'Batman' theater gunman to go on trial

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'Batman' theater gunman to go on trial

AFP
April 26, 2015, 10:35 pm

Centennial (United States) (AFP) - Opening statements will finally begin Monday in the long-awaited trial of James Holmes, the allegedly crazed gunman accused of opening fire in a packed Batman movie premiere in 2012, killing 12.

Troubled graduate student Holmes, 27, has been in custody since the night of the mass murder in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012, which also left 70 people injured.

Holmes -- who had a shock of orange hair when first seen after the attack, in which he allegedly dressed up as Batman villain the Joker -- faces 166 counts of aggravated murder, attempted murder and possession of explosives charges.

If convicted, he could face the death penalty. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and much of the trial is expected focus on whether Holmes was sane at the time of the massacre.

A panel of 12 jurors and 12 alternates was selected after attorneys questioned over 1,000 of the 9,000 residents of Arapahoe County who received summons since January, when jury selection began.

The trial is likely to hear some grisly and harrowing evidence.

"Jury service is not something we do because it's easy," said Colorado District Judge Carlos Samour. "It's something we do because we deeply treasure our democracy."

Witnesses said Holmes threw smoke bomb-type devices before opening fire randomly with weapons, including an AR-15 military-style rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and a .40-caliber pistol.

In preliminary hearings, prosecutors said Holmes had enough ammunition to kill everyone in the crowded theater showing "The Dark Knight Rises."

His apartment was later found to be booby-trapped with an array of home-made explosive devices, which police had to disarm before entering the dwelling.

Holmes appeared in court initially with flaming orange hair, apparently to mimic the Joker, who also had colored hair in the Batman movies.

By the time he appeared at the start of jury selection, Holmes wore a sport coat, blue shirt and khaki pants, glasses and had his brown hair and beard neatly trimmed.

- 'Gripped by mental illness' -

Proceedings have dragged on for more than two-and-a-half years because the prosecutor is seeking the death penalty, according to Denver attorneys following the case. The defendant has undergone two psychiatric examinations.

Holmes's parents, Robert and Arlene Holmes, in December wrote a letter to the editor of The Denver Post saying their son had never harmed anyone prior to the shooting.

"He is not a monster. He is a human being gripped by a severe mental illness," the couple wrote of their son, who was a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine before the shooting.

If he is found not guilty by reason of insanity, Holmes will be confined to a state mental hospital. To win a release, he would have to be found free of mental illness and no longer a danger to himself or to others.

Attorneys say that is not likely to happen, as no psychiatrist would be willing to sign off on releasing him.

There is at least one famous precedent: John Hinckley, the man found not guilty by reason of insanity in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, who was back in court last week seeking to gain freedom.

Hinckley has been in a Washington mental institution, but has lived with his mother in southeast Virginia 17 days a month since 2013. His doctors joined in Hinckley's request that he be allowed out permanently with monitoring.

 

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'Batman' killer studied brain disorders before mass murder

AP
April 27, 2015, 11:58 am

Batman killer studied brain disorders before mass murder The long-awaited trial of James Holmes will begin on Monday. Source: AP.

James Holmes was growing volatile well before he put on a gas mask and body armor, strapped on a rifle, shotgun, pistol and ammunition, and slipped into a midnight premiere of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises."

He was a sought-after neuroscientist-in-training, but he was falling apart. He told a classmate he wanted to kill people, prosecutors say. He fell out of favor with his professors, who suggested he find a new career. He stopped seeing his psychiatrist, then sent her text messages so threatening that she alerted University of Colorado campus police. He even mailed her his journal, in a package with burned $20 bills.

Months before Holmes opened fire on the audience on July 20, 2012, killing 12 and injuring 70 more in one of America's deadliest mass shootings, the 24-year-old doctoral student was preparing for violence.

He stockpiled weapons, ammunition, tear gas grenades and riot gear, and rigged his apartment to become a potentially lethal booby trap, cranking techno music in an apparent attempt to lure someone into opening his door. One neighbor who came to complain narrowly avoided a fiery explosion by walking away.

Many observers hope Holmes' death penalty trial beginning Monday will finally show what twisted a seemingly dedicated scholar into a sadistic killer. Prosecutors have suggested he was angry over his academic decline. But anyone looking for a trigger or tipping point with mass killers is usually disappointed, said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego.

“There's no such thing as someone snapping,” said Meloy, who is not involved in the Holmes case. “What we know now is that even if a person is psychotic, they can still plan and methodically go about the preparations to carry out a mass murder.”

Mass violence is usually premeditated, following a path that begins with a personal grievance and is complicated by narcissism and paranoia. But only 1 in 5 of these killers is psychotic, Meloy said.

Psychosis is something Holmes knew all about. Before the shooting, he was preparing to give a class presentation on “MicroRNA Biomarkers” that provide a biological basis for psychiatric and neurological disorders.

About the same time, he was amassing deadly firepower: Two Glock pistols. A shotgun. An AR-15 rifle. Boxes upon boxes of ammunition — 6,295 rounds in all.

Police who searched his apartment also found prescription medications for anxiety and depression, 50 cans and bottles of beer, paper shooting targets, and a “Batman” mask.

The long-awaited trial of James Holmes will begin in the US on Monday. Source:AP.

“He was absolutely out of his mind,” said Denver defense attorney Iris Eytan, who initially represented Holmes but is no longer involved.

She compared Holmes to schizophrenics she has defended: They are erratic and irrational; they hallucinate.

“Look at his eyes, they're completely dilated,” she said, referencing a mug shot showing Holmes with hair dyed comic-book orange.

“He was under the influence of something, and I believe it was mental illness,” she said.

Prosecutors say the meticulous plotting shows Holmes was deliberate and calculated, and that evidence suggests he knew right from wrong. For example, Holmes searched online for “rational insanity,” and took haunting selfies the night of the shooting, sticking out his tongue and smiling with a Glock under his face.

“He didn't care who he killed or how many he killed, because he wanted to kill all of them,” Prosecutor Karen Pearson said.

After an emotionally wrenching trial lasting four months or more, the 12 final jurors, chosen from a pool of 9,000, will have to decide whether he was insane at the time.

If so, the 27-year-old inmate with a doughy face and vacant eyes who sits tethered to a courtroom floor will be committed indefinitely to a state psychiatric hospital.

If not, prosecutors will press for the death penalty over life in prison without parole.

Holmes' former psychiatrist and two court-appointed doctors who spent days interviewing him will likely be asked questions that could explain how a seemingly harmless college student without so much as a traffic ticket on his record could march up and down the aisles of a stadium-style theater, mercilessly shooting down those who tried to flee.

His mother apparently has no idea. He didn't do drugs or gamble or even stay out late, she says in a recently published book of poems and reflections.

“What the hell happened?” Arlene Holmes writes in one, titled “Home Videos.”

“How can the kid who read about the Berenstain Bears and John Stewart's Earth and Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, how could he change?” she asks in another, “Jim's Room.”
“I leave his room untouched because I need the memories and tangible evidence that he was a good person.”

“People think he is a monster, but he has a disease that changed his brain,” she writes in another poem.

If Holmes' mother knows more about a mental illness, her book doesn't say. The family and their lawyers didn't respond to requests for comment.

This file photo released on Sept. 20, 2012 by the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office shows James Holmes shortly after his arrest. Source:AP.

Holmes was a shy teen who rarely started conversations but graduated with highest honors from the University of California, Riverside, and then applied for elite doctoral programs. In one essay, he wrote of mentoring a schizophrenic as a summer camp counselor. The boy “vacuumed the ceiling of our cabin. These kids were heavily medicated but this did not solve their problems, only create new ones. ... I wanted to help them but couldn't.”

In another, Holmes hinted at how his own mind worked, writing that he was “fascinated by the complexities of a long lost thought seemingly arising out of nowhere into a stream of awareness. These fascinations likely stemmed from my interest in puzzles and paradoxes as an adolescent and continued through my curiosity in academic research.”

He landed at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus near Denver, one of just six students awarded entry into the exclusive doctoral program in June 2011. He also earned a National Institutes of Health grant for top performers. But by his second semester, his world was crumbling.

His professors sought to keep him out of their labs. He flunked a key oral exam on June 7, and withdrew from the university three days later. He saw his psychiatrist a final time, then pretty much fell out of sight, his former classmates said.

Outside his 800-square-foot apartment in the suburb of Aurora, neighbors recalled seeing him alone, sometimes drinking beers at a nearby bar.

From July 5 to July 18 — two days before the attack — he logged onto a dating website with the handle “classicjimbo.” His profile said he was seeking "casual sex" and asked "Will you visit me in prison?"

When he showed up at the "Batman" movie dressed head to toe in protective gear, some theatergoers assumed he was part of the show.

Then, he tossed tear gas canisters into the crowd and started shooting.

 

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‘Batman’ gunman lost girlfriend and failed college before massacring 12

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 28 April, 2015, 8:44am
UPDATED : Tuesday, 28 April, 2015, 8:44am

Agence France-Presse in Centennial, Colorado

James Holmes sits in Arapahoe County District Court in Centennial, Colorado, in this 2012 file photo. Photo: AP

Batman theatre gunman James Holmes meticulously planned the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado, after breaking up with his girlfriend and flunking college, prosecutors said, giving harrowing details of the slaughter.

In opening remarks at Holmes’ trial on Monday, prosecutor George Brauchler gave the first authoritative blow-by-blow account of the killings that left 12 dead and 70 injured.

“On a cool July night... 400 people filed into a box-like theatre to be entertained... and one person came in to slaughter them,” the prosecutor said, pointing at Holmes in a hushed courtroom.

The death toll could have been much higher, Brauchler said - but a gun cartridge jammed in Holmes’ gun, while booby-trapped explosives he rigged at his apartment failed to go off.

The 27-year-old, who has pleaded not guilty due to insanity, listened calmly as the prosecutor set out his case on the first day of his trial, which could see Holmes face the death sentence.

Holmes - who sported neatly-trimmed brown hair and a beard for the first court session - has been in custody since the night of the mass murder in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012.

Grisly and harrowing evidence is being presented at the trial.

In an emergency 911 call from that night, played in court, repeated shots and screams can be heard as a caller tells the police dispatcher about the unfolding massacre.

Brauchler opened his case by showing a photo of the back door of the Aurora movie theatre, smeared with blood.

“Through this door is horror,” he said. “Through this door is bullets, blood, brains and bodies.”

Witnesses said Holmes - who had bright orange hair at the time of the attack - threw smoke bombs before opening fire randomly with weapons including an AR-15 military-style rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and a .40-calibre pistol.

Prosecutors say Holmes had enough ammunition to kill everyone in the crowded theatre showing The Dark Knight Rises.

Contrary to reports, the shooter’s orange hair at the time was not linked to the film’s Joker character, Brauchler said.

His apartment was later found to be booby-trapped with an array of homemade explosive devices, which police had to disarm before entering the dwelling.

The prosecutor told how Holmes had been dumped by his first-ever girlfriend in the months before the attack, and had also failed to make the grade at college, leaving him with no obvious next step.

“I decided to dedicate my life to killing others,” Holmes wrote in a notebook he posted the day before the massacre to a college psychiatrist whom he had seen for counselling in the months before the attack.

Proceedings have dragged on for more than two-and-a-half years because the prosecutor is seeking the death penalty, according to Denver attorneys following the case. The defendant has undergone two psychiatric examinations.

Holmes’s parents Robert and Arlene Holmes - who were in court Monday - wrote a letter to the editor of The Denver Post in December saying their son had never harmed anyone prior to the shooting.

“He is not a monster. He is a human being gripped by a severe mental illness,” the couple wrote of their son, who was a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado School of Medicine before the shooting.

If he is found not guilty by reason of insanity, Holmes will be confined to a state mental hospital.

Relatives of victims of the massacre are expected to attend the trial.

Marcus Weaver, a survivor, said he has forgiven Holmes.

“When all is said and done... God loves all his children, even the sick ones,” he wrote on his Facebook page, according to The Denver Post. “So I forgave him for what he did... It allowed me to move forward.”

 

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Survivors tell gruesome details of Colorado theater shooting

By SADIE GURMAN
Apr. 28, 2015 6:44 PM EDT

Colorado theater shooter James Holmes, left rear in light-colored shirt, watches during testimony by witness Derick Spruel, upper right, on the second day of his trial in Centennial, Colo., Monday, April 27, 2015. Standing at left is prosecutor Lisa Teesch-Maguire. (Colorado Judicial Department via AP, Pool)

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — Katie Medley, nine months pregnant and crouching between the seats of a movie theater filling with tear gas, gunfire and screams, looked at her husband Caleb's bloody face and told a friend, "He's dead, he's dead."

Prodeo Et Patria was 14 that night, and sitting with his parents somewhere in the middle of the 421 people watching a midnight Batman premiere. He thought the gunfire was a joke until his father ordered him to the floor, where someone kicked off his glasses in the chaos.

His father told him to run and refused to leave his mother, whose arm and foot were shattered by bullets. Hoisting his wife onto his back, they made for an exit together. "That's when I first felt a gunshot hit me," Patria said.

They were the among the first of many prosecution witnesses in the death penalty trial of James Holmes, and their gripping testimony made clear the state's determination to make sure jurors know the carnage Holmes caused inside the suburban Denver theater on July 20, 2012.

Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. warned jurors as the trial opened not to let sympathy and emotion influence their judgment. The defense team has conceded that Holmes was the killer, hoping to focus not on the crime itself or its lingering damage, but on what it sees as the only question jurors must resolve: whether Holmes was legally insane at the time.

But on this first long day of testimony, the judge repeatedly turned away defense objections to particularly gruesome and tragic details. Defense attorneys did not question any of the witnesses from the theater.

Defense attorney Katherine Spengler argued that grisly photos, a 911 recording of shrieks and screams, and the words "bloody victim" that a witness wrote on a diagram of the theater served only to inflame the jury. The judge dismissed her motions, reasoning that the evidence is relevant and fairly depicts a horrific crime.

Prosecutors say they will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was sane, therefore guilty, and should be executed. Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; his defense hopes the jury will have him indefinitely committed to a mental institution.

Tuesday was Day One of testimony in a trial expected to last four months or more. If the prosecution keeps this up into August, the cumulative weight of the victims' suffering could make the defense job even more difficult.

Perhaps the most riveting testimony was also the shortest so far, coming from Caleb Medley, an aspiring comedian who lost an eye and was left unable to walk and barely able to speak after Holmes fired a bullet into his brain.

Prosecutors asked him only two questions: Was he married to Katie? Was he at the theater that night?

From a wheelchair, he answered the first with a breathy, grunted "Yeah."

To the second, he tapped out his answer on a poster board with the letters of the alphabet: Y, E, S.

His wife filled in the rest of their story, recalling her desperation between the seats before she decided to make a break for it, to try to save their baby. She said she took his hand, and felt him squeeze hers back, thinking she'd never again see him alive.

"I told him that I loved him and that I would take care of our baby if he didn't make it," she said.

She later gave birth to a healthy son, now 3, as Caleb underwent his third brain surgery in the same hospital.

She kept her composure Tuesday, even as her husband's injuries were put on display, but sobbed as she returned to her seat in the courtroom. Others comforted her and said "good job."

Robert and Arlene Holmes, sitting two rows behind their son, had no visible reaction to these descriptions of his slaughter. Neither did Holmes, who stared directly ahead. But Ian Sullivan, whose 6-year-old daughter Veronica was the youngest to die that night, fixed his gaze on Holmes, glaring intently at him from the audience for long periods of time.

In opening statements, the defense sought to focus instead on what was going on inside Holmes' mind, which they say was so addled by schizophrenia and psychosis that his sense of right and wrong was distorted, and he lost any control over his actions. They won't call their own witnesses or begin making the case for insanity until after the prosecution rests, many weeks from now.

Defense lawyers said Holmes was a "good kid" who sensed something wrong with his mind, even at a young age. Studying neuroscience at the University of Colorado was his attempt to fix his thoughts; Instead, "psychosis bloomed" when he failed in the doctoral program, and delusions then commanded him to kill, they said.