History of Colorado - Twenty-first Century

Twenty-first Century

In July 2012, not far from Columbine, 12 people were killed and 58 people were injured in the 2012 Aurora shooting, when James Eagan Holmes, a former neuroscience doctoral student, walked into an Aurora, Colorado Cinemark movie theater with three different guns and started shooting at random at people trying to escape, during a midnight Thursday showing of The Dark Knight Rises. It was the deadliest shooting in Colorado since Columbine in 1999 and, including both the dead and wounded in the number of casualties, was the deadliest single mass murder shooting in U.S. history.