IDAHO FALLS, Idaho » A referee lifted Oscar Ortega’s hand high into the clear Rocky Mountain night last summer. Ortega had not yet been accused of trying to kill the president. He had not yet told the world he was Jesus Christ. Not until the next morning would all the blows to his body make him urinate blood.

That July night at the rodeo grounds in Pocatello, with 2,000 people watching beneath the dry Western sky, the lazy kid who used to smoke too much dope was lucid and devastating in his debut as a mixed martial arts fighter. For the first time anyone could remember, he was an undisputed winner.

It was his first bout, and it would be his last.

"When his hand was raised in that ring," said Eric King, who helped train Ortega at the YMCA here, "I think that was one of the brightest moments of his life."

The fight ended in the second round, with Ortega astride his prone opponent in what is called a full mount, pummeling him in the face. Technical knockout, the referee ruled. Ortega carried his infant son, Israel, in triumph.

Now he may spend the rest of his life in prison. The government says that on Nov. 11, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, 21, rode past the Ellipse in Washington in a black Honda Accord he bought with money he earned waiting tables at his family’s small chain of Mexican restaurants here. Investigators say he slowed down as he passed the White House and fired a semi-automatic rifle from the passenger window. Bullets struck the White House near the residential quarters. The president and Michelle Obama were out of town.

The federal charges accuse Ortega of attempting to assassinate President Barack Obama. They say acquaintances claim that Ortega was trying to kill Obama because he considered him "the Antichrist."

That a religious extremist from a small town in Idaho would try to kill a black Democratic president might seem like cinematic stock. The state has long been stereotyped as violently anti-government and racist. Remember the white supremacists of Hayden Lake? Remember Ruby Ridge? But many people here in Idaho Falls say the cliche is empty this time.

Ortega is a Mexican-American whose family knows the sound of ethnic slurs and worries mostly about its restaurant business, not politics. People here say that the only thing that could have motivated Ortega was mental illness — but that they did not realize the severity of it until it was too late.

"I kind of thought we should sit down and talk with him," said Ortega’s sister, Yesenia Hernandez, "but then he was already gone."

The family reported Ortega missing on Oct. 31, eight days after he left on what he said was a vacation to Utah; instead it was a trip to the East Coast. His family never heard from him, and still has not.

Family members and others say that while Ortega was behaving increasingly strange — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with U.S. foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.

They said that he could not have truly wanted to kill the president, but that he may have wanted a larger audience. He read his speech to anyone who would listen. In September, Ortega made a video in which he asked Oprah Winfrey to let him appear on television with her.

"You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world," he says. "It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for."

Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has "a textbook case" of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.

Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center in the 1970s and 1980s.

"These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,"’ he said. "A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication."

Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Ortega, he acknowledged, is accused of going much further than pestering a guard or climbing a wall.

"I can guarantee you that in his mind, it all makes perfect sense," Torrey said. "If he’s Christ, Obama’s the Antichrist."

Ortega had a lengthy arrest record in and near Idaho Falls, but the charges were mostly misdemeanors, like underage drinking, and rarely involved violence.

"He really did fly under the radar," said Joelyn Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Falls Police Department.

Now the entire town knows who he is.

"He seemed like a nice guy, but when he started talking, it was like, wow," said Ramon Bailey, a student at Idaho State University who made the video of Ortega in September, after they met at the gym. Bailey was among several people traveling to Washington this week to testify before a grand jury. Jake Chapman is also scheduled to make the trip to Washington. The AK-47 that Ortega is accused of using to fire on the White House was registered to Chapman, who said in an interview that he is known to friends as "the gun guy." He said that he sold the gun to Ortega in March for $550 and that he believed it was the first gun Ortega owned.

In addition to his son, whom friends and family say he doted on, Ortega was devoted to mixed martial arts. He started training about a year ago and learned quickly, developing strong stand-up fighting skills and often volunteering to help others.

After years of eating junk food and caring little about his health, he started paying close attention to his diet, drinking protein shakes and eating more fruit and meat. Like other mixed martial arts fighters, when it came time to fight, he quickly dropped weight, getting to 154 from about 165 in a few days, in order to qualify for a lighter division, his trainers said.

He had let his hair and beard grow long in the last year. He told some people that it was part of his fighting identity, meant to intimidate. More recently, he said it was because he was Jesus.

"You ever heard of Andrei Arlovski, the fighter?" asked King, the trainer. "Oscar looked like him. But he also looked like Jesus."

© 2011 The New York Times Company