Colorado shooter’s mom: Silence was his loudest cry for help

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — James Holmes’ mother insisted Wednesday that she would “have been crawling on all fours” to reach him had she known he was talking about killing people weeks before he ambushed a crowded Colorado movie theater.

Arlene Holmes said her son’s campus psychiatrist never told her that Holmes had homicidal thoughts when she called in June 2012 to reveal that he was quitting therapy and dropping out of school.

“We wouldn’t be sitting here if she had told me that!” Holmes’ mother said, her sobs rising to anger. “I would have been crawling on all fours to get to him. She never said he was thinking of killing people. She didn’t tell me. She didn’t tell me. She didn’t tell me!”

“He was not a violent person. At least not until the event,” Holmes’ father, Robert Holmes, said earlier Wednesday in the sentencing phase of Holmes’ trial.

“The event” is a phrase Mr. Holmes used several times to refer to his son’s attack on the audience inside a darkened Colorado movie theater on July 20, 2012, which killed 12 people, injured 70 others and makes Holmes eligible for the death penalty.

Ms. Holmes was the defense’s last witness in its portion of the sentencing phase. Others who testified included family friends, teachers and former neighbors who said the Holmes they knew was shy, mild-mannered and polite — not the kind of young man who would gun down innocent strangers.

Closing arguments were scheduled for today. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty; Holmes’ attorneys are arguing for life in prison.

Holmes on Wednesday declined his last opportunity to speak to the jury.

In her testimony, Ms. Holmes complained that the University of Colorado psychiatrist, Lynne Fenton, didn’t respond to a message seeking more details about their son. The parents didn’t know he was getting therapy and thought perhaps that he was depressed or had Asperger’s syndrome, Mr. Holmes said.

Dr. Fenton testified earlier that she called Holmes’ parents, despite her concerns that she was violating her client’s privacy, because she was trying to decide whether he posed a danger to himself or others. A campus security official offered to detain him for an involuntary hospital mental health commitment, but Dr. Fenton declined, in part because she said the parents had told her that he had always been withdrawn.

“Schizophrenia chose him; he didn’t choose it, and I still love my son. I still do,” Ms. Holmes said, choking up on the stand.

Before she testified, the couple held hands in the courtroom gallery, their fingers intertwined. Holmes looked up at the screen as his childhood photos were displayed, but he and his mother didn’t appear to look at each other.

“People said to me that when your kid turns 18, you’re done. And that’s not true. We’re not done. We are never done, and that’s why we’re sitting here. We’re not done,” she said.

Holmes enrolled in a prestigious neuroscience postgraduate program at the university in 2011. But his parents grew increasingly worried when he came home on his first winter break looking haggard and making odd facial expressions. He shared his fear of failure later that spring, but his parents said they had no idea that he was descending into mental illness.