Jared Loughner's Ex-Girlfriend 'Knew He Had Problems'
Jared Loughner remembered by former girlfriends as having a temper.
Jan. 13, 2010 — -- An ex-girlfriend of accused gunman Jared Loughner said that she felt like she was looking at someone who had become "soulless" when she ran into the suspect just a few months prior to Saturday's massacre.
"It was like staring into somebody you didn't know," said Ashley Figueroa, who dated Loughner at Mountain View High School in Tucson, Ariz., when she was 15.
"He was different," she said in the interview with ABC News' affiliate KGUN. "He [used to have] a big heart, but I don't know what happened. I knew he had problems, but I never thought it would escalate to something like this."
Figueroa's recollection of her relationship with Loughner is shedding more light on the suspect's troubled life, one she says was devoid of any sort of parental figure.
"He had a difficult relationship with his parents," said Figueroa. "They would never let me come in the house. I couldn't understand why."
"He had definite dysfunction in his family," she said. "His father as far as I know worked a lot and kind of picked on [Loughner]. He basically didn't have parent figures. It was like having roommates for him. He lived there and [his parents] were just sort of there."
Figueroa, who didn't specify how long she dated Loughner, said that she eventually left him because of his anger management problems.
"He used to scare me sometimes," she said. "He'd make me feel uncomfortable. He'd get really mad, clench his fist and kind of have a little tantrum, he'd flail his arms and walk off."
Another former girlfriend of Loughner's, Kelsey Hawkes, told CBS' "The Early Show" that the Loughner who allegedly opened fire Saturday, killing six and injuring 14, is not the same person she dated for nearly nine months.
"The Jared that I used to know is completely changed from what the world sees him now as," said Hawkes, who said she had a positive relationship with Loughner's parents. "You know, I would never have ever expected him to become what he has."
Others have said they mark the beginning of Loughner's descent into isolation and anger to his break-up with Hawkes.
"I've just been very overwhelmed by everybody tracking me down and trying to get information out of me that I don't have, or trying to pin our breakup on his behavioral change," Hawkes told the Los Angeles Times.
They broke up six years ago in high school, she told newspaper. "What he chose to do with himself and his life between the time that we weren't dating and what he did on Saturday is far beyond me," she said.
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