Aurora theater shooting: Part 2

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Update profiles: The victims who lost their lives in the Aurora theater massacre »denverpost.com/theatershooting MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Responders stymied L I A B I L I T Y L AWSU ITS

Congestion, chaos slowed medical help to epicenter

“THE LIGHT IN THE ROOM”

Hurdles high for claims

By Chuck Murphy and Karen E. Crummy The Denver Post

Legal experts say survivors, the injured and families have little chance in cases.

By Tim Hoover The Denver Post

Survivors of the Aurora movie theater shootings and the families of those killed will have a high hurdle to clear if they try to sue the theater or others, legal experts say.

“The only obvious civil defendant is the shooter himself, and I doubt that he has anything in the way of assets or insurance,” said Tom Russell, a professor of law at the University of Denver and a personal injury lawyer.

That hasn’t stopped speculation about whether there will be lawsuits against the Cinemark Holdings-owned theater where James Eagan Holmes is alleged to have shot or wounded 70 people, leaving 12 dead.

Russell and others say plaintiffs would have to show that the theater should have foreseen that the shootings could have taken place.

“Did the movie theater know or have reason to know that some kind of violent crime might affect their patrons?” Russell said. “It’s beyond belief that they would know this kind of attack was coming.”

He said that in cases where LIABILITY » 8A

Moving on. Survivors balance joy in being alive with guilt that they made it out of the theater. »7A Explosives ID’d. Gasoline and gunpowder found booby-trapping Holmes’ apartment. »2A Surprise visitor. “Batman” actor Christian Bale visits hospitals, memorial »6A Some good news. Baby Hugo born as dad remains hospitalized. »9A

Shirley Wygal speaks about her daughter Rebecca Wingo, who was killed. Aaron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

“Her legacy is the friends and family that are inspired by the way she lived and loved.”

By Lindsay H. Jones The Denver Post

aurora » On one of their first nights without her, Rebecca Ann Wingo’s family gathered on the patio, swapping memories of a woman who for 32 years had been the center of their world.

They remembered a woman who always sat in the first row at church, who devoured books in a single sitting and always seemed to be juggling multiple projects.

As they talked, her former husband, the father of her two daughters, wiped away tears.

“I’ve been loving and fighting with that girl for 15 years,” Robert Wingo said.

A few moments passed. The family was silent.

“And then my oldest son said, ‘Yeah, she sure was good for the loving and the fighting,’ ” recalled Rebecca’s mother Shirley Wygal.

And then the family smiled.

“Her legacy is the friends and family that are inspired by the way she lived, and loved,” Wygal said.

“I’d like for her death to not be in vain and maybe, in some way, help protect some people at some point in the future.”

The picture that emerged about Wingo in the days immediately following her death in the Aurora movie theater mass shooting was only a glimpse into her life.

Wygal and Robert Wingo share

stories of a woman who had lived in three states and two countries by the time she was 12; who showed so much aptitude for foreign languages that by the time she was 20, she was fluent in Mandarin and working for the U.S. Air Force as a translator; and who was raising two daughters while putting herself back through school with a dream of becoming a social worker who would help teens transition out of the foster-care system.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh this person was amazing.’ It wasn’t that, it was that Rebecca was a catalyst.

She was the person who walked Rebecca Ann Wingo

INS I D E Business » 15-17A | Comics » 5-7C | Lottery » 2A | Markets » 16A | Movies » 4C | Obituaries » 23A | Puzzles » 5-6C

WINGO » 6A

aurora» While Aurora police charged into a multiplex theater within three minutes of the first report of a shooting there, more than 20 additional minutes passed before medical personnel arrived at the epicenter, a period when at least one victim was still alive but in desperate need of medical attention, dispatch tapes from that night show.

Aurora fire officials say they did the best they could. They had a truck on scene within five minutes of the shooting, and emergency medical workers treated every victim they came across outside in a parking lot. But, they said, the scope of the incident, unprecedented in Aurora, overwhelmed resources, and they were unable to immediately get closer to the theater because the lot was packed with cars from patrons and police.

“They were overwhelmed with patients,” Aurora Fire Capt. Al Robnett said of the first responders, who arrived 4 minutes and 59 seconds after they were dispatched. “Patients were running towards them. They were covered with blood. We cannot move past a patient to get to another patient.”

What resulted was a medical response that worked from the outside in — allowing the less seriously injured to get to help first while critically injured patients who couldn’t be moved waited as minutes ticked by to be assessed, treated and transported. When medical help finally did reach them, according to the dispatch recordings, ambulances weren’t available, and police cars — neither equipped nor staffed for lifesaving — took them to hospitals.

Twelve were killed and an additional 58 injured in the shooting at 12:39 a.m. Friday.

Eight minutes and 13 seconds into the crisis, police began asking dispatchers to send emergency medical help to behind theater 9 in the Century Aurora 16, where the shooting had occurred and some of the most critically injured were awaiting help. Previous requests had already been made for help in parking lots and outside the theater as patrons RESPONSE » 4A

Transcript: Read the exchanges between the police, fire and crisis command centers during the aftermath of the shooting. »4A

Midnight massacre wednesday, july 25, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post Medical response delayed at theater 9

Twenty minutes passed between the time police arrived inside the theater (the shooting scene) and when medical personnel arrived at the epicenter. Aurora fire officials had a truck on the scene within five minutes of the shooting, and emergency medical workers treated every victim outside the theater. But the medical response worked from the outside in, delaying care to some of the critically injured.

Medical facilities where victims were taken

Macy’s

Sp 25 ee

Town Center at Aurora mall

Dillard’s

70

DENVER E. Colfax Ave.

285

Century Aurora 16, theater 9

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Parker Adventist Hospital DOUGLAS COUNTY

E 470

Distance to medical facilities Sports Authority

Emergency vehicle staging area

E. Exposition Ave.

Facility Aurora Medical Center Children’s Hospital Colorado University Hospital Denver Health Medical Center Parker Adventist Hospital Swedish Medical Center

Source: Denver Post research

available ambulance and medical worker in the area.

But a fire commander on the scene estimated at the same time there were just 20 patients throughout the scene who would need hospitalization.

“I’m just trying to sort it out right,” the unidentified commander said. “I hear 10 here, four here. I’m going to go

225

Swedish Medical Center 85 ARAPAHOE COUNTY

Emergency vehicle staging area

Seriously injured victims behind the theater

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walked in every direction out of the multiplex.

“I’ve got a child victim,” an officer calls. “I need rescue at the back door (of) theater 9. Now.” But while that request was relayed immediately, neither ambulances nor trained medical responders approached — they remained in the nearby parking lot treating others.

When the medical responders announced they had arrived at the back of the theater — 15 minutes and 49 seconds after the call for help from theater 9 — police had already moved nine or 10 patients into the parking lot outside and the child patient apparently remained inside.

When rescuers from the fire department finally arrived at the back of the theater to help some of the most critical patients, they were thwarted again by the lack of ambulances for transport.

“FYI, right now we’re loading patients into back of PD cars to get them transported,” the first fire department responder to reach the theater said.

“Any ambos we could get would be nice.”

By then, it had been about 24 minutes since the shooting. None of the 25 ambulances that had responded from several area hospitals were available or able to get where they were immediately needed.

Gov. John Hickenlooper praised the willingness of police to do whatever it took to get medical aid to the wounded.

“I couldn’t believe how many people got to the hospital by police cars and not by ambulance,” Hickenlooper told The Denver Post. “Several people (he had spoken with from other jurisdictions) said, ‘You know, where I am, the police won’t touch injured people for fear they will hurt their back or whatever. These police looked at us, blood

everywhere and said, there are not ambulances here, we have to start taking people.’ ” The child inside theater 9 who so concerned police is believed to be Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, who did not survive. An autopsy report on her death has not been released, so it is impossible to tell whether she might have been saved by a more rapid response.

This is not the first time questions have been raised about Aurora’s emergency medical response. After a 2010 shooting, Aurora medical rescuers waited to enter an apartment scene because of the chance that a shooter was still at large, so police carried a wounded victim to a cruiser, then drove him to an ambulance.

At the time, fire department policy required medical help to wait until they heard the phrase “scene safe” from police. After that incident, Aurora fire officials said they would change their policy to leave the response decision up to commanders at a crime scene, allowing them to send help even if police were unable to declare a “scene safe.”

Robnett said safety was never a consideration Friday morning and that policy never came into play. Instead, it was simply the volume of patients, the lack of available resources for a crisis that large and the logistics of moving large trucks through the parking lot that made the response difficult.

“Absolutely not,” Robnett said. “The safety issue was treating patients.

They were not waiting in a safe area.

They were treating patients from the moment they arrived on the scene.”

But the dispatch recordings indicate there remained an information disconnect between the fire commander on scene outside and police in the theater.

By the approximately 21-minute mark after the shooting, police knew they had several bodies in the theater and scores of patients across the property who needed transport to hospitals or were already on their way in police cars. They repeatedly asked for every

S. Broadway

RESPONSE «FROM 1A

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S. Sable Blvd.

4A»

Distance 2.3 miles 3.2 miles 3.5 miles 10.3 miles 12.5 miles 13.4 miles The Denver Post

with 20 right now. Let’s just go with 20 people until we get this verified.”

Dr. Bruce Wapen, a board-certified emergency physician who works in a California hospital emergency department and occasionally serves as an expert witness, said minutes are critical for gunshot victims.

“Minutes count,” Wapen said. “With

chest and great vessel injuries, and organ injuries, speed is very important.”

Chuck Murphy: 303-954-1829, cmurphy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/cmurphydenpost Staff writer Lynn Bartels contributed to this report

Frantic minutes for emergency personnel

12:42 a.m.

What follows is a partial transcript of the dispatch tapes from the Aurora fire and police departments regarding emergency medical response after Friday’s movie theater shooting. The times in parenthesis represent the amount of time passed after the shooting was first reported.

Abbreviations: PO(police officer); FDD (fire department dispatch); Command (fire department command).

PO: I have a party shot here. I need rescue hot.

(3:07) FDD: Medic … They need you in front of the

12:54

theater.

FDD: Engine 8, we may have a second victim.

FDD: Starting third ambulance. (3:50) Command: We’re going to have staging away

12:46

12:49

from the scene.

PD: People who are shot running out of the theaters.

FDD: Multiple victims probably three plus.

PO: I need rescue … at least three to four ambulances, everyone can stage in the west parking lot.

(5:43) Command: Let’s set up ambulance staging at Expo and Sable. Is that where they want us to stage in the first place?

FDD: Now they’re saying west parking lot. Let me clarify with PD somewhere where we won’t necessarily be coming into their scene.

Command: They need to set us up a staging area.

FDD: They want the staging area in the west part of the theater.

MEDIC: We are on scene with APD. (6:56) Engine 8: We’re on the scene. We’re getting reports of multiple victims and an active shooter.

(7:14) PO: I have two victims. … I need an ambulance here quick.

PO: We need to start putting them into cars and start shuttling them out to the west end.

PO: (inaudible) shot twice in the back.

PO: I need one ambulance.

PO: We need rescue inside the auditorium. Multiple victims. (8:13) FDD: They’re saying they have a party on the east side of the theater they can’t get to. They need an ambulance. He’s shot in the back. And multiple parties inside the theater.

PO: I need as many ambulances as we can to the Dillard’s lot.

FDD: Looks like you have four ambulances started. PD requesting as many ambulances as possible to Dillard’s. How many ambulances do you want?

PO: I’m taking one male to the hospital in my car.

PO: Seven down in theater 9.

PO: I got a child victim. I need rescue at the back door of theater 9 now. (9:52) MEDIC: I’m down here north of the Century theater. I have a GSW … to the leg.

PO: Dispatch, give me some ambulances on Sable. I want ambulances on Dillard’s lot.

FDD to Command: Sir, (inaudible) metro sent all available ambulances.

PO: We’re bringing out bodies now. (11:44) PO: I’ve got one ambulance here. Where my ambulances at?

Tower 8 to Command: We need an ambulance for GSW to abdomen, arms and legs if you have anyone to spare.

PO: I need a medical crew. ... I’ve got one victim eviscerated.

FDD: PD wants as many medical personnel as possible. Two additional engines in route.

12:59

Engine 8: I need … two ambulances over here right away.

PO: Get me some ambulances in the back of the theater or Sports Authority parking lot. (13:21) FDD: PD is requesting as many medical personnel as possible to the Dillards. … We also have a child down.

PO: Do I have permission to take some of these victims via car? I have a whole bunch of people shot out here and no rescue. (14:00) PD command: Yes. Load them up and get them in cars and get them out of here.

PO: We have one we cannot move in theater 9.

Get us an ambulance here as soon as they’re available. (14:51) FDD: Engine 2, truck 2, engine 4, engine 5 in route.

FDD: PD is requesting medical personnel in theater 9. Have a child down and cannot evacuate.

(16:19) Command: We’re going to set up Fire Department that aren’t on scene to stage at Exhibition and Sable.

PO: We need rescue or we need more patrol cars. … We’re just gonna take these people.

FDD: DP advising there are 10 people down behind theater 9.

PO: Cruiser 6 is taking two more victims.

PO: (Inaudible) … shot in the neck.

Command: I need all ambulances that they’re sending to stage at Exposition.

FDD: PD is again requesting emergent medical to the back of the theater. (18:36) Command: I copy that. I’m just trying to get things under control here.

FDD: I copy, and again they are still asking for additional medical in theater 9.

PO: Moving (inaudible) by police cars. I still need some ambulances over here.

Truck 2: We can take the theater.

PO: Let Aurora South know cruiser 6 is in route.

One critical, one semi-critical.

Command: I need you …to come up here.

Dispatch Police: Truck 2 in route to theater 9.

(19:10) PO: We need rescue to move up to the rear of the theater. We have officers there requesting they come immediately for multiple victims. (19:27) PO: Advise rescue that officers will be there for security. That’s the best thing we can do at this point.

FDD: Sir, I apologize again, but PD is asking for emergent medical to the back of the theater. They are on scene to provide security.

Command: Copy. I have truck 2 … to help engine 8.

FDD: I believe they have another party inside theater 9 that they can’t evacuate, which is the child, but they have 10 parties down behind the theater.

PO: We’re evacuating victims. (20:45) Command: Go ahead and activate the EM system. We’re going to need to know exactly how many beds these … hospitals can take.

FDD: Do we have an approximate patient count?

PO: Come back for more. I have two here that need treatment right away.

PO: All right. I’m getting there.

Command: I’m just trying to sort it out right. I hear 10 here, four here. I’m going to go with 20 right now. Let’s just go with 20 people until we get this verified. (21:06) FIRE Dillard Division: I have Medic 102 over here. Can I have them to transport my two red patients?

Command: Copy. All divisions set up a extrica-

1:03

1:09

tion, triage, treatment, transport within your division. (21:28) Engine 5: Command, we’re right by the theater.

We just had a police officer run up to us that has nine patients behind the theater here. This would be on the east side of the theater. Do you want us to stay here or go with the police officer? (21:49) FDD: Command, did you copy engine 5? (22:56) Command: Copy.

FDD: I need to know if you want them to stay there or continue onto Dillard’s.

Police dispatch: I still have a lot of people shot on the east side. I need cars there.

Engine 5: We’re on the east side of the theater on Sable. Do you want us to attend to the patients on the east side?

Command: You only have one patient there, correct?

Engine 5: Police officer told us said there are nine patients.

Truck 2:We are in the rear of the theater. We have nine shot. If we can get any ambulances in stage on Sable, we can get them over to the ambos.

(24:02) Command: OK, just stand by. Let me get this sorted out. I will be with you in a minute.

Command: Do we know if the chief is responding?

FDD: That’s negative, sir. Do you want me to start (inaudible) chief?

Command: Yeah, I need chief (inaudible) here.

Command: Truck 2, I want you to join up with Engine 5. I’m just going to make you Sable division. … We’re going to start there until we get more resources. (25:06) Police dispatch: We need another car for transport behind theater 9.

FDD: The lieutenant with the police department is requesting to meet you face to face in front of the theater.

Dillards Division: We’re sending two … patients off.

Command: We’re waiting to hear from the EM system what beds are available.

Truck 2 to command: FYI, right now we’re loading patients into back of PD cars to get them transported. Any ambos we could get would be nice. (26:47) Command to FDD: How many ambulances … do I have? I need to have them all go to staging cause we have people jumping in and out. I’m not sure anybody even is.

FDD: To be honest, sir, I don’t know an exact count of ambulances. They did just advise me that they’re sending two more from (inaudible ) and we have every unit that’s available in the city of Aurora.

Command: I need them to go to Sable. Can they send a supervisor, … to be in charge of the transport area over there at Expo and Sable so we can get a handle on ambulances, have them stage and then I can send them into each division.

Command: Make sure that all these ambulances know to return to staging area over at Expo and Sable.

East division to command: We have transported seven patients. We’re on our eighth patient.

Also talked to police officer who said we may have a number of people dead inside the theater. (29:46) Command: OK, if they’re dead, leave them.

We’re in a mass casualty situation at this time.

FDD: They do have ambulances returning to the staging area.

Command: Anybody else that’s in the area that we can contact? Somebody we can get a hold of … anybody?

FDD: We’re working on finding additional transport rigs.

6A»

Midnight massacre wednesday, july 25, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post

BATMA N STAR VISITS VICTIMS

6

RESPONDING TO TRAGEDY

Caution urged in aid to victims Although no fundraising scams are plaguing relief efforts in the Aurora shootings, experts suggest research.

By Anthony Cotton The Denver Post

Christian Bale, who stars in “The Dark Knight Rises,” and his wife, Sibi Blazic, on Tuesday afternoon visit a growing memorial to victims of the Aurora theater massacre, which left 12 dead and 58 wounded. The couple also spent time at Medical Center of Aurora. Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post

“It was touching” Christian Bale, wife spend time at Medical Center of Aurora, memorial

By Kurtis Lee and Ryan Parker The Denver Post

aurora »Christian Bale, star of the last three Batman films, met at the Medical Center of Aurora on Tuesday afternoon with seven patients injured in the mass shooting that occurred during a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Hospital interim president Bill Voloch said Bale spent about 2½ hours at the hospital, where he met with five people being treated for their injuries.

Two others came from Swedish Medical Center to meet Bale, who stars as Batman/Bruce Wayne.

“The patients were really happy to meet Bale,” Voloch said. “They are obviously big fans of his movies. They wanted to see Batman and were really pleased to see Bale.”

Bale and his wife, Sibi Blazic, also met with a number of doctors, Aurora police officers and emergency medical technicians who were first responders when James Eagan Holmes allegedly killed 12 people and injured 58 others at Century Aurora 16 theater early Friday. Bale spent about 10 minutes with each person.

“It was good for the patients,” Voloch said. “We hope it was therapeutic for them, and all the staff really appreciated him coming.”

Nurse Crystal Flateland said she definitely did.

Flateland and 18 other staff members from

Actor Christian Bale visits Aurora shooting victim Carey Rottman. Special to The Denver Post Swedish were taken to Medical Center of Aurora on Tuesday for an appreciation buffet and — to their surprise — a meet and greet with Bale.

“I am probably one of the biggest Batman fans ever,” Flateland said. “It was amazing, actually, to get to meet him. I think it’s really great he came out here. It was touching.”

Flateland was called in to work after the shooting. During that morning, she was part of a medical team transferred to Medical Center of Aurora,

where more help was needed. Flateland said she ended up working about 40 hours straight.

“It was kind of exhausting,” Flateland said. “But I’ve now caught up on sleep and recovered.”

Bale also spent some time with Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Medical Center of Aurora received 18 patients from the movie theater shooting, and seven were admitted. Four patients went to Swedish Medical Center.

Voloch said Bale notified hospital officials that he wanted to visit the injured but asked that media not be notified. “He just wanted to meet with victims and police.”

Among the people Bale visited was Carey Rottman of Denver. Friends quickly tweeted out a photo of their visit.

Bale and Bazic also visited a growing memorial to victims near the movie theater.

Officials from Warner Bros. Pictures, maker of “The Dark Knight Rises,” said Bale came to Aurora on his own.

“Mr. Bale is there as himself, not representing Warner Brothers,” said an assistant for Susan Fleishman, executive vice president for Warner Bros.’ corporate communications.

Kurtis Lee: 303-954-1655, klee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kurtisalee

WINGO «FROM 1A into a room, and then everything is going to happen,” her former husband said. “She would brighten a room, and take you in a direction.

Rebecca, she kind of had her own gravity to her, and that’s why so many people like her.”

Rebecca spent nearly a decade living in Hawaii and serving as an Air Force translator. It was in her intense foreign-language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., that she met Robert Wingo, and their lives became intertwined.

In the 15 years since they met, Rebecca and Robert were classmates and friends; lovers, spouses and parents; exes and eventually partners, dedicated to raising their two daughters in a happy, loving, stable environment. Though divorced, their homes in Aurora were just 4 miles apart, with their girls’ school in the middle.

Robert Wingo received a text from Rebecca last Thursday night, shortly before she headed out to the Century Aurora 16 movie theater on a date that included a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Rebecca died inside the theater early Friday morning, one of 12 people killed. It left their daughters, ages 9 and 5, without their mother, and Wingo without the one person who had been with him through everything.

“We went full circle. Literally from the time she was 17 or 18

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

“

She would brighten a room, and take you in a direction. Rebecca, she kind of had her own gravity to her, and that’s why so many people like her.”

Robert Wingo, former husband

years old till now, we were partners,” Wingo said. “That’s the selfish loss that I’ve got, because honestly, as an adult, I don’t know how to be without her.”

For Wygal, she was just relearning what it was like to live near her daughter. Thousands of miles had separated them for much of Rebecca’s adult life, but in September, Wygal moved to Aurora to be with Rebecca and the girls.

Money was tight as Rebecca

worked her way through classes at the Community College of Aurora, though Wygal said that never seemed to matter. Wygal said Rebecca frequently gave cash away to people she thought needed it more than she did — a $20 bill to a woman holding a sign on a street corner; $100 to a friend whose purse was stolen days before Christmas.

“I had to say, ‘OK. Good girl!’ She was always doing that,” Wygal said.

“Things didn’t matter to her. Peo-

With the world responding to last week’s theater shootings in Aurora, a myriad of outlets have sprung up online, asking for donations with the promise that any money will be given to those most affected by the tragedy.

And while most are legitimate, donors should be aware of potential scams.

“It’s unfortunate, but it does happen. There are people out there who want to take advantage of a tragedy like this,” said Robert Thompson, a spokesman for the Mile High United Way in Denver. “We haven’t seen anything yet, but we’re very cognizant and looking very hard for anything along those lines.”

While the public’s collective heart goes out to the victims and their families, and many want to respond with some sort of financial assistance, Thompson said there should still be a measure of caution involved.

“Just do a little research. You should be wary of any fundraising effort unless you can verify it,” he said.

During the spate of recent wildfires throughout the state, the United Way set up a telephone bank to direct people who wanted to help to the right outlets. In this instance, Thompson said, the organization is directing the public to GivingFirst.org, the online resource referenced by Gov. John Hickenlooper in the aftermath of the shooting.

“What you want in these cases is a clear message about where people should go, you don’t want them jumping through hoops,” Thompson said. “There should be a collective effort.”

Even so, just as with the wildfires, there have been numerous cases of almost spontaneous websites going up with the purpose of honoring individual victims and seeking help for them and their families.

Citing a judge’s order restricting pre-trial publicity in the Aurora shooting case, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Attorney General’s office declined to provide tips on avoiding scams connected to the shootings.

Rather, she referenced warnings issued by the AG’s office during the wildfires.

In an interview with Colorado Public Radio earlier this month, Jan Zavislan, Deputy Attorney General for Consumer Protection, said people should be leery of robo-calls asking for donations, particularly those prompting the recipient to press the numeral 1 or the pound sign, or asking for credit card information.

Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292, acotton@denverpost.com or twitter.com/anthonycottondp

W HER E TO G IV E

Victims’ funds growing by thousands

ple mattered to her.”

Friends posting messages on a memorial Facebook page told stories of Rebecca opening her home if someone needed a place to stay.

While she worked for the Air Force, she hosted six foreign exchange students, and Robert affectionately referred to Rebecca as the “animal whisperer” for her habit of taking in stray animals.

“Our cat, Kiki, was a feral cat, just running around Hawaii, and she calls it to the car, and brings it home. We still have that cat today,” Robert said.

Robert Wingo and his daughters (the family has asked that their names not be published), and one of Rebecca’s brothers visited with other victims’ families and President Barack Obama on Sunday.

The girls both wore white dresses.

They hugged the president.

A woman who watched the encounter said Rebecca’s daughters were “the light in the room.”

The younger girl closely resembles her mother, but both girls share Rebecca’s mannerisms and are taking on characteristics of her personality. They are outgoing and confident, traits Wingo and Wygal believe Rebecca gave them.

“I hope they’ll love to read like Rebecca did. I hope they’ll be lifelong students like Rebecca was,” Wygal said. “I want them to be fearless. I want them to live life with abandon like she did, and enjoy being here like she did.”

Aid to victims of the Aurora theater massacre is flowing steadily, including a $50,000 donation by auto dealer Ed Bozarth, who established a victim assistance fund.

Bozarth made the donation on behalf of his family, business partners and Ed Bozarth Chevrolet. Of that gift, $30,000 is earmarked for victims’ families. The Aurora Police Department and the Aurora Fire Department will each receive $10,000.

“I am asking other businesses and citizens in our community, and across the nation, to open their hearts and checkbooks (for) these families attempting to build back their lives,” Bozarth said.

Not everyone is equipped to give on such grand a scale. But every bit helps: • GivingFirst.org: This Lakewood-based Community First foundation has identified several legitimate nonprofits. Contributions of any size are welcome. Including a large donation reported to be about $1 million from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Picture, that fund is approaching $2 million.

• Wish Upon A Hero Foundation invites those affected by the shooting to submit wishes, financial and otherwise, to the foundation website, wishuponahero.org. “Not all [wishes] are monetary based,” says spokesman Ryan Rendfrey.

• The Harmony Project in Columbus, Ohio, has recorded the Beth Nielsen Chapman song, “How We Love,” and $1 from each download will go to GivingFirst.org.

• The Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Galaxy, through owner Phil Anschutz’s Anschutz Entertainment Group, has donated $10,000 to the Jessica Redfield Sports Journalism Scholarship Fund, according to sources.

Lindsay H. Jones: 303-954-1262, ljones@denverpost.com or twitter.com/lindsay_h_jones

Joanne Davidson: 303-809-1314, jdavidson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/getitwrite

By Joanne Davidson The Denver Post

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A REMARKABLE LIFE

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Today: Updates from the first official day of Denver Broncos training camp at Dove Valley. »denverpost.com/broncos

SPORTS

MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Suspect sent notebook to CU before rampage WELCOME, CAMPERS

THE LIFE OF ALEX SULLI VAN, FRAM E D I N TO UCH I N G M E M O RI E S

The Broncos will conduct their first training camp practice today, a first step that they hope leads them to New Orleans and the Super Bowl. »1B

BUSINESS

A HEALTHY FIRST DAY OF TRADING Shares of Lakewood-based Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage, the natural and organic groceries and dietary supplements retailer, closed at $17.86 — a 19 percent increase over the offering price. »15A

NATION & WORLD

DECIDING WHEN TO COME OUT In pop culture, the fine arts and the entertainment industry — and in some individual sports — it’s now commonplace for luminaries to be out as gay or lesbian. But in many other fields, the dynamics are different. »19A

COLORADO STYLE

BUTTERFLIES TAKE FLIGHT IN DENVER More than 250 types of butterflies are found in Colorado. The Lepidopterists’ Society meets at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science through Sunday. »1C

Photographs of shooting victim Alex Sullivan are arranged by his father, Tom, and Alex’s sister, Megan. Alex Sullivan, one of 12 people killed in Friday morning’s shooting at an Aurora movie theater, turned 27 on the day he died and was just days shy of celebrating his first wedding anniversary. Below, Tom and Megan laugh as they remember a happy story about Alex. Photos by AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

“Every single picture just has a story behind it”

By Kevin Vaughan The Denver Post

To the world, Alex Sullivan was a gentle bear of a man who died in a movie theater on his 27th birthday.

To me and my family, he was something else — a friend. He was the newborn at my wedding, the smiling 3-year-old petting my dog, the 10-year-old hockey star whacking me in the shins as we played in the street, the polite teenager, the newlywed whose hug took my breath away.

There is a cold detachment that comes with being a journalist. We move in other people’s worlds and hope to see them in unguarded moments that give our stories their resonance. We come to care about the people we write about — I remain in regular touch with several of the families who lost children at Columbine — but there’s still a wall between us, for, in the end, we are merely observers. That wall was shattered Friday morning.

Every photo a memory Photographs of Alex — as a baby in a car seat, as a big brother at a reservoir, as a teenager at the Olympics — spill across an ottoman.

“Every single picture just has a story behind it,” Megan Sullivan, Alex’s younger sister, says as she looks over the snapshots.

She and Alex’s dad, Tom Sullivan, are telling some of those stories.

There is a photograph taken July 20, 1991 — Alex’s 6th birthday. In the image, there’s a cake and candles, SULLIVAN » 8A

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By Jeremy P. Meyer, Sara Burnett and Allison Sherry The Denver Post

A notebook sent through the mail by suspected killer James Eagan Holmes before Friday morning’s massacre was delivered at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus on Monday — the day of his first court appearance, university officials said.

National news organizations, quoting unnamed law enforcement sources, said the notebook detailed Holmes’ plans to kill people.

Neither officials with the university nor law enforcement would discuss the contents of the package, citing a judge’s order banning investigators and lawyers involved in the case from discussing it.

A law enforcement official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity did confirm to The Denver Post that a package containing a notebook was sent by Holmes to the university. That official did not know the contents.

University officials, who had been mum on the details surrounding the delivery of two packages that caused the evacuations on the campus Monday, on Wednesday afternoon released a statement to rebut a claim by Fox News that the package had been delivered on July 12 and went unopened for more than a week.

HOLMES » 2A

MEDICAL BILLS

Children’s will waive Aurora victims’ bills

By Allison Sherry The Denver Post

Children’s Hospital said Wednesday that it will forgive the unpaid medical bills for those they treated in the Aurora shooting — including co-pays and deductible-related expenses for those with health insurance.

Two adults remain hospitalized there, and three have been released.

Children’s treated five people, and one patient died.

“We are committed to supporting these families as they heal,” the hospital said in a statement.

The other five area hospitals treating victims from the massacre last week were non-committal Wednesday on how they were going to handle the rising bills for those who remain hospitalized — particularly for the uninsured patients.

Most hospitals’ financial chiefs declined to say how much they’ve spent BILLS » 4A

Inside the theater.

Despite all the pandemonium, Pierce O’Farrill could hear the gunman’s footsteps — slow, methodical and menacing. »4A

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Midnight massacre thursday, july 26, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post

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H OL M ES’ TRIA L

Briefs PRESIDENT BACKS STEPPED-UP CHECKS In one of his most expansive responses yet to gun crime, President Barack Obama on Wednesday embraced some degree of control on the sale of weapons but said he would also seek a consensus on combating violence.

He said some responsibility also rests with parents, neighbors and teachers to ensure that young people “do not have that void inside them.”

Obama pledged to work with lawmakers of both parties to stop violence — not only the sudden massacres that have bedeviled the nation, but also the steady drip of urban crime that has cost many young lives.

In a speech to the National Urban League in New Orleans, Obama called for stepped-up background checks for people who want to purchase guns and restrictions to keep mentally imbalanced individuals from buying weapons. He says those steps “shouldn’t be controversial; they should be common sense.”

Romney: Suspect shouldn’t have had “many” of weapons

Police allowed the neighbors of suspect James Holmes to return to their apartments Wednesday after days of investigation. Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post

Defense team combs apartment

By Ryan Parker The Denver Post

aurora» A team of four from the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office spent 45 minutes Wednesday afternoon combing through the apartment of their client, accused theater shooter James Eagan Holmes.

They arrived about 1:10 p.m. led by the chief trial deputy Daniel King and stayed until 1:55 p.m. The team wore latex gloves and shoe covers while inside the three-story building.

While in apartment No. 10 at 1690 Paris St. in Aurora, they used handheld video cameras to film the scene and paid close attention to windows broken out by police when they defused explosives inside.

Dan Recht, a criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the theater shooting case, said the defense team likely did not have an agenda for this visit. “You go in with an open mind to see what you can see.”

The team was accompanied by two Aurora detectives, who exited the apartment with full manila envelopes that were empty when they entered.

King would not comment when he left the apartment.

Recht said it was appropriate that the defense team didn’t bring other specialists along for the visit. “You want to get a sense of who your client is.”

Holmes was arrested early Friday, after a gunman in body armor opened fire in a packed theater in Aurora. The rampage left 12 dead and 58 wounded.

After his arrest, Holmes reportedly told police there were explosives in his apartment.

Recht said he thinks the defense is focused on Holmes’ mental condition.

“They have no doubt he was the shooter, so now they have to look for signs of mental illness, such as deranged writings or drawings, and the cleanliness of the house,” Recht said.

Holmes, 24, is being held without bond at the Arapahoe County Jail.

Charges are to be filed on Monday.

Prosecutors examined the apartment Tuesday afternoon. Recht said they were able to look at the area first because Holmes’ unit is a separate crime scene due to the bombs placed inside.

“If it had just been his home, prosecutors and law mostly likely wouldn’t even have access to it,” Recht said.

Ryan Parker: rparker@denverpost.com, 303-954-3804, twitter.com/ryanparkerdp

Daniel King, chief trial deputy with the Colorado State Public Defender’s office, examines James Holmes’ apartment on Wednesday Stephen Mitchell, The Denver Post

HOLMES «FROM 1A “The anonymous Fox News source that the package was received on July 12 and sat on a loading dock is inaccurate,” according to the press release.

The university said the “suspicious package discovered at the Facilities Services building on Monday was delivered to the campus by the U.S. Postal Service that same day, immediately investigated and turned over to authorities within hours of delivery.

“This package prompted the building’s evacuation at 12:26 p.m., and employees were allowed to return by 3:06 p.m.”

In addition to Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, NBC and CNN reported law enforcement sources had confirmed that the notebook contained drawings about a massacre and was sent

to a CU psychiatrist.

Fox News said the notebook contained drawings of stick figures being shot and a written description of an attack.

It was unclear if Holmes, 24, had had any previous contact with the person.

However, as part of his studies in a neuroscience program on the Anschutz Medical Campus, Holmes was enrolled in a course — “Biological Basis of Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders” — that was taught by a psychiatrist and included presentations by seven others with that speciality.

He withdrew from the program June 10.

Whether the package and its contents will affect the criminal proceedings is unknown, said legal analyst Scott Robinson. Often, mass killers produce manifestos to take claim, he said.

“Is it a manifesto or an apology?” he said. “If it includes drawings that are sufficiently deranged as to

Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367, jpmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jpmeyerdpost

Corrections

Contact The Post

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Editorial: Increasing security at theaters isn’t worth it if it impacts the ticket price — or cuts into our freedoms. »24A

Guest commentary: “It will be OK,” says Columbine survivor Liz Carlston, who offers her advice to shooting victims and survivors on how to move on. »25A

Comedian to appear at fundraiser.

Comedian Gabriel Iglesias will appear at the Denver Improv next Wednesday in a fundraiser for Caleb Medley, an aspiring comic who is hospitalized after being shot in the head during the Aurora theater massacre Friday.

Iglesias doesn’t know Caleb, whose wife, Katie, escaped uninjured from the rampage. Katie gave birth to a boy Tuesday.

After Hugo was born, Caleb’s brother, Seth, told reporters that Caleb, 23, is making small improvements.

The couple doesn’t have health insurance, and his brother said recovery could take several years.

Iglesias called out of the blue and said he wanted to do a benefit for Caleb. He asked whether he could do it at the Denver Improv, said Al Canal, the Improv’s general manager.

Jesse Jackson to push gun control

be from someone who appears mentally ill, it could assist defense in a not guilty by reason of insanity defense. If it appears to be the work of someone who knew exactly what they are doing, and they knew it was wrong, that could help the prosecution.”

Robinson said the initial report that the package had remained unopened for days before the attack created unnecessary anguish for people suffering amid the tragedy.

Denver attorney David Lane said the notebook, if it contains plans, could further reveal premeditation. But, he said, that doesn’t necessarily mean insanity.

“You can be the most intelligent person on the planet and be starkraving mad,” he said. “I would want to see the letter. How logical or coherent is it? You can learn from the wording his state of mind.”

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B london» Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday said many of the weapons obtained by the shooting suspect in Colorado were obtained illegally and that changing laws won’t prevent gun-related tragedies.

But the firearms that authorities allege the gunman used were all obtained legally.

“This person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices, and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them,” Romney told NBC News in an interview. “And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t.”

Spokesman Andrea Saul said later that when the candidate referred to illegal items, he meant the bombs and other items in the apartment.

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B aurora» The Rev. Jesse Jackson is scheduled to visit Aurora on Thursday to address gun control in light of last week’s theater massacre.

Pastor Thomas Mayes of Living Water Christian Center Church in Aurora told the Aurora Sentinel that the civil rights activist will tour Aurora, meet with the family of one of the victims and hold a news conference.

The news conference, which Jackson will use to discuss gun control, is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. outside the suspect’s apartment at 1690 Paris St.

Florida senator cancels appearance. Sen. Marco Rubio’s planned appearance in Colorado on behalf of Mitt Romney has been scrapped following last week’s massacre in Aurora.

The Florida Republican and potential vice presidential choice will still stump for the presumptive Republican presidential candidate on Saturday in Las Vegas.

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PAYING RESPECTS

A

urora Police Cmdr. Kevin Flynn on Wednesday visits the memorial near East Centrepoint Drive and South Sable Boulevard. The senior leadership of the Aurora Police Department, the Aurora Fire Department and the Denver Field Office of the FBI gathered at the site to honor the victims of Friday’s movietheater massacre. Twelve died, and 58 were injured. Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

ment later, they connected again, and the next few hours at Gateway High School were a swirl for Tom and Terry, for Megan and Cassie, and for the friends who gathered with them.

There was an agonizing, fruitless search of hospitals.

By 10 a.m., Tom resigned himself to the idea that Alex was gone.

It would be 10 hours before officials would confirm that, but as they waited, desperate for news, they told Alex stories.

“This might sound hard to believe, but we already had — we had laughter on Friday at Gateway High School,” Tom says.

That celebration has continued in the numbing days since.

Like the story of the day Alex, as a little boy, scratched a $40 winner on the lottery ticket in his Christmas stocking. He wasn’t yet in school, but he suspected the $2 Tom gave him for candy and a soda was a pittance.

“Dad,” he protested, “where’s the four-oh?”

In recent days, the family has been overwhelmed by the kindness shown by friends and strangers alike — a huge fruit basket from the cookie shop where Alex worked for all of three weeks as a teen, the friends from every phase of his life who have stopped by their Aurora home, the call from Arizona Charlie’s casino in Las Vegas, which in recent years has been Tom’s annual stop during a two-day, guys-only, Super Bowl jaunt — a trip that has included Alex since he was 21.

Today, the people who loved Alex will gather to say goodbye to him.

There will be tears. But there will also be Alex stories.

“We’re going to keep doing it,” Tom says. “We’ll be talking about Alex forever and ever. There’s no reason to stop — and that’s just the way it’s going to be. ... When I hear a new story, it will be a new adventure. I will have met him again that day.”

SULLIVAN «FROM 1A and big smiles on Tom and Alex and Megan, and a handmade “Happy Birthday” banner on the wall behind them.

It was snapped the day Tom and his wife, Terry, started a tradition with Alex — taking him to the movies on his birthday.

They saw “The Rocketeer” that day.

And all these years later, it no longer matters that when they went to Pizza Hut after the film, the special “Rocketeer” kids meals with the cups featuring images from the movie were all gone. It is the first film Megan can remember seeing in a theater.

“A lot of my memories growing up, we always had a great time together, and had fun and played and climbed trees, and I was right there with him on everything,” she says.

There’s a photo of Alex and Megan on a sunny day at Aurora reservoir — one of her favorite shots of the two of them — their faces frozen in youthful wonder. And another of them in an embrace as adults.

There’s a photo of Tom and Alex in the blue and orange of their beloved New York Mets — homemade baseball posters on the wall.

It was their answer to Broncos Day at Alex’s school.

“I said, ‘Alex, do they have a Mets Day?’ ” Tom recalls. “And he looked up at me, and he said, ‘I don’t think so, Dad.’ And I said, ‘Well, by God, from here on out, we’re going to have a Mets Day.’ ” Each year on opening day, they’d buy everyone a new Mets T-shirt, or a hat, or a jacket, and they’d grill hot dogs, fill a bowl with popcorn and watch whatever baseball game was on.

As Tom and Megan talk, they laugh at the silly things, like the time Alex put his head through a door during a squabble with his sister — damage the two conspired to hide with a poster (Terry discovered it immediately). Or the times too numerous to count that Alex showed up drinking a giant cup of Starbucks coffee (Megan worked at Caribou Coffee).

And they express pride in all that Alex was.

A husband whose love for his wife, Cassie, was obvious and who seemed a natural at marriage. A peacemaker who would tell Tom to calm down when he got worked up. A lover of comic books and movies who made friends everywhere and could quote “Caddyshack” from the opening scene to the closing credits.

A brother who would call his sister and make her day each time they met.

“He’d give me a big hug,” she says, “and, I don’t know, it just made everything better.”

Utterly happy

Above: Alex Sullivan with his father, Tom, during his birthday party at Bayou Bob's. His sister recalls of the event, “We had crawdads. It was disgusting.” Below (from left): Photo at an undated Rockies games, Alex and his sister Megan during his wedding rehearsal in July 2011 and a family trip to Golden. AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Friends since college I was a freshman in college when I met Tom Sullivan. Both of us were pursuing journalism degrees. He was a few years older; I was right out of high school. He came from upstate New York; I was a Westerner.

But something clicked. Chatting turned into coffee and lunch, and by Christmastime, he and Terry were a regular presence in my life.

Over the past 30 years, their friend-

ship has blossomed through barbecues and ball games, halloween parties and high school graduations. There was even a chance meeting in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

“Alex is shot” At 3 a.m. Friday, Tom was up, getting ready for his early morning shift at the Post Office. He clicked on the news and saw the initial reports on the shooting, and he knew Alex had been planning to see the new Batman mov-

ie. But as soon as he saw an image of the Century Aurora 16, he felt a wave of relief.

That wasn’t the theater Alex usually visited.

After arriving at work, Tom tried several times to reach Alex, just to be sure, but his calls went straight to voicemail.

Then, about 6:30 a.m., Terry called — frantic.

“Tom, Tom, Alex is shot,” she said.

The call was disconnected. A mo-

My wife and I last saw Alex at his wedding a year ago. He was 2 weeks old at our wedding; now he was a grown man whose love for his wife was infectious. During the reception, he stopped to visit, making us feel that we had been the ones who had made the event special, thanking us for coming.

“Well,” I deadpanned, “I figured since you came to our wedding, we needed to come to yours.” Alex laughed.

But my enduring memory won’t be of my lame attempt at humor. It will be of the bear hug that made it hard to breathe for a moment. And it will be of the smile on his face — the smile that made it clear he was deeply in love. And utterly happy with his life.

Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019, kvaughan@denverpost.com or twitter.com/writerkev

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FRIDAY, JULY 27, 2012

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Get in the Games: Expanded coverage of the 2012 London Olympics. Âťdenverpost.com/london2012 MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Idle ambulances troubling Six medical responders weren’t called for up to 35 minutes — if at all.

CHERISHED SIGNATURE

By Karen E. Crummy and Chuck Murphy The Denver Post

Even as Aurora police begged for ambulances at the scene of last week’s theater massacre, at least six nearby medical responders weren’t called to the scene for 20 to 35 minutes — or were never called at all.

The existence of unused ambulances contradicts early accounts that the injured were taken to hospitals in police cars in part because ambulances were doubled up with casualties.

The Denver Post reported Wednesday that emergency medical workers from the Aurora Fire Department arrived at theater 9 almost 24 minutes after the shooting, even though police began asking for help there 8 minutes into the crisis. Many ambulances, meanwhile, were directed by a fire commander to a nearby staging area to await further instructions, according to dispatch tapes.

Aurora Fire Chief Mike Garcia said Thursday night he was “disappointed people are second-guessing the excepAMBULANCE Âť 14A

Micayla Medek: Friends and family remember the 23year-old, killed at the Century Aurora 16, as a generous and independent spirit. Âť4A

O N S L AU G HT O F IN J U R IES

W

ER scene: “Like you were at war�

ith all eyes on Peyton Manning, thousands of Broncos fans came out to see the new quarterback and the rest of the team Thursday in the Broncos’ first training-camp practice of the 2012 season. As the biggest offseason move in the NFL, Manning’s arrival in Denver has fans buzzing about the Broncos improving this season. Photos by AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post story, 1B

By Kevin Simpson and Michael Booth The Denver Post

Follow along: For daily info on Manning and the QB watch, and updates before, during and after practices, go to denverpost.com/broncos throughout the day for stories, blogs and analysis.

NATION & WORLD

HOT, DRY SUMMER INCREASES RISK OF WEST NILE VIRUS The drought in much of the Midwest has created the perfect environment for the mosquitoes that carry the West Nile virus. Several states are reporting higher rates of infected mosquitoes. Âť25A

ENTERTAINMENT

DRAGON TRAINING Get an inside look at this weekend’s Colorado Dragon Boat Festival with a Q&A with a dragon-boat racing champion. 1C

DENVER &THE WEST

DENVER MUSEUM CURATOR TAKING SMITHSONIAN JOB Kirk Johnson, the chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, has been tapped to helm the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. 16A

They appeared by the dozens, washing up in an improbable surge at one emergency room, and wave after bloody wave at another.

The flood of injured victims from the Century Aurora 16 theaters, where a lone gunman wrought havoc and death at a midnight premiere, arrived in the wee hours last Friday morning at six metro-area hospitals any way they could get there — in ambulances, police cars, even private vehicles.

And at University of Colorado Hospital, they arrived with little warning — 23 patients, the most among the six facilities that treated casualties — and with wounds that spoke to the firepower wielded by their assailant. “It felt like you were at war,â€? said Dr. Comilla Sasson, one of two attending physicians working the overnight shift. “The sheer number of people INJURED Âť 4A

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AMBULANCE «FROM 1A tional work” done by the firefighters, and that due to the “severely congested” scene with hundreds of cars from patrons and police, “routing ambulances to all patient locations was impossible.”

“By using available ambulances and police cars, we were able to transport all onscene patients within 55 minutes,” he said in an e-mailed statement to The Post. “ Our response times were outstanding and critical patients were quickly moved from the scene because fire and police worked together to use all available resources.”

Whether additional ambulances would have impacted the treatment of the 58 people injured or 12 who died isn’t clear. Autopsies have not been released, and a judge has issued a gag order on law enforcement agencies involved in the case.

David Patterson, division general manager of Rural/Metro Corp. which contracts with the city of Aurora to provide ambulance services, declined to discuss details about where his 14 ambulances went once they arrived on scene. However, he said, the first ambulance arrived at the shooting scene 2 minutes and 45 seconds after the 12:39 a.m. shooting call.

“We had a critically wounded patient treated and loaded into the ambulance within 11 minutes,” he said.

Another 10 ambulances from other agencies also responded, although it appears many of those were dispatched later.

Cunningham Fire Protection District was not called to the scene until 20 minutes after the shooting was reported, said Chief Jerry Rhodes. He and two medical personnel arrived about 1:13 a.m.

One of the medical personnel went to the theater, and the other to the staging area.

“Clearly, most of the patients — reds and yellows — were removed from the scene by then,” he said.

Denver Health was notified at 12:47 a.m. to brace for multiple victims in the emergency room. The call for ambulance assistance didn’t come for another 16 minutes.

South Metro Fire Rescue was called 30 minutes after the shooting was reported. Englewood Fire Department was called 35 minutes after.

Nearby private companies — American Medical Response and Action Care Ambulance Inc. — were called to back up nonrelated 911 calls but not to the scene.

“We asked Rural /Metro where they wanted us, and they said we weren’t needed,” said Bill Wallace, president of Action

Aurora to keep flags at half-staff indefinitely to honor 12 victims The city of Aurora will keep flags at half-staff until further notice to honor those who died in the Century Aurora 16 shootings July 20, a city spokeswoman said Thursday.

“As our community continues to heal, we want to be mindful and show respect for the victims,” said spokeswoman Kim Stuart.

The assault left 12 people dead and 58 injured, most by gunfire or bullet fragments and a few who were hurt while fleeing the theater packed to see the premiere of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

After the shootings, Gov. John Hickenlooper and President Barack Obama ordered flags lowered to honor the victims until sunset Wednesday. The Denver Post

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Aurora police and emergency personnel respond to the Century Aurora 16 movie theater shooting early July 20. Karl Gehring, The Denver Post Care, who said he had four ambulances in the city of Aurora at the time.

Dr. Comilla Sasson, who was one of two ER doctors on duty at University of Colorado Hospital on Friday morning, said most of the patients who came in were brought in police cars.

She said typically, a patient in an ambulance comes into the ER after key steps are taken by the paramedic, including an IV line, if necessary, and the gathering of vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure and whether the patient is talking coherently.

But speed can be just as important, if there’s not a choice of vehicles.

“At the end of the day, the fact they were able to bring patients to us quickly is why we saved 22 out of 23 people (brought to the hospital),” Sasson said.

Whether a patient is better off being treated by a medical responder or getting to the hospital as fast as possible can only be analyzed on a case-by-case basis, said Carl Schultz, director of research at the Center for Disaster Medical Sciences at University of California at Irvine.

“It all depends on the patient’s injuries,” he said.

At 1:25 a.m., police officers said the victims were “all gone,” according to the dispatch. About 15 minutes later, another officer mentioned he found a man who was wounded with shrapnel in his face, but it

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was minor enough that the man didn’t realize he was hurt.

Asked what to do, another officer said there were “a bunch of ambulances backed up over there” on the west side of the theater.

The Post reported Wednesday that the medical response to the shooting worked from the outside in, which meant that some critically injured patients who could not be moved had to wait. When medical help did reach them, according to the dispatch recordings, ambulances weren’t at theater 9.

“FYI, right now we’re loading patients into back of PD cars to get them transported,” said the first fire department responder to reach the theater, according to the dispatch tapes. “Any ambos we could get would be nice.”

The metro area has mutual-aid agreements among agencies that stipulate that one municipality, and its ambulance contractor, if it has one, will help another municipality in emergency situations. However, an outside agency must get permission to respond.

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BIKES MADE OF BAMBOO GET IN GEAR Weak spending and hiring slows second-quarter growth. »BUSINESS, 16A

The Broncos will put on their pads Saturday for the first time since a playoff loss in January. » 6B

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Get the latest: Learn about news as it happens, and sign up for alerts. »denverpost.com/breaking news MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Suspect saw psychiatrist Therapists are required to notify law o∞cers if a threat is perceived.

London 2012

Opening ceremony

By Karen E. Crummy and Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

Fireworks illuminate the stadium during the opening ceremony of the Summer Games in London on Friday night. John Leyba, The Denver Post

Missy grieving, driven MARK KISZLA

Denver Post Columnist

More on the Games. »1B »denverpost.com/london2012

DENVER & THE WEST

COLORADO HEALTH INSURANCE CO-OP LANDS FEDERAL LOAN The state’s first consumer-run, populist health-insurance co-op launched Friday with a $69 million startup loan. Marketing of the plan will begin next year. »10A

A cool breeze for Craig patients.

More than 50 patients from Englewood’s Craig Hospital with paralysis and brain injuries spent the day on sailboats with nothing but the wind, water, a therapist and a volunteer. »10A

london» fter a summer filled with way too much bad news on the doorstep, Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin hopes to make it OK for Colorado to smile again.

“All my races right now are dedicated back home to Colorado,” said Franklin, whose eyes will be fixed on gold, silver and bronze at the Aquatics Centre during the Summer Games, while a little piece of her heart

A

aches for home.

Although the rankings at the world’s toughest swim meet confirm her status as one of the planet’s best athletes, Franklin is not so different from the girl down the street. She attends high school in Aurora. During the hours after “The Dark Knight Rises” movie premiere, Franklin was glued to her telephone, hoping and praying nobody she knew was caught in the horror of a KISZLA » 8A

HOME

A WAY TO STAY National grassroots groups are helping aging homeowners with daily tasks so they can remain in their houses.»1C

GARDENING INSIDERS SHARE EIGHT THRIFTY TIPS Savvy homeowners and garden-center professionals are happy to share insider tips on bargain hunting. First, collect seeds from farmers market vegetables as well as from your own crops. »1C

INS I D E Business » 16-17A | Comics » 7-9C | Lottery » 2A | Markets » 17A | Movies » 4C | Obituaries » 21A | Puzzles » 7-8C

aurora» James Eagan Holmes — suspected in the Aurora movie-theater attack — was seeing a University of Colorado psychiatrist to whom he allegedly mailed a notebook before the July 20 massacre, court documents reveal.

Friday’s disclosure came in the wake of two days of news stories about the contents of the notebook, which several news outlets reported contained details of Holmes’ alleged murderous plan. Those reports were based on unnamed law enforcement sources.

On Friday, Holmes’ attorneys filed papers accusing the prosecution of leaking damaging information about him, and District Attorney Carol Chambers, in response, denied the charge and alleged that some of the stories may have been fabricated.

Those dueling motions included the disclosure that Holmes, a 24-year-old Californian who enrolled in a doctorate program at the University of Colorado, was seeing Dr. Lynne Fenton, a psychiatrist. Fenton is the medical director of student mental-health services at CU’s Anschutz Medical Campus.

Judge William Sylvester set a hearing Monday morning to consider the request

by Holmes’ attorneys that the notebook be turned over to them and prosecutors’ motion that it remain sealed.

In addition, The Denver Post and 19 other media organizations filed a motion Friday seeking to unseal the court file in the case, which Sylvester closed to the public Monday. Sylvester will TREATMENT » 2A

AJ Boik: 18-year-old’s “huge personality” is celebrated.»4A

Rebecca Wingo: Friends and family honor “Becky.” »5A

COMING SUNDAY

Special section. Stories of heroes emerge from tragedy.

NATION & WORLD

SYRIAN GUARDS KILL BOY FLEEING WITH HIS FAMILY The 6-year-old, killed Friday, was crossing into Jordan with his family to escape the continued violence in Syria. International concern is also mounting over the attacks on the city of Aleppo. »20A

Romney heading to Israel. After a gaffe in London that miffed some city officials, the Republican presidential hopeful aims to win over Israel. »19A

2A»

Midnight massacre saturday, july 28, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post

TREATMENT «FROM 1A

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consider that Monday as well.

Holmes was arrested outside the Century Aurora 16 early July 20, accused of slipping into an exit door during the premiere of the new Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises,” and unleashing an attack that left 12 dead and 58 injured.

The disclosure that Holmes was seeing Fenton raised serious questions in a possible death-penalty case, none of which the attorneys or university and law enforcement officials would discuss, citing a gag order.

Did Holmes reveal his plans to Fenton?

Did Fenton tell the police? Will it become the basis of an insanity defense?

Therapists are reFenton quired by law to investigate any threat of violence. They are supposed to determine the likelihood that the threats are real. If therapists believe a threat is real, they have a legal obligation to protect the intended victim or victims — notifying the police or taking whatever step necessary.

It appears that Fenton never opened Holmes’ notebook, which was seized at CU’s Anschutz campus by Aurora police after they obtained a search warrant.

Fenton could not be reached for comment Friday.

After reports about the notebook’s contents spread, Sylvester ordered Chambers to serve every law enforcement agency working on the case with his original gag order.

Meanwhile, defense attorneys filed a motion seeking access to the contents of the package that Holmes apparently mailed to Fenton and identification of who had access to it in what appears to be an effort to figure out the source of the leak.

Chambers responded by saying that the information in reports by Fox News and NBC were inaccurate, casting doubt on whether the person who leaked the story to the network was a law enforcement agent with access to the correct information.

“For instance, the Fox News story stated that the FBI took possession of the package — this is incorrect, as it was the Aurora Police Department,” Chambers wrote in the motion filed Friday.

Police are not examining the contents of the package, Chambers said.

“The contents were secured and not examined and held for potential in camera review,” she wrote, referring to the process where a judge privately reviews information to decide whether the defense and prosecution may have access to it.

BBB

Corrections The Denver Post will correct all errors occurring in its news columns. If you find a problem with a story — an error of fact or a point requiring clarification — please call the city desk at 303-954-1201.

T

raci Gillespie, left, is comforted by her daughter Avery, 7, at the flower-covered memorial for the Century Aurora 16 shooting victims in Aurora on Friday. The memorial has grown steadily since its creation Sunday, when Greg Zanis traveled to the site from Aurora, Ill., to install his homemade crosses. Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post Chambers also said media outlets may have made up sources and information.

“To put it bluntly, the People are extremely dubious of the media assertions that ‘law enforcement sources’ exist,” she wrote. The media, she said, are getting information from “hoaxers, fraudsters or maybe from nobody at all.”

Dan Recht, a Denver defense attorney, said it will be hard for the prosecution to use communications between Holmes and his psychiatrist against him at a criminal trial. However, he said, if Holmes’ defense is based on an insanity plea, it changes things.

“Once the defense uses information from the psychiatrist, they’ve opened the door and the prosecution does have a right to use it as well,” he said.

It was not clear Friday why Holmes was seeing Fenton — or for how long.

Federal law requires a psychiatrist to disclose any perceived threat issued by a patient. This includes notifying the police.

The law stems from a 1976 California case involving a graduate student, who said during a session with a University of California psychologist that he wanted to kill another student.

The psychologist notified police that the student was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and should be detained and civilly committed as a dan-

gerous person. But authorities released the student, and the psychologist’s supervisor did not object. The student carried out his plan, stabbing and killing another student.

The California Supreme Court ruled that mental-health professionals have a duty to protect people threatened with bodily harm by their patients. This law has been adopted by almost every state in the country, including Colorado, which adopted the mandatory-reporting law in 1987.

Holmes was dropping out of the university’s graduate program in neuroscience and had turned in his student-access card around June 10.

It is unclear when or whether Holmes had stopped receiving healthcare services offered under the Student Health Insurance Plan.

Students who have withdrawn from school can pay to continue their student insurance or self-pay by getting a referral to a clinician they can see off campus, said Jacque Montgomery, CUDenver spokeswoman.

But his dropping out of such an esteemed program should have raised a flag with his psychiatrist, said Georgetown law professor John Banzhaff.

“We have someone who is being treated by a university psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia,” he said.

“The university has knowledge of this,

and they also know the days leading up to this, the person who is seeing someone for mental illness suffered at least three major stressors.”

He left the program; he is forgoing his only source of income, which he received from a federal grant; and he is likely to be evicted from his apartment, Banzhaff said.

“A psychiatrist does have some sort of duty to make sure that he gets some further treatment,” he said. “Did she say, ‘Here are three guys who can take your case?’ I don’t think you can drop him like a hot potato.”

Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies records show Fenton was reprimanded by the Colorado Board of Medical Examiners in 2005 for writing prescriptions for herself, an employee and her husband, Channels 4 and 7 reported.

Records indicate she prescribed the allergy drug Claritin for herself in 1997, took the anti-anxiety drug Xanax while her mother was sick with a terminal illness in 1998, provided four Xanax pills for an employee in 1999 and provided the sleep aid Ambien for her husband three times. As part of an agreement, she completed 50 hours of classes in pain management.

Staff writer Allison Sherry contributed to this report.

• Because of incorrect information provided to The Denver Post, the explanation of how Petra Anderson survived a bullet to the brain was incorrect in an article that appeared on The Denver Post’s website Tuesday. According to the surgeon at the Medical Center of Aurora, the path that the shotgun pellet took missed the brain’s many blood vessels and key sections controlling vital functions. Had the pellet wavered a millimeter in any direction, she would have likely either died or been severely injured, the surgeon said.

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THE DENVER POST Copyright 2012 / Vol. 119 / No. 342

Comedian apologizes for Aurora joke. Comedian Dane Cook issued

My heart goes out to all of the families & friends of the victims.”

an apology on his Twitter page for telling a joke at the L.A. Laugh Factory that was connected the the Aurora theater shootings. The joke was recorded by a member of the audience and posted online.

“I am devastated by the recent tragedy in Colorado & did not mean to make light of what happened,” Cook said. “ I made a bad judgment call with my material last night & regret making a joke at such a sensitive time.

Last

Flags back to full staff in Colorado on Sunday. A week after the Century Aurora 16 shooting, Gov. John Hickenlooper ordered that flags return to full staff on all Colorado public buildings beginning Sunday.

Hickenlooper initially ordered flags lowered to half-staff until further notice after the July 20 massacre that left 12 people dead and 58 injured. Sunday falls one day after the last scheduled

! e c n a Ch

ra, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, told the Istook Live show Friday that he believed that the country’s move away from its “Judeo-Christian beliefs” was responsible for God withdrawing his “protective hand” from the country.

Gohmert pointed to a study that he said indicated that the rate of suicide in the military was associated with atheism — drawing a connection that he said implied that a lack of faith was associated with mental health disorders. Post staff and wire reports

funeral this week for shooting victims.

Hickenlooper ordered flags be lowered to half-staff on Aug. 3 for Jon Blunk’s funeral in Nevada. A full military funeral and burial will be held then at the Mountain View Mortuary in Reno. Flags are to be lowered for the youngest victim, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, when her funeral is later scheduled.

Texas lawmaker fears God withdrawing his protection. In response to the mass shooting in Auro-

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Training camp. The latest news on the Broncos’ preparation for the 2012 season. »denverpost.com/broncos MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

SOLEMN GROUND London 2012

The Aurora memorial is the latest example of people’s grassroots way of expressing sorrow.

4x100 freestyle relay

Dream come true 17-year-old Missy Franklin wins bronze in first Olympic event

By Electa Draper The Denver Post

Across the street from the Aurora movie theater where 12 people lost their lives to a gunman July 20, hundreds of people each day make a pilgrimage to what had been a big dusty lot with only prairie dogs and a sign reading: “Retail Coming.”

A grassroots memorial has overtaken this vacant property near South Sable Boulevard and East Centrepoint Drive. New signs — “Rest in Peace” and “Gone But Not Forgotten” — have claimed this territory for the dead.

Greg Zanis last week drove 16 hours from Illinois to erect 12 white crosses, much like the ones he put up for Columbine shooting victims in 1999.

Each 3-foot cross bears a name and a growing heap of flowers — single roses and big bouquets, some artificial and some withering in the heat and dust. Helium-filled balloons bob on short tethers.

Spilling over the newly hallowed ground are piles of stuffed animals (most pre-loved and worn), hundreds of candles, photographs, countless hand-lettered notes and posters, storebought placards inscribed with counsel, inexpensive jewelry, toys, hats, flags, Bibles, rosaries, and images of Jesus and all the saints.

Behind the crosses, a line of 52 identical small teddy bears forms a protective border.

MEMORIAL » 14A

Heroes among us. The stories Missy Franklin, center, congratulates members of the gold-medal-winning Australian team Brittany Elmslie, in yellow cap, and Cate Campbell after the women’s 4x100 freestyle relay Saturday at the Olympic Aquatics Centre. John Leyba, The Denver Post

By John Henderson The Denver Post

T

he stands in the Olympic Aquatics Centre stretch seemingly to the heavens on both sides of the pool. D.A. and Dick Franklin, sitting eight rows from the top, certainly felt like they were in the vicinity of Cloud 9 on Saturday night. From up there, the Centennial couple looked down, down, down at their 17-yearold daughter, Missy, with a bronze medal around her neck.

Missy Franklin, a senior-to-be at Regis Jesuit High School, is an Olympic medalist.

“We could see her smile from the roof,” D.A. said.

The bubbly Franklin is getting an international rep for getting overly enthusiastic when street lights turn green. Well, Saturday she had a big reason to burst.

She won a bronze in the 4x100 freestyle relay in her first Olympic swim. The U.S. wasn’t favored in the event, so the Americanrecord time of 3 minutes, 34.24 seconds and a bronze medal felt FRANKLIN » 20A

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of the everyday people whose courage saved the lives of others during the shootings. »section B

14A»

Midnight massacre sunday, july 29, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post

6

6

the denver post B denverpost.com B

sunday, july 29, 2012

Midnight massacre «15A

Greg Zanis last week drove 16 hours from Illinois to erect 12 white crosses, much like the ones he put up for Columbine shooting victims in 1999. Each 3-foot cross bears a name — and a growin ng mound of flowers, toys, notes, posters, inexpensive jewelry, hats, flags, Bibles, rosaries, and images of Jesus and all the saints. Photos by Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

AURORA THEATER SHOOT TING VICTIMS MEMORIAL

“Something frrom my heart” «

FROM 1A

The impromptu memorial is the latest example of a relatively young phenomenon of memorializing rather than trying to forget.

Trivial items have been consecrated by their givers at this latest shrine to American mass-murder victims. These objects are the “standard vocabulary of grief” used by stricken communities, experts say. Most of the gifts come from strangers, not family and friends of the dead.

Cultural anthropologist Sylvia Grider has made a decade-long study of grassroots memorials, pioneering a trend since the late 1990s to preserve and archive these small gifts to the dead in tragedy’s aftermath.

“Children will often pick their own favorite toy to give,” Grider said. “The people who bring these artifacts genuinely care. And it gives them a sense of spiritual communion with those who have died.”

The trinkets are imbued with deep feeling, she said. In a word, these expressions of compassion are “profound.”

Yet the community of Aurora, Grider said, must soon sort through a host of difficult options regarding what happens to such sacred ground — or at least to the already-deteriorating artifacts strewn across someone’s private property — and whether there will be a permanent memorial, what it might look like and where it will go, and who pays for any of it.

Spontaneous memorials University of Colorado professor Ken Foote returned home from a trip a few days ago, and his first stop after the airport was Aurora’s growing memorial. He saw that a few commemorative items had been left at a couple of spots close to the theater where 12 were killed and 58 injured during a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie. But police soon made these areas out-of-bounds, and the nearby corner lot with the crosses became the dominant site.

“The place of death, though largely accidental, is becoming increasingly important to people as the last place the victims were alive. People want memorials as close to the site as possible,” said Foote, a geography professor and author of “Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy.”

Tyrone Rhodes, 22, was trying at midweek to wrap his mind around the fact that the movie theater he had happily frequented since he was 12 became a house of carnage.

“Something just really worked me up, and I came out here,” Rhodes said. “This is just something from my heart. I put my rosary on a teddy bear for the little girl.”

Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, was the youngest victim.

“I brought her a balloon, a silver star,” Rhodes said. “I have nieces and nephews her age. I wanted to add my blessings. I just hope we can overcome.”

Mass-murder sites — whether privately owned businesses or not — typically don’t remain intact, Foote said. It might take time for them to succumb, but the places where blood was shed often can’t withstand their association with the tragedy.

The memorials are a different story.

Foote was once interested only in historical and permanent monuments, but he has come to realize, he said, the early, intense expressions of grief at spontaneous memorials are perhaps the most profound.

“What’s going to be remembered gets worked out quite early in the process,” Foote said. “This is when people begin to establish the meaning of an event, although it won’t fully emerge for many years.”

The power of grassroots memorials is undeniable. “The Dark Knight Rises” star Christian Bale, who plays Batman, paid homage here Tuesday. Aurora police and other officials viewed the memorial and offered prayers Thursday evening.

Stacy Bender of Gresham, Ore., is visiting friends in Westminster, yet she drove across the metro area to this memorial with her camera.

“Sometimes we become desensitized in our society,” she said.

“This makes it real. These were real people. They had lives too. It’s important to have these feelings and to come and honor them. It could be any of us. No tragedy like this is local.”

Christy Cordray of Commerce City brought her 12-year-old nephew and 10-year-old daughter to the memorial. They released 12 balloons and placed flowers in front of Veronica’s cross.

“We didn’t know anyone, but it hit home for us,” Cordray said.

“The balloons are for each of their souls.”

Jordan Hill of Boulder County is a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech University. He is a scholar of history and religion who has studied 17 mass-murder events that took place over 112 years.

Hill’s interest in the subject began when his father, a member of a Boulder SWAT team, left his 19th-birthday celebration April 20, 1999, to join a mission at Columbine High School. Two heavily armed students killed 13, injured 24 and took their own lives in an agony-filled event now known simply as “Columbine.”

At Hill’s college, on April 16, 2007, a senior undergrad went on a shooting rampage that killed 32 and injured 23. He also killed himself.

Mass murders have been happening for centuries, but what is new, in just a generation, both Hill and Foote said, is the memorializing of the victims.

“It’s only been since 1989 that America has decided to ‘always remember, never forget,’ ” Hill said.

That was three years after the Edmond Post Office Massacre on Aug. 20, 1986. The people of Oklahoma made a permanent memori-

Estefania Echeverri, right, on Thursday lights a candle for Jesse Childress at the memorial honoring the 12 killed in the Aurora theate er massacre. The impromptu memorial, which includes 12 crosses, is the latest example of a relatively young phenomenon of memorializing rather than trying to forget. Heather Rousseau, The Denver Post al to what was, at the time, the nation’s third-largest and the state’s largest mass murder by a single individual (before the Oklahoma City bombing). A “disgruntled postal worker” killed 14 co-workers, wounded six and killed himself.

Before that, Foote said, there was a sense of societal shame, and the events and violence-tainted places were insults that communities largely wanted to forget.

People see it differently now. Immediate creation of grassroots memorials is the norm (especially since TV images of the people’s memorial for Princess Diana were in people’s homes for weeks), Hill said.

And communities are even memorializing retroactively.

Honoring lives lost Forty years after the Aug. 1, 1966, shooting rampage by ex-Marine Charles Joseph Whitman, the tower sniper, at the University of Texas at Austin, officials dedicated a Memorial Garden to his victims, of whom 14 were killed and 32 wounded, Foote said.

A small memorial was recently made for a principal and a janitor who died while saving children at Cleveland Elementary in San Diego on Jan. 29, 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer started

shooting at the school across the street from her home with a rifle she got for Christmas. She wounded nine.

“No matter how memorializing is done,” Foote said, “there is always a tension between honoring the victims and drawing attention to the killer.”

Despite this, the record shows Americans have reached a cultural consensus to honor the innocent lives lost.

Hill said there is more than one reason for the change. Among them: Intense media coverage of mass murders has focused more attention on individual victims. And the increasing frequency of murderous rampages has heightened the feeling that it could happen to any one of us, anywhere, anytime.

A developing trend, Hill said, is the archiving of artifacts left at spontaneous memorials. At Virginia Tech, the school created the 4/16 Archives to preserve the early materials that mourners left on campus. There is also a Columbine archive.

Grider warns that archives of spontaneous memorials are costly to create and maintain, and that financial support for them is harder to come by as the years go on. After the fatal accidental collapse of Texas A&M’s bonfire structure in 1999, her research emphasis shifted to the documentation and analysis of spontaneous shrines.

“ “It’s not that the materials aren’t worth saving,” Grider said, “but it iis very, very expensive. It is a tremendous long-term commitme ent.”

And A once the objects are removed from the site, she said, they are selldom displayed or viewed.

Hill H also has mixed feelings.

“Each community must make its own decision, but I’m not cer“ tain n preserving these things is always the right thing,” he said. “Perhap ps they’re meant to be emphemera, and that’s part of their power.””

His H ambivalence could have another source. “ “How long,” Hill said, “do we focus on memorials and look at the ese things as individual, unrelated events, instead of asking: ‘W What is our collective responsibility for these events and the violen nce in our society?’ ” Sta aff writer Sarah Simmons contributed to this report.

Eleecta Draper: 303-954-1276, edraper@denverpost.com or twiitter.com/electadraper

HONORING T HE VICT IM S

Aurora discussing how best to memorialize tragedy

By Carlos Illescas The Denver Post

Aurora has begun to discuss how to best memorialize the victims of the theater shooting and how to preserve related items for future generations to see.

“We are just in the beginning stages of how that will proceed,” city spokeswoman Julie Patterson said.

Patterson said officials will seek community input on what should be done for the 12 people who died and 58 others who were injured at the Century Aurora 16 theater in the early hours of July 20.

Jennifer Kuehner, executive director of the Aurora History Museum, also is gathering information on whether and how the museum should honor the victims.

Items that could find their way into a future display may include things left at two impromptu memorials, stories written about the

victims and the shooting, and letters the city has received from around the world, Kuehner said.

“What story do you preserve to tell how Aurora as a community was feeling?” she said. “There are 100 different ways of preserving the past.”

A decision is probably far off. It took years for a memorial to the victims of the Columbine High School massacre to be constructed.

“We’re still grieving and attending funerals,” Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said of the theater rampage.

For now, the two temporary memorial sites where people have been placing items in honor of the victims — one at the Aurora Municipal Center and the other across from the movie theater — will remain, Patterson said.

“We want to honor what’s happening at those sites,” she said.

HEROES AMONG US THEY PROTECTED THEIR LOVED ONES

THEY CARRIED STRANGERS TO SAFETY

THEY PROVIDED COMFORT AND CARE

By John Ingold; Photos by RJ Sangosti and Joe Amon, The Denver Post

What would I do?

When the lights go down in a movie theater, you are alone, even in the crowd.

Please be quiet. Silence your cellphone.

The room smells of popcorn butter, and your shoes stick to the floor. But the surroundings drift away as the images onscreen spool into your imagination and the sound effects vibrate into your rib cage. The accelerating story takes you along. That’s the point, isn’t it? To escape?

From practically the opening scene of “The Dark Knight Rises,” pretend guns fire and actors shriek, a classic slambang opener.

But then, during a quiet scene, the sound of gunshots — suddenly, confusingly — comes alive again in theater 9 at the Cen-

tury Aurora 16. Bullets rip into the air. Innocents scream. The gunman shouts. The wounded wail out. The bloodshed is real.

What would I do?

Inside the theater, some froze and many ran. They were human. There is no disgrace in that.

But sitting amid the crowd, Jon Blunk did not freeze, and he did not run. Instead, he quickly pushed his girlfriend to the ground — to safety — then shielded her from bullets that took his life but not hers. Across the theater, others — Matt McQuinn, John Larimer, Jesse Childress and more — were just as selfless.

Even as the gunman continued to shoot, even as fear was at its strongest, the theater was awash in courage.

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MATT Mc Q U I N N | A M I X O F H U M I L I T Y A N D C O U RAG E

“That’s just the type of person he was”

By Ray Mark Rinaldi The Denver Post

I

t’s impossible to say now why Matt McQuinn reacted the way he did when the shooting started that night at an Aurora movie theater. Instead of protecting himself, the Ohio native protected another, his girlfriend, Samantha Yowler.

He joined her brother, Nick, to form a human shield over her as a gunman took aim at the innocent.

Nick was uninjured. Samantha was shot in the leg. Matt took three bullets and died.

People who knew McQuinn, 27, say it was his natural way.

“That’s just the type of person he was,” said longtime family friend Micaella Clay.

“He was the first person I know who you would call if you needed something.”

One of the last times Clay saw McQuinn, he was headed out the door to rescue a friend with a flat tire.

It’s a long way, though, from doing favors to sacrificing a life, from being a nice guy to choosing the ultimate act of chivalry, and that is where those who knew about McQuinn will have to connect the dots.

And it’s not just friends and family, but everyone affected by the tragedy in any way, who find hope in the notion that it brought out the best in some.

By now, news accounts have detailed the key facts.

McQuinn went to high school in Vandalia, Ohio, a small, scattered Dayton suburb caught somewhere between our traditional and modern notions of middle America. It has its Walmart superstore but also the old doughnut shop, where people gather around a counter and go through five trays of blueberries a day.

As a young adult, he was well-known in nearby Springfield, where he was active in Maiden Lane Church of God. He and Samantha, also 27, worked at Target. Last November, the pair joined Nick Yowler in Colorado, transferring to a Target store not so far from the Century Aurora 16 movie theater.

The trail McQuinn left behind — through the testimony of acquaintances, social networks and stories — offers some clues about why he acted bravely when things turned dark at a screening of a Batman sequel July 20.

In some ways, it seems simple. “I’m not surprised at all about Matt,” said David Kasel, who went to school with McQuinn and knew him since they were kids. McQuinn wasn’t one to steal the spotlight then, he said. He was a sport, not a showoff.

“He was very loyal, a good friend,” Kasel said.

The type of guy, yes, who would take a bullet for you.

McQuinn’s own pages on Facebook and MySpace offer a more complex portrait.

They have all those things you would expect from a kid who grew up in a Midwest setting best described as usual. He had lots of friends, and they clearly had some good times; there is a lot of camaraderie and a little beer in the picture. He was close to his family, no doubt.

But he wasn’t all the quiet type, either.

Clicking through the photos, another trait — something akin to nerve, even daring —

HEROES «FROM 1B Young women and men such as Jarell Brooks stayed beside wounded friends or frightened strangers — vowing not to leave them — even though they themselves could flee.

“You actually have to take into consideration that helping this person might be the end,” Brooks would later say.

While people pushed out in a wave of panic, Chris Lakota ran into the theater, toward the danger. These words — “Unto the breach, dear friends” — popped into his head as he did.

In the parking lot outside, Stephanie Rodriguez took off her belt and fashioned a tourniquet on the leg of a man screaming in pain.

Todd Peckham stopped his own escape — shouting down any fear inside him — and helped victims to safety. He held one man’s head as the man gushed blood.

“I’m an able-bodied man,” Peckham says now.

“I was like, I gotta do this. I can’t not be a part of this.”

Would I do that?

It is, perhaps, obvious that you don’t know what you have inside of you until you are forced to look.

“Unless you’re in that situation,” says Medical

Matt McQuinn poses with his girlfriend, Samantha Yowler, whom he covered with his body to protect amid the horror at the Century Aurora 16. Yowler, also shielded by her brother, Nick, was wounded. McQuinn was shot three times and died. The Associated Press emerges. His bottom lip was pierced twice with metal posts. Facial hair comes and goes, and there is a colorful parade of sunglasses and ball caps. His musical favorites give a nod to Michael Jackson but center more on louder rock bands such as Avenged Sevenfold. Matt took lots of pictures with his hand held up, index finger and pinkie pointed out, heavy-metal style.

It’s nothing too outrageous; it looks like fun, actually.

But maybe it all adds up. There’s that bold McQuinn, the one who dressed like the Joker on Halloween, friended Playboy Playmate Kendra Wilkinson and tattoo TV star Kat

Center of Aurora Dr. Frank Lansville, “you have no idea how you’re going to react.”

But, though there is no formula for bravery, Cornell University psychology professor David Dunning says valor “is surprisingly a seed we all contain.”

And it is a seed that can be nurtured.

What it takes is the experience to help — medical training, crisis skills, even just a habit of doing kind acts for others — and an occasion to use it.

These things can be trained. They can be practiced.

The next open Mile High Red Cross class on first aid and CPR starts Friday in Broomfield.

The Tuesday class is already full.

Take a look at the people who performed acts of courage at the theater.

They are military veterans and people with medical skills. They are the children of parents who taught them to always help, no matter where, no matter what.

Sometimes it was a choice that night, and sometimes it was just a reflex. But every one of them was prepared for bravery.

Is it any wonder that Blunk told friends he expected to die valiantly?

“People would be surprised when an opportunity arises, how much they might rise to the occasion,” Dunning says. “People respond in helpful ways more than they might think.”

Courage is contagious. One person acting bravely causes another to do so. We gain

Von D, and liked motorcycles.

And there’s the quiet McQuinn, who was popular at church, whom Kasel describes as disinterested in the spotlight, a guy who liked to laugh at other people’s jokes.

A mix of humility and courage, of kindness and audacity, of tradition and rebellion. The type of guy, yes, who would take a bullet.

McQuinn’s friends are returning his loyalty in the days following his death. Clay has started a fund drive on the website giveforward.org, and more than $11,000 has poured in. They hope to raise more and spread the generosity to the families of the other shooting victims.

strength from one another. Even at the movies, you are not really alone.

Outside the theater, bystanders stopping to help inspired others to do the same. An Aurora police officer began loading the wounded into his cruiser to drive them to the hospital himself.

Another followed his lead. And another.

At the hospital, teams of doctors and nurses worked aggressively to fight back against death, the belief of one amid the chaos fortifying the belief of others. Of the 60 people — 60 people — taken to the hospital that night, doctors and nurses saved all but two.

“I don’t know what the ‘it’ was that night,” says Lansville, the Aurora doctor. “But ‘it’ worked.”

For most of its duration, “The Dark Knight Rises” is a story about a terrorist who thinks he has won.

It isn’t until the end — when citizens step forward to protect one another and police officers show the bravery behind the badge — that heroes emerge.

But the Aurora gunman didn’t need to wait until the end to learn that. He saw it play out in front of him in real life.

Heroes arose before his eyes.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold

Kasel, a graphic artist, has designed a Tshirt that turns the Batman logo into two “M’s,” a tribute to his old pal. McQuinn’s mother asked for 30 of the shirts for family and friends to wear as they grieve. He is giving them to her and will sell the rest to raise money for burial costs (purchase via the website signsteingraphics-com1.webs.com).

No one knows exactly why McQuinn rose to the moment. But it’s clear that friends and family want to rise up for him.

Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi

About the section Section editor: Lee Ann Colacioppo Design: Matt Swaney Photography editor: Ken Lyons Editing: Marcus Chamberland, John Ealy, Dale Ulland, Vinny Vella, Bob Willis Research: Vickie Makings Reporting: Karen Augé, Michael Booth, Jennifer Brown, Eric Gorski, Tegan Hanlan, John Ingold, Ray Mark Rinaldi, Erin Udell Photography: Joe Amon, Karl Gehring, Helen H. Richardson, RJ Sangosti

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MICHAEL W H IT E SR . | A FAT H E R P ROT E C T S H I S C H I LD REN

Michael White Sr. was able to shield his son’s girlfriend, Farrah Soudani, during the shooting. Both his son and Soudani were wounded in the rampage. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

“He’s going to shoot me, but he’s not going to get them”

By Karen Augé The Denver Post

M

ichael White Sr. lifted his head just enough to peek through the ribbon of space between two theater seats in front of him.

“I saw him climbing the stairs, coming toward us, shooting. I thought, ‘This guy’s gonna shoot me.’ ” The fire alarm was bleating by then, and White remembers thinking, “What’s taking the police so long?”

He kept peeking between the seats. The shooter kept coming.

“I thought about Farrah and my son. I thought, ‘He’s going to shoot me, but he’s not going to get them. He’s not going to get both of us.’ So I laid over Farrah to cover her, and I tried to keep her quiet.”

He lay there, his body shielding his son’s wounded girlfriend and listening to the poppop-pop of semi-automatic rounds spraying around the dark theater, where up on screen, “The Dark Knight Rises” was still playing.

“I was waiting for the bullet to come.”

White figures the killer was about two rows away, still firing, when the lights came on. “And he stopped shooting. He turned and started to head out.”

The father waited a few seconds to make sure he hadn’t just imagined the shooter leaving. “Then I told Farrah I was going to go get help.”

Midnight-movie premieres had become something of a White family tradition. For this particular Batman premiere, though, only two of White’s four children — his oldest son, Mike Jr. and his daughter, Paula Adams — could make it. Mike Sr.’s girlfriend, Michelle Baker, came, along with Mike Jr.’s girlfriend, Farrah Soudani, who mixed her boyfriend’s family with a group of her friends and co-workers from the nearby Red Robin restaurant. Between the Whites and the Red Robin employees, the group claimed pretty much the entire seventh row.

The previews were over, the opening credits had rolled, and Bruce Wayne was in the Batcave talking to Alfred when Michael White Jr. saw a canister fly through the air across the front of the theater.

“I chuckled because I thought, ‘Somebody lost their Batman prop.’ ” His dad saw the canister too.

Mike White Sr. also saw the exit door down at the front of the theater open. And when light from the movie playing on screen flickered just right, White saw the man dressed in black.

“I thought it was a Batman costume, something the theater was doing,” he said.

He still believed that when the man fired a shotgun.

Then, White watched as he switched from a shotgun to a semi-automatic rifle.

“That’s when I realized it was real.”

At that moment, it was as if a switch had been flipped. Everyone in the theater seemed to come to that realization at once.

People started screaming, and all over the theater, the Whites could see people hitting the floor — either because they were hiding or because they had been shot.

Michael White Jr. heard his father yell, “Get down!” but by then, the 33-year-old was already hit.

So was Soudani. “ ‘I’m hit!’ ” Mike Jr. heard her scream. “ ‘My guts are on the floor.’ ” He tried to crawl across the floor to his girlfriend, but he couldn’t move. “I remember seeing Farrah trying to work her way toward us. I remember watching bodies drop.”

At that point, the shooter’s gun jammed, although at the time, the elder White figured he must be reloading.

“I thought, ‘This is gonna take him a minute,’ ” so the elder White grabbed his daughter and his girlfriend by the hair, pulled them toward the back door and told them to run.

“I turned back to see about my son and Farrah. That’s when I realized Farrah was hurt.”

Mike Sr. took off his shirt and held it over a hole on Farrah’s side.

“I started talking to her. She was saying, ‘I’m scared. I don’t want to die,’ so I told her, ‘I’ve got you. I’m not going to leave you.’ I told her, ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ ” He didn’t believe that last sentence for a second.

It was about that time, White said, that he looked through the sliver of light between theater seats and saw the man in black gunning for them a second time.

At that moment, White stopped comforting Farrah and set about saving her life.

When the shooting stopped and White finally left the theater to get help, police were in the lobby. They ordered him to get down, to crawl out the door, and he did.

A police officer took Mike White Jr. to the hospital in his patrol car, and that same officer — the Whites think his name was Mike Hawkins, and they would like to thank him — came back to the scene and found Mike Sr. a shirt to put on.

In the days since, as the critically wounded Soudani has been recovering at University of Colorado Hospital, White said he has asked himself why he risked his life to save that of a woman he’d met only once before.

He spent 20 years in the Air Force, but it wasn’t his military experience kicking in. He never saw combat or got shot at in two decades of service that took him to Japan and England and all over the U.S. It wasn’t instinct, either, or some innate tendency to heroics. Asked if he had ever saved anyone’s life before, White joked that he had maybe saved a teddy bear from drowning as a kid, but that was the closest he had come.

It’s definitely not that he was ready to die

that night.

The best answer he has come up with might make sense only to another parent.

“I was thinking of my son, and of how much they are in love. I didn’t want that to end.” His son loved her, White said. “I couldn’t let her get away.”

Mike Jr. spent four days at University. He was shot in the arm, but the bullet grazed a lung and broke a rib before exiting his back.

Six days after the shooting, White took his son to the dusty corner across the street from the Aurora theater that had been filled with flowers, candles and good wishes. His right arm was still in a sling, and he moved a little slowly in the blistering heat, but he stopped in front of each victim’s name. He was surprised, he said as the two men walked away, at how much the pile of teddy bears and the kind words people had written moved him.

Then someone asked him what he thought of his dad, and Mike White Jr. broke into a grin.

“He’s pretty great. But I always knew that.”

Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or twitter.com/karenauge

A N G G I AT M O R A | H E L P I NG H IS FA M I LY

“I’m going to carry you”

By Michael Booth The Denver Post

The killer had walked on to shoot others. Anggiat Mora had to shoulder his wounded family.

Mora felt he had already escaped disaster once, in what suddenly seemed like a different life, and maybe he didn’t deserve that reprieve.

So there was no getting away from this one. Not with his wife crying on the movie theater floor, shot in three places.

“Leave me here,” Rita sobbed.

“No, I’m going to carry you,” shouted Mora.

“We go together.”

And the small man, whose plane had taken off from a Japanese airport just as last year’s tsunami hit, hoisted Rita on his back and staggered 30 feet.

He didn’t stop until he saw the warm welcome of flashing red-and-blue police lights.

Mora had an eye out for his son, Patria, amid the heavy noxious gas and the flashes of light. Patria, 14, had moved a few feet away as they fled the terror of even more gunshots. But then Mora saw him again, as a young woman called for help with a man shot in his leg.

“He could have left, but he stopped to help,” Mora said of his son. They carried their wounded — mom and a complete stranger — until Mora was out of breath, and his son needed to show him something.

Patria lifted up his shirt and showed his father another gunshot wound.

Asked whether carrying Rita was unusual somehow, Mora says: “No, no, no, no. I was not a hero to help my family. I needed to help my family.”

Shooting victim Rita Mora was carried from the theater by her husband, Anggiat Mora. Rita was shot three times during the attack, which left 12 dead. Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

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JO N B LU N K | FAT H E R O F T WO D I E D P ROT E C T I N G H IS G I RLF RI EN D

“The situations in my life made me the man I am”

By Karen Augé The Denver Post

J

on Blunk knew instantly that it was real.

Blunk wasn’t fooled.

His girlfriend, Jansen Young, has said that when “a bomb or something flew up behind us,” Blunk reacted immediately.

She hadn’t yet processed what she’d heard and seen, so when he pushed her to the floor she asked, “Why, what’s going on?”

Out in the parking lot, a handgun, part of Blunk’s firearms collection, lay in his car.

In some ways, a good portion of Blunk’s 26 years were preparation for the moment when a gunman marched up and down the dark aisles of the Century Aurora 16 theater.

When he was a toddler, his mother took off, leaving Blunk’s dad to raise him alone, said his friend Kyle Dawson. Growing up in Englewood, Blunk believed his mother was dead, Dawson said.

He was a teenager, living in Reno, Nev., before he learned she was alive and that he had halfbrothers and a half-sister.

Dawson heard bits and pieces of Blunk’s early life on long shifts together when the two were deployed on the nuclear super carrier USS Nimitz.

What Dawson never heard, he said, was a complaint about it out of his friend.

“He just said, ‘The situations in my life made me the man I am,’ ” Dawson said.

Just out of high school, Blunk joined the Navy.

By 20, he was married to his high school sweetheart, Chantel; at 21, he was a father.

“I’d never seen happiness in his face like when his first child came into the world,” said Dawson, who is godfather to Hailey, now 4. “By the time his daughter was 6 months old, he was, like, ‘I want a son.’ ” Blunk picked out a name for his boy.

“Before long, he had a tattoo on his back that was his son’s initials,” Dawson said.

Sure enough, a year so later, Chantel gave birth, and the baby boy was christened with Blunk’s chosen name: Maximus.

Blunk warned Chantel early on that he wouldn’t be a 9-to-5, home-every-night kind of husband and father, Dawson said. Even the job the Navy gave him, working on the Nimitz’s power plant, didn’t satisfy his appetite for a life outside everyone else’s comfort zone.

What he really wanted was to be a Navy SEAL, Dawson said. But he was afraid if he applied and didn’t get accepted for SEAL training, he could wind up back on a power-plant crew for four years.

So in 2009, he left the Navy and set his sights on becoming a police officer — not to be a guy writing traffic tickets, as Dawson put it. “He wanted to be on a SWAT team,” he said.

He brought his wife and kids to Colorado, the home state he’d missed since he left as a kid. But this time, things didn’t go as Blunk planned. A couple of teenage screw-ups stood in the way of his plans to become a police officer, so he redirected his energy toward getting back into the Navy and into SEAL training.

His relationship with Chantel frayed, and eventually she took the kids and went back to Reno, where she planned to stay until he got his act together, Dawson said.

The man she struggled with and the man she married was never a guy who picked a fight, but neither was he a guy to back off from one.

Once, in a Navy-base weight room, a man Dawson said was at least 300 pounds with arms “like two anacondas” was firing off critiques, and not in a helpful way, of other guys’ lifting technique and skill.

Everybody in the place was intimidated, except Blunk. Jon got in his face and told him to be quiet, Dawson said — and got those arms around his neck for his trouble.

“You wouldn’t think anybody in his right mind would bite off a piece of that,” Dawson said.

Maybe, Dawson said, a kid whose mom leaves him has nothing left to fear. In any case, “there wasn’t much in any situation that could scare him.”

If he was scared in the theater in the early morning of July 20, he gave no sign of it.

A lot of people have asked Dawson if he’s surprised by what Blunk did in that theater. Nothing could be further from reality.

As the shooter walked up the aisle, firing at people who were screaming and running away, Jansen Young has said, Blunk “pushed me farther under the seats,” still protecting her, telling her to be quiet and stay down.

He kept pushing, Young told NBC. And then, she didn’t feel him pushing anymore.

Dawson and Blunk had talked about how they would react if, say, they were in a bank when a robber came in waving a gun.

“We talked about how he would love to be the person in that situation … who would step up,” Dawson said.

Whether he ever considered that his bravery might leave his kids, whom he planned to see the weekend after he died, without their dad, he never talked about that, Dawson said.

“He said, ‘Everybody’s going to die. I’d be more than happy to die doing something or protecting somebody other than myself.’ ”

Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or twitter.com/karenauge

Jon Blunk, pictured with his children Maximus and Hailey, wanted to be a Navy SEAL. His girlfriend said he showed no sign of fear during the theater shooting. Reuters

Online.

View slide shows and watch a video interview with some of those profiled in this section. »denverpost.com/ heroes

Read previous coverage of the Aurora theater shootings. »denverpost.com/ theatershooting

Jansen Young survived the Aurora shooting rampage when her boyfriend, Jon Blunk, sacrificed his own life by shielding her from the bullets and shrapnel flying around the movie theater.

Photo courtesy of the Young family

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TODD PE C K HA M A N D JU ST I N BA KE R | FRI E N D S H ELP STRA NG ERS

“Do you need help?

Are you OK?”

Justin Baker, left, and Todd Peckham, who had been watching a movie in another theater, guided victims toward safety and treatment. Photos by RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

By Ray Mark Rinaldi The Denver Post

T

odd Peckham and Justin Baker may have surprised themselves when they dived into the chaos unfolding at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater.

But they didn’t surprise each other.

The two have been friends for four years.

They share a certain sort of common sense, an admiration for each other’s character, resourcefulness, honor. Each uses that to explain why it was natural for the other to enter the bloody fray, to walk toward the mess when someone yelled, “Shots fired!” rather than away from it.

“Todd is amazing,” said Baker, simply.

“I’m so proud of Justin,” Peckham said.

Together, Peckham and Baker ushered victims to safety, helped the wounded into vehicles, held the heads and hands of people whose bodies had been ravaged in the shooting rampage. It was an experience that cost them — in the days since the event, and maybe in the days that are to follow — sleep, security, confidence, calm.

The two men share a kinship. Peckham is 41, Baker, 21. Peckham is a mentor, of sorts, for Baker. He helped him out through school, gave him a place to stay for a while.

If anyone wonders what kinds of adventures bond the two of them, it might be this: They were both up for the 10:20 p.m. showing of the Spider-Man sequel in the Century’s theater 15, a late screening of a blockbuster two weeks past its opening-weekend prime.

They got there five minutes late and saw the film through to the start of its closing credits when the fire sirens went off. No big deal, they thought, false alarm. They began to gather their popcorn and bottled water.

Then, a movie-theater employee entered

and told them to get out — now. “His eyes were big, scary, wet. That’s when I knew something was wrong,” Peckham said.

That something became clear as they exited the building through a hazy hallway, arrived outside and looked toward the theater showing “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“In a flash, there was just this mad rush and we saw hundreds of people pouring out of the north end,” Peckham said.

They spent the next 40 minutes in an adrenaline-fueled rush, guiding victims away from whatever was going on in the theater and toward a stand of trees on the edge of the parking lot. Peckham saw a group of people hovering around a man who had been shot in the leg and began shouting orders for them to bring him over.

“I can be bossy,” Peckham said.

They laid the man down near a curb.

“I held his head so it wouldn’t hang off or be on the cement,” Peckham said.

Baker jumped on his phone to call 911.

The man was screaming, “I have to call my wife. I have to call my wife.” He was asking frantically about his friend Pierce, left behind in the movie theater. All the while, another helper, Stephanie Rodriguez, steadfastly kept pressure on the man’s wound.

“What’s your name?” Peckham asked.

“Carey,” the man said.

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Jessica.”

Peckham calmed Carey Rottman by pledging to call his wife on the spot. He tapped her number into his cellphone as Rottman dictated. Just then, a police cruiser arrived, and Peckham helped lift Rottman into the back seat, holding a flashlight, pushing aside seat belts. The car rushed off.

Peckham went to dial his phone, but the number had vanished from his screen.

“I didn’t have a chance to save it, and it killed me because I had promised this guy,”

Peckham said.

The pair plunged back into the darkness of the parking lot. Victims were scattered about, on phones, in groups. Some were bleeding.

They saw two young women walking aside the theater. One of them collapsed.

They ran over. “I put her arm around my shoulder and my hand around her waist,” Peckham said, “and she screamed out, ‘My right side, don’t touch my right side!’ ” She had been shot.

He scooped up Allie Young and maneuvered her to a safe area while her friend, Stephanie Davis, put pressure on her wounds. They placed her on the ground next to another man who had been shot. Her head rested in Baker’s lap.

A police officer walked toward them. He was clutching a little girl to his chest. She was limp, like a rag doll. Quickly, they flagged an ambulance and returned to the crowd.

“We went through the parking lot and asked everyone that was there, ‘Do you need help? Are you OK?’ ” Peckham said.

By then, the area was filling with emergency crews, and “there was a sense of minimal safety,” as Baker puts it. It was time to get out of the way. They walked over to Peckham’s Nissan Z, drove though the police barricades that had been set up and went home.

There was little sleep that night and plenty of questions. The next day, they were hooked on news accounts of the shooting.

They grew more and more worried about the people they had seen.

Bit by bit, they pieced some of it together.

They saw a story about Rottman and learned he survived. They connected with Rodriguez and shared their experiences.

They heard a woman being interviewed on TV and recognized her voice. It was Young. She was safe too. Hospital visits followed.

Still, they wonder about the little girl. Was she the child shot and killed? Which of the other murky faces they encountered made it through, or didn’t?

The questions are not so easily put away.

Both men hold on to a sense of urgency.

They want people to understand all of what happened that night and for the story of braver acts to be heard. They want everyone to know about Rodriguez’s strength, Rottman’s concern for others when he was injured himself.

They want people to know that a veteran hairstylist and a Starbucks barista did what they could, that “something like this is bigger than what one person created and the evil that he brought there,” said Peckham, who owns Fix salon in Cherry Creek North.

That “light always beats dark.”

There’s a burden in that, and it weighs heavily. Both have reached out for counseling. Baker went to a meeting that Starbucks quickly arranged for three employees who were at the scene. Managers and counselors offered to assist.

In a sense they are victims too, even if it was their decision to enter the fray.

Friends have tried to tell them that their reaction was natural, that they are the kind of guys who are always there for others, good people who had no choice but to do the right thing.

But that’s not entirely true. It was a choice.

They remember making it.

Peckham: “I took a moment and know in my head there’s a switch — on and off, on and off — that says, ‘What do you do, what do you do, what do you do, what do you do?’

What do you do?”

And they did what they did.

Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi

WE WILL REMEMBER JON BLUNK

AJ BOIK

Jon Blunk, 26, was a lot of things — among them a Navy veteran and the father of two young children.

But he may always be remembered as the man who lost his life saving someone else’s.

Blunk was attending the midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora with his girlfriend, Jansen Young, when a gunman opened fire in the theater. Blunk responded immediately, telling Young to get on the floor and pushing her under a seat.

According to Young, Blunk covered her body with his own as bullets flew around them.

“Jon took a bullet for me,” Young said.

His actions that night surprised no one.

“He always said if he was ever going to die, he wanted to die a hero,” Blunk’s estanged wife, Chantel, told KNRV-TV in her hometown, Reno, Nev. The couple was separated, but Chantel Blunk said Blunk was a devoted father who “wanted his kids to look up to him.”

Alexander Jonathan Boik — AJ to everyone who knew him — graduated from Gateway High School barely two months before he was killed in an Aurora movie theater.

The 18-year-old on the cusp of adulthood will be remembered by his family for his “warm and loving heart.”

At a candlelight vigil days after his death, friends and family — many dressed in purple, Boik’s favorite color — described a young man who was the life of the party. “AJ could put a smile on anybody’s face,” one friend said.

Boik loved pottery, played baseball in high school — he was buried with his catcher’s mitt — and planned to attend the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design this fall. His dream was to teach art and own a studio someday.

At AJ’s funeral, about 1,000 people heard his uncle John Hoover say Boik wasn’t the biggest guy but that he “had a huge personality.”

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HEROES AMONG US «7B

STE PHA N I E RO D R IG U E Z | A 1 7-Y E A R-O L D ’ S S E L FL ESS ACTIO NS

After fleeing the Aurora theater, 17-year-old Stephanie Rodriguez stopped to help a man who was shot in the leg. She used her belt as a tourniquet. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

“She had the strength of 10,000 men”

By Jennifer Brown The Denver Post

I

nstead of running for her life, Stephanie Rodriguez ran to him, the man who collapsed outside the theater and lay on the pavement, screaming.

“My leg! Help me!” he yelled, panicking.

The 17-year-old girl knelt beside him and pushed her hands on his thigh, trying to stop the rush of blood like she had seen doctors do on “Grey’s Anatomy.” She took off her belt, the one with the silver buckle she had picked out that night to go with her Hollister shirt, and tied it like a shoelace around his leg.

Then Stephanie lifted the man’s wounded leg, while her brother supported his other leg and two strangers cradled his torso.

They dragged him out of the parking lot and to a grassy spot where he wouldn’t get run over by one of the fleeing cars.

So many others had run right past the man before Stephanie came.

She would find out later his name is Carey Rottman.

Stephanie, a Gateway High School senior who thinks about becoming a police officer or a nurse, was calm — even as a stranger’s blood covered her hands and stained her jeans.

“She had the strength of 10,000 men, and she’s 17 and she’s little and she’s beautiful,” said Todd Peckham, who was also helping victims that night. He was inspired by the girl with long eyelashes and thick, dark hair, the girl who didn’t flinch when she put pressure on a gunshot wound with her bare hands.

“It was adrenaline,” Stephanie said. “I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I hadn’t processed it yet. My first reaction was to help him.”

Stephanie hadn’t really wanted to see the new Batman movie. Her older brother talked her into going with him and two of his friends.

Like the others, she saw a figure enter through the emergency exit door beside the screen. She saw the man in the seat in front of her throw up his hands, batting at the gas canister flying through the darkness. It landed in the row in front of her, about halfway up the theater on the left side.

And she saw the flash of white light streak out of the gun each time the gunman fired.

Stephanie’s 20-year-old brother, Chris Ramos, grabbed her arm and pulled her to the floor. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he kept saying. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

The shooting stopped, and Stephanie and Chris tried to escape. But the terror began again within a couple of seconds. Stephanie hit the floor and crawled back into her row.

She prayed: “Dear God, please help us. Let all of us get out.”

She remembers a man standing up and staring at the shooter, frozen with fear. She heard a girl screaming, “Dad! Dad!” but no one answered.

She hoped someone would stop the gunman before he got anyone else.

When the shooting stopped again, briefly, Stephanie stood and joined the rush of people clambering down the stairs toward the exit. She lost her brother and hoped he was

somewhere in the sea of people pushing down the stairs.

She won’t forget the woman she couldn’t help.

The woman’s legs were inside a row of seats, her upper body in the aisle, face up, eyes closed.

Stephanie’s instinct told her to stop, to try to pick her up, but people were pushing from behind. In the panic, amid the screams and people shouting, “Go! Go! Get out!” the crowd stepped on the woman in the aisle.

Outside in the parking lot, Stephanie and her brother stayed with Rottman, 27, until police set him in a squad car and drove him to the Medical Center of Aurora.

“He stayed on my mind all night,” Stephanie said.

The next day, she decided to find him. She commented on an online 9News story that mentioned Rottman, introducing herself and asking if he was doing OK. Then they connected through Facebook.

When she walked into Rottman’s hospital room, his father grabbed her and squeezed.

His mother asked Stephanie how old she was.

“I told his mom I just turned 17, and she just burst into tears,” she said.

Stephanie, who wears hot-pink flip-flops and blue glittery nail polish, said her mom has always taught her to help other people, whether they need money or kindness. Her mother, Violet Duran, said Stephanie’s character was tested that night, and her actions were selfless.

“I don’t feel any different,” Stephanie said.

“In my heart, I feel really proud of myself. I see myself as human.”

One of the friends who had gone to the movies with Stephanie and Chris called their mother minutes after the shooting, telling her they had been separated and didn’t know where they were.

Duran was eating with her boyfriend. She stood up from the table, and her body began to shake.

Her boyfriend drove her as close to the theater as they could get. She jumped out of the car and ran six blocks, as fast as she could. She didn’t stop shaking until she found her children in the crowd.

Since that night, Stephanie’s brother keeps apologizing for taking her to the movie. He went to see it again at another theater and started to cry 20 minutes in, after seeing the scene now forever linked with the most terrifying day of his life.

He woke up in a panic a few nights ago, the theater in his nightmares.

Stephanie thought she was handling it fine until a loud pop outside her house made her crouch down and put her arm over her head.

She burst into tears.

And the morning after the shootings, Stephanie woke up in a fog at about 5 a.m., her cellphone in her hand. On the screen, it was ticking off the minutes since she had placed her last call, still on the line.

She had called 911 in her sleep.

Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jenbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost

WE WILL REMEMBER STAFF SGT. JESSE CHILDRESS

GORDON COWDEN

Staff Sgt. Jesse Childress — who served his country in the military and loved sports and superheroes — died trying to save a friend.

Childress, 29, whom a friend lovingly called a “big nerd,” was fatally wounded when he dived in front of a female Air Force member stationed with him at Buckley Air Force Base.

Childress, of Thornton, worked as a cybersystems operator and was on active-duty orders in the 310th Force Support Squadron, according to the Air Force Reserve Command. His friends said Childress worked with the base’s computer systems.

He played sports with friends nearly every day of the week — softball, bowling, flag football. He trained for a Tough Mudder race, which he completed last month with colleagues from Buckley.

“He was a huge part of our unit, and this is a terrible loss,” said an Air Force sergeant who stopped by the memorial site near the theater.

“The person that did this was an incredible coward.”

Gordon Cowden, 51, was the oldest of the victims. He was a smallbusiness owner raising four kids who lived with him part time: Kristian, 21, a student at Colorado State University; Weston, 20, attending the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy; Brooke, 17; and Cierra, 16. Two of his girls were in the theater with him that night. Cowden’s family described him as a loving father, a “quick-witted world traveler with a keen sense of humor,” an outdoorsman and “a true Texas gentleman that loved life and his family.”

“He will be remembered for his devotion to his children and for always trying his best to do the right thing, no matter the obstacle,” they said.

Cowden was laid to rest Friday in his native Texas, two days after a memorial service in downtown Denver. Cowden owned a real-estateappraisal business and loved to hunt, ski and tell funny stories, according to his obituary in the Austin American-Statesman. “Above all, he loved spending time with his four children,” it said.

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EMMA G O O S | COM FORT FOR A STRANG ER

“I was terrified this would steal my faith in humanity” O

By Eric Gorski The Denver Post

utside the theater, just as the first squad cars arrived, Emma Goos encountered the man who thought he had a hole in his head.

He stood alone, his right arm limp, begging for help.

He had short-cropped hair and a blue shirt. His face was so covered in blood, Emma couldn’t make out any distinguishable features.

“Is there a hole in my head?” he said.

She was no doctor. She was a college kid home for summer break, a girl with a nose ring and straight blond hair and a book of fairy tales in the bag she had left behind in the theater when she ran for her life.

Blood poured from the right side of the man’s head and down his arm.

He did not have a hole in his head.

As best as Emma could tell, he had been grazed by a bullet. She thought how she might help him.

“You’re OK,” the 19-year-old girl told the stranger.

The outing was to be the beginning of a weekend birthday celebration for a friend.

Six of them met for the premiere, Emma wearing a green striped sweater and purple hat, the color scheme of the Riddler.

There was a buzz in the theater, a sense of communal anticipation, of seeing something first, when the rest of the world is asleep.

Even after the shooting started, Goos thought it was a theater-sponsored stunt.

She expected a character dressed as Batman to come down the stairs at any moment and punch out the villain.

“Get down!” one of her friends yelled.

Goos’ entire row hit the floor.

When the gunman, several rows above them, paused, her group ran.

She slipped on a pool of popcorn butter, banged her face on a seat and fell to the carpet. One of her shoes came off.

Outside, the parking lot was chaos.

The man was to her right.

He was leaning against a patrol car that had just arrived.

The police officers rushed past him, guns drawn, in pursuit of the shooter.

“Help me,” the man said.

The people closest stood against the theater’s brick wall, dumbstruck.

“No one else had stopped to help him,” Goos said. “No one had even answered him or sort of acknowledged that he was covered in blood. If I was in his position, I would be terrified. I would have wanted someone to at least say, ‘Hi. You’re still alive. ... I’ll try to help you while I can.’ ” She took a closer look at his head wound.

She saw tissue and cringed.

“Is there a hole in my head?”

She stuttered and stumbled.

“You’re OK. I don’t think you’re going to die.”

She helped the man remove his shirt. He couldn’t raise his right arm, so Goos lifted it for him. She pressed the blue cotton T-shirt against where a knot on his head had swelled to the size of a goose egg.

“I had no idea what to do,” Goos said. “I had no idea whether telling him to put pressure on the wound was good. But I thought it was better than him standing there waiting for the paramedics alone.”

Later, Goos considered what had caused her to stop and help.

She thought about her mother, the woman who before Goos was born had been an emergency medical technician and a firefighter, someone who never seemed scared when her clumsy, reckless kid broke both arms falling off a scooter or busted her nose diving into a pool.

She thought about her own coming of age as a budding actor at Hinkley High School in Aurora, where playing the role of Anita in “West Side Story” gave her license to be

Emma Goos, 19, escaped injury in the Aurora theater shooting when the gunman passed her row. Goos later stopped to comfort a man who had a wound to his head. She was never able to find out his name. Joe Amon, The Denver Post strong and independent too.

She thought about her just-completed freshman year at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, of studying Greek philosophers and mathematicians, of Aristotle’s ideas about the virtuous man.

She carries a book with her everywhere, always. On the night of the shooting, it was a volume of fairy tales by Oscar Wilde. She read it while on break from her job at a momand-pop pizza joint before the movie.

“Is there a hole in my head?”

No matter how Goos tried to reassure the man, how she answered differently, he repeated it again and again, like a record skipping.

The shirt pressed to his head had become soaked with blood.

Goos calmed the man down, helped him elevate his arm and told him she was going to look for something to replace the shirt and be right back.

By the time she returned, paramedics were swarming around the man. She walked by and nodded, but he probably didn’t see her.

She never learned his name.

She never found out what happened to him.

Goos reached her mother on the phone and told her there had been a shooting, that she couldn’t find her friends.

Her mother and stepfather live just a few minutes away and arrived before the police blockades went up. She found her friends, all unhurt.

“That night, I was terrified this would steal my faith in humanity,” Goos said. “Everyone will live their life on a few basic principles of ‘I love my family, I love my neighbor.’ ... You will have a trust in other people.

We all have the human condition. We all have to establish some kind of common ground between us, and the violation of that

common ground is really hard to come back from for people who have lost loved ones, who have been injured, to those who got out all right and wonder why.”

A couple of days later, Goos went to the Aurora police station. She had been told to come there to look for what she had left behind.

Her bag with the Oscar Wilde book. Her lost shoe.

Someone brought out a box of shoes, so many tossed together, scuffed and covered with dirt or worse. It reminded Goos of the piles of shoes belonging to victims of the Nazi concentration camps.

“Symbols of anonymous suffering,” she called them.

She found her lost shoe and went home.

Eric Gorski: 303-954-1971, egorski@denverpost.com or twitter.com/egorski

L AW E N F O RC E M E N T | AC T IO NS SP EA K LO U D LY

“We’re loading patients into back of PD cars”

By Eric Gorski The Denver Post

“Do I have permission to take some of these victims via car?

I have a whole bunch of people shot out here and no rescue.”

— an unidentified Aurora police officer At the scene of the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, police assumed roles both familiar and not: running toward danger to find the shooter, figuring out whether he acted alone, answering questions from the panicked and injured, using their squad cars as ambulances.

Aurora officers arrived within 90 seconds of the dispatch center getting deluged with the first calls at 12:39 a.m., authorities have said.

Because of a judge’s gag order preventing authorities from discussing the case, Aurora police declined requests to interview officers who helped the injured at the Century 16 theaters.

Bits and pieces of their stories reside in the memories of victims and hospital staff and on the terrifying dispatch tapes from that night.

“I have a party shot here. I need rescue hot.”

“I’m taking one male to the hospital in my car.”

“Let Aurora South know cruiser 6 is in route. One critical, one semi-critical.”

“FYI, right now we’re loading patients into back of PD cars to get them transported.”

Outside the theater, Aurora police Officer Nigel Labarrie was among a group of strangers who comforted and held the hand of 18-year-old Bonnie Kate Pourciau, who had been shot in the leg. Labarrie helped carry her to a waiting patrol car, and another Aurora police officer rushed her and a family to University of Colorado Hospital.

“He didn’t care if I would sue him,” Pourciau said from her hospital bed last week, a yellow daisy tucked in her reddishbrown hair. “He just did the right thing. He did it, man. He got me there.”

Labarrie, an 18-year veteran of the department, visited her in the hospital several times before Pourciau boarded a medical flight back to her home in Louisiana on Thursday night.

One witness to the massacre, Jacob King, described someone carrying out a motionless little girl, covered in blood. A police officer took the girl, set her in his squad car and sped away, he said.

Dr. Frank Lansville, medical director of emergency services at Medical Center of Aurora, said an Aurora policeman with emergency medical training apparently took over some of the earliest triage on the scene, helping sort out the injured amid crowds of moviegoers coming out and crowds of police moving in.

“That’s a very courageous thing,” Lansville said.

WE WILL REMEMBER JESSICA GHAWI

JOHN LARIMER

Jessica Ghawi grew up a hockey fan in football-crazed Texas.

The 24-year-old wanted to be a sports journalist and came to Colorado to pursue that goal. She worked here for 104.3 The Fan, where she impressed people with her liveliness and hard work.

When fire destroyed many homes in Colorado last month, Ghawi decided to start collecting donated hockey equipment for kids who had lost theirs.

“She wanted to help. That’s the type of heart she had,” her brother Jordan Ghawi told 9News.

In June, Ghawi was in Toronto, where she walked out of a shoppingmall food court moments before a gunman shot seven people there.

Writing as Jessica Redfield in a June 5 blog entry, she described how that reminded her “how blessed I am for each second I am given.

“Every second of every day is a gift,” she wrote.

John Thomas Larimer stood ready to be deployed to dangerous corners of the world for two simple reasons, his girlfriend recalled: to protect his country and to save others from harm.

The 27-year-old Navy sailor died shielding his girlfriend, Kelley Vojtsek, from a barrage of bullets in a place that is supposed to be safe.

Larimer will be remembered for his kindness and position as an “outstanding shipmate,” friends said. “A valued member of our Navy team, he will be missed by all who knew him,” said his commanding officer.

Larimer joined the Navy in June 2011 and was a cryptologic technician 3rd class. For the past year, he had been stationed at the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command station at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora.

The youngest of five children, Larimer was from Crystal Lake, Ill., a suburb of Chicago.

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HEROES AMONG US «9B

JAR E L L B RO O KS | H E K N E W H E H A D TO H E L P

Jarell Brooks helped a mother and her two children escape. The 18-year-old was shot in the leg as he put himself between the gunman and the family. Joe Amon, The Denver Post

“You never know what you’re going to do in a situation”

By Eric Gorski The Denver Post

J

arell Brooks was raised to fear God, respect women and make good decisions.

Confident and calm, the son of a pastor, he punctuates answers with “Yes, sir,” and won’t let girls pick up the check, ever.

He rapped about sandboxes and swings when he was in fourth grade and wrote love songs when he was in middle school.

On the night of July 19, meeting a friend at the Century Aurora 16 theater, Jarell was standing on the cusp of manhood — 18 years old and 6 feet, 4 inches tall, about to start college and a new chapter.

He noticed a young family coming up the aisle, a man and woman in their mid-20s, the woman holding the hand of a little girl in a Spider-Man cap, the man cradling an infant.

All wore Batman shirts.

Jarell did not question — as others have — why parents would bring such small children to a violent midnight movie.

He thought it was nice to see a family doing something together.

Around him, moviegoers played cards to pass the time.

Jarell played a game of hangman on his Android phone.

The next time he saw the young mother, the room was filled with smoke, people were screaming, and hard decisions were being made.

Their seats were near the rear of the theater, about six rows down from the projection room. When the shooting started, Jarell ducked behind the seat in front of him and made sure his friend was safe.

As he started to crawl toward the exit, he bumped into the young mother. She was clutching her children, too scared to move.

“It’s just me and my two kids,” she said.

Up until that moment, Jarell said, he was of singular focus, thinking only of getting himself out. Seeing the young family, it was as if he was jarred into remembering who he was raised to be.

“You never know what you’re going to do in a situation,” he said. “For someone to say anything about it, … unless you are in that moment, in that crunch time, you never know what you are going to do.

“When someone is shooting, you get out,” he continued. “But when I saw her, I kind of had to take a 180. You have to help this woman. You can’t live with yourself knowing a family was hurt or killed.”

Jarell crawled alongside the woman and children, shielding them from the gunman firing into the crowd from the other side of

the theater. He began to guide them out, crawling little by little.

When the woman began to stand, so did Jarell. There was another flash. Almost immediately, he felt a sharp pain in his left leg.

He tried to steady himself and fell. He saw blood and a hole in his leg.

The bullet had entered his thigh, turned and danced, and exited below his knee. The shrapnel struck the woman he was shielding, spraying her right leg from the ankle to the upper thigh.

He tried to stand up, move the woman and her children along, and keep a hand on his wound, all at the same time.

Then all were out, safe but separated, Jarell hopping on one foot and losing a lot of blood. Strangers helped him to a car, paramedics tended to his injuries, and he was taken to Denver Health.

The next day, as news reporters sought out survivors’ stories, Jarell learned the names of the young family he helped save: a 25-year-old schoolteacher named Patricia Legarreta; her 4-year-old daughter, Azariah; and 4-month-old Ethan. The children were unharmed.

In the terror of the theater, the three had become separated from Patricia’s fiancé and Ethan’s father, Jamie Rohrs, also 25.

In interviews, Rohrs has described hur-

dling over a row of seats and running for his life, disoriented and unable to find his family.

“I don’t blame him for that at all,” said Jarell, who graduated from Overland High School this year and will begin studies at Metropolitan State University in Denver this fall. “Someone is shooting in a closed space. His life is on the line. You’re in a panic situation.”

Jarell’s actions have inspired tributes on Facebook and a fundraising campaign to help cover his medical and school expenses.

The leg injury is keeping him from his catering job at Elitch Gardens.

On the Sunday after the shooting, the young family Jarell helped rescue attended services at New Life Worship Center in Commerce City, where Jarell’s father, Jeffrey, is the senior pastor.

During a prayer of thanksgiving, the family came forward. God had a plan in putting Jarell where he did, the pastor said.

Back at his family’s apartment in Aurora, Jarell Brooks rested and recovered, replaying in his mind the choices he made in theater 9.

Eric Gorski: 303-954-1971, egorski@denverpost.com or twitter.com/egorski

WE WILL REMEMBER MATT McQUINN

MICAYLA MEDEK

Matt McQuinn, who had moved to Colorado with his girlfriend just a few months ago, died shielding her from gunfire.

When the shooting started, McQuinn, 27, protected Samantha Yowler. The two had worked together at a Target store in Ohio, then both transferred in November to work for a Target in Aurora.

Yowler’s brother, Nick, also helped form a shield to protect her. He was uninjured, while Samantha was shot in the leg.

McQuinn was shot three times.

“I’m not surprised at all about Matt,” said David Kasel, who went to school with McQuinn. “He was very loyal , a good friend.”

McQuinn graduated from Vandalia-Butler High School, in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, in 2004.

He met Yowler while the two were working at a Target in Springfield, Ohio. McQuinn was active in the Maiden Lane Church of God in Springfield.

People knew her as “Cayla.” A 23-year-old who described herself as simple and independent, Micayla Medek was “just trying to get her life together while still having fun.” A joyful spirit, Medek had a love for hot pink, “Hello Kitty” and the magic of fairies.

She spent every Thursday night eating dinner with her dad.

Medek, a graduate of William C. Hinkley High School in Aurora, worked as a Subway “sandwich artist.” She took classes at the Community College of Aurora through last fall.

Those who knew Medek loved her tolerant philosophy of life, which was captured in a quote from her printed in the program at her memorial: “We’re all a little weird. And life’s a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up in mutual weirdness and call it love.”

Medek, the youngest of three children, was known for her radiant spirit, infectious laughter and willingness to help others, family and friends said.

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ME DI CA L P E R SO N N EL | T H E L O N G E ST N I G H T

Angel Chavez, a nurse at Denver Health

Dr. Comilla Sasson, University of Colorado Hospital

Dr. Gilbert Pineda, Medical Center of Aurora

Dr. Tien Vu, Children’s Hospital Colorado

Cheryl Stiles, a nurse at Children’s Hospital Colorado

“You’re running on adrenaline, instinct. And flat-out guts.”

By Michael Booth The Denver Post

By Michael Booth The Denver Post

By Jennifer Brown The Denver Post

By Karen Augé The Denver Post

A

ed and blue police lights bouncing off the windows of the emergency bay, Dr. Comilla Sasson reached for gloves.

She didn’t usually carry extras. But suddenly a cop cruiser was backing into University of Colorado Hospital, full of bodies gushing blood.

And then another cruiser.

And then another. Sasson stuffed 50 pairs of gloves into pockets of her scrubs. This was not going to end anytime soon.

“At some point, it was the longest night of my life. And at some point, it was ‘How did that five hours go by?’ ” she said.

Sasson and her shift partner that Friday morning, Dr. Barbara Blok, spent the next hours triaging 23 victims from Aurora’s movie-theater shooting. Surrounded by trauma surgeons, charge nurses, orthopedic specialists, radiology techs and cleanup crews, they pointed fingers, steered gurneys and tried to bolster the spirits of first-year residents three weeks out of medical school.

And peeled glove after glove after soiled glove.

It’s the quantity of blood that sticks in Sasson’s mind. Blood from head wounds. From shattered limbs. From chest cavities opened to stem internal bleeding.

Underneath all that blood was more to worry about. A bullet powers in and bounces, doing more damage on the way out. Or worse, stays inside and threatens veins and tissue.

Sasson describes her triage duty as a constant circling. A patient with a pulse, talking, will suddenly crash from unseen internal bleeding. The ER doctor must cycle around and around the arrayed beds, heading off that crash.

University’s ER was already full and on divert status, with 10 more in the waiting area, when the shooting started just after 12:30 a.m. With gunshot trauma, you make room. The first hour is the golden hour for those on the brink.

“The first nine to 10 patients were all in the resuscitation area,” she said.

“More than five could not tell us their names.”

Aurora police cars kept rolling in, Sasson remembers looking from indoors to outdoors. “These people are really sick,” she thought, “and I’ve got two minutes to figure it out before the next one comes in.”

Six hours after it began, at a 7 a.m. shift change, Sasson let out a deep breath and said to herself, “Wait — what did I just see?”

But inside that six hours?

“You’re running on adrenaline, instinct,” Sasson said. “And flat-out guts.”

R

D

he first inkling of what was in store came rolling up to the Children’s Hospital Colorado emergency room without warning — and without lights and sirens — a little before 1 a.m.

A car — not an ambulance or police car, just some ordinary car that not long ago had transported people to a movie theater — drove up. Inside was a passenger who had been shot.

“That’s when we were told — and it’s a little fuzzy now — but they said there’d been a shooting in a theater,” said Dr. Tien Vu. Soon, the victims came too fast for Vu to track.

Cheryl Stiles’ phone rang just after 1 a.m. A self-professed night owl, she had been asleep only an hour, and she had already put in a full shift the day before.

Stiles started her nursing career at Children’s 25 years ago — and 24½ of those have been in emergency medicine. Now that she is director of emergency services, those late-night calls are part of the job.

In Colorado’s hierarchy of trauma care, Children’s has the highest ranking.

For children, that usually means a car accident or a fall. To get multiple gunshot wounds within an hour probably had never happened, Vu said.

Stiles was in her car within minutes of getting the call. When she arrived at the hospital, Stiles said, the first thing she saw was a group of staffers standing just outside the emergency-room doors, in the ambulance bay. “The team was in a circle. Some were holding hands, some hugging,” Stiles said.

They had just needed a moment, she said.

Stiles joined them briefly, then they all walked together through the glass doors back to the emergency room.

Stiles remembers a nurse torn because a patient was afraid to have the lights turned off or be left alone. She held his hand while a colleague did whatever clinical things were required.

Twelve hours after it began, Vu’s shift was over; Stiles still had seven more hours — her scheduled shift — ahead.

Vu got into her car and headed north on Peoria Street. She had gone only a couple of blocks when she saw red lights clustered around a brick building.

“I went home and turned on the TV,” she said. “That’s when the enormity of what happened hit me.” It is also when she learned the red lights were gathered at the booby-trapped home of the man suspected of causing the carnage.

She turned off the TV, kissed her 2year-old daughter and, exhausted, went to bed, hoping finally to get some sleep.

She didn’t.

good portion of Angel Chavez’s job is to be calm when she realizes the patient coming out of the ambulance has three fingers blown off by a gun.

And to swallow shock when the captain’s chair of the next ambulance holds a girl sitting upright and bleeding, gunshot wound to the chest.

And not to let a burgeoning massacre 10 miles away distract her team from the usual patients facing death outside the spotlight.

Chavez was the night charge nurse in the Denver Health emergency room when the theater shootings began.

Alerted by dispatchers around 1 a.m., she checked which ER rooms could be safely cleared and how many hallway spaces were open for overflow victims.

“We could have taken 20 ourselves,” Chavez said, with potentially more in the children’s ER. All without forgetting the current traumas: A patient in deep septic shock who would later die. Head injuries to a helmetless motorcycle rider. Early on a Friday morning in summer, the Denver ER is often stuffed with the aftermath of bar fights, car wrecks and gang posturing.

One of the tricks is to not set everyone in motion immediately, no matter how strong the instinct, said Dr. Chris Colwell, Denver Health’s emergencymedicine chief. He was woken up by cellphone calls after midnight, but part of his job is to think three days down the road.

Colwell, who treated students on the ground at Columbine High School’s shootings in 1999, allowed himself one brief flash that Friday’s call was “eerily similar”: dozens of young people shot in a place that should have been safe.

In the next moment, Colwell felt lucky there was something he could do about it.

Just a few hours after 1 a.m., the ER bays were quiet again, and parents of the theater victims checked in the hospital lobby to meet social workers and doctors. Chavez looked forward to the Saturday yoga class she takes to slough off stress and thought of the girl missing her fingers.

Who was, surprisingly, cheerful.

“She was so happy it wasn’t worse,” Chavez said.

The trauma-response culture is all about “What did we learn?”

“It’s so positive, it makes you feel you could be positive as well, in something like this,” Chavez said.

r. Gilbert Pineda grabbed a full bottle of water and chugged all of it in a few gulps.

He shook his head a couple of times. “Focus. Focus. Focus,” he said, only to himself.

Pineda walked down the narrow, stark-white corridor of the emergency department and added up the scene. A man with a bloody bandage on his head.

One patient intubated, on life support.

Another man with “graphic” gunshot wounds to his arms and legs.

Patients lined up in the hallway, including a man with a belt wrapped around his thigh like a tourniquet. A man screaming: “I need pain medication!” More screams coming from one of the rooms.

Pineda told himself not to let the yelling distract him — just because patients are loud doesn’t mean they’re critical.

He saw a doctor in a white “moon suit” preparing to decontaminate people exposed to a noxious gas. Eighteen patients, 13 with gunshot wounds.

Before walking into the Medical Center of Aurora early that Friday morning, Pineda had been up 20 hours. He had worked a 12-hour shift, then gone to dinner with his daughter who was in town from college. He was as tired as he had ever remembered being and went to bed at about 11:45 p.m. Thursday.

Pineda was asleep for about an hour when his phone rang. It was the hospital’s emergency medical chief, Dr. Frank Lansville. His voice was direct and solemn.

“Gilbert, there has been a mass shooting in Aurora. There may be as many as 20 patients. I need you to go to the emergency department.”

Pineda slipped on a pair of Levis and grabbed his medical bag. As he was leaving, he thought, “Boy, what an idiot you are. You are in your car, backing out of your driveway, and this is something that’s been a dream.”

He turned on the EMS radio in his car.

What he heard snapped him alert.

Pineda went from one patient to the next, unwrapping bandages and checking for signs that shotgun pellets had entered the chest or the bloodstream.

One man had 20 pieces of buckshot in his body.

Pineda, the hospital’s EMS medical director, said it’s those kind of days that remind him why he chose emergency medicine.

“This is what I trained to do,” he said.

“When something like this happens, you just click into this mode of ‘Wow. This is what I like to do.’ Not that I want to see people injured, but if they are injured, I want to have the opportunity to take care of them.”

T

WE WILL REMEMBER VERONICA MOSER-SULLIVAN

ALEX SULLIVAN

Innocent and beautiful, her aunt says. Veronica was a 6-year-old, vibrant, excitable child who a few days before she died was chatting away about learning how to swim.

The blond, blue-eyed girl attended Holly Ridge Elementary School and loved to play dress-up.

Her mother, critically wounded that night in the theater, was pregnant and later miscarried. Veronica had gone to the movie with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

“Veronica was just so full of joy every day. She loved life, no matter what we did,” her father, Ian Sullivan, told London’s The Sun. “She was the sweetest, most innocent, angelic little child anyone could ever ask for.”

Her father took her on a camping trip near Georgetown a few days before Veronica died, he told the newspaper. They slept in a tent, went fishing, saw elk and deer and cooked over a campfire.

Friends and family will miss his big heart and his bear hugs. Alex Sullivan was a loving husband, a good-humored guy, a comic-book lover and film fanatic who could quote “Caddyshack” from start to finish.

He died on his 27th birthday, keeping a family tradition started at age 6 to go to the movies that day. A year ago last Sunday, he married his wife, Cassie. Sullivan stood 6-feet-4 and weighed about 280 pounds. He played football and wrestled before graduating from Grandview High School in 2003. Later, he went to culinary school. Sullivan worked at a Red Robin restaurant and went to the Aurora theater with several of his co-workers that fateful night; seven of them were injured.

Sullivan was the family peacemaker. He hugged his sister each time they met and loved his wife so much it showed on his face.

“A lot of my memories growing up, we always had a great time together and had fun and played and climbed trees, and I was right there with him on everything,” said his sister, Megan.

6

the denver post B denverpost.com B sunday, july 29, 2012

HEROES AMONG US «11B

C H RI S LA KOTA | H E R A N I N TO T H E AT E R 9

Chris Lakota, who was watching a different movie when the Aurora shootings began, went into theater 9 to help Bonnie Kate Pourciau escape. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

“I wanted to do something good”

By Jennifer Brown The Denver Post

H

is first reaction wasn’t fear. It was anger.

Chris Lakota is a mixed martial artist and a sword fighter.

He was once shot in the arm with a 9mm pistol after shoving a guy who was throwing gang signs, he said. He has a scar on his stomach where he was stabbed and a tattoo on his biceps with the initials of a childhood friend shot to death in a gang fight when Lakota was 17.

So when a shaken and sweating young theater employee stood in front of the credits at the end of the new Spider-Man movie and told everyone to evacuate immediately, Lakota didn’t listen.

He saw the people streaming out of theater 9. He knew someone was shooting in there; the theater employee had already told him it wasn’t a fire. Instead of running out, he went in.

He ran in. To theater 9. In the dark and smoke, the first person Lakota saw who needed help was Bonnie Kate Pourciau. The 18-

year-old from Baton Rouge, La., was struggling down the last few steps toward the screen, her knee ripped apart by a gunshot.

Lakota threw her arm around his neck and carried her out of the theater. Outside, he put a sweat shirt under her head and wrapped another one around her knee. He grabbed a bottle of water from a man who passed by, held Bonnie Kate’s head up and put the bottle to her lips. He yelled for an ambulance.

“It was just pandemonium,” he said.

People were screaming. Running for their cars. One man’s hand was blown apart. Another man’s shinbone stuck out of his leg. A man moaned in agony. The fire alarm pulsated, three intense beeps at a time, on endless repeat.

Lakota’s friend started taking a video with his phone. It begins as Lakota is crouched over Bonnie Kate and ends as he and a couple of others carry her to the front seat of a patrol car.

Bonnie Kate was quiet when Lakota was with her. She barely made a sound, just moaned a couple of times.

“Think about positive things,” Lakota told

her. “Think about your summer.”

He told her not to look at her leg, which at first was spouting blood as fast as a pour from a bottle of wine, Lakota said. “Just keep your eyes up.”

He stayed with her the whole time.

When Lakota, 36, ran into theater 9, he wasn’t focused on carrying someone out, he said. His initial thought was to take out the “coward” who was shooting people. But then he saw Bonnie Kate.

“I wanted to do something good,” said Lakota, whose full name is Brent Christopher Thunderhorse Lakota. “If you see bad, and you don’t do anything, I feel it’s just as bad as the evil itself.

“It felt like everything in my life prepared me to go in there.”

After about 15 minutes in front of the theater, police officers asked whether Lakota could move Bonnie Kate behind the complex, where ambulances were supposed to arrive. He put her arm around his neck again and carried her around the building.

She accidentally scratched his cheek with her fingernail, drawing blood. He made a joke

about them both having scars from that night.

She felt as light as feathers, he said.

They waited behind the theater for several more minutes, Lakota said. And when he slid her into the front seat of a patrol car, he patted her knee. He buckled her seat belt.

“Good luck to you. I hope I see you again.”

Lakota tracked Bonnie Kate down at University of Colorado Hospital last week. Her mother answered the phone when he called.

“Bonnie’s been looking for you,” he recalled her saying.

When he went to visit her, he brought gifts from his American Indian heritage — a white-tailed hawk feather, a dreamcatcher and, to keep good spirits close, sweetgrass.

Lakota’s wife won free tickets to the movie that night and encouraged him and his friend to use them. Now, he feels that he was meant to go.

“I wouldn’t change it for anything,” he said.

Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jenbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost

WE WILL REMEMBER ALEX TEVES

REBECCA WINGO

Amid the onslaught of bullets, shotgun blasts and general chaos, Amanda Lindgren said her boyfriend, Alex Teves, never hesitated to shield her with his body during the deadly attack that ended his life.

“He was my angel that night, but he was my angel every day I knew him. … I’m broken,” Lindgren, 24, told ABC News.

Teves grew up in the Phoenix area, graduated from Desert Vista High School and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona.

He worked as a mentor at Arizona and the University of Denver, where he earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology.

“Alex’s last act of heroism is a testament to his character, his selflessness and unending compassion for those he loved,” his family said in a statement. “Alex had the heart of a lion, but it was made of gold, always willing to help anyone.”

Rebecca Wingo was a mother, daughter, sister and friend.

But, according to her former husband, Robert Wingo, with whom she had two daughters, she was more than that.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, this person was amazing.’ It wasn’t that; it was that Rebecca was a catalyst. She was the person who walked into a room, and then everything is going to happen,” Robert Wingo said.

“She would brighten a room and take you in a direction. Rebecca, she kind of had her own gravity to her, and that’s why so many people like her.”

Wingo was fluent in Mandarin and worked as a translator for the Air Force for nearly 10 years.

When she was killed, the 32-year-old was working at Joe’s Crab Shack in Aurora, and she had been attending college since 2009, working toward an associate of arts degree and hoping to become a social worker.

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Shadows over generation Post-Columbine, mass murders have occurred with alarming — and to some, accepted — frequency

By Kelsey Fowler The Denver Post

Not many 30-year-olds can point to a specific spring day in high school and remember it in vivid detail.

But Sam Granillo can. He was 17 when gunmen killed 12 of his peers at Columbine High School in 1999, and he hasn’t forgotten.

For Granillo and the other members of his generation, mass shootings and the relentless media coverage of them are frequent and, while disturbing, not always surprising — more like unavoid-

able, if unpredictable, natural disasters than logic-defying anomalies.

“It’s pretty inescapable,” Granillo said.

Jeffrey Jenson, associate dean for research at the graduate school of social work at the University of Denver, said these events add an unmistakable level of complexity to growing up. Jenson also serves as the Philip D. and Eleanor G. Winn professor for children and youth at risk.

“As a group, young adults have had a lot of challenges in the last 10 years,” he said. “This generation has certainly been exposed to things previ-

ous generations didn’t experience.”

By most counts, the number of mass public shootings has risen in the past 30 years. Prior to 1980, the most frequently mentioned incident was the 1966 clock-tower sniper killings at the University of Texas at Austin. Before that, mostly silence.

But from just before the turn of the millennium, the number of incidents increased drastically.

Columbine, 1999. The Amish school shooting in 2006. Virginia Tech in 2007. Northern Illinois University, 2008. Fort Hood, 2009. Tucson, 2011.

HOW TO ROW YOUR DRAGON

The list goes on.

Colorado has seen its share of extreme violence at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey in 2006 and New Life Church in Colorado Springs YOUTH » 4A

Facing charges James Eagan Holmes will appear in court Monday »2A

Follow the story Read previous coverage »denverpost.com/theatershooting

W IL D F IR E S U P P R ES S IO N

Waterloaded planes favored

The Forest Service still plans to buy chemical-dropping tankers despite the findings of a firefighting analysis.

By Bruce Finley The Denver Post

M

itzi Nakamura drives her team, the Phantom Dragons of Quality crew, by calling out to row as she beats on a drum Sunday at the 12th annual Colorado Dragon Boat Festival. The team placed second in the recreational division of the dragon-boat races. Thousands turned out for the two-day event over the weekend on Sloan's Lake.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

See more photos from the Dragon Boat Festival »denverpost.com/mediacenter

For their pilots, drones put new twists on familiar war Operators acknowledge a disconnect when using a joystick to control a plane thousands of miles away.

By Elisabeth Bumiller The New York Times

hancock field air national guard base, n.y.» From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family

INS I D E

compound for weeks.

“I see mothers with children; I see fathers with children; I see fathers with mothers; I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton said.

When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant — and only, Brenton said, when the women and children are not around — the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet.

Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” he said. “I have a duty, and I execute the duty.”

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A three-year analysis commissioned by the U.S. Forest Service has found that the most efficient air-attack strategy to suppress wildfires would use water-scooping aircraft — not the heavy tankers that the government favors.

But Forest Service leaders plan to press ahead in acquiring more heavy tankers, which drop up to 3,000 gallons of fire-retardant chemical slurry.

Nonprofit think tank Rand Corp.’s cost-benefit analysis being released Monday morning — launched in 2009, costing $800,000 — is aimed at perfecting the nation’s methods for swiftly suppressing wildfires of the sort seen this summer along Colorado’s Front Range.

Fire-suppression aircraft fought blazes all over Colorado in June, including the devastating Waldo Canyon fire, which burned 346 homes and 18,247 acres in Colorado Springs, and the High Park fire, which chewed through 87,284 acres and destroyed 259 homes west of Fort Collins.

“Our proposal would be to evolve to a portfolio of firefighting aircraft that is dominated by water-bearing scoopers. You can drop more water from a scooper per hour than you can drop slurry from a tanker,” said Ed Keating, an economist who ran Rand’s project.

“Our perspective was to look at it from the taxpayer’s perspective. Our estimates are that the most cost-effective portfolio would be dominated by water-scoopers,” Keating said.

The scoopers are chubby yellow aircraft the size of commuter planes with propellers on each wing and inlets below. They swoop over water, needing a three-quarter-mile stretch several feet deep. They’re deployed in Canada, Russia and other areas with abundant waFIRE » 9A

4A»

Midnight massacre monday, july 30, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post

Batman tops box office for second weekend los angeles» “The Dark Knight Rises” stayed atop the box office for the second straight weekend, grossing just more than $64 million.

But it’s lagging behind the numbers of its predecessor, 2008’s “The Dark Knight.”

Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros., declined to comment on the Sunday estimates again out of respect for the victims of the Aurora shootings that left 12 people dead and another 58 injured.

But people are still going to the

movies, and they did so even the previous weekend, said Hollywood .com analyst Paul Dergarabedian. If anything hurt the numbers this past weekend, he said, it was Friday’s opening ceremony of the Olympics in London, which drew a record-setting 40.7 million viewers in the U.S. In second place over the weekend was the animated family film “Ice Age: Continental Drift.”

The 20th Century Fox comedy “The Watch” came in third place with $13 million. The Associated Press

“The Dark Knight Rises” pulled in just over $64 million in ticket sales for the weekend. Warner Bros.

6

Suspect won’t be charged in connection with miscarriage The man accused of shooting and killing 12 people and injuring 58 others at an Aurora theater won’t face an additional homicide charge after one of the victims who was critically injured suffered a miscarriage, according to a former prosecutor.

Defense attorney Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor and current adjunct professor at the University of Denver, said homicide charges in Colorado apply only to those “who

had been born and alive.”

The family of Ashley Moser, who was critically wounded in the July 20 shooting in Aurora, said in a statement Saturday that she was recovering from surgery but that the trauma caused the miscarriage.

Moser suffered gunshot wounds to her neck and abdomen. Her daughter, 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, was the youngest person killed in the attack. The Associated Press

YOUTH «FROM 1A in 2007 — and now, at the Century Aurora 16 theater.

“It can become numbing,” Jenson said. “As it happens three, four, 10 times, young people kind of become used to it.”

Brandon Fox, 24, was a childhood friend of Aurora shooting victim Alex Teves. Fox, who is from New Jersey, said he was surprised by how connected he felt to the Colorado shooting.

“It’s very much in your face,” he said.

“Previous generations saw senseless violence in war, but it wasn’t random violence. It wasn’t just someone walking in somewhere and shooting people. I feel like that’s a lot more indicative of what’s happening to our generation.”

Jenson said with students sharing so much information online, it matters less where tragedy occurs. Digital media allow everyone to feel a certain proximity.

He believes we’ve fallen short on empathy as a result.

“It speaks to the fabric of our culture that as a society, we are not doing things we used to do,” he said. “Communities used to be more bonded.

We’ve become more isolated, even though we’ve connected in other ways.”

Fox remembers the days after the Columbine shooting, when “Goth” kids in his middle school who resembled the shooters were bullied. He said his college campus in Pennsylvania boosted security after Virginia Tech.

“You see these things, and they seem

Members of the Rodriguez family lit candles before they prayed Tuesday night at a memorial for massacre victims in Aurora. “Cumulative exposure to violence definitely impacts youth,” said Eric Sigel, associate professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Colorado. “Recent studies show as exposure to violent events accumulates, it can have great ranges of effect.”

Karl Gehring, The Denver Post

completely out of the ordinary, but I guess it happens more than you’d like to think,” he said.

Eric Sigel, associate professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Colorado, is researching ways to identify adolescents at risk for future violent behavior. He said the brain does not fully finish developing until age 25, so violent events can have lasting outcomes.

“Cumulative exposure to violence definitely impacts youth,” he said. “Recent studies show as exposure to violent events accumulates, it can have

great ranges of effect.”

Those effects can include mentalhealth problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, poor grades, substance abuse and future violent acts in young adults.

Aurora shooting suspect James Eagan Holmes is only 24.

But Sigel said it is all relative. The closer someone is to the epicenter of the violence, the more affected he or she will be.

“Massacres don’t occur with any large frequency,” he said. “A limited

number of people have close exposure.”

Tess La Fera, 20, grew up in Colorado Springs. Too young to remember Columbine, La Fera still feels her peers have come to accept violence as a daily part of life.

“As a country, and as a generation, we have generally seen more violence than in the past,” she said. “Even though I wasn’t personally connected to the (Aurora) shooting, my location makes me feel it more.”

It’s unclear, Jenson said, whether millennials (children born in the 1980s

and ’90s) come away more attuned to these types of events or dulled from hearing so much about them.

Granillo is anything but desensitized.

“It rocks you hard,” he said. “But you have to take a step back, look at all of these horrible things that have happened lately and choose to make a difference.”

Kelsey Fowler: 303-954-1211, kfowler@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kelseylian

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Mars landing: Learn more about the Mars Curiosity Rover’s special features. »denverpost.com/extras MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

142 counts for Holmes London 2012

Franklin swims to gold

Missy’s American grit

The most lenient penalty if convicted on murder charges is a life sentence.

By John Ingold The Denver Post

In pressing the case against James Eagan Holmes, the man accused of one of the worst mass shootings in American history, Arapahoe County prosecutors made it clear Monday they were leaving little to chance.

Holmes, 24, was formally charged with a total of 142 criminal counts — including two separate allegations of murder for each of the 12 people who died in the July 20 attack at the Century Aurora 16.

The two murder charges are based on different legal theories.

Prosecutors similarly filed two counts of attempted murder for each of the 58 people who were injured in the attack, carried out during an early morning premiere of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

All told, Holmes faces 141 felonies: 24 counts of first-degree murder, 116 counts of attempted murder and one count of possession of an explosive device. Holmes, 24, was also charged with one “sentence enhancer” count for allegedly committing a crime of violence.

In the murder and attempted-murder charges, Holmes was accused in half the counts of committing the crimes after deliberation and in the other half with committing them with extreme indifference.

Denver attorney Daniel Recht said the different counts are an advantage to prosecutors CHARGES » 6A

With their own eyes: Victims, family head to court to see Holmes in person. »6A

Comedy community stands up: Shows will benefit victims. »7A

Filed: Read all the charges against Holmes. »denverpost.com/theatershootings

Missy Franklin brandishes an American flag Monday after the Olympic awards ceremony, where she was presented with her first gold medal after coming from behind in the last 15 meters to win the 100-meter backstroke at the Summer Games in London. John Leyba, The Denver Post london »

W

hen a 17-year-old girl from Colorado finds a dream come true, where does she put it?

“In my pocket,” Missy Franklin said Monday night, reaching to show off a gold medal won with a stunning comeback in the 100-meter backstroke at the Summer Olympics. “Isn’t it pretty?”

With a victorious touch of the pool wall, Franklin morphed from a teenager hyped as the future of U.S. swimming to a bona fide Olympic legend. How quickly can a young life change forever?

“Thirteen minutes and 55 seconds. I timed it,” said coach Todd Schmitz, who has put a stopwatch to nearly every lap of Franklin’s swimming career since she was 7 years old.

A lucky 13 minutes and change was all Franklin needed to record a rally so incredible it would do John Elway proud. In less time than it takes most people to shower, Franklin pulled off a feat in the water so bold it had Olympic icon Michael Phelps shaking his head. “I can’t believe Missy just did that,” Phelps said. “She’s a force.”

Franklin did more than win gold. Before swimming the race of her life, the Regis Jesuit High School senior broke every rule in the book of muscle recovery by trying to swim two Olympic races with less than 14 minutes of rest. She risked embarrassment in front of

MARK KISZLA Denver Post Columnist

17,500 witnesses at the Aquatics Centre. Heck, she made her mother fret.

“I didn’t know if she was going to be able to do these two swims without blowing up,” D.A. Franklin confessed from her seat in Section 311 of the arena.

Franklin had the audacity to take on Australian sensation Emily Seebohm, who had set an Olympic record during the 100 back prelimiKISZLA » 10A

Franklin’s quick turnaround Missy Franklin’s incredible day Monday in London, swimming three events and finishing with a gold medal.

10 a.m.

Swims the 200-meter freestyle prelims, finishing in 1 minute, 57.62 seconds — second in her heat, third overall.

Legal challenge to TABOR law moves forward Attorney General John Suthers’ argument is rejected by a federal judge in a case that could decide the statute’s constitutionality.

7:35 p.m. Swims in the semifi-

By Tim Hoover The Denver Post

nals of the 200 free and falls far behind. She rallies to finish in 1:57.57 to place fourth in her heat and eighth overall, grabbing the last spot in Tuesday night’s finals. She emerges from pool at 7:40 p.m.

In a major ruling, a federal judge on Monday allowed a legal challenge to the constitutionality of Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights to move forward, rejecting arguments from Attorney General John Suthers that plaintiffs in the lawsuit did not have the right to sue.

U.S. District Judge William J. Martínez’s ruling was the most recent blow to the state’s effort to derail a lawsuit challenging TABOR, with the judge already having rejected a central pillar of the state’s defense of TABOR during a court hearing in February. Passed by voters in 1992, the TABOR amendment limits state spending and bars lawmakers from raising taxes without a vote of the people.

The suit, filed by 33 plaintiffs who are mostly Democrats, argues that by taking away lawmakers’ ability to tax, TABOR violates the U.S.

7:53 p.m.

With no warm-down between races, Franklin is slow off the start in the 100-meter backstroke finals.

She continually closes the gap until passing Australia’s Emily Seebohm to win in 58.33, a U.S. record. »1B

Taking a tumble: Pressure gets to U.S. men’s gymnastics team, which lands into fifth-place finish. »7B

INS I D E Business » 11-13A | Comics » 5-7C | Lottery » 2A | Markets » 12A | Movies » 4C | Obituaries » 18A | Puzzles » 5-6C

TABOR » 10A

6A»

Midnight massacre tuesday, july 31, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post ADVERTISEMENT

CONFRONTING THE SUSPECT

Victims, families in court to see Holmes in person

By Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

The second court appearance of James Eagan Holmes brought a group of people touched by the attack — some who survived, some who came to support those who did not make it out of the Century Aurora 16.

Shooting survivor Don Lader walked into the courthouse wearing a “Dark Knight Rises” T-shirt — evoking the Batman movie during which the shooting occurred that left 12 dead and 58 injured.

Holmes was charged Monday with 142 separate criminal counts in the attack.

Lader, who escaped the theater without physical injury, said it was important to be able to watch the proceedings and send a message to Holmes.

“Now I get to be on the other side,” Lader said. “We get to be on the attack now. That’s the best I can put it. I think he’s a coward, and we have so much more strength than him.”

Amber Harris, another shooting survivor, walked in with

Lader. Asked what punishment she would like to see Holmes receive, Harris demurred.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” she said. “I think only God can be the final judge.”

Four people wearing Batman T-shirts and memorial ribbons with the words “Sully” on them attended the hearing. Shooting victim Alex Sullivan, known to his friends as “Sully,” died on his 27th birthday.

MaryEllen Hansen, a retired Jefferson County school principal, is the aunt of shooting victim Ashley Moser, whose story has featured one devastating wave of news after another.

Moser’s 6-year-old daughter, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, died in the theater attack. Moser herself was critically injured, and over the weekend her family released a statement confirming that she had suffered a miscarriage as a result of her abdominal wounds.

Hansen said she wanted to go to the hearing “just so I could see him in person because on TV it’s not quite the same thing.

I was hoping that he would look at the victims. But he never did.”

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Hansen said Holmes looked “indifferent.

“He was very cogent, and I believe he was very aware of what was going on,” she said.

“He would open his eyes very wide. It might have been that he was processing things.”

Hansen said she wanted to be there in solidarity for the other victims and is committed to continuing through the entirety of the legal proceedings.

She later went to visit her 26year-old niece, who remained hospitalized and is likely to be paralyzed from wounds suffered in the July 20 attack.

At the hospital, Moser was sitting up in bed eating lunch and seemed to be in better spirits than Hansen had expected.

“I told her that we were at the hearing today,” Hansen said.

“Her comment was, ‘I never want to see that man.’ ” Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367, jpmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jpmeyerdpost Staff writers Kristen Leigh Painter, Jessica Fender and John Ingold contributed to this report.

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Rita Paulina, who was injured during the theater shootings, leaves in a wheelchair with her family from the court after a hearing for suspect James Holmes on Monday. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

CHARGES «FROM 1A because if a jury were to acquit Holmes under one theory, it could still convict him under the other theory. Extreme indifference, Recht wrote in an email, is “arguably a much easier mental state for the prosecution to prove.”

If convicted of any of the murder charges, Holmes could face execution, though prosecutors have not yet said whether they will pursue the death penalty.

The most lenient sentence Holmes could receive if convicted of the murder counts is life in prison without parole.

In a statement issued after the hearing on behalf of the family of shooting victim Jonathan Blunk, his cousin Jessica Watts said Blunk’s family has faith the district attorney’s office will “pursue all applicable charges” against Holmes.

“He will be held accountable for his actions and we, Jonny’s family, will continue to mourn the hole we now have in our lives,” Watts said in the statement.

In a charging document unsealed after the hearing, prosecutors accuse Holmes of one count of murder after deliberation and one count of murder with extreme indifference for each of the 12 victims who died.

The attempted-murder charges follow a similar pattern — officials have said 58 people were wounded in the shootings but have not released a list of names. The charging document muddies the picture somewhat.

The document listed wounded survivor Bonnie Kate Pourciau twice, in two charges naming a victim Bonnie Kate and in another two charges naming a victim as Bonnie Pourciau. Officials at the District Attorney’s office said they could not clear up the confusion, citing a judge’s order limiting publicity.

“Because of the gag order, our

office is unable to interpret the charging document at this time,” said Casimir Spencer, a spokeswoman for District Attorney Carol Chambers.

The charging document also included the names of several shooting survivors who were not physically injured and did not include the names of some of those who were wounded and survived.

Recht, the Denver attorney, said attempted murder is a valid charge in cases where people are shot at but not hit. He said prosecutors likely made their charging decision after talking to victims and ensuring they were comfortable with being included in the case. More so, Recht said, prosecutors likely didn’t want to charge Holmes with every possible crime he could be charged with, such as aggravated assault.

“Clearly the prosecution decided they needed to keep this to the most serious charges,” Recht said. “They wanted to keep the jury from getting confused with potentially hundreds of counts.”

The charges can be amended in the future.

It was Holmes’ second court appearance — at a preliminary advisement hearing July 23, he looked dazed and drowsy. Monday, Holmes appeared more composed. His hair, still dyed a Kool-Aid orange and red, was combed flat.

For much of the hearing, he appeared to be paying attention, often looking at Judge William Sylvester as he spoke.

When Sylvester asked Holmes a question — whether he would agree to waive his right to a preliminary hearing within 35 days — Holmes answered with a muffled, “Yes.” Media cameras, which had been allowed for Holmes’ first appearance, were not allowed in the courtroom during Monday’s hearing.

In the audience, dozens of shooting survivors and family members of victims looked on, at times leaning forward to lis-

ten as Sylvester spoke and at other times craning their necks to look at Holmes.

Shooting survivor Rita Paulina, whose wrist, arm and leg were wrapped in bandages, fidgeted with the gauze and rested her arm awkwardly on the seat.

The next hearing in the case is scheduled Aug. 9, when attorneys will debate a motion from 20 news media organizations to unseal the case file. After that, on Aug. 16, Sylvester plans to hear arguments from the prosecution and the defense over a notebook Holmes allegedly mailed to his psychiatrist.

Holmes’ attorneys have asserted that the notebook is privileged doctor-patient communication.

The next major hearing in Holmes’ case will likely be a preliminary hearing, at which the judge will listen to testimony to determine whether there is enough evidence for the case to proceed to trial. That hearing could provide the public with significant new information about the events of July 20. But the hearing, which Holmes’ attorneys said could take a week, isn’t scheduled until Nov. 13.

Even that date could be optimistic, said Denver defense attorney Pete Hedeen.

Given potential mental health issues hinted at publicly, Holmes’ defense team is likely to raise issues of competency to determine whether he is able to participate in his own defense.

Once competency is raised, it stops the clock on the trial while defendants typically undergo at least two rounds of psychological evaluation. A judge makes the final determination, but even a fast-tracked process can take three to five months, Hedeen said.

“Certainly the indications are that this guy is seriously mentally ill,” Hedeen said. “It’ll be interesting at what point will they raise the competency issue.”

Staff writers Kristen Leigh Painter, Jessica Fender and Jeremy P. Meyer contributed to this report.

Mistake #1 Using prescription medication as the primary tool for dealing with your neuropathy. If this is something YOU are doing you owe it to yourself to get a second opinion NOW, before your neuropathy deteriorates into something even more serious. Sure drugs may make you feel okay but is it making the problem better or worse?

Mistake #2 Sitting in cramped positions for extended periods of time such as in front of the T.V. or computer. If there is ONE recipe for making the pain, tingling and degeneration of neuropathy worse its committing mistake #1 and having the primary treatment being prescription drugs and then following that with long extended periods of inactivity.

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LINES DRAWN IN BATTLE OVER DIA LAND »denver & the west, 4A

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 2012

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66

Online today: Updates from presumptive GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s Colorado stop. »denverpost.com

EN ER GY PO LICY

Changing rules keep Colorado guessing Obama vs. Romney offers a stark contrast for the industry’s future.

MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Sources: CU team was warned about Holmes

By Jeremy P. Meyer and Allison Sherry The Denver Post

London 2012

By Mark Jaffe The Denver Post

Reed Williams wants to drill a gas well on Colorado’s Western Slope.

Steve Bachar’s Denver-based company is trying to sell energy-efficient systems for cooling towers. Both say federal government messes with business.

“The one thing we aren’t doing well is creating predictability in the energy business,” said Bachar, chief executive of Silver Bullet Water Treatment.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are an oil and gas company or a renewable energy company,” Bachar said.

Williams echoes Bachar, saying, “It just feels like the rules keep changing.”

The question now is what impact the 2012 presidential election will have on the rules.

President Barack Obama has been a supporter of renewable energy, which he argued was a job creator, while trying to balance opening public lands to oil and gas development with conservation concerns.

Obama’s presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney is opposed to incentives for renewable energy — such as the wind- production tax credit — and for opening as much public land to drilling as possible.

This debate is not an idle one for Colorado, where 22,394 people worked in oil and gas production in 2010 and nearly 19,000 are employed in the renewable energy sector, based on state figures.

And yet from the Western Slope well fields to the Eastern Plains wind farms, Colorado, like the rest of the country, has had to cope for decades with a lack of a consistent energy policy.

“We’ve been trying for an energy policy since Richard Nixon,” said Charles Ebinger, director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. “But we have too many conflicting ENERGY » 10A

POLITICS

ROMNEY MAKING CAMPAIGN STOP IN JEFFERSON COUNTY GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney will be in Jefferson County on Thursday, his first campaign appearance since returning from a tour of London, Israel and Poland. »11A

Polling data.

President Obama has opened leads over Romney in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. »18A

Freestyle relay

GOLDEN GIRLS

The University of Colorado Denver psychiatrist seeing accused murderer James Eagan Holmes was so alarmed by his behavior that she notified the campus-wide threat-assessment team that she helped create years before, a source told The Denver Post.

Dr. Lynne Fenton, identified in a court document as Holmes’ psychiatrist, in June took her concerns to members of the campus’ Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment team, but no further action was taken, a source with knowledge of the process told The Post.

University officials could not confirm or deny the report, citing the federal health privacy law and a judge’s gag order in the case against Holmes.

The information was first reported late Wednesday by Denver’s KMGHTV, 7News. The station, citing unnamed sources, reported that CUDenver officials did not contact Aurora police before the July 20 massacre at the Century Aurora 16 theater that killed 12 people and injured 58 others.

There was no mention in the report of whether CU-Denver police were notified.

The Anschutz Medical Campus, where Holmes, 24, was enrolled in a doctoral program, is in Aurora.

He has been charged with 24 counts of first-degree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder in the case.

Fenton, director of student mental health services on the Anschutz Medical Campus, in 2010 was involved in BETA » 7A

R EU S ED SY R IN G ES

C

oloradan Missy Franklin, right, shares a hug with Shannon Vreeland, Dana Volmer and Allison Schmitt as they celebrate their win in the women’s 4x200 freestyle relay at the London 2012 Summer Games. The team posted an Olympic record with a time of 7:42.92 to capture the gold medal. »story, 1B John Leyba, The Denver Post

broxbourne, england» In a few minutes, a group of at-risk kids from Colorado and England will be hearing Olympic icon Bob Beamon tell his remarkable story — how he went from being a juvenile delinquent in Harlem to obliterating the world record in the long jump at the 1968 Olympics.

But as they wait for him to arrive by train

By Michael Booth and Kieran Nicholson The Denver Post

Wednesday at a Christian conference center 30 minutes north of London, Jesus Garcia of Eagle is talking about the eye-opening wonders he has seen since he arrived here Saturday.

Garcia is one of 18 youths visiting with Avonbased SOS Outreach. They’ve gone sightseeing, visited Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and attended Olympic events — beach volleyball, cycling, even tennis at Wimbledon. Garcia loved the volleyball.

Three people who sought testing after being warned about possible infection exposure from a Denver-area dentist have tested positive, state health officials announced Wednesday morning.

The three were patients of Dr. Stephen Stein between 1999 and 2011 and had received notifications because the dentist reused sedation syringes for days at a time, the state said.

The patients tested positive for HIV, hepatitis C or hepatitis B, but, in order to protect their privacy, the state would not say which. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has urged more than 8,000 oral-surgery patients of Stein’s to seek testing.

The results do not mean the patients got their infections at Stein’s Cherry Creek or Highlands Ranch practices,

KIDS » 8A

PATIENTS » 8A

Program helps at-risk youths make a leap into new worlds

By John Meyer The Denver Post

3 ex-patients of area dentist have infections

INS I D E Business » 13-15A | Comics » 5-7C | Lottery » 2A | Markets » 14A | Movies » 4C | Obituaries » 19A | Puzzles » 5-6C

66

the denver post B denverpost.com B thursday, august 2, 2012

BETA «FROM 1A the creation of the campus BETA team. The team is an ad hoc group of high-level CU academic employees skilled at assessing potential threats on campus. The group does not include CU-Denver police.

University Chancellor Don Elliman said Wednesday, “I believe, until it’s been demonstrated otherwise, that our people did what they should have done.”

In April 2010, Fenton was among three people who gave a presentation about the creation of the BETA team to the Academic and Student Affairs Leadership committee. The team will be a “way to determine when student action moves from an academic concern only to a broader campus concern,” according to minutes from the meeting.

“One of the most difficult aspects is knowing when immediate action is required, or if there is time to convene the BETA

team to discuss the issues,” the minutes say.

“Generally, if you believe the threat is imminent, call campus police. If you think it’s best to involve the BETA team, contact Lynne Fenton,” the minutes say.

Fenton no longer is a BETA team leader but remains an adviser to the program, CU officials said.

CU’s website says the BETA team is available whenever faculty, staff or student community members are confronted with people they believe are threatening, disruptive or otherwise problematic.

The team provides guidance and consultation and may make referrals to appropriate campus or community resources. It is not a law enforcement mechanism, said CU officials in a statement released Wednesday.

7News reported Wednesday that a source said Fenton first contacted the BETA team in “the first 10 days” of June, but the team didn’t meet or move the matter forward because Holmes began the process of leaving CU.

Under a federal rule followed by psychiatrists, Fenton had a duty to take action if Holmes told her of a specific plan to harm others.

The revelation that Fenton was Holmes’ psychiatrist came in a motion by Holmes’ defense attorneys made public last week. That information has since been blacked out in the document posted on the Colorado State Judicial Branch’s website.

Holmes had sent a package with a notebook to Fenton before the attack, according to court papers made public last week.

Fox News, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, said the package was sent several days before the attack and contained details about his murderous plan.

The university has said the package was delivered on July 23 and immediately turned over to authorities.

NEWS «7A

GO FOR

Staff writer Lynn Bartels and Staffer Charles Minshew contributed to this story.

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Games on: Continuous, updated coverage of the 2012 London Olympics. »denverpost.com/london2012

NATION & WORLD

RENEWED FIGHTING IN SYRIAN CAPITAL Gunfire, explosions and smoke in Damascus keep frightened residents at home as regime forces battle with rebels on the edge of the capital. »15A

BUSINESS

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MISSY

BYA MILE

Tuition plan moves ahead Metro State has registered 96 illegal immigrants for the fall semester under its new rate.

By Anthony Cotton The Denver Post

Expressing “exceptional” confidence in its ability to withstand potential legal challenges, Metropolitan State University of Denver is moving forward with a controversial new tuition rate for illegal immigrant students.

“The advice we’ve received says that this is absolutely the correct decision,” Metro trustee Terrance Carroll said Friday. “We’re not looking for a fight, but we are certainly willing and able to defend our decision.”

Unveiled in June, the plan creates a special tuition rate for some Colorado students who are illegal immigrants. They would pay $3,358 per semester — more than in-state students but less than the out-of-state rate they now pay — provided they meet a set of criteria that include being a state resident for at least three years, having a degree from a Colorado high school or a GED, and being in good legal standing other than their immigration status.

According to school officials, 72 new and 24 returning students have already registered for classes using the new rate. Applications of another 50 to 75 students are being reviewed to see if they qualify.

Fall-semester classes begin Aug. 20.

When Metro State announced the plan, not long after the failure of the ASSET bill, which would have established a discounted tuition at all

SPACE PLANE

Sierra Nevada Corp. will reap the benefits of a landmark NASA announcement, which awarded the company’s Louisville branch $212.5 million to continue developing its Dream Chaser space plane. »12A

SPORTS

FREE AGENT RECEIVER SEES AN OPENING

METRO » 8A

Work permits. Rules and costs of Obama’s immigration program revealed. »15A

Denver Bronco Andre Caldwell will push hard for prime playing time at wide receiver, even in some of the team’s two-widereceiver sets. »1B

M ID N IG HT M A S S AC R E AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

GROW Coloradan Missy Franklin touches the wall in record-setting fashion in the women’s 200-meter backstroke. The win earned Franklin her second individual gold of the Games. Mark J. Terrill, The Associated Press

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london» he personality of swimmer Missy Franklin is so magnetic, gold medals stick. A world record fell hard Friday for the charm of her irresistible smile.

After swimming the 200-meter backstroke faster than any woman in history, the bubbly Colorado teenager climbed out of the pool and into the spotlight as the biggest American heroine of the Summer Olympics.

“I can’t believe what just happened,” gushed Franklin, beaming after breaking a record that had stood for three years with a time of 2 minutes, 4.06 seconds. “I knew I was giving it everything I had because I couldn’t feel my arms or legs and I was just trying to get my hand to the wall as fast as I could.”

Mental trauma, substance abuse on the rise after tragedy

By Michael Booth The Denver Post

A word of advice: Don’t be blinded by the megawattage of Franklin’s smile. It’s a beautiful disguise. Behind the 24-karat mask, she dreams the impossible with an intensity that can cause a world record to sink in the wake of Missy the Missile.

Before Franklin hopped in the water and placed her feet for the start of her favorite event, those who know her best already knew:

Mental health experts are seeing a widespread need for trauma counseling in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting, and substance treatment centers warn of increased abuse of alcohol or drugs.

Reactions are coming from unharmed theatergoers, first responders, relatives of victims and even those with no personal connection to the shooting, counselors said.

Moods range from sleeplessness and panic to staying walled up in the house, and may intensify as parents get ready to send their kids off to a new school year, they added.

“It is absolutely an increase in volume” of calls and contacts with Aurora Mental Health Center’s walk-in facilities and crisis outreach teams, said Kathie Snell, deputy director of child and family

KISZLA » 9A

TRAUMA » 11A

MARK KISZLA

Denver Post Columnist

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the denver post B denverpost.com B saturday, august 4, 2012

NEWS «11A

H UN D R E DS HO NO R JON BLUNK

Saluting a man who “had your back”

By Joey Bunch The Denver Post

reno, nev.» The warm, funny memories of Jon Blunk’s short life were no match for the heartbreak of his loss, as hundreds gathered in his hometown Friday morning to remember the 26-year-old victim of the Aurora theater shooting.

His Navy buddy and “brother,” Kyle Dawson of Colorado Springs, began his eulogy by ordering everyone to put on a “big cheesy grin,” ear to ear, just like the one so common on their friend.

Blunk was a man’s man, who felt not an ounce of embarrassment about caring deeply and openly for others, his friends said. But he would not want anyone to shed a tear for him.

Police have told his family things investigators under a gag order have not told reporters: Blunk died from a gunshot blast to the chest, and judging from the position of his body he was charging the shooter to save others in the Century Aurora 16, said Roland Lackey, who officiated the 26-year-old’s military funeral. Friends in the chapel murmured “Yeah,” and “That’s J.T.” “You didn’t have to look over your shoulder to know Jon had your back,” Dawson said. “You knew it like you knew the sun was going to come up the next day.”

Hundreds had meandered in to a medley of soft country music — a mood that was at once like a high school, Navy and family reunion of all the people in Blunk’s orbit. People grew quieter and, yes, sadder when the Lonestar song “I’m Already

TRAUMA «FROM 1A programs for the nonprofit.

To help address that demand, Aurora Mental Health announced Friday it would indefinitely waive any out-of-pocket expenses for aid to anyone in the theater during the shootings, for their immediate family, and for first responders and families.

The center added it would waive the same expenses for any Aurora residents under 21 or their family members through 2012, relying on donations to pay the increased expenses.

Experts at Arapahoe House substance-abuse treatment center, meanwhile, said they are also seeing clients needing to talk about the trauma and expect increases in abuse. Researchers have documented jumps in alcohol, tobacco and other substance use after the mass community traumas of 9/11, the Oklahoma City courthouse bombing and southern hurricanes, they said.

After the Oklahoma City attack, drinking rose 2½ times over that in a control community, according to a paper by the

There” began to play.

“I’m already there,” goes the song. “Take a look around. I’m the sunshine in your hair. I’m the shadow on the ground. I’m the whisper in the wind. I’m your imaginary friend. And I know I’m in your prayers. Oh, I’m already there.”

Dawson told of a grueling hike Blunk and friends went on once, and it appeared one of them couldn’t make it. There was no hesitation. Blunk snatched up the man’s heavy gear, lashed it to his own, then helped the friend march on.

“I would have said, ‘You’re going to have to leave your crap or you’re going to die.’” Dawson said, making everyone laugh.

“But that’s not Jon.” Jon refinished hardwood floors in the Denver area, something he had helped his father do for a living, and he worked part time providing security on the 16th Street Mall. An early news report had incorrectly said he had worked in a hardware store.

“Can you imagine Jon wearing a little smock?” Dawson asked the crowd, again making them laugh.

Blunk was born in Aurora on Jan. 20, 1986. He lived there as a boy, and then moved to Reno when he was about 8 when his father got a job there, Dawson said after the service.

But Blunk never left the Denver Broncos. In one of the photos in the funeral home lobby, he has his face painted Broncos colors, with a giant D on his face. He is posed next to a buddy in San Diego Chargers face paint. Blunk and his wife, Chantel, lived in San Diego during his time in the Navy.

Additional help Several churches also are offering counseling services.

For a complete list, go to denverpost.com. federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Prescriptions for antianxiety drugs increased by 22 percent in New York City immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

“The relationship is high between substance abuse and trauma,” said Angela Bornemann, residential program manager for Arapahoe House.

“We’ve definitely seen more people come in and people inside of our centers not wanting to go out,” Bornemann said. “A lot of our clients get triggered by this because of a past trauma; it adds to their overall sense of not feeling safe, of wanting to look outside themselves for soothing and coping.”

Helping people past the trauma is a delicate mix of affirming the current feelings while pushing them beyond the tragedy to better experiences, trauma counselors said.

Clients who say they don’t want to go to the movies any-

Chantel Blunk, third from right, the wife of Jon Blunk, joins family and friends in leaving handprints on his casket Friday at Mountain View Cemetery in Reno, Nev. Blunk was killed in the Aurora theater shootings on July 20. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post To the left of his coffin Friday was a signed and framed Peyton Manning jersey, a gift to the family from the player and the team. When Chantel and the kids were in Denver last week to escort his body back to Reno, the Broncos gave them a tour of their facilities and let the kids run through the tunnel the players take onto Sports Authority Field at Mile High, something that would have thrilled Jon to no end, Dawson said.

“They’ve been so great to her and the kids,” he said. “And it’s really meant a lot.”

Chantel, his 22-year-old widow, tried to speak to the audience Friday, but couldn’t find the words, with her husband re-

more, or don’t feel safe in an everyday area like a grocery store, are common after out-of-theblue events like Aurora or Columbine, said Ann Kelly, a program director at Aurora Mental Health.

“Those feelings are appropriate because this was an incredibly inappropriate thing that happened,” she said. The next step, she said, is to ask clients, “What else do you enjoy doing? Go to the park, do something. Redirect, and find something else that’s a positive coping skill.

Push back on that isolation.”

Mental health agencies say ruefully they are better prepared now, after building new programs in the wake of Columbine in 1999. They had identified teams to reach out to schools and first responders, and added in-house services for residents or clients re-living trauma.

“In a situation like this, no one is prepared for how they are going to react, how they are going to feel,” Kelly said. She urges people to “give ourselves permission to feel whatever comes up and talk about it with close family, friends, or people who are supportive. That’s the core of disaster response, connecting people with other peo-

posed at her feet. She said she wished she could hug and bake cookies for everyone. “If you give me your address, I’ll send you some cookies,” she began.

Then someone in the audience interceded, “We love you, Chantel.”

They had been high school sweethearts. Jon had enlisted in the Navy after graduation from high school in Reno in 2004, serving aboard the USS Nimitz in San Diego, where Chantel had followed him. They moved to Colorado in 2009, but Chantel had moved home to Reno to find work and be near her family to help with the kids, Dawson said.

And though they were re-

ple so they can start to help.”

Responders and medical experts who themselves looked for answers after Columbine echo that advice from experience.

Dr. Chris Colwell, emergency medicine chief at Denver Health, was in the parking lots treating students at Columbine, and in his ER the morning of July 20 overseeing Aurora patients. He builds staff schedules and programs with employee trauma in mind, knowing that, sooner or later, most will need to deal with feelings of grief, helplessness and loss.

His own family, with kids grown up since Columbine, talks about mundane activities that are now worrisome.

“Do you send your kids to school? Do you not ever go to movies?” Colwell said. “These are the questions that don’t have answers.”

The Colwells tried for their own answer the Sunday after the shootings, deliberately going to a movie when none of them felt enthusiastic.

Their movie, Colwell said, was “Brave.”

Michael Booth: 303-954-1686, mbooth@denverpost.com or twitter.com/mboothdp

cently going through a rough patch apart, “Chantel and their children were the most important relationship in his life,” Dawson said.

Jon was supposed to fly home for a visit the weekend after he was killed. His 4-year-old daughter, Hailey, had made him a welcome-home poster.

Another Navy buddy, James Gill, remembered how much brighter Jon’s smile had been the day she was born, and how determined he was to have a son.

He had named his son Maximus and gotten a tattoo with

that name before Chantel became pregnant. Maximus is now 2.

“You may have lost a father,” Gill told the children. “But you’ve gained a lot of uncles and aunts.”

Blunk was laid to rest on a peaceful hill, a spot his children will come to know by heart.

Twenty-one gunshots fired in military tradition before a bugler played taps.

Navy Chief-Select Amy DeGuzman of Bremerton, Wash., who had been Blunk’s supervisor on three tours in the Middle East, stepped forward for “roll call.” As she called out the names of those who had served with Blunk, each answered.

“Blunk” she barked in military tone.

Only a breeze answered.

“Blunk,” she called again.

Someone answered in the same tone, “Blunk gave his life saving another on 20 July, 2012.”

A bagpipe began to moan “Amazing Grace.”

As the service ended, DeGuzman strode away quickly from the crowd, 50 yards down the hill to a green open space by herself. She bent over at the waist and cried.

So much heartbreak.

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com

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NATION & WORLD

MIDNIGHT MASSACRE AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Well on his way at CU

OKLAHOMA TOWN LEFT CHARRED A deliberately set fire in Luther, Okla., destroys nearly five dozen homes as other towns evacuate. »2A

DENVER & THE WEST

THE BOON OF BACKYARD BEEKEEPING The national bee count finds bee visits lagging in cities, but urban gardens generate buzz. »1B

Only months before the rampage, suspect James Holmes was among the elite in neuroscience.

ARTS & CULTURE

By Karen Augé and Jennifer Brown The Denver Post

Ken Soper, Dove Creek High’s former football coach, listens to a phone message from a former student in which she expresses her support and calls him the best teacher she ever had. AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

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A school board dismissed him just shy of that record, for reasons that haven’t been revealed. And now, this one-time pinto-bean capital of the world, whose latest motto is “Together We Thrive,” is instead divided by strife.

This is a story about football. But it’s also about the nature of conflict in a no-traffic-light community that is so tightly interwoven, it’s impossible to walk into the few offices and businesses here and not encounter people who are cousins, in-laws, exes, nieces or offspring of one another.

It’s hard to find any adults who didn’t once play football, basketball or baseball under Soper, who didn’t toe the strict line in one of his American Government classes, or who don’t have kids or grandkids who have done one or both. This man, with his Oklahomafarmboy manners and old-school formality, is a respected institution in Dove Creek.

UTAH

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dove creek» Two wins. A matter of several more drives into the end zone. A few more kicks splitting the uprights. That was all Ken Soper, the head coach for nearly a half century in this town, needed to become the winningest high school football coach in Colorado.

But he didn’t get that chance.

Dol o re s

Fifty years after her death, the aura of the blond, curvy, whispery-voiced actress persists. »1E

By Nancy Lofholm The Denver Post

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About two months before he sat wild-haired, bug-eyed and dazed as a judge told him he faced murder charges, James Eagan Holmes was supposed to give a presentation on a topic so complex that most people would barely understand its title.

Near the same time he would have been discussing “microRNA biomarkers” with doctoral students and faculty, authorities say, Holmes began amassing the cache of guns and ammunition he used to carry out one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.

University of Colorado Denver officials won’t say whether he gave that presentation, listed on the syllabus for a class called “biological basis of psychiatric and neurological disorders.”

In any case, Holmes was by then already slipping out of the rarefied world of intellect and scientific discovery that for much of his 24 years had seemed embedded in his DNA. Holmes took an oral examination June 7 and dropped out of the elite CU PROGRAM » 19A

Perspective. After tragedies, evangelical Christians step forward to tell their survival stories, finding audiences among fellow believers and in broader society. »1D Security. A $70 alarm on the exit door in theater 9 might have prevented the mass shooting. »19A

Courts. Gag order issued with good intentions, but it brings unwelcome consequences. »18A

6

PROGRAM «FROM 1A Denver neuroscience graduate program June 10.

He is now accused of murder and attempted murder in the deaths of 12 people and the injuring of another 58 during a midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20 at an Aurora movie theater.

“Aspiring scientist” In Holmes’ 2010 résumé, he calls himself an “aspiring scientist.” The student experience he listed then, as he applied for lab-technician jobs online, is an impressive catalog of research in neuroscience: the study of the brain and nervous system.

Digitization of mouse muscle. Neuronal mapping of the zebra finch. Dissection, staining and photography of hummingbird flight muscles.

As a lab assistant at the University of California, Riverside, Holmes picked up skills such as dissecting cells and using dye to stain biological tissues before examining them under a microscope, according to the résumé.

No one at CU Denver and few in the broader neuroscience community would talk about Holmes directly. But directors of CU’s neuroscience graduate program described the environment Holmes had entered, and was withdrawing from, as intellectually demanding and rewarding.

Every year, 100 or so budding scientists apply to the CU Denver doctoral program in neuroscience. Ultimately, only about six are admitted, said program director Angie Ribera.

In 2011, Holmes was one of the six.

Then Holmes was chosen for inclusion in a National Institutes of Health grant program designed to train the best and brightest for careers as neuroscience researchers.

Each year, Diego Restrepo, co-director of CU Denver’s NeuroScience Center, and a group of faculty select three of the most promising first-year doctoral students and three second-year students to split the grant.

It covers tuition and fees, and provides a stipend for living expenses, in part because the rigorous neuroscience program hardly leaves time for students to work.

The NIH awards the grant, in Restrepo’s name, to the university. The intent of the grant is not to support any particular research but to train future neuroscientists, Restrepo said.

How the brain works Neuroscience is a relatively new discipline, becoming more attractive to doctoral students over the past decade or so because of the intrigue of the asyet unexplained. It is the study of how nerve cells communicate with one another, and how the brain generates thoughts and ideas, controls movement and processes vision, smell and hearing.

“One of the great mysteries is how our brain works,” said Dr. James Ashe, director of the graduate program in neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. “We have a fair idea how the kidney works; we know a lot about the heart. There are far more unknown areas in brain research than in many fields.”

Some who earn doctorate degrees in neuroscience go on to run their own research labs, either at a university or in the pharmaceutical or biotech industries. Others end up teaching or going to medical school, Ashe said.

Their work is complex, to say the least. Ashe, for example, is trying to help people with prosthetic limbs.

The goal is to implant an electrode in a person’s brain that would collect signals that tell an arm or leg to move. The signals would be interpreted by a mini-computer and broadcast to another device that would understand the signal and tell the prosthetic what to do.

At CU Denver, first-year doctoral students take courses that include cellular and molecular neurobiology and biomedical core courses, Ribera said.

Most of the roughly six years it takes to earn that Ph.D., though, are spent working — sometimes night and day — in a lab.

First-year students, such as Holmes, rotate through three labs, working with a different researcher in each for 12 weeks.

At the end of that first year — the program continues almost year-round — “the student sits down with three faculty members, for 45 minutes to an hour. The three faculty members represent the three courses,” Ribera said.

The goal is not to pass or fail the student, or even to grade them.

“It’s an oral exam — a discussion, really,” she said. That discussion includes a student’s research strengths and weaknesses.

The students’ work is scrutinized not to see whether they made any scientific discoveries but to make sure they are on the right track to understanding how to design research that

the denver post B denverpost.com B sunday, august 5, 2012

NEWS «19A

THEATER S ECURI T Y

Door alarms cost little but are not widely used

Evidence sits at the crime scene behind the Century Aurora 16, in which a gunman opened fire July 20. The rampage left 12 dead and 58 wounded.

Authorities say suspect James Holmes entered the theater through its rear door. Cinemark, the theater operator, declined to comment on whether the rear door was alarmed but disabled, but there is no indication it was. AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Cinemark won’t say whether Aurora rear door was alarmed

By Chuck Murphy and Karen E. Crummy The Denver Post

aurora» A $70 alarm on the exit door in theater 9 might have prevented a mass shooting at the Century Aurora 16 multiplex.

But in today’s world of the multiplex, moving large crowds in and out of the building efficiently is paramount, and those exit doors play a key role in clearing a theater quickly.

Doors leading from a theater auditorium to the outside, such as the one police say was utilized by James Eagan Holmes to slip in and kill 12 and injure 58, are not only common at most multiplex theaters worldwide but are also required by most fire codes. And while there is neither prohibition against putting alarms on them nor requirement to do so, many theater chains eschew them and instead hope some patrons exit that way to clear the room quickly and prepare for the next showing.

“It depends on whether they really want to force their audience to come back through the lobby to exit,” said Erich Friend, a consultant on theater and performing-arts safety. “That can create kind of a traffic jam.”

Through a spokesperson for its attorney, Cinemark, operator of the Century Aurora 16, declined to comment on whether the rear door that police say Holmes used was alarmed

will lead them to answer the scientific question they are asking, Ribera said.

By the time they are ready to defend their doctoral dissertation, students are expected to have their research published in a peer-reviewed journal, Ribera said.

It’s a rigorous, demanding program.

“But if this is what you want to do, if it’s your passion,” the load isn’t crushing, Ribera said.

Of those admitted, nearly 90 percent will earn their Ph.D., she said.

Federal stipends, common at neuroscience graduate programs across the country, allow students to devote their time to coursework and lab work, Ashe said.

“It’s very unusual for students in our

but disabled, but there is no indication it was. At another Cinemark theater, the Century 16 Bel Mar in Lakewood, the doors leading to parking lots are not alarmed and remained that way last week.

Bel Mar’s theater 9 has a door to the side of the screen leading to the parking lot, similar to what appears to be the arrangement at the Aurora multiplex. That would be in keeping with the international fire code used

by Aurora and many other cities, which requires two exits from a room holding up to 500 patrons.

The capacity of Aurora’s theater 9 has not yet been released. Attorneys hired by Aurora have cited a broad interpretation of a judge’s gag order as reason to refuse requests from The Denver Post for copies of the building plans for the Century 16 there.

Theater 9 at the Lakewood multiplex seats a maximum of 432. Under the formula required by the international fire code, which calls for onefifth of an inch of exit width for every occupant, that capacity requires a little more than 7 feet of total exit openings to get them out. Some head toward the lobby, some directly outside.

Those exterior doors must remain unlocked from the inside, though they can be locked to the outside. Police believe Holmes went undetected by theater personnel as he propped

program or most other neuroscience programs to have jobs,” he said. “It’s unrealistic.”

In Minnesota, first-year students typically spend up to 60 hours a week on coursework, in class and in lab rotation.

Competition among the chosen few in the program — at Minnesota, that’s about nine to 12 students each year — can become an issue if students are vying for lab spots with a particularly popular faculty researcher.

Quiet and reserved By many accounts, Holmes would have appeared to be an excellent candidate for a doctoral program.

People in the comfortable San Diego suburb where Holmes grew up

open the door while he went to his car, got his guns and other equipment and returned.

“The exit doors should not be locked,” said Capt. Keith W. Dix, deputy fire marshal for West Metro Fire Rescue, which covers the multiplex at Bel Mar. “The concern is not about people getting in. Our No. 1 concern is making sure people can get out.”

Theater companies have known for decades that exterior doors are convenient entry points for thieves.

One friend buys a ticket, then props or opens the door so his or her buddy can get in for free.

It’s as old as the multiplex itself and in such common usage that options for accomplishing an unlawful sneak-in are outlined online on blogs such as moviecultists.com, which covers the topic in a post called: “How to sneak into a movie: 3 easy methods.”

“While the front entrance is usually crawling with theater employees, these exit-only doorways are, more often than not, completely void of anyone nearby,” the post notes. “So go in, buy a ticket, walk to the exitonly doorway, open it, and let all your friends in.”

In 1997, the industry learned that a propped-open exit door can pose a much greater threat than just theft.

In a North Vancouver, British Columbia, incident that bore disturbing similarities to the Aurora theater

have described him as quiet and reserved back then. A classmate from Westview High School told The New York Times that Holmes played soccer and ran track for a while but gave up those sports to devote himself to academics.

Holmes won merit scholarships to the University of California, Riverside and graduated in 2010 as an honors student in neuroscience, school officials said.

At UC-Riverside, Holmes “was at the top of the top,” Chancellor Timothy White said at a news conference after the shootings. “He really distinguished himself.”

The world of neuroscience research is small enough that some resented its

shooting, a man dressed in a disguise burst into a theater from a proppedopen exterior exit door, then opened fire. But he was interested only in killing a rival gang member and did not spray the theater with bullets.

Just as was initially true for some in the Aurora case, patrons believed the gunfire was part of the film.

The shooter was later caught and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years, but his actions did not lead to changes in the theater industry, such as door alarms.

Those who use them today do so not to prevent the unthinkable like the Aurora massacre but just to keep the place secure.

Jeff Logan owns Logan Luxury Theaters Corp. — three movie theaters and a drive-in in three South Dakota towns. He has always had alarms.

“In the early days,” he said, “it prevented a kid from paying for a ticket and coming in and then letting 10 of his buddies in who were waiting in the alley.”

It also prevents teenagers from opening the door to sneak in beer and other alcohol.

“The alarms are effective at preventing all sorts of mischief,” Logan said. “We know when it goes off, somebody is up to something.”

Chuck Murphy: 303-954-1829, cmurphy@denverpost.com or twitter.com/cmurphydenpost

recent link to an accused mass murderer and declined to comment for this story.

“The neuroscience community, like all of the public, is deeply saddened by the tragedy that occurred in Aurora, and (I) am sorry to say that we can’t do an interview at this time,” Todd Bentsen, director of public information and outreach at the Society for Neuroscience, said in an e-mail.

Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or twitter.com/karenauge Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost

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THE MANNING FOCUS

M ID N IG HT M A S S AC R E AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Team asserts mental illness Holmes’ lawyers seek evidence to study client

By John Ingold The Denver Post

B

roncos quarterback Peyton Manning looks for an open receiver against the Chicago Bears during the first quarter of their preseason opener at Soldier Field in Chicago on Thursday night. In a debut delayed briefly by lightning, Manning completed four of seven passes in the game’s opening drive, which ended with a goal-line interception. It was the game’s only series for Manning. The Broncos won the game 31-3. »story, 1B AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Photos: From the preseason debut of Manning and the Broncos »denverpost.com/sportsphotos

CU lenient on lobbyists, say similar schools

HEARING » 13A

Paperwork: Landlord acts to evict Holmes from apartment »4A

Larimer event wasn’t a party for everyone

Several universities close in size to the University of Colorado do not allow advocates on their payroll to lobby on behalf of outside clients.

By Anthony Cotton The Denver Post

Several universities similar in size to the University of Colorado take a stricter approach than CU to their lobbyists working for outside clients.

The associate vice president for political and government affairs at the University of Oregon, Betsy Boyd, is a registered federal lobbyist who works from the school’s main campus in Eugene.

Boyd said she can’t imagine a scenario in which she, or any other university employee, would be able to take on outside clients while lobbying for the school.

“There would be a whole lot to figure out there,” she said.

The University of Washington has a twoperson staff based in Washington, D.C., and neither of the federal relations staffers is doing any work outside of university responsibilities.

University employees can take on outside work, but only after submitting forms asking permission from their supervisors. Even then, that work would be limited to no more than one day a week, a spokesman said.

At CU, three highly paid employees responsible for lobbying on behalf of the school, including the head of government relations, CU » 6A

Attorneys for accused movie theater killer James Holmes on Thursday asserted publicly for the first time what is widely expected to be the foundation of their defense: Holmes is mentally ill.

At Holmes’ third court appearance since the July 20 shootings that killed 12 and injured 58, his lawyers told a judge that prosecutors aren’t sharing evidence with them quickly enough.

The delay, defense attorney Daniel King said, is blocking the defense’s investigation of Holmes’ mental health.

“We as a defense team cannot begin to examine the nature or depth of Mr. Holmes’ mental illness until we receive full disclosure,” King said.

Holmes, who attended the hearing in shackles and a protective vest visible beneath a maroon jail jumpsuit, showed no reaction to King’s statement. As in his previous court appearance, Holmes sat with glimmerless eyes throughout Thursday’s hearing, looking at the judge and speakers without appearing engaged. His infa-

By Kristen Leigh Painter The Denver Post

amond ring she designed with her mother more than 30 years ago, until a Sunday trip to Water World.

“This is a story of prayers, persistence and honesty,” said Stan Harper, as he praised the North Table Mountain Water and Sanitation District workers who spent hours Tuesday searching the sewers for the lost rings.

Telling the story of the two-day search for the rings brought Wilkerson to tears.

Around 10 p.m. Sunday, Harper, 93, who shares a home with Wilkerson, said he woke up to find his friend lying on the floor screaming and crying. She had accidentally flushed

Hard questions are being asked after a private event at Larimer Square rerouted traffic for three days, closed businesses and created numerous inconveniences for the neighborhood’s residents — an event that put virtually no money in the city of Denver’s coffers.

Ameriprise Financial, a Minneapolis-based company, hosted a private “welcome” party for the company’s top advisers, who are in town for a convention. The event sealed off the popular Larimer Street to the public Wednesday night and congested traffic since Monday while the event was being set up.

In addition to the inconvenience factor, eyebrows are being raised regarding the city’s apparent lack of financial benefit from this deal.

By finding its way through a policy loophole, Ameriprise was able get the street-closure permit — which normally has a price tag of approximately $22,000 — for free.

“People are somewhat taking advantage of the current policies and procedures,” said Kevin Scott, special event and film liaison for Denver. “I think this event really brings some of that to light even more. A lot of policies and

RINGS » 5A

CLOSINGS » 13A

Gail Wilkerson, 57, of Golden accidentally flushed two sentimental rings given to her by her parents down the toilet. Heather Rousseau, The Denver Post

BURIED TREASURE

Golden woman’s prized rings rescued from sewer

By Tegan Hanlon The Denver Post

golden» Gail Wilkerson says she was a tomboy growing up — she played tennis, swam, ran track and tried her hand at gymnastics.

So the diamond ring given to her by her father when she graduated from Westminster High School in 1974 was nothing less than a shock.

“I mean, I did all the sports and everything.

I was the one who came home dirty,” said Wilkerson, 57, as she gazed at the jewelry on her left middle and ring fingers that was absent earlier this week.

She never took that ring off, nor a second di-

INS I D E Business » 9-12A | Comics » 9-11C | Lottery » 2A | Markets » 11A | Movies » 5C | Obituaries » 19A | Puzzles » 9-10C

6

the denver post B denverpost.com B friday, august 10, 2012

Victims find closure in seeing Holmes

By Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

arapahoe county» Taryn Dirito took a cathartic step Thursday when she walked into a courtroom and looked at the man suspected of the mass shooting that has filled her days and nights with fear.

“We just want closure,” said Dirito, 18, who was in the Century Aurora 16 theater July 20 for the premiere of the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises.” Police say James Eagan Holmes opened fire on that showing’s audience, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others.

Dirito and other survivors, victims and their family members are filling out seats in court hearings in the case against Holmes, many coming for a chance to look the suspected killer in the eyes.

Dirito and her friend, Juliana Curtis, who also was in the theater, went to the hearing that had been called to discuss motions by the media to lift parts of a gag order imposed by the judge.

“When he walked in, we shut down, our hearts just dropped,” Dirito said. “It was unnerving.

But it made it more real.”

Dirito said she has had trouble sleeping and has seen a

HEARING «FROM 1A mous dyed red hair continued its recession into his natural brown, while thickening sideburns marched down his cheeks.

In the audience, the brother of slain theater shooting victim Micayla Medek glared at Holmes, who largely did not look back.

“He’s just such a coward,” Shane Medek said. “He wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

Medek said their eyes met once, briefly: “I’m glad he knows I will be here every time.”

King said that so far the defense team has received 2,677 pages of documents from the prosecution. Most of those are written reports by police officers. King said the prosecution has not yet shared any photographs, recordings of interviews or expert reports.

Arapahoe County Deputy District Attorney Rich Orman said police detectives are still working to interview witnesses and prepare the reports from those interviews. Prosecutors said hundreds of people must

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Aurora victim Pierce O’Farrill is checked by security before entering the Arapahoe County Courthouse on Thursday to attend a hearing related to the incident. Stephen Mitchell, The Denver Post therapist. This week, she bought a ticket for a midday showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“I walked into the theater and started crying,” she said, adding that she stayed nervous until after the scene when the shooting began. That night, she was able to get a good night’s sleep.

Prosecutors are meeting with victims and survivors after hearings, giving them updates on the case and providing them with information on how to get help if they need it.

Miranda Norris was in the

theater next door when the shooting began and said she came to the hearing to get closure.

“I just wanted to know that he is in trouble and he is going to get punishment for what he did,” she said. “When I saw him, I just wanted to get up and be aggressive toward him. I have anger inside of me.”

People in the hearing were subjected to a brief moment of panic when a woman with a shaved head and a ribbon on her arm stood up and interrupted the proceedings, saying she

still be interviewed or re-interviewed in the case — which is only 3 weeks old.

“There is a large queue of information to be typed up,” Orman said.

The back-and-forth on closely guarded investigation records stood unexpectedly center stage at a hearing that had been scheduled to discuss matters of public information.

Attorneys for a coalition of roughly 20 news media organizations had filed motions asking 18th Judicial District Chief Judge William Sylvester to unseal the case file and clarify the case’s gag order, which the media attorneys argued is being abused to withhold public information only tangentially connected to the shooting. The Denver Post is among the organizations party to the motion.

Currently, almost all the documents in Holmes’ case file — as well as the record that shows what documents have been filed — are closed to the public. The only exceptions are several documents that Sylvester has said can be public. Attorneys for the prosecution and the defense have alluded during court hear-

ings to other motions that remain sealed, and Sylvester has also issued unsealed orders that make reference to sealed pleadings.

Attorney Steven Zansberg, representing the news organizations, said the arrangement keeps the public from understanding the significance of the information that is unsealed.

“The public,” Zansberg said, “is completely in the dark about what is going on in this judicial proceeding.”

Both the prosecution and the defense, though, said the case should remain sealed out of concern for the ongoing investigation and Holmes’ ability to receive a fair trial. Both sides expressed worry that making more information about the case public would taint the potential jury pool.

“It is much too premature at this juncture to unseal the documents,” said prosecutor Jacob Edson. King said the amount of attention the case has received “has resulted in all kinds of problems already.”

He specifically mentioned the unsealing of a motion from Holmes’ attorneys that revealed Holmes had been seeing a psy-

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chiatrist and that was altered four days later to redact the information about the psychiatrist. He said the revelation prompted a wave of unfair media speculation about his client.

“Both parties have a constitutional right to a fair process,” King said, later adding that the victims, “I’m sure want to see this process result in a just outcome.”

Outside the courtroom, Medek said the discussion of fairness for Holmes angered him.

“They kept talking about fairness in there? C’mon,” Medek said. “Where’s my fairness?

Where’s my sister’s fairness?”

Sylvester did not rule on either of the news organizations’ motions, indicating he would make a decision in the next few days.

The next hearing for Holmes, who faces 24 counts of first-degree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder, is Thursday.

At that hearing, attorneys are expected to debate whether a notebook Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist is protected under doctor-patient confidentiality.

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ordinances are being reviewed.”

It’s not unusual for Denver streets to be closed for events — for everything from festivals to fundraisers. City policy allows the fees for such events to be waived when it benefits a nonprofit, but the line between for-profit and nonprofit organizations is becoming increasingly hazy as such events gain in popularity.

Ameriprise worked with Larimer Associates, the managing company for Larimer Square’s real estate, which consists of restaurants, coffeehouses and specialty boutiques. Larimer Associates then enlisted the help of an area nonprofit organization, We Don’t Waste, to file the permit request.

“The ordinance provides that there must be a (nonprofit) beneficiary involved, and we were approached by Epicurean Catering and Larimer Square to see if we were interested in being a beneficiary in their activities, and we agreed,” said Arlan Preblud, executive director of We Don’t Waste.

In exchange for filing the paperwork and proving that it could meet the city’s insurance requirements for the event, We Don’t Waste received a financial contribution from Ameriprise.

Preblud said the event helped foster relationships between his organization and forprofit companies, which he hopes will continue to benefit We Don’t Waste and its hungerfighting mission in the future.

A Larimer Square spokeswoman said We Don’t Waste benefited both from the financial donation and that it got all the leftover food from the event. Epicurean did not return a message Thursday evening.

While all of this was done legally, it raises serious procedural questions for city officials.

“The event scene is changing a bit,” Scott said. “And we are working on policies and procedures to find a better way.”

He did not specify which policies are being reviewed.

The city of Denver’s special-event requests, which include private parties such as the one Wednesday night, increased by 30 percent from 2010 to 2011. Now, Scott says, the city is receiving more and more requests that straddle the blurry line between charitable good and corporate play.

While the street fee was waived, Ameriprise still

bought out most of Larimer Square’s businesses for the night, closing off the sidewalks to any pedestrian not wearing a party badge, and paid a private company for the barricades and any additional police presence that was needed, and gave the city $350 for parking meters.

When Mark Greenberg, owner of The Market, received an offer letter from Larimer Associates asking for him to name his price for closing down his business for the night, he refused to entertain the idea.

“This was not a political statement for me. It was a business statement,” Greenberg said. “I have a good rapport with Larimer Square. I can see why they did it. But I don’t think it was good for the block to close the street, personally.”

Greenberg, who has been in business at 1445 Larimer St. for 29 years, relies on a client base of about 500 regular customers daily.

“I’m not upset with Larimer Square,” he said. “But those people are never going to come into my store. My base of business is local, regular people.”

The Market stayed open, but customers couldn’t access the front door.

“They had to come in through the backdoor, by the dumpsters,” Greenberg said.

He never responded to the letter with his closing quote and doesn’t know how much Ameriprise paid other businesses in Larimer Square for the night.

Neither Larimer Associates nor Ameriprise would disclose what the businesses were paid.

“I’m sure it was a big dollar amount, or I don’t think (the businesses) would’ve closed,” Greenberg said.

Ocean Prime, 1465 Larimer St., was the only other business that stayed open as its front door faces 15th Street.

Without the city, and subsequently the taxpayers, receiving a financial perk from these events, residents were left feeling as if their hands were tied.

“The neighborhood sure wasn’t consulted,” said Dave Caprera, whose apartment overlooks Larimer Square, in an e-mail to The Denver Post.

The loud music reverberated throughout Caprera’s apartment well into the evening hours Wednesday.

“There should be a city policy that includes neighborhood input,” Caprera said. “I question the economic, social and political decision to sell a public street for three days to a private concern.”

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had information that could help the defense team.

The 37-year-old woman from Tucson, whose name was not released, was escorted out of the courtroom by deputies, briefly detained and then released, Sheriff Grayson Robinson said.

Carli Richards, who has 22 wounds from buckshot, came to get a glimpse of Holmes.

“The only vision I have of him is him throwing tear gas at me.

It was almost a relief to see that he is just some scrawny dude,” she said. “He’s just a cowardly person who did something awful. Just like me, he is able to be injured.”

But the incident with the woman in the courtroom unnerved her and her boyfriend, Chris Townsend.

“We just wanted her out of there,” she said.

Townsend, too, came to the hearing to see Holmes.

“He looked a lot smaller without all that body armor on,” Townsend said, referring to the gear authorities say Holmes was wearing during the rampage in the theater.

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IGGY COMES TO DENVER

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MI DN I G HT MA SSACRE AU RORA THEATER SHOOTING

No hint Holmes ill in 2011 ART IN LIGHT AND SHADOWS

His Illinois grad school papers reveal a student who dazzled professors.

By Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

James Eagan Holmes, the man suspected in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, offered no hint of mental problems in early 2011 when he applied for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The university on March 21, 2011, accepted Holmes into the neuroscience program, offering him a $22,660 annual stipend and waiving his tuition and fees as long as he kept in good academic standing.

Holmes ultimately rejected the offer to attend the University of Colorado Denver, where he was a student in the neuroscience program until dropping out in early June.

He has been charged with 142 counts in connection with the July 20 attack during the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises.” Holmes allegedly burst into the midnight premiere and killed 12 people and injured 58 others in the Century Aurora 16 theater.

HOLMES » 10A

Trial: Experts say plea bargains on mental illness are tricky.»10A

L

oveland artist Kenneth Knox works on a painting outside the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver on Friday, the opening of the Denver Plein Air Arts Festival that runs through Sept. 16. Artists will paint on location in the Golden Triangle Museum District, along the 16th Street Mall, in several city parks, at Denver Mountain Parks, and along the Lariat Loop National Scenic & Historic Byway. At left, Arvada artist Cheryl St. John works on a painting of the City and County Building. Organizers say the festival is the largest of its kind in the country. Photos by Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

By John Ingold The Denver Post

LONDON 2012

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MI DN I G HT MA SSACRE AU RORA THEATER SHOOTING

Uncertainty of insanity pleas Legal experts say Holmes’ attorneys will likely struggle to secure a deal based on mental illness

By Jessica Fender The Denver Post

The life-in-prison plea deal for mentally ill mass shooter Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona this week shows how difficult — and risky — insanity pleas in murder cases can be for prosecutors, legal observers say.

And that task is even more challenging in Colorado, where the burden falls to prosecutors to prove a defendant’s sanity at the time of the crime.

As information about accused theater shooter James Eagan Holmes’ mental health emerges, it appears prosecutors could face a choice: Cut a Loughner-like deal that guarantees prison time, or risk a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity that could leave Holmes institutionalized with a hope of someday walking free.

Both Holmes and Loughner exhibited bizarre behavior and allegedly shot into crowds that included children in high-profile rampages that had farreaching effects on their communities.

The horrific details of those crimes make it a more difficult choice to craft a plea deal, said Steve Jensen, chief deputy district attorney in Jefferson County.

“As a prosecutor, you would have to have some serious concerns about your ability to prevail ... to negotiate a deal like (Loughner’s),” Jensen said.

“But the thought that someone seriously ill and dangerous would one day be released back into society is something that has to weigh heavily.”

Jensen’s prosecution team risked a trial in the case of schizophrenic Deer Creek Middle School shooter Bruco Eastwood — one of the Denver metro area’s most recent high-profile insanity cases — only for a jury to find him not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity.

Eastwood shot and injured two students Feb. 23, 2010. Once state mentalhospital doctors deem him safe to reenter society and a judge concurs, Eastwood will be set free.

Holmes, 24, has been charged with two dozen counts of first-degree murder — two counts for each person who died when he allegedly opened fire June 20 at the Century Aurora 16 theater. He also faces 116 counts of attempted murder for the 58 injured victims who survived.

Jensen said he can foresee the difficulties his Arapahoe County colleagues are likely to face.

Eastwood submitted to a lengthy taped interview just after the shooting that ended up being the prosecution’s only chance to question him. Holmes, on the other hand, quickly clammed up after his arrest, authorities say.

Jensen said that cases potentially involving the death penalty are made even more difficult because of lingering controversy in the field of forensic psychiatry over whether it’s ethical for practitioners to participate.

And prosecutors in Colorado are required to prove a defendant is sane during the crime. Thirty-five other states require the defense team to show their client was insane at the time, according to information from legal resource website FindLaw.com.

Whoever has the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt has the tougher battle, said Quin Denvir, the former federal public defender who with Loughner’s lawyer, Judy Clarke, represented Unabomber Ted Kaczynski in the 1990s.

“That’s a problem, particularly when you’re talking about mental illness,” said Denvir, now in private practice in Sacramento, Calif. “It’s a really imprecise area. You have to meet a certain

standard of proof based on expert testimony, and that’s much more difficult.”

Denvir said plea deals in cases like Loughner's and Holmes’ can be winwin-wins.

They take the death penalty off the table, the greatest concern for defense attorneys. From the prosecution’s perspective, it’s often a way to send defendants to prison rather than a state mental hospital.

And for victims, they provide quick closure on cases that would otherwise drag out for years, Denvir said.

“Having it drag on for years, to testify and relive it, that’s a pretty horrible thing,” he said.

Before the Eastwood verdict, Deborah Weber really wanted a trial. She knew nothing about the man who wounded her daughter or what had happened outside the school.

But the outcome that left Eastwood in a mental hospital instead of prison galled her.

“I ended that trial with 100 percent clarity and all my questions answered,” Weber said. “But if I had my choice of a trial or knowing he would get life in prison, I would choose life in prison.”

In Holmes’ case, prosecutors won’t necessarily have to meet a higher bar by showing he intended to kill people, because of the way they’ve charged his alleged crimes. But they will need to show he was able to distinguish right from wrong.

In murder cases where a defendant’s sanity is called into question, attorneys pick apart his actions before and after the alleged crime, looking for clues that might show his state of mind, said Christina Habas, former Denver District Court judge-turnedplaintiff’s attorney.

“Did the defendant run? Did he hide

HOLMES «FROM 1A Authorities also accused Holmes of booby-trapping his Aurora apartment with explosives to cause further damage.

The University of Illinois released documents from Holmes’ application process to become a neuroscience graduate student at the school, complete with a personal statement and a photograph of Holmes in sunglasses pointing a strand of hay at a llama.

Information in the documents released by Illinois, first reported Friday by The NewsGazette in Champaign, offers a window into the world of the aspiring scientist and academic striving to learn as much as he could about how the brain works.

“Those who met you … during your interview visit felt that your personal and professional qualities are truly outstanding and that you will be an excellent match for our program,” said the Illinois acceptance letter from professor J. Lee Beverly.

The trove of documents released include Holmes’ résumé, a personal statement, letters of reference with the names blacked out, confirmation of a criminal-background check, a schedule of Holmes’ March 2011 campus visit and multiple email exchanges among school officials about the prospective student who professors winkingly referred to as “Llama.”

Holmes was the final neuroscience candidate to visit the campus and obviously wooed the professors, making the tentative list to become a distinguished fellow.

The 176 pages of information provide a picture of a Holmes very different from the alleged killer seen in an Arapahoe County courtroom in recent weeks — a 16-month span in which he went from interviewing for graduate programs to being accused of 24 counts of first-degree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder.

On Thursday, Holmes’ attorneys said their client is mentally ill, arguing they needed more information to help their investigation into “the nature or depth of Mr. Holmes’ mental illness.”

But in March 2011, Holmes was busy scheduling trips to colleg-

James Holmes submitted this photo with his application to graduate school at the University of Illinois. es, ending his e-mail exchanges with a jaunty “cheers.” He stood out from the other applicants with his pithy photograph taken with a llama — the context of which was not explained in any documents released by the University of Illinois.

“You can’t miss the llama,” wrote Samuel Beshers, neuroscience program coordinator, in an e-mail to a colleague.

Holmes’ application reveals

his grade-point average from the University of California at Riverside was 3.94 on a 4.0 scale, that he was a Phi Beta Kappa member and his GRE verbal score was in the 98th percentile and quantitative score was in the 94th percentile. His analytical-writing score was in the 45th percentile.

His résumé also included an entry from his work at a children’s camp in which he said he

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Steve Jensen, chief deputy district attorney in Jefferson County the crime or make up a story?” said Habas, who discussed insanity pleas in general, but not Holmes’ case specifically, at a recent Colorado Bar Association event.

Holmes, for example, quickly and quietly surrendered to police after his alleged rampage, authorities have said.

But was that a sign he didn’t comprehend the gravity of his actions? Or was it the decision of a rational man realizing that resistance was futile?

Likewise, the months Holmes spent allegedly stockpiling weapons and ammunition, the sophisticated series of explosive booby traps he left in his apartment and the high intellect of the former neuroscience graduate student can cut both ways, said Karen Steinhauser, a University of Denver adjunct law professor and former prosecutor.

“Both sides could use” those facts, Steinhauser said. “The issue is going to be what does a psychiatrist do with that information?”

Insanity pleas come at great risk for defendants as well, said Denver defense attorney Pete Hedeen.

Holmes would have to submit to psychological evaluation by state doctors, who share their findings — in-

“took an active stance as a positive role model.”

Letters of reference, apparently from his undergraduate professors but whose names were blacked out, said Holmes was “among the top 1 percent of honors students and is self-motivated, intelligent, and driven.”

“James is an extraordinarily gifted student who is very dedicated to his academic pursuits,” one letter said. “He takes an active role in his education, and brings a great amount of intellectual and emotional maturity into the classroom. He is passionate about a career in science and seeks out opportunities to learn as much as possible about his chosen field of interest, and how he can positively contribute to the world.”

In his personal statement, Holmes revealed that as a high school student he interned at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, working in Terrence J. Sejnowski’s computational neurology lab.

He said in other labs, he explored the “facets of chemical analysis” and advanced to complicated analytical techniques.

“Rational people act based on incentives for self-fulfillment, including fulfilling needs of

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“As a prosecutor, you would have to have some serious concerns about your ability to prevail. ... But the thought that someone seriously ill and dangerous would one day be released back into society is something that has to weigh heavily.”

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cluding any self-incriminating information — with the prosecution.

Nor are they a favorite of jurors, he said.

In Eastwood’s case, the defense team thought they had overwhelming evidence of a defective state of mind in Eastwood’s journal, which detailed the long-untreated schizophrenic’s torment by imagined mutant creatures infesting his organs.

Physical tics and other manifestations of his illness were evident as he sat at the defense table.

Even so, jurors deliberated for two days and ultimately split their decision, finding that Eastwood was sane at the time he carried the weapon onto school grounds — a low-level felony — but insane when he pulled the trigger.

“It was a textbook case of (not guilty by reason of insanity), and still the jury couldn’t bring themselves to fully acquit,” Hedeen said. “Juries are very skeptical of insanity pleas. They have preconceived notions that the person is going to walk.”

Jessica Fender: 303-954-1244, jfender@denverpost.com or twitter.com/oh_fender

self-development and needs of feeling useful and helpful to others,” Holmes wrote in his application. “I look forward to fulfilling my quest to advance my knowledge, and I plan to use my critical thinking skills by studying the subject I am passionate about, neuroscience.”

He described his “unquenchable curiosity, a strong desire to know and explore the unknown, and a need to persist against the odds.”

He said his goal was to analyze memory.

“I have always been fascinated by the complexities of long lost thought seemingly arising out of nowhere into a stream of awareness,” he wrote. “… These are the very cognitive processes which enable us to acquire information and retain it. They are at the core of what distinguishes us as people. Due to the seemingly infinite vastness of indefinite knowledge, we must be selective in our pursuits of knowledge.

This is why I have chosen to study the primary source of all things, our own minds.”

Among the documents are two pages of handwritten notes detailing some parts of Holmes’ background — although it’s not clear who wrote them. Among

Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367, jpmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jpmeyerdpost Denver Post staff writer Chuck Murphy contributed to this report.

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the entries is a listing of Colorado, Iowa and Alabama — apparently universities he was considering.

Officials at the University of Iowa on Friday said they were looking for records that would verify whether Holmes applied there. And officials at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which also has a graduate program in neurosciences, declined to release any information Friday, citing federal privacy laws.

Holmes ultimately decided to attend CU. When he made the decision not to attend Illinois, Holmes wrote a short e-mail in which he declined the university’s offer and apologized “for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Later that night, a colleague forwarded the news to Beshers, the neuroscience program coordinator.

“Glad we put the $$ and effort into bringing him,” Beshers responded.

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MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

DA: June was a telling time DENVER & THE WEST

Prosecutors lay out CU-linked events they assert motivated suspect James Holmes to kill.

METRO STATE TUITION FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

MOST TEACHERS HELP BUY FOOD FOR STUDENTS

By John Ingold, Jessica Fender and Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

More than half of Colorado teachers dip into their own pockets to buy food for hungry students, and about a third spend up to $50 a month. »6A

Hugo, from left, Oscar and Juan Juarez take a break on an Auraria campus lawn Tuesday. The three brothers, who came to the U.S. illegally with family in 1999, attend Metropolitan State University of Denver and take advantage of the reduced tuition rate for illegal-immigrant students. Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

THE BOOK ON MUSICAL “MORMON” Those with tickets for the sold-out Denver run of “The Book of Mormon” are in for a taut, joyously performed musical of near perfection. »1C

NATION & WORLD

HAITI IN PATH OF TROPICAL STORM ISAAC Tropical Storm Isaac churned toward Hispaniola on Thursday, a crossing that could determine the potential impact on Florida but almost certainly will prove devastating for Haiti. »19A

“I’m pretty sure it’s going to change my life.”

By Anthony Cotton The Denver Post

F

or Oscar Juarez and his brothers, Juan and Hugo, every day is about taking risks.

As the children of parents who illegally immigrated into the United States in 1999, most of the time those gambles — such as searching for work — come with negative connotations and always the chance of deportation.

“It’s really tough; you get frustrated because all we want is the chance to get out of the shadows, to become someone,” said Oscar, 20, a freshman. “We’ve talked about going back, but Mexico is a place we don’t know, and we feel like, ‘We grew up here, we

centennial» On the day in June that James Holmes failed the crucial oral examination for his neuroscience program at the University of Colorado Denver, he bought an assault-style rifle.

Also in June, the same month that professors told Holmes that perhaps he wasn’t cut out for a career in neuroscience, he quietly stockpiled explosives.

Holmes also made threats in June that prompted CU officials to contact police.

That confluence of events was laid out Thursday in an Arapahoe County courtroom by the lead prosecutor in the case against Holmes, the suspect in the Aurora theater massacre.

In the court hearing, which centered on access to education records related to Holmes, prosecutors from the county district attorney’s office sought to draw a straight, bold line between Holmes’ purported academic failings at CU and the events of July 20, when authorities allege Holmes walked into an Aurora movie theater and killed 12 and injured 58 others in one of the worst mass shootings in American history.

HOLMES » 17A

L IF ET IM E BA N

Armstrong to lose 7 Tour de France crowns Cyclist Lance Armstrong says he is finished with fighting drug charges.

By Jim Vertuno The Associated Press

belong here.’ ” And so, when the brothers heard about Metropolitan State University of Denver and its newly established tuition rate for illegal-immigrant students, they decided to take another risk: They wanted to show that they indeed belong.

“I’m 26 years old. I should have my degree. I should have my career,” said Juan, a sophomore in mechanical engineering.

His brother Hugo, 24, is a sophomore in psychology.

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austin, texas» The U.S. AntiDoping Agency said Thursday it will strip Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles after he declared he was finished fighting the drug charges that threaten his legacy as one of the greatest cyclists of all time.

Travis Tygart, USADA’s chief executive, said Armstrong also would be hit with a lifetime ban Friday.

“There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ For me, that time is now,” LANCE » 7A

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HOLMES «FROM 1A

U N IV ER S IT Y O F C O LO R A D O D EN V ER

James Holmes timeline

Thursday’s details marked the most extensive explanation authorities have offered to date as to the motive behind the shooting. And it means prosecutors and Holmes’ defense team — which disputed the details of the prosecution’s account — have now staked out opposing narratives for what allegedly led Holmes to the movie theater for a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

In a previous hearing, Holmes’ attorney Daniel King has suggested that his client is mentally ill. Prosecutors, meanwhile, on Thursday portrayed Holmes as isolated and dejected after the collapse of his goal to become a neuroscientist.

“When that goal does not end up being reached, … all of that is relevant to his decision to withdraw from school, booby-trap his apartment, buy ammunition and explosives, and commit this act,” Karen Pearson, the case’s lead prosecutor, said in court Thursday.

Denver attorney Craig Silverman said prosecutors appear to be trying to shift the focus of the case away from Holmes’ mental health and instead recast the shooting as an act of revenge.

“The prosecution is starting to build a case that these murders were a response to a broken relationship between Holmes and CU,” Silverman said.

Holmes failed his oral exam June 7, Pearson said. That is the same day authorities have said Holmes bought a semiautomatic rifle, one of three guns officials say was used in the attack.

Also in June, Pearson said Holmes made threats that so worried CU officials that they contacted police. She didn’t specify what the threats were.

Aurora police Chief Daniel Oates said Thursday his department was not notified of any threats, either by CU leaders or by the campus police department.

“We didn’t know about any of this before the shooting,” Oates said.

King suggested the prosecution has its facts wrong. “I would question the validity of some of that,” King said of Pearson’s statements.

During the hearing, Pearson said Holmes was banned from the CU campus and had his key-card access to secure areas of buildings on the Anschutz Medical Campus revoked. But CU spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery asserted that neither was true.

Montgomery said Holmes voluntarily withdrew from the neuroscience program. His key card was deactivated after his withdrawal, as it would be for

BUSINESS «17A

School hires lawyers for employees who may have had link to suspect

March 2011: James Holmes accepts the University of Colorado’s offer to join the neuroscience graduate program.

May 2011: Holmes moves to Denver, renting an apartment at 1690 Paris St. in Aurora.

June 2011: Holmes starts classes at CU Denver.

Oct, 28, 2011: Holmes is ticketed for driving 46 mph in a 35-mph zone.

April 28, 2012: Holmes makes his last posting on the dating website OKCupid.

May 22, 2012: Holmes buys the first of two Glock pistols at Gander Mountain in Aurora.

May 28, 2012: Holmes buys a Remington 12-gauge shotgun at Bass Pro Shops in Denver.

Early June 2012: Dr. Lynn Fenton, a psychiatrist, calls members of campus BETA team with a report about Holmes, according to anonymous sources.

June 7, 2012: Holmes buys a Smith & Wesson M&P15 at Gander Mountain in Thornton.

June 7, 2012: Holmes takes and fails his oral board.

June 10, 2012: Holmes officially withdraws from CU Denver.

July 2, 2012: Holmes places $306 order with TacticalGear.com for a combat vest, magazine holders and a knife, paying extra for expedited two-day shipping.

July 5, 2012: Holmes signs up for an account on AdultFriendFinder website.

July 6, 2012: Holmes returns to the Bass Pro Shops store in Denver and buys another Glock pistol.

July 20, 2012: Holmes is accused of an early-morning shooting rampage inside an Aurora movie theater that kills 12 and injures 58 people.

any student, Montgomery said.

King, meanwhile, said information about Holmes’ time at CU is largely unconnected to the case.

“Motive is not an element of any crime charged here,” King said. “It is irrelevant what the motive is.”

Holmes’ education records are important because prosecutors say they need them to prepare for a hearing scheduled for Thursday over what could be the biggest clue to the planning and motivations behind the theater massacre. At that hearing, the two sides are expected to debate whether a notebook Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist at CU is a confidential doctor-patient communication.

Holmes’ defense team has argued in a motion that the notebook is protected by doctor-patient confidentiality and should be returned to Holmes.

The prosecution countered that the notebook is not protected and should be available as evidence.

In order to determine who is right, 18th Judicial District Chief Judge William Sylvester must wade through details about when Holmes started visiting the psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton; when the treatment relationship ended, if at all; and whether Holmes did anything that would have waived the usual doctor-patient privilege.

To prepare for that hearing, prosecutors said they needed access to roughly 100 pages of education records that a CU lawyer turned over to the court in

By Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

The University of Colorado Denver has hired more outside lawyers to represent employees who may have had a connection to accused Aurora theater shooter and former graduate student James Holmes — a move at least one legal analyst says shows the university is anticipating liability.

“It definitely appears they are concerned that they have exposure,” said Dan Recht, a Denver defense attorney who is not involved in the case. “It is not a confession.

They are concerned they have a risk of a lawsuit being filed against them and some of their employees.”

Earlier this month, the school hired lawyers for a psychiatrist who had treated Holmes and for a university police officer. Former U.S. Attorney Robert N. Miller was hired by CU Denver to review its procedures and actions in dealing with Holmes.

Now the university has hired lawyers for employees and psychiatrists within student mental-health services, and for employees of the Office of Community Standards and Wellness, the campus police department and the Office of Dean

a sealed envelope last week in response to a subpoena. Holmes’ attorneys objected to the release of documents — even objecting to the judge’s looking over the records in his office — and that debate was the subject of much of Thursday’s hearing.

King said the prosecutions’ bid for CU records is an overbroad effort to dig up whatever they can on Holmes, even if those records should be confidential.

“This is quite literally nothing other than a fishing expedition,” King said.

But Pearson countered that the CU records are relevant to the case.

“What’s going on in the defendant’s life at this time is extremely important to this case,” she said.

Sylvester did not rule publicly whether prosecutors could have the documents.

As for the man in the middle of the argument, Holmes sat impassively throughout the hearing. His wrists were shackled. His hands were folded in his lap. His eyes looked blankly downward.

In the audience sat a young woman who said she was in the theater during the shooting. She would give her name only as Nicole.

“Just being in the same room,” she said of the hearing, “gives you an unsettling feeling in your stomach.”

of Students.

In a court hearing Thursday, prosecutors said Holmes made threats around the time he withdrew from his graduate program on the Anschutz Medical Campus the month before the Century Aurora 16 shooting. The threats were reported to university police, lawyers said in court.

Former prosecutor Craig Silverman said the university is merely being prudent.

“The job of a lawyer is to anticipate possible problems,” he said. “It is easy to anticipate that some people may truly blame CU for something that it did or didn’t do. I cannot fault CU for getting a lawyer and for hiring lawyers for various members of its staff.”

Silverman said, however, the taxpayer is going to be stuck with the bill. Every attorney in the case so far is receiving public money — from the prosecution to the defense and now attorneys being hired for CU employees. “There are going to be some significant financial repercussions to the taxpayers in this atrocity.”

Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367, jpmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jpmeyerdpost

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold

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Case files: Read the unsealed court documents in the theater shooting case. Âťdenverpost.com/extras

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MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

DA: Death threat in March Prosecutors say suspect James Holmes told a CU classmate about killing “when his life was over.�

EARTHRISE

By Jessica Fender and John Ingold The Denver Post

Months before James Holmes allegedly opened fire in a packed movie theater, he began talking about killing and said he would do so “when his life was over,� according to new court documents.

Prosecutors allege Holmes, 24, turned to a classmate in March with his dark intentions and later began carrying out his plan — buying weapons and body armor — as his academic career in a competitive neuroscience graduate program collapsed around him.

By the time prosecutors say Holmes made threats to a professor June 12, he had already failed his oral board exam and bought the assault-style rifle he’s accused of using in the theater attack.

The new information came to light in a court document released Friday that lead prosecutor Karen Pearson filed in an attempt to obtain University HOLMES Âť 8A

ARMSTRONG’S DECISION

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Cancer groups hope funding won’t drop oâ‰

he Planet Earth balloon owned by Doug Grimes and Patty Lewis fills at the Rocky Mountain Airshow in Broomfield on Friday. The balloon consists of 436 individually digitally printed panels of images from the “Blue Marble� Earth photographs taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972. Mahala Gaylord, The Denver Post

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As the Denver Broncos draw closer to setting their 53-man final roster, it certainly pays to get noticed by excelling on special teams. Âť1B

By Kevin Simpson The Denver Post

Colorado programs for cancer survivors, which have drafted off cycling legend Lance Armstrong’s monumental fundraising efforts, expressed belief — or at least hope — that his decision to drop his defense against doping allegations won’t affect their longrange work.

Armstrong’s foundation in 2006 funded a $1.7 million grant over five years to the University of Colorado Cancer Center, which became one of eight institutions in the U.S. that make up the invitation-only Livestrong Survivorship Center of Excellence Network.

The CU program still receives

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HOLMES «FROM 1A

COLORADO SPRINGS PROGRAM

Soldiers making a splash on their road to recovery Volunteers donate boats, gas and expertise to help injured troops try water-skiing.

By Jakob Rodgers The Gazette

colorado springs »Water shot up from each side of the specially retrofitted water ski carrying Spec. Dallas Casey atop Prospect Lake.

He looked like a natural, sailing across the glassy lake and easing back and forth on the water. It was a brief moment of serenity before he splashed into the lake.

“He’s down,” said Spec. Kenny Hill, as volunteers placed him back on the board.

“That’s what he gets for going outside the wake,” said Capt. Brian McCarroll, commander of Kilo Company of the 64th Brigade Support Battalion, with a smile.

There was a time when Casey thought he couldn’t go into that lake.

Shrugging off aching bones rattled by bombs, years of rugged training and the rigors of Army life, injured Fort Carson soldiers took to water-skiing this summer to gain a little confidence on their road to recovery. They did so with help from a military branch of the city of Colorado Springs’ Therapeutic Recreation Program, which aims to help soldiers dealing with a range of injuries, from amputations to sore backs.

Most of the program’s work happens in the morning, when Sarah Braun, the military program’s manager, leads workouts at a Colorado Springs YMCA. The soldiers practice yoga and work out in a pool, where buoyancy helps relieve stress on the soldiers’ joints.

While the city has held therapeutic recreation classes for disabled community members since the 1960s, it began target-

6

ing soldiers a year and a half ago — serving 400 to 500 so far, Braun said.

And when not doing morning physical training sessions, she prefers to host recreational activities. About 75 soldiers went out on the lake during two water-skiing and tubing sessions this summer.

Volunteers donate their boats, gas and expertise in spotting the soldiers as they ride traditional water skis, as well as skis retrofitted with chairs.

Their goal: Get anyone not afraid of water onto the lake.

“We’re trying to help with that self-esteem, with their confidence,” said Braun before the outing. “And ultimately some acceptance with their injuries.”

Most soldiers in the program are with the post’s Warrior Transition Battalion, which serves troops battling the most severe injuries.

The ones visiting Prospect Lake on Aug. 15 belonged to the Integrated Disability Evaluation System — another program for soldiers who suffer from less severe injuries.

The soldiers in this program are being medically discharged, a process that can drain the confidence of soldiers who may have bet on a career in the Army.

Minutes after the watery crash, Casey was doing laps around the lake. After seven years in the Army, Casey suffers from spondylosis — a condition that occasionally makes his hip and legs go numb from wear and tear to his back.

“For me, it lifts my morale,” Casey said. “I don’t want my life to be put on hold just because of this injury.”

of Colorado records.

“The defendant had conversations with a classmate about wanting to kill people in March 2012, and said that he would do so when his life was over,” wrote Pearson, chief deputy district attorney for the 18th Judicial District.

Holmes is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others during a shooting rampage July 20 at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” at the Century Aurora 16.

He faces 24 charges of firstdegree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder in the case.

The prosecution is casting Holmes as a disappointed student who launched a revenge plot after failing at his studies.

Pearson told Chief Judge William Sylvester in court Thursday that in the weeks before the shooting, Holmes failed his exam, was asked not to return to a lab he worked in and was encouraged by a professor to find another course of study.

The defense has said its client is mentally ill, without elaborating on the nature of his disease.

Public defender Daniel King said in a Thursday court hearing that he “would question the validity” of some of the prosecution’s assertions.

The timing of Holmes’ alleged conversations with his classmate four months before the shooting could bolster either side if they are admitted into evidence, said former Denver District Court Judge Christina Habas, now a plaintiff’s attorney with Keating Wagner.

“The prosecution would say it wasn’t a psychotic episode. It was a plan, a depraved plan,” Habas said. “The defense could say he’s been laboring under this delusion for a very long time.”

In the filing unsealed Friday, Pearson also repeated a previous claim that Holmes was kicked off campus after he made threats to a professor.

Psychiatry professor Lynne Fenton was treating Holmes before he left the university, although she’s not named in Pearson’s filing.

“After he was denied access to the University of Colorado Denver’s Anschutz campus, he began a detailed and complex plan to obtain firearms, ammunition, a tear-gas grenade, body armor, a gas mask and a ballistic helmet, which were used in the commission of the murders and attempted murders,” Pearson wrote.

CU spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery reiterated Friday that Holmes was never banned from campus, but she declined to say whether his access was limited in some other way.

“These legal processes will ultimately present the full history of James Holmes’ interactions with the University of Colorado, its educators and its medical providers,” Montgomery wrote in a statement citing a gag order by Sylvester that limits the information CU can provide.

Sources have said Fenton alerted a team of academic officials, dubbed the BETA team, who deal with threats on campus. Campus police were also warned about Holmes, according to Pearson.

Jessica Fender: 303-954-1244, jfender@denverpost.com or twitter.com/oh_fender

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MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Doctor’s career diverse Lynne Fenton, 51, who reported James Holmes as a threat, began her psychiatry residency in 2005.

By Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

Dr. Lynne Fenton sounded the alarm that alleged theater shooter James Holmes was a threat to others.

Friends and acquaintances say they would expect nothing less from the University of Colorado Denver psychiatrist who is a central figure in the

murder case being built against the former neuroscience student accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others in an Aurora movie theater.

On Thursday, attorneys will debate about access to a notebook Holmes mailed to Fenton — a crucial piece of evidence in the case against Holmes, who is charged with 24 counts of first-

degree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder.

News reports, citing anonymous sources, say the notebook contains details of Holmes’ murderous plans.

Defense attorneys say the notebook is protected by doctor-patient confidentiality and should be returned to Holmes.

Prosecutors say the notebook’s content is not privileged and should be admitted as evidence.

To determine who is right, 18th Judicial District Chief Judge William Syl-

vester will consider when Holmes, 24, started visiting Fenton; when the treatment relationship ended, if it did; and whether Holmes did anything that would have waived the usual doctorpatient privilege.

So far, information about Fenton and her connection to Holmes has been a tightly held secret, protected by the judge’s gag order.

Sources say Fenton, who is skilled at recognizing trouble and who in 2010 DOCTOR » 22A

NEIL ARMSTRONG | AUG UST 5 , 1 9 3 0 – AU GU ST 2 5 , 2 0 1 2

L ANCE ARMSTRONG

Legendary cyclist says he’s “more at ease”

Moon alighter

Apollo 11 astronaut made “one giant leap for mankind” Denver Post wire services

He rides a race in Aspen two days after dropping his doping-scandal fight.

U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, who made the “giant leap for mankind” as the first human to walk on the moon, died Saturday. He was 82.

His family announced the death in a statement but did not disclose where he died. They attributed his death to “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.” Armstrong had a bypass operation this month, according to NASA. Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon July 20, 1969, capping the most daring of the 20th century’s scientific expeditions. His words after becoming the first person to set foot on the surface are etched in history books and the memories of those who heard them in a live broadcast.

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said.

His trip to the moon — particularly the hair-raising final descent from lunar orbit to the surface — was history’s boldest feat of aviation and came during the climax of a heated space race with the Soviet Union.

Yet what the experience meant to him, he mostly kept to himself.

Like his boyhood idol, transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh, Armstrong learned how uncomfortable the intrusion

By Nancy Lofholm The Denver Post

aspen» While the cycling world ties itself in knots over Lance Armstrong’s dropping his fight last week against doping allegations, a relaxedlooking Armstrong said at the end of a mountain-bike race Saturday that he is at peace and focusing on his health and family.

“Nobody needs to cry for me. I’ll be great,” the mud-spattered cyclist said, without referring specifically to the allegations that shadow his incredible legacy as a seven-time Tour de France champion.

Armstrong finished second in the Power of Four race, won by 16-year-old Keegan Swirbul of Carbondale.

“I’m more at ease now than I’ve been in 10 years,” Armstrong said. “I have five great kids and a wonderful lady in my life. My foundation is unaffected by all the noise out there.”

At the finish line, Armstrong was greeted like a winner by a crowd clicking cellphone cameras and shouting their support. There were fist bumps and handshakes, as well as raised arms sporting yellow Livestrong bracelets.

Armstrong, who will be 41 next

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DOCTOR «FROM 1A helped create the campus’ Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment team, alerted team members in early June about her concerns regarding Holmes.

For her to take her concerns outside of her office, Fenton must have seen something worrisome.

Mental-health professionals have a duty under federal guidelines called the “Tarasoff Rule” to protect or warn a third party only if the therapist believes or predicts that the patient poses a serious risk to a reasonably identifiable victim.

Colorado law gives further direction, saying a psychiatrist cannot be held liable for failing to warn about a mental-health patient’s behavior, except where the patient has communicated to a mental-health-care provider a “serious threat of imminent physical violence against a specific person.”

Specific threat According to courtroom discussion and documents released Friday, Holmes made a specific threat that was brought to the attention of campus police.

Those documents say Holmes told a fellow student in March that he wanted to kill people. The documents also say he made threats to a professor sometime before June 12, when he withdrew from the graduate program.

Fenton’s friends and colleagues say she would have known exactly the right thing to do in any situation.

Fenton, 51, has not responded to requests for an interview.

Her friends and ex-colleagues described her as a highly intelligent physician with an easy ability to connect with her patients.

“You don’t meet people quite as brilliant and amazing and caring and thorough as her,” said Dr. Ellen Price of Grand Junction, who worked with Fenton in the early 1990s. “I am sure she did everything completely the right way. I am sure of it.

“Her history shows that is what she does. She is ethical, caring and brilliant.”

Fenton earned a bachelor’s degree in genetics from the University of California at Davis in 1982, then earned her medical degree at Chicago Medical School in 1986 and completed her residency at Northwestern University Medical Center.

She began her career as a physiatrist, specializing in rehabilitation of injuries or illnesses that affect a person’s movement. Her first job was as chief physician at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Not long after, she relocated to Colorado, where she worked for Colorado Rehabilitation and Occupational Medicine in Aurora and eventually started her own practice, the Merlin Medical Institute.

She began to use acupuncture as a way to treat pain.

A 1998 Denver Post article also showed that she had begun looking into ways to use acupuncture to increase women’s breast sizes.

In the article, Fenton said she knew some people, including fellow doctors, “will say this (is) silly.”

“But I’m glad to have this procedure to offer to women who like this idea but wouldn’t want to have (implant) surgery,” she said. “It’s a big self-esteem issue for a lot of women.”

ing from chronic headaches; and Xanax to another employee who was nervous about flying.

Also, she took three tablets of Xanax herself during a time when her mother was dying.

The investigation concluded she had failed to maintain required medical charts, and she agreed to never again prescribe drugs for family members or employees. She voluntarily completed 50 hours of continuing medical education in pain management.

The discipline did not seem to derail her career.

Along with her private practice, she became the medical acupuncturist at the Mile High Spine and Rehabilitation Center in Greenwood Village, where she worked with Dr. Jennifer Burns.

“We took care of people who were in pain, and most of those patients are depressed and anxious,” said Burns, who added that she noticed Fenton becoming more intrigued with the counseling aspect of the work.

Fenton’s husband at the time, Steffen Andrews, said she began to realize it wasn’t just the needles that were helping people recover.

“She started to begin to think that there was something in the one-on-one, the direct doctorpatient interaction beyond just the needles that may have been having a therapeutic effect,” he said. “That led her to think, ‘Maybe it’s the dialogue that I am having.’ ”

Career change In 2005, she entered the residency program for psychiatry at CU Denver. Friends were not surprised when Fenton decided to change careers.

“Most people do one residency.

Not Lynne. She does two,” said Price, the Grand Junction doctor.

Each year, residents take the Psychiatry Resident In-Training Exam. Fenton’s scores were among the nation’s highest, said Andrews, who was divorced from Fenton in 2002 but remains her friend. The university could not confirm her scores in relation to others in the nation.

“The wonderful part about her is that she is brilliant and great in social situations,” Andrews said. “She has these wonderful interpersonal skills.

That’s why her colleagues like her and loved her. That is why she always had wonderful relationships with her patients.”

The best and brightest usually end up as the chief resident.

Fenton was chief resident in the CU psychiatry department, and Andrews said she held the same position during her residency at Northwestern.

In 2009, Fenton became medical director of the Anschutz Medical Campus student mental-health service. A year later, CU hired her as an associate professor of psychiatry. She is paid about $150,000 per year.

She supervised residents, taught courses and was a research fellow with the Veterans Administration. She wrote papers, gave presentations and continued research projects. One of her specialties was schizophrenia, and her “particular research interest is the neurobiology of psychotherapy, what happens in the brain with psychotherapy, and why does it work,” she wrote in her online biography.

In August 2009, she helped coordinate sessions on how to train students to recognize the signals of common mentalhealth problems — and what they should do when they saw them. Within a year, she was leading an effort to create a campuswide Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment — or BETA — team, a collection of ad hoc administrators who can help provide support, information and referrals to those dealing with threatening or disruptive situations.

Name in the news An avid gardener and lover of the outdoors, Fenton was described by a neighbor as apparently comfortable in her career and life.

“We love her as a neighbor and a person,” said Marie Mossett, who lives near Fenton in the Mayfair neighborhood. “We think it is terrible what (the media) is doing to her.”

In the minutes after a court document revealed Fenton was Holmes’ psychiatrist, the psychiatrist’s name and photo were splashed around the world as people searched for a motive behind the shooting.

The university immediately disabled her online biography and refused to comment about her, citing the gag order. It hired an attorney to represent her.

Even limited data found on the Web about Fenton made news, including an agenda from a May 30 presentation to the psychiatry department called “World of Warcraft: The Use of Archetypes in Psychotherapy” — a discussion that Fenton participated in about a multiplayer role-playing video game that Holmes had reportedly played.

Later, after open-records requests from The Post, CU released limited information about Fenton, including employment agreements and her yearly performance evaluations for 2010 and 2011 that rated her

as “outstanding” and that she “far exceeds performance expectations.”

Why and when Fenton began to see Holmes have not been publicly discussed. According to a CBS report, Holmes also was seen by two other psychiatrists at the campus mentalhealth clinic.

Prosecutors say sometime in the spring, Holmes began to struggle in the rigorous neuroscience graduate program on the Anschutz campus — failing in his labs, prompting a professor to suggest another vocation.

On June 7, he performed poorly on his oral exams. That day, he bought the second of two Glock pistols he would bring to the Century Aurora 16 on July 20.

The prosecution clearly is laying out its courtroom strategy: Holmes reacted to his academic failure with the shooting.

Questions remain: What did Fenton know? Did she do enough to stop the massacre?

“I feel so badly for her,” said Price, who moved to Grand Junction in 1995 but still considers Fenton a friend. “It is not fair for one person to have the burden of this on their shoulders. No doctor can be responsible for this guy’s actions.

“He was smart, and he probably didn’t tell her much. People don’t know her, and they are looking for someone to blame.

But she is not God.” Staff writer Charles Minshew contributed to this report.

Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367, jpmeyer@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jpmeyerdpost

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Disciplined by board Her career record is not pristine.

Around the same time as The Post article, the state medical board disciplined Fenton after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency found that she had improperly prescribed medicine to herself, her husband and two staff members.

The discovery came after Fenton alerted the DEA about a bogus prescription order from a staff member, whom she promptly fired.

The DEA found the employee had obtained multiple illegal prescriptions through Fenton’s office and conducted a complete investigation — discovering Fenton in violation of drug laws.

She had prescribed Ambien and Claritin (then not an overthe-counter drug) to her husband; Lorazepam and Vicodin to an employee who was suffer-

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Politics: Complete coverage and analysis of the Republican National Convention. »denverpost.com

REPUBLICAN

NATIONAL CONVENTION

For GOP, Mitt officially it The delegates nominate Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate six hours after he arrives in Tampa. » 19A

Key speech: Ann Romney does what party support. From left to right: Ann Romney; right foreground, Luke Kirk, Colorado GOP chairman Ryan Call and Monica Owens speak up; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Photos by Lionel Hahn, Abaca Press (left); Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post (center and right)

MIDNIGHT MASSACRE | AURORA THEATER SHOOTING

Colorado Republican women say they needed her to do — humanize her husband, her family and her life. »20A

P U B L IC M EETIN G

“We shouldn’t have to beg to get a little voice”

RTD defends FasTracks spending But northern residents say $243 million in taxes has bought no services.

By Monte Whaley The Denver Post

Regional Transportation District general manager Phil Washington defended the FasTracks commuter rail project Tuesday night over searing criticism that the agency has steered rail away from the north suburbs in favor of other metro corridors.

Washington also said RTD soon will unveil a series of moves in the next 60 days — including the possible sale of agency properties — to help fund rail on the 41-mile Northwest Corridor in Boulder County and the North Corridor through Adams County.

“We will be looking at the entire FasTracks plan for cost savings and revenue enhancement,” Washington said.

Residents of Adams, Boulder and Broomfield counties have paid RTD RYD » 13A

Eighteen representatives of victims in the Aurora theater shooting attend a news conference Tuesday morning at The Summit Conference and Event Center in Aurora. Group spokesman Tom Teves, father of slain victim Alex Teves, said victims and their families have had no say and seen little of the $5 million relief fund in their names in the wake of the July 20 massacre. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

By Electa Draper and Jordan Steffen The Denver Post

M

oney donated after the Aurora movie-theater shooting should go directly to the victims and their families, said representatives of those killed or injured July 20. Yet, they said Tuesday, they’ve had no say and seen little from the $5 million relief fund in their names.

“We are certain that everyone who donated their hard-earned wages intended for 100 percent of their donations to go directly to the victims, and then each family affected would use those funds for what they most needed to help with the healing process,” said group spokesman Tom Teves.

He read from a statement delivered to media Tuesday morning at The Summit Conference and Event Center in Aurora.

Teves, father of slain victim Alex Teves, said grieving and stressed families have been forced to contend with bureaucrats in a process that is neither transparent nor responsive.

“The Giving First website continues collecting donations using the pictures and names of our loved ones to motivate donations without our permission (and by) promising this would go AURORA » 11A

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the denver post B denverpost.com B wednesday, august 29, 2012

AURORA «FROM 1A ‘directly to the victims,’ ” Teves said.

The group of victims, he said, should include anyone inside the movie theater that night or those living at suspect James Holmes’ apartment, which was booby-trapped with explosives.

It should include, Teves said, anyone harmed physically or emotionally, directly or indirectly, by “the coward’s” actions.

The loosely organized 7/20 Recovery Committee, charged with distributing the donations, has released $350,000 to the Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance. The families’ understanding is that, after they started asking questions and discussed holding a news conference in mid-August, checks were cut, giving $5,000 each to families of the 12 people killed and the 58 wounded in the shooting at the Century Aurora 16 theater.

Teves said he has had trouble getting straight answers and commitments from COVA. Not everyone has received money.

“We shouldn’t have to beg to get a little voice,” Teves said.

Dave Hoover, uncle of slain victim A.J. Boik, said he has had to help several victims contact COVA because they were left entirely out of the loop. “It needs to be fixed,” he said.

Prosecutors were delayed in forwarding names and addresses of victims to COVA by a court-issued gag order.

Earlier this month, the lawyers asked a judge for permission to send on the names. It was granted.

COVA executive director Nancy Lewis said she couldn’t comment because of the gag order. “I would love to defend my staff and the work they have done here, but I can’t do it.”

When Teves voiced his concerns to administrators at Community First Foundation, which oversees GivingFirst.org, he said, he was told victims could start their own fund.

Members of the group were also critical of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s role in the tragedy’s aftermath.

“Gov. Hickenlooper, you came and grieved with our families,” Teves said. “We allowed you into our innermost circle at the worst time in our lives. We didn’t do that lightly. You pledged 12 times that ‘We will remember.’ Are you a man who

The 7/20 Recovery Committee’s executive committee Don Quick, district attorney for the 17th Judicial District; Robin Finegan, victim services specialist who worked with Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine and Hurricane Katrina victims; Steven Siegel, Office of the Denver District Attorney; Marla Williams, president and chief executive of Community First Foundation; Paul Suss, Aurora business owner and community leader; John Gay, chairman of the Aurora Key Community Response Team; Skip Noe, Aurora city manager; Reid Hettich, chair of Aurora Faith Community; and Michelle Wolfe, Aurora deputy city manager.

NEWS «11A

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Deidra Brooks talks about the difficulties her family has faced after her son Jarell was shot in the leg during the Aurora theater shooting. Families of some of the 12 people killed in the attack are upset with the way the millions of dollars raised since the tragedy has being distributed.

RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

is true to his word, or were they just words?”

The governor’s office responded that everyone is trying to do the right thing in a difficult situation. A meeting between families and the 7/20 Recovery Committee is scheduled Friday to improve relations.

“We understand the frustration shared today by victims’ families,” governor’s spokesman Eric Brown said. “That’s why we have been advocating for them to have a greater voice in the process. We have also actively supported the 7/20 Recovery Committee to improve communication and the ongoing distribution of assistance.”

In the last week, the 7/20 Recovery Committee selected nine members for an executive committee, although more members could be added, city of Aurora spokeswoman Kim Stuart said.

The executive committee held its first organizing meeting Tuesday, the day of the victims’ news conference.

The committee also just engaged a special adviser, former Mile High United Way executive Rich Audsley, who was the lead staff member for the Columbine Healing Fund.

“The committee is a group of committed and compassionate

people who want to do the right thing,” Audsley said.

When asked about the families’ demands for more say about how the funds will be distributed and used, Audsley said: “The lion’s share, the vast majority of the fund, will go to the victims.”

And, he said, every effort will be made to give the victims and their families “input” into decisions. Yet, he added, the pool of victims is much larger than the 70 killed and wounded. Many people in the community suffered trauma as a result of the shooting. The long-term needs of the community will require significant investment in mental health agencies.

Mike White Sr., whose 33year-old son, Mike, was shot in the chest, said his son isn’t the same person he was before a bullet shattered a rib and punctured his left lung. His son stays in his room. He has experienced panic attacks — one at a group therapy session. His family has received nothing of the $5 million in donations.

“When you have a family that needs bread at night, you can’t have places that keep this kind of money,” White said.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276, edraper@denverpost.com or twitter.com/electadraper

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Arapahoe Basin offers bold plans for expansion. »15A

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MI DN I G HT MA SSACRE AU RORA THEATER SHOOTING

Doctor told police of concern for patient That day, Lynne Fenton also saw suspect James Holmes for the last time.

REPUBLICAN

NATIONAL CONVENTION

“Time to restore the promise of America” Romney says we need jobs, that he will create 12 million

By John Ingold and Jeremy P. Meyer The Denver Post

On the day she last saw James Holmes, University of Colorado psychiatrist Lynne Fenton went to a campus police officer with concerns about a patient.

Fenton testified Thursday during a hearing in Holmes’ murder case that she had no contact with Holmes after June 11. That same day, Fenton said, she contacted Officer Lynn Whitten about a patient. Fenton did not identify the patient, citing the confidentiality issues that were the focus of Thursday’s hearing.

“I was trying to gather information for myself,” Fenton said.

“I communicated with Officer Whitten,” Fenton said later, “to gather more information about this case and to communicate my concerns.”

She did not say what those concerns were. Moments earlier, when asked whether she had ever contacted authorities for reasons required by the RULING » 7A

Iowa. University rejected James Holmes’ application, saying, “Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances.” »6A Paul Ryan and his wife, Janna, join Ann and Mitt Romney on stage under a shower of red, white and blue confetti at the closing of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Thursday. Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

D E N V E R ZO O IC O N

Aging elephant stirring a trunk full of memories

By Electa Draper The Denver Post

Mimi is an old girl — the grand dame of the Denver Zoo, where she has ruled the roost since 1961 in spite of her shyness.

She is at least 53, and elephants, under human care and in the wild, have an average life span of just over 44 years.

Mimi’s slow decline has been steeper lately and harder to watch. Tender feet, sore joints and a slower gait have been apparent for a while — but when their “big-boned” girl recently lost her legendary appetite, zookeepers started thinking about the end.

MIMI » 8A

Fact check: Romney’s statements “To assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.”

The Facts: Romney has promised to cut $500 billion per year from the federal budget by 2016 to bring spending below 20 percent of the U.S. economy, and to balance it by 2020. But he’s vague on how. He has offered ideas like repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law, which is actually projected to save money overall, and cutting smaller areas of government spending. Some of his priorities, such as increasing military spending and reversing $716 billion worth of Obama’s cuts to Medicare, would make the job more difficult. He has also proposed to cut tax rates while ending some deductions and exemptions, but he hasn’t detailed which ones.

“I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs.”

The Facts: No one says he can’t, but economic forecasters are divided on his ability to deliver. He’d have to nearly double the anemic pace of job growth lately. Moody’s Analytics, one financial research operation, expects nearly that many jobs to return over the next four years no matter who occupies the White House. Other analysts have questioned Romney’s rosy job promises.

“President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet.”

The Facts: Really? Yes, pretty much. In a June 2008 speech marking his victory in the Democratic primaries, Obama said generations from now, “We will be able to look back and tell our children that … this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

The Associated Press

By David Espo and Robert Furlow The Associated Press

M

tampa, fla.» itt Romney launched his fall campaign for the White House in a rousing Republican National Convention finale Thursday night, proclaiming America needs “jobs, lots of jobs” and promising to create 12 million of them in perilous economic times.

“Now is the time to restore the promise of America,” Romney said in a prime-time speech to a nation struggling with 8.3 percent unemployment and the slowest economic recovery in decades.

Often viewed as a distant politician, Romney made a press-the-flesh entrance into the hall, walking slowly down a convention hall aisle and shaking hands with dozens of delegates. The hall erupted in cheers when he reached the stage and waved to his cheering, chanting supporters before beginning to speak.

ROMNEY » 10A

Online. Watch video, and view more images from Romney’s speech. »denverpost.com | GOP women. Social issues take back seat. »19A

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friday, august 31, 2012 B denverpost.com B the denver post

6

Iowa rejection: “Do NOT o≠er”

New preschool chief throws doors open

By Jordan Steffen The Denver Post

Since Nancy Spillane‘s arrival at Paddington Station preschool, all the doors have been removed from their hinges, and her desk was moved from a spacious office on the second-floor to a nook at the end of the main hallway.

The long-time educator was called to Denver in early August, as shock and fear from the arrest of David Moe, a former preschool teacher at the center of a child pornography investigation, reverberated throughout the preschool.

Moe, who worked at the preschool for 18 years, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court Tuesday. He is accused of distributing, receiving and owning child pornography.

Spillane, who founded and ran the Lowell Whiteman Primary School for 18 years in Steamboat Springs, came to Paddington to offer leadership in the new school year.

Classes begins Sept. 4.

“If we don’t have a solution right now, we are working on the solution,” said Spillane, who will serve as the interim head of school until Dec. 31.

Spillane spent her first weeks in Denver meeting with parents, many of whom have removed their children from the school. Next she began working with staff on solutions, focusing on improving communication and transparency.

Windows are being installed in all of the school’s doors and video cameras are being placed throughout the school.

Almost immediately after speaking with parents, Spillane

University denied Holmes grad admission in 2011

By Jeremy P. Meyer and Chuck Murphy The Denver Post

The University of Iowa rejected a 2011 application by suspected theater shooter James Holmes, saying “Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances,” according to documents obtained Thursday by The Denver Post.

Two of the Iowa officials looking through the applications agreed not to make an offer to Holmes, though their reasoning is unclear.

On Jan. 30, 2011, Daniel Tranel, apparently on the admissions committee, sent an e-mail about seven “applicants from this past weekend.” The names of the other students were blacked out. Of the seven, only Holmes was dismissed as an applicant. The others generated comments such as “stellar” or “solid, not spectacular.”

Mark Blumberg, also apparently on the committee, replied to an e-mail, saying, “James Holmes: I agree with Dan. Don’t admit.”

Neither Tranel nor Blumberg returned calls seeking elaboration, but university spokesman Tom Moore said the decision was made after Holmes interviewed for a position in the graduate program.

“It’s very much a process of trying to determine if the person is a good fit,” Moore said.

“He just simply was not a good personal fit for our program and that’s all we are comfortable with saying.”

The documents released after a formal records request include an essay that Holmes, a graduate of the University of California at Riverside, apparently wrote to explain why he sought a graduate degree in neuroscience.

He wrote that he had chosen to pursue a life of learning, focusing on the way memory works.

Paddington Station interim director Nancy Spillane talks about transparency and reform at the school rocked by a staff member’s pornography investigation. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post decided to create a new board of directors.

Before Moe’s arrest, Pippi Hambidge, who founded the school in 1993, served as the school’s director and sat on the three-person school board.

Hambidge did not attend a parent meeting following Moe’s arrest and has since resigned.

Spillane helped create a sixperson nominating committee to select board members from more than 20 nominations.

Spillane said the group will have to amend the by-laws to enlarge the board. The committee hopes to have a new board selected by late September.

Spillane will then recommend that the board create standing subcommittees to address issues such as planning, finance and governance.

Still, Spillane said that most of her work at the school will be enforcing or improving policies or practices that are already in place.

“The core Paddington pro-

gram itself — I’m not here to fix something that’s not broken,” Spillane said. “Believe me, that is not broken.”

A number of concerns have centered on an incident more than 11 years ago, in which school officials did not notify law enforcement or human services about an accusation that Moe inappropriately touched a 3-year-old girl while changing her diaper. Parents — past and present — say they were never informed about the report.

Implementing good practice and fostering communication between teachers, parents and supervisors is crucial, Spillane said.

“If you see something, if you feel something, if something seems a little bit off to you, talk to someone,” Spillane said. “It’s not just going to be a sign on the wall.”

»denverpost.com/theatershooting

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Holmes wrote that he has “always been fascinated by the complexities of long lost thought seemingly arising out of nowhere into a stream of awareness. These fascinations likely stemmed from my interest in puzzles and paradoxes as an adolescent and continued through my curiosity in academic research.”

He detailed a time that he was a camp counselor, working with kids ages 10 to 11. He noted that two of the 12 children had attention deficit disorder and another child had schizophrenia. One night that child awoke at 3:30 a.m. and began vacuuming the ceiling of the cabin.

“These kids were heavily medicated, but this did not solve their problems,” he wrote.

“The medication changed them from being highly energetic creative kids to lax beings who slept through the activities.”

In a letter of recommendation from an unidentified official at Riverside, Holmes was described as “truly exceptional.”

Other documents showed his grade point average from Riverside was 3.9. He also said that he was applying at Texas A&M, University of Michigan, University of Alabama, University of Colorado and Kansas University. He doesn’t mention the University of Illinois.

Holmes did submit an application to the University of Illinois. In contrast to the response from Iowa, Illinois offered Holmes a position in their neuroscience program. Holmes rejected that offer to attend the University of Colorado Denver.

Holmes, 24, is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others in a midnight shooting on July 20 inside a movie theater in Aurora.

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RULING «FROM 1A state law that mandates psychiatrists report specific threats of violence made by their patients, Fenton said she had not.

The testimony of Fenton — a key figure in the timeline of Holmes’ path from promising neuroscience student to accused murderer of 12 at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater — stood out during what was the most weighty hearing to date the case. Fenton has never spoken publicly about her relationship to Holmes.

The purpose of the hearing was for prosecutors and defense attorneys to debate whether a notebook Holmes mailed to Fenton the day before the July 20 rampage, which also left 58 injured, is a confidential communication between a doctor and a patient. The defense says it is. Prosecutors believe they should be able to look at it.

The hearing ended Thursday unfinished, and the issue will be taken up again Sept. 20.

Fenton’s testimony looms large in the debate. On Thursday, Fenton confirmed that she had treated Holmes at least once, on June 11. The next day, prosecutor Karen Pearson said, Holmes’ key-card access to CU buildings was cut off. The day after that, Pearson said, Holmes began to withdraw from CU. Crucially, Fenton testified that her doctor-patient relationship with Holmes ended June 11 — playing into the prosecution’s argument that Holmes was not Fenton’s patient when he mailed the notebook.

But 18th Judicial District Chief Judge William Sylvester said he was unconvinced that the relationship was formally severed, a small victory for the defense. “What (Fenton) may have perceived as terminating the relationship may not have actually terminated the relationship.”

Later he said: “The court is unable to make a determination as to whether that relationship was terminated.”

Sylvester also found that Holmes’ relationship with Fenton is governed by the state law confidentiality provisions for both physicians and psychologists.

That does not mean the notebook — which may contain information about the planning and motives behind the attack — is officially off-limits to prosecutors. But it does mean prosecutors will have to argue that the notebook falls outside of confidentiality in other ways.

They appear ready to do just that. Deputy District Attorney Rich Orman argued that the notebook was not set with any therapeutic purpose in mind.

“He planned he would be dead or in custody or something else — on the run — when the package was received,” Orman said.

Later in the hearing, defense attorney Tamara Brady argued that a mental-health counseling relationship could continue to exist even after someone has been put in prison. Or, she said, the notebook may have been a plea for help from a trusted

Pa. forwarding of Holmes’ mail target of probe

By Jeremy Jojola 9News

Mail intended for Aurora theater-shooting suspect James Holmes has been forwarded to a Pennsylvania man known for filing lawsuits against celebrities, and postal inspectors have launched an investigation.

“A change of address for Holmes had been filed that may be fraudulent,” said Denver U.S. Postal Inspector Pamela Durkee. “Upon hearing this, we immediately notified the Postal Service, and the forwarding order was canceled.”

Jonathan Riches of West Chester, Pa., posted on Facebook a picture of a magazine originally sent to Holmes’ address on Paris Street in Aurora that also bears a post office issued forwarding sticker addressed to Holmes at Riches’ address.

Riches could not be reached for comment.

the denver post B denverpost.com B friday, august 31, 2012

counselor.

“Perhaps the package was to say, ‘I’m feeling bad. Please stop me,’ ” Brady said.

Brady also hit upon the theme during an exchange with Fenton in which Brady seemed to hint that Holmes had called a CU hospital switchboard number just minutes before the shooting began. It would have been possible to reach Fenton after-hours using that number.

“Do you know whether James Holmes called that number 9 minutes before the shooting started?” Brady asked.

“I don’t know,” Fenton said.

Thursday was the first time since the shooting that Holmes, a man who allegedly stockpiled weapons while attending classes, saw Fenton, a woman who

may have learned some of his secrets. Holmes’ head crooked toward the courtroom door when Fenton’s name was called as a witness.

But rather than revelations, Thursday’s hearing mostly produced moments of attorneys on both sides metaphorically tiptoeing around mousetraps.

Time and again, when prosecutors asked questions, the defense would object on the grounds that the information solicited was privileged. Sylvester often agreed — the court couldn’t allow the information out into the open, he said, only to later rule it should be kept under wraps.

The most precise detail, then, came not about the notebook but about what it was mailed in.

NEWS «7A

It was a padded envelope, a U.S. postal inspector testified. It was purchased, along with a sheet of Forever stamps, on July 12 at the Fletcher Post Office in Aurora. It was dropped in the mail sometime after the last pickup July 19 and scanned through at the main Denver processing center on July 21, during which pictures were taken of its front and back, as is the case with every envelope processed there.

It was delivered July 23 to the Anschutz Medical Campus.

The exact contents of the envelope, though, remain the subject of mystery — at least for a little longer.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold

Dr. Lynne Fenton, the University of Colorado psychiatrist who was treating James Holmes before the Aurora theater massacre July 20, is visible through a door window outside a district courtroom Thursday. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

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