On July 21, two of those who had attended their local movie theater in Colorado to watch the midnight airing of The Dark Knight Rises would unknowingly risk their lives at the hands of a mass shooter who managed to enter the premises with pure Gasket names in multiple firearms. Welcome or welcome back to Twisted Minds. My name is James and today we’ll dive into the mind behind the Colorado shooting in 2012, James Holmes, who took the lives of twelve innocent people and left around 70 others injured on December 13, 1987. Holmes was born in San Diego, California. Robert Holmes, his father, was a mathematician and physicist who holds degrees from Stanford, UCLA, and UC Berkeley.
Arlene Holmes, his mother, was a registered nurse. The two would go on to have their second child, a younger sister. For James Holmes, to be raised alongside their home was situated in Oak Hills, a Monterey County neighborhood in Castroville, California. When he was just twelve years old, Holmes returned to San Diego while living in the Rancho Penasquitos neighborhood. He allegedly began to degenerate socially.
Despite these alleged claims, in the year 2006, he graduated from West View High School. James was a soccer player and a cross-country runner in high school. According to his lawyer, Daniel King, Holmes began to deal with mental health issues in middle school and attempted suicide at the age of eleven. He used to be a sweet, happy little boy from a loving home, a good kid who was careful with his dog and baby sister. He was desired.
He was praised, and he was enrolled in piano lessons, soccer practice, and birthday parties in the neighborhood. His life appeared to be quite ordinary. He was a good student who enjoyed basketball and video games. He visited the beach, went on mountain camping trips, and visited Disneyland. On Thanksgiving and Christmas.
There were family gatherings, and on July 4 in Halloween, there were community festivities. After completing his fifth-grade tasks, he and a classmate spent their free time programming code and creating a school website. His teacher praised him and referred to him as a Renaissance child. His mother stated, he was planned for, wanted, hoped for, and waited for. We desired a kid and were blessed with one.
It was just what we had hoped for. He inherited a slew of familial traits when he was born. He was quiet, smart, and an intellectual overachiever, just like his mathematician father. He developed another characteristic as he grew older. Social discomfort.
His stoicism came from his mother, who instilled him in a family ethos that valued hard labor and community duty while shunning weakness. Then there were the report cards, which usually included straight as and a stack of school and team photos. His father referred to him as Jimmy and his mother called him Jim. Neighbors, family acquaintances, instructors, coaches, friends, and classmates reported a boy who avoided getting into fights, was seldom aggressive, and tried to blend in when he was twelve, his condition began to get worse and his family relocated from Castroville, near Montreal to San Diego. He struggled to make friends and began to isolate himself in his room playing video games, according to her, his mother went door to door looking for playmates, but the boys in their new area weren’t very nice.
Her son lost his excitement, she said, for not being able to make him happy. She felt sorry. According to the defense, what was dismissed as a difficult transition was likely an early indication of Holmes’s mental condition. Even by the time he was in high school, a cross-country coach had taken note of his behavior. He kept to himself and was so uncomfortable standing close to others that the team photo was ruined.
His time at College was uneventful. In the Riverside campus of the University of California, he made a few friends among the honors students and received as but he wasn’t exactly joyful. He and his housemates were engrossed with the television series Lost. It was the social highlight of his week. He was rejected from most of the prestigious graduate institutions for which he applied, so he went home and stayed up late, slept throughout the day, and seemed lost until his mother recommended he seek a job.
He went to work in a pharmaceutical mill where coworkers observed his peculiar faraway countenance as he stared out into space. After the second round of graduate school applications, he got admitted to the Anchhoots Medical campus of the University of Colorado. Instead of cruising through his classes with straight A’s, Holmes found himself struggling for the first time. He eventually came undone. In 2012, he dropped out of graduate school after being dumped by his first girlfriend.
He was losing the battle with his broken brain, as he put it. According to the prosecution, these setbacks may have prompted Holmes to lash out with violence. However, the defense claims that these were merely psychosis triggers. No matter how much neuroscience he read, he’d conclude that his broken brain couldn’t mend itself. The social interactions required for lab work and presentations were too much for him.
According to the defense, his focus turned to planning and carrying out a mission to validate his self-worth so he wouldn’t have to commit suicide. He wrote about a peculiar human capital idea in a notebook that he addressed to a psychiatrist in which he would add value to his own life by ending the lives of others.
According to CBS News, Homes visited with at least three mental health doctors at the University of Colorado before the Atrocity. One of them considered putting Homes on an involuntary mental health hold after learning of his homicidal thoughts but decided against it because she believed Holmes was borderline and that the committee would further enrage him. Before the incident, one of Holmes’s psychiatrists feared that he had a mental disorder that could have been hazardous. Dr. Lynn Fenton informed campus police that he had made homicidal statements.
A month before the accident, Holmes wrote a text message to a graduate student two weeks before the master, asking if the student had ever heard of the disorder dysphoric mania and urging the students to keep away from him because he was bad news. Holmes chose the Century 16 theater for his attack and, according to a Rapaho County district attorney, George Brochler, because he liked movie theaters, that specific theater had doors that he could lock to increase the number of casualties, as well as being in an area where police response would take longer. He targeted the midnight chilling because he assumed fewer children would be present and he didn’t want to harm them. Holmes investigated alternative venues for a mass shooting, such as an airport, but decided against it because airport security would be excessive. He further explained why an attack on an airport might be misconstrued as a terrorist attack, adding, the message isn’t one of terrorism.
The message is that there is none. He had also considered employing explosives, chemical agents, or biological agents in his attack, but ruled out the possibility because he feared he would blow himself up. James had also pondered serial killing, but he eventually dismissed it as too personal, too much proof. Easily caught, few kills. Holmes bought a Glock.
22 pistol from a Gander Mountain store in Aurora on May 22, 2012. He then acquired a Remington 870 Express tactical shotgun at a Bass Pro shop in Denver. Six days later, on May 28, he bought a Smith and Wesson MP 15 sports rifle. On June 7, just hours after failing his University oral exam, all three weapons were legally purchased and background checks were completed. Homes also purchased 3000 rounds of pistol ammo, 3000 rounds of MP 15 ammunition, and 350 shelves for the shotgun over the Internet in the four months leading up to the shooting, he ordered a Blackhawk Urban Assault vest, two magazine holders, and a knife from an online merchant on July 2.
He also bought spike traps, which he subsequently claimed he meant to deploy if cops shot at him or tracked him down in a car chase. Holmes emailed his application to join a firearms club in Buyers, Colorado, on June 25, less than a month before the massacre. Glenn Rockovich, the owner, called him numerous times over the next several days to invite him to a mandatory orientation, but he could only get through to his answering machine. Holmes mailed a notebook to his psychiatrist on July 19, just hours before the shooting began. During the weeks leading up to the shooting, he kept a diary that chronicled his ideas and preparations.
The notebook was discovered in the main facility of the Anschutz Medical campus in an undeliverable package. James reportedly called a mental health crisis hotline just before the shooting in hopes that someone would persuade him out of carrying out the slaughter at the last minute. However, after 9 seconds, the call was disconnected he then went on to commit the most devastating mass shooting the state had ever experienced. At the time. It was reported by Maine’s.