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Psychiatrist: Theater shooter never revealed murderous plan

Holmes

CENTENNIAL – The psychiatrist who treated James Holmes before he attacked at an Aurora movie theater said Tuesday that she would have called police and had him detained if she had known his plans.

Dr. Lynne Fenton testified that Holmes acknowledged he was having homicidal thoughts as often as three or four times a day, but je never let on that he was assembling an arsenal and planning a mass killing.

Had she known that Holmes “had some sort of plan and some intent to carry out those thoughts,” she said, “I likely would have put him on a mental-health hold and contacted the police.”

Two years after the bullets Holmes sprayed into the audience that night killed 12 people and wounded 58 more, he told a court-appointed examiner that “I kind of regret that she didn’t lock me up so that everything could have been avoided.”

But Holmes never revealed enough to justify being institutionalized, even for just 72 hours, Fenton explained: “He never met criteria for me to hospitalize him.”

Defense attorneys say Holmes, who has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, is schizophrenic, and he was in the grips of a psychotic episode as he carried out the attack on July 20, 2012. If the jury agrees, he’ll be committed indefinitely to a mental hospital.

The state must prove he was legally sane at the time, which is the conclusion of two court-appointed psychiatrists who examined Holmes months and years after the attack. A guilty verdict could bring the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

Freed from patient-client privilege by Holmes’ insanity plea, Fenton on Tuesday made her first public statements about him. Among other things, she described his behavior as anxious, hostile, bizarre and so worrisome that she took it upon herself to alert campus police and Holmes’ mother, but didn’t find the evidence needed to hold someone against his will.

They had five therapy sessions between mid-March and June 11, 2012, when Holmes dropped out of the graduate neuroscience program at the University of Colorado. He had come in seeking prescription drugs for what a social worker described as the worst obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms she had ever seen.

Holmes got his medicine, but deflected efforts to probe his thinking, she said.

“I thought he had social anxiety disorder,” she said. “I was hoping to have a working alliance with him so he would keep coming back ... I was worried that he might drop out of treatment at any time.”



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