“If he was frustrated, he would just cool off and leave”. They say he was suffering from a severe psychotic break at the time of the attack.
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Chris Holmes testified Monday that he responded to questions with one-word answers during the visit almost two years after the attack. And his eyes “were nearly bulging out of his head in a way”, she said.
She described a normal childhood in California, packed with vacations, but said her brother had a hard time finding friends and adjusting when the family moved to San Diego.
Defense attorney Rebekka Higgs asked Chris Holmes, 22, about her relationship with her older brother, whom she has visited only once since the shooting. Now they must decide whether he should be executed of serve life in prison.
The trial is now in the mitigation phase, with defense attorneys calling witnesses including former friends and teachers, in hopes they can prove mitigating factors outweigh the aggravating ones.
Chris Holmes gazed at the image of her 2-year-old self, now displayed for jurors on a giant courtroom video screen.
Their parents have attended every day of James Holmes’ trial, but the family has not spoken publicly. Metzner took the stand for the defense on Monday to opine that mental illness is the deciding factor in the sentencing decision.
“Sometimes I was jealous of how much they seemed to really like him”, she said. “It may increase your capacity to make bad choices”, Metzner testified Monday. “He acted on his delusions, and that’s a reflection of the severity of his mental illness”.
Metzner testified that he thinks Holmes committed the shooting under the delusional belief that killing would increase self worth. But Metzner also said the attack would not have happened if not for Holmes’ mental illness.
For the most part, Holmes and her brother got along pretty well “until I got too annoying”, she told jurors.
The 12 jurors said they saw or heard about it through news reports or from friends or family but they quickly turned away or ended those conversations.
The defense asked for one alternate juror to be dismissed after she said she clicked on an online story about Lafayette, and mentioned it to her husband.
“Yes”, she said. “It was nice to know that someone was always there”.
Holmes’ lawyers asked Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. on Monday to poll jurors about whether they had seen or read anything about the shooting in which two were killed and nine others were wounded.
Jurors in the Colorado cinema trial have been questioned about their knowledge of last week’s Louisiana movie theatre shooting.
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By the end of the week, jurors could again be deliberating about a possible execution for Holmes – the second of three separate deliberations that are required to impose a death sentence. After that, prosecutors are expected to call the relatives of the 12 people killed in the theater during the July 2012 attack.
