A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  Both triggering devices set, he got into the car that had brought him to Aurora just over a year before and fastened his seat belt. The theater was only a short drive away.

  8. Armageddon

  “It was really gonna happen … I’m really gonna do this.”

  (James Holmes, remembering events just before the shootings)

  In the wee hours of the morning on Friday, July 20, Geovany Padilla heard music coming from near the trash dumpster for the apartment building at 1690 Paris Street. He took a look and found a boom box, a plastic bag with a toy car, and what seemed to be a remote control device. He took the boom box home with him and left the car and the remote where they lay. At about 12:10 a.m., one of Holmes’s neighbors in the 1690 Paris Street apartment building called Aurora police to report loud music coming from apartment 10.

  ____________

  Holmes drove carefully to the theater. He didn’t speed. He stopped at all the lights even though traffic was light on a Thursday just before midnight. “I was concentrating on getting to the theater without getting pulled over.” He was on his way to kill as many people as he could. I asked whether or not, if an elderly woman had walked into his path, he would have swerved. He said he would have avoided her because it would have interfered with the mission, “plus that’s kind of personal, hitting a little old lady with your car.”

  When Holmes got to the Century 16, he parked his Hyundai Tiburon close to the rear exit for Auditorium 9. He got out of his car and walked around the building to the theater entrance. He didn’t stand out much; he’d left all of his ballistic clothing in the car. He wore what Holmes usually wore: informal pants and a dark T-shirt with a long-sleeved open shirt on top. His orange hair was covered by a dark knit cap.

  He walked in a little after midnight. The foyer was crowded. Most of the people were there for the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. So was he. He went up to a service kiosk, entered the transaction code from his iPhone, and got a paper ticket. It was for Auditorium 8; he hadn’t been able to get one for Auditorium 9. That didn’t matter much. No one noticed his ticket as he walked back to the concession area and then to Auditorium 9.

  The previews had started; the theater was dark. Holmes went to the very front of the full auditorium, immediately took out his cell phone, and feigned a call. Witnesses said he looked like someone who had gotten a call and was politely taking it outside to avoid bothering anyone. One saw him prop the exit door open with his foot. He looked back at the auditorium as he left and saw a sea of faces lit by the light from the screen.

  Holmes left the theater through an exit on the right of the screen. He carefully placed a tablecloth clip—a piece of plastic designed to secure a picnic tablecloth—on the edge of the door to keep it from closing completely. He had measured earlier to be sure the clip would fit. He had to be able to get back in and complete the mission.

  Holmes got into his car and began the laborious process of putting on all the body armor in that cramped space. He managed. He had preloaded all his weapons and gotten everything ready before leaving the apartment. The car windows were heavily tinted; no one could see inside.

  Early in the suiting-up process, as Holmes put earbuds into his ears, he heard a noise outside the car. It was a theater employee putting trash into a nearby dumpster. He froze. The interruption was a surprise but not a serious impediment to the mission. He had a pistol in the passenger door of his car for just such eventualities, and he was fully prepared to shoot if he was discovered. I asked if his heart was racing, his adrenaline pumping; how did he feel when he realized someone was just a few feet away? Holmes said simply, “Calm and collected.”

  The man dumped the trash and went back inside, none the wiser. He didn’t die that night.

  Holmes continued gearing up and then stopped again. He took out his cell phone, entered the number he had saved for the CU Hospital’s mental health hotline, and pressed SEND. It was one last chance, he said, “to see if I should turn back.” We know that he went through with the shootings, but the part of him that wanted to be, in his words, “overruled” was enough to make him dial the phone.

  Holmes told me that after he dialed, he “just didn’t hear anything.” Eventually, the connection ended; he’s not sure what happened. His iPhone screen read “Call Ended” after nine seconds. He is sure the number was entered accurately but didn’t hear it ring. A hotline operator later reported to investigators that she answered a call (verified as coming from Holmes’s phone) but didn’t hear anyone on the other end.

  “What do you think would have happened if somebody [at the hotline] had answered?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I might have talked to ’em.”

  Sometimes getting a real answer from him was like pulling teeth.

  “What might you have said to whoever answered?”

  “Told them the situation.”

  “What do you think might have happened then?”

  “They would have tried to convince me not to.”

  “Do you think they would have been successful?”

  “No, I think it would have been overruled in the end.”

  Could the call have made a difference? Did any part of him really want to stop what seemed to be an unstoppable course of action? I pressed further.

  “How did you feel when you pressed END on the phone? What was going through your mind?”

  “Just that it was really gonna happen. There was still a chance it wouldn’t when I was in my car. [Up to that moment,] I was still skeptical.”

  “And when the phone call ended?” I asked.

  “I’m really gonna do this.”

  The last barrier to his mission had fallen.

  As Holmes opened the driver’s-side car door, one of his two tear gas canisters fell onto the pavement and rolled away. He looked for it briefly, couldn’t find it, and then stepped into a sort of corridor and alcove outside the auditorium exit. The area was well lit but out of sight from the parking lot. It would have taken about fifteen seconds to walk from his car to the door, but he paused there for several minutes.

  Holmes had a fantasy about the FBI stopping him. He thought, maybe hoped, that he might have been under some kind of surveillance during the past few weeks. He’d seen an FBI-marked SUV near the Byers Canyon shooting range, and sometimes there were police cars in his apartment building parking lot. He imagined that once he got out of the car with his gear and stood in the pool of light outside the exit door, the FBI would arrest him.

  It didn’t happen. Nothing and no one showed up to take advantage of whatever part of him was, in his words, “still skeptical” as he donned his gear and waited to reenter the auditorium. He turned up the techno music on his iPod, adjusted his gas mask and visor, pulled open the door, and went inside.

  The exit door was at an angle to the right of the screen. Only a few people noticed it opening during a quiet scene in The Dark Knight Rises, and the bulky figure that took up a position beside and just below the bright screen. Holmes had activated the metal fuse on the Clear Out tear gas canister while he was still outside the door. It made a hissing noise as he stepped inside and immediately threw it to his right, sending bright sparks and “smoke” spewing in an arc in front of the screen. Several people thought someone was playing a prank, “some idiot throwing a firecracker,” one recalled. Then he started shooting.

  Holmes said that he was “on autopilot” from the time he entered the auditorium. He didn’t feel particularly exhilarated, or frightened, or cautious. He remembers being aware of the setting and people around him, but he didn’t feel the hypersensitivity to the environment that some soldiers experience in combat. He denied that the shooting was exciting or particularly rewarding for him as it occurred. Once the process began, he said, he was just carrying out a mission.

  He could see people trying to leave and hunkering down behind the seats. Most of the audience were trapped in the
auditorium as he was shooting. No place was safe.

  His first shots were with his 12-gauge. “I saw that people were getting up in the back left corner so I, like, shot in that direction.” I asked why they might have been getting up before any shots had been fired. “They could see me all decked out with my guns and stuff.” He heard a scream from the group and assumed he had hit someone. He shot all of his shotgun rounds toward the people who were trying to flee at the back of the auditorium, then dropped the shotgun onto the floor.

  One victim, who had been sitting about halfway to the back of the auditorium, on Holmes’s right as he fired, told investigators he saw muzzle flashes. The shots kept coming every two or three seconds, he remembered. They wouldn’t stop. People near him were covered with blood. He pushed his wife to the floor behind the seats and played dead, praying that they wouldn’t be shot. A water bottle exploded when it was hit. He was wounded at least twice by bullets and shrapnel; his wife and friend were injured, as well. He got up to run but collapsed. He told police that the shooter (or shooters—he couldn’t be sure in the dark, loud chaos) seemed to be firing at specific people and never said a word.

  After Holmes dropped the empty shotgun, he switched to his M&P15 and fired at more people who were trying to escape. He said that he “couldn’t see very well at all,” because of scratches on his gas mask visor. (It was brand new, with a wide visor rather than simple goggles.) I asked about firing his rifle—he referred to it as an AR-15 rather than an M&P15—and how he adapted to firing it with the gas mask in place. He said the mask and the low light of the theater made it difficult to use the close-range infrared scope he had installed.

  It’s important to note that Holmes clearly remembers seeing people getting up in the back of the auditorium, and he shot at them. He heard a scream. A moment or two later, he saw a victim “flop” as he was hit. Regardless of his later comments about having trouble seeing and hearing, we know that he could see well enough through the gas mask visor to shoot effectively, with or without the infrared viewer (which was on his rifle, not the shotgun), and he could hear in spite of the music playing through his earbuds.

  Holmes’s descriptions of firing the rifle were a little confusing. Although he’d practiced a lot, with and without the gas mask, with and without gloves, holding and sighting in different light levels, sometimes at the Byers Canyon outdoor range and sometimes in his apartment, some of his statements suggested that he had been doing it wrong all along. For example, he spoke of putting the rifle to his shoulder. The AR/M&P is short, a carbine, with very little recoil. The stock should be held against the top of the shoulder, not nestled into it, and steadied using the grips in front of the magazine and behind the trigger. That provides easy viewing through whatever sight is mounted on the Picatinny rail. The Strikefire sight is easily used in low light; that’s what it’s designed for. Sighting and firing are easily accomplished so long as the weapon is held correctly.

  Holmes sometimes said that he fired randomly toward the crowd of people. Evidence indicates, however, and Holmes often agreed, that he targeted many individuals in the audience. No matter what he said after the shootings, there was nothing random about his actions in Auditorium 9 that night.

  He told me he focused on the people who were escaping “’cause I can’t have everybody running away from the scene … ’cause then I’m kind of out of control of the situation.” He wanted to control the “situation.” He tried to keep people inside the theater where he could shoot them. He kept them panicked and disoriented with the tear gas, which he hoped would also keep them from rushing him and stopping the shooting. His plan guided people as best he could toward areas where he could shoot them more easily.

  A victim who had come with her family and friends, all sitting together in the “stadium” seats, heard a loud “BANG” and started choking from the tear gas. More bangs followed, and she saw a man wearing all-black “padded” clothes shooting at people. He looked calm and didn’t say anything, she told investigators. As her family ran for the exit, her mother wounded and her young brother screaming, she saw a woman’s body on the floor.

  A pregnant woman ducked to the floor, terrified, when the shots began. The shooting finally stopped, and her husband told her to run. She remembered stepping over bodies as they scrambled out of the theater.

  A wounded man tried to cover his girlfriend and her child. The woman had already been shot twice. Her daughter had been badly wounded. He, like everyone in the theater that night, heard the screams of horrified, desperate people and saw Holmes shooting at them as they tried to escape.

  Holmes said at one point that he didn’t remember the sounds of gunfire. He thought there was “yelling and screaming, and I think the fire alarm or emergency alarm went off and it was making noise … but I didn’t hear it.” He noticed, though, that the movie continued to play. He denied remembering the muzzle flashes in the dim light or any other sensations during the shooting. No visceral sensations, heat, cold, sweating; no tingling or tension. He didn’t smell the tear gas through his mask.

  He thinks some of his senses were “blocked out” in the chaos. He said he didn’t remember firing his handgun, but he did, many times; the auditorium floor was littered with shell casings. He didn’t remember what it felt like to pull the trigger; “I was wearing gloves.” He didn’t understand that I was asking for an emotion, not whether or not he physically felt the pressure of the trigger pull. There wasn’t one.

  Holmes remembered shooting only from the front corner nearest the screen-side exit. Victims, however, saw him shooting as he walked up one of the aisles. They were ducking down behind seats. He shot them anyway, sometimes directly and, since the seat backs were no match for full-metal-jacket bullets, sometimes through the thin, easily yielding cushions.

  I asked Holmes to picture himself at the front of the theater, firing, and to picture what he saw from there. He saw “bullets going toward seats” but not toward anything else. “All of the people are hiding behind the seats.” He said he hit only four or five people directly, with shotgun blasts, but the evidence is clear that a great many people were shot directly, not just through the seats. “I thought the [rifle rounds] would go through the seats.” They did.

  I asked where he planned, or pictured beforehand, people would be when they were shot. He thought most would be sitting in their seats. Some would try to run. “That’s why I left an exit route available, so they don’t fight. They can escape by running down the right aisle way … I wound up shooting at ’em but only a few tried it … the plan was to contain them so they wouldn’t start running.”

  Holmes didn’t want to be overwhelmed by people trying to escape or attack him. He shot from in front of the screen and to the audience’s right, having planned for their only escape route to be an aisle on the side away from him. “It was far away from me and they wouldn’t attack me, come down and run and attack me,” he said, “a pressure release valve so they don’t attack where I’m at.” He aimed at those who were trying to escape down the opposite aisle; some shots went through the wall into Auditorium 8, next door.

  I asked Holmes what people feel when they’re getting shot at in a dark, crowded theater.

  “Terror … kind of unbelieving,” he said.

  “What do people feel when someone near them gets shot?” I asked.

  “That there needs to be help coming.”

  “What do they feel when they get shot?”

  “Shock,” Holmes said. “Just reaching out for help.”

  A man sitting in the middle of the theater ducked to the floor when he saw the tear gas grenade and heard shots. His throat burned from the gas. His companion was confused and asked what he was doing. Then the companion slumped over him, shot.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Holmes’s rifle jammed. There were lots of people left in the auditorium, many more to kill, and he still had a loaded, working pistol with dozens of hollow-point cartridges in at least four high-capacity magazines. But the
M&P15 was his primary weapon, high-powered, aggressive and aggressive-looking, the one that defined him as someone to be reckoned with, the killer in the selfies he had taken earlier in his apartment who, in his words, “knew the ways of weaponry.” He wanted that gun, so he tried to unjam it.

  The problem for Holmes, however, was that he didn’t know the ways of his weaponry well enough to realize that he had overloaded one of the M&P15 magazines, forcing an extra cartridge into it and causing a misfeed. He pulled out that magazine and tried to insert another, but the new one wouldn’t click into place. He walked down the lower aisle to his left and paused under a dim wall sconce to try again. The lower aisle was a safer place to pause and reload, “’cause they couldn’t see me in there.” Maybe there was a jammed cartridge in the breech. Maybe he wasn’t as calm and collected as he thought; even experienced shooters can get confused in the heat of a crisis and try to insert the curved magazines backward. Maybe it was the gloves he wore to protect his hands. One way or another, he couldn’t get it done.

  He stopped trying to reload after a minute or two and simply decided to leave. He walked toward the screen and looked back toward the seats—“the stands,” he called them. “They were completely empty except for, like, the first row where people were [still] ducking down.”

  At the time, Holmes thought he had hit perhaps twenty people and maybe killed three. He wasn’t sure he’d killed anyone, but he thought, “Somebody’s probably died.” He thinks he fired his rifle about fifteen times, emptied the shotgun with six or seven, and shot about ten rounds with his Glock .40 handgun. There were a lot more shots than that. Some sixty-five .223 (rifle) shell casings were recovered from the theater, five .40 handgun casings, and six spent shotgun shells. That still seems low considering the number of people killed or wounded—seventy in all, many shot multiple times.