WATCH: Video of Dr. Lynne Fenton’s testimony in the Aurora theater shooting trial
CENTENNIAL — The first time they met, he told her he wanted to kill people, and, by their last visit, she was worried enough that she broke the law herself.
James Holmes’ former psychiatrist testified Tuesday that she was so concerned Holmes might be a danger to the public in the month before the Aurora theater shooting that she contacted police and Holmes’ mother the day of her last session with him — a violation of health care privacy laws, she conceded.
But Dr. Lynne Fenton said she ultimately decided against taking further action. Holmes’ confessed thoughts of homicide were too generalized, and — even though prosecutors contend he had already amassed a small arsenal — he didn’t tell Fenton about specific plans.
“He never met the criteria for me to hospitalize him,” she said Tuesday.
“I guess I always sort of hoped,” she added later, “he would maybe come back for treatment.”
That tension — Fenton’s concern about what her patient might do and her limits in what she would do to stop him — punctuated one of the most significant days of the Aurora theater shooting trial so far.
Was it preventable?
Fenton and a colleague were the last mental health professionals to see Holmes prior to the July 2012 attack on the Century Aurora 16 theater that killed 12 and injured 70. That makes her uniquely positioned to help answer the murder trial’s central question: Was Holmes sane when he carried out the shooting?
But, even more broadly, questions about what Fenton knew, what she did and how things might have turned out differently have shadowed the public’s understanding of the shooting for nearly three years. Could authorities have averted the attack? Would stronger laws for mental health professionals have made a difference?
For the first time, Fenton’s testimony on Tuesday offered hints to those answers — but it also raised more questions.
On the witness stand, she made no mention of a specific offer from law enforcement to place Holmes on a mental health hold, something sources have told The Denver Post and other news outlets occurred. She played down threats that prosecutors previously suggested were serious enough to cut off Holmes’ key card access at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz medical campus, where he was a neuroscience graduate student.
Immediately worried
Fenton, then the medical director for student mental health services on the campus, and Holmes met seven times in spring 2012. Holmes initially called the service for help with social anxiety and, after confessing homicidal thoughts with a social worker, he and Fenton held their first session March 21.
She was immediately worried.
Holmes told her he thought about homicide three or four times a day, Fenton testified. He told her his self-diagnosed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder were the worst they had ever been in his life. He was eerily still — “frozen nervousness,” Fenton wrote in her notes, according to her testimony.
He told her about getting glasses as a kid and how they made him want to “overcome his biology,” she said. Later, he brought up the idea again in reference to his social problems — but he suggested a solution.
“The solution to the biological problem would be to eliminate the problem: homicide,” she recalled him saying. “But you can’t kill everyone, so it’s not an effective solution.”
LIVE BLOG: Live updates from The Denver Post staff and others inside the courtroom
“He seemed to be dismissing the idea of homicide as an effective solution,” Fenton testified.
Concerned but not perceiving an imminent threat, Fenton scheduled more appointments. In total, she and Holmes would meet for about four hours over their seven visits — the last two with a more senior psychiatrist also sitting in. Fenton spent about the same amount of time on the witness stand Tuesday.
In testimony, she was expressive. When repeatedly asked a series of questions by Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler whether Holmes told her about specific plans, she frowned, “No.” When she quoted Holmes’ statements from her notes, she spoke in a gruff, agitated voice.
Multiple times she made reference to things Holmes said that she didn’t understand. There was the part about “sheeple” and his hatred of mankind. There was the emoticon he sent to her in an e-mail after she accidentally wrote his last name as “Hughes” on a prescription. Only after prying did he tell her what it represented: He was punching her in the eye.
“Every time he said something I didn’t understand, I tried to get him to clarify it,” Fenton testified, “but it was rare he provided any information.”
An alarming change
By their last session, June 11, she said she was scared. He had begun to make paranoid statements — including one about her keeping a suspicious package behind her chair. He said he was reading the writings of the Unabomber. He had failed his exams and was dropping out of school, and, although he seemed strangely untroubled by that, he also refused her offer to continue treatment.
“He may be shifting insidiously into a frank psychotic disorder like schizophrenia,” Fenton said she wrote in her notes.
When Holmes cut the last session short, Fenton jumped into action. She said she called members of the campus’ Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment team, including a campus police officer, and asked them to check on Holmes’ background to see if there were any red flags. She also called Holmes’ mom, Arlene, who told her Holmes had long struggled with social phobias. Fenton said she didn’t tell Arlene Holmes that her son had confessed to thinking about homicide.
Lacking a specific threat and uncertain whether Holmes’ behavior represented a downward slide, Fenton said she backed off.
How to define danger
In Colorado, mental health professionals can have patients involuntarily committed to a hospital but only if they pose “an imminent danger to themselves or others,” said Tom Olbrich, the director of access and emergency services for the Jefferson Center for Mental Health.
That leaves much up to the interpretation of the therapist. In 2014, lawmakers provided clearer guidance about what “danger” means, but Olbrich said the decision turns on whether the threat is “imminent.”
“Unless you have good, strong evidence that indicates that the person is about to do something in the next day or two it, it probably doesn’t meet the standard of imminent,” he said.
Fenton, who is now facing a lawsuit over her decision, insisted that Holmes never told her anything to suggest an attack was imminent.
To prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty, it showed Holmes calculatedly kept details of his plot from his therapist. To defense attorneys, who have pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, the fact that Holmes continued going to therapy shows a man who was reaching out for help.
But it was Fenton who seemed most torn, still unable to understand the mind of her patient. During one break in testimony, she and Holmes and the rest of the courtroom stood at attention as the jury exited the room.
Her eyes drifted to the right. They looked first at the floor by the defense table. Then they lifted to look at the man on trial there.
