AURORA | University of Colorado Denver officials, under fire for whether they could have prevented accused gunman James Holmes from his July 20 Aurora theater rampage, revealed Friday afternoon that a former U.S. Attorney is independently reviewing the university’s role in the tragedy.
“We are committed to evaluating every step in the process to ensure it worked properly,” University of Colorado Denver Chancellor Donald M. Elliman said in a statement. “We want the community — especially the loved ones of those who lost their lives and the individuals injured in this senseless tragedy — to know our resolve rests with understanding all the facts so we can assist law enforcement and other authorities in ensuring that justice prevails.”
Miller’s involvement was requested by Elliman and Executive Vice Chancellor for the Anschutz Medical Campus Lilly Marks. CU has retained Robert N. Miller, a former U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado to assess the university’s role in dealing with Holmes before the shooting.
Days after the shooting, questions about whether someone at Anschutz was aware of Holmes’ plan began to arise.
A Denver TV station reported this week that a university psychiatrist reportedly treating Holmes was so alarmed by the graduate student’s behavior that she tried to bring him to the attention of the school’s threat assessment team more than a month before the attack, but the group never met to talk about him because he had already taken steps to drop out.
Holmes, 24, is charged with murdering 12 people and wounding 58 in the July 20 rampage a few miles from the Aurora campus after methodically stockpiling guns and ammunition for months.
That response has elicited criticism from other college officials.
“If the argument is because he was no longer a student, he was no longer their problem, they are absolutely incorrect,” said Larry Barton, a threat consultant and professor at American College in Bryn Mawr, Pa. “Any court and any victim’s family would have an argument that the school acted with indifference. I hope they have a very compelling answer to why they did what they did.”
Elliman has repeatedly said the school did all it could with regard to Holmes. He and other university officials have refused to discuss any specifics, citing privacy laws and a judge’s gag order. The university would not say whether staff members had any concerns about Holmes or whether police were ever alerted to him.
However, KMGH-TV and the Denver Post, citing sources they did not identify, said police were never contacted.
University spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery said the review does not conflict with a gag order by an Arapahoe County judge issued last week. That order, she said, would prevent the school from releasing some information gleaned from the review, but it does not prevent school officials from talking with Miller.
University of Colorado President Bruce D. Benson pledged the CU’s cooperation in this independent assessment, “The University is doing everything it can to fully cooperate with the criminal investigation. Additionally, we are doing everything we can to understand how the university’s systems and processes functioned in this situation. We have given Miller broad latitude to conduct his review.”
Officials said the review will likely take “some time,” but gave no specific schedule for Miller’s team, nor an estimate for when he might have a report.
“At this time, it is uncertain what information collected in the review can be disclosed publicly,” school officials said in a statement. “Beyond the court order which bars the university from discussing matters related to the law enforcement investigation, it must also abide by other laws that protect some types of information from disclosure.”
Those other laws would include medical and student privacy statute and regulations, Montgomery said.
It’s not clear what alarmed the psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, or whether she even treated him. But she helped found the school’s Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment Team in 2010.
The team’s members are drawn from the counseling center, the faculty, the housing and student services departments and campus police. It consults with police, the university’s legal team and mental health services.
It doesn’t have the power itself to suspend or expel students or to force anyone to get mental health care. But it can refer students for voluntary care or school discipline and report threats to the authorities, the university said.
The idea of such teams is to bring all the warning signs together in one place.
“The end goal is to have coordinating systems, that different departments talk to each other,” said Alison Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus, which helps colleges and universities deal with security.
“People might act differently or say something during class, at a club or in a dormitory that might disclose different behaviors. It might not raise a concern when something’s taken individually, but when you put them all together, they raise red flags.”
Virginia passed a law in 2008 requiring its four-year public colleges to set up threat assessment teams to investigate students after a mentally unstable Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people to death and committed suicide at Virginia Tech. The student had been sending out warning signs for years with his sullen behavior and twisted, violent writings.
Even if the Colorado team had convened and police investigated, it’s unclear whether any violence could have been prevented.
In December, Morgan State University police and counselors in Baltimore evaluated student Alex Kinyua following an outburst in a computer lab and concluded he posed no threat. Months later he was charged with murdering a man and eating his heart and brain.
In Arizona, Pima Community College student Jared Loughner had several run-ins with faculty members, students and campus police before he was suspended in 2010. Campus police told him to get a mental health evaluation or not return.
Loughner was later arrested in the 2011 assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that left six people dead.
For Jennifer Seeger, who was in the theater at the time of the shootings and was uninjured, the question is academic.
“I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt,” Seeger said. “Young people say things and they’re often misunderstood. She probably deals with a ton of crazy people who say a lot of crazy things. I guess you never know who’s the one who’s going to pull the trigger. It’s really difficult to say.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story
It will help to have more control over Threat Assessment Teams. They should include BOTH psychologist AND psychiatrist. They should report to someone outside the Universities. They should be audited once in a while to verify what thay are doing.
I used to work at a University and was laid off after I brought up a safety issue I am not there anymore but I think there is still danger.
Threat assessment teams are secretive and don’t have the will to be overseen. The leash is loose on them and they do whatever they want.
They should be directly accountable. Perhaps then they will do a better job.
Sorry for those in their hands.
Although I wasn’t aware of them, these ‘teams’ of doctors (?, very vague field of study, only treatment, not cure is available in the form of drugs) were formed to avoid situations like the most recent in Aurora. (Va. Tech, etc.came before) Having formed such ‘teams’ and having had such a persn within their inner circle of aid, they are indeed responsible for his behavior.
Not being an exact science, and not being medically recognized as viable, they can only access the person and monitor the person or prescribe drugs to keep the person within themselves.
Some people live out their entire lives with regular visits to phychiatrists.
But, in this case, when a ‘team’ of doctors is formed to combat just this type of behavior, then I say they are indeed responsible for the person’s behavior and actions.
Here comes the witch hunt….your so predictable.
Why not let the gunman be responsible for his own actions…why does it have to be another person’s fault. Oh yeah, someone to sue.
Whatever the investigation turns up about proper procedures being followed, the issue involves common sense perhaps something that elite ph.d.s lack.
You have a kid who allegedly failed his oral exam in an extremely tough ph.d program and however and we will find out he found a psychiatrist, his communications prompted referral to the threat assessment team. Later we learn that the team did not meet because the kid withdrew from the university 3 days after the oral exam and so was beyond the control of the team. Common sense should tell you that you make a phone call to the cops saying we may have a potential problem for the public(may or may not) and so here are the details. Even if this gets the doctor in some trouble with confidentiality, you do the extra to protect the public, not to protect the doctor.
It may also be apparent that phychiatrists are not the best people to predict dangerous behaviour against the public and so the threat assessment team should be administred by a non psychiatrist, a cop, an emt worker and so on.
Commentary so far about correct procedures being followed are small comfort to the families of the dead as well as the injured, as well as repeat the tired refrains of psychiatrists which are not good enough to call a spade a spade.
And the pressure of the ph.d. program on the kid may have been a factor so the university in my opinion should have done the referrral to the cops.
Now a legal review will be done, lot of money spent on it to say the same thing that I am saying here.
My prayers and thoughts go out to everyone in Aurora and everyone ho has been affected by this horrible tragedy.
I do wonder though, if Dr Fenton was seeing John Holmes as a patient, wouldn’t she be breaking confidentiality and her own professional rules and ethics to report this behaviour to the threat assessment team? I realise that behaviour can be reported to the police (and potential victim) where there is a specific threat etc, but if this was the case then it shouldn’t it have been reported to the police? If it wasn’t the case, and she was seeing John Holmes as a patient, then she had no right to report it to the Threat Assessment Team. Even the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act seems to make this clear.
I’ll be interested to see if this issue is raised at all and how it turns out.