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Susan Hileman, who was wounded in the attack, said nothing would return her life to what it was before and that she regretted Loughner didn't get treatment earlier. Hileman had taken 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green to the Giffords event outside a supermarket, where the girl was killed in the shooting. "This is so sad -- a 23-year-old who's going to spend the rest of his life in a box. I feel empty. What I want, I can't have," she said. "This is closing the barn door after the horses left. This is too late." Pietz, the court-appointed psychologist, testified that Loughner appeared to be a normal child and average student until he was 16, when a girlfriend broke up with him and a friend's father died. He was diagnosed with depression and landed at an alternative education program at Pima Community College his senior year after he showed up drunk for school one day. He was enrolled at the Tucson college until September 2010, alarming his parents and friends with his increasingly erratic behavior, Pietz said. He became obsessed with the Constitution, wrote jumbled words on the chalkboard and a final exam, and yelled incoherently in class. Loughner's parents told Pietz that their son once asked them if they heard voices. They worried that he would take his life. Pietz recounted turning points in Loughner's recovery in prison: regular exercise; counseling sessions with three other inmates; and prison jobs rolling towels, T-shirts and socks, and stamping envelopes. He has been forcibly medicated for more than a year after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. "He loves his jobs," she said. Pietz said she found him competent in an April report, and added: "I think he's improved even more." Clarke also avoided the death penalty for other high-profile clients, such as "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics in the late 1990s and Atlanta's Olympic park in 1996. David Bruck, a close friend of Clarke since law school, said that it was a question whether Loughner could endure the stress of a trial. But, he said, the defense had no reason to challenge the finding. "To say what someone else's mental capacity is always iffy. If the prosecution was still seeking the death penalty, the question of competency would have been raised by the defense," Bruck said.
[Associated
Press;
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