When Officer Justin Grizzle approached Holmes to ask again if he was alone at the complex, the young man answered not in words, but with a self-satisfied smirk that Grizzle found maddening. He saw a green dot, like a laser beam, aimed at him from some bushes next to the parking lot. A second shooter must have been in there, training his weapon on the police, or it could have been a detonating mechanism. The dot disappeared and Grizzle realized that it had come from the Glock lying on the roof of the Hyundai.
On the pavement at the rear emergency exit door leading into Theater Nine, Grizzle saw an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle with a magazine still in it. As he moved toward the firearm, streams of moviegoers charged out of the exit, yelling, “Help me! Help me! Help me!”
Reaching for his handgun and steeling himself, Grizzle walked into Theater Nine, slipping on pools of blood. Tear gas burned his eyes and throat. He was crying now and his nose had begun to run. Strobe lights whirled above him, alarm bells clanged, and ringing cell phones filled the air. Behind him, a blaring movie—the most recent Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, which was having its midnight premiere at many locations across the country—played on a huge screen. The picture had just started and the dialogue boomed out across the theater. The light and the noise and the enlarged characters standing over his shoulder all added to Grizzle’s sense of disorientation. Sounds and colors and smoke and shrieks collided with so much tear gas he could barely breathe.
Through the fog, he saw bodies lying motionless and other bodies cowering in the first several rows of seats; other bodies crawled up the aisles on hands and knees and still others raced for the exits. When they reached the lobby, they were hustled by theater employees outside or told to crouch down behind the concession stands. Officers bent over some of the corpses and checked them for booby traps.
Blood, popcorn, and 249 live rounds of ammunition mingled together on the floor of Theater Nine. As Grizzle moved toward the wounded, other policemen began appearing inside the smoke, booming out instructions, opening doors to let out the tear gas, and ripping down the movie screen to see if anyone was hiding behind it. No one was.
“Get ’em out of here!” they commanded back and forth, improvising a triage section for those closest to death.
If the victims could talk, they were carted away from the exits to await help from emergency medical personnel. If they couldn’t talk, they were kept by the theater doors and offered help now.
Grizzle grabbed two of the wounded and steered them outside toward his patrol car; waiting for the stalled ambulances was no longer an option. As he settled the pair into the vehicle’s seats, he thought: I don’t want anyone else to die. No one else can die . . .
With his siren whirring, he wended his way out of the parking lot and took off for the Aurora South Medical Center. He was violating protocol because patrol cars weren’t supposed to transport the wounded to hospitals, but he felt he had no choice.
In the rear seat was Ashley Moser, pregnant and bleeding heavily from gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Sitting next to Grizzle was her husband, Ian Sullivan.
“That’s my wife in the back,” Ian said over and over again. “That’s my wife. Is she going to live?”
“Where’s my six-year-old daughter?” the man asked.
Grizzle didn’t know where Veronica Moser-Sullivan was, so he didn’t answer.
“You have to turn around and go find her!” Ian said.
The officer kept driving as fast as he thought he safely could.
“You have to go back and get her!”
Grizzle drove on.
Ian flung open the passenger door to jump out of the speeding patrol car, but the officer caught him by the arm and yanked him back inside.
“Don’t!” Grizzle screamed.
Ian didn’t try it again.
After dropping off the two victims at the hospital, Grizzle went back to the theater to pick up others, repeating this pattern twice more before the night was over. Only later, after all the trips were finished and the night was giving way to dawn, did he learn that six-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan had been hit four times and was dead.
On his third trip in the early morning hours of July 20, Grizzle drove a badly wounded man named Caleb Medley to the University of Colorado Hospital, one of twenty-three victims taken to this facility—where Holmes had been in graduate school a few weeks earlier—since other emergency rooms in the area were filled up.
In the back seat, Medley’s breathing made what Grizzle described as a “God-awful sound,” but that sound was much better than when he stopped breathing altogether.
Each time it ceased, Grizzle yelled over his shoulder, “Don’t you fucking die on me! Don’t you fucking die!”
Every time he said this, Caleb started breathing again, slowly but steadily keeping the air moving through his lungs.
At the hospital, the doctors saved Caleb’s life, but more than a year later he’d still be using a wheelchair.
According to a report on the emergency response to the Aurora shootings delivered more than two years later, by breaking protocol and transporting the wounded in patrol cars instead of ambulances, Grizzle and other officers saved all of the lives that night that could have been saved.
From a twenty-one-year-old male college student in Missouri:
Sometimes, I just want to blow. The only thing that stops me is my own sense of self-control. Take that away and I just don’t know what would happen. I don’t think any of us feel a part of a real community anymore or feel that we know one another. Being disconnected socially is the start of the problem.