Tucson: Descent Into Madness

January 16, 2011 6:00 PM

“60 Minutes” talks to Jared Loughner’s friends and classmates and to ex-Secret Service, to reconstruct the pathway to mass murder he allegedly took in Tucson. Scott Pelley reports.

(CBS) VIDEO: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7253008n&tag=related;photovideo

If you think what happened in Tucson is incomprehensible, you’re about to meet people who understand the madness behind a massacre. The United States Secret Service has studied 83 assassins and would-be assassins, and it has found remarkable similarities among them.

As you see what we’ve learned about the accused Tucson gunman, notice how he fits what the Secret Service discovered. The horrific loss of innocent life seemed to come from nowhere. But it appears Jared Loughner followed a well-worn path on his final descent into madness.

The Secret Service & An Assassin’s Mind
A decade of “60 Minutes” reporting on the definitive Secret Service study, the best tool for understanding the Arizona shooting spree.
In the hours before the massacre, Loughner was busy wrapping up his troubled life. At a drug store, just before midnight, he dropped off a roll of film – pictures he shot of himself posing with his gun. Then he checked in to a motel two miles from his home and his parents.

At 2 a.m., the moon was out, it was a little above freezing, and life as he knew it would be over in about eight hours.

He seemed upset as he said his goodbyes. It appears he made one call to Bryce Tierney, a close friend. That call, at 2:05 a.m. went unanswered, so Loughner left this brief message: “Hey. Hey it’s Jared. I just want to tell you ‘good times.’ Peace out. Later.”

“Peace out” is slang these days for goodbye.

“There’s this heavy sigh at the end,” correspondent Scott Pelley remarked.

“It was all in past tense. And it sort of bothered me how he said ‘We’ve had good times,'” Tierney replied.

Tierney heard his cell phone ring at 2:05 a.m., but instead of a number, his screen said “restricted” so he didn’t pick up. “I was afraid I was going to wake up and find and see his name in an obituary in a couple of days,” he told Pelley.

Tierney and Tyler Conway met Loughner in high school and hung out with him four or five times a week.

“Up until he was about 19 or 20 he was always, you know, pretty enthusiastic, pretty passionate. He was always quiet but you could see that there was that passion in him. He did care, he was happy. He was always an observer and especially around the time he started getting mentally ill,” Conway said.

We don’t know what was happening to Loughner and a lot of what you’re about to hear isn’t going to make sense. But Tierney and Conway say that’s because their friend was slipping into insanity and it was showing up in the poetry he wrote.

“I started seeing heavy influence of just chaos and just non-connective patterning in his, in his poetry. Just ranting or mixing of ideas,” Conway explained.

“Did you ask him what he was driving at, what he was thinking?” Pelley asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Conway replied. “And I told him, I was like, ‘Like, because I read it and I just don’t find, I find nothing. It’s like nothingness to me and he was like, ‘Exactly!’ You know, that’s where the meaning is. He, people are gonna say he doesn’t believe in anything but it’s not that he doesn’t believe in anything he literally believes in nothing, nothingness.”

Tierney and Conway told “60 Minutes” Loughner was interested in a philosophy called nihilism; it essentially says life is meaningless. They say he was obsessed with the film “Waking Life” in which a man walks through his dreams listening to various philosophies.

A character in the film echoes something at the center of Loughner’s apparent delusions: that big government and media conspire to silence the average guy.

To protest his lack of voice, the character in the film sets himself on fire.

Loughner told his friends reality has no more substance than dreams.

“He was obsessed with how words were meaningless, you know, you could say ‘This is a cup.’ And he’d be like, ‘Is it a cup or is it a pool? Is it a shark? Is it, you know, an airplane?’ You know?” Conway said.

Play CBS Video Video Tucson: Descent Into Madness“60 Minutes” talks to Jared Loughner’s friends and classmates and to ex-Secret Service, to reconstruct the pathway to mass murder he allegedly took in Tucson. Scott Pelley reports.

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What the Secret Service Knows About an Assassin’s Mind

A decade of “60 Minutes” reporting on the definitive Secret Service study, the best tool for understanding the Arizona shooting spree

Earning the trust of the United States Secret Service is no easy feat. But, in this video, you’ll hear how “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley and producer Bill Owens convinced the agency to share its definitive research on the minds of assassins and school shooters.

VIDEO:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-20028652-10391709.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody

As Pelley tells “60 Minutes Overtime” editor Ann Silvio, he and and Owens followed the research for more than a decade, producing several reports with rare interview footage of shooters and would-be assassins speaking from prisons and mental institutions across the country.

Within hours of the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Giffords, the authors of the Secret Service study were in touch with the “60 Minutes” team again. As details about alleged shooter Jared Loughner emerged, it appeared that his actions before the attack followed an all-too familiar path to violence.

Jared Loughner had no political thought and belived in “nothing”, nihilism

noun 1. total rejection of established laws and institutions.

2. anarchy, terrorism, or other revolutionary activity.

3. total and absolute destructiveness, esp. toward the world at large and including oneself: the power-mad nihilism that marked Hitler’s last years.

4. Philosophy . a. an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth.

b. nothingness or nonexistence.

5. ( sometimes initial capital letter ) the principles of a Russian revolutionary group, active in the latter half of the 19th century, holding that existing social and political institutions must be destroyed in order to clear the way for a new state of society and employing extreme measures, including terrorism and assassination.

6. annihilation of the self, or the individual consciousness, esp. as an aspect of mystical experience

Jared Loughner’s friend say this movie had a large influence on him as he slipped into mental illness.

Waking Life

A boy has a dream that he can float, but unless he holds on, he will drift away into the sky. Even when he is grown up, this idea recurs. After a strange accident, he walks through what may be a dream, flowing in and out of scenarios and encountering various characters. People he meets discuss science, philosophy and the life of dreaming and waking, and the protagonist gradually becomes alarmed that he cannot awake from this confusing dream.