Michelle Martinez ran into Loughner during his rambling odyssey. She and some friends were hanging out in the neighborhood when a sullen figure emerged from the darkness in a black hooded sweatshirt and startled them. Loughner picked his way through the group rather than walk around them, offering a deep, distant “What’s up?” He then quickened his pace and disappeared into the darkness.

“I had a feeling he was thinking about something,” said Martinez, who knew Loughner from their school days. “It was just kind of weird.”

The encounter epitomizes Loughner’s final hours as he became increasingly unhinged, culminating with him opening fire on a crowd of people at an event for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Six people were killed and 13 were wounded amid a barrage of bullets from a Glock 19.

Authorities do not know what pushed the 22-year-old mentally disturbed loner over the edge, but interviews, records and a police chronology released Friday provide a fuller picture of his movements that in many ways reflect his scattered mind.

It would all play out within a few miles from the modest, single-story home where he grew up and lived all his life — save for a brief attempt he made at living in an apartment by himself.

The chaotic night, according to the official law enforcement chronology, began at 11:35 p.m. when he dropped off a roll of 35 mm film at a Walgreens.

In the next hour he stopped at a Circle K gas station/convenience store and checked into a Motel 6, a $37.99-a-night spot popular with truckers near a Long John Silver’s and other fast-food restaurants.

If he slept at all that night, it wasn’t for long.

At 1:45 a.m., he was back outside his parents’ home, where he ran into Martinez and her friends.

At about 2 a.m., Loughner called an old friend, Bryce Tierney. They had been confidants in high school but hadn’t talked for months — another in a series of friends with whom Loughner severed ties amid his increasingly bizarre behavior.

Loughner used to bang the drums in Tierney’s garage while his friend jammed on the guitar. They used to talk philosophy, about how the modern world was draining people of individualism. They got high, as police found out when they pulled the two over in September 2007 and Tierney admitted they smoked a joint in a van on the way back from a convenience store.

Early Saturday, Tierney was up watching a real-life ghost chasers show on TV. When his cell phone rang, the incoming number was listed as blocked, so he didn’t answer.

Tierney picked up the message immediately. It had a melancholy tinge: “Hey Bryce, it’s Jared. We had some good times together. Peace out.”

After the call, Loughner headed back to the Walgreens, where — at 2:19 a.m. — he picked up the developed photos. And 15 minutes later, he stopped to make more purchases at yet another convenience store.

At 4:12 a.m. Loughner was at a computer keyboard in an unknown location, typing a farewell bulletin on his MySpace page — “Goodbye friends.” Authorities said the photo included in that posting was from the shots developed at Walgreens hours earlier.

After one additional stop, at another Circle K, Loughner began his quest for ammo. His first stop, a Walmart between his house and the scene of the shooting, doesn’t sell bullets before 7 a.m. It was only 6:12 a.m. He returned at 7:04 a.m., but left the store without making a purchase.

He then drove 5 miles west to a Walmart superstore, where he purchased 9 mm ammunition and a black, backpack style diaper bag. It was now 7:27 a.m.

Just three minutes later, he was pulled over for running a red light in his 1969 dark gray Chevy Nova.

Loughner was cooperative, and the officer from the Arizona Game and Fish Department took his driver’s license and vehicle registration information. Loughner had no outstanding warrants and was let go with a warning. And without a search.

The only thing the officer saw in the car was fast-food wrappers.

Around 8 a.m., Loughner had returned home. And there was his father, Randy, who had questions for his son.

The confrontation happened in the driveway.

The son pulled a black bag from the trunk of the Nova; Randy Loughner demanded to know what was going on.

“The father went out and said, ‘What’s that?’ and he mumbled something and took off,” Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said.

Loughner was desperate to escape. He hustled toward the corner where he used to catch the school bus with his neighbor Martinez, then hung a right and a quick left before entering a sandy wash that runs behind the houses on the other side of his street, North Soledad Avenue.

Winding his way through the desert scrub and cactus, Loughner arrived at a dry tributary 300 feet later that dead-ends into a bigger wash. His father jumped into his truck to catch up with his son.

But his son had disappeared from view.

Jared Loughner was alone again.

The only clue about the desert pursuit that has turned up is the black bag recovered Thursday at the intersection of the two washes. Inside, they found the same caliber of ammunition Loughner bought at Walmart.

Loughner’s escape route took him up the wash, past the back of a post office, to where the dry stream bed opens into a broader swath of desert. In this part of suburbia, brush-choked expanses are never far away.

Eventually, Loughner returned to the Circle K he’d visited three hours earlier.

He was carrying two extended pistol clips that hold up to 31 bullets, along with two 15-round magazines, a four-inch buck knife, a Visa card, his driver’s license and cash in a plastic bag.

Authorities said a cab picked him up at 9:41 a.m.

His destination was a Safeway store — and a violent confrontation with Gabrielle Giffords.

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Associated Press Writer Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix and Pete Yost in Washington contributed to this report.

Investigators with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department previously said they found handwritten notes in Loughner’s safe reading “I planned ahead,” “My assassination” and “Giffords.” Capt. Chris Nanos said all the writings were either in an envelope or on a form letter Giffords’ office sent him in 2007 after he signed in at one of her “Congress on Your Corner” events — the same kind of gathering where the massacre occurred.

On the morning of the shooting, a mumbling Jared Loughner fled after his father asked him why he was removing a black bag from the trunk of a family car, said Nanos and Rick Kastigar, chief of the department’s investigations bureau. Investigators are still searching for the bag.

Meanwhile, this city held a tribute to victims the eve of a presidential visit.

On Tuesday night, several hundred mourners filled a Tucson church for a public Mass to remember the slain and pray for the injured. As people filed in, nine young girls sang “Amazing Grace.” The youngest victim of the attack, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, was a member of that choir.

“I know she is singing with us tonight,” said Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas, who presided over the service.

President Barack Obama visits Arizona Wednesday and will honor the victims in a speech to a rattled state and nation.

In one apparent reaction to the shooting, the FBI said background checks for handgun sales jumped in Arizona following the shootings, though the agency cautioned that the number of checks doesn’t equate to the number of handguns sold.

Still, there were 263 background checks in Arizona on Monday, up from 164 for the same day a year ago — a 60 percent rise. Nationally, the increase was more modest: from 7,522 last year to 7,906 Monday, a 5 percent jump.

Loughner’s parents, silent and holed up in their home since the shooting spree, issued a statement Tuesday, expressing remorse over the shooting.

“There are no words that can possibly express how we feel,” Randy and Amy Loughner wrote in a statement handed to reporters waiting outside their house. “We wish that there were, so we could make you feel better. We don’t understand why this happened.

“We care very deeply about the victims and their families. We are so very sorry for their loss.”

Sheriff’s deputies had been to the Loughner home at least once before the attack, spokesman Jason Ogan said. He didn’t know why or when the visit occurred, and said department lawyers were reviewing the paperwork and expected to release it Wednesday.

The visits were for nonviolent incidents, including a report by Jared Loughner of identity theft, a noise complaint and Amy Loughner’s claim that someone had stolen her license plate sticker, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to the new details about the hours before the shooting, interviews with those who knew Loughner or his family painted a picture of a young loner who tried to fit in.

Before everything fell apart, he went through the motions as many young men do nowadays: Living at home with his parents, working low-wage jobs at big brand stores and volunteering time doing things he liked.

None of it worked. His relationship with his parents was strained. He clashed with co-workers and police. And he couldn’t follow the rules at an animal shelter where he spent some time.

One close high school friend who requested anonymity to avoid the publicity surrounding the case said he would wait outside 10 minutes for Jared to leave the house when they were going out. When Jared would get into the car, he’d say that it took so long because his parents were hassling him.

The parents of another close friend recalled how Loughner’s parents showed up at their doorstep in 2008 looking for their son, who had left home about a week before and broken off contact.

While the friend, Zach Osler, didn’t want to talk with the AP, his parents Roxanne and George Osler IV did.

With the Loughners at their house, Zach Osler told them the name of the place where their only child was staying, Zach’s father said.

Loughner was arrested in October 2008 on a vandalism charge near Tucson after admitting he scrawled the letters “C” and “X” on a road sign in a reference to what he said was Christianity. His address listed on the police report was an apartment near his home.

Loughner eventually moved back in with his parents.

Even when Loughner tried to do good, it didn’t work out.

A year ago, he volunteered walking dogs at the county animal shelter, said Kim Janes, manager of the Pima Animal Care Center. He liked dogs; neighbors remember him as the kid they would see walking his own.

But at the shelter, staff became concerned: He was allowing dogs to play in an area that was being disinfected after one had contracted a potentially deadly disease, the parvovirus.

“He didn’t think the disease was that threatening and when we tried to explain how dangerous some of the diseases are, he didn’t get it,” Janes said.

Loughner wouldn’t agree to keep dogs from the restricted area, and was asked to come back when he would. He never returned.

Loughner also jumped from paid job to job because he couldn’t get along with co-workers, according to the close high school friend who requested anonymity. Employers included a Quiznos sandwich shop and Banana Republic, the friend said.

On his application at the animal shelter, he listed customer service work at Eddie Bauer.

Loughner grew up on an unremarkable Tucson block of low-slung homes with palm trees and cactus gardens out front. Fittingly, it’s called Soledad Avenue — Spanish for solitude.

Solitude found Loughner, even when he tried to escape it. He had buddies but always fell out of touch, typically severing the friendship with a text message. Zach Osler was one such friend.

Loughner’s father moved into the house as a bachelor, and eventually got married, longtime next-door neighbor George Gayan said. Property records show Randy Loughner has lived there since 1977.

Gayan said he and Randy Loughner had “differences of opinion but nothing where it was radical or violent.” He declined to provide specifics. “As time went on, they indicated they wanted privacy,” Gayan said.

Unlike other homes on the block, the Loughners’ is obscured by plants. It was assessed in 2010 at $137,842.

Randy Loughner apparently has not worked for years — at least outside his home.

Amy Loughner got a job with the county parks and recreation department just before Jared was born, and since at least 2002 has been the supervisor for Roy P. Drachman Agua Caliente Park on the outskirts of the city. She earns $25.70 an hour, according to Gwyn Hatcher, Pima County’s human resources director.

Linda McKinley, 62, has lived down the street from the Loughner family for decades and said the parents could not be nicer — but that she had misgivings about Jared as he got older.

“As a parent, my heart aches for them,” she said.

She added that when she was outside watering her plants she would see Jared riding down the street on his bike, often talking to himself or yelling out randomly to no one.

McKinley recalled that once he yelled to some children on the street: “I’m coming to get you!”

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Associated Press writers Alicia Chang and Gillian Flaccus in Tucson, Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix, Christy Lemire in Los Angeles and news researcher Julie Reed in Charlotte, N.C., contributed to this report.

BP PLC’s 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company’s preparedness to deal with one.

“BP Exploration and Production Inc. has the capability to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or a substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan,” the oil giant stated in its Deepwater Horizon plan.

In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, La., says there are “3,000 acres (of wetlands) where life as we know it is dead, and we continue to lose precious marshland every day.”

There are other wildly false assumptions. BP’s proposed method to calculate spill volume based on the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.

The Gulf’s loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida’s southern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn’t mentioned in either plan.

The website listed for Marine Spill Response Corp. — one of two firms that BP relies on for equipment to clean a spill — links to a defunct Japanese-language page.

In early May, at least 80 Louisiana state prisoners were trained to clean birds by listening to a presentation and watching a video. It was a work force never envisioned in the plans, which contain no detailed references to how birds will be cleansed of oil.

And while BP officials and the federal government have insisted that they have attacked the problem as if it were a much larger spill, that isn’t apparent from the constantly evolving nature of the response.

This week, after BP reported the seemingly good news that a containment cap installed on the wellhead was funneling some of the gushing crude to a tanker on the surface, BP introduced a whole new new set of plans mostly aimed at capturing more oil.

The latest incarnation calls for building a larger cap, using a special incinerator to burn off some of the recaptured oil and bringing in a floating platform to process the oil being sucked away from the gushing well.

In other words, the on-the-fly planning continues.

——

Some examples of how BP’s plans have fallen short:

– Beaches where oil washed up within weeks of a spill were supposed to be safe from contamination because BP promised it could marshal more than enough boats to scoop up all the oil before any deepwater spill could reach shore — a claim that in retrospect seems absurd.

“The vessels in question maintain the necessary spill containment and recovery equipment to respond effectively,” one of the documents says.

BP asserts that the combined response could skim, suck up or otherwise remove 20 million gallons of oil each day from the water. But that is about how much has leaked in the past six weeks — and the slick now covers about 3,300 square miles, according to Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami’s satellite sensing facility. Only a small fraction of the spill has been successfully skimmed. Plus, an undetermined portion of the spill has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf or is suspended somewhere in between.

The plan uses computer modeling to project a 21 percent chance of oil reaching the Louisiana coast within a month of a spill. In reality, an oily sheen reached the Mississippi River delta just nine days after the April 20 explosion. Heavy globs soon followed. Other locales where oil washed up within weeks of the explosion were characterized in BP’s regional plan as safely out of the way of any oil danger.

– BP’s site plan regarding birds, sea turtles or endangered marine mammals (“no adverse impacts”) also have proved far too optimistic.

While the exact toll on the Gulf’s wildlife may never be known, the effects clearly have been devastating.

More than 400 oiled birds have been treated, while dozens have been found dead and covered in crude, mainly in Louisiana but also in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. On remote islands teeming with birds, a visible patina of oil taints pelicans, gulls, terns and herons, as captured in AP photos that depict one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of the spill’s impact. Such scenes are no longer unusual; the response plans anticipate nothing on this scale.

In Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, a dead sea turtle caked in reddish-brown oil lay splayed out with dragonflies buzzing by. More than 200 lifeless turtles and several dolphins also have washed ashore. So have countless fish.

There weren’t supposed to be any coastline problems because the site was far offshore. “Due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected,” the site plan says.

But that distance has failed to protect precious resources. And last week, a group of environmental research center scientists released a computer model that suggested oil could ride ocean currents around Florida and up to North Carolina by summer.

– Perhaps the starkest example of BP’s planning failures: The company has insisted that the size of the leak doesn’t matter because it has been reacting to a worst-case scenario all along.

Yet each step of the way, as the estimated size of the daily leak has grown from 42,000 gallons to 210,000 gallons to perhaps 1.8 million gallons, BP has been forced to scramble — to create potential solutions on the fly, to add more boats, more boom, more skimmers, more workers. And containment domes, top kills, top hats.

——

While a disaster as devastating as a major oil spill will create some problems that can’t be solved in advance, or even foreseen, BP’s plans do not anticipate even the most obvious issues, and use mountains of words to dismiss problems that have proven overwhelming.

In responses to lengthy lists of questions from AP, officials for BP and the Interior Department, which oversees oil rig regulator Minerals Management Service, appear to concede there were problems with the two oil spill response plans.

“Many of the questions you raise are exactly those questions that will be examined and answered by the presidential commission as well as other investigations into BP’s oil spill,” said Kendra Barkoff, spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. She added that Salazar has undertaken transformational reforms of MMS.

Said BP spokesman Daren Beaudo from Robert, La.: “We expect that a complete review of the regional response plans and planning process will take place as part of the overall incident investigation so that we can determine what worked well and what needs improvement. Thus far we have implemented the largest spill response in history and many, many elements of it have worked well. However, we are greatly disappointed that oil has made landfall and impacted shorelines and marshes. The situation we are dealing with is clearly complex, unprecedented and will offer us much to learn from.”

A key failure of the plan’s cleanup provisions was the scarcity of boom — floating lines of plastic or absorbent material placed around sensitive areas to deflect oil.

From the start, local officials all along the Gulf Coast have complained about a lack of supplies, particularly the heavier, so-called ocean boom. But even BP says in its regional plan that boom isn’t effective in seas more than three to four feet; waves in the Gulf are often bigger. And even in calmer waters, oil has swamped vital wildlife breeding grounds in places supposedly sequestered by multiple layers of boom.

The BP plans speak of thorough resources for all; there’s no talk of a need to share. Still, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said his shores were left vulnerable by Coast Guard decisions to shift boom to Louisiana when the oil threatened landfall there.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, Nungesser and others have complained that miles of the boom now in the water were not properly anchored. AP reporters saw evidence he was right — some lines of boom were so broken up they hardly impeded the slick’s push to shore.

Some out-of-state contractors who didn’t know local waters placed boom where tides and currents made sure it didn’t work properly. And yet disorganization has dogged efforts to use local boats. In Venice, La., near where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, a large group of charter captains have been known to spend their days sitting around at the marina, earning $2,000 a day without ever attacking the oil.

But perhaps the most glaring error in BP’s plans involves Lutz, the professor, one of several dozen experts recommended as resources to be contacted in the event of a spill.

Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published.

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Associated Press Writers Brian Skoloff in Grand Isle, La., Harry R. Weber in Houston, and Jason Bronis in New Orleans contributed to this report. Lush reported from New Orleans. Pritchard reported from Los Angeles.