A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  Jimmy saw his mom and dad talking together, caring about each other, James the adult told me after the shootings. “You could see love between them … they showed it.” The feeling came to Jimmy, too, he said: warmth, hugs, and he was a part of that.

  Chris recalls a noticeable change in Jimmy after the family moved back to San Diego and another as he moved into adolescence. She says he communicated less, perhaps because they were five years apart and he was in high school. James the adult doesn’t remember their relationship that way. He remembers being with her in the house and in the backyard, where sometimes she was a bit of a pest. She “wanted to do exactly what I was doing.” But he knew she looked up to him.

  For most of Jimmy’s childhood, the family went to church regularly. He recalls a Presbyterian Sunday school early on, but after returning to San Diego, they attended Peñasquitos Lutheran. James the adult says he went to Sunday school because Mom insisted. As he got older, the family sat together during adult services. He remembers being “indifferent” to Sunday school and church. The family would go for donuts or Mexican food afterward, James the adult says, with a bit of a smile. “They had to bribe me with Taco Bell.” Then he added, “I was never really a believer, I guess” (a statement redacted from the interview videos shown to the jury). On the other hand, he volunteered to help with vacation Bible school and church gardening, and he attended “pretty much every Sunday.”

  Religion was “pretty much insignificant” in the adolescent life James remembers. It was most important to Arlene, but, he says, she “left it at the church” rather than bringing her faith into the home. Bob “was kind of like me, but he would go because of my mom.”

  As he entered high school, Jimmy’s social difficulties, and some troubling thoughts and mental images, were evolving, but he still didn’t tell anyone. The gist of neighbors’ and classmates’ stories from that time is that Jimmy kept to himself with everyone except family and friends. They remember him as quiet and shy, even though once he became comfortable with someone he could be talkative, funny, and “pretty normal.”

  High school classmate Sumit Shah told the media after the shootings that Jimmy “always had really good grades,” even in advanced placement courses, and would join in lunch hour football games. Neighbor and classmate Anthony Mai knew a “happy and smiling” Jimmy for years, who played soccer and ran cross-country on the track team at Westview High. Ilana Aronson, who lived across the street and a few houses north, remembered that he used to swim with the neighborhood kids in the Aronsons’ backyard pool.

  Jimmy hung out with one of the quieter groups, going to movies and playing paintball. He and Alex Van Horne played junior varsity soccer. “There’s people you see in high school that you worry about sometimes,” Van Horne told the San Diego NBC affiliate, “but he wasn’t one of those.” Jimmy didn’t stand out, but “he always seemed fine.”

  Jimmy wasn’t particularly successful at sports at the time, but he stayed with it. Track coach Lori Godwin says he wasn’t very athletic, “but he kept coming to practice.” She saw a painfully awkward boy who kept his head and eyes down around strangers as if to say, “I can see you but please don’t talk to me.”

  None of them could see what was going on inside him.

  James the adult remembers what was going on inside during those early and middle teens. He remembers mental images of atomic blasts and “nuclear winter” that began to slip into his thoughts when his mind wasn’t occupied. He remembers a kind of shift from the disturbing but passive thoughts of death and destruction of a year or so earlier to more active ones, from images of anonymous people dying to thoughts of killing them himself. The thoughts were sporadic, intruding to fill “blank spaces,” what he called “down time.”

  REID: “[You wrote in your notebook a few weeks before the shootings,] ‘the obsession to kill since I was a kid; with age became more and more realistic. Started as the entire world with nuclear bomb and then shifted,’ more amorphous when you were a child.”

  HOLMES: “Right. There wasn’t any clear detail. It was just nuclear bombs.”

  REID: “… What did you mean by ‘obsession’?”

  HOLMES: “Recurring thought…. Sometimes multiple times a week, sometimes every other week.”

  REID: “Did it interfere with any of your kid activities?”

  HOLMES: “No, it would occur on my down time and, like, before going to sleep…. Kind of times when nothing’s happening.”

  Holmes said that to me on August 27, 2014. Almost four weeks earlier, on August 1, I had asked him about his earliest obsessions about killing, which occurred during middle school. He generally denied feeling any hatred, just “strong inner thoughts of killing people” without any images attached. There were no specific victims in his thoughts or fantasies, no enemies, or people who teased him, or video game bad guys; “they were just abstract humankind.”

  James the adult would speak of hating mankind years later, in our postshooting interviews, but he told me that the “hate” was as a child hates vegetables (he picked broccoli) rather than in anger. It wasn’t vengeful, but he still wanted to kill people. He seemed perplexed when I asked about his motives or the context for those early thoughts. “It just popped up,” he said. “I didn’t really have anything to be angry at.”

  Jimmy had the impression that he made other people uncomfortable and that their being uncomfortable would cause problems. At first, James the adult explained that the worst outcome he (young Jimmy) could imagine from his awkwardness during those years was simply to make the other person feel awkward too, or maybe to start a fight. As time passed, he began to think about it in terms of death: “if somebody gets killed or not.”

  Around that time, perhaps a year or two before, Jimmy had read Of Mice and Men, the John Steinbeck novel about two California migrant workers: George, wiry and smart, and Lennie, a mentally defective “gentle giant” whom George protects from a world that doesn’t understand him. When I asked James the adult if there were characters in the book he found particularly interesting at the time or with whom he might identify, he chose Lennie. “George liked him,” James said. “That’s what made it hard for him to kill him in the end.” George killed Lennie because “he was the closest one to him.”

  There’s a lot of psychological evidence that Jimmy was afraid of letting his angry feelings get out of control, that those emotions might hurt others or drive them away. That’s a routine childhood fear, shown in different ways by children of all ages, and it was of great concern to Jimmy. For example, like all kids, sometimes he got mad at his mother, and sometimes he felt that he hated her. He was so afraid of those feelings, or that he would lose control, that he made a pact with himself never to hate her. “It wasn’t acceptable to be angry at her,” he told me. If a kid gets really angry at his mother, “she could treat you differently … [and maybe] ignore you.”

  Later, things became more complicated and more ominous. Jimmy’s early fantasies and mental pictures of “nuclear winter,” metaphors for thinly suppressed anger getting out of control, evolved into more complex mental defenses. His parents didn’t notice very much in the way of emotional symptoms, but he was getting worse. Sometime during late middle school or early high school, Jimmy developed a particular way of mentally defending against his anxiety and awkwardness in uncomfortable situations. Others saw him withdrawing, unable to find words, or “clamming up,” but Holmes described it more dramatically, as “freezing.”

  In mild, even imagined, confrontations, Jimmy would stop talking, moving, or outwardly reacting. He told his various examiners, including me, that he didn’t remember anything about the early “freezing” episodes because he couldn’t think or feel when he froze. Nothing was going through his mind, he said; it was “kind of a mental block.”

  Later, sometime during high school, disturbing images began to appear within the freezing. Holmes has vivid memories of violent images—“saws going against other people” and “getting their
heads cut off”—but he has trouble pondering the possibility that the images had any psychological meaning. The saws just “popped up” in his mind, he remembers, like a “floating saw” chopping off a limb or a head. “Then there’s no more. It’s done.” It’s a “random” saw that Jimmy didn’t associate with himself: “The saw is doing it on its own.”

  Of course the saws were associated with Jimmy’s feelings and wishes, but he truly failed to see any connection, either at the time or during our interviews years later. In spite of his considerable intellect and in spite of his fervent wish to understand why he was “different,” neither Jimmy the teenager nor James the adult ever pondered their psychological meaning. Thinking about one’s own unconscious wishes and fears is very difficult. The unconscious is unconscious and is inaccessible for good reason. However uncomfortable our conscious thoughts and fantasies may be, the ones they conceal scare us even more.

  That kind of fantasy is not extremely rare in adolescents, and it isn’t always psychologically ominous. When people are faced with great anxiety, their minds create ways to feel safer. That means either eliminating the threat—mentally or physically—or moving away from it. It’s like fight or flight in the jungle, but without real lions. When the person is trapped in the situation, as Jimmy when he was frozen in a verbal interchange, the mind automatically comes up with ways to eliminate the perceived threat.

  But we’re not wild animals. The rational part of the mind knows that we don’t want to destroy the other person just because we feel awkward. We, including young Jimmy Holmes, almost always control our animal protective impulses and quickly create mental and physical actions that protect us without resorting to violent measures unless they’re truly warranted. We often suppress our most violent fantasies so well that we don’t even become aware of them.

  Jimmy did become aware of his. He didn’t recognize them as his own impulses (that is, the images were seen as sort of “free floating” rather than his consciously imagining himself wielding the saw or the nuclear bomb). But Jimmy, even though he didn’t experience the fantasies as his own wishes, came to realize that they, like some of his other feelings and behaviors, meant that he was “different.”

  Dr. Raquel Gur, a prominent Philadelphia psychiatrist, reviewed the Holmes records and interviewed him several times for the defense. She, too, elicited evidence that being different was painful for Jimmy and that those feelings intensified during his adolescence. She believes that by the ninth grade, he had begun to think he might be “crazy.” By the next year, he felt isolated, couldn’t communicate with people, and thought that others could tell that he was different. Dr. Gur suggested—or at least James the adult told her—that Jimmy was paralyzed by a fear of people, not specific ones but “humans in general.”

  James the adult told both Dr. Gur and me that he believes his thoughts of hurting others were mentally blocking out thoughts of hurting himself, though other interview material suggests that he wasn’t actually aware of feeling self-destructive (assuming he was suicidal at all). He didn’t have any concrete plans for either suicide or killing others at the time, he told us; they were just thoughts.

  The thoughts of hurting others that would pop into Jimmy’s head went away when he was active with schoolwork or computer games. Still, he knew that he was different from other people, and he wanted to understand why. He hoped understanding would fix him. “Is my brain different?” Jimmy asked himself. He became interested in neuroscience—how brains work—because “there’s nothing more important than my brain in my daily life.”

  By age fourteen or fifteen, Jimmy believed there was something wrong with his mind, but he didn’t call it “mental illness.” He thought of it as a “broken brain.” He was pretty sure there were other kids who thought there was something wrong with themselves, too, but he never talked about it with anyone. “I kept it private.”

  Kids have all kinds of private thoughts and secrets, but the reasons for keeping things to oneself provide hints about how a young boy sees his place in his family and the world. Is that place solid and predictable? Or is it precarious, shaky? James the adult consistently speaks of anxiety and discomfort when he was in even innocuous social situations, especially when he couldn’t easily leave or control the setting, but he shared very little with his family or his friends.

  Separately from his inner thoughts of the time, James the adult remembers high school as more or less typical for a bright, shy kid. He enjoyed schoolwork and hanging out with friends. Math, science, and history were his favorite subjects, and he made outstanding grades, often in advanced placement courses. He wasn’t at the very top of his class, but his GPA, adjusted for his AP courses, was close to 4.0.

  His social life was about as one would expect for his nerdy, mostly male group. He wasn’t very specific in later interviews, but all the evidence points to guys who hung out and played lots of video games, especially StarCraft, a real-time strategy game. His group didn’t gravitate to the violent ones, the “first-person shooters.” Jimmy talked a lot about athletics and participated in several sports, partly because of a little pushing from his parents. He describes himself as mediocre but holding his own in soccer and cross-country since elementary school.

  And girls. The guys in his group didn’t have girlfriends, and Jimmy was no exception. One thinks of boys like that as not dating much but very open to the invitation if a girl gives them some attention. James the adult, though, chuckled a little when he said that when girls asked him out, he said no. Maybe he was gay? “Naw,” he answered. “I don’t fly that way.”

  Jimmy applied to lots of California universities during his senior year at Westview. He was accepted by all of them and got a full-ride scholarship to the University of California, Riverside, honors program.

  During that senior year, he also applied for and won a position in the highly competitive summer internship program at San Diego Miramar College. After a week of Miramar science “boot camp” to prepare him for laboratory work, he spent seven weeks in Dr. Terrence Sejnowski’s computational neurobiology lab at the San Diego Salk Institute. His main job, supervised by a graduate student named John Jacobson, was writing computer code for an experiment related to humans’ perception of time. Some commentators and media reports after the shooting completely misunderstood that project, erroneously labeling it a crazy attempt at time travel.

  Late that summer, Jimmy and other Miramar interns presented their work in scholarly talks. A video of his presentation, “Temporal Illusions,” shows him behaving quite normally, explaining scientifically sound student research to a large audience of peers and strangers. In spite of all the comments from neighbors, friends, and classmates about Jimmy’s shyness and awkwardness, and his own memories of painful interactions and freezing in the face of slight or imagined confrontation, the Jimmy who gave this ten-minute presentation is poised, confident, and humorous and interacts well with his audience.

  Dozens of other photos and other videos by family and friends, taken over many years, also seem to show a normal, social, happy adolescent at parties, with sports teams, snowboarding, and joking around in groups. He doesn’t appear to be “freezing” or even uncomfortable. That’s a little perplexing, but candid photos and brief video clips can be misleading. They’re quick snapshots—no pun intended—from a much longer continuum of actions and expressions that occurred over months and years. One can find inconsistency in virtually all descriptions of Holmes that rely on cherry-picked events, such as those that appear in many prosecution and defense statements and in media accounts.

  Single or isolated examples of James Holmes’s behavior or appearance are woefully inadequate for understanding the whole person. Jimmy was not one-dimensional. His mental problems, which indeed have been present since late childhood, influenced his adolescence, but they didn’t overwhelm it. There were times when his emotional foibles faded into the background, when the healthier parts of Jimmy’s mind took over, when his emotional defenses did t
heir jobs effectively, when life was good.

  ____________

  Aurora, Colorado, July 20, 2012, just after midnight:

  Jonathan was the twenty-six-year-old father of two young children, a Navy veteran with three tours in the Middle East. Tall and well built, he was planning to reenlist to become a Navy SEAL. He and his girlfriend, Jansen, came early to the Century 16 theater to see The Dark Knight Rises.

  About ten minutes into the movie, Jonathan pushed Jansen to the floor and threw himself on top of her, saying that someone had a gun. A woman just behind them screamed that she had been shot. Jansen felt blood spray onto her as Jonathan was shot in the head and back, one of the bullets penetrating both his lungs. Jonathan “gurgled,” she said, and did not move, saving her life as James Holmes killed him.

  3. College

  “We’d all be better off if everybody on earth dies.”

  (James Holmes thought in high school and college)

  Jimmy started calling himself “James” around the time he started college, in the fall of 2006, although family and friends stuck with “Jimmy” or “Jim.” He remembers coming to UC Riverside with the often-nihilistic thoughts he had in high school. At one point he described them globally: “I suffer. Other people suffer. We’d all be better off if everybody on earth dies.” But he also thought that such ideas were “not realistic.” It’s impossible to say, looking back with only James the adult to tell us, whether his thoughts were simply dramatic or philosophical, indicated severe—even delusional—depression, represented a wish to kill, or something else. Whatever the case may be, he decided to focus on academics for the next four years.

  ____________

  James started his freshman year living in the honors section of Pentland Hills Residence Hall. Pentland Hills is a large freshman dorm made up of twenty-two buildings that resemble an apartment complex, with modern three-story structures, courtyards, and walkways. Students live “suite-style,” with shared bedrooms and bathrooms and a living room with microwave and refrigerator in each suite. The buildings are coed, but the suites themselves are same-gender. There are study lounges, computer centers, and a fitness center.