colorado theater shootings Documents show university’s lack of response to homicidal urges

Associated Press

DENVER

More than a month before James Holmes’ rampage on a Colorado movie theater, the head of his neuroscience graduate program called a campus police officer with alarming information: Holmes had told his psychiatrist that he wanted to kill people to make up for his failure in science.

The call, never previously disclosed, came just after the psychiatrist expressed similar concerns to the same University of Colorado police officer in June 2012, when Holmes abruptly ended his academic career after repeatedly sharing his homicidal urges.

But newly released documents show the officer did little other than check to see whether Holmes had a criminal record and deactivate his campus access cards. And his psychiatrist declined to detain Holmes, who had revealed no specific targets or threats, because she thought it would only “inflame him.”

The documents obtained by The Associated Press provide new details about the best chance authorities had to stop Holmes before the July 2012 theater massacre. They also show how hard it can be to predict who will turn violent, even when they’ve displayed warning signs, experts say.

“There’s no reliable way we can identify those few who will pick up a gun and start shooting people from the vast number who might seem odd or unusual or even scary,” said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who has studied and written about mass killings. “You can’t predict it. Did they do everything they could have? That’s another question.”

A judge last week sentenced Holmes to life in prison without parole for murdering 12 people and trying to kill 70 more after jurors couldn’t agree that he deserved the death penalty. The documents, released by the University of Colorado and prosecutors in response to open-records requests by the AP, provide the fullest look yet at how university officials handled concerns about Holmes, who dropped out of the prestigious program a month before the attack. A long-standing gag order lifted at the end of Holmes’ trial had prohibited officials from releasing the documents or speaking publicly about the case.

A federal lawsuit filed by the widow of one of Holmes’ victims accuses university officials and Holmes’ psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, of not doing enough to stop the shooting. With the trial over, the lawsuit can proceed. During the trial, Fenton testified that, without specific threats or targets, she lacked the evidence to have him placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold.