AURORA | With chilling effectiveness, police say James Holmes unleashed horror on an Aurora movie theater, and the entire community.
He also helped define a city that has long struggled to define itself.
Now, the sprawling suburb that has battled an at-times battered image has a fairly clear identity: It’s that place, the place where moviegoers were picked off with lethal efficiency, the place where a lone gunman toting an arsenal of high-powered weapons wreaked unimaginable havoc. Twelve dead, 58 wounded, numbers forever linked to Colorado’s third-largest city.
People who live and work in Aurora can expect to hear outsiders for the next several years say something like, “Oh, Aurora, that’s where …”
It’s something local officials say they are ready for, even if they don’t think the definition is fair. And it’s something other communities where similar attacks occurred say is inevitable.
“This is an isolated incident,” Mayor Steve Hogan said during a press conference less than 12 hours after the Century Aurora 16 theater massacre. “It’s tragic, it’s horrible, but it is isolated.”
Since their first public comments about the slayings, Hogan and other local leaders have vowed not to let the July 20 shootings define Aurora going forward.
“This is a safe city, in a safe state, in the safest country in the world,” Gov. John Hickenlooper said.
Local officials have said they hope people think of Aurora as a place where the community pulled together in the face of tragedy, and where heroic acts of first-responders made sure the death toll wasn’t higher.
Still, they fully expect the city’s image to be forever marred by the rampage.
“Unfortunately, the reality will be that some people will have those thoughts,” said Aurora City Councilman Bob Roth.
In Blacksburg, Va., city officials dealt with the same struggles after a gunman killed 32 at Virginia Tech University in 2007. Mayor Ron Rordam said that after the shootings on the school’s campus, he hoped the massacre wouldn’t define the school and the town.
“Yes it happened, but what I wanted to define Blacksburg, and Virginia Tech, was how we as a community came together afterward,” he said.
For outsiders, though, the first thing that often pops into their minds when they think Virginia Tech isn’t the way the town rallied around each other, it’s the mayhem the shooter unleashed on the picturesque campus.
Rordam said that’s something that still happens and will likely continue. In fact, the mayor said he was in Maine this month chatting with a lobster fisherman when one of those “that place” conversations occurred. When he told the fisherman where he was from, the man immediately said something about the shootings.
“Most of the time, when people say it, it’s more in empathy, saying, ‘I’m sorry,’” he said.
And while cities can move past earth-shattering events like the theater shootings or the shootings at Virginia Tech, they shouldn’t expect things to ever return to “normal,” Rordam said.
“It’s still there,” he said. “It doesn’t ever go back to the way it was, it’s a new normalcy.”
A few miles to the west of Aurora, Littleton city officials dealt with similar struggles after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.
The school isn’t in the city of Littleton proper, but it has a Littleton address and media coverage of the school shootings seemed to always mention Littleton.
While the city and the shootings are forever linked, Kelli Narde, Littleton’s director of communications said officials worked hard after the shootings to make sure people also remember the way the community banded together after the shootings.
“People wanted to do something, if you gave them something to do they jump on it,” she said.
For Aurora though, the theater shooting appears poised to mar a reputation that city leaders for years have tried to improve.
Even with crime rates that consistently rank the city among the state’s and nation’s safest, a myth persists among many in the metro area that Aurora is a city packed with violent crime.
“I have felt for years that there is somewhat of a media bias against Aurora and this may not help that situation obviously,” said Roth, who has lived in Aurora for 13 years and been on City Council since 2010.
But there is a kernel of truth to the myths about Aurora’s propensity for violence. All three men on Colorado’s death row, for example, are from Aurora and committed their crimes here. And like any major city, Aurora has neighborhoods where drugs and violent crime persist.
The theater shootings will join that list of high-profile crimes that have tarnished the city’s image, and they will likely define Aurora in ways that none of the previous headline-grabbing crimes ever did.
But, Hogan said, the city will bounce back.
“We’ve taken a blow,” he said. “But we will get back on our feet.”