As the Holmes January 27 sanity hearing approached, two mental health experts met with Dr. Metzner to discuss his earlier examination of the defendant. The DA’s office had already selected this duo to test Holmes again, if Judge Samour allowed that to happen. Psychologist Kris Mohandie worked with the FBI and psychiatrist Phillip Resnick had “been involved in just about every high-profile homicide case this country has seen” in recent decades, the judge would write of him. Some of these cases included that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The prosecution had already been paying Resnick $400 an hour and Mohandie $300 an hour for their opinions about the sanity of the defendant; so far, Mohandie had earned an estimated $45,000 for this work.
Mohandie and Resnick had both read and found problems with Metzner’s report on Holmes. They felt that Metzner was biased, and they sought to study the defendant themselves. In the view of some legal professionals, the prosecution’s desire to have their own handpicked experts examine Holmes was justified, given that in Colorado, the state must prove that a defendant is sane.
Stan Garnett, the District Attorney for Boulder County, had been involved in numerous cases involving both sanity issues and the death penalty. In his county in 2010, Stephanie Rochester suffocated her six-month-old son because she feared he had autism. A state psychiatrist determined that the mother had a “major depressive disorder,” and the judge declared Rochester not guilty by reason of insanity. Garnett disputed this and cited evidence that she’d tried to suffocate the baby over a period of hours, at one point going back to the dinner table to rejoin her husband after an unsuccessful attempt on the infant’s life. The DA unsuccessfully appealed the judge’s decision not to allow a prosecution expert to examine her.
“Because the defendant is the sole source of evidence in this situation,” he said in his appeal, “courts have noted a defendant’s opportunity to manipulate the information the prosecution receives.”
In discussing the Holmes plea, Garnett said, “In many cases, because the defense is seeking the exam, the results will come back and say that the defendant is insane. The judge can then order a second evaluation from an independent examiner so you also have that opinion. But the prosecution can’t have its own experts test the defendant. I think the state legislature should change this law to make things more fair, but defense attorneys would strongly oppose that.
“When the Holmes case occurred, I began hearing from prosecutors around the state who told me, ‘We should have made these changes before this happened.’ I’d change the law to say that both sides can examine the defendant. Then the jurors can hear all the evidence and make their own decision.”
Dr. Metzner had devoted twenty-five hours to interviewing Holmes and roughly one hundred additional hours to speaking with witnesses and mental health personnel who’d talked with the defendant prior to the crime, and to digesting the scores of CDs and DVDs made about the young man. For weeks he’d focused his full professional attention on the case and reached his conclusions after much research and consideration. Before his only meeting with Mohandie and Resnick, he didn’t understand that his comments to them might be used against him and to convince Judge Samour that Holmes needed further testing. After getting together with Mohandie and Resnick, he refused to see the prosecutors again because he felt “blindsided” and “set up” by them.
The sanity hearing lasted from January 27–30 and was at times testy. The mental health professionals were all fighting for their point of view about Holmes, while the judge refereed the conflict. As Mohandie and Resnick offered a detailed critique and criticism of Metzner, he became more upset and defensive, again feeling undermined by the prosecution team.
Three weeks later, Samour ruled that although he did not think Metzner had been biased when first testing Holmes, he’d now become biased because of his difficulties with the prosecution’s psychiatrists. Given another chance to evaluate the prisoner, Metzner wouldn’t be able to “resist the temptation” to prove that his initial findings had been accurate.
Prosecutors, he wrote, were requesting a second exam because “the prior experts’ opinions were incomplete. That is, a potentially new and significant diagnosis had been proposed that could dramatically alter an assessment of the defendant’s behavior on the day of the incident.”
Samour ordered a second evaluation, to be conducted at the jail where Holmes was incarcerated or again at the hospital in Pueblo. He rejected the request by Mohandie and Resnick to do the follow-up exam, asking the Colorado Mental Health Institute to conduct a nationwide search for an independent psychiatric expert by March 10, 2014, a few weeks hence. The new report had to be completed by July 11, 2014, and the next evaluator had to answer only one question: Was Holmes insane at the time of the shootings?
The judge then set a new trial date of October 14, 2014, nearly twenty-seven months after the massacre. If that date held up, the first group of 9,000 prospective jurors—an unheard of number—would be summoned to the Arapahoe County courthouse for voir dire, the question-and-answer session leading to the selection of a jury. This process alone could take several months and would involve the largest jury pool ever called before the start of an American trial. This number might have seemed like overkill, but given the parameters of the case, and the extreme circumstances each juror would have to confront, it also seemed justified. Some portion of those nine thousand potential jurors called likely knew one of the victims, or their families, or one of 223 officers who’d come to the crime scene or one of the first responders at the theater, or one of the medical personnel at the hospitals where the wounded were taken. Also, the jury had to be “death qualified,” meaning that they would not only pass judgment on Holmes’s guilt or innocence but also commit themselves to deciding whether he lived or was executed. Finally, they had to be available to sit through four or five months of legal proceedings for fifty dollars a day. They would be presented with gruesome forensic and photographic evidence of the carnage inside the theater. Even after casting such a wide net over the jury pool, the various hardships the potential jurors were facing were certain to cause many of them to be dismissed.
As soon as the judge ordered a second evaluation, the defense said that they’d challenge this decision in the Colorado Supreme Court. They did, and they lost. Legal commentators said the trial wouldn’t start now until early 2015, which turned out to be accurate, but not before the defense would try to postpone it several more times.
A year earlier, virtually all of the relevant facts of the case had become known, but something was missing. The facts did not add up to the truth—not the whole truth. That lay elsewhere, hidden in the pages of the spiral notebook or the defendant’s words to Dr. Metzner or in the testimony of Dr. Metzner himself. More than a year and a half after the massacre, the gag order remained in place and the case felt frozen. In any murder trial, this would have been troubling. But in this case, it felt like something more than that.
From the beginning, the Aurora shootings had stood out as an educational opportunity for those trying to understand more about America’s mass-shooting phenomenon. All of the elements were in place. The defendant had chosen to live instead of die in police gunfire or commit suicide at the theater. He was highly intelligent and had been a PhD candidate in neuroscience. Holmes had likely been studying his own mind and/or mental illness in grad school. He’d written extensively in his spiral notebook about his inner life in the months leading up to the murders. He’d spoken with a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado who specialized in what may have been plaguing him—the onset of schizophrenia—which tended to affect some men in their twenties. He’d given information to another mental health expert, Dr. Metzner, yet no one could speak about any of this in a public way, a way that might illuminate the phenomenon of mass violence committed by American youth.
Nearly two years after the shootings, the legal system had made it impossible to extract any pertinent psychological data from the tragedy. The division and conflict pervading the culture that had produced Holmes had infected everything and everyone in the courtroom.
The defense now asked for a change of venue for the trial and attacked the Twitter feeds of Rob McCallum, the public information officer for Colorado’s Eighteenth Judicial District. They disliked McCallum’s “jovial tweets” with a prosecutor, his exchanges with journalists, and his announcements about press conferences or responses to inquiries from non-news sources.
The eighteen-page criticism of McCallum prompted Jeremy Meyer of The Denver Post to write, “The Holmes case is one of the most intriguing in the country and is being watched internationally. McCallum has handled the crush of media interest with aplomb and has not endangered the case with his Twitter feed. Last year, McCallum was even awarded the Sue O’Brien Award for Public Service by the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition . . .”
The case, Meyer argued, hadn’t been undermined by Rob McCallum, but by an “overreaching gag order,” which had kept the Aurora Police Department from publicly discussing their tactics on the night of the crime when loading their patrol cars with wounded victims because ambulances couldn’t get close enough to the theater. Other cities had sought to learn from Aurora’s law enforcement experience, but the APD couldn’t provide them with this information until a court order allowed this in the fall of 2014. Likewise, the surviving victims who were suing the Century 16 Theater owners had also been denied access to critical transcripts and exhibits that had already been exposed during Holmes’s preliminary hearing.
Meyer was pleased when the judge chose not to punish McCallum. Yet Samour did use this incident to remind everyone that the strict gag order remained in place. “He didn’t need to say that,” Meyer concluded. “We already were gagging.”
In late May, as Judge Samour was denying the defense’s change-of-venue motion, twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger, the son of a Hollywood director, went on a stabbing and shooting spree across the seaside California college community of Isla Vista. Enraged after being rejected by young women he’d wanted to date, Rodger killed two females and four males, all of them students at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Another thirteen people were injured before Rodger shot and killed himself inside his BMW. He posted on YouTube a “Day of Retribution” video right before the assault. He also wrote a 140-page manifesto, outlining his wounded feelings and desire to extract revenge.
Right after the massacre, Richard Martinez, whose twenty-year-old son Christopher had died in the rampage, held a press conference. He was so distraught that he could barely force out his words: “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”
Responding to Martinez, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (who’d become nationally known as “Joe the Plumber” during the 2008 presidential campaign) wrote an open letter to the grieving parents of the people Rodger had killed: “I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through is what you are going through now. But as harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
Martinez’s comments about the NRA and politicians, he said, “will be exploited by gun-grab extremists as are all tragedies involving gun violence and the mentally ill by the anti-Second Amendment Left . . . It is my responsibility to protect my family” and “[I] will stand up for that right vehemently.”
Because Elliott Rodger had targeted young women (and men), the shootings inspired a social media movement that immediately sprang up around women’s issues. Called #YesAllWomen, it went viral and amassed 1.5 million tweets in its first three days.
Once again, America’s undeclared civil war had been highlighted by the violence of a twentysomething male from a privileged background.
A few weeks later, Aaron Ybarra, a twenty-six-year-old armed with an AK-47 and other weapons, including a knife, opened fire at Seattle Pacific University, killing one person and wounding three more.
According to the periodical Awareness, the single biggest common factor in nearly all recent mass shootings was that the killers were either taking psychotropic drugs or had been doing so in the not-too-distant past. The periodical mentioned scientific studies and pharmaceutical companies’ internal documents showing that SSRI drugs (Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors) have clearly known, but basically unreported, side effects, including suicide and other violent behavior. Counting Elliot Rodger’s massacre at Isla Vista, thirty-three school shootings and/or school-related acts of violence had been committed by those taking or getting off of psychiatric drugs—acts that had left 177 people wounded and eighty-three dead. The mass shooters linked to psychotropic drugs—to quote from just a partial list of names provided by Awareness—included:
Seventeen-year-old Eric Harris (on Zoloft and then Luvox) and eighteen-year-old Dylan Klebold, who killed twelve students, one teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School.
Sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise was on 60 mg/day of Prozac—three times the normal starting dose for adults—when he murdered his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend, and his fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota, before killing himself. He left a total of ten dead and twelve wounded.
Sixteen-year-old Cory Baadsgaard of Wahluke (Washington State) High School was on Paxil when he held twenty-three classmates hostage with a rifle. He retained no memory of doing this.
Thirteen-year-old Chris Fetters killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.
Twelve-year-old Christopher Pittman murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
Thirteen-year-old Mathew Miller hanged himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for six days.
Fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel, on both Prozac and Ritalin, shot his parents and then opened fire at his school, killing two classmates and injuring twenty-two shortly after starting on Prozac.
Sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham was on Prozac when he killed his mother and two students, wounding six others.
Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal was on Ritalin when he fired on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed and five others were wounded.
Eleven-year-old Andrew Golden and fourteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson were on Ritalin when they shot fifteen people—killing four students and a teacher and wounding ten others.
Fifteen-year-old T. J. Solomon was on Ritalin when he opened fire and wounded six classmates.
Fourteen-year-old Rod Mathews was on Ritalin when he beat a classmate to death with a bat.
Nineteen-year-old James Wilson was on multiple psychiatric drugs when he went into an elementary school with a .22-caliber revolver and killed two young girls, while wounding seven other children and two teachers.
Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on Paxil when she unleashed a school shooting in Pennsylvania.
Jason Hoffman was on Effexor and Celexa during a school shooting in El Cajon, California.
Seventeen-year-old Julie Woodward was on Zoloft when she hanged herself in her family’s garage.
In early June 2014, as the second anniversary of the Aurora shootings approached, the Albuquerque News published an article that began, “Young killers have brains that differ considerably from those of male adolescents who have committed other types of serious crimes.” The Mind Research Network at the University of New Mexico had looked at MRI brain scans of young male offenders and determined with an 81 percent degree of accuracy the brains of those who’d killed, according to Kent Kiehl, the lead author of the first in-depth neuro-scientific examination of the brain differences in teens who murder. Kiehl found that the killers had reduced gray matter in regions deep in the brain, where emotions are processed and impulses are regulated. The regions appeared to show delayed development in teens who commit homicide.
A few days after the study was released, thirty-one-year-old Jerad Miller gunned down two Las Vegas police officers at CiCi’s pizza north of the Strip and an armed civilian in a nearby Walmart. Videos made prior to the massacre depicted his face painted to look like The Joker’s. He was aided in the killings by his twenty-two-year-old wife, Amanda, and both had embraced extreme beliefs against what they saw as the tyrannical American government. The police shot and killed Jerad, while Amanda committed suicide.
Referring to the roughly thirty thousand gun deaths a year in America, including homicides and suicides, Truthout wrote, “The shooting of women by misogynist men, and the shooting of children in schools, and even the shooting of police officers having lunch, is doing far more to destroy the United States than a terrorist group ever could . . . We have met the terrorists threatening our national security. They are here in the homeland, empowered with legal standing to terrorize. This nation spends hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars annually to ‘fight terrorism abroad’ . . . while U.S. domestic agencies let the terrorism within fester without constraint.”
As these words were published, the American population watched Iraq being torn into fragments by fighting on several different fronts. The militant group ISIS would soon start beheading journalists and others and releasing videos of these events to the world. From 2003–2011, 4,486 U.S. soldiers had died fighting in Iraq, sent off to war on the Bush administration’s repeated belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found, and once the United States began leaving that country after 2011, Iraq started its long descent into chaos. Bullying and violence had not worked abroad, and there was absolutely no evidence that it was working at home.
In midsummer 2014, Dr. William Reid, the second psychiatrist to examine James Holmes, told the court that the results of his testing would not be ready by the court-mandated deadline of July 11. Dr. Reid needed several more months, so the October 2014 date for the start of the trial had to be pushed back once again. The new trial date was December 8, 2014, but that wouldn’t hold up either.
While these delays unfolded, the lawyers now tried to keep the public from being able to watch the Holmes trial, should it ever commence. The Aurora Sentinel was having none of it. “Arguments against a televised Holmes trial,” the newspaper’s editors wrote, “pale in comparison to the American public’s compelling and overwhelming need to see this vital case unfold for itself. The entire country is the jury that will decide where we go from here. Anything less is less than justice served.”
As the second anniversary of the Aurora shootings came that July, actor Christian Bale wrote a letter supporting more gun control: “My heart sank when I heard the news about the shooting two years ago in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. It was opening day of The Dark Knight Rises and twelve people had just been shot and killed at a midnight showing—fifty-eight wounded. The only thing I could think to do was go to Aurora. I visited the survivors and family members in the hospital.
“One of the amazing survivors of the shooting I met was Steve Barton—a guy who just happened to be passing through on a cross-country bike trip when he stopped to go to the movies with friends. Tomorrow marks two years since the Aurora shooting. After the shooting, Steve focused his incredible talents on fighting for public safety measures that will prevent others’ lives from being affected by gun violence like his was. I’m inspired by his resilience and dedication.
“The fact is, there’s a lot more we can do to cut down on gun violence. After the Aurora shooting, Colorado passed a strong law that has already blocked criminals from easily buying guns without a background check. But making that kind of progress in other states or at the federal level is going to require elected officials with the backbone to act. That’s why it’s so important to support local, state, and federal candidates who will push for common-sense gun laws.
“On this sad anniversary, let’s all recommit ourselves to turning tragedy into meaning. Watch Steve’s powerful message now and then spread the word:
http://every.tw/aurora-two-years
“It’s an honor to stand with Steve, with you and with all Americans fighting to reduce gun violence.
“Thank you, Christian Bale.”
Others like Bale, operating outside the political and legal arenas, were trying to make a difference. Bill and Melinda Gates donated a million dollars to the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility, which was committed to lowering violence in the Evergreen State. The group backed Initiative 594, requiring criminal background checks on all firearms sales and transfers in Washington, including those on the Internet and at gun shows. “We believe,” the couple said in a statement after offering their financial support for Initiative 594, “it will be an effective and balanced approach to improving gun safety in our state by closing existing loopholes for background checks.”
In 2012, the gun-control movement was $285 million behind the gun-rights movement in terms of fund raising, but Aurora and Newtown began to change the momentum in this battle. The citizen activities following the Holmes and the Lanza massacres included a national, multimedia, investigative reporting project, run by News21, called “Gun Wars: The Struggle Over Rights and Regulation in America.”
In 2005, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation came together to start News21 as part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. News21 was headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and engaged leading college journalism students from coast to coast in its projects. After studying the financing of the gun control movement, News21 reported in 2014 that it was beginning to catch up with the gun-rights crowd. Organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety and the Michael Bloomberg-backed Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) campaign were at least attempting to even up the score on the economic front.
At an Everytown event in Washington, DC, in May 2014, Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun control group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said, “Now, for the first time in our country’s history, there is a well-financed and formidable force positioned to take on the Washington gun lobby.”
In mid-September 2014, The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter, Jessica Ghawi, was killed at the Aurora theater, sued the online retailer who sold James Holmes body armor and ammunition used in the shootings. It was the first lawsuit ever against cyber sellers of ammunition and military equipment. Holmes bought ammunition and body armor from various online retailers, including bulkammo.com. The plaintiffs alleged that the websites “negligently supplied Holmes with the arsenal” and failed “to use any screening mechanism to determine his identity or intent for the products.”
America’s legal system may have been paralyzed, but its citizens were not. The first step toward taking action was seeing oneself not merely as a victim of these tragic circumstances, but as someone with the power to create change. Small steps might lead to larger ones later on.
In mid-November, those in Nevada promoting gun-owner background checks turned in slightly under 247,000 signatures for a 2016 state ballot measure to strengthen screening and reporting of weapon purchases. Nevadans for Background Checks want their state to become the eighteenth to require universal background checks for all sales and transfers of firearms.