ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Martin Kaste reports that people were trying to understand Jared Loughner long before Saturday's tragic shooting.
MARTIN KASTE: Steve Woods has lived next door for seven years.
STEVE WOODS: I've seen Jared walk down the street several times and, like I've said, my son will try to say hi to him and he still wouldn't say hi or anything. Just bundled up in his hoodie, he's got his ear buds in and just doing his own thing going down the street.
KASTE: Loughner's father, Randy, moved here three decades ago when this was a lonelier place. As things got more crowded, the family seemed to close in on itself. Woods points to the high bushes around the backyard.
WOODS: They just really just didn't want to be bothered - leave us alone, we're just going to do our own thing - and now this.
KASTE: Unidentified Man: I'm just here to support the family. Anybody else? Thanks for your patience, guys. No other statement.
KASTE: Neither side knows what it's talking about, says Amber Troy.
AMBER TROY: He definitely thought that the government was controlling his mind, but he didn't say which side.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KASTE: Troy took a poetry writing class with Loughner at Pima Community College last spring.
TROY: A lot of the times when he spoke, none of us understood what he was trying to say, honestly.
KASTE: The words you could understand but the ideas you couldn't.
TROY: Right, yeah. The words we could understand. Like, he wasn't like mumbling or anything. The words we could understand but where he was coming from, what he meant by them, what he was - the concepts that he was trying to get across, like, none of us could really grasp.
KASTE: But it wasn't ideological, she says. He just seemed to want to get a rise out of people. Troy recalls a moment when another student had just finished reading an autobiographical poem about abortion.
TROY: So all of us are just very somber, she's in tears, and Jared starts laughing and a lot. And we all just kind of look at him strangely. And then he starts bursting out about tying a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomb. Yeah.
KASTE: Loughner wrote his own poetry in the class. Another student, Don Coorough saved a copy and reads a bit.
DON COOROUGH: (reading) Awaking on the first day of school, pain of a morning hangover; attending a weightlifting class for college credit, attempting to exercise since freshman year of high school. Crawling out of bed and walking to the shower, warm water hitting my back. Eureka, thoughts of being promiscuous with a female again.
KASTE: Coorough said Loughner had the poem memorized and he stood up in class and performed it with great drama, at one point grabbing his crotch. But Coorough says the poem itself is strangely empty.
COOROUGH: I mean, most of us, when we have a eureka-moment, it's something much larger and much more grand and much more engaging than, oh, I want to have some sex.
KASTE: Loughner's friends talk about a change over the last few years. He didn't last long at jobs and he was rejected by the Army. A friend from high school days, Travis Smith, wrote to NPR that Loughner, quote, "wasn't always a bad person." He says there were growing signs of mental illness.
SIEGEL: And yet, while many people thought Loughner was strange, no one claims to have seen this coming. Certainly not Amber Troy from the poetry class.
TROY: Oh, he was definitely strange. And, like I said, he wasn't the kind of person that I was going to go, you know, have coffee with because I thought he was strange. But I mean, none of us were really afraid for our safety.
KASTE: Martin Kaste, NPR News, Tucson.