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At Hearing, Officer Tells of Suspect’s Calm After Colorado Massacre At Hearing, Police Recall Details of Horror at Colorado Movie Theater
(about 4 hours later)
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — A police officer testified at a preliminary hearing here on Monday that when he responded to emergency calls about a mass shooting at a crowded movie theater this summer, he found the suspected gunman standing calmly outside his car in a parking lot just moments after the man had opened fire inside, the authorities say, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. CENTENNIAL, Colo. — The movie theater was a blood-soaked nightmare that night in July. Wounded moviegoers screamed for help and tried to crawl for the exits. Bodies lay in the aisles. The floor was a carpet of shell casings, the air stung with the smell of tear gas, and dozens of abandoned cellphones bleated incessantly.
“He was very relaxed,” said the police officer, Jason Oviatt. “It was like there weren’t normal emotional responses to anything. He seemed very detached.” But outside, James E. Holmes stood with eerie calm, his head hidden behind a gas mask and helmet, his hands resting on the roof of his car. He was, police officers recalled here in court on Monday, detached from the chaos he had created moments before. He was sweating heavily underneath a sheath of black body armor. He smelled foul.
Officer Oviatt said that because the suspect, James E. Holmes, had been wearing a helmet and a gas mask, he had first thought that he was a fellow police officer. “He was very, very relaxed,” said Officer Jason Oviatt of the Aurora Police Department, who apprehended Mr. Holmes behind the theater minutes after the shooting. “It was like there weren’t normal emotional responses. He seemed very detached from it all.”
“He was just standing there,” said the officer, as all around them panic-stricken people fled the theater as quickly as they could, many with bullet wounds, many others covered in blood. Officer Oviatt was one of six police officers to testify here on the first day of a preliminary hearing to determine whether there is enough evidence to try Mr. Holmes, 25, for killing 12 people and wounding dozens more inside the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, a Denver suburb. An Arapahoe County district judge, William B. Sylvester, will make that decision.
But after a few moments, Officer Oviatt realized that aside from his calm demeanor, there was something else dangerously amiss about the man, whom he had first seen standing perfectly still — his hands were oddly positioned on the roof of his white car. Mr. Holmes faces more than 160 counts of murder and attempted murder.
He noticed that Mr. Holmes, who was wearing a red jumpsuit, was sweating profusely and that he was emitting a very foul body odor. For victims and their families, the hearing may offer the best, and perhaps only, opportunity to understand how the July 20 shooting unfolded, and to get a glimpse of Mr. Holmes’s actions and mind-set in the weeks and minutes before the attack. A criminal trial — if one ever convenes — remains months away, probably at the end of a long series of legal arguments, including over Mr. Holmes’s mental fitness to stand trial.
Then, as he placed the compliant Mr. Holmes into handcuffs, the officer learned why Mr. Holmes may have been standing in such an unusual way, reluctant to move: a handgun was lying on the roof of the car where Mr. Holmes’s hands had been. On Monday, some of the first police officers at the scene drew a grim and detailed picture of the moments before, during and after the mass shooting, the deadliest in Colorado since a 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.
While frisking Mr. Holmes, he said, he found that he was swathed in layers of body armor, which officers eventually had to cut off with knives to search him adequately. They described searching vainly for a pulse on a 6-year-old girl, the shooting’s youngest victim. They described a theater floor littered with popcorn and casings, flip-flops and blood. They recalled carrying wounded victims to their squad cars and racing them to local hospitals, yelling to one man, “Don’t you die on me!”
Police officers were among the first people to testify at a weeklong court hearing that will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to move the case against Mr. Holmes to trial, a decision that will be made by William Sylvester, a district judge in Arapahoe County. And for the first time in public, police officers gave a moment-by-moment account of arresting Mr. Holmes, a once-promising student from Southern California who moved here to study neuroscience.
But for victims and their families, the hearing may offer the best, and perhaps only, opportunity to understand how the July 20 shooting unfolded, and to get a glimpse into Mr. Holmes’s actions and mind-set in the weeks before the attack. A criminal trial — if one ever convenes — remains months away, probably at the end of a long series of legal arguments, including over Mr. Holmes’s mental fitness to stand trial. Officer Oviatt said he stumbled upon Mr. Holmes behind the theater, at first believing that the tall, thin man in the gas mask and commando gear was a police officer. He quickly realized he was mistaken, and said he aimed his gun at Mr. Holmes and ordered him to the ground.
It has been more than five months since Mr. Holmes, a neuroscience graduate student, was accused of striding into a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” at a movie theater in an Aurora shopping mall and began shooting. As sirens wailed and bloodied, terrified moviegoers streamed out of a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” Officer Oviatt said that Mr. Holmes made no attempt to run, to confront the police or to resist them. He raised his hands when ordered to by another officer, lay prone on the ground and glanced around at the lights and sounds piercing the night.
He faces more than 160 counts of first-degree murder and attempted murder. “He just did what he was told,” Officer Oviatt said. “No resistance.”
On Monday, police officers described the scene inside the theater in graphic terms, describing amounts of blood on the floor so copious that they had trouble keeping their footing. As the movie played on and cellphones rang incessantly, the officers said, they went from person to person, checking for signs of life. Fearing there could be other gunmen lurking, Officer Oviatt said he dragged Mr. Holmes into an alcove for trash bins and patted him down, searching for other weapons. The police would find an assault rifle just outside the emergency exit door of Theater 9, and a shotgun inside.
“They were screaming, they were yelling: ‘Help us! Help us!'” said Justin Grizzle, a police officer who was among the first to respond. After the police removed layers of Mr. Holmes’s body armor, stripping him to his boxer shorts, they found his wallet and driver’s license and asked whether he lived at the listed address. Mr. Holmes said he did, and then told them he had booby-trapped his apartment with explosives.
Realizing that there were not enough ambulances to transport all the injured to hospitals, the officer said, he began putting people in his patrol car. He made four trips to the hospital, he said. By the end, he could hear the sloshing sound of blood in the back of the car, he said. Daniel King, a public defender for Mr. Holmes, homed in on observations from the police about Mr. Holmes’s behavior that night. He called attention to the fact that Mr. Holmes was so relaxed and disconnected from his surrounding, and that his eyes were dilated.
Lawyers for Mr. Holmes, 25, have signaled that they might call witnesses this week to discuss his mental state in the hope of rebutting the prosecution’s evidence that Mr. Holmes spent months methodically buying 6,000 rounds of ammunition, handguns, a shotgun and an assault rifle. He had also booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, which he told the police about after he was arrested. Mr. Holmes’s lawyers have signaled they may call witnesses this week to discuss his mental state. Although Mr. Holmes has not yet filed a plea, his lawyers have said several times that he is mentally ill. Mr. Holmes had seen a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he had been a graduate student.
The fact that Mr. Holmes did not kill himself, unlike gunmen at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Columbine High School or Virginia Tech, has transformed the aftermath of the tragedy into a trying and costly legal case.
Although Mr. Holmes has not yet filed a plea, his lawyers have said several times that he is mentally ill. Mr. Holmes had seen a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he had been a graduate student, and had so alarmed his doctor that she contacted the campus police about him.
Less than a month before the shooting, after he had dropped out of his neuroscience program, Mr. Holmes sent a text message to a classmate that suggested he believed that he suffered from dysphoric mania, a bipolar condition that combines manic behavior and dark, depressive tendencies. Mr. Holmes warned the classmate to stay away from him “because I am bad news,” the classmate has said.Less than a month before the shooting, after he had dropped out of his neuroscience program, Mr. Holmes sent a text message to a classmate that suggested he believed that he suffered from dysphoric mania, a bipolar condition that combines manic behavior and dark, depressive tendencies. Mr. Holmes warned the classmate to stay away from him “because I am bad news,” the classmate has said.
Prosecutors contend that Mr. Holmes methodically planned the killings for weeks, buying guns, ammunition and ballistic gear, and purchasing his ticket to the movie 12 days in advance.
On Monday, for the first time, the final placid moments before the shooting came to life in video images captured by the theater’s security cameras. As excited teenagers high-five one another and buy popcorn, Mr. Holmes walks into the Century 16 theater, holding the door open for an arriving couple. He retrieves his ticket by scanning his smartphone, dawdles at the popcorn counter for a few moments, and then heads toward Theater 9.
In the next silent video played by prosecutors, theater employees suddenly crane their heads toward something off-screen. Gunshots. They duck behind the ticket counter. Frantic moviegoers fill the screen, racing through the front door and into the night.