Prosecutor says theater gunman sane in attack
In a two-hour opening statement, a prosecutor calls Colorado theater gunman James Holmes a “meticulous” planner who thought about killing people for much of his life.
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — During an intense twohour opening statement, the district attorney for Arapahoe County on Monday painted a picture of a “cool” and “meticulous” planner who had thought about killing people for much of his life, and ended up slaughtering a dozen and injuring 70 more nearly three years ago.
As family members of the victims, along with the wounded, listened raptly, sometimes wiping away tears, District Attorney George Brauchler named every one of the people James Eagan Holmes is accused of killing “on a cool July night.”
Holmes sat motionless at the defense table, neatly shorn and wearing a striped dress shirt, looking nothing like the orange-haired suspect staring wide-eyed out from his 2012 mug shot. His parents, Arlene and Robert Holmes of San Diego, sat in the audience behind him, looking exhausted and somber.
There is no question that the onetime neuroscience graduate student pulled the trigger on that bloody summer night. He was arrested outside the theater with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a Remington shotgun and a Glock pistol. He had booby-trapped his apartment. His hair was dyed bright orange. He said he was the Joker, of “Batman” fame.
“Four hundred people filed into a boxlike theater to be entertained and one came to slaughter them,” Brauchler told the jury. “The man that came there that night, covered head to toe in armor to protect himself from injury, brought with him four weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He is in the court with us today. He’s seated right over there. … He tried to murder a theater full of people to make himself feel better.”
Toward the end of his opening statement, as sniffling could be heard in the courtroom, Brauchler talked about Holmes boobytrapping his apartment and entering the crowded theater and then “starts with the shotgun and he begins to pull the trigger.”
“Boom!” Brauchler thunders. “A.J. Boik, who is sitting with his fiancée, is shot and killed. Boom! Jesse Childress. The shot ripped through his heart, lungs and organs, and he died.”
Half of Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr.’s courtroom was peppered Monday with freshly opened boxes of bright white tissues. And rows of black seats behind the prosecution table have been set aside for men and women who survived the 2012 massacre.
Holmes, 27, has been charged with 166 counts in the rampage.
Jurors must decide whether he is guilty, not guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity. If he is found guilty, they must then decide if he will be put to death.