A Dark Night in Aurora Read online

  Holmes walked out through the same exit door he had entered a few minutes earlier and dropped the M&P15 onto the ground. Several of the audience had escaped that way, as well; the concrete was slippery with their blood.

  The scores of wounded were “collateral damage,” Holmes said, who weren’t a factor in his mission; they didn’t detract from his “success.” In fact, he continued, no number of wounded, even a thousand, would affect it since “I’d only count the kills.” Family devastation from lost or disabled parents, spouses, children, or siblings, he said, “never came under consideration.”

  I asked a slightly different question: “Does the collateral damage matter at all?”

  “Well, people were maimed and wounded and injured,” he answered. “It’s not good that they had to be injured for me to kill the other people.”

  A 911 call came into Aurora Police Department dispatch at 12:38 a.m., the first of some forty-two emergency calls from the theater that night. It was hard to hear the caller, Kevin Quiñonez, over the screams and gunshots in the background. “There’s some guy … after us!” comes through on the 911 recording, and Quiñonez told the Denver Post, “It was really dark. I could see his head every time he fired [from the muzzle flash]. He had a mask.” Aurora police detective Randy Hansen testified that he counted thirty gunshots in the background during the twenty-seven-second call.

  Police were dispatched in less than a minute, but by the time they arrived at the theater, the shooting had stopped. The task now was to help the victims, secure the scene, and deal with a tragedy of enormous proportion. No one knew exactly what had happened, how many shooters there had been, or what dangers might still be waiting for civilians and officers alike.

  Four hundred people and their families will never forget Holmes, but he remembered only one in detail, a man in the front row who seemed to be “smiling.” “When I was gonna leave, going towards the exit, I just looked back and saw that he was smiling.” It was odd, he thought. Was it really a smile? A grimace? Was he wounded? Frozen in his seat? Relieved that the auditorium was suddenly quieter? Holmes didn’t think about shooting him because “it would have been really personal to shoot a person who’s smiling at me.” Besides, the mission was over.

  Holmes had “accomplished what I set out to do.” He left twelve human beings dead or dying and fifty-eight wounded, many severely and permanently disabled. Every one of the survivors has lasting emotional scars, as do others who were in the theater and many of the first responders. Aurora, whose very name evokes the optimism of sunrise, would never be the same.

  AFTERMATH

  9. Aftermath

  “Don’t die on me; we’re almost there.”

  (Officer Justin Grizzle, to a victim he was transporting after the shootings)

  Almost 130 law enforcement officers, in over fifty police cars, converged on the Century 16 cinema within minutes of the dozens of frantic 911 calls. Arriving officers saw people running out of the exits, many covered in blood. Lots of others didn’t run out; they were lying on the floor in Auditorium 9.

  ____________

  Holmes left footprints in the blood of escaping victims as he walked out the front of the auditorium—the back of the theater—toward his car. He dropped his rifle onto the ground, put the Glock on the roof of his Hyundai, and began to take off his body armor. Then he saw two policemen walking toward him. He thought briefly of shooting them but quickly decided that would get him killed.

  Officers Jason Sweeney and Jason Oviatt had met at the northeast corner of the theater building and were moving south, following blood spatters on the sidewalk and looking for a way in. They saw a lone figure dressed in what appeared to be Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) gear, with a black Kevlar helmet and gas mask, standing beside the open driver’s door of a white, two-door coupe. They thought it was another officer at first, and then Sweeney realized that the man’s gas mask wasn’t usual police issue. Oviatt noted that he was just standing there, without the urgency and activity shown by the dozens of officers. They had heard radio chatter that there was gas in the theater. If this guy with a gas mask wasn’t a cop, Oviatt would later tell a debriefing detective, then they were about twenty feet away from a shooting suspect.

  Oviatt drew his handgun. Sweeney called out, “Show us your hands!”

  Holmes complied, raising his arms into the air. Oviatt told him to get onto the ground. Holmes complied again, without a word. Oviatt handcuffed him while Sweeney stood guard and looked into the car to be sure no one else was there. The Hyundai’s windows were dark, but through the open door he could see a hard-shell rifle case in the back seat.

  Officer Oviatt felt uneasy having his back to the theater exit; an accomplice could come out behind him at any second. He quickly checked Holmes’s waistband for obvious weapons and dragged him unceremoniously a few yards to the metal door of a dumpster enclosure. Holmes didn’t resist or talk back; he didn’t say anything. He was simply limp and compliant. One pistol magazine fell out of his weapons vest during the handcuffing. Another came out of a pocket as Holmes was being searched. He had a large knife on his belt and a folding knife in his pocket, but no more guns. They put him into a squad car.

  While Holmes was in the patrol car, Officer Sweeney asked him if anyone else was involved in the shootings. Holmes said, “Just me.” Sweeney asked if he had any bombs or other explosives. Holmes said yes, in his apartment. He used the phrase “improvised explosive devices.”

  “Are they set to go off?” Sweeney asked him.

  “If you trip them.”

  Oviatt wasn’t convinced that Holmes had been fully disarmed. He could feel the soft, bulky body armor—“the kind we wear,” he told the debriefing detective—under Holmes’s coat and pants. Who knew what was hidden there? They pulled him out of the car, and two officers held Holmes while Oviatt first cut and then peeled away everything he was wearing except his underwear and T-shirt.

  Holmes was acting a little strangely, “unnaturally calm through everything … along for the ride [though he followed instructions] … relaxed and disconnected.” “He smelled horrible,” Oviatt remembered. “He was dripping with sweat,” probably from the body armor and weapons vest. He was skinny, had dyed red hair, “and his pupils were huge.”

  While the officers were stripping Holmes of his clothing and body armor, they heard a thin voice, “like a teenage girl,” from inside the trash enclosure. “She asked if we were cops,” Oviatt reported. “We said we were.” The terrified woman, whom the officers never actually saw, had bolted from the shooting, out the screen-side exit, over the wall, to a hiding place in the dumpster.

  Officer Justin Grizzle was working with Oviatt and Sweeney when they heard that there might be another shooter in the area. He, too, asked Holmes if there were any other shooters, but Holmes just smiled and didn’t say anything. Grizzle then noticed a luminous green dot, almost certainly from a laser sight, seeming to come from the area beyond Holmes’s car. Suspecting a second gunman lurking in the dark, he alerted Sweeney. There was no cover for them and no safe approach to the apparent gunman. Nevertheless, they quickly but carefully cleared the area; no one was there. Then they realized that the green laser dot was coming from the handgun Holmes had placed on top of the Hyundai before he was arrested. It was harmless.

  Holmes, who had been placed temporarily in Sergeant (now Lieutenant) Stephen Redfearn’s vehicle, was moved to Officer Sheldon Irons’s patrol car for transport to the Aurora police Major Crimes Unit (MCU). It was the same car Irons had just used to transport victims to a local emergency room.

  The scene outside the theater was chaos, the parking lot so choked with police cars and civilian vehicles that many ambulances couldn’t get to the main doors where people from all the auditoriums gathered in shock and often panic. They had trouble getting to the Auditorium 9 rear exit as well, where many of the most seriously injured had been carried. Officers quickly began to transport shooting victims, many horribly wounded, in thei
r patrol cars, some to waiting ambulances and others directly to nearby hospitals, alerting the emergency departments to expect catastrophic numbers and to have their operating rooms ready for emergency surgery.

  Before helping his colleagues with Holmes, Officer Irons took victims to the Medical Center of Aurora and helped other officers unload their cargoes of wounded, including a man shot in the head and a woman who appeared to have died.

  Officer Aaron Blue helped Officer Everett Williams load Jessica Ghawi into Blue’s vehicle, then Williams drove to University Hospital as Blue held her airway open. “Every time she moved, she stopped breathing,” he would testify later. Ghawi, twenty-four years old, had barely missed being in a mass shooting at Toronto’s Eaton Centre just a few weeks earlier. On this night, she died.

  Officer Grizzle used his patrol car to transport victims after helping with Holmes. The first two were a couple, both “very critical” and covered with blood. The woman had been shot in the face and chest and was “unresponsive.” The man was shot in the head. As Grizzle rushed them to Aurora South hospital with lights and siren on, he kept saying to the woman, “Please stay with me.” The man repeatedly asked where his daughter was and at one point tried to jump out of the speeding car to go back to her. That’s when Grizzle realized that the fallen child he had stepped over moments before to rescue the couple had been their daughter, six-year-old Veronica Moser. “I wanted to tell the man, ‘She’s gone. She’s gone,’” he said later, during Holmes’s trial, “but I couldn’t.” He remembered the sound of blood sloshing on the floorboards behind his seat.

  Grizzle went back for more of the critically injured victims, taking them to Aurora South and University hospitals. One was badly wounded in the face, barely breathing and unresponsive, making awful sounds as the officer kept yelling, “Stay with me, man. You’re gonna be okay.” The man, Caleb Medley, survived and was there with his wife for Grizzle’s testimony at the trial.

  Officer Irons took Holmes to the station, then he and Officer Gary Rivale stayed with him until detectives from the Major Crimes Unit arrived. Holmes was placed in a stark interview room to wait for his interrogation. He looked tired, slumped in a chair with his head resting against his right hand, still in the dark boxer shorts and the torn T-shirt that he wore under the body armor that had been cut away at the scene of his arrest. It didn’t seem to bother him that his right shoulder and part of his chest were exposed. An officer stood nearby, his digital recorder on the table in front of Holmes. There was some chatter on the officer’s radio. The wall clock opposite Holmes’s chair read 2:45 a.m.

  After a couple of minutes, Detectives Chuck Mehl and Craig Appel came into the room and introduced themselves. They asked Holmes to move to the other side of the table, under the clock; he did. Detective Appel asked if he needed anything to drink, being courteous and appearing accommodating as part of the interrogation routine. Holmes accepted. Appel said, “We’ll get a water for you, sir. It’ll be here right away.” They rearranged their chairs, Mehl sitting across the table from Holmes and Appel to one side.

  Holmes answered questions about his name, birthdate, and other introductory information clearly, if a little softly, without much inflection, his cheek still resting on his hand. Appel asked if he was okay, or injured in any way other than a few scrapes. Holmes said he wasn’t injured. Mehl reiterated that water was coming and said they would make the interview “as easy as possible on you.”

  Holmes wasn’t very animated, but he understood the detectives and attended reasonably well to the conversation. The third time they asked if he needed anything, Holmes paused and then said in a soft, mildly sarcastic tone, “Uh, oxygen.” He wasn’t being confrontational; maybe he sensed that the offer was a little solicitous.

  What the detectives saw and heard that morning was the closest any interviewer would get to a firsthand look at Holmes’s mental condition during the shootings two hours earlier. They wondered if his listlessness and apparent lack of anxiety or concern indicated something more serious. They looked carefully for signs of mental illness or intoxication. They asked if he was having trouble breathing. They asked if he wanted them to get him medical help. They asked at least three times, “Are you good to talk to us?” He said he was.

  Then Mehl read Holmes his Miranda rights, and Holmes lawyered up. He understood his legal situation completely. He asked how he could get a lawyer and then said, “I want a court-appointed attorney.” All interrogation stopped. Mehl asked if he knew of any other source of danger to anyone at the theater, such as a second shooter. Holmes said no, and the detectives left. The first interview had taken less than eight minutes.

  Holmes sat in the room, with an officer at the door and the video camera running, for several more hours. Law enforcement staff came in and out to complete his booking and jail processing. He sat quietly, sometimes appearing to nod off for a moment or two. From time to time he engaged in small diversions, such as picking apart a Styrofoam cup and fiddling with an exposed computer cable outlet on the wall. He was photographed, and the inside of his cheek was swabbed for DNA material.

  Paper bags were placed over his hands and taped to his wrists, to preserve gunshot residue. He played a little with the paper bags as if they were hand puppets and listened to the sounds his fingers made inside them (“like popcorn bags,” he told me later). He said that he understood the evidence-gathering process “from watching, like, CSI,” but his attorneys would later imply in court that his actions were evidence of serious mental illness. Actually, he simply seemed bored—in his words, “fidgety.”

  After a while, Officer Michael Gerbino, one of those guarding him, fetched an orange jail jumpsuit and flip-flops for Holmes to wear, handcuffed him, and with two other officers escorted Holmes to the adjacent Aurora City Jail. No one asked him questions except for booking and jail paperwork, preserving his right to avoid self-incrimination. Later that day, he was transferred to Arapahoe County Detention Facility (ACDF), a few miles away in Centennial.

  Early in his detention, on the way through the police station to the interrogation room, Holmes had noticed a wall sign that mentioned child homicides. Just before Detective Mehl read him his Miranda rights, he asked if any children had been killed. Mehl said he didn’t know. The next day, Holmes learned he had killed a six-year-old. He told me he was “remorseful” about that. “I tried to minimize child fatalities by choosing midnight and a PG-13 movie.” Whether his comment was genuine, a rationalization, or designed to engender some small shred of support from a future jury is anyone’s guess. Empathy was never his strong suit.

  The Century 16 crime scene investigation was just beginning as Holmes was being transferred from his Aurora Police Station holding cell to ACDF in Centennial. Early police video shows the inside of Auditorium 9 lit by house lights and the open exit door Holmes had used a few hours before, now held open by a pair of police handcuffs stuffed between the hinges.

  The unseen videographer enters as a moviegoer would, moving slowly down the left aisle, seats not yet visible to his right. There’s debris on the floor: a cap, concession stand cups and wrappers. Then the first body comes into view, a young man wearing a Batman T-shirt, lying barefoot at the foot of the auditorium steps. The camera moves to the right, panning above the seats and then slowly down for a surreal view of three more bodies on the stairs. It feels like a film project with student actors, or installation art designed to shock an audience, but this was the audience.

  The seats are all empty, with popcorn strewn on the floor and more drink cups, still in their holders, as if the patrons had just left for a moment. Daylight pours through the open screen-side exit, dawn finally here after a terrible night. The screen itself lies on the floor like an enormous white sheet, pulled down by police to be sure it didn’t hide another gunman.

  The camera tilts down to spent rifle cartridges on the floor in the front row. There’s one under a seat; there’s another, another, now many, as the videographer moves toward the o
ther side of the auditorium. An empty shotgun shell, pistol brass: someone fired a lot of shots.

  Looking up, there’s the impression of an empty theater just after the movie has ended, pastel light rising softly from wall sconces. Panning back down, though, brings back the terrible scene. More empty shells, then two empty high-capacity rifle magazines: someone fired a lot of shots.

  There’s a half-open combat knife on the floor, there more spent shotgun shells, and there the shotgun, a tactical model with a short barrel for quick aim and fire, and a military-style strap. Another shotgun shell. A blue jacket.

  The view moves up the right aisle, looking down empty rows. There’s a hiking boot and beside it, against the red-and-gray pattern of the carpet, a full-metal-jacket bullet, hard to see until the camera zooms in. More cartridge casings. Now another body, sprawled in an impossible pose, soaked in blood, tinted glasses pushed up onto his forehead. The body’s eyes, the person’s eyes, are open.

  The uncarpeted part of the floor is shiny in the high-contrast light of the video. Another jacket. Another body. More shell casings. Popcorn. A purse. Another body. Sneakers. A jacket. A pair of insoles. A Coca-Cola cup. Another body. Popcorn. A sandal. Another body. Another row. Another body. Jackets. Purses. More damned popcorn. An empty handgun magazine. Another rifle magazine. A few live .223 rounds. A high-capacity “Beta-Mag” double-drum magazine. Two more M&P magazines, one with live rounds.

  The cameraman walks out of the auditorium, into the hall, into the foyer, into the morning sun streaming through glass doors, so bright that the lens can’t handle the glare. No one is there, but the animated concession stand signs are still playing, bright colors hawking drinks and candy and the damned popcorn.