A woman who says she dated Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner for a year told a British newspaper that he started to go "off the rails" after she broke up with him.
that Loughner, who is accused of killing six people and wounding 13, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was a normal person during their relationship in 2005.
She claimed that Loughner appeared as if he had "nothing to live for," the newspaper said, when she broke up with him.
Hawkes said he then began cutting himself off from mutual friends and taking drugs and alcohol.
"My breaking up with him was not the cause of him going off the rails but it was definitely the start of it," she told the Mail.
"Something changed in him, he wa s not the same person when I told him it was over," she added. "I remember his face clearly — he just looked like he had nothing to live for. It was my first relationship and it was his first relationship."
Suspect was 'normal person'Hawkes told the paper he was "definitely" in love with her, but added "I'm not sure I could say I was in love with him."
"Jared used to care about everything, his grades, school, his friends. That was when Jared was a normal person. It all stopped when we broke up," she told the paper.
Hawkes added she saw no signs of what was to come later, saying "I would not have dated a weirdo."
Their relationship began, she told the Mail, when they met at a college football game while studying at Mountain View High School in Tucson. She was 15 and he was 16.
"We clicked and we hung out, we did our homework together, we went to the movies. Typical teenage romance stuff," she said.
Hawkes said she cried all day when she learned Loughner had been arrested over the shooting spree in Tuscon Saturday. She said the thought of him doing something like that "just blows my mind."
Elements of Loughner's decline are detailed in records held by Pima Community College's campus police.
in finding a context in which to intervene, despite Loughner's increasingly erratic behavior.
According to the records, in February 2010, Loughner talked about strapping guns to babies, disrupting a poetry class.
In June, he disturbed a math class with incoherent arguments that the instructor was using the wrong number. The next day, he denied he had been disruptive in a conversation with a counselor.
"My instructor said he called a number 6 and I said I call it 18," he told the counselor. He had asked the instructor, "How can you deny math instead of accept it?"
Incomprehensible, eyes jittery
In a Sept. 23 campus police report, days before his suspension, an officer called to quiet another one of Loughner's outbursts described him as incomprehensible, his eyes jittery, his head awkwardly tilted.
"He very slowly began telling me in a low and mumbled voice that under the Constitution, which had been written on the wall for all to see, he had the right to his 'freedom of thought' and whatever he thought in his head he could also put on paper. ... His teacher 'must be required to accept it' as a passing grade," the officer wrote.
"It was clear he was unable to fully understand his actions."
The school reports provide the most detailed accounts so far of Loughner's troubles at the college, and he is depicted at times as "creepy," "very hostile" and "having difficulty understanding what he had done wrong in the classroom." School officials have not said if the reports were shared with any authorities beyond campus.
On Nov. 30, the same day he bought the Glock allegedly used in the shooting spree, Loughner posted a YouTube video, seething about campus police and the college.
"If the police remove you from the educational facility for talking then removing you from the educational facility for talking is unconstitutional," he said on the video. "The situation is fraud because the police are unconstitutional. ... Every Pima Community College class is always a scam!"
School officials told Loughner and his parents that to return to classes he would need to undergo a mental health exam to show he was not a danger. He never returned.