Loughner's Ex-Girlfriend: This Isn't the Jared I Knew

Jared Loughner may have been seen as “creepy” and “hostile” in recent years, but it wasn’t always so, says his ex-girlfriend. Loughner dated Kelsey Hawkes six years ago, in high school, and she tells the Early Show she saw him as a “completely different … person, very caring, very sweet, gentle, kind, a little bit quiet, but altogether a pretty great guy.” She also describes his family as “really great” and his parents as “very kind.”

When she heard news of the shootings, “it was very emotional, I was very upset that the person that I used to know could become so changed and turn into something else,” she says, adding that after they split (her decision; she wanted to be single), she heard Loughner had become “a little more isolated” and perhaps gotten involved in drugs and alcohol, but she still “would never have expected him to become what he has.”
(More Jared Lee Loughner stories.)