A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  • “His scientific accomplishments are without question … probably the top student recruit on paper. But I do have concerns about his maturity and/or interest…. He did not take this interview seriously at all…. [I] found the interview very disappointing…. I vote alternate” (a recommendation that he be placed on a waiting list and admitted if an accepted applicant backs out).

  • “Overall very positive.”

  • “Excellent breadth of knowledge … insightful questions … seemed genuinely excited about the science…. Good interview, good test scores and letters of recommendation.”

  • “Pretty good … suggested interesting experiments…. Interesting candidate with loads of potential…. I think he would be just fine. He does have a somewhat quirky character, but what good scientist doesn’t!”

  • “Very focused on one particular area … articulate … a bit naïve, but that’s to be expected…. Probably would be a good student.”

  • “Excellent but a bit socially awkward (not [necessarily a] liability).”

  • “Very shy. This can come off as disinterested in a group setting…. Responded well to every question…. Besides appearing quiet and disinterested at times I feel that James is a very strong candidate.”

  All of the Denver interviewers except one recommended immediate admission. James was offered a tuition waiver and a $26,000/year National Institutes of Health (NIH) stipend. He accepted. He says he chose Colorado over Illinois mainly because of the larger stipend.

  In April of 2011, he flew to Denver and rented an apartment near the Anschutz Medical Campus. Then he returned to San Diego, packed his Hyundai Tiburon for the move, declined his dad’s offer to make it a “father-son” trip, and drove alone to Aurora.

  ____________

  Aurora, Colorado, July 20, 2012, just after midnight:

  Rebecca Wingo was an Air Force veteran and the mother of two young children. She sat in the fifth row of the Century 16 auditorium with her friend Marcus Weaver. As The Dark Knight Rises began, they heard “whizzing” noises immediately over their heads and then gunshots coming in bursts from the front of the theater. They huddled behind the seats, surrounded by screams, more gunfire, and the sounds of bullets hitting things, and hitting people, around them. The gunman began to walk up the aisle.

  James Holmes shot Rebecca five times, with both a shotgun and a rifle or handgun. She was hit in the trunk, arm, and head, her skull and brain instantly destroyed. Holmes shot Marcus in the shoulder and leg. When the shooting slowed, Marcus tried to lift Rebecca, who was covered in blood and not moving, and then scrambled out of the theater.

  JAMES

  4. Aurora

  “I am not inherently evil.”

  (James Holmes, in a text to Gargi Datta, March 25, 2012)

  The Anschutz Medical Campus of the University of Colorado Denver is in Aurora, about ten miles from the main campus downtown. The medical school, laboratories, and hospitals are its core, with schools of dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, public health, and biomedical graduate studies, as well as research facilities and housing, making up the rest of the largely new 230-acre complex. There are dozens of graduate programs on the Anschutz campus, in virtually every biomedical field, and almost half a billion dollars in grant-funded research.

  Holmes moved into his Aurora apartment April 28, 2011. The building is nondescript, brick, three stories, at the corner of East 17th and North Paris Street, walking and biking distance from the neuroscience laboratories and about three miles from the Century 16 theater. There’s another apartment building across the parking lot, an elementary school in the middle of the block, and a couple of small restaurants, the Blue Lagoon Asian Bistro and La California, around the corner on Peoria. Hundreds of other students, trainees, and staff live in the area, on and off the campus; several had apartments in Holmes’s building. Holmes often commuted to the campus on a small BMX-style bicycle that he’d owned for years, usually wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an open plaid shirt.

  His apartment was on the third floor, a simple one bedroom, rented sparsely furnished in student-modern, to which James added the usual television, computer, and a few posters. There was a zombie poster, one from the film Pulp Fiction, one that referred to a movie about the “misfortunate” (a word that would later come up in Holmes’s writings), and one of a scantily clad woman. He kept the place very neat and clean, but it lacked soft or “homey” touches; postshooting photos show a Batman mask peeking from behind the top of the television. There was only one other living thing in the apartment: a nondescript potted plant that he named “Planty.”

  James’s communication with his parents was almost exclusively by e-mail. He didn’t like talking on the phone. Bob’s e-mails were about as one might expect from a father, interested in his son and often offering advice. James always answered quickly and sometimes added a little friendly banter. Arlene’s notes were warm and motherly, saying they missed him and thought of him every day, asking how he was doing, wondering about friends, expressing little worries about things like whether or not he had a warm coat, and offering to send things from home.

  James didn’t express much emotion in his e-mails. When his mom told him that Rocky, their family dog during the years after Zooby and Whimby, had died, and the household felt empty, he simply wrote back, “That’s too bad, at least he had a good home.” That response was very different from the sadness and loss he’d expressed about Zooby’s and Whimby’s passing. There’s no indication that he ever brought it up with friends, and he never mentioned it to me.

  After a day of group orientation to the Anschutz neuroscience program, James settled into classes and his first laboratory rotation. Classes at the graduate school level are small, seminars really, usually with fewer than a dozen students. The lab rotations, which lasted about ten weeks each, provide hands-on experience in a biological research environment designed to acquaint future doctoral candidates with different professors and projects and to allow the professors to see which students would be a good fit for future training and research.

  Had he been anywhere except an esoteric scientific community, James’s shy demeanor and social awkwardness would have stood out far more. In the neuroscience graduate program, though, he only stood out a little. Almost all of his classmates and teachers agreed that his behavior was within the expected range for his peers.

  Cammie Kennedy, neuroscience department staff liaison for students and trainees, saw James several times a month from the very beginning of his Anschutz experience. She liked him. He was “quirky,” she said, “a cute little geeky kid,” shy, and “extremely intelligent” with a quick sense of humor. He wasn’t particularly different from lots of other graduate students.

  James’s first lab rotation was with physiology and biophysics professor Achim Klug, helping with research using Mongolian gerbils. Otto Albrecht, a third-year graduate student who interacted with him in Professor Klug’s lab, reported that James wasn’t very motivated. He worked minimal hours, Albrecht said, although he seemed intelligent and gave an impressive talk at an internal lab meeting. He saw James as quiet and unemotional, but he became more sociable as time went by. Otto, James, and another grad student, Florian, went to a couple of movies together, one at the nearby Century 16 complex.

  From time to time, James was assigned to sacrifice the gerbils, a humane and strictly regulated procedure, and prepare their brain material for examination and experimentation. There is no indication that he enjoyed killing them or was particularly fascinated with death.

  Most of the friends James made that year were in the classes he took in the fall. Ben Garcia, Tim Tapscott, and Gargi Datta stood out early on. Tim had been raised in California; he and James were known as “the California boys” in the group. James almost never talked about his family or California home, though; Tim didn’t even know he had a sister. He met Hillary Allen and Yeom Pyo Lee around that time as well. Hillary and Yeom were part of his small neuroscience program group; the rest were
in other graduate tracks but took the same “core” classes that met every day.

  Ben, Tim, Gargi, and James became close. Ben described Gargi, a computational bioscience graduate student from India, as the “alpha” of the group. She made most of the group plans and selected entertainments. James tended simply to go with the flow, often a bit disconnected from the others. The friends spent several hours a week doing things like eating, playing strategy board games, and drinking a little beer. No one ever saw James very inebriated or taking drugs other than very occasional marijuana. They sometimes took Saturday hikes and short trips, once to the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, once to hear Infected Mushroom (a psychedelic-trance-electronica band). They saw Sherlock Holmes at the Century 16.

  Ben was James’s best friend in graduate school. He went to James’s apartment often during the first few months of the academic year. Both liked games; neither did drugs, drank more than socially, or talked much about girls. Their conversations, in person or by text, would sometimes turn to philosophical venting or to their respective mental discomforts, but nothing out of the ordinary at the time.

  Gargi became more than a friend for James. They met at the graduate student orientation and shared core classes. She liked him, but he seemed painfully shy. They finally went out together in October, when she invited him to a horror film festival. After that, they dated several times a week, often going to his apartment to watch movies or play games. She has memories of Slurpees and study sessions, Ethiopian food and watching Saturday Night Live sketches. Gargi became James’s first and only girlfriend and his first and only sexual partner, but she wasn’t interested in a long-term commitment.

  James’s second laboratory rotation, with Professor Mark Dell’Acqua, began in November. Jonathan Murphy, a third-year doctoral candidate in the lab, says that he was socially awkward but could “come out of his shell.” James attended some social events outside the lab later in the rotation, such as joining students at the Cedar Creek Pub on campus, but largely isolated himself from those beyond his group. According to Murphy, he didn’t interact much with others in the labs, had a poor work ethic, took long lunches, and spent minimal time on the memory and learning project that had been designed especially for him. James had potential, Murphy thought, but didn’t grasp the concepts. Maybe he was just lazy.

  Professor Dell’Acqua himself found James so withdrawn in the lab that it was difficult to see whether or not he was learning anything. His required scholarly presentation to peers and faculty was acceptable, however, in spite of his seeming uncomfortable and attempting forced and poorly timed humor. Dell’Acqua questioned James’s fitness to continue in the program but gave him a low-but-passing grade of B. (C is a failing grade in most graduate schools.)

  Neuroscience is a broad field. James’s interest since high school had been in human brains and minds, particularly his own, but to get to a human level of study, he would have to learn a great deal about smaller, nonhuman things, like brain cells from Mongolian gerbils.

  Perhaps that’s why he didn’t do as well as expected in his graduate seminars and labs. Professors reported his work as mediocre to very good, often contradicting administrator Cammie Kennedy, who once commented that he was “top of the top and best of the best.” Several professors and advanced students who were interviewed after the shootings described James as unmotivated, leaving the laboratories early, and not seeming to care about the tasks to which he was assigned. He did much better with “book work.” A few thought he wasn’t particularly intelligent, albeit by the very high standards of people who work at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge.

  I don’t think that was the problem. He was, as one peer said, “scary smart.”

  Maybe James was impatient. Maybe his studies weren’t moving him fast enough toward his goal of figuring out what was wrong with him. Maybe, as a couple of the postshooting psychiatric experts theorized, he was descending further into a severe mental illness that kept him from focusing on the increasingly difficult scientific training.

  The “descent into madness” theory by itself is too simplistic, I think. The story of James Holmes and his terrible “mission” is much more.

  This is a good place to reiterate that all the interviews of peers, faculty, supervisors, and others—and of Holmes himself—were carried out after the Century 16 massacre. The news media and Internet at the time were packed with sensationalism, rumors, unsupported theories, and uncorroborated accounts. Some of the people interviewed were swept up in the events and prone, if unintentionally, to hyperbole and/or inaccuracy. Many statements by Jonathan Murphy, for example, the graduate assistant just mentioned who was critical of James, don’t seem to jibe with on-the-spot videos of James’s academic presentations. When one looks at actual footage of his May 17, 2012, talk, James appears quite normal.

  In November, James’s friend Tim Tapscott, a recreational shooter, was shopping for a particular handgun, a Glock Model 26 9mm pistol. Ben, Gargi, and James went with Tim to a couple of gun shops; Tim eventually bought one and showed it to the group. James showed no particular interest and appeared to know little about handguns. He held it improperly, had trouble racking the slide (pulling back the top part of the gun as if to eject a spent cartridge, seat a new one, and cock the hammer), and was surprised at the pistol’s weight. He had probably never fired a gun in his life.

  James went home to San Diego for eight days over the 2011 Christmas holidays. The family would spend Christmas Day with Arlene’s terminally ill brother, Dexter, in Havasu, near the Arizona border. Just before Christmas, James and some former college classmates from UC Riverside got together in Los Angeles. He, Soren Carr, and a few others met at a restaurant in Woodland Hills and then went to the then-new movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Carr said later that the old gang “clicked” as if they were back at Riverside, and Holmes seemed about the same as he had been in college. Another friend said he had changed a little, but the differences were vague.

  James complained of a sore throat and fatigue before going back to San Diego. A CU Denver doctor had diagnosed a cold or mild flu, but a San Diego Kaiser Permanente physician discovered that he had infectious mononucleosis (“mono”). On December 29, knowing that James was going back to school, a Kaiser Permanente clinician told him to follow up at his campus student health service. James returned to Colorado the next day but didn’t go back to the clinic. He felt better after a while.

  The primary symptom of mono is an unusual tiredness that interferes with physical and mental tasks. James’s version was mild, but the diagnosis introduced a new possibility for explaining his performance in the lab rotations. As it turned out, though, his work was mediocre both before he became ill and well after the symptoms went away. A careful attempt to link his psychiatric symptoms to mononucleosis met a dead end. There is no evidence that mono causes, or is associated with, mental symptoms such as his, fantasies of violence, or violent behavior.

  To almost all observers, James’s classwork and class presentations about scientific data were not a problem. He earned an A in Professor Diego Restrepo’s winter neuroscience course. Although he was more reserved than most, he was similar enough to other graduate students that his behavior raised no red flags. Personal interactions and direct, day-to-day work with others, except for close friends Tim, Ben, and Gargi, were something else again.

  Some of James’s texts with Ben Garcia suggest that things were beginning to deteriorate by early 2012 and that he (James) might be having trouble holding his mental problems in check. Most of their texts and online communications between November and January had been chatty and normal. They often carried on a repartee that might have seemed unusual out of context, but it was, after all, repartee, a jousting between friends who could, like all of us, joke back and forth without explaining every nuanced comment. Their talk of “killing” each other and a passing reference to the Highlander television series referred to their avatars in a game, not real life.

/>   There was nothing clearly ominous in the texts, nothing particularly symbolic, nothing that should have predicted the events of July 20. Nevertheless, by about January, James’s emotional problems were finding more and more foothold in his inner life. He socialized to a point, but only to a point.

  James the adult told me later that unusual things had started to happen to him around that time. He began to see, or at least to perceive, troubling images that appeared not only in his mind (as they had off and on for years), but also in the room around him.

  There’s a difference between seeing and perceiving. The first is something that registers on the retina in the back of one’s eye. The second is a broader category that includes both visual hallucinations (images that arise in the brain rather than in the eye) and misperceptions (illusions, in which things that are actually seen are misidentified by the brain). At first, his descriptions were vague. He seemed to attribute some problems to his mononucleosis, saying that he became more disorganized and “I guess my mind was kind of falling apart” around the time he returned to CU from Christmas break.

  In late January, James sent Ben a text saying that he had “psychotic delusions.” His meaning wasn’t clear; he didn’t describe the phenomena in detail. Ben wasn’t sure how to take the text. James said he didn’t “hear voices” and that the subject of his “delusions” (maybe hallucinations, maybe illusions) was “a secret.”

  He would keep a lot of things secret during the next few months.

  On Valentine’s Day, James prepared a special evening for Gargi at his apartment. He made “French fried onion chicken” with vegetables and bought ice cream for dessert. He lit candles, “the good-smelling candles.” They watched videos on Netflix. I asked whether he had gotten the candles because he liked them or because Gargi might like them. He chuckled and replied, “Because I liked the candles.”