Richard A. Oppel Jr. reports in The New York Times:
TUCSON — The chief investigator for the sheriff’s department here has for the first time publicly described the brief and gory video clip from a store security camera that shows a gunman not only shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords just above the eyebrow at a range of three feet, but then using his 9-millimeter pistol to gun down others near her at a similarly close range.
The video, according to Richard Kastigar, the investigative and operational bureau chief of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, also reveals that Judge John M. Roll appears to have died while helping to save the life of Ronald Barber, a Giffords employees [sic]. Mr. Barber, who was near Ms. Giffords when he was shot twice, has left the hospital.
Mr. Kastigar said Tuesday that the video shows Ms. Giffords standing with her back a few inches from a wall when she was shot by the gunman, who approached in “a hurried fashion” with the gun at his side and then raised it and fired a single bullet above her eye at a range of no more than two or three feet.
Jared L. Loughner, 22, has been arrested in the shootings. In the video, the pistol “is down near his right side, but it is visibly out from where he was keeping it, presumably under his clothing, and then he raises it and fires,” Mr. Kastigar said. “It happens in a matter of seconds.”…The video, he said, is now in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation…
More than a dozen video clips, from cameras at the scene and the hard drive of a security system at the Safeway supermarket at the mall where the shootings occurred on Jan. 8, provide other new information about the minutes before the shootings, which left 6 dead and 13 wounded. Some were described in an article on The Washington Post’s Web site on Tuesday.
When a deputy sheriff arrived minutes after the shooting and took control of Mr. Loughner, who was being held down by two people, the deputy removed a set of earplugs from Mr. Loughner. Minutes earlier, a surveillance photo also shows Mr. Loughner inside the Safeway talking to a clerk and “pointing to his ears because he’s telling the individual that he can’t hear what she’s saying because he’s got earplugs in,” Mr. Kastigar said.
The Washington Post story on videos of the shooting is here. That article, by David Nakamura, Dana Hedgpeth and Sari Horwitz, says:
TUCSON – Authorities have analyzed nearly two dozen surveillance videos in the massive investigation of accused Tucson killer Jared Lee Loughner, some of which clearly show a gunman shooting federal Judge John Roll in the back as he and an injured congressional aide try to scramble under a table, officials who have viewed the footage said Tuesday.
It also shows the gunman walking toward Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and firing his first bullet into her face from two to three feet away, the officials said; he then blasts 31 more shots in a span of no more than 15 seconds. Doctors initially said the bullet entered Giffords’s head from the back, but they have since said it struck her above the left eye, and the footage leaves little doubt of that…
