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An eerie face, floating on a blue screen. Shaved, lumpy skull surrounding twisted features. Eyes blazing with an unfathomable glee. A determined, satisfied grin twisting harsh young features into a frightening clown mask of human misery.
The face of a 22 year old man from Tucson. An unknown man, from an everyman street in an every man suburb. And yet, this is every mother’s worst nightmare.
Jared Lee Loughner wasn’t born in this image. Going back 22 years, he was undoubtedly a lovely infant, with chubby cheeks and toes. Loved by a mother. Raised in a nice neighborhood. And yet, that lost infant is, irrevocably, the tortured man on our TV screens.
No matter what events unfold over the next few weeks, can any of us really understand who he became, and why? There will be learned speculation, media dissection of his family and life, more facts about his bizarre behavior will be uncovered. But will we uncover what made Jared the man we see now?
Already, people are stepping up to tell us how he would always walk by, head down. How he was obviously troubled in his college classes. How his childhood appeared to be different from the others on his block. And all these things will be churned together to try to give us an answer to the question “Why?”.
But there are other questions here. Why did Jared always walk with his head down? Who noticed and who asked him why? Anyone? And, if someone had, could they have helped? What in his life made him act as if he expected the world to despise him? And what events conspired to make him turn his expectations into a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Looking at his booking photo, it almost seems as if he is saying “See, you all hated me, so I showed you just how awful I could be. I win.”
And, as a mother, I wonder what terrible pain did this child hold in his heart that caused this face to look back at the world.
To plan and execute the horror in Tucson convinces most of us that Jared graduated from lonely, disenfranchised boy to an evil, angry man. I don’t believe he is insane, in the sense that he had no idea of what he was doing. He knew. And he chose. And he should be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law.
But as a mother, I think that for a while, every time I see a child walking alone, head down, my heart will tremble and I will say a prayer that another Jared isn’t growing within that anonymous adolescent making his way home under the leafy trees of everyman street.
