CENTENNIAL – Agonizing grief has devolved into never-ending physical pain for Caren Teves, who lost her firstborn in the Aurora theater shootings.
“I’m in pain every day,” Teves said Wednesday, speaking softly as prosecutors made their final case for executing the man who killed her son Alex and 11 other people.
“It’s God-awful. It’s horrific. I miss everything about him,” she said.
Jurors will soon decide whether to apply the death penalty to James Holmes or grant him the mercy of life without parole for murdering 12 people and trying to kill 70 others three years ago.
Relatives of the dozen who lost their lives have been recounting the life-shattering emotional trauma they have suffered since then.
Prosecutors have summoned mothers and fathers, sisters and daughters, husbands and wives to the witness stand. They wept, laughed and struggled to retain their composure as they sought to show why the victims’ lives mattered.
Jurors will begin deliberating as early as Friday. Colorado administers capital punishment by lethal injection, although the state’s death-penalty process has been effectively frozen for years.
Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. repeatedly warned jurors not to be swayed by the emotional nature of the testimony. “Your decision must reflect your individual reasoned moral judgment,” he tells them.
But the family stories have often left jurors in tears.
Teves told jurors she has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and the stress of her son’s murder has accelerated the symptoms. Her son was athletic, caring, intelligent and thoughtful, she said.
“Fierce. Kind. Caring. If you were in a room with five people or 20 people, you would remember Alex,” she said. “He made you feel good about yourself. It was a very unique thing he could do: Whenever you left him, you just wanted to be a better person.”
Nineteen-year-old Cierra Cowden laughed between her tears as she tried to describe her father’s personality and show how difficult his absence has been.
“I just feel like my family’s broken,” she said.
Gordon Cowden, a 51-year-old father of four, was the oldest person killed. He was patient and charming and so kind that he once stopped their car to herd a prairie dog to safety. In the mornings, he would awaken his children with a kind of reveille, singing “dit-dit-dittle-ee,” his daughter testified.
Jerri Jackson described going to the coroner’s office to identify the body of her son, Matthew McQuinn, who died trying to shield his girlfriend, Samantha Yowler, from the gunfire.
“I went in, and he was there, and it was my son,” she said softly. “I told him that loved him, that I was proud of him because he saved Samantha’s life, and that we would take care of Samantha’s life.”
But her son’s murder left her with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety that keeps her from working. She gets by instead on Social Security disability payments, which cut her income in half.
“I went back to work and could not handle it,” she said. “I’ve been in counseling for almost three years now. I’m on four medications to help me sleep from the nightmares.”
Defense attorney Rebekka Higgs asked jurors not to “answer death with death,” insisting that the crimes were caused by the psychotic breakdown of a mentally ill young man. Life without parole is the morally appropriate response, she said.
The last round of closing arguments could take place Thursday, and deliberations could begin Friday, attorneys on both sides said.
