RA Student Shoots Congresswoman, Kills Fed Judge

[Albert Hidel]

...or something even more dangerous, like Rene Descartes.

Jared Loughner's college instructor: I was worried he might have a gun in class
By David A. Fahrenthold

A community college instructor who taught Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner was so disturbed by the student's outbursts in class that he requested Loughner's removal from the course, he told the Washington Post in an interview Sunday.

Ben McGahee, a third-year instructor at Pima Community College, taught Loughner in an elementary algebra class last summer. McGahee said that while Loughner never threatened him directly, he was concerned by his behavior.

"I always felt, you know, somewhat paranoid," McGahee said. "When I turned my back to write on the board, I would always turn back quickly--to see if he had a gun."

McGahee said he had to make several complaints before administrators finally removed Loughner.

"They just said, 'Well, he hasn't taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn't provoked anybody. He hasn't brought any weapons to class,'" McGahee recalled. "'We'll just wait until he takes that next step.'"

On his first day in class, McGahee said, Loughner yelled out a random number during a lesson, then asked the instructor a strange question. "How can you deny math instead of accepting it?" he yelled.

Other times, McGahee said, Loughner would listen to his iPod in class. On quizzes, he would answer some questions accurately, and then write nonsensical answers for others. On one, he wrote "Mayhemfest!" McGahee said he thought that was a reference to a rock-music festival: a concert tour called The Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival played in Phoenix last July.

On another test, McGahee said, Loughner wrote the words "Eat+Sleep+Brush Teeth=Math." "He just miserably failed the test," McGahee said.

Finally, several weeks into the class, McGahee said Loughner arrived and pointed to a copy of the U.S. Constitution on the wall.

"'You're violating my First Amendment right of free speech,'" McGahee recalled him saying. "That's when I went to go get the dean."

At that point, he said, a college official came to talk with Loughner, then assured McGahee that he would not return to class. "You don't have to worry about Jared anymore. We asked him to not come back to class," the official said, according to McGahee.

Lynda Sorenson, 52, another student in the class, said that Loughner was disruptive and unruly from the first day.

"There was never a time when he was in class that he was not disruptive, and he scared me. He frightened the daylights out of me," Sorenson said in a telephone interview. "I kept saying to people, 'I'm afraid he's going to come into the class with a gun.'"

Sorenson and her husband are unemployed: they had gone back to college to learn new skills for the job market. She said that Loughner's first outburst came on the first day of their class, which met four days a week for five weeks.

"The professor started talking, started teaching, and all of a sudden Jared started spouting off that this was all a fraud, and he was trying to deceive us," she said. Finally, she said, the professor told him to leave--and, after first resisting, Loughner did.

As the class went on, she said, Loughner exhibited other odd behavior: he wrote nonsensical answers on his tests, wrote on the class blackboard, and walked around and around in tight circles in the school courtyard. One day, she said, he sat in class with an odd, enormous grin on his face.

"Like he was just about to start laughing," she recalled. "And it was just--there was nothing funny. We were talking about something stupid like triangles." Finally, she said, a police officer and counselor removed him from class in the third or fourth week, and he did not return.

The school said on Saturday that Loughner was a student from 2005 to last September--several weeks after Sorenson last saw him. It said the final straw was a YouTube video Loughner had made on campus, calling the college unconstitutional. He was suspended, and agreed in October to withdraw.

Sorenson said that Loughner never threatened violence, but she felt menaced by him. She said her only previous contact with someone like that came at time when she was working in a psychiatric hospital.

By David A. Fahrenthold | January 9, 2011; 12:37 PM ET

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Profiles in courage.

Captured by a 61-year old woman and a 74-year old man. Now we see why the Army rejected him.

I'm not denegrating their bravery in any way; they truly are the real deal:

Woman Wrestled Fresh Ammo Clip From Tucson Shooter as He Tried to Reload
Patricia Maisch Hailed as One of the Heroes Who Stopped Tucson Slaughter
By KEVIN DOLAK and JUSTIN WEAVER
TUCSON, Ariz. Jan. 9, 2011

Patricia Maisch looks like a grandmother, but she is being hailed as a hero today for helping to stop alleged Tucson shooter Jared Loughner by wrestling away a fresh magazine of bullets as he tried to reload.

Maisch, 61, effectively disarmed the shooter as several men pounced on him and threw him to ground. As they struggled to hold him down, Maisch joined the scrum on the ground, clinging to the gunman's ankles.

Maisch and her fellow heroes -- identified as Bill Badger, Roger Sulzgeber and Joseph Zimudie -- stopped the carnage after 20 people were shot, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Six people died.

"[I] knew right away it was a gun... I heard a continuation of shots," Maisch told a news conference today.

Maisch, who has a crown of snow-white hair, was standing towards the back of the line to greet and snap a photo with Giffords at the "Congress in Your Corner" event at a Safeway grocery store.

Speaking to the press today, Maisch recalled how she stopped Loughner as he tried to reload his Glock 9 mm weapon.

"I could see him coming. [He] shot the lady next to me," Maisch said.

As he was shooting, she said, she was expecting to be hit and she wondered what it would feel like.

There was "lots of blood and confusion," she said.

She considered trying to run away, she said, but thought that would make her more of a target, so she laid down on the ground. But then something unexpected happened.

"Then he was next to me on the ground," she said. "The gentleman knocked him down.

"I kneeled over him. He was pulling a magazine [to reload] and I grabbed the magazine and secured that. I think the men got the gun, and I was able to get the magazine," she said.

Maisch said Badger and Sulzgeber both sat on the gunman while she held his ankles down. Police said that Zimudie helped by hanging on to Loughner's legs.

Sulzgeber was reportedly standing with his wife, third in line to meet with Giffords, while Zimudie was in the nearby Walgreens and came running out once he heard the shooting.

"I thought I would be shot. I am thankful for those two brave men," Maisch said. "I am not a hero. The other guys are. I just assisted getting the clip."

Badger, a 74-year-old retired army colonel living in Tucson, told Pottsville, Pa.'s Republican-Herald how he helped capture Loughner, and that he was grazed in the back of the head by a bullet.

The Heroes of the Tucson Shooting

"I heard the shots but I thought they were fireworks at first," Badger told the newspaper. "I wasn't sure they were shots until I actually saw the shooter, and I was sure he was really shooting bullets when I felt the sting on the back of my head."

According to Badger, who the Republican-Herald confirmed was treated for an injury at a hospital, he was the first person standing next to a row of chairs leading to Giffords when the first shots rang out.

Badger told the paper, "I turned and saw him running down the line of people on the chairs. He ran between me and the store. Someone hit him with a chair and he flinched a little. That's when I grabbed his left arm. Someone grabbed his right arm and we got him to the ground.

"The other guy put his knee into the back of his neck and I grabbed him around the throat. We held him until police got there. While we had him on the ground I saw blood running and it wasn't until then I realized it was coming from the back of my head," Badger said.

Speaking outside her home this evening, Maisch said that when she noticed that one of the men was bleeding from the head, she ran into the Safeway to get paper towels.

"I put a compress on the man's head while he was securing the shooter," she said.

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Reminds me of how often I get panhandled by dickheads with $2500 worth of tattoos. Not joint tattoos either, but the store bought ones like this dumbass has. If you can afford body art you can afford bus fare, asshole.