Police and federal law enforcement authorities are looking for a man they are calling a “person of interest” in the Colorado massacre investigation.
Sources tell FOX31 Denver reporter Justin Joseph that a second man is now a person-of-interest in the Aurora theater shooting investigation. We are not disclosing his identity because he has not been charged.
Twelve people were killed and 58 injured early Friday when James Egan Holmes allegedly opened fire inside the crowded theater.
Neighbors of the person of interest say for the past two days there have been SWAT team and police cars in their alley and unmarked cars in street.
“He’s been there about a year,” said one neighbor.
Agents showed up again this morning.
“I woke up this morning with cops still here trying to look inside his home. At 5:00 a.m. cops showed-up and asked me about (him).”
Sources tell Justin Joseph someone made either a call or a text from the person of interest’s phone threatening violence if James Egan Holmes was not released from jail. That call prompted police to issue an alert to find and detain him.
Sources also say a picture of Holmes with red hair on an adult website is what Egan looked like when he was arrested.
Neighbors recognized him instantly but they say he recently dyed his hair.
“I`ve seen him before,” said a neighbor to the person of interest.
The person of interest’s Facebook page shows he has a master’s degree in bio-medical science.
Anshutz Medical Center confirms he is in their doctorate program, the same program from which Holmes withdrew several months ago.
Out of caution police searched their campus Friday, but they won’t say what if anything they were looking for or found.
As for the person of interest, all law enforcement jurisdictions, local, state and federal, are looking for him.
Neighbors say he and his roommate left their home hours before the massacre. They haven’t seen him since.
Two crazies? That’s not very likely, especially since we’re not exactly sure how crazy the alleged shooter, James Holmes, might be. It appears that the massacre was meticulously planned for months, and was hardly a spur of the moment action. While planning such a horrific act does not necessarily denote rationality, it certainly will make it harder for Holmes to use an insanity defense at his trial.
As for the person of interest, there have been questions about how Holmes was able to enter through a locked emergency door that only opened from the inside. Police weren’t commenting at the time, but the possibility of an accomplice makes sense in that context.
Update
The Aurora police chief is denying the Fox Denver report of another “person of interest:”
Aurora police chief Daniel Oates rejected media reports that a second person of interest is associated with Friday’s massacre in Colorado. He said James Holmes is the only suspect responsible but they are interested in speaking to anyone who knows or has had contact with Holmes.
“All the evidence we have, every single indicator, is that… this is all Mr. Holmes’ activity and that he wasn’t particularly aided by anyone else,” Oates said in an exclusive interview Sunday on “Face the Nation. “We’re building a case to show that this was a deliberative process by a very intelligent man who wanted to do this.”
Oates said the person brought in to be questioned on Saturday “was a casual consequence.”
“The relationship was real inconsequential,” he said. “[I]t’s really an inconsequential matter.”
I suspect that Colorado, like Arizona, has a “guilty but mentally ill” standard. Meaning he spends life in prison even if he becomes sane. Insanity only saves him from a death sentence.
As for entry through the emergency door, it’s my understanding that he attended an earlier showing at the same multiplex and propped the door open so he could re-enter at the 12:30 AM Batman premier. I’m certain I read that somewhere, but with the enormous number of stories reported over the last two days, I cannot hope to pinpoint the article.
Later the same day CNN aired a report stating exactly that, and showed an image of a ticket stub to “Dark Knight” with a time stamp of 6:52 p.m. I don’t recall if they specified the image was actually the shooter’s own ticket, but certainly they implied it.
It couldn’t have been an earlier showing of The Dark Knight Returns. The showing that Holmes shot up was THE premiere at the Aurora theater.
One of the survivors was saying that he saw someone go outside for a moment apparently to take a call and then came back in. After hearing that, I believed that there was another person involved. The police might be walking back the “person of interest” story so as not to tip their hand.
That story came and went very quickly the weekend after the shooting. Fox is the only site I go to for hard news so it may have been there. Very curious indeed. The witness was a woman saying someone in the front row took a cell phone call and went to the door and opened it just prior to the attack. This directly conflicts with the story about Holmes propping the door lock open to enable reentry.
Let the conspiracy theories begin.
Lt Col David Grossman, a recognized expert in young mass murderers, preaches the “Four D’s”, the first of which is ‘Deter’. I suggest to you that as we learn more in the coming weeks, the fact that there was no alarm on the emergency exit was a significant factor. I’ll bet the killer knew the door was not alarmed. Had it been alarmed he would not have been able to slip out undetected. to gather his implements of destruction.
I worked at a movie theater just a few years ago. The emergency exits usually serve a dual purpose. First is to give patrons an exit to utilize in an emergency. Second, it serves as an easy access point for ushers to take trash straight out to the dumpsters. Soda and popcorn rotting in the bottom of a trash can, even for just a couple of hours, is not a pleasant smell, so parading full trash cans or trash bags through the hallway and lobby is to be avoided. Each theater has its own trash can(s), and when they’re full, you take the bags straight out to the dumpster. Our theater had 14 screens. They were mostly bunched up in pairs with each theater having an emergency exit to an exterior courtyard that was open to the back of the building. We would keep man-portable rolling dumpsters at each of those openings to collect the day’s trash, and when those filled up, they’d get emptied into the compacter right behind concessions.
These emergency exits had a button on the inside of the doorjam at the top of the door that would let you temporarily let you prop the door open for taking out trash and coming back in. You’d push the button after opening the door, then it would stop the door from closing all the way just a single time. As soon as you pull the door off of its prop, the mechanism retracts and the door will shut all the way and latch.
You also sometimes see these mechanisms installed for exterior doors to smoke break locations. I expect the aurora theater may have had something similar. If nothing else, a small rock or a piece of packing tape would accomplish the same thing.