Charges Filed Against Loughner
The New York Times reports:
Prosecutors accused Jared Lee Loughner, a troubled 22-year-old college dropout, of five serious federal charges on Sunday, including the attempted assassination of a member of Congress, for his role in a shooting incident that left 20 people wounded, six of them fatally, on Saturday morning.
According to court documents filed in the United States District Court in Phoenix, the authorities seized evidence from Mr. Loughner’s home showing that he had planned to kill Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was in critical condition on Sunday with a gunshot wound to the head. Tony M. Tayler Jr., an F.B.I. special agent, said in an affidavit supporting the charges that an envelope was found there with the handwritten words “I planned ahead,” ”My assassination” and “Giffords.”Other details about the envelope were not disclosed.
The court documents say that Mr. Loughner purchased the semiautomatic Glock pistol used at the shooing at Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson on Nov. 30. The documents also indicate that the suspect had previous contact with the congresswoman: The authorities found a letter from Ms. Giffords thanking Mr. Loughner for attending a 2007 “Congress on Your Corner” event similar to the one she was holding on Saturday morning when she was attacked.
Along with being accused of trying to kill Ms. Giffords, Mr. Loughner was charged with killing or attempting to kill four other United States government officials: United States District Judge John M. Roll and Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide to Ms. Giffords, who were killed, and two more Congressional aides, Pamela Simon and Ron Barber, who were wounded. The shooting of the other 15 people who were wounded or killed in the attack would be state crimes rather than federal crimes; as of Sunday afternoon no state charges had yet been filed.
The authorities released 911 tapes of the minutes after the shooting in which caller after caller, many of them out of breath, dialed in to report that multiple shots had been fired, and that people were falling, too many to count.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, who traveled to Tucson from Washington to oversee the investigation at President Obama’s request, said at a news conference on Sunday that agents were working intensively to determine “why someone would commit such a heinous act and whether anyone else was involved.”
Early on Sunday, the police released a photograph taken from surveillance video in a nearby store, showing someone who they thought might be a possible accomplice in the shooting. But he turned out to be a taxi driver who dropped the suspect at the shopping mall where the shooting took place, and then entered the supermarket with him when he did not have sufficient change, the sheriff’s department said. ...
