Year 11 GCSE Psychology
Key topic 8: Aggression
Batman cinema shooting: killer said he was 'The Joker'
James Holmes
Like everyone else inside screen 9 of the Century 16 cinema, Jessica Ghawi could hardly contain her excitement as she waited for a midnight premiere of the latest Batman epic, The Dark Knight Rises.
She was so desperate for the film to begin that she even tweeted her frustration, writing in capitals: Movie doesnt start for 20 minutes. In a staff car park at the back of the cinema, James Eagan Holmes, a medical school drop-out, 24, was also counting down the minutes to an evening for which he, too, had spent weeks getting ready. While many children inside the cinema had come dressed as Batman, Holmes had painted his hair red and, when arrested, told police he was the comic book heros nemesis, The Joker. He had armed himself with four guns and tear gas canisters as he prepared to storm the multiplex in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, determined to kill as many people as he could. Half an hour after the film began, Miss Ghawi and 11 others were dead or dying after Holmes carried out Americas latest
Year 11 GCSE Psychology
Key topic 8: Aggression
mass shooting, silently and indiscriminately targeting men, women, children and even a four-month-old baby. Every few seconds it was just boom, boom, boom, said Jennifer Seeger, who was in the theatre. He would reload and shoot and anyone who would try to leave would just get killed. Holmes, who dropped out of a neuroscience PhD at the University of Colorado School of Medicine last month, shot 71 people, including at least one person in an adjacent cinema who was hit as the bullets penetrated the walls. The 250-seater cinema was packed with families and high school students. When Holmes was arrested outside the cinema, he told police: Im The Joker. Ray Kelly, the commissioner of New York police, who was kept updated by his colleagues in Colorado, said: It clearly looks like a deranged individual. He had his hair painted red, he said he was The Joker, obviously the enemy of Batman. Police are trying to ascertain whether Holmes was acting out one of the anarchic, bloody attacks carried out by The Joker in Batman films and comics. In one Dark Knight comic, The Joker kills an entire late-night television audience with gas. In the same comic, a deranged loner carries out a mass shooting in an adult movie cinema and the Batman video game, Arkham City, is set in an abandoned cinema. Some witnesses also said the gunman burst into the cinema during a scene in which members of the public are killed during an attack on Gotham Citys stock exchange. Holmes, who is originally from San Diego, California, told police he had left explosives at his flat five miles away. Bomb disposal experts, who went in through a window, found a booby trap consisting of a very sophisticated system of fluid-filled bottles and tripwires rigged to explode if the front door was opened.
