CENTENNIAL — As the premiere of the new Batman movie began to play three miles to the south, Kaitlyn Fonzi knocked on her neighbor’s apartment door, seriously ticked off.
Moments earlier, she and her boyfriend had been sleeping in their apartment directly below. But then, around midnight on July 20, 2012, techno music blared so loudly from the apartment above that it shook the whole complex’s walls. Fonzi and her boyfriend had to shout at each other just to be heard. She stormed upstairs.
But no one answered, even though the door was left ajar.
“In my better judgment,” Fonzi testified Friday at the Aurora movie theater shooting trial, “I went back downstairs and called the police.
“I had a bad gut feeling that I didn’t want to see whatever was behind that door.”
At the end of the second week of the trial on Friday, jurors got to see — through the recorded video of a bomb-squad robot — what Fonzi didn’t that night. Inside James Holmes’ apartment, a spaghetti plate-like tangle of wires led to mason jars filled with napalm and bullets, pyrotechnic launch control boxes, and gasoline-filled fireworks shells that looked like cartoon bombs.
Just inside the door of the darkened apartment, visible only in the glint of the robot’s flashlight, was a fishing line connected to a Thermos perched above a frying pan — what Holmes would later tell investigators was the trigger to the whole thing. If someone unwittingly jiggled the fishing line, knocking over the Thermos onto the frying pan and mixing the chemicals held by both, a flame would light that and would spread throughout the rest of the apartment.
“From my observations,” Adams County bomb squad Sgt. James Gerdeman testified, “it seemed configured to go off.”
Friday was a day filled with technical testimony about bomb robot operation and “render-safe” techniques and the differences between incendiary and explosive devices, as prosecutors plunged deeper into the evidence that they argue shows Holmes knew right from wrong on the night of the shooting. As part of their presentation, prosecutors passed around the Thermos and the frying pan to jurors.
In an interview with detectives hours after the attack on the Century Aurora 16 movie theater, Holmes said he planted the devices in his Aurora apartment — near East Colfax Avenue and Interstate 225 — to draw first responders away from the theater prior to the attack that killed 12 and wounded 70. He faces 166 counts, including murder, attempted murder and possession of an explosive device. He could be executed if convicted.
Defense attorneys say Holmes was insane on the night of the attack, and one of the lawyers, Katherine Spengler, sought on Friday to diminish the threat the rigged apartment posed. She noted that most of the devices inside were incendiary, not explosive — meaning, if they worked, they would burn rather than blow up. She showed a video clip of the Denver police bomb squad disabling one control box, a process that knocked over several other devices. Spengler noted that those devices did not ignite.
But prosecutor Rich Orman pounced on an opportunity he saw.
“Can they burn down a building full of sleeping people?” he asked Gerdeman.
“Yes,” Gerdeman said.
Prosecutors say they didn’t because of Fonzi’s decision to back away from the apartment that night. During his opening statements last week, Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler called the decision “providential.”
Fonzi attributed the decision to a sixth sense.
“It just seemed really off,” she testified.
In her 911 call to report a noise complaint, which was played in court Friday, she spoke casually.
“It’s just really, really loud music,” she told the operator.
“We’ll try to get someone out there as soon as we can,” the 911 operator replied.
It was only a few minutes before the shooting began at the theater. Around 1 a.m., the music stopped Fonzi said, and she and her boyfriend fell back asleep. The next sound they heard was an hour later, when there was a crash at their apartment building’s back door.
The Aurora police SWAT team had arrived to evacuate the building.
Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733, jpaul@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/JesseAPaul
