LOOSE ENDS IN AURORA

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/07/loose-ends-in-aurora.html



“There are so many loose ends,” Daniel Oates, the police chief of Aurora, said on “Face the Nation.” And, from a law-enforcement perspective, there are: clearing the booby-trapped apartment (a scene scribbled with wires); finding out just how much James Holmes had isolated himself (there is no other “person of interest,” the chief said) and what warning signs there might have been; tallying the number of bullets fired (on the first day there were too many to count); calculating how many more people would have died if one of Holmes’s guns hadn’t jammed (unknowable, but imaginable in one’s worst dreams).

Along with the loose ends there are lives unraveled, and the memorials and funerals held Sunday offered no answer to the mystery of luck, let alone of the good and the bad. Hundreds of people were in two movie theatres. About seventy were hit by bullets, and twelve died. Three of them—Jonathan Blunk, a Navy veteran; Alex Teves, a graduate student; and Matt McQuinn, who worked at Target—were said to have died shielding their girlfriends from bullets. (Movies are places you go with someone you love.) In Aurora Sunday, President Obama told the story of Allie Young and Stephanie Davies: Allie was shot in the neck; Stephanie, Obama said, placed “her fingers over where she—where Allie had been wounded, and applied pressure the entire time while the gunman was still shooting,” until help arrived. According to the Denver Post, some people “dragged one another from the chaotic smoke-filled theater 9,” and, amid the shouting and running, “someone carried out the motionless body of a young girl, covered in blood….The child was handed to a police officer, who put her into the back of his squad car and sped away.” Veronica Moser-Sullivan, who was six years old and seeing the movie with her mother, died in the hospital, as did one other victim. Ten died on the scene, and their bodies lay in the theatre for a long time, from the midnight showing until the following afternoon.

Who died in Aurora? There is no single type of person that likes to go to the movies, not even to a particular kind of movie. And, as Anthony Lane pointed out, this was a midnight showing that people dressed up for—a carnival at a mall, where you might go if you just liked being with other happy people. The Pentagon said in a statement Friday afternoon that a sailor, “known to have been at the theatre that evening, is currently unaccounted for.” (The statement added, “We can also confirm that the alleged gunman in this incident, James Holmes, is not a past or current member of any branch or component of the U.S. Armed Forces.”) He was soon identified as Petty Officer John Larimer, who, according to the Denver Post, was twenty-seven, worked in cryptology, and the youngest of five siblings. “He was an outstanding shipmate,” his commanding officer said. An Air Force reservist named Jesse Childress also died.


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