There was no closure or relief for me from yesterday’s verdict that came almost three years to the day after the Aurora theater massacre.
I feel like Tom Teves, whose son Alex Teves was one of 12 people inside that theater murdered by James Holmes.
“It sucks to have your kid dead,” Teves said yesterday after the verdict. “Today is a great day, but it really isn’t … It never stops sucking.”
It never stops. Reports don’t stop it. Debates in the legislature don’t stop it. Three-year shooting anniversary story packages don’t stop it. Millions of dollars worth of sanity trials don’t stop it, either.
It never stops sucking.
It’s been three years since my phone went off in the middle of the night and drew me, like all of you, into something unimaginable before July 20, 2012. From long before daybreak, the tsunami of terror and heartbreak kept sending wave after wave of horror across the city.
But the worst, the worst of the worst that I can never unsee, that I can never unthink or diminish, is watching parents at an Aurora high school hysterically trying to find their kids, who were either dead or wounded.
Tom Sullivan was one of those parents. Frantically waving a photo of his son, Alex Sullivan, he embodied every parent’s worst nightmare in the middle of nightmare that engulfed all of Aurora, all of us. It’s still so fresh and raw and palpable after three long years, that all I can do is marvel that it never stops sucking. It just never stops. And all I did was watch, ask questions and report details about kids we’d written about for years. All we could do is watch as the hearts of panicked parents, friends, lovers and neighbors were ripped from them by a man who wanted to kill a lot of people, and he did.
Tom, you’re so right. It never, ever stops sucking, even for me. I am embarrassed that I cannot begin to touch that place inside my head that would imagine how much more it sucks every day for you and your family. The place that imagines that it was my kid in that theater, along with the Teves family and the Sullivans. I cannot go there after watching those parents who had to.
Yesterday, the jury made short work of deciding whether James Holmes was innocent because he was insane when carrying out his slaughter, but it did not bring me peace or closure. It didn’t bring anything to diminish the horror that has waxed and waned over the past three years.
There was no justice yesterday, only a verdict that came at great emotional and financial expense to all of us. Holmes was murderous, sick and twisted. He still is. And everyone killed inside that theater is still gone. Everyone who loved them still agonizes over their deaths. Everyone maimed still aches from their wounds. And all of us in Aurora still wince and clench our jaws and fail to hold back tears when we relive that day and what Holmes did.
Nothing happened yesterday that will make any of this change for Tom, all of the victims and all of us.
It just never stops sucking.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.
Dave, I’d bet most of the victims and their families would disagree with you.
The pain continues, but most would see justice as an ‘easing’.
Wish you hadn’t mentioned the killer’s name. Please, no more notoriety for him.
I’ll write the words you truly wanted to write here, but even you couldn’t bring yourself too, the repercussions would have been too great. ‘As much as this sucks, can we put ourselves in Holmes mind, his sick, tortured mind, the poor man, who needs our help, was found guilty, but now will face many years of care, care he should have gotten years ago’
These are the words you were thinking, and I’m not a mind-reader, but know you well enough to write them. You nearly did with this statement in your words,
‘There was no justice yesterday, only a verdict that came at great
emotional and financial expense to all of us. Holmes was murderous, sick
and twisted. He still is.’
Right! The oracle of goo claims to know what Dave Perry wanted to say. “I’m no mind reader” says goo goo. That’s for sure! In my opinion the goo goo is not much of anything other than a busy body noise maker.
Some Different Ways of on-u-r-o-r-a-e-n-t-n-e-
Language and culture has sunk so low, most people including this author, can not make their point without vulgarity. This particular Colorado author, not doubt stoned on legal Colorado weed, builds the skeleton of his article upon the repetition of vulgarity. Common and vulgar, in my view.