In Holmes’s apartment, the bomb squad found a trip wire leading from the front door to a thermos filled with glycerine. The thermos tilted over a frying pan full of potassium permanganate. If these two chemicals were combined, they’d create a spark, causing a chain reaction that would produce flames, igniting the other nearby explosives. A remote-controlled pyrotechnic box sat atop the refrigerator and was filled with six-inch firework shells. Because The Joker had bombed a hospital in The Dark Knight, Holmes had intended to level the building where he and other CU medical students now lived.
According to FBI bomb technician Garrett Gumbinner, a remote-control device, in addition to the trip wire placed on his apartment’s front door, had been placed outside the building in a trash bag, along with a toy car and a boom box connected to a timer. When he left for the theater around 11:30 p.m. on July 19, Holmes thought that if no one triggered the interior wire, someone passing by on the sidewalk would reach into the bag, pick up the car, touch the remote, and set off the bombs. To heighten the destruction, he’d soaked his carpets with oil and gasoline. Gumbinner would later testify that during or after the massacre Holmes hoped that “someone would call the police and that the police would respond to his apartment . . . in order to divert police resources” away from Century 16.
Scattered around the apartment were an online receipt for a ticket to The Dark Knight Rises and a Batman mask, along with ten gallons of gasoline, thirty homemade hand grenades, motor oil, ignition systems, and paper shooting targets. A black box with a red blinking light held dozens of softball-shaped firework shells full of explosive powder. On the walls were posters for the movie Pulp Fiction and the paintball series Soldiers of Misfortune.
Holmes owned several action video games, including the role-playing Oblivion and the futuristic military strategy game StarCraft. Set in the twenty-fifth century, StarCraft involves three species—humans, insectoid aliens, and humanoids—all fighting for dominance in deep space. Many consider it one of the best and most important games ever with sales far in excess of ten million worldwide (the top players around the globe compete in televised tournaments). A third video game retrieved from Holmes’s residence was the role-playing Skyrim, among the most popular for males sixteen to twenty-five. The game revolved around the player’s efforts to conquer Alduin, a Dragon out to destroy the world. In the first week of its 2011 release, Skyrim shipped seven million copies to retailers.
It took nearly four days for the bomb squad to dismantle all the explosives enough for them to be transported to a field outside Denver, where they were safely detonated. On the day of the massacre, Aurora police Lieutenant Thomas Wilkes, the incident commander at Holmes’s apartment, had felt that this “building would go” and their primary mission now was to the “defend the other buildings around it.” In part because of Holmes’s lucidity and willingness to speak with detectives that afternoon about defusing his elaborate explosive designs, another catastrophe was averted. Given the full range of possibilities for mayhem that he’d envisioned, the aftermath of the shootings was handled about as well as anyone could have expected.
“We’ve done a very good job of learning how to react to these tragedies once they’ve occurred,” says Denver therapist Joycee Kennedy, a first responder at the shootings at Columbine High. The author of Bridging Worlds: Understanding and Facilitating Adolescent Recovery from the Trauma of Abuse, Kennedy was also contacted after the Aurora killings. “We’ve developed excellent means for helping victims with psychological first aid, but we’re failing badly at preventing these mass murders from erupting. I feel very, very sorry for Dr. Fenton and for what lies ahead for her, but I’m also very disappointed in the mental health system, especially after what took place right here at Columbine.
“In these circumstances, it’s standard operating procedure to put a James Holmes into the seventy-two-hour psychiatric evaluation program, but they didn’t do that. People like Holmes are very smart, so no one wants to believe that a merit scholar with a federal grant can be a mass murderer, but his intelligence is only part of the story. In school, he was probably studying himself and how his own mind functioned, but he was very detached from his emotional impact on the world.
“Then came the multiple stressors leading up to the shootings—he messed up an oral exam and dropped out of school. His lifelong goal had just evaporated. He had no income to pay the rent. In Denver, he’d built up no friendships and no social structure to fall back on.
“For anyone to turn this violent, his emotional-sensory system had to be impaired or completely shut down. He could no longer feel other people. When your emotional-sensory system is working, you cry in front of a therapist, you get sick to your stomach, you feel bad about your thoughts, and you show what you’re feeling physically. Things happen that a therapist can observe. We have ways of measuring these physical reactions and an in-depth evaluation would have revealed all this.
“If Holmes enters an insanity plea in court, it’s completely meaningless. He was highly deliberate in planning the attack and indifferent to the consequences. He should plead guilty to the charges, but he probably won’t and the university will try to seal his records, including his therapeutic ones, because they’re terrified of the liability issues. This is all wrong because it keeps us from learning what we need to know about these events.”
In the spring of 2014, almost two years after the massacre, this fear of liability—along with the death threats that had come to Dr. Fenton—caused mental health providers and state lawmakers to take action. Working together, they drafted House Bill 1271, passed unanimously by the Colorado House and Senate. The bill would permit mental health providers to report on threats against locations and on threats against specific groups or individuals, while offering them immunity from potential civil lawsuits.
“I’ve met and worked with Dr. Fenton,” says psycho-pharmacologist Dr. Jeffrey Gold, “and I think she’s a very good and well-respected doctor. No one could have predicted what Holmes was going to do. I feel very bad for her because psychiatrists don’t have a crystal ball. In my mind, this isn’t a case about her not diagnosing schizophrenia or latent schizophrenia in her patient. I say that because of all the planning and strategy that went into the shootings. It was very well thought out and put together. To me, it feels more like a bitter message being sent to society by someone who wanted to be a super-villain and then became one.”
“Mass shootings,” says Joycee Kennedy, “aren’t about intelligence or brain structures or genetics, but emotional numbness. We’re seeing this everywhere now in our society and we’re watching it explode into violence again and again. The rising stars in the psychiatric or neuroscience field look at brain patterns or neurotransmissions far more than at emotions. They’re missing the boat and the emotional clues that are there before these things happen. If James Holmes had been my patient, I’d never practice therapy again. My sense of guilt would be too overwhelming.”
Seven million Americans currently suffer from mental illness, and half are untreated.
“We don’t have a criminal justice problem in this country,” Kennedy says. “We have a mental health crisis because the at-risk population isn’t getting the psychiatric care it needs. It’s all part of the larger health care issues we need to look at now. These events are there to make us focus on what we’ve been avoiding.
“The Aurora murders represent a huge opportunity to educate the public about the effects of emotional numbness and about how the psychiatric community isn’t paying enough attention to this condition. It’s imperative that we finally learn something from this tragedy.”
From a twenty-nine-year-old female working in the educational field in New Mexico:
We’re all starting to feel less safe and more vulnerable. I get nervous going to a mall or sitting in a room with other people. I look at them more closely now. I check where the exits are. You can now kill fifty people in about thirty seconds, if you have the right weapons.