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Her kiss-off sent heartbroken Jared Lee Loughner into a sick downward spiral of drugs, depression and dark thoughts that dead-ended in mass murder last week.
Kelsey Hawkes, the first and only love of Loughner’s young life, yesterday revealed how the temperamental Tucson teen “fell apart” after she dumped him in high school.
“My breaking up with him was not the cause of him going off the rails, but it was definitely the start of it,” Hawkes, 21, told Britain’s Daily Mail.
“I remember his face clearly — he just looked like he had nothing to live for.”
“Something changed in him — he was not the same person when I told him it was over,” Hawkes said, adding that Loughner was a “normal person” and not a “weirdo” when they dated for a year in 2005.
But after the split, he began boozing, drugging and alienating himself from friends, she said.
Hawkes’ dramatic disclosure of Loughner’s devastation in the wake of their breakup shed new light on the 22-year-old killer, who fatally shot six people and wounded 14 others last Saturday outside a Tucson supermarket.
The victims included US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — who has been fighting to recover from a bullet that passed through her brain — and federal Judge John Roll, who was killed.
After Hawkes was told her ex was the suspect in the shooting spree, “I cried for the rest of the day,” she said. “We had such an ordinary high-school relationship that to think of him like that just blows my mind.”
The boy who years ago loved Hawkes was a far cry from the grinning maniac captured in a chilling mug shot this week.
David Gonzales, US marshal for Arizona, said yesterday that Loughner, now locked up on charges that could carry the death sentence, “just sits in his cell with a smirk on his face — nothing else.”
“Not a smile. Just a smirk.”
“When I saw him, he was in the temporary cell, just before his arraignment,” Gonzalez told The Daily Beast. “He refuses to talk to deputy marshals, just ‘yes,’ or ‘no,’ or ‘OK.’
“He has this sort of ‘paranoid headlights’ stare.’ ”
California federal Judge Larry Burns yesterday was named to temporarily handle Loughner’s case after all Arizona federal judges were recused because of the murder of their colleague, Roll.
It was also revealed that Loughner was stopped by cops less than three hours before opening fire at an event the Democratic congresswoman was hosting.
He was pulled over at about 7:30 a.m. Saturday after running a red light — but the state Game and Fish Department officer who stopped him released him with a verbal warning after finding he had no pending warrants.
The traffic stop came before Loughner reportedly visited two Walmarts — one that refused to sell him ammo and one that sold him the bullets.
That same morning, Loughner’s dad, Randy, saw him pulling a black bag from the trunk of their car, cops said. Loughner ran off, chased by his father in the car, when the dad asked what he was doing.
Also yesterday, Tucson police and Pima County Community College released a slew of incident reports related to the Loughner.
They detailed, among other things, his 2006 arrest for drinking vodka swiped from his dad’s liquor cabinet, a binge that landed him in an emergency room when high-school staffers saw he was “extremely intoxicated.”
A year later, Loughner and a buddy were arrested on drug and paraphernalia charges after being pulled over in a van reeking of marijuana, a police report said.
Reports from the college detail several disturbances Loughner created there.
The dean, Patricia Houston, told school police that “Loughner has a ‘dark personality’ and is kind of ‘creepy’ and they had resolved to just keep an eye on him,” said a report written last February.
In June, police investigated an incident in which Loughner interrupted a math teacher who “called a number 6 and I said I call it 18,” and also asked the teacher to explain, “How can you deny math instead of accept it?”
Loughner was suspended in September after posting a YouTube video referring to PCCC as “my genocide school” and “one of the biggest scams in America, documents show.
When a college cop spent an hour at his home reading aloud the suspension notice, Loughner “held a constant trance of staring, saying at the end only, ‘I realize now that this is all a scam,’ ” a report said.