The Joker

"Front right there was an emergency exit and a man walked through there ...  I thought it was some sort of publicity stunt for a second.  He threw tear gas over the crowd and as soon as he threw it, I could feel it in my eyes.  It was mass chaos.  He threw in the gas can, and then I knew it was real."

It was unimaginably real.  No publicity stunt would ever have garnered the attention that this assault on a peaceful gathering of men, women and children waiting to be entertained by the latest blockbuster film advertising !Bam!, !Blast!, !Pow!, as the Dark Knight rose to the occasion at the Century 16 cinemas in Aurora, Colorado.  The deadly drama that unfolded before the horrified eyes of those soon to be dead and wounded did not come with the price of admission.

That wholly gratis performance was quietly and precisely planned by a mind whom no one, not his parents, his acquaintances, his neighbours even might have imagined existed, not in their wildest, most sinister of disturbed dreams.  James Eagan Holmes, now a national figure of greatly fearful notoriety, odious in his role as mass executioner, as Batman's comic-strip nemesis, The Joker, self-described as "quiet and easygoing".

That he might once have been.  Since the time when he was a doctoral student in the healing arts, as a budding neuroscientist, some malevolent psychic disease turned him from the path of healing to death-dealing.  He may reveal in due course, what horrible disturbance wracked his mind, when he became so personally conflicted and chose not to preserve life, but to destroy it.

"It clearly looks like a deranged individual.  He had his hair painted red, he said he was The Joker, obviously the enemy of Batman", reported Ray Kelly, the commissioner of New York police, maintaining update contact with his Colorado colleagues. 

This is a young man who, for unknown reasons decided not to pursue his neurosurgical doctorate at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  Who carefully planned and executed the slaughter of a dozen innocent people in a movie theatre, and who, in the commission of his dramatic enacting of a scene that must have played out in his head repeatedly before committing to the final act, shot no fewer than 71 people.

There was no background of a disturbed, anti-social problem personality here.  This was a confident, albeit quiet, super-achiever, an intelligent young man who chose for his future a complex degree and profession, aspiring to the healing arts to benefit humankind.  Yet this is the mind that John Hickenlooper, Colorado's governor, claimed through the horrific event to be reflective of "the act of an apparently very deranged mind".

Witnesses reported watching as this young man began his shooting spree with his Remington 870 pump action shotgun, which was discarded once it was empty, while he calmly reached behind to grab the AR 15 Assault rifle he had strapped to his back, to continue firing.  One of the two Glock .40-calibre handguns he had in his possession was the last of the weapons he used in an uninterrupted frenzy of committing panicked people to death.

"I saw one girl covered in blood.  I don't know whose little girl that was, but my heart goes out to them.  A cop came walking through the front door ... holding a little girl in his arms and she wasn't moving."  The police had been alerted with the first 911 emergency call that went out at 12:39 a.m., after the midnight showing of the film had commenced.  The first of the local police vehicles began arriving at 12:40 a.m.

It took one minute during which time hundreds of 911 calls had gone out for aid.  When, later, police arrived at James Holmes' apartment, pre-warned that it was booby-trapped, they discovered that a sound system had been set up on a timer.  "It was to turn the music on ... it was on a timer.  It came on loudly, obviously to create a call for noise disturbance.  People would make entry and potentially (trigger) those explosive devices."

Police, who broke into the apartment from an exterior third-floor window, found the apartment extensively booby-trapped.  Before attempting any detonation, it was required that people be evacuated from that building and several others.

Photographs of James Holmes reflect a pleasant-enough, attractive-looking young man.  Smiling for the camera.  He eyes bright, as though he was in possession of a deep-rooted, private joke.  Who might have suspected?  How can any society protect itself against the psychotic actions of such a predator, a psychopath disguised as a normal human being?

The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, however, feels that the buck should stop somewhere.  He has made a call on the campaigns of both incumbent President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent for the presidency, to state "specifically what are they going to do about guns?".

"Soothing words are nice, but maybe it's time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country."