A Dark Night in Aurora Page 4

  After his freshman year, he moved to an on-campus apartment for two years, studying and hanging out with many of the same friends. He rarely called or e-mailed his family, although he came home for summers and holidays.

  James remembers living in the freshman honors dorm as “fun because of the dorm atmosphere. I got to meet a bunch of people … [It] helped me kind of bridge between new people.”

  Ryan LaCroix lived a couple of doors down the hall; they became good friends. Ryan found James very shy socially, never initiating conversations, but he says James soon became part of a group of similarly intelligent, somewhat reserved students who hung out together, played video games like Mario Kart, and watched Lost on television every week. They stayed together through all four years of college, went on snowboarding trips, and had some “hilarious” experiences. Ryan testified that James “was, like, top five in the world at World of Warcraft 3,” a popular strategy-based online multiplayer game. The group occasionally played Halo, which is much more aggressive, but first-person-shooter games were not James’s style.

  Classmate and friend Harry Soren Carr also remembers James as introverted, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He was sociable among the science majors, often joining them for dinner in the cafeteria, but they didn’t party much. James was singularly nonaggressive. The only time Carr saw any hint of anger was when the group was playing a video game and one person on James’s team kept “killing” him. James simply got up and walked out of the room.

  Carr says there was nothing unusual about James. He was quiet, dressed normally, didn’t talk about weapons or shooting, and didn’t seem to have any mental issues. He was just smart and aced tests without even taking notes. He never showed any interest in Batman movies and never commented about The Joker (a topic that would greatly occupy news and social media after the shooting).

  Carr gave the FBI three photos of James, in which he was smiling, clowning around, and looking like a perfectly normal college student. Two showed him as an undergraduate. One showed James and five or six other members of the group enjoying an impromptu Christmastime reunion at a Woodland Hills restaurant in December of 2011, six months after graduation and seven months before the shooting. The friends’ consensus was that he had changed since college, but they weren’t sure how.

  There was lots of studying, but James also had a social life. He went out to dinner with friends, sometimes to the dormitory diner. He had a full scholarship, and his parents paid for the dorm and other expenses, so he didn’t have to work during college (although he sometimes did). He had a car, a white Hyundai Tiburon. In a few years, he would drive it to the Century 16 theater in Aurora, Colorado.

  Although James remembered college as a relatively social time in his life, some fellow students recall that he kept largely to himself. He stayed in his room a lot, they said, and participated in dorm gatherings only after much encouragement. He didn’t participate much in social media: he almost never updated his Facebook page and never had a Twitter or Instagram account.

  James didn’t mention “freezing” during college. He still had the intrusive violent thoughts, and probably the ominous fantasies, that were prominent earlier, but he could usually keep them away or control them by occupying his mind with studying and video games. Some of his peers remember peculiarities, but no one recognized anything terribly wrong. Jessica Cade, a friend who lived across the hall from James for a year and shared a study group with him, described him as a little strange, but not in a threatening way. Another female student told defense investigators that James had a “spaced-out stare” much of the time. A roommate from his sophomore and junior years said he was a “loner” who “liked to go off by himself” and would lie on his bed at night staring at the ceiling as if deep in thought.

  James says he partied a bit, but it doesn’t sound like much by college standards. He brought up the traditional college drinking, but he drank only “socially,” if that. He never got so drunk that he passed out or got into trouble. The parties themselves sound like an insult to UC Riverside’s reputation as a party school (somewhere below Berkeley, Cal State Fresno, and the San Francisco Art Institute, according to student surveys). Those he went to had a lot of talking and playing video games. He finally told me, “I wasn’t really partying. Partying was, like, a once-a-year type of thing.”

  Dating is a big part of social life for most college kids, but it wasn’t in James’s world. He had female friends but no girlfriend, which wasn’t unusual for his peer group. No one interviewed after the shootings recalled that he ever had a girlfriend before graduate school. James was interested in girls to a point—he even had the obligatory sexy dorm room poster on his wall—but his dating efforts were tentative at best, and women weren’t a high priority. For most of his time in college, he didn’t, maybe couldn’t, ask women out.

  James’s first real date happened between his sophomore and junior years at UC Riverside. He was working at a summer camp and went out a couple of times with one of the other counselors. He called her “cheerful and bubbly, easy to talk to, nice” and thinks she would have described him as “shy … and kind” because he was nice to her. They went to the movies, then back to a secluded room at the camp. It was three o’clock in the morning, but things didn’t go any further, he remembers. “It was just hard to get started.” Most of their second, and final, date was spent simply walking around Hollywood near a dance club. They didn’t go inside.

  There was another girl, a student who lived in an adjacent dorm, who James hoped would be a girlfriend. His roommate called it a “crush.” That girl, too, was “cheerful and bubbly,” but circumstances and his reluctant, nonassertive style dissolved his hopes; she never showed any romantic interest. James’s rationalization was that “she was Persian, so I think she had a cultural barrier.” He admits that he never actually asked her out. The closest he came was simply saying hello. He didn’t try again, with her or with anyone else, until he started graduate school.

  James responded differently to children than to people his age or older. He seemed to be comfortable around kids, even empathic. He didn’t keep them at a distance as he did with peers and adults. In his childhood Oak Hills neighborhood, he invited younger kids to a Halloween haunted house in the family home. At UC Riverside, he volunteered to visit an orphanage.

  The honors program required community service. James went on four group trips to a Tijuana orphanage called Corazon de Vida. The Riverside students paid twenty-five dollars each to ride there on a bus, spend the day with the children, distribute small gifts, and return to campus in the evening. James signed up because he thought it would be good to learn about kids. He had trouble remembering any feelings about the children in spite of visiting them at least four times.

  “They seemed just like normal kids,” he told me. He played soccer and cards with them and usually made them lunch. Once, the students brought toys for Christmas; James the adult thought it was a nice thing to do. He remembers the events but no particular individuals, none of the kids’ reactions, no emotions of the time. He couldn’t bring up a mental picture, an internal “video” in his mind, of the experience.

  Between his sophomore and junior years, James was a summer counselor at Camp Max Straus, a Glendale, California, camp for underprivileged urban kids. He had no problems at the camp, though supervisors encouraged him to be more outgoing. He lived in a cabin with each week’s young charges, taking care of them, guiding their activities, and giving each child an experience to remember. Kevin Wright, his supervisor, remembered James as good with the counselor team and “goofy” in a positive way. He made the kids laugh and worked with them in the various camp activities. Gabriel Menchaca, one of his co-counselors, said James was shy but acted fine with the children.

  When I asked about that summer, James remembered the counselors singing songs for the kids around the fire pit, sans fire because of dry weather and wildfire danger. “I sang ‘On Top of Spaghetti,’” he said. “It was jus
t a song about spaghetti.” He chuckled at the memory, then became more serious when I asked,

  REID: “How did you enjoy being there that summer?”

  HOLMES: “It was kind of stressful, because I’m not that outgoing.”

  REID: “As you look back on that summer, how does it make you feel?”

  HOLMES: “It was a fond memory of at least trying to get out there and be more social.”

  Two years after graduating from UC Riverside, as he planned his “mission,” he would choose a primarily adult setting for his shootings, dismissing venues such as schools, where children were likely to be present. He deliberately picked a time at the Century 16 cinema—midnight—when small children probably wouldn’t be there.

  James was happier in college than he would be in graduate school. One reason he gave was that there was “less necessity of public speaking” as an undergrad. Graduate school required scholarly talks and presentations to colleagues. When I asked him how public speaking is so powerful or distressing that, in his words, it brought an end to his happiness, he said, “Because I worry over saying the right things.”

  That worry was part of James’s ongoing impression that something was very wrong with him. He was obsessed with flaws he thought he saw in himself: that he focused too much on himself, for example, and that he was still having violent thoughts. He was especially concerned about being “self-centered.” Something felt wrong about putting all his studying and learning toward improving himself or getting a good-paying job. Most important, he wanted to use the knowledge “to see why I was different.” He was interested in comparing “normal people and people who are different … outside the norm, I guess.” James was thinking of himself, of course, and of people like him who were “mentally ill … [with] social awkwardness … [with] the intrusive thoughts.”

  “Which intrusive thoughts?” I asked.

  “The violent ones.”

  Several postshooting interviewers and examiners, and James himself, surmise that studying hard helped to keep his odd thoughts and obsessive defenses at bay and perhaps, in defense psychiatrist Dr. Raquel Gur’s words, “divert[ed] his attention from the inner turmoil he was experiencing.” Dr. Gur believes he was nevertheless continuing to deteriorate and that there were “signs and symptoms of emerging delusions” that would continue in graduate school.

  James moved to an off-campus apartment on Everton Place for his senior year at UC Riverside. His friend Soren Carr visited the apartment only once but says he noticed nothing unusual about it. James lived there alone because, in his words, “I prefer that way…. There was a lot more freedom … to do what you want to do.”

  During his senior year, he applied to eight university graduate schools with doctoral neuroscience programs. The schools to which he applied were often described in the criminal case records as “top tier,” or the best in their fields. In reality, and in fairness to other schools, the ones he chose that year varied from excellent to ordinary, as doctoral programs go, according to academic ranking sources such as phds.org. One, the University of California, Irvine, is very highly ranked. Another, Montana State, isn’t in the phds.org top 100.

  The graduate school application process is lengthy and complicated. Grades are important, of course. Letters of recommendation from faculty count for a lot. One must also score well on a multipart test called the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), participate in positive college and life experiences, and write a narrative “personal statement” about his or her academic goals or scientific philosophy. Good schools receive a great many applications for only a few enrollment slots; they try to choose the best candidates and to gauge the “whole” applicant once basic qualifications are met.

  James’s college grades were outstanding. He had a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of just under 4.0 (in the top 1 percent of UC Riverside graduates). He was a Regents’ Scholar, a Dean’s Fellow, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His reference letters were strong; one read, in part, “… a very effective group leader … Brings a great amount of intellectual and emotional maturity into the classroom.” His GRE scores were very good as well.

  But James’s personal statement essays hurt his applications. They were oddly worded, referring, for example, to using his “clairvoyance” to solve difficult problems. He sometimes invoked “the infinite vastness of indefinite knowledge,” or called upon “our own minds” as “the primary source of all things.” When a staff person at Montana State called James to follow up his written application, she found his voice mail greeting so strange that she was relieved not to hear from him again.

  Most graduate school candidates are culled during the written application process; a well-qualified few are interviewed by faculty, and sometimes students, as a final step before the acceptance decision. The interviews, sometimes stressful and sometimes relaxed, give the admissions team a chance to see the applicant in person and the applicant an opportunity to meet some of the people with whom he or she might work. Final interviews also assess the candidate’s motivation for a career in (in James’s case) science, and his or her “fit” for the school to which admission is sought.

  James was offered an interview by only one graduate program that year: the University of California at Irvine. He isn’t sure how he came across in the interviews there, except to say that he was a bit anxious and probably seemed “shy.” UC Irvine turned him down. In fact, in spite of his very impressive college transcript, James was rejected by every graduate school he contacted.

  A few weeks later, he graduated summa cum laude from UC Riverside. There’s no record that he attended the ceremonies.

  After graduation, James moved back into his parents’ home and applied for several low-level science-related jobs, such as laboratory technician. No one hired him, and he settled into what family members described as a life of sleeping late, watching television, and playing video games. His mother, particularly, became increasingly frustrated by his passive refusal to become productive or even to contribute to the household. Arlene was more vocal than Bob, according to James, but both parents ultimately let him know that if he didn’t get a job, he’d have to leave.

  In October of 2010, four months after graduation, James registered with Aerotek Staffing, a temporary placement agency specializing in scientific and technical jobs. They sent him to MeriCal, Inc., an Orange County dietary supplement factory, where he operated a pill-coating machine from 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., five days a week.

  Most MeriCal staff reported that James was “a model employee.” He didn’t get into disputes or participate in the drama that was common in the workplace. He was competent, and they liked the fact that “he never destroyed a batch of vitamins.” Some coworkers, though, thought he was arrogant and standoffish. Some saw him as intelligent and just doing his job, essentially watching the pill-coater hour upon hour, day to day, week to week. One said he seemed “retarded” at first. A human resources manager thought he might have had autism or Asperger’s disorder.

  Once he was seen staring into a corner of the room and giggling. He said he had just thought of something funny and kept chuckling intermittently. They started calling him “the giggler.”

  One coworker believed James was childlike and fragile and needed protection from the other workers. Later, when an aggressive employee did harass him, the self-appointed protector intervened, and a loud argument began. James, standing nearby, simply didn’t get involved in the fray. When human resources investigated the incident, he said he hadn’t heard a thing.

  After about three months, James submitted his resignation. MeriCal supervisor Adam Plachta urged him not to quit, but James said he wanted to pursue work in another state. In fact, at his parents’ urging, he was applying to graduate schools once again.

  In early 2011, James applied to six more graduate schools with neuroscience programs. He was offered in-person interviews with at least four but withdrew his application to one, the University of Kansas. The University of Alabama refuse
d to release any information about his application but is known to have turned him down. He applied to Texas A&M University, but they didn’t release details either. In the end, he was interviewed at the universities of Iowa, Illinois, and Colorado.

  One admissions reviewer at the University of Iowa graduate school said James’s application looked like a “slam dunk” on paper, but his interviews told a different story. Some of the faculty members there who met with him wrote comments such as “bizarre, disconnected, and aloof” and “global lack of effort.” An Iowa psychology professor who met with James told the admissions group not to admit him “under any circumstances.”

  Faculty and liaison graduate students at the prestigious University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave James mixed reviews. His personal statement essay had been very peculiar, referring to “the complexities of long lost memthought seemingly arising out of nowhere into a stream of awareness” and, as he wrote in some earlier applications, “the seemingly infinite vastness of indefinite knowledge.” James was quiet and awkward during his visit to the school, avoiding conversations with the students assigned to orient him. One, who hosted him for a couple of hours at her apartment as he waited for his ride to the airport, found James so socially uncomfortable that she simply had him watch television while she went about cleaning house.

  But very bright neuroscience students often seem a bit odd to the rest of us. Eccentricity isn’t a disqualifying factor. UIL Urbana-Champaign approved James for admission—his first graduate school acceptance—and offered him a research stipend to join their doctoral program.

  James was also offered interviews at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver/Aurora, which accepts only six new neuroscience trainees each year. He met individually with seven faculty members in February of 2011. Their comments and recommendations to the admissions committee are interesting: