Finally some good news...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/us/14giffords.html?_r=1&hpDoctors Call Giffords’s Progress Remarkable
By MARC LACEY and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: January 13, 2011
TUCSON — Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at close range Saturday, is able to keep her eyes open for up to 15 minutes at a time and can move her legs and hands, although her right hand has only slight movement, doctors at University Medical Center said Thursday morning.
“She is doing some fairly specific things with her left hand,” Dr. Peter Rhee, the hospital’s chief of trauma told a news conference. “She is yawning. She is starting to rub her eyes.”
Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., the hospital’s chief of neurosurgery, said Ms. Giffords can also “move both of her legs to command.”
Her turnaround was deemed remarkable by doctors.
Ms. Giffords was only able to open her eyes for the first time on Wednesday, shortly after a visit from President Obama and while several of her Congressional colleagues were in the hospital room. During a speech from Tucson on Wednesday evening, President Obama relayed the news to the nation.
“Gabby opened her eyes for the first time,” Mr. Obama said. “Gabby opened her eyes!”
Six people were killed and 14 others, including Ms. Giffords, were wounded in the shooting rampage on Saturday in a Tucson parking lot, where Ms. Giffords was meeting constituents. Ms. Giffords, who the authorities believe was the target of the attack, is the only one of the victims who is listed in critical condition at the hospital. Four others who are still at University Medical Center are listed in fair condition, and two are in serious condition.
Jared L. Loughner, 22, has been charged in federal court with shooting Ms. Giffords and four other people who were federal employees, and is expected to face state prosecution for the rest. Officials at Pima Community College, where Mr. Loughner was a student, believed that he might be mentally ill or under the influence of drugs, after a series of bizarre classroom disruptions in which he unnerved instructors and fellow students, including one occasion when he insisted that the number 6 was actually the number 18, according to internal reports from the college that were released on Wednesday.
The 51 pages of documents offer vivid firsthand accounts of Mr. Loughner’s contacts with law enforcement officials in the months leading up to the shootings, and will inevitably be studied closely for answers to the question of whether the college did everything it could have, or should have, with him.
Authorities said on Wednesday that Mr. Loughner had had repeated contact with law enforcement officers over the years. Hours before the shooting on Saturday, he was pulled over by a police officer for running a red light. Investigators are “100 percent” certain that Mr. Loughner did not have an accomplice, and while they continue to investigate his “online associations,” they have seen no obvious connection between Mr. Loughner and political extremists, said Richard Kastigar, who oversees investigations at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.
Local and federal law enforcement officials are focusing instead on filling in gaps in the timeline of the day of the shooting, and on gathering evidence to counter an expected insanity defense, investigators said.
Judge Larry Alan Burns of Federal District Court in San Diego was assigned on Wednesday to preside over Mr. Loughner’s trial. Judge Burns, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2003 by President George W. Bush, is best known for presiding over the trial of Representative Randy Cunningham of California, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors.
Investigators said that the evidence they were gathering shows that Mr. Loughner set out to kill Ms. Giffords, and that he knew the difference between right and wrong. They point to comments he made to a friend, asking for forgiveness. Mr. Kastigar also noted scrawlings on a piece of paper found in his house, including the words “die bitch,” “die cops” and words to the effect of “assassination plans have been arranged,” Mr. Kastigar said.
The sheriff’s department released records on Wednesday showing that Mr. Loughner and a member of his family had had at least nine contacts with law enforcement between 1994 and 2010. Mr. Loughner had been bullied at school, and was poked with a needle by a classmate in 2004, the documents said. He was rushed to the hospital in 2006 after showing up at school severely intoxicated; he told the police he had consumed a lot of vodka because his father had yelled at him.
In 2007, the records show, he and a friend were arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia after the police smelled marijuana when they stopped a vehicle they were in.
In 2008, an officer seemed to notice something was amiss with Mr. Loughner, who came to the station to report that someone had improperly posted his name and photograph on a Web site. “I noted that Jared was slow to respond to my questions,” the officer wrote. “He often hesitated, as if he was trying to think of an explanation.”
Mr. Kastigar offered a robust defense of police officers’ actions with regard to Mr. Loughner, and characterized Mr. Loughner’s run-ins with them before the shootings as minor.
“There’s been all this speculation” that the gunman could have been stopped, he said. But “there was nothing, and I cannot underscore this strongly enough,” he said, that would have led law enforcement “to conclude that this guy was going to act out and shoot 20 people.”
Investigators are combing through social networking sites like Facebook and other online forums to reconstruct Mr. Loughner’s trail on the Internet in the weeks leading up to the shooting. But Mr. Kastigar said that would take time.
Another law enforcement official said that the only gun found at the Loughner home was a single-shot shotgun. “He didn’t have a major cache of weapons,” the official said.
Mr. Loughner bought the bullets for the Glock semiautomatic pistol used in the shooting on Saturday morning at a local Wal-Mart, the authorities said. The bullets were full metal jacket range rounds, one official said, noting that, had the gunman purchased more expensive self-defense rounds that mushroom upon impact, many more of people might have died. Such ammunition would have done far more damage to those it hit, the official said.
The most severely wounded of the survivors was, Ms. Giffords, who was hit by a bullet that passed through her head. Doctors said on Wednesday that she was continuing to make progress.
“We have decreased the amount of sedation, and she is becoming more spontaneous,” said Dr. Peter Rhee, the director of medical trauma care at the University Medical Center.
Three hospital workers were fired Wednesday for looking at private medical records of victims of the shootings, though officials said they did not believe the information they saw had leaked into public view.
At Ms. Giffords’s Congressional office in Tucson, staff members said they were overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for the wounded lawmaker. Among those visiting in recent days were Dennis DeConcini, a former senator, and Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, whose district abuts Ms. Giffords’s. Mr. Grijalva has offered to assist Ms. Giffords with constituent services while she recovers.
Then there was the unknown man who came in and offered to be put to work. “He came in and said he wanted to volunteer,” said C. J. Karamargin, the congresswoman’s communications director. “We said, ‘Who are you?’ Then he told us he was a congressman.”
It was Representative Hansen Clarke, a newly elected Democrat from Michigan.
“It was a touching gesture,” Mr. Karamargin said.
