Aurora theater shooting: 'I had to go. I was going to get shot'

As the mass shooting in Colorado unfolded, theater-goers faced terror and confusion in the struggle to reach the safety of police
Aurora Police outside the Century 16 movie theatre, Denver
The first emergency calls were received by police dispatchers at 12.39am local time. Twelve people died in the shooting. Photograph: Karl Gehring/AP

The Dark Knight Rises was about 10 minutes in to its premiere viewing when the violence it depicted on screen leapt out into the auditorium in a hail of gunfire. Among the packed midnight audience in cinema nine of the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Denver, was a young sportswriter called Jessica Ghawi, 24, whose palpable excitement at the upcoming show is captured hours earlier on her Twitter feed.

"Never thought I'd have to coerce a guy into seeing the midnight showing of the Dark Knight Rises with me," she wrote under her writing name Jessica Redfield. "actually won the argument. He's going! WIN!!!"

Her last tweet was: "MOVIE DOESN'T START FOR 20 MINUTES"

Half an hour later, Ghawi became one of 12 people to die in the carnage. Among the other victims: a six-year-old girl killed in the shooting, and an injured baby aged three months.

The first emergency calls were received by police dispatchers at 12.39am local time. By then, James Holmes had begun to put his meticulously planned attack into action.

James Holmes-Colorado-shooting-Batman-Aurora The University of Colorado

On screen, Anne Hathaway was already fully engaged in a shootout, and the sound of make-believe detonations was filling the room. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a very tall man, about 6ft 3ins, coming into the auditorium from a side door.

He was dressed in black and wearing a mask and flak jacket. Survivors said that the way he looked wasn't as weird as it sounded – there were plenty of Batman obsessives who had dressed up in costume for the premiere, and several people assumed this was just part of the revelry.

The masked man in black threw a couple of canisters to the ground, and there was a loud hissing noise as gas started to emerge and spread through the auditorium. Even then, some people thought that a special effects stunt had been arranged by the movie theatre.

And then he pulled out a shotgun, aimed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. A shot rang out. Then he pointed at the back of the cinema and shot some more. There was no mistaking his deadly intent then.

James Wilburn, sitting in the second row of the theatre, told the Denver Post that he and his three friends instantly dropped to the floor in the hope of shielding themselves behind the seats in front. He watched as the gunman, just five feet away, emptied the shotgun of bullets, let it fall to the ground, then calmly grabbed a semi-automatic rifle from his back and carried on shooting.

Jennifer Seeger told NBC television that when the carnage began she shouted at her friend: "We've got to get out of here." But when they started to move she saw people fall around her as the gunman began silently making his way up the aisle, shooting anyone who was trying to escape ahead of him.

"He shot people trying to go out the exits," she said.

At that moment, Seeger stared her own imminent death in the face. The shooter came towards her, saying nothing. The barrel of the gun was pointing directly at her face. "I was just a deer in headlights. I didn't know what to do."

A shot rang out, but it was aimed at the person sitting right behind her. "I have no idea why he didn't shoot me," Seeger said.

Later, when she was safe, Seeger told her mother: "Mom, God saved me. God still loves me."

But first, she had to get out. She began crawling along the cinema floor, heading to the exit. There was a girl, about 14, lying apparently lifeless on the stairs in front of her. She passed a man with a bullet hole in his back.

She checked his pulse, then tried to pull him out, but he was too heavy, and she couldn't hang around. She could feel the gun casings hitting her leg after each shot. One casing burned her forehead. "I had to go. I was going to get shot."

All around her there was blood and mayhem. The shooting went on and on. People were bleeding from their mouths, their legs, shrapnel was flying around the air, there was glass showering everywhere.

"I thought it was pretty much the end of the world," said Robert Jones, a survivor from theater nine.

By then the room was full of smoke from the canisters. Pepper spray, people thought, or perhaps teargas. It made the eyes sting, then worse. "It was like a teargas," said Naya Thompson. "I was coughing and choking and I couldn't breathe."

In the adjacent theater eight, the audience thought that it was just part of the film when they heard even louder shots ringing out next door. But then they could hear screaming, and as they came out to see what was happening people began to emerge on their knees or hunched up.

Some lay motionless on the ground. Tanner Coon, 17, said as he rushed for the exit he tripped. "I slipped on some blood. I fell on a lady and told her, 'We've got to go'. There was no response. I presumed she was dead."

Outside the multiplex people began to gather, waiting for help. Shayla Roeder said she saw a young teenager sitting on the ground, bleeding. "She just had this horrible look in her eyes. We made eye contact and I could tell she was not all right."

Fire alarms blared out, sending their distress call out into the night. Ten people died at their scene, and two more in hospital. About 50 people were treated in hospitals throughout the Denver area, some suffering shrapnel wounds, others cut by glass.

Within minutes the area was swarming with Swat teams and ambulances. The lessons of the Columbine high school shooting, only 13 years and 15 miles away, had been learned: the emergency services were well prepared and co-ordinated. They even had a walkie-talkie system shared between all main services – something they lacked at Columbine back in 1999 on that terrible day when 12 school pupils and a teacher was killed.

It says something about America today that emergency personnel now pride themselves in coping with mass shootings.

As police began to sweep the parking area, they quickly came upon a man dressed in black crouched behind a car. He had a mask with him and some guns. There were buckets of ammunition inside the vehicle.

He gave himself up in precisely the opposite manner to his conduct in theatre nine – peacefully and without incident.

He told the police where he lived, and warned them it was booby trapped. The area around his third-floor apartment was evacuated, and bomb technicians mobilised to disarm what was presumed to be flammable or explosive material.

The fire alarms were still blaring out at the Century 16 cinema hours after the shooting had ended. They were audible reminders of the trauma that has engulfed this suburban town, that will remain with its people for many years to come.

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