Colorado theater shooter went from happy boy to mass killer

They didn’t know he was getting therapy and thought perhaps he was depressed or had Asperger’s syndrome, Robert Holmes said.

“The event” is a phrase he used several times to refer to his son’s attack on the audience inside a darkened Colorado movie theater, which killed 12 people, injured 70 others and makes James Holmes eligible for the death penalty.

Arlene Holmes also described her son as someone who did well in school, did volunteer work as a child, and continued to do so when he went to UC Riverside. “I still do”, Arlene Holmes said, choking up on the stand.

Robert Holmes assumed his son had been hurt when he got an early morning phone call from a reporter telling him of the shooting at a crowded midnight movie premiere.

Had she known…”I would have been crawling on all fours to get to him”.

“Of course I do”. “She didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t tell me”, she wept. “He still had a family that loved him”, the elder Holmes testified.

“We don’t kill people for being sick”, defense attorney Rebekka Higgs said in her opening statement. He also told her that he had thoughts of killing people.

Earlier in the day, Holmes’ mother and father took the stand as his attorneys try to persuade jurors to spare his life.

“No, he was not a violent individual”, Robert Holmes stated.

It was about that time that he said he tried to cut his wrists with a piece of cardboard, he told a psychiatrist after the shootings.

Arlene Holmes, sobbing on the stand: “We wouldn’t be here today…” But his parents had grown increasingly anxious when he came home on his first winter break looking haggard and making odd facial expressions.

Holmes did send his parents sporadic and terse emails that gave no hints of trouble, and their concerns were eased again when they finally reached him by phone that July 4, just two weeks before the shooting.

A few close Westview High School friends said he would open up to them, but his family never met them. Their son was more talkative than usual and “he didn’t give any indication he was homicidal or depressed, at least not to us”, Robert Holmes said. But this time they were anxious because the psychiatrist said James, who had broken up with the only girlfriend he’d ever had, planned to drop out of school. It would be too late.

Taking to the stand, his mother Arlene Holmes said her son was a happy baby who did not choose to have a psychiatric illness.

But he did and now faces the possible sentence of death. While the jury has already decided that Holmes was legally sane at the time of the attack, his defence is hoping at least one juror will agree that his mental illness reduces his moral culpability so much that he deserves the mercy of a life sentence instead.

He spoke of his son’s idyllic boyhood in Castroville, a small California town south of San Jose that treasured its children. You play video of him as a laughing little boy cutting out gingerbread Christmas trees with his grandmother and struggling to pick out “Jingle Bells” on the piano.

She was aware of his growing social anxiety but said she had no idea how bad it was.

“We knew some things weren’t going well there”, Robert Holmes said. But Dr. Lynne Fenton never told James Holmes’ mother that he had cut off treatment, that he might be psychotic, that he had expressed homicidal ideation. They both smiled before a deputy told the father to stop.

The father said that he has only seen his son in jail three times because he typically does not allow visitors.

In this image taken from Colorado Judicial Department video, James Holmes, top left in light-colored shirt, sits in court as his younger sister Chris, right, testifies during questioning by Holmes’ defense team, in the penalty phase of Holmes’ trial, Monday, July 27, 2015, in Centennial, Colo.

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