Colorado shooting spree could have been worse; shooter’s gun jammed, official says

By David A. Fahrenthold, Thomas Heath and Joel Achenbach
Updated: Sunday, July 22, 3:15 PM

Washington Post:

AURORA, Colo. — New details about the midnight-movie shooting rampage here suggest that the death toll could have been even worse, as the gunman’s semiautomatic assault rifle jammed and prevented him from emptying a 100-round clip of ammunition, a law enforcement source said Sunday.

There also emerged a new twist in the narrative that indicates that the alleged shooter, identified by authorities as James Holmes, did not immediately surrender to police and could have come close to eluding capture by slipping away in the guise of a SWAT team officer.

The law enforcement source, who is close to the investigation but not authorized to speak publicly, said something went awry in the killer’s planned assault at the Century 16 theater during the midnight screening Friday of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.” Police said the alleged gunman had three weapons: a Remington shotgun, a Smith & Wesson M&P assault rifle, and a Glock 40-caliber handgun.

The semiautomatic assault rifle, which is akin to an AR-15 and is a civilian version of the military’s M-16, could fire 50 to 60 rounds per minute, and is designed to hold large ammunition clips. Holmes allegedly had obtained a 100-round drum magazine that attached to the weapon, the source said, but that such large magazines are notorious for jamming.

The law enforcement official said authorities believe Holmes first used the shotgun — some victims in the hospital have buckshot wounds — and then began using the assault rifle, which jammed. Then he resorted to the handgun.

Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, interviewed on Fox News Sunday, did not confirm or deny that the gun jammed, but said police found the 100-round magazine lying on the floor of the theater. He said he didn’t know whether it was empty.

Holmes is accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 in one of the worst mass shootings in American history.

Initial police accounts said Holmes surrendered without incident to police who found him at his car in the rear of the Aurora theater. But Oates, in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, described a more complicated scene in the minutes after the shooting: He said that officers arriving at the scene might have mistaken Holmes for a SWAT officer. He allegedly wore a helmet, throat guard, ballistic vest, ballistic leggings, gloves and was dressed entirely in black.

Oates said a piece of equipment in Holmes’ elaborate gear — he wouldn’t specify which piece — struck one of the responding officers as irregular. The officer questioned Holmes. Oates did not describe the exchange, only the result: Holmes was arrested.

Police are in the process of trying to restore some sense of normalcy to the neighborhood where Holmes lived, and where residents of five buildings had been evacuated after police discovered that the suspect’s apartment had been booby-trapped with dozens of explosives.

After clearing the apartment of explosives on Saturday, bomb squad officers Sunday transported hazardous chemicals to a nearby field and burned or destroyed the material.

Police said Holmes, 24, spent months amassing explosives, weapons and ammunition and then walked into a movie theater early Friday and began shooting.

In an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said nine of the people wounded were in critical condition and some had undergone several surgeries. The death toll could rise, officials said.

“They’re in bad shape,” Hogan said. “There are people who have had already numerous surgeries, numerous brain surgeries, there are some folks that are in bad shape.”

Hogan said authorities were analyzing the contents of Holmes’s apartment.

“I’m told there was a computer inside the apartment and with the assistance of the FBI that computer will be completely analyzed,” Hogan said on the news show. “That may take some time. So we’re hopeful that will yield some information.”

Meanwhile, details began to emerge about the failed neuroscience student who is scheduled to appear in court Monday — a young man who, despite troubles in academia so severe that he was quitting his graduate school program, showed no obvious sign of being on the brink of extreme violence.

Glenn Rotkovich, owner of the Lead Valley Range, in Byers, Colo., said he received an e-mail from Holmes on June 25 asking for an application to join the shooting range.

“When I get e-mails, I look at the application and see if everything is filled out and see if they are answered properly,” Rotkovich said.

He said he followed up with Holmes within a day or two, calling him to inform him when to come to the range for orientation.

“I called him and I did not get him,” Rotkovich said. “I got his answering machine. It was a very bass, very deep-sounding, guttural voice that once you heard it, you realize it was not an accident or a message. Somebody was trying to make it sound that way. It was an intentional act. . .bizarre or freakish. I could not make out certain words.”

Rotkovich, who has never spoken with Holmes, called a couple more times in the following days and heard the same message. “By the time I called the third time, my attitude is one that I don’t like this,” Rotkovich said. “So I told everybody, if James Holmes shows up, he’s doing nothing before I saw him. Is he weird? Is there something strange about this dude? I flagged it that he had to see me before he gets to do anything.”

Rotkovich said he has forwarded the e-mail he received from Holmes to authorities.

ABC News reported Sunday that Holmes had been studying neuroscience under a grant from the National Institutes of Health, only one of six people annually selected for the honor, according to the report. The network also broadcast a video from a science camp in San Diego that the network said Holmes attended six years ago, at age 18, where he addressed an audience on the topic of subjective experience.

In the video, the person who introduced Holmes to the audience at the science camp said his professional goals were to become a researcher and make scientific discoveries. She said that Holmes enjoyed soccer and strategy games and one day hoped to own a Slurpee machine.

Last fall, Holmes began a four-year doctoral course in neuroscience at a University of Colorado medical campus in Aurora, a Denver suburb. He would be studying the mechanics of the brain, the ways that electrical signals transmit thoughts and sensations. Holmes was part of a small group of first-year students who met together numerous times a week for classes in a small conference room.

Five of the students formed a close bond over their shared classes and workload, and their concerns about being accepted to their preferred research laboratory — a ritual that happened at the end of the first year. But Holmes didn’t share in that bond, one student said. Holmes spoke only when prompted in class, and spoke almost never outside of the classroom.

“I was always trying to get into his head,” said one fellow neuroscience first-year. “If no one had ever said anything to him, he wouldn’t have said a word” all year.

The student, who asked not to be named because the university has asked students not to speak to the media, said that Holmes often was the first to arrive at class, riding from his nearby apartment on a BMX bike more fit for an adolescent. But once class began, he had a habit of daydreaming.

“It’s like you’re interrupting” another train of thought that Holmes was pondering, the student said.

When Holmes was required to speak in class, he often spoke in a monotone, but he sprinkled his presentations with attempts at humor, little puns and jokes. In the hallways, Holmes would join — when prompted — in grousing about assignments and required reading. He often smiled when he spoke and gave his classmates good marks when they had to review each other’s work. The classmate remembers no hint of anger or edge.

But Holmes volunteered little information about his life outside the classroom. The student could remember just one personal detail that Holmes revealed without being asked: During a conversation about football, he said he was a San Diego Chargers fan.

After classes, Holmes was always the first to leave. His fellow students assumed he was just sequestered in his off-campus apartment.

“I always just figured he liked being alone,” the student said.

Four months ago, when Holmes allegedly began stockpiling ammunition and explosives, his behavior in class didn’t seem to change. Then came early June, when all first-year students must face a demanding oral exam. The exam came and went, and the other students didn’t hear how Holmes did. Then they got word that he had sent an e-mail to administrators, saying he would leave school. His classmates were not told a reason.

A few days after that, the student saw Holmes walking across a campus food court and wondered why Holmes was still on campus. Then, on the morning after the shootings, this odd classmate’s name was suddenly on the news.

“My stomach just sank,” the student said. Somehow, the student felt it must be the same quiet student who had never shown signs of anger. “I completely knew.”

Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said he and his officers felt targeted by the elaborate network of explosives in Holmes’s apartment.

“This apartment was designed, I say, based on everything I’ve seen, to kill whoever entered it,” Oates said at a news briefing. “It was gonna be a police officer, okay? Make no mistake about what was going on there. You think we’re angry, we sure as hell are angry.”

Aurora police said Saturday night that all explosives had been removed from the apartment and that FBI agents had gone inside to examine other evidence.

The protracted bomb-squad work at Holmes’s apartment took place on a day when Aurora residents learned the names of the victims in the assault at the Century 16 movie theater, where a crowd of mostly young people showed up for the midnight screening early Friday of the new Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Among the dead were two members of the military, a man celebrating his 27th birthday and a 6-year-old girl, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, whose 25-year-old mother, Ashley Moser, is in critical condition and semiconscious with multiple gunshot wounds to her throat and abdomen.

President Obama will travel Sunday to Colorado to visit with shooting victims and their families in Aurora, the White House said Saturday night.

Holmes had no criminal record. He is being held without bond in the Arapahoe County Jail on suspicion of first-degree murder, reportedly in solitary confinement, and although he has not been formally charged, police said there are no other suspects. He is being represented by the public defender’s office.

Police learned from Holmes when they arrested him that his apartment was booby-trapped. It is unclear why Holmes, minutes after allegedly shooting strangers in a movie house, told police about the explosives.

Oates said that for four months, Holmes had been receiving a large number of commercial packages, which the chief said enabled him to assemble the material in the booby-trapped apartment and the small arsenal of weapons and ammunition allegedly used in the massacre.

“What we’re seeing here is evidence, I think, of some calculation and deliberation,” the police chief said.

Detectives had been unable to investigate Holmes’s 800-square-foot third-floor apartment because of the elaborate web of incendiary and chemical devices, numbering about 60 in all. The effort to defuse and disarm the explosives was made all the more delicate by the need to preserve any criminal evidence.

In a hallway just inside the front door, a wire-filament tripwire was strung at waist height, according to a law enforcement source. The tripwire was connected to two containers of chemicals that, when mixed, could create an explosion.

The bomb squad disarmed the setup by sending in a robot that slipped beneath the tripwire and removed one of the bottles of liquid.

Then came 30 spherical canisters in the living room. These resembled fireworks shells packed with gunpowder — “improvised grenades,” the official called them. Wires ran from these devices to a “control box” in the apartment kitchen. It was not clear, the official said, how they were supposed to be detonated.

Authorities used a “bottle shot” — a small explosive charge that sends out a wave of water at high speed — to destroy the control box.

Finally, the official said, there were about three jugs in the living room filled with what appeared to be a combination of liquid and gunpowder. “Improvised napalm,” the official called it. These were not rigged to blow up, but likely would have been set off in a “sympathetic detonation” if the other explosives had been tripped. That would have given the blast extra heat and destructive power.

With the explosives cleared, residents of four adjacent buildings can begin returning home. Some had been staying in emergency shelters and others with friends and relatives.

“It went very, very well,” FBI Special Agent James Yacone said Saturday afternoon.

Churches in the Denver area have changed their signs to honor the victims, and radio DJs have been reading messages of support. But inside the homes and hospital rooms where victims were recovering, the second day was said to be harder than the first. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving the reality of injury and loss.

It was the first full day of living with what happened, and what happened still didn’t make any sense.

Annie Dalton, the aunt of Ashley Moser, told the Associated Press that the critically wounded 25-year-old has been in and out of consciousness and had not been told that her daughter, Veronica, did not survive the shooting.

“All she’s asking about, of course, is her daughter,” Dalton said, according to AP. “She was a vibrant 6-year-old. She was excited, she’d just learned how to swim.”

The Navy and Air Force confirmed that John Larimer, 27, and Jesse Childress, 29, both stationed at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, had been killed.

“Sailors were really drawn to his calming demeanor and exceptional work ethic,” Cmdr. Jeffrey Jakuboski, Larimer’s commanding officer, said of the young officer. “He truly did have a bright future ahead of him in the Navy.”

Lt. Col. Pat Walsh, who supervised Childress in his job as a computer technician, said: “He literally touched everyone in the wing, over a thousand people. . . . We’ll get through this, but it’s extremely difficult for us right now.”

Matt McQuinn, 27, died at the theater trying to protect his girlfriend, Samantha Yowler, 27, along with her brother, Nick Yowler, 32. McQuinn and Nick Yowler stood up to shield Samantha from the bullets. McQuinn was struck in the chest, leg and back, said lawyer Rob Scott, a spokesman for both families. Samantha Yowler is in the hospital recovering from surgery after a bullet struck her knee.

Alex Sullivan of Aurora was at the midnight showing to celebrate his 27th birthday when he was killed.

“Alex is known for his bear hugs,” said his cousin Steve Schwab. “It doesn’t matter how long since you’ve spoken to him, he’ll always end the call with ‘I love you.’ ”

Sullivan, known for his love of comics, worked at the Aurora theater where he died. Sullivan’s family didn’t get confirmation of his death from authorities until Friday evening.

“What we just kept thinking is that he was in the theater helping everyone, because that would be his natural inclination,” Schwab said.

Three helicopters circled above the movie theater Saturday afternoon. The nearby mall was closed. Some cars from Thursday night’s premiere still sat behind police tape in the parking lot.

Down the block, mourners dropped flowers at a makeshift memorial on a street corner. Two men stood by the memorial and held up signs promoting Jesus — one in English, one in Spanish.

Achenbach and Heath reported from Washington. Sari Horwitz, T.W. Farnam, Jenna Johnson and Carol D. Leonnig in Washington and Eli Saslow and special correspondent Sandra Fish in Colorado contributed to this report.