Jared Loughner's behavior recorded by college classmate in June e-mails

[Liberal_in_LA]

From June 1, the first day of class:
"One day down and nineteen to go. We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I'm not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit. The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon."

From June 10:
"As for me, Thursday means the end to week two of algebra class. It seems to be going by quickly, but then I do have three weeks to go so we'll see how I feel by then. Class isn't dull as we have a seriously disturbed student in the class, and they are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can't do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by
the door."

From June 14:
"We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast..."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2011/01/jared-loughners-behavior-recor.html

[lpbk2713]

1. He must have been highly sedated during registration.

Otherwise it seems like a lot of flags would have gone up before they let him enroll.

[Viking12]

2. The enrollment process at most colleges is online.

There i no human interaction in the process. Even if there were, there isn't really accepted protocol for dealing with erratic students (and I'm not sure there should be one).

[GSLevel9]

3. isn't there a gov't department that handles crazy people walking the streets? nt

[notesdev]

4. When they make death threats like this guy did

yeah, it's that Sheriff who is casting blame onto others. He's the one responsible to enforce the law, and apparently he chose not to, to the great detriment of the victims.

[GSLevel9]

6. looks like Sheriff BigMouth might have some 'splainin to do. nt

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

5. Fine line sometimes -- socially inept and super-intellgent

(not that this applies to JL at all.. especially in Math class).

Way back in Freshman year in college we had this one guy who seemd 'weird' in the way he dressed, moved, talked, behaved. Everyone would shy away from him.

He would interject in class at awkard times (Western Civ by the way) but usually would at least be on subject or a close tangent to the topic at hand.

One day he kind of went off on the instructor. Everyone seemed VERY ill at ease and the instructer pretty much just laughed him off in a demeaning manner. I listened to what the guy actually said and not the way he said it and was wanting to go 'but.. but...' on his behalf, but being a shy kid, I didn't.

Next day, the intstructor had to apologize to the guy. The guy WAS RIGHT and the professor was wrong.

Sometimes socially awkward behaviour doesn't have to be meaningful.
But then again, we still kept an eye on him!!!
Wary yes, scared no.