Decked out in a Batman hat and black-and-yellow tank top, Lasamoa Cross grabbed a seat with her boyfriend, AJ Boik, near the front of the theater.
The movie opened with the heaviness fans of the Batman franchise expect. The villain sacrifices one of his partners on an airplane in the opening scene. Grim stuff. Lasamoa leaned over to AJ and told him those first few minutes were probably the darkest she had ever seen. AJ agreed.
She noticed a dark figure walk into the theater through the exit door at the front, but she didn’t pay him much attention. Onscreen, Catwoman snatched a necklace.
The shadowy figure by the door yanked some sort of pin and chucked a smoke grenade into the theater. The canister looked weightless hurtling through the dark theater and landed with a clink a few rows behind Lasamoa and AJ.
She heard the gunshots, but assumed they had something to do with that smoke bomb or firework or whatever it was. She wasn’t scared then, in those moments before she knew what was going on, before AJ was gunned down and her life forever altered.
She was just pissed at that guy ruining her date.
“Dude,” she thought, “you’re messing up my movie.”
AJ and Lasamoa were easy to find last spring and summer. The teenagers were almost always together, enjoying the few uninterrupted months they had with each other before college started in the fall and their studies encroached on their hours together.
And they spent many of their nights out at the movies. They caught “The Amazing Spider Man,” “The Avengers,” “50/50” and about a dozen others in the few months after she moved home to Aurora following the fall semester at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Other than one trip to Southlands to watch “In Time,” the couple’s cinema of choice was Century Aurora 16. The now infamous theater is just a few blocks from both their homes, and up the street from Gateway High School, where they’d met a few years before. Their first date was to Century to see “The Green Lantern.”
“It was always Century,” she said.
They had a routine, too. They always bought the jumbo-sized popcorn and on the way out, scored the free refill. AJ’s mom loved the popcorn after it had sat for a few hours, so they always brought the bag home to her.
As spring wound down their moviegoing tapered some.
“Summer came around and we realized we were getting broke,” she said.
The hobby slowed but it didn’t end. They were avid movie buffs, and Lasamoa had even majored in film production during her first semester of college. But finances what they were, nights that were spent at the theater were replaced with evenings in the parks, days at Aurora Reservoir or just time with friends.
Still, even as they stepped back a bit from movies, they looked forward to July 20. Batman fans around the country had that date circled from the moment the ads for the film hit theaters the previous summer. “The Dark Knight Rises” was one of the most highly anticipated films of the year, and one Lasamoa and AJ were determined not to miss.
They loved 2008’s “The Dark Knight” and Christopher Nolan’s other popular movie, “Inception” in 2010. Even before AJ finished his senior year at Gateway in May, plans had been discussed, and then discussed some more.
“All summer, we were like, ‘July 20 is the day,’” she said.
The couple started dating in spring 2011. Lasamoa was a senior at Gateway, AJ a junior. They’d known each other for a few years, but it wasn’t until they went to South Dakota with the school band — April 18, 2011, to be exact — that they made a lasting connection.
“I had gotten dumped the week before so I was actually sad, and he was there to listen to me, and he actually cared,” she said.
They stayed together through her first semester at CU, with Lasamoa making the trek down from Boulder some weekends and AJ going to see her on others. After that semester, she moved back home. The plan was for Lasamoa to return to Boulder in the fall, and AJ to attend Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Lakewood.
AJ was finishing up his senior year that spring, but they spent as much time together as they could. And they talked about their future often. AJ was going to be an art teacher, Lasamoa an English teacher.
“We even talked about death, as sad as that is,” she said.
Lasamoa asked AJ what he’d do if she died, if tomorrow she wasn’t around. His answer was typically honest: He’d mourn, go through the motions, and one day, find someone else to love. If he had kids, he’d explain that when he was younger, there was another woman he really loved. And he’d want her to do the same.
“He wouldn’t be happy if I dropped everything and said I’m gonna die alone,” she said.
In March 2012, AJ proposed to her. Wedding arrangements were still several years out — they both had college ahead of them. But the plans were being laid.
Once the shooting started in the theater, it was chaos. The movie was still blaring, and the crowd was bolting for the exits through clouds of tear gas while the gunman popped off shot after shot.
AJ grabbed Lasamoa’s hand and said, “Babe, we gotta go.” The couple jumped out of their seats, not bothering to duck, just hustling toward the exit, toward safety and out of the chaos.
Then AJ dropped her hand. He turned to her and his face was wracked with pain and fear. The couple fell to the floor between rows of seats and Lasamoa clutched AJ’s head. She stayed there with him for what felt like minutes. Confusion reigned, and the horror only became clear when she felt hot liquid on her hands.
Someone shouted that the gunman was coming back. She propped AJ against a wall and crawled on her hands and knees to the exit then bolted for the door.
Lasamoa borrowed a phone from a former teacher at Gateway and called her mom. Then she went to AJ’s car and waited. If he came out, he’d come to the car, so she stayed there.
Investigators arrived and separated the crowd into two groups. One for theater No. 9, one for theater No. 8. Lasamoa was in No. 9.
After a few hours in the parking lot, the witnesses were bused over to Gateway, where they waited for about 18 hours for word on their loved ones. AJ’s family arrived. The Red Cross showed up with food for the families.
“No one ate any of it,” she said.
She walked around Gateway a few times, reminiscing about her time there with AJ. And she clung to what little hope she had that he was safe. “There was nothing else to do but get bad news,” she said
The next night around 8:30 p.m., the July evening still smoldering, Lasamoa and AJ’s family were called into a breezeway at Gateway where police delivered the news. Even before that they knew, but they still clung to hope that maybe he was in surgery somewhere and the doctors hadn’t yet had a chance to identify him. The news dashed those thin strands of hope.
“There goes all my faith in humanity, right out the door, just like that,” Lasamoa said.
She hasn’t stepped foot in a movie theater since the shootings. She hasn’t finished watching “The Dark Knight Rises,” either. She has watched a few movies at home, and still loves film, but she’s not ready to go back.
“It’s not something I can just let go of. I wanted that to be a big piece of my life, as ironic as it is, the film major stuck in a movie theater loses her boyfriend there, the place that we were happiest,” she said.
But she will go to the movies again. And she’ll date again, too. She remembers well those conversations with AJ, and knows he wouldn’t want her to be alone. She’s still going to pursue many of those plans she laid with AJ, too.
“Maybe not all the dreams I had with him because some of those I strictly want to share with him,” she said.
And in an odd parallel, she finds herself again looking forward to July 20, just as she did last year. This time, she’s filled with a mix of excitement and dread.
She plans on spending the day with AJ’s family, as she has many days since the shootings, maintaining a relationship with the people who knew AJ best. They’re going to have a barbecue and the menu will be AJ’s favorites, cheddar bratwursts and macaroni and cheese followed by roasting s’mores.
July 20 is going to be a sort of New Year’s, and hopefully something resembling a new start.
Or, maybe she’ll wake up that day again overwhelmed by the fact that she’ll spend a lot more time in her life without AJ than she every did with him, she said. Either way, it’s going to be an important moment as she tries to push ahead.
“It’s like a new door,” she said. “We’ll see. We’ll see.”
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: The personal toll
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: The physical toll
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: The emotional toll
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Our identity
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Our city
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Our children
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Our community
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Ourselves
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Message triggers a new attitude toward guns
7.20.2012 THE PRICE WE PAID: Q&A with Gov. John Hickenlooper
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