South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Theater shooter’s psychiatrist tells her side of story in ‘Aurora’
Ten years ago, Dr. Lynne Fenton felt villainized after she was identified as the psychiatrist who treated the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter, James Holmes, in the months leading up to his massacre during the midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Now, Fenton is telling her story in “Aurora,” recently published by Berkley. She hopes it will help educate other psychiatrists and the public about the minds of mass shooters and what possibly can be done to prevent them.
“As these mass shootings have continued — and if anything they’re becoming more frequent — I realize how unusual the Holmes case is because we amassed so much information,” Fenton said in a recent interview. “I realized I was in a unique position to pull this information together and take a close look at these mass shootings and consider whether there were things we could do to prevent them.”
But as much as Fenton wants to educate others, the book also is giving her a chance to explain her actions, a sort of self-vindication for what transpired when she met with the shooter six times before the events of July 20, 2012.
“After the shooting,
I and everybody else involved in the case were under a gag order,” Fenton said. “It was very difficult to have folks saying things publicly, that I should have just locked him up or the blood’s on my hands and things like that. I couldn’t defend myself.”
Fenton’s life was turned upside down after the shooting as the press quickly identified her after the shooter’s defense team filed a court document.
She recounts the hateful emails that flooded her inbox and cellphone, and writes about the reporters waiting outside her home. She remembers wearing a disguise and slumping in a friend’s car seat as she was whisked to an airport to leave town, and getting outfitted for a bulletproof vest.
“I felt shattered, angry, betrayed,” Fenton writes. “My life had become unrecognizable. It was one thing to know a killer, or to study a killer’s history and be able to connect the dots (or not, as in Holmes’ case). It was quite another to have multiple hidden enemies forever, to know that, even when the trial ended, there would never be closure from me.”
Fenton talks about how the shooter unnerved her from the first session on March 23, 2012. He rarely spoke but almost immediately revealed that he was having thoughts of killing people. Still, the former patient’s discussions never rose to the level that would lead Fenton to seek a mental health hold. That’s because he never told her about a specific person he wanted to kill or indicated he had plans in the works.
She hopes the book helps people understand how mental health holds work and the limits they have in being successful in stopping violence.
“To put someone on a mental health hold for socalled homicidal ideation, it can’t be this big statement of ‘I had thoughts of killing people,’ ” Fenton said in the interview. “They need to have specific targets. It needs to be imminent, not just ‘One day I’m going to shoot people.’ I never had that information with Holmes.”
Fenton’s book will be hard to read for many. She often recounts scenes from the theater shooting in graphic detail, citing police documents, court testimony and media reports.
Fenton and her coauthor, Kerrie Droban, chose to use the shooter’s name in the book even though the victims and their families are adamant that a mass killer should not be glorified or publicized. But Fenton said it became too awkward to write a 304-page book without using his name.
“Kerrie and I have nothing but respect and sympathy for the families,” Fenton said. “I hope they’ll see this book as an attempt to pull together all this information so as a country we can look at it and discuss these issues to prevent more of these mass shootings.”
As for the guilt, Fenton says she has learned to live with what happened. She still sees a psychiatrist and leans on close friends and family for support. She also reminds herself that multiple professionals have reviewed the case, and all have concluded that she did all she could.
“That thought pops into my head,” she said, “not as frequently as it used to, but I will wonder for a moment if there is more I could have done.”