AURORA — The lone figure who appeared suddenly at the front of the theater looked, to moviegoers engrossed in early scenes of "The Dark Knight Rises," like a live-action twist on a fun midnight show already populated with costumed fans.

Several minutes into the much-anticipated new Batman film, he entered through an exit door near the screen, clothed entirely in black. He carried multiple weapons — some long-barreled, some short — and wore what appeared to be body armor, gloves and a gas mask.

He tossed two canisters that burst into billowing clouds.

In the second row, Corbin Dates and Jennifer Seeger realized this wasn't done for theatrical effect only when they began to choke on the fumes — and the dark figure fired a single shot into the ceiling.

Far from a comic-book villain, the gunman methodically set about turning a packed movie premiere into a chaotic scene of random carnage that left 12 dead and dozens injured. The weapons were all too real: an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a shotgun and a .40-caliber Glock handgun.

The assailant then pointed the rifle directly at Seeger's face — yet didn't immediately pull the trigger. Instead, he fired into the row behind her while Seeger and Dates dived into the aisle and crawled to seek cover behind nearby seats. They felt hot shell casings burning their legs as the gunman fired multiple shots toward the back of the theater.

"I have no idea why he didn't shoot me," recounted Seeger, 22. "He shot the person right behind me."

From his second-row vantage point, James Wilburn could make out a rifle slung over the gunman's back. Amid the noxious fumes from the canister, he saw the assailant raise the shotgun and repeatedly fire toward the back of the theater.

Ducking behind the seat backs in front of him, Wilburn figured the man couldn't have been more than 5 to 6 feet away. Many in the audience took flight.

Everyone was screaming

The film played on

Emma Goos, a 19-year-old college student home for the summer, sat with a friend in the third row — the only seats left when they got there — when the figure entered the theater.

"It took seven shots for me to realize it wasn't a joke and realize it was a real gun," Goos said. "I very much wanted to believe it was a prank. By that point, everyone was screaming to get down and our whole row collapsed on each other."

She wondered later if she escaped the gunman's field of vision because of his gas mask: "His face was completely covered. He looked like a monster."

After exhausting the shotgun rounds, the gunman calmly dropped the weapon and resumed firing with the rifle as he made his way up the aisle. Twenty to 30 rapid-fire shots struck patrons in their stadium-style seats or scrambling up the steps, witnesses said.

The dim light, combined with spreading smoke, obscured emergency exits as the passing time became impossible to reckon in the pandemonium. Seeger and a few others hushed one another as they moved away from the sound of the gunshots, hugging the floor and hoping the shooter would ignore them if he couldn't hear them.

She saw bodies lying around her.

"I was trying to stay out of his sight," she said. "I was pretending I was dead."

Elsewhere in the theater, 28-year-old Robert Jones also initially took the smoke to be an elaborate special effect. When gunshots ripped the semi-darkness, he knew it was something else, something horrific.

"I thought it was pretty much the end of the world," he said.

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Chris Ramos initially took the flying canisters for fake bats, in the spirit of the film. But the sharp explosion and the hissing cloud of fumes changed his mind.

Then he saw the gunman, standing in a corner of the theater, shoot a man sitting next to him in the chest. The violence had only begun, but Ramos, 20, would continue to be haunted by the sight of the killer blasting away, choosing people's fate with each bullet.

"No care for people's ages, or male or female, or anything," Ramos said. "He was heartless. I panicked. I thought at that moment I was going to die."

For Mora and Rita Silalahi and their teenage son Patrick, the gunman's first shot into the theater ceiling prompted Mora to turn to his wife and say: "This is not right. We'd better duck."

Their friend, 42-year-old Jerry Sahertian, relayed their account of seeking cover beneath a ladder at the front of the theater. Then, during a brief silence after the initial fusillade, the three of them tried to flee to safety.

"He saw my friends move, and he shot," said Sahertian.

Patrick took a round in the back, with the bullet lodging in his stomach. Rita was struck in the shoulder, elbow and left side. Both were later transported to area hospitals, where Rita underwent surgery.

Naya Thompson, 21, and her 22-year-old boyfriend, Derrick Poage, also made a break for safety, with Thompson coughing and choking from the smoke. When they emerged, Poage noticed blood splashed on his pants.

His shoes had come off in the chaos.

Violence struck others who never saw it coming.

In the adjacent theater in the multiplex, which also was showing the Batman feature, 23-year-old Eric Hunter heard three "pops" and saw holes appear in the wall to his right.

Smoke wafted through them.

It happened just as a gunfight broke out on screen, and like so many others, Hunter assumed this diversion was just another means of amping up the entertainment.

"And then I thought, 'Oh, it's just firecrackers, or stupid kids,' " Hunter said. Seconds later, he heard several more pops and saw more holes in the wall — and realized something was seriously wrong.

Nearby, Joel Wheelersburg also heard shots coming from the theater on the right and figured them for "new sound effects." But then he noticed the smoke drifting through the holes.

"I thought, why smoke? Why ash?" said Wheelersburg, 27.

Then he noticed something even more disturbing — people hunched over in the seats near the holes. They looked hurt.

Some were. Meghan Walton, 20, was sitting next to 18-year-old Gage Hankins when one of the bullets ripped through the wall and struck her friend in the arm.

Walton ran outside with him, holding his arm, and remembers that it felt hot. Her vision blurry from the smoke, she counted a dozen people bleeding as ambulances arrived. She could hear hysterical crying.

As Hunter rose to leave the theater, the violent reality of the situation began to dawn on him. Blood pooled on the stairs. He and others yelled a warning: There was a shooter.

He came upon two teenage girls who appeared to be in shock — one looked to have been shot in the jaw. Blood ran from her face and down her shirt. Hunter said he grabbed their hands and began to lead the girls outside but then saw the gunman walking down the hallway from the adjacent theater.

The quick glimpse — all-black clothing, mask, body armor, multiple weapons — told Hunter that the assailant "didn't plan on making it out of there."

He pulled the girls back inside, slammed the door and held it shut. He said someone, presumably the shooter, pounded on it for a few seconds.

Then nothing

Unsure whether anyone had notifed authorities, he told another patron to hit the fire alarm. Once the shooting stopped, and the threat appeared to pass, he helped walk the girls out through the lobby, past others who were wounded, past cops rushing in and ambulance workers brushing past.

Outside, huddled with a terrified group of patrons, Hunter looked back at the doors and watched a large man pace back and forth, in apparent agony, then scream and fall over. He appeared to have been shot in the back.

He saw a little girl carried out limp in a man's arms.

Time crawled. Jennifer Seeger, the young woman who had looked down the barrel of the assailant's rifle, estimates the ordeal lasted perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. Once outside, she phoned her anxious father.

"My dad is not a sentimental guy," Seeger said, "but he was crying on the phone."

Tom McGhee and Kurtis Lee contributed to this report.

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, or