CENTENNIAL — The defense attorney pointed to where her client sat and then turned to the witness with a simple question: Do you recognize this man?
“Yeah,” came the chipper reply from Patrick Silva. “That’s Jimmy.”
In the memories of witness after witness , James Holmes was a polite, sensitive kid who got along well with others and almost never caused trouble.
To Silva, he was the stalwart teammate on the junior varsity soccer team. To Katherine Barrett, he was the neighbor boy from four houses down, one of several costumed kids in a favorite Halloween photo. To Barbara Martin, he was the close friend’s son who diligently helped her one summer with a yard project.
“Absolutely nothing but a model child,” she testified.
Defense attorneys on Friday to convince jurors that Holmes is more than the man who murdered 12 people on July 20, 2012. The testimony came during what is called of Holmes’ — the phase when the defense team can present evidence about the whole of their client’s life in the hopes it sways jurors to vote for a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
But the testimony on Friday did not come before jurors. Instead, it was video recorded to be played for jurors next week.
Judge Carlos Samour Jr. sent the jury home abruptly earlier Friday after one juror told him she had a sinus infection so severe that she could not focus on her work.
Rather than call their witnesses back Monday, the defense asked to record the testimony of eight people.
Waiting their turn, the witnesses gathered in the hallway outside the courtroom, like a line of guests for a strange sort of reunion.
On the stand, many described a “Wonder Years”-like life in the suburbs: annual Halloween parties, picnics and neighborhood games of football. They spoke warmly of Holmes’ parents, Robert and Arlene.
“We all kind of lived our lives through our kids at that time,” Martin Barrett, Katherine’s husband, testified.
Prosecutors asked few questions of the witnesses other than to point out how long it had been since they’d actually seen James Holmes. The Barretts hadn’t seen him since about 2000. Silva lost touch after high school.
Only one witness made even the vaguest of references to 2012, when Holmes, then a neuroscience student at the University of Colorado, plotted the attack on the Century Aurora 16 theater amid what defense attorneys contend was a deteriorating mental condition.
Scott Zoldi, a co-worker of Robert Holmes’, said Robert asked for time off work in mid-2012 so he could take a trip to Denver.
“He needed to come visit his son,” Zoldi testified, “because they had lost contact with Jimmy.”
John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningold
