7.20.2012 — 6 Years After The Aurora Theater Shooting

AURORA | Despite a long-awaited, visually stunning memorial to victims of the attack, the sixth anniversary of the Aurora theater shooting will feel a little like a first for many of the survivors and others touched by the horror inside that packed cinema in 2012.

This year marks the first time that the annual July 20 candlelight vigil will take place with the backdrop of the memorial sculpture, titled “Ascentiate” in the Reflection Garden near the Aurora Municipal Center at East Alameda Parkway and South Chambers Road.

Theresa Hoover, the chairwoman of the foundation, said the memorial itself is unique. During the long process to design the memorial, the intent was for it to never be a somber place but instead a place to celebrate life and remember those that were lost.

“We didn’t want it to be a place like a cemetery, where you have headstones,” said Hoover, whose son AJ Boik was one of the victims.  “This is a place to go and just remember, remember the good and not remember why this is there. It’s not a typical memorial where we want it to be ‘poor us.’ We want it to be ‘look at us.’ The community was so amazing throughout the whole thing, the fire, the police, we all came together and everybody helped everybody else out and we need to celebrate that.”

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The piece was installed this month and made its unofficial debut during a recent beer festival at the garden.

Heather Dearman, vice chair of the 7/20 Memorial Garden’s board, said it was a magical experience to see the work finally completed and have it capture perfectly the emotion the board wanted to share with the garden.

“The night that (the artist) Douwe (Blumberg) had finished the sculpture he invited us over the next day to look at it. Our feeling was indescribable. The way it looked was more than we had hoped for,” Dearman said. “The way we went about this, we went by the feeling we wanted and not by the look. We wanted a certain feeling and that’s exactly what it has become.”

In contrast with the boisterous celebration that surrounded the sculpture during the Gardens on tap beer festival, Dearman said she knew the sculpture being in place for the first time for the annual candlelight vigil to mark another year since the shooting would be a cathartic experience.

“Everyone will be able to cry their hearts out at the candlelight vigil and have some time to breath and come together. And it will be uplifting because we can look at how strong we are now and how far we’ve come,” Dearman said. “The feeling of love is described in so many different ways and in so many different languages. But there’s only one pure love that connects us as human beings and it only can be known as a feeling and not as a word. I feel like people 100 years from now, even though they don’t won’t know the story, they will feel the love (of this sculpture) and understand it.”

Randy Stith, who recently retired from his position as executive director of Aurora Mental Health, said the days, weeks and months after the shooting were the hardest in a career that spanned more than 40 years. The center provided free counseling to anyone affected by the shooting, which took a toll on staff. Stith said there were times when staff, including himself, had to be told to leave the office to keep from burning out.

But even in the midst of that horror and pain, Stith said Aurora truly came together and showed as a community the strength and togetherness to get through the murders.

“That was the hardest single year of my career and the hardest single week of my career as a psychologist. You watch this city you love going through such pain, so many people including your staff, clients directly impacted,” Stith said to the Sentinel in January. “We…were convinced that we will be OK. That we will help these families and the part of this community that’s hurting and we will be OK. There was the message but there was also a real belief in that message from the beginning.”

For the first few years after the shooting, the anniversary was largely marked by where things stood with the killer’s criminal trial, which didn’t wrap up until July 2015. Later that year the same jury that convicted him sentenced James Holmes to life in prison, narrowly deciding against a death sentence when at least one juror balked at sending him to death row.

Once the court cases wrapped up though, the focus each anniversary has shifted toward the Aurora Municipal Center where an army of volunteers have spent years figuring out the best way to honor the people killed that night, the survivors, and the hundreds of relatives and friends who lost the people they loved on what should have been a peaceful summer night.

Last year, after pressure from survivors and their relatives, state prison officials disclosed the shooter’s location and said he is being held in a Pennsylvania prison as part of a deal to exchange high-profile inmates between states. That was a relief to many of the relatives, who worried the killer would get to serve his life sentence in a prison closer to his family in Southern California.