Giffords' Husband: 'I Thought She Was Dead'

For 20 excruciating minutes, Gabrielle Giffords' husband believed his wife was dead.

Mark Kelly first got a call on the morning of Jan. 8 from one of the Democratic congresswoman's staffers, saying she'd been shot. A friend volunteered a private plane to whisk Kelly to Tucson, Ariz., where his wife had been meeting constituents in a Safeway parking lot when a gunman opened fire. On the plane, he saw erroneous TV reports saying that Giffords was dead.

"I just, you know, walked into the bathroom, and you know, broke down," Kelly, an astronaut slated to command the Space Shuttle Endeavour's final mission this spring, told ABC's Diane Sawyer in an interview aired Tuesday night. "To hear that she died is just, it's devastating for me."

His family was on the plane with him. His two daughters, Claudia and Claire, started crying, and his mother, "I think she almost screamed," Kelly said.

Twenty minutes later, Kelly was able to get through by phone to someone at the hospital where Giffords was taken -- who told him that his wife was actually alive but in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head.

"It was a terrible mistake," Kelly said about his decision to turn on the TV and follow news reports that ended up being wrong. "As bad as it was that she had died, it's equally exciting that she hadn't."

Giffords' condition has been upgraded from critical to serious. Her mother, Gloria Giffords, wrote in an e-mail to friends and family Tuesday that her daughter will probably be released from the hospital Friday and transferred to a rehabilitation center. Giffords' staff has so far said no decision has been made.

The e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, describes the wounded congresswoman as conscious and alert -- even able to scroll through photos on her husband's iPhone.

"Every day Gabby improves and shows higher levels of comprehension and complex actions," Giffords' mother wrote. She even tried to undo Kelly's tie and shirt, and was able to browse through get-well cards and pages of a large-print Harry Potter book, she said.

But Giffords' doctors have said her progress so far is encouraging, she has a long recovery ahead.

"At times I'm 100 percent confident that she's going to make a 100 percent recovery," Kelly told ABC. "And, you know, at other times I don't know." He said he sometimes worries whether his wife might lose her sense of humor, which he loved so much.

Kelly also revealed for the first time that before the Jan. 8 shooting, his wife had talked about her fears of being shot at one of the many open, meet-and-greet events she holds with constituents. She'd spoken about the possibility about 10 times, he said.

Meanwhile, the accused suspect in the shootings, Jared Loughner, is being held in solitary confinement in an Arizona prison, awaiting trial on federal murder charges. He's believed to have been targeting Giffords, but six other people were killed, including a federal judge, John Roll. The trial is likely to be moved to San Diego because of how many Arizona judges and lawyers worked closely with Roll, and how traumatized the Tucson community has been.

Detectives are poring over more than a dozen videos from surveillance cameras in the Safeway supermarket and its parking lot, gleaning details of the gunman's actions in the moments before he opened fire. The clips show Loughner inside the supermarket, where investigators believe he made final preparations for the shootings -- including going into the store bathroom and inserting earplugs, The Washington Post reported.

The videos show him walking through the crowd to Giffords and firing his first bullet into her face from two or three feet away, law enforcement officials told the Post. At first, doctors surmised that the bullet entered Giffords' head from the back, but the video shows otherwise, with the gun aimed above her left eye. Thirty-one more shots rang out in a span of no more than 15 seconds.

The chief investigator for the Pima County Sheriff's Department, Richard Kastigar, said the footage shows the gunman approaching Giffords in "a hurried fashion." He told The New York Times the gunman seemed "very deliberate in my estimation, very calculated."

Kastigar said the video also shows that Roll died while helping to save the life of Ronald Barber, a Giffords aide who was shot in the cheek and leg. Roll can be seen guiding Barber to the ground and shielding him with his body, "literally lying on top of him, and his back was exposed," Kastigar said. Roll was then fatally shot in the back.

"It's very clear to me the judge was thinking of his fellow human more than himself," Kastigar told the Times.

Barber, 65, survived, and is now out of the hospital.

"I'm still trying to deal with how I feel about what I saw and what happened to others," he told the Arizona Daily Star. "There's the business of, you know, why did I survive and why did others die. Just seeing my boss get shot is pretty horrible. I'm still working that out."