been cleared, source says
  

Follow the latest developments on CNN's "This Just In" blog. Share your accounts, images from the shooting with CNN iReport. For more information visit CNN affiliates KGUN, KOLD, KVOA, KPHO and KMSB.
Read the charges against Jared Lee Loughner (PDF)
(CNN) -- The suspect in the weekend massacre in Arizona scrawled "my assassination" and "I planned ahead" on an envelope found in his home, according to court documents released Sunday.
The details were part of criminal complaint filed against 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, the Tucson man now charged in Saturday's bloodbath at a supermarket where U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was hosting an open house for constituents. Investigators found a letter from the congresswoman in a safe at the house where Loughner lived with his parents, thanking him for attending a similar 2007 event, a federal agent's affidavit states.
"Also recovered in the safe was an envelope with handwriting on the envelope stating 'I planned ahead,' and 'my assassination' and the name 'Giffords,' along with what appears to be Loughner's signature," the affidavit states.
The shootings killed six people, including U.S. District Judge John Roll and Giffords aide Gabe Zimmerman. Among the 14 wounded were Giffords, who was shot through the skull, and two other members of her staff.



Alleged shooter to be formally charged



Doctors: Giffords able to communicate



Timeline of Arizona mass killing



Gallery: Shooting at Giffords event

RELATED TOPICS

• Arizona
  
• Shootings
  

Prosecutors filed two first-degree murder counts, two attempted murder counts and one count of attempting to kill a member of Congress against Loughner on Sunday. Those counts involve only victims who worked for the federal government, but state prosecutors also could bring charges in the remaining cases.
The murder count involving Roll states the judge, like Gifford and her aides, was conducting official duties at the time. According to the affidavit, Roll came down to Tucson from Phoenix to discuss the volume of federal cases in Arizona with Giffords and had talked with one of her aides, Ron Barber, before the shooting.
Loughner is scheduled to make an initial appearance before a federal magistrate in Phoenix on Monday, prosecutors said. A federal public defender known for handling high-profile cases, Judy Clarke, has been appointed to represent him, a federal judicial source told CNN.
Clarke previously defended the "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, and assisted in the case of confessed al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui.
Meanwhile, investigators have found, questioned and cleared a man they had sought as a "person of interest" after the killings. the FBI announced. The man was cab driver who dropped Loughner off at the Safeway where Giffords' "Congress on Your Corner" event was being held, a law enforcement official said Sunday.
Loughner has invoked his right against self-incrimination and is not talking with investigators, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said. The suspect was suspended from a Tucson community college in October after what the school said were multiple run-ins with campus police that led to his suspension.
"There's reason to believe this individual may have a mental issue," Dupnik told reporters Saturday night.
Pima Community College warned Loughner in a follow-up letter that to return to campus, he had to present a doctor's note stating that his presence would not be "a danger to himself or others."
Online, he railed against government "mind control" and illiteracy in YouTube and MySpace postings. He tried to enlist in the Army in 2008, but was rejected for reasons the service said it could not disclose.
Roll is the fourth federal judge killed since 1979, when District Judge John Wood was slain in a contract killing outside his Texas home. In 1988, District Judge Richard Daronco of New York was killed by the father of a plaintiff whose case the judge had dismissed; and in 1989, Circuit Judge Robert Vance was killed by a mail bomb sent to his Alabama home by a man prosecutors said had a grudge against the appellate court on which Vance sat.
In addition, the husband and mother of District Judge Joan Lefkow were killed in their Chicago home in 2005. A man who committed suicide two weeks later in Wisconsin left a note confessing to the killings, blaming a judgment against him in a malpractice case for the loss of his house, job and family, police said.
CNN's Bill Mears and Jessica Yellin contributed to this report.


Contains embedded media...



http://edition.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/01/09/...stigation/

[Charles Drago]

Jared LEE Loughner, pronounced LONER.

LEE, LONER.

The people who make up these names mean to send a message.

Jack

Oswald Lewinter, anyone?

[Ed Jewett]

Giffords' brain benefits from benign route of bullet


By Peter Henderson
TUCSON, Ariz | Sun Jan 9, 2011 3:11pm EST

TUCSON, Ariz (Reuters) - Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords suffered what her doctors on Sunday called a "devastating wound" to her brain in a point-blank shooting, but the bullet's relatively benign trajectory bodes well for her recovery.
For doctors at the University Medical Center in Tucson, the fact that the bullet did not cross from one hemisphere to the other nor through the center of the brain was crucial to Giffords' brain "preservation" before her two-hour surgery on Saturday.
"Because of that, congresswoman Giffords is able to communicate with us this morning through following simple commands," said Dr. Michael Lemole, head of neurosurgery.
A suspect, identified as Jared Lee Loughner, opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol at a meeting held by Giffords outside a Tucson supermarket on Saturday, killing six people including a 9-year-old girl. Fourteen people were wounded.
Giffords, a 40-year-old Democratic lawmaker, did not have severe bleeding in the brain nor large sections of devitalized brain tissue, Lemole said.
But doctors insisted it was nevertheless a brutal injury.
"This wasn't a little grazing wound to the brain. This was a devastating wound that traveled the entire length of the brain on the left side," said Dr. Peter Rhee, trauma medical director at UMC.
The bullet appeared to have entered the back of the head and exited above Giffords' eyebrow, he added.
Twenty-four hours after the shooting, Giffords remains in critical condition in the intensive care unit with half her skull removed to permit the brain to swell. Rhee said brain swelling was her biggest threat.
She can't yet open her eyes and she can't speak because she is on a ventilator, but she can squeeze a hand and hold up fingers, doctors said.
"We take those type of simple commands for granted, but they imply a very high level of functioning in the brain," said Lemole.
In most people, the left side of the brain controls their right-side strength sensation and their speech function, the ability to both speak and understand speech.
Rhee said Giffords will suffer some degeneration of brain cells and matter.
"This is very early in her course, we don't know what the deficits will be in the future," Rhee said.
While cautiously optimistic, the doctors could not conceal their relief about the area of the brain that was hit. "There are obvious areas of the brain that are less tolerant to intrusion," said Lemole.
And Rhee noted the ability of the body to permit brain trauma victims like Giffords to recover and lead meaningful lives.
"With a penetrating brain injury it is always surprising to the lay people that you think any bullet going into any brain means instant death," Rhee said. "But there is a lot of capacity that the human body has to compensate."


http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7082UY20110109

[Jack White]

Jared LEE Loughner, pronounced LONER.

LEE, LONER.

The people who make up these names mean to send a message.

Jack

Oswald Lewinter, anyone?

What ever became of Oswaldo Ortiz and Raymond Lee Harvey?

Jack

[Peter Lemkin]

As might be expected, there are already articles by psychologists and psychiatrists saying how they think the shooter was schizophrenic. Expect a diminished responsibility due to mental illness defense. While I don't doubt he might have had some mental problems [natural or induced], but it seems clear from what I've heard he knew right from wrong and was functional in society. If, as CNN is reporting, that he is not cooperating or talking to investigators, it tells me he's been professionally prepped by someone on how to resist interrogation. Few 22 year olds with his background would not talk to the police investigators - at least about the basics and maybe if he did it alone or not; pre-planned it or not, etc. But, one look at that last photo he left with the book on American history with an image of the White House and Presidents on top - and his gun he used on top of both is, IMO proof ENOUGH of premeditation!!! along with his last statements and posts...and hardly the usual acts of someone with schizophrenia. These shootings are all formulaic. I see, here, most see the patterns, but for the MSM and the average Sheeple they are all unique and done by some pathetic lone nut....to me they seem like clones.

And where is the 50-something man.....?! They going to forget about him?

[Peter Lemkin]

Guardian's take:

Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old resident of Tucson identified by police as the gunman in Saturday's rampage, left a series of indications revealing the mentally unstable state of his mind and the extreme rightwing causes he supported in the run up to the tragedy.

Just hours before he embarked on the shooting, he posted a message on his MySpace page saying: "Goodbye friends. Dear friends, please don't be mad at me." He also posted a YouTube video of written slides called My Final Thoughts. In it, he wrote: "Jared Loughner is in need of sleep."

In a series of videos, he gave a rambling account of obsessions and paranoias that appeared to be troubling him with increasing intensity up to the catastrophe. They included references to conscious dreaming, or "conscience dreaming" as he called it, a process of directing one's own dreams that he is thought to have practised. Another was a belief in the gold and silver standard of currency a favourite topic of the rightwing of American politics that is regularly propounded by the Fox News commentator Glenn Beck.

The tone of Loughner's rantings is almost exclusively conservative and anti-government, with echoes of the populist campaigning of the Tea Party movement. "Don't trust the government listener!" he said in one video, accusing Washington of mind control and brainwashing.

The US constitution, the bible of the Tea Parties, features heavily, as does the suggestion that the federal government is acting against the text. "You don't have to accept the federalist laws. Read the United States of America constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws."

There is also a strong streak of implicit violence in the postings.

He linked to his favourite video, America: Your Last Memory in a Terrorist Country, which shows a ghostly figure burning the US flag in the desert to a heavy metal song that repeatedly chants "Let the bodies hit the floor!"

He referred to people calling him a terrorist and wrote "a terrorist is a person who employs terror or terrorism, especially as a political weapon."

Until 4 October, Loughner was a student at Pima community college in Tucson, but he was suspended after a number of inappropriate acts.

The college said he had five contacts with the campus police for having disrupted classrooms and the library. In a YouTube video posted on 29 September, Loughner accused the college of fraud and of being illegal under the US constitution.

After Loughner quit the college, the institution made clear that, if he wished to return, he would have to undergo a mental health check to ensure that his presence did not "present a danger to himself or others".

Fellow students at Pima told local newspapers that he had displayed troubled behaviour. He was reported to be isolated and withdrawn and used to laugh out loud in the poetry class in a way that made others feel uneasy.

"He disrupted class frequently with nonsensical outbursts," Lynda Sorenson, who shared his mathematics class last year, told the Arizona Daily Star.

He lived with his parents on the northwest side of Tucson, a few miles away from the shooting scene. His difficulties began relatively early, with one incident recorded by police of a drug violation while he was at high school. He tried to enlist in the US military in Tucson but was turned away for unspecified reasons.

Arizona prides itself on its loose gun laws but there is still shock that a man with such a prolonged history of erratic and disturbing outbursts was able to legally acquire the gun he used in his rampage. The shootings were carried out with a Glock 19 semiautomatic, with a magazine of 30 bullets.

[Peter Lemkin]

sorry....wrong thread....looking my marbles.

[Peter Lemkin]

Christina Taylor Green: Arizona Shooting Claims Life Of 9-Year-Old Born On 9/11

Nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green was among those killed in a tragic shooting in Tucson, Ariz. on Saturday.

The incident occurred at a public event held by U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in her home district. Local NBC affiliate KVOA reports that family members say Christina, who was a student at Mesa Verde Elementary School, went to the event because she wanted to learn more about the world of politics.

The Arizona Republic reports:
A neighbor was going to the Giffords event and invited Christina along because she thought she would enjoy it, said her uncle, Greg Segalini.

Christina had just been elected to the student council at her school. The event, held outside a Safeway supermarket north of Tucson, was an opportunity for constituents to meet Giffords and talk about any concerns they had related to the federal government.

Featured in the book Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11, Christina was described by family members as a vibrant individual and someone who was excited about life, according to KVOA. The local outlet reports they called her "the best daughter in the world."

Segalini told the Republic that his niece was involved many extracurricular activities ranging from ballet to baseball. KVOA notes that she loved the sport, as well as horseback riding and swimming.

"She was real special and real sweet," he said.
She also loved animals and was a passionate dancer who loved ballet, hip-hop, jazz and gymnastics and was the only girl on her Canyon del Oro Little League baseball team, "The Pirates." She played second base.

Christina came from a family of baseball players. Her grandfather, former Major League pitcher Dallas Green, was team manager for the Philadelphia Phillies when they won the World Series in 1980.

Christina's mother Roxanna Green appeared on MSNBC Sunday morning to talk about her daughter's death.

"I just want her memory to live on, she's a face of hope, a face of change," she said. "Stop the violence, stop the hatred."

[Paul Rigby]

IS DAILY KOS INVOLVED IN ARIZONA MURDERS?

"My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!" eerie Daily Kos hit piece on Gabrielle Giffords just two days before assassination attempt; repeated use of word "dead" in relation to Giffords just 48 hours before she and a dozen others were fired upon.

UPDATE: Daily Kos scrubs "dead to me" thread but screengrabs document everything

http://hillbuzz.org/2011/01/08/my-congre...pt-on-her/