As Aurora theater shooting trial concludes, civil lawsuits set to proceed

With James Holmes’ criminal trial complete, the legal focus in the Aurora theater shooting fallout will shift to the civil courts, where several lawsuits have been on hold pending the end of the criminal trial.

In the months after the shooting left 12 dead and 70 wounded, several people wounded in the attack and the families of those killed sued the theater’s owners, Texas-based Cinemark, Inc., accusing the theater chain of failing to provide adequate security that night in July 2012.

In April, just before the criminal trial was set to start in Arapahoe County, U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson rescheduled the three-week trial for July 2016. She slated a trial preparation conference for June 2016.

Christina Habas, a Denver lawyer who represents Josh Nowlan and Denise Traynom, who were wounded in the shooting, said even with the criminal trial complete, the lawyers in the civil cases are still in a waiting mode.

They need to see whether all the information available in the criminal trial will be handed over to the civil lawyers or if a protective order will put restrictions on the information, she said.

Before the trial next summer, Habas said there could be additional depositions under oath, but those won’t happen in open court.

Since Nowlan and Traynom filed the first lawsuit in September 2012, several other victims have done the same. Eventually, a federal judge consolidated all the cases — which largely accuse Cinemark of the same type of negligence.

According to the complaint Cinemark was negligent in not hiring off-duty police to work security during the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

The theater regularly hired off-duty officers to work security, but officials said after the shooting that off-duty officers were not on hand that night.

Christina Habas, a Denver lawyer who represents Josh Nowlan and Denise Traynom, who were wounded in the shooting, said even with the criminal trial complete, the lawyers in the civil cases are still in a waiting mode.

The suit also said the theater’s exterior doors lacked security alarms and that Cinemark failed to monitor their parking lots.

“(Cinemark) knew or should have known of the dangers and risks caused by its failures,” Traynom and Nowlan’s suit said.

The suits seek an undisclosed amount of damages, though each said damages to the three victims should exceed $75,000.

Cinemark sought to have the lawsuits dismissed, arguing nobody, not even people close to Holmes, could have predicted that horror.

In August 2014, Judge Jackson rejected that and said the theater company had failed to prove the attacks were so unprecedented there was no way for the theater to see them coming.

Jackson said that while that argument held up 30 years ago when a judge threw out a lawsuit against McDonald’s after a mass shooting at restaurant in California, the rash of mass shootings since then means businesses have to prepare for such attacks.

“One might reasonably believe that a mass shooting incident in a theater was likely enough (that is, not just a possibility) to be a foreseeable next step in the history of such acts by deranged individuals,” Jackson wrote.

The judge also noted that 80 of the 300 Cinemark theaters that showed the Dark Knight Rises that night opted to hire off-duty police to work security.

The topic of security at the theater only came up briefly at the trial.

During testimony early on, Marcus Weaver, who was wounded in the shooting and who was at the theater with Rebecca Wingo, who was killed, testified that one of the first things he notices when he got to the theater that night was the lack of police.

Typically, Wingo said, the theater has uniformed police officers working security. But on this night, they didn’t, and Weaver said that seemed strange.

Weaver is one of several victims who have sued Cinemark.

“One might reasonably believe that a mass shooting incident in a theater was likely enough (that is, not just a possibility) to be a foreseeable next step in the history of such acts by deranged individuals,” Jackson wrote.

In addition to the lawsuit against Cinemark, the widow of the one of the 12 people killed sued University of Colorado and Holmes’ psychiatrist Lynne Fenton,

Lawyers for Chantel Blunk, whose husband Jonathan Blunk was killed said the school and Fenton failed to act when Holmes said he had homicidal thoughts in the months before the shooting.

Richard Murray, one of the lawyers representing the school and Fenton, said the case is still active but has been on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case. What happens next is up to Blunk’s lawyers, he said, and no court dates are currently scheduled.

Blunk’s lawyer, Nicholus Palmer, did not return a call for comment.