CENTENNIAL — The witness was an anvil of a man, 6 feet tall with muscled arms like hammers.
His voice trembled with emotion when he talked.
“What we came across was blood and bodies everywhere,” Aurora fire Lt. Bernd Hoefler testified Wednesday, the third day of the Aurora theater movie shooting trial. “It was like a horror film.”
For a second straight day, witness testimony focused on the victims of the shooting, the survivors and the people who tried to save them all. The stories they told were at once familiarly tragic and hauntingly fresh: The man who so loved superhero movies that he arrived seven hours early for the premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises”; the friends who huddled together on the floor as bullets zipped overhead that night in July 2012; the police officer working her last graveyard shift who cradled a woman on the way to the hospital, not sure whether she was alive or dead.
And Hoefler, the firefighter who went into the tear gas-choked theater to see whether anything could be done for the most gravely wounded in an attack that left 12 dead and 70 injured.
Outside the theater that night, Hoefler and other first responders testified Wednesday, they quickly set up a triage system. The least injured were tagged green and told to walk to the far end of the theater complex for help. More serious injuries were labeled yellow.
Those in need of immediate assistance were tagged red and loaded into police cars for frantic trips to the hospital. Police officers carried many of the red-tagged victims out of the theater, fighting to hold onto them by limbs greased with blood.
“I believe the phrase was, ‘If they’ve got a pulse, get them out of here,’ ” Aurora police Officer Annette Brook testified.
Officer Natasha Cabouet held a seriously injured Ashley Moser in her arms during one such trip. Moser, who survived but who lost her daughter and unborn child and is paralyzed, had been talking for most of the trip, but she fell silent by the time they reached the hospital. Cabouet sobbed in recalling the moment.
“I really thought she had just died there in front of me,” Cabouet said.
For the most gravely injured back at the theater, the tag was black. It meant moving on to someone more likely to be saved.
“We had to tag him black”
Hoefler and another firefighter began working their way through the theater after police officers had evacuated most of the injured. The first person they came to: black tag. The second: black tag.
Hoefler paused at the third. He was still warm.
“I wanted to save him. I wanted to work him,” Hoefler said.
His voice caught.
“We had to tag him black because, with the amount of victims we had, we couldn’t spend that much time on one.”
Hoefler didn’t say who the man was. Many of the seven officers and firefighters who testified Wednesday said they never learned the names of the people they helped that night. The three survivors who testified Wednesday said they never learned the names of some of the first responders who helped them. It was stranger helping stranger on a night that had begun so joyously for many.
Alex Sullivan went to the theater with several friends from work to celebrate his 27th birthday party, his co-worker Christina Blache testified. “Sully,” everyone called him. He arrived for the midnight movie at 5:30 p.m., and, when a preview played before the movie for an upcoming Superman film, Sullivan burst to his feet and shouted, “Yeah!”
Joshua Nowlan and his friends rewatched two earlier Batman movies before heading to the theater. He has a lifelong love of superheroes and comic books, he testified. He hopes his two sons will have the same.
Sullivan died in the shooting. Nowlan had serious wounds to a leg and an arm, the latter of which required a skin graft from his shoulder. The tattoo of a bald eagle that once resided on that shoulder now covers that wound. He walks with a cane, which he used Wednesday to demonstrate how the gunman swept his rifle from side to side.
“It looked like he was searching for more people,” Nowlan said.
10 feet away from them
Over two days of testimony, defense attorneys have yet to ask a question of any witness. Nor has any witness yet spoken the name of James Holmes, the man sitting 10 feet away from them, the man on trial for the shooting. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and he could face the death penalty if convicted.
Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794, jsteffen@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jsteffendp
