TUCSON, Ariz.—The father of shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner has prepared and may release a public statement, according to a neighbor who met with Mr. Loughner's parents Monday. 
 
 A neighbor of Randy and Amy Loughner, who have lived for decades in a ranch house north of Tuscon, Ariz., describes their devastation at learning that their son Jared had shot 20 people, killing six of them. WSJ's Charles Forelle reports. 
 
 Devlin Barrett reports on how federal investigators are working to make the case against accused shooter Jared Loughner in this weekend's massacre in Tucson. Plus, former House Majority Leader Tom Delay is sentenced to three years in prison. 
 
 Randy and Amy Loughner disappeared from view shortly after the shootings, and a statement would be the family's first public comments since the attack. 
 
 Even in normal times, many on his block describe the elder Mr. Loughner as a reclusive man who had little time for neighborhood niceties. 
 
 Few people besides law-enforcement officers have been spotted entering the family home. Neighbor Wayne Smith did so on Monday evening, after he said Mr. Loughner asked him to bring in the mail. 
 
 Mr. Smith emerged to tell a small group of reporters that Randy Loughner had written a statement but isn't sure when to release it. Mr. Loughner is reluctant to greet the public and will try to coordinate the release through the local sheriff's office, Mr. Smith said. 
 
 "They're hurting real bad," Mr. Smith said, outside the house, in a neighborhood north of Tucson amid a flat carpet of strip malls and low subdivisions. "They are devastated." 
 
 Officials say Mr. Loughner had psychological problems and plotted his attack, which killed six people, gravely wounded congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and injured 13 others. 
 
 Mr. Loughner's parents have been unreachable since. The parents told investigators they didn't realize the severity of their son's problems, say people familiar with the matter. 
 
 The Loughners' single-level ranch house stands out on the quiet and open block: its entire front is shrouded by shrubbery—a billowing mesquite, a cactus with droopy paddles and a stunted palm whose fronds shield a street-facing window. 
 
 "They liked their privacy," says George Gayan, a retired mechanic who has lived next door for three decades. Sometimes "I didn't see him for three or four days." 
 
 Mr. Smith, who is 70 and has lived in a house across the street since 1972, said he didn't know the couple's last name until after Saturday's rampage. And Mr. Loughner didn't know his, he said. Still, he said he was probably one of Randy Loughner's closest acquaintances in the neighborhood. 
 
 He said he believes Randy hasn't worked since Jared was born. Amy had a steady job and Randy raised Jared, he said. 
 
 Residents interviewed on the block said they barely knew the Loughners. Stephen Woods, who lives next door, had run-ins with Mr. Loughner over uncollected trash that he said were vituperative and hostile. 
 
 Once, Mr. Woods said, Mr. Loughner spotted him from a distance in a Wal-Mart parking lot and repeatedly shouted "Trash people!" 
 
 It was Mr. Smith who told the Loughners what had happened Saturday. They returned from shopping, grocery bags in their peeling white Chevy truck, to find sheriffs' cars parked in front of the house and deputies stringing up crime-scene tape. 
 
 Mr. Smith, who had seen the news on TV, walked up and told them their son was suspected in a mass shooting. 
 
 "She almost passed out right there," Mr. Smith said. "He sat in the road with the tape up and cried." 
 
 —Evan Perez contributed to this article. 
 
 Write to Charles Forelle at charles.forelle@wsj.com ||||| TUCSON — The parents of Jared L. Loughner , the man who killed six people and wounded 13 others during a meet-and-greet event hosted by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, told the authorities after the mass shooting that they had become so concerned about their son’s strange behavior in the previous months that they had taken away his shotgun, insisted he get psychological counseling and had even begun to disable his car so that he could not go out at night, according to thousands of pages of documents related to the case released Wednesday. 
 
 The records, about 2,700 pages of police reports, witness statements and other material, detail the events leading up to the attack, from Mr. Loughner’s purchase of ammunition at a Walmart on the morning of the shooting to the response of Pima County Sheriff’s deputies to a bloody Safeway parking lot, where Mr. Loughner had been subdued by bystanders while reloading his 9-millimeter Glock semiautomatic. 
 
 The documents, released by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department after Freedom of Information requests from news organizations, reveal the depth of the worries that Mr. Loughner’s parents had about their son’s rapidly deteriorating psychological stability. 
 
 The parents, Amy and Randy Loughner, have not spoken publicly about the attack, for which Mr. Loughner, 24, was sentenced in November 2012 to seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in prison. Mr. Loughner, who pleaded guilty to 19 federal charges, had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia after his arrest, but was deemed competent to agree to the plea deal. The arrangement makes him ineligible for parole or to appeal his conviction. 
 
 Two days after the January 2011 shooting, Randy Loughner told a group of F.B.I. and sheriff’s investigators that he had grown so worried about his son’s odd behavior in the months since Jared had been forced to withdraw from a community college because of campus officials’ fears about the safety of the staff and students that he had begun to keep his son in at night by rendering his Chevrolet Nova inoperable. 
 
 But, Randy Loughner told the investigators, he had not done so before the morning of the attack, when his son drove away at 6 a.m. to secretly buy ammunition for the Glock he purchased at a local sporting goods store about six weeks before. 
 
 When his son returned home a couple of hours later, Randy Loughner said, he questioned him about what he was carrying in his backpack, which prompted Jared Loughner to turn and run, eventually fleeing into the desert. 
 
 About two hours later, he had apparently used some of that ammunition, emptying a 33-round magazine in about 19 seconds, and killing, among others, a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl and seriously wounding Ms. Giffords, who was shot in the head at close range. 
 
 In her interviews with law enforcement officials, Amy Loughner described her son as a “loner” who talked to himself. She said she had insisted that he be tested for drugs because she believed he was using methamphetamine despite his denials. She told Pima County sheriff’s detectives that she and her husband had taken a shotgun away from their son in the months before the shooting and told him he needed to get psychological help. 
 
 “Sometimes you’d hear him in his room, like, having conversations,” Ms. Loughner said about her son during an interview with investigators. “And sometimes he would look like he was having a conversation with someone right there. Be talking to someone. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t.” 
 
 Ms. Loughner said that she told Jared that “he needed to go see someone about it” but that he never did. She told deputies, “His behavior is not normal.” 
 
 Ms. Loughner said her son had denied using methamphetamine, but had acknowledged smoking marijuana and trying cocaine. 
 
 A police report by one of the arresting deputies, whose full name was not disclosed in the documents, said that when he arrived in the Tucson supermarket parking lot where the January 2011 shooting had occurred moments before, two or three people were holding Mr. Loughner down on the ground. The officer said that after handcuffing Mr. Loughner he had found two fully loaded Glock ammunition magazines in Mr. Loughner’s pockets, along with a folding knife with a four-inch blade. The deputy said Mr. Loughner repeatedly said that he pleaded “the Fifth,” even though the deputy said he had not asked him any questions. The deputy said he had removed a pair of disposable earplugs that Mr. Loughner had been wearing during the shooting. 
 
 Once in custody, Mr. Loughner told F.B.I. agents that “I’d like to sign something, a paper,” according to a police report. When told he did not need to sign anything, he responded, “All righty,” the report said. 
 
 The documents chronicle several particularly chilling moments from the morning of the shooting. The first occurred when Mr. Loughner was stopped by a state Game and Fish officer for running a red light shortly after 7:30 a.m. According to the officer, when Mr. Loughner learned the officer was not going to give him a ticket, he began to cry. He then thanked the officer and shook his hand, explaining, “I’ve just had a rough time,” the officer told investigators. 
 
 Soon after, a clerk at a convenience store told an F.B.I. agent, Mr. Loughner came in and asked for them to call him a cab. As Mr. Loughner nervously waited, the clerk told the investigator, Mr. Loughner looked at a clock in the store and said aloud: “9:25. I still got time.” The cab eventually arrived, and within 45 minutes, Mr. Loughner had gunned down 19 people, killing six of them. 
 
 Sarah Garrecht Gassen reported from Tucson, and Timothy Williams from New York.
– The parents of Jared Lee Loughner have released their first statement, and they sound as perplexed as the rest of us. "We don't understand why this happened," says the statement, via AP. "It may not make any difference, but we wish that we could change the heinous events of Saturday. We care very deeply about the victims and their families. We are so very sorry for their loss." Earlier, a neighbor described Amy and Randy Loughner as "hurting real bad," reports the Wall Street Journal. "They are devastated." The same neighbor—like others, he described the Loughner family as extremely private—was the first to break the news of their only child's arrest. He approached when they arrived home from shopping to see police cars and crime scene tape surrounding the house. "She almost passed out right there," said the neighbor. "He sat in the road with the tape up and cried."