One month before the Aurora movie theater shooting, the gunman’s psychiatrist told a university police officer that it was “on the borderline” whether her patient should be placed on a mental health hold, according to newly released police records.
But Dr. Lynne Fenton said she ultimately decided against asking for James Holmes to be involuntarily committed to a mental health facility because she worried that doing so would “inflame him.”
“Don’t think it would help,” University of Colorado Denver police Officer Lynn Whitten wrote in notes recording what Fenton told her, according to a later police report.
That explanation is partly at odds with the reason Fenton during Holmes’ trial, when she said she didn’t place Holmes on a hold because his threats weren’t specific enough to give her the legal authority to do so and she hoped he would return to treatment on his own.
The newly released reports raise other questions about one of the shooting’s most important outstanding riddles: Should CU officials have taken stronger action against Holmes prior to the July 20, 2012, shooting, in which he murdered 12 people and wounded 70 others at a movie theater about four miles from the Anschutz Medical Campus, where Holmes was a neuroscience graduate student?
Fenton and CU are by the widow of one of the shooting’s victims who alleges they should have done more. The police records detailing Whitten’s investigation of Holmes were released this week after requests by multiple media outlets.
Fenton started seeing Holmes as a patient in spring 2012 for problems caused by social anxiety. But almost immediately he told her, as well as a social worker and another psychiatrist, that he wanted to kill ” as many people as possible,” according to Whitten’s notes on her conversations with Fenton.
“I like thinking about it,” Holmes said, according to what Fenton told Whitten.
But Fenton told Whitten that Holmes hadn’t revealed any specific plans or targets for an attack.
“He hasn’t told anyone how he would kill,” Whitten wrote in her notes.
Fenton told Whitten she was worried that her patient was having a psychotic break, and he had refused anti-psychotic medication. She said she and her supervisor were “very concerned about this individual.”
Fenton reported her concerns to Whitten on June 11, 2012, after Holmes left his final therapy session “in a huff,” according to Whitten’s notes.
But Whitten’s subsequent investigation focused as much on threatening messages that Holmes sent to Fenton as it did on Holmes’ homicidal statements. Whitten told Aurora detectives after the shooting that she ran a criminal background check on Holmes and called his neuroscience adviser, who told her that Holmes had failed key exams and was dropping out of school. She never contacted Holmes or asked Aurora police to do so.
Fenton, meanwhile, called Holmes’ mother without his permission to ask about his mental health history — a possible violation of health care privacy laws. In a follow-up voicemail to Whitten on June 11, Fenton sounded upbeat.
“Pretty good news on our guy James,” Fenton said in the voicemail, which was reviewed after the shooting by Aurora detectives. “Sounds like he’s always been like this. I’ve talked to his mom so she and the dad are putting in some quiet support in place. They’ve got my number in case they need anything.”
In , Holmes’ mother, Arlene, said Fenton did not tell her about her son’s homicidal statements but rather asked whether he had always been shy and anxious. Arlene Holmes said she tried to call Fenton later to follow up, but the phone call was not returned.
Whitten told detectives that she personally deactivated Holmes’ campus key card June 12, 2012, as a result of Fenton’s complaint. That conflicts with what CU officials — that Holmes’ key card access was revoked not because the university had concerns about him but because he dropped out of school.
On Wednesday, CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue reiterated the university’s position that Whitten asked for Holmes’ key card to be deactivated but only because he had withdrawn from school.
Whitten’s reports and interviews with detectives — she had at least four of them, during three of which she was accompanied by an attorney hired by CU — also raise another question: How many people at CU knew that Holmes was homicidal?
The morning after the shooting, Whitten said she spoke to Holmes’ neuroscience adviser, Sukumar Vijayaraghavan. The professor goes by the nickname “Suke.”
Whitten said Suke told her that Holmes had once told him that “he didn’t think he would make a mark on the world with science so he could blow people up and become famous.”
If true, that would mean four people — Suke, plus the three mental health professionals — heard from Holmes directly that he wanted to kill.
But, in an interview with Aurora detectives after the shooting, Suke said Whitten was mistaken. He said he had merely relayed to Whitten what Fenton had told him Holmes said. Suke said Holmes never made such threatening statements to him.
Holmes, who began stockpiling weapons for an attack in spring 2012, had no contact with Fenton after their last visit, on June 11. Whitten’s investigation apparently ended after a couple of days.
In a statement released Wednesday by a CU-Denver spokeswoman, the university defended its handling of Holmes.
“The University of Colorado participated fully in the investigation and the subsequent trial process, with dozens of members of the CU community testifying extensively about the events that led up to the tragic shootings in Aurora,” the statement reads. “The University has nothing to add to the testimony given by those individuals on the stand, except to say that we believe our faculty and staff acted responsibly.”
John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningold
