The police lowered Holmes into the back of a patrol car, strapped him in, and drove him to the Aurora City Detention Center. By 2:44 a.m., APD Detectives Chuck Mehl and Craig Appel were beginning their initial interview with the suspect. They asked if he needed anything, like water or oxygen, but he declined. His skin was raw from being dragged to a Dumpster behind the theater, but the damage wasn’t serious enough to warrant medical treatment.
The detectives had wrapped paper bags over his hands to preserve gunpowder residue or other evidence, a standard procedure in crimes involving firearms. As the men gathered at a table, Holmes raised his hands and waved the paper bags around in the air as if they were finger puppets. The veteran officers had never seen this before. Holmes lowered the bags and ripped a staple out of the table, trying to ram it into an electrical socket.
They stopped him, stunned by his bizarre behavior.
“Do you need help?” one asked.
“Like in counseling?”
“No. Like in paramedics. We want to make this easy for you.”
“No.”
He nodded at some nearby evidence bags and wondered aloud if they were used to hold popcorn.
The men shook their heads. They hadn’t yet given Holmes his Miranda warning, that he had the right to remain silent and the right to consult with an attorney and to have an attorney present during questioning. If he were indigent, a lawyer would be provided to represent him at no cost.
Seven minutes into the interview, Holmes said, “I want to invoke my Sixth Amendment rights.”
“So you’re invoking your right to counsel?” Mehl asked.
“Yes. I want an attorney.”
The officers prodded a little more before the discussion came to an end.
A number of things about the twenty-four-year-old suspect were unusual—starting with his appearance, his demeanor, and his apparent intelligence (many people being interrogated were not aware of their Sixth Amendment rights). Some other things about him were no longer that odd. In the past two decades, mass shootings had become almost predictable across America. In about 60 percent of these cases, the killer or killers decided to die during the massacre. They either committed suicide, as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had done inside Columbine High School in suburban Denver in April 1999, or committed “suicide by cop,” offering violent resistance to the arresting officers, who shot them to death.
Holmes had done neither. He’d surrendered peacefully and had been fully accommodating with those who’d put him in a patrol car and taken him to the station. He’d been cooperative right up until asking for a lawyer. Like The Joker in The Dark Knight, he’d decided to live and to watch what he’d set in motion. As a result, he was going to go through an astonishingly lengthy legal process that was now only a few hours old. This process would confound countless observers of the case and force lawyers and judges to face issues with the potential of making U.S. judicial history—most notably, issues concerning doctor-patient confidentiality and criminal insanity. By staying alive, Holmes was going to put America on trial for how to deal with this new epidemic of mass violence.
With just one of his guns, the AR-15, he’d fired thirty rounds in twenty-seven seconds. In something less than two minutes, he’d shot bullets or bullet fragments into 238 theater seats and left twelve people dead, with ten of the bodies still inside Century 16. Seventy other moviegoers had been wounded (fifteen of them permanently), and all were on their way to hospitals or already checked in. Among the fatalities were Jessica Ghawi, twenty-four, an aspiring sportscaster; Jesse Childress, twenty-nine, a member of an Air Force skydiving team; and Gordon Cowden, fifty-one, who’d taken his two teenage daughters to the theater.
Within the next few days, Ashley Moser would have a miscarriage. Because she was paralyzed from her injuries, her six-year-old daughter’s funeral would be delayed for three months until Ashley was able to attend the service.
On average, 196 people are shot in America every day, yet nobody seems to know where all the violence is coming from. Tonight it had come to Aurora, a city of 335,000 just east of Denver, but it would soon explode again at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin; at a college in Texas; at several other venues; and then finally, near the end of the year, at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. The last massacre of 2012 left twenty children and eight adults dead, including the shooter himself, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza, who’d lived with his mother in a home stockpiled with weapons.
Around Newtown, Lanza had been known as noticeably strange and far more likely to do something horrific than, say, James Holmes. In the four months between the Aurora shootings and those at Sandy Hook, Lanza had studied Holmes and seemingly snapped because his mother was planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility.
Following Newtown, the questions around mass shootings had at last become too large to ignore or dismiss. For a few weeks, the nation’s airwaves were filled with dialogue about this subject. Had we finally reached a tipping point that left us ready to attempt to do something to end the carnage? What was the driving force behind all this bloodshed, and how might it be lessened, if not stopped? Why did America have far more of these events than any other developed nation in the world?
For the crimes of burglary, assault, robbery, and theft, the United States had similar numbers to other developed countries. But our country’s gun homicide rate was about eleven thousand a year—thirty times higher, for example, than France’s or Australia’s, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. It was twelve times higher than in most other comparable nations. In the first five months following the Newtown massacre, after the dialogue had begun to fade and people turned to other matters, the number of American gun deaths would exceed the total number of U.S. troops killed in the eight-year Iraq war: 4,499 to 4,409, based on statistics released by the Department of Defense.
Of the 196 people shot in the nation on an average day, eighty-six died. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one child or teen per hour was now injured by a firearm—hurt seriously enough to require hospitalization. For those fifteen to nineteen, firearm injuries remained the second leading cause of death, behind only car wrecks.
Mass killers were now targeting Americans almost once every two weeks. Based on FBI records from 2006–2010, 156 of these homicidal rampages had met the Feds’ definition of mass shootings, where four or more people had died. Earlier decades in America were much worse in terms of overall rates of violent crime, but saw far fewer mass shootings. In the 1980s, the country had experienced eighteen of them. By the 1990s, there were fifty-four such events, and the 2000s had seen eighty-seven.
In the dozen years after September 11, 2001, our nation saw less than twenty terror-related deaths on American soil—but nearly 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. It cost the nation more than $2 billion a year in hospital charges to treat victims of gun-related wounds, and the average cost per victim was $75,884. An Urban Institute study reported that more than 80 percent of gun violence was paid for by taxpayers through Medicaid or other publicly funded programs.
Newtown had been anything but a tipping point in slowing down this phenomenon. In the fourteen months following that massacre, America would see a school shooting an average of every ten days—or eighty-eight more over the next two years. Instead of turning around the trend, Sandy Hook had made it worse.
From a twenty-four-year-old female graduate student:
These mass shootings are there to wake us up to our own worst behavior and our own involvement in the violence. They’re to make us think and to take action. It’s up to us to figure all this out and to try to stop it—because by the time these people commit these murders, their lives are over and they’ve already checked out.