Scott LaMar/WITF
Psychiatrist who treated mass murderer James Holmes tells her story
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Scott LaMar
Scott LaMar/WITF
Airdate: August 22, 2022
Listen to Smart Talk every weekday at 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. on WITF 89.5 & 93.3. You can also stream WITF radio live on our website or ask your smart speaker to “Play WITF Radio.”
James Holmes shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater in July, 2012. He had been planning a mass shooting for months and was buying guns at the same time.
Ten years later, a new book Aurora tells the story.
Co-author, true crime writer and attorney Kerri Droban described the scene on Monday’s Smart Talk,”If you can imagine the scene beforehand, happy moviegoers are there. They’re there to see the premiere of The Dark Knight. They’re dressed in costume. They’re happy. They’re buying popcorn. They’re sitting in this crowded movie theater. It’s packed. He gets in there and he’s one of the moviegoers, and then he slips out surreptitiously to get his weapons, which he’s brought ahead of time. He’s actually swallowed a pain pill. So he in case he gets shot, he won’t get hurt, puts on a gas mask. He throws a gas canister into the movie theater so that the moviegoers are blinded and they’re coughing and they can’t breathe. They can’t get out. And so pandemonium erupts as he starts to fire indiscriminately into the movie, the moviegoers. And so people are running and they’re screaming and they’re tripping over each other. And there are bodies falling. And the fire, those shots just keep coming until finally his shotgun, his rifle, one of them jams. And that’s what stops the massacre. And in the end, you have this very probably the most eerie sound of all are the cell phones ringing, ringing, and nobody’s answering.”
The photographs of Holmes the world saw afterwards with dyed bright red hair and eyes wide open left many people judging Holmes, fairly or not, to be mentally unstable or even seriously mentally ill. In fact at trial, Holmes’ lawyers tried to prove an insanity defense but were unsuccessful.
Dr. Lynne Fenton is a psychiatrist who treated Holmes before the shooting, on Smart Talk explained that even though Holmes told her he had thoughts of killing people, he wasn’t specific and as a result couldn’t report Holmes to police or anyone else,”If you get enough information that somebody potentially is going to harm somebody else, you have a duty to to warn that person. But Holmes never not only didn’t meet that criteria, he didn’t even come close. So what? What you need for duty to warn is for somebody to have a, like, a specific target. So it could be a particular person or people, a family or maybe a place like if it’s at a movie theater. And it also has to be something sort of imminent. You need an indication that they’re planning to do this. This isn’t some, you know, vague idea in their head. Someday I’m going to get that person or something. It and that’s all that Holmes ever let on. To me, it was this very vague thought of killing people.”
Dr. Fenton admitted she broke privacy rules and reached out to Holmes’ mother and police but there were no legal reasons to have Holmes committed for treatment of mental illness or detain him.
Dr. Fenton was identified publicly by mistake of treating Holmes before the massacre and many blamed her for not not stopping him and she received death threats,”I became, I think, sort of a a natural target after one of these horrible events. People are, of course, trying to understand what the heck happened. Is there, you know, did somebody drop the ball? Is there a way to prevent this? And so as soon as they heard — a psychiatrist beforehand, well, (it must) be her fault. She must have known about this or been able to prevent it…I could no longer stay at my house, which was really sad to me. I actually ended up leaving Colorado for a while while things were the hottest. When they cooled down a little bit, I came back, but it was very, a very scary time for me. And things were never the same after that.”
