AURORA | A year ago Saturday, just a few minutes of terror changed Aurora for good.
Just after midnight on July 20, the city joined the ranks of other American cities marred by horrific gun violence. The city’s worst day is also its most notable, and one that will always be central to Aurora’s history.
But just as that two-minute stretch inside a dark and jam-packed theater changed Aurora, so, too, has the year that followed. America and the world watched the community openly grieve, then proudly rally around its city. They watched the wounded heal and learned the stories of heroes.
“I think that in this case, people saw more than the act,” said Aurora City Councilman Bob Roth. “People saw the reaction of the city and the citizens.”
Roth said he sees a civic pride that’s easier to spot today than it was on July 19, 2012.
“I think the whole ‘Aurora Strong’ message has really caught on,” he said.
In the days after the shootings, Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan made it a point to say that Aurora wouldn’t be defined by the massacre. Instead, Hogan said the city would be defined by its response, and that in the process, the city would grow and come out of the atrocity a stronger community.
“It’s a horrible way to grow up,” Hogan said, “but as a city, we grew up that day.”
Hogan said that in the year since July 20 he finds himself being more aggressive when it comes to pushing for changes as mayor. Part of that aggressiveness is a product of just getting older and wanting to make things happen rather than waiting for them, he said, but there’s something else, too.
“Some of it is probably a reaction to the awareness that there might not be a tomorrow, so you have to do it today,” Hogan said.
Councilwoman Barb Cleland said the shooting showed the random nature of horrific crime.
“I think people realized that this was a tragedy that can happen anywhere, not just Aurora, it can happen anywhere,” she said.
Last spring, after the Boston Marathon bombings, Cleland said she got a call from city leaders there about how to respond to these sorts of large-scale attacks. She told them to take their time, to go slowly and keep the victims at the front of their minds.
“Everybody has different ways to grieve,” she said. “It’s just a very slow process.”
The year since July 20 has brought more tangible changes, too, especially in legislative terms.
In the months after the theater rampage, state lawmakers passed a handful of controversial gun control measures that supporters say will prevent future gun violence and even massacres like Aurora. Among the measures are a ban on the sale or transfer of high-capacity ammunition magazines like the one the shooter used that night in the theater. Lawmakers also passed a new law that requires background checks for virtually all gun sales.
The debate over the measures proved to be one of the most-bruising in recent memory, and even after the governor signed the bills into law the fractious debate has continued. The bulk of the state’s elected sheriffs have signed on to a lawsuit aimed at overturning the laws, and gun control is already shaping up to be an issue in the 2014 elections.
In the past, mass shootings have sparked several changes in the way police respond to crimes like these. After the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, for example, SWAT teams around the country adopted more aggressive response plans that call for officers to confront active shooters more quickly than they did pre-Columbine. So far, after the theater shootings, Aurora police haven’t made any changes to the way they respond to similar situations.
“We had an aggressive active shooter response policy and philosophy in place for numerous years prior to 7/20, and I think this has reiterated the importance of that policy,” Aurora police spokesman Officer Frank Fania said. Because of a gag order in the accused shooter’s criminal case, police declined to discuss the one-year anniversary of the shootings further.
Police have generally been praised for their response to the shooting that night, particularly several quick-arriving officers who rushed victims to area hospitals in their police cruisers. Those stories of officers clutching the wounded as they sped toward an emergency room, or of their blood-soaked police cruisers in the aftermath have been some of the most defining of the past year.
But the Aurora fire department and Rural/Metro Ambulance have been criticized in some circles after their crews failed to quickly reach theater No. 9, where the shooting occurred. Those crews were stopped outside the theater by the crush of moviegoers fleeing the shootings, and critics have said less-seriously injured victims who reached crews in the parking lot were treated before the gravely hurt who couldn’t get out.
This spring, city council signed off on a $248,000 contract with TriData Corp. to review the city’s response to the shootings. The Virginia-based company conducted similar studies after other high-profile mass shootings.
The study is expected to take about several months to complete and is expected to be comprehensive. City documents said the TriData report will rely in large part on interviews with first responders, as well as interviews with some victims and hospital staff.
The investigation is expected to determine how ambulance and fire crews responded to the scene, and how they can avoid the sorts of bottlenecks they encountered in the parking lot on July 20.
The complex and the theater where the shootings happened has since reopened, but only after an almost six-month renovation that saw the building’s interior — especially in theater No. 9 — wholly gutted and rebuilt.
Theater No. 9 was turned into what Cinemark, Inc., the theater chain that owns Century, dubs its “extreme digital cinema,” a massive high-definition screen that stretches from floor to ceiling.
Cinemark opted to remodel and reopen the theater after an online poll conducted by the city showed the majority of respondents backed reopening it. Still, many community members and victims’ families disagreed with the decision and accused Cinemark of being insensitive.
While the year since the shootings has produced ample change on the policy front, the passing of time hasn’t done much to dull the pain for those directly impacted by the shootings. With 12 dead and more than 70 physically wounded, the list of people closely connected to the shootings — families who lost a loved one, wives who saw a husband gravely wounded — stretches well into the hundreds.
And a year later, they’re still dealing with the hole July 20 left in their world.
Caren Teves’ son, Alex, was one of the 12 people killed in the theater that night. She said a year after Alex’s death, she still doesn’t feel like herself.
“There’s a part of me missing,” she said. “I just feel broken and not whole.”
Lasamoa Cross was in the theater that night with her boyfriend, A.J. Boik, another of the 12 killed in the rampage.
The next day, when Cross and AJ’s family got confirmation that he had been killed, she said the announcement robbed her of something else.
“There goes all my faith in humanity, right out the door, just like that,” she said.
In the year before the shooting, Cross was a regular at the Century Aurora 16 theater. She was such a movie buff in fact that she majored in film when she started college. But since then, she hasn’t stepped inside a theater.
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.
The days after the shooting left the city with a palpable sense that people weren’t as safe as they assumed they were. Gun sales spiked in the days after the theater shootings, and police posted extra officers at every theater in the area for several days after.
But for the most part, that sense that the shootings were a sign that Aurora is less safe seems to have dissipated, Roth said. If anything, he said he feels more safe knowing that an almost random, horrific event like that isn’t likely to befall the same city twice.
“This was a random act of one person. It wasn’t a group of people, it wasn’t gang violence, it was a random act,” he said. “And the chances of something similar to happen is probably less likely than being struck by lightning twice in the same day.”