Jared Loughner was no stranger to police

Jared Lee Loughner, it is now becoming clear, was no stranger to run-ins with authorities — and even had one a few hours before the shooting rampage he is charged with committing at a Tucson shopping center.

His behavior ranged from “subdued” — as he was described by an officer who stopped him for running a red light early Saturday — to angry and intimidating, as when he yelled at an instructor who gave him a B in Pilates at Pima Community College, according to school records.

On Wednesday, the Arizona Game and Fish Department said one of its officers had let Loughner go with a warning after the traffic stop. And Pima Community College officials released 51 pages of Loughner’s files, including his redacted transcript, and documents with granular details about his increasingly bizarre interactions with students, teachers and school officials.

Instructors and campus police were keeping an eye on Loughner as early as February, according to a campus police report, after he had an outburst in his advanced poetry writing class. The teacher reported that his classroom comments were a “huge leap from the context” of a poem that they had been discussing and that he said “things about abortion, wars, killing people” and at one point uttered, “Why don’t we just strap bombs to babies.”

Division Dean Patricia Houston described Loughner as “creepy” and having a “dark personality,” the report said, and told campus police that another student had informed them that Loughner may have been carrying a knife. Campus police checked Loughner’s background for warrants or other criminal history, finding that he had “some prior drug involvement” but “no warrants or anything of immediate concern.” Campus police concluded at that time that additional contact with Loughner was not necessary, records show.

Two months later, in April, school officials responded to the Northwest Campus library to check on Loughner’s “welfare.” The college’s library director said Loughner had been making loud noises while working on the school computers. When the officer asked Loughner about his behavior, he said he’d been listening to music and that it wouldn’t happen again.

Loughner’s final days at the college were marked by an incident on Sept. 23, when a biology instructor called college police at 7:31 a.m. According to an incident report, the instructor told police that Loughner disrupted the class “when she told him that he would only receive half credit on an assignment because it was late.”

Loughner’s protests grew louder, one officer wrote in his report, and Loughner said his freedom of speech was being taken away, though he had trouble verbalizing his distress.

Another officer said Loughner’s head “tilted to the left with a confused look in the countenance of his face. His eyes focused down at his homework and he showed a sustained bobbing of the eyes while looking to his upper left side during questioning.”

In a low, mumbling voice, Loughner, who appeared bewildered that police were involved, said that under the Constitution, he had the right to his “‘freedom of thought,’ and whatever he thought in his head he could also put on paper. By placing his thoughts within his homework assignment, his teacher ‘must be required to accept it’ as a passing grade,” according to campus police records.

On Sept. 29, campus police found a YouTube video in which Loughner proclaimed the college “a genocide school.”

The title of the video, which has since been deleted, is “Pima Community College School-Genocide/Scam-Free Education-Broken United States Constitution.” It was uploaded on Sept. 23 under the username “2PLOY,” the same day officers interviewed Loughner after he disrupted his biology class, according to police records.

The video showed the college campus, and the narrator said:

“We are examining the torture of students … This is my genocide school. Where I’m going to be homeless because of this school … I haven’t forgotten the teacher that gave me a B for freedom of speech … Thank you…. This is Jared … From Pima College.”

According to the campus police report, one of the officers who watched the video “positively recognized the voice and the reflection in the window” as Loughner’s. That officer was one of two who had escorted Loughner from his biology classroom on Sept. 23.

Hours after they discovered the video, two campus officers pulled up to the Loughner home, with two others nearby as backup. Randy Loughner, Jared’s father, invited the officers into the garage, where they spoke with the two men and informed them of Jared’s suspension. Jared, wrote the officer, “held a constant trance of staring as I narrated the past events.” Jared broke his silence, the officer wrote, and said: “I realize now that this is all a scam.”

The college transcript, which covers Loughner’s career from summer 2005 to summer 2010, shows he took courses for credit in a wide range of subjects — philosophy, logic, psychology and computers, plus American Sign Language I and II and at least five writing classes. He also took some noncredit courses, including country swing and beginning tai chi.

On the morning of the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others, according to law enforcement reports, Loughner had been target-shooting in the desert, where he was stopped by a Game and Fish officer for running a red light.

Game and Fish officials said an officer on patrol in the desert about six miles from the Safeway found himself behind the 1969 Nova driven by Loughner.

Loughner stopped at a light in front of the officer, then “crept through the red light,” said Game and Fish spokesman Jim Paxon.

The officer, whom Paxon did not identify, pulled Loughner over.

The officer approached Loughner’s car, Paxon said. By then, the young man had his license, registration and insurance out and handed it to the officer, who had a dispatcher check the documents, which were valid.

“Mr. Loughner was very polite and very subdued,” Paxon said.

The officer also visually inspected the car and “saw nothing to give him probable cause to do an extended search or detain the subject,” Paxon said.

Loughner received a warning, then went on his way. The interaction took no more than 10 minutes.

When Loughner’s name was released after the shooting, the officer remembered the traffic stop and informed investigators from the Pima County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI, who interviewed him about the incident, Paxon said.

Randy Loughner told the FBI that he had chased his son that morning after becoming concerned when he saw him take a black bag from a family car, according to a Pima County Sheriff’s Department statement. When Randy Loughner questioned his son about the bag, his son fled on foot. The father followed Jared Loughner in his car, but lost sight of him.

When Loughner arrived at the shopping center by taxi around 10 a.m., he was armed for mayhem, federal law enforcement sources said.

He had a Glock semiautomatic pistol, loaded with a 30-round extended magazine, hidden in his waistband covered by his untucked shirt. In his pants pockets, he hid three magazines — one with 30 9-millimeter bullets, the other two with 15 each. He also carried a blunt-blade “tactical knife” in another pocket, the sources said.

The Sheriff’s Department also released reports detailing various law enforcement interactions from 2004 to this week with Loughner or his father. In two of them, Randy Loughner called authorities to report that members of the media were trespassing on his property, or that a television truck was blocking access to his home.

At least twice during high school, Loughner had contact with the authorities, once as a victim. While in college, he had two run-ins with law enforcement for minor infractions.

In September 2004, when Loughner was 16 and a student at Mountain View High School, Loughner was stuck in the arm by a classmate with a needle, sheriff’s records show. The report said Loughner was standing in the cafeteria with friends when a classmate walked by and plunged a needle into his arm between his elbow and his shoulder.

Loughner, said the report “started to become pale, got dizzy could not stand and had to be helped to a nurse’s office by another friend,” the report said. After talking to his parents, the young man told officers he did not want to press charges. His parents did, however, want the young man who poked him to be tested “to see if he has HIV or any other kind of disease,” the records show.

In May 2006, high school officials said Loughner got so drunk at school that they had to call an ambulance, which took him to an emergency room.

Loughner, whose eyes were red from crying, told the school nurse that he had drunk vodka that he taken from his father’s liquor cabinet. He told officers that he drank the vodka “because he was very upset as his father yelled at him.”

Pima Sheriff’s Department officials also revealed more details about Saturday’s search of the Loughner home by the FBI and sheriffs. Evidence seized from a letter safe included writings that included an epithet directed at “pigs” and another that said “die bitch.” Federal law enforcement sources said that during their search, only one weapon was found — an old shotgun. It was not loaded, they said, and had not been fired for years.

maeve.reston@latimes.com

ron.lin@latimes.com

sam.quinones@latimes.com

Richard A. Serrano in the Washington bureau and Times staff writers Robin Abcarian and Rick Rojas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.