Before opening fire onto an Aurora movie theater in July 2012, shooter James Holmes made a phone call that lasted 18 seconds. In a video recorded interview with forensic psychiatrist Dr. William Reid, the shooter said he called the main phone line of the University of Colorado Hospital and hung up when he didn’t hear anything after nine seconds. He said this was a last chance for someone to “stop the process” before he entered the theater with a shotgun, an AR-15 rifle, a handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammo.
“Some things seemed to be intended to be received in a certain way,” Reid said, adding that, “There’s a strong implication, I think, that he wanted to be stopped from doing something wrong.”
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Judge Carlos Samour reminded the jury that the contents of the video, which is being played in court in its 22-hour entirety, is to be used to only consider if the defendant was legally sane at the time he committed the crime. The interview took place in July and August of 2014, two years after 12 people were left dead and 70 injured. Legal insanity, he said, means:
(1) The defendant was so diseased or defective in mind at the time of the act to be incapable of knowing right from wrong.
(2) The defendant suffered from a condition of mind caused by a mental disease or defect that rendered him incapable of forming a culpable state of mind, and he committed the crime after deliberation and with intent, knowingly.
In today’s showings of the interview, the shooter told Reid, “A part of me wished (I was) locked up so that it could’ve been prevented.” He researched how to submit an opinion piece to the New York Times online, considered submitting photos of himself with orange hair and black contact lenses, then ultimately decided not to. The shooter said he wanted to be remembered as “a significant figure.” So what would people think of the man in those photos, Reid asked?
“He’s mentally different,” the shooter said. “He has a different view of the world than other people.”
The defendant mailed a spiral notebook filled with his detailed thoughts and plans to his psychologist hours before the massacre. His notes included a list of symptoms self-diagnosing himself with a mental illness, and some of these symptoms could be associated with a form of schizophrenia.
Dr. Reid testified that the contents of the notebook, in his opinion, “were not absolutely true or representative of what the shooter was really thinking.”
The defendant spoke of fleeting shadows that he caught glimpse of in the corners of his eyes, prior to being medicated. Reid said that, to his knowledge, the shooter did not discuss seeing “shadows” or other visual phenomena with other mental health professionals. Most people suffering from visual phenomena experience distress, he said; Holmes did not exhibit any distress when talking about the “shadows”.
When asked what his definition of psychotic is the shooter said, “Having beliefs that don’t match up with reality.”
Before entering the theater he said he had no fantasies and was not nervous, he was operating with a “just get it done” mindset and was “calm and collective”. He aimed for people trying to escape while techno music blasted through his wireless headphones, just as he had trained at the firing range with music. He stopped shooting when the magazine to his AR-15 jammed, and he said he doesn’t know why he left the theater. He did, however, speculate on how the people in the theater likely felt.
“Terror, I’d say. Very afraid. Unbelieving that (it) could happen in that moment…Shock…Reaching out for help,” the shooter said.
He also explained that shooting at a crowd is different from killing an individual —Ěýit is more “impersonal”. Reid asked him about the 70 people who were maimed and wounded but not killed.
“I wouldn’t want that to happen to me,” the shooter said during the conversation, and added later that it was not his intention to be locked up.
The defense will have a chance to cross-examine Reid following the completion of the taped interview’s exhibition. They will also have the opportunity to bring to the stand other psychiatrists who interviewed the defendant in order to provide more opinions and assessments of his mental state at the time of the crime.
“In 32 months he was treated by more than 20 doctors,” defense attorney Dan King said in the trial’s opening statements. “…When (he) stepped into that theater on July 20, he was insane.”
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Editor’s Note: CU News Corps will remember the victims of the tragedy with every post via this graphic.
