Witnesses told of a typical suburban Saturday torn apart by indiscriminate gunshots, writes Lara Marlowe
JARED LEE Loughner, the gunman suspected of killing six people and wounding 14 others at La Toscana shopping centre in an affluent suburb of Tucson, Arizona, on Saturday morning, queued quietly behind Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s constituents before raising his automatic pistol and firing a single bullet through her head. Loughner then sprayed the crowd of about two dozen people with gunfire, hitting most of them.
Witnesses told how Ms Giffords sat on the ground, leaning against a window of the Safeway supermarket, her head covered by a jacket, while an aide cradled her. A man whose head was grazed by a bullet first tackled Loughner, while a middle-aged woman struggled to wrest a second ammunition clip from him. Three helicopters landed in the nearby highway intersection to ferry Ms Giffords and other victims to the University of Arizona medical centre.
Joe Zamudio was in a nearby shop when he heard the shooting and rushed out. “The first thing I saw was the people wrestling with the gunman,” Mr Zamudio told CNN. “Behind that it was just kind of like people laying everywhere and kind of falling and crawling.”
Mr Zamudio heard several people say “I’m bleeding” and ask for ambulances. “Nobody really kind of realised the massiveness of what happened,” he said.
When Mr Zamudio saw the woman trying to pull the ammunition magazine away from Loughner, “I realised he was trying to reload his gun . . . I just kind of fell on him too, like kind of put my weight over him, and made sure the gun was down.”
Police identified the dead as US District Judge John Roll (63), Christina Greene (9), Ms Giffords’s aide Gabe Zimmerman (30), Dorothy Morris (76), Dorwin Stoddard (76), and Phyllis Scheck (79).
Law enforcement officials said there was no evidence of terrorism or a wider plot, but members of Congress were nonetheless advised to exercise caution. In a televised statement from his home state of Ohio, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Such acts of violence have no place in our society.”
President Barack Obama called Ms Giffords “a friend . . . an extraordinary public servant” and “someone who is warm and caring”. Ms Giffords “was doing what she always does – listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbours. That is what our democracy is all about,” Mr Obama added.
Ms Giffords is a member of the Jewish Reform Congregation Chaverim in Tucson. Rabbi David Saperstein described her as “a leading advocate for sensible immigration reform, a strong and thoughtful voice on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, [who] is willing to cast difficult votes on issues she believes in, including healthcare reform”.
She has also been an ardent defender of the right to bear arms. “It continues to be far too easy to acquire guns, including the weapon used in today’s shootings,” Rabbi Saperstein said.
One of the strongest condemnations came from Republican senator John McCain of Arizona. Mr McCain called the gunman “a wicked person who has no sense of justice or compassion” and added that “whoever did this, whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race”.
But some Democrats pointed a finger at Mr McCain’s former running mate, Sarah Palin, who had included Ms Giffords on a target list of Democrats to defeat last year. “We live in a world of violent images,” Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, told CNN. “The [Palin] phrase, ‘Don’t retreat, reload’, putting crosshairs on congressional districts as targets . . . they invite the unstable”.
Ms Giffords is married to US Navy captain and astronaut Mark Kelly. A lover of science, she serves as chairwoman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee.
Joe Watkins, a professor at the University of Arizona, recalled his last encounter with Ms Giffords at a meeting of the Galileo Circle. He shuddered when he remembered its title: “Mind and Brain”.
Last year’s campaign was “very, very vitriolic,” Prof Watkins said. “She is not temperamentally capable of dealing with it.” Prof Watkins several times responded to text messages urging him and other Democrats to attend rallies to dilute the presence of the right-wing Tea Party. “Now we are waiting for the first time she waves out the [hospital] window,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.