The seats of Theater 9 had barely warmed when the night became a massacre. Just after midnight on July 20, 2012, a capacity crowd settled into the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colorado, for the midnight premiere of *The Dark Knight Rises* — one of the summer's most anticipated releases. James Eagan Holmes had purchased his ticket on July 7. He had not come to watch the film.
Holmes, 24, was a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado and lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Paris Street in Aurora. Armed with multiple weapons, he entered Theater 9 after the film began and opened fire on the audience at approximately 12:30 a.m. The attack lasted only minutes. When it was over, twelve people were dead and seventy more had been injured — sixty-two directly by gunfire, eight more hurt in the chaos of evacuation.
Holmes was taken into custody, and investigators soon turned to a second scene. His apartment on Paris Street had been rigged with an elaborate network of incendiary and explosive devices — traps Holmes had reportedly prepared in the weeks before the shooting. Bomb disposal units spent hours carefully neutralizing the building before forensic teams could enter and begin collecting evidence.