 |
|
The Century 16 Theater in Aurora, Colorado
where the 2012 Aurora shooting took place, photographed the day after the
shooting.
|
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting
On
July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside of a Century
16 movie
theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. A gunman, dressed
in tactical clothing, set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple
firearms. Twelve people were killed and seventy others were injured, which was
the largest number of casualties in a shooting in the United States until the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting.
The sole assailant, James Eagan Holmes, was arrested in
his car parked outside the cinema minutes later. It was the deadliest shooting
in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre in
1999. Prior to the shooting, Holmes rigged his apartment with homemade
explosives, which were defused by a bomb squad one day after the shooting.
The
shooting prompted an increase in security at movie theaters across the U.S.
that were screening the same film, in fear of copycat
crimes. The shooting also led to a spike in gun sales in Colorado as well
as political debates about gun control in the United States.
Holmes
confessed to the shooting but pleaded not
guilty by reason of insanity. Arapahoe County prosecutors sought the death
penalty for Holmes. The trial began on April 27, 2015. He was convicted of
twenty-four counts of first-degree murder, 140 counts of attempted first-degree
murder, and one count of possessing explosives on July 16, 2015. On August 7,
2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. On
August 26, 2015, he was given 12 life sentences, one for every person he killed,
and 3,318 years for the attempted murders of those he wounded, and for rigging
his apartment with explosives.
No comments:
Post a Comment