Burnt money, campus ban: Tidbits on Colo. shooter

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By P. SOLOMON BANDA and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

DENVER (AP) - The suspect in the Aurora movie shooting case mailed "burnt currency," along with a notebook, to his psychiatrist before the attack. He threatened a professor and was banned from a university campus before withdrawing from its neuroscience graduate program. His defense team has added a psychiatrist.

Those were the few tidbits of information in hundreds of pages of heavily-redacted court documents released Friday, which serve as the best chance the public has to understand what happened before James Holmes allegedly opened fire at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie more than two months ago.

The documents shed little light on Holmes' possible motives or whether the university ignored warning signs about him. That's partly because Arapahoe County District Judge William B. Sylvester continued to keep under seal the key documents in the case - the affidavit that lays out prosecutors' case against Holmes, and the search warrants that allowed them to gather evidence against him.

Holmes, 24, faces 152 charges in the July 20 shooting that killed 12 people and injured 58 others.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20120928/DA1IVVKO0.html

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This file photo provided on Sept. 20, 2012 by the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office shows James Holmes. Holmes, the suspect in a deadly movie theater attack in Colorado, threatened a professor before the shooting, leading the university to ban him from campus, prosecutors said in court documents released Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. (AP Photo/Arapahoe County Sheriff, File)

[valerief]

1. OMG, the face of the Tea Party. Smug and nuts. nt

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. There's no evidence this guy had any connection to the Tea Party

or that he had any political motive for the shooting. We can't assume that every time somebody jumps the rails and kills a bunch of people, that person must be a Tea Partier or a Republican or that they had any political motivation at all. Sometimes people are just mentally ill and do bad things for no sane reason.

That said, he does look rather mad in that photo.

[valerief]

3. I didn't say he belonged to the Tea Party. I said he was the face of the

Tea Party. Don't get your panties in such a twist.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. My panties are not in a twist.

I simply find it objectionable to take a person who obviously is seriously mentally ill and put him in the same category as Tea Partiers, who are simply ignorant, partisan assholes. There was no reason to even mention the Tea Party in the context of this incident.

[valerief]

7. You know, there are days on end when I don't think about the words

objectionable or appropriate. Just don't give a shit.

But I accept your apology.

[Warpy]

4. Too bad the state system of mental health hospitals got dismantled

in favor of "community care" that was never funded. The old hospitals were awful places but they did get the crazies off the streets and stabilized on meds. Some got well enough to leave.

[valerief]

6. Yep, another thing Raygun gave us.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3103173

[hunter]

8. It doesn't help that our society is more punitive than proactive.

Which results in people concealing their mental illnesses when they might otherwise be helped.

But a few violent mentally ill people will slip through gaps in the social safety net, even in a place like Norway...

Victims of Anders Behring Breivik (BBC)

[Tom Ripley]

9. I liked the other hairdo better