My journalistic alma mater the San Diego Union-Tribune has a fascinating article written by Peter Rowe and John Wilkens on accused Colorado theater murderer James Holmes, yet another example of a report that underscores how we may have walking-time-bomb people living among us. Here’s the first part of it:
He was as quiet and unassuming as the middle-class North County neighborhood where he grew up. Before he was arrested after a deadly shooting spree in a Colorado movie theater, James Eagan Holmes was known as a loner — shy, smart, a bit odd.
But not, people thought, dangerous.
“We were honors students — that always has a little bit of a stigma of being weird, right?” said Jessica Cade, who knew Holmes when they were both UC Riverside undergraduates. “But I never would have thought he would do something like this, never considered him to be a ‘lunatic’ or ‘deranged’ like the news is calling him.”
Margie Aguilar, who lives near the Holmes family in a Rancho Peñasquitos neighborhood she terms “kind of like Mayberry,” was equally stunned.
“I’m just trying to figure out what could possibly cause a straight arrow, clean cut kid to do something like this,” she said.
If this most recent massacre sounds painfully familiar — the nice-enough but perhaps too-quiet suspect, the random eruption of lethal force — Friday’s news also resembled a vision of madness. As moviegoers watched a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” a Batman movie about society besieged by bloody mayhem, a gunman dressed head-to-toe in tactical gear stormed through an exit door and opened fire.
Unimaginable
By all accounts, Holmes is an unlikely mass murderer.
His family lives on a hilly street of well-kept two-story houses with red-tiled roofs, north of Highway 56…
Go to the link and read all of it. There is a lot more. The paper also has a photo taken 6 years ago of Holmes at a science fair. FOOTNOTE: His parents live about 6 blocks from my condo.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.