The husband of shot former US lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords said Friday his wife decided only recently that she would attend the sentencing hearing for her would-be assassin to seek a “sense of resolution.”
Astronaut Mark Kelly said the experience of seeing Jared Loughner open fire on Giffords while she was meeting with constituents, killing six and wounding 14 on January 8, 2011, outside a Tucson supermarket was “intense.”
“It was pretty intense, you know, to be sitting just probably about 30 feet (nine meters) from where Jared Loughner was,” Kelly said in an interview on NBC’s Today Show.
“Gabby was sitting up in her chair and sitting up straight, spent a lot of time looking at him. It was the first time she really had ever seen him.”
He said Giffords had initially thought she wouldn’t attend the hearing, “but about a month ago she changed her mind and thought it would be a good idea for her to be there, to get some sense of resolution to what happened.”
During the dramatic and emotional hearing Thursday, other victims and Giffords, who was shot through the head at pointblank range but made a remarkable recovery, confronted Loughner over the rampage.
With Giffords by his side, Kelly read a prepared statement, during which he told Loughner, “You tried to create for all of us a world as dark and evil as your own. But know this, and remember it always: You failed.”
Kelly said on NBC that he believed Loughner, who stayed mostly silent and showed little emotion during the proceedings, was “paying attention to what we were saying.”
“Gabby’s eyes were locked on his the entire time as I read our statement, you know, I kept looking up and his expression would change,” Kelly recalled.
“I almost felt like, during that whole few minutes, that he and Gabby were having quite the staring contest.”
Kelly repeated comments that Giffords struggles “every single day” to do “almost anything that was easy before,” but said she continues to improve month by month.
“The thing that we see that improves the most is her ability to communicate. It is also the thing she works the hardest on,” Giffords said.
He called on politicians, at the state and federal level, to address gun control laws, saying: “I think almost everybody would agree that we have a problem.”
“Repeatedly we lost the opportunity, and I hope somebody picks up that mantle and tries to do something about it,” he said.
Loughner was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Giffords at shooter's hearing to seek 'resolution'
