When medical examiners from the Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office started their investigation in the hours after the Aurora theater shooting, the bodies of the deceased were in the same state they were in when police found them in the theater.
Some still had popcorn in their hair, said Dr. Kelly Lear-Kaul, now Arapahoe County’s elected coroner and the deputy coroner at the time of the shooting. And many of the victims still had their cell phones in their pockets — phones that continued to ring even on the exam table as medical examiners worked to identify the deceased and determine how they died.
Lear-Kaul, who conducted several of the autopsies herself, said medical examiners knew who was on the other end of those phone calls.
“We see that it’s the family,” she said. “We know what that means, that the family is frantically trying to find their loved ones.”
Like other officials involved in the case, Lear-Kaul had been barred from speaking publicly about how the coroner’s office responded in the days after one of the worst mass shootings in the country’s history. But when the gunman was sentenced to life in prison last month, the gag order that barred her and other officials from speaking about the case was lifted.
Looking back, Lear-Kaul said there isn’t much she would do differently if Arapahoe County was faced with a similar large-scale crime like this one.
But, she said, she would likely give families of the deceased confirmation that their loved one was killed sooner than the families received after the theater shooting.
In the hours after the shooting, Lear-Kaul and then-coroner Michael Dobersen — both of whom are forensic pathologists and medical examiners — each conducted autopsies on the dead. They started in the early morning hours of July 20, 2012, and notified families around 6 p.m. that evening.
“These victims were identified much quicker than usual,” she said.
Like other officials involved in the case, Lear-Kaul had been barred from speaking publicly about how the coroner’s office responded in the days after one of the worst mass shootings in the country’s history. But when the gunman was sentenced to life in prison last month, the gag order that barred her and other officials from speaking about the case was lifted.
But officials opted to wait to notify the families until all 12 victims had been identified.
That delay bothered the family of John Larimer, one of the 12 killed.
Kathleen Larimer, John’s mom, testified at the sentencing for the gunman that waiting for confirmation was excruciating for her and her family.
“If you wanna know what hell on earth is, I can tell you that Friday, July 20, is it,” she said.
It was especially frustrating, she said, because John was on active duty in the United States Navy and was wearing dog tags with his name on them.
“It could not be that he was hard to identify. And I think that’s one of the reasons it was so hard to go through that day,” she said.
Judge Carlos Samour Jr. said he too didn’t understand why the families had to wait as long as they did for confirmation that their loved ones were dead.
“I think it’s a fair comment,” he said of Larimer’s frustration.
Lear-Kaul said the coroner’s office has to make sure they are correct before they contact next of kin, and that usually means waiting on fingerprint confirmation.
While the she would still need that confirmation in any future case, she said rather than waiting until all the victims have been identified, she would notify families as soon as she confirms an identity. That sort of staggered notification, as opposed to waiting until everyone has been identified, would speed things up, she said.
“Obviously it wouldn’t get everybody the information sooner,” she said. “But it would get some people the information sooner. Other than that I don’t know that there is anything we would have done differently.”