![]() “He needed to emotionally and mentally get over the hump of what happened three years ago.” “I told him this would be the last step for him,” Lumba said. He held strong on the stand, but tears welled up when he returned to his seat. He was hit in the face and arm and recalled blood running down his face, blinding him. When he woke up in a hospital, part of his intestine was gone.ĭuran testified first. “We just encouraged each other,” said Lumba, 20, who was shot through the left side, bullets piercing his lung and arm. ![]() Ryan Lumba and Louis Duran had gone to the movie together, sat together and were shot together, so they wanted to testify together, too. Like many of the survivors, she wasn’t prepared for a flurry of interruptions from defense attorneys objecting to the more emotional parts of her story. “It was a bit of an out-of-body experience,” she said. But on the stand, surrounded by attorneys, jurors, the judge and a packed gallery, she felt utterly alone. Prosecutors had advised survivors to bring a support system. Wear comfortable clothes, but nothing so casual it might undermine what she had to say. She agonized over the smallest things: Don’t eat too big a breakfast, but enough to get through the morning. Gravelly couldn’t sleep the night before she testified. She dreaded having to explain that to the jury. “I had to step over him to get out,” she said. People were yelling that they needed to leave. Her friend Jesse Childress was facedown, dying. But when the lights came on, she realized it was blood, and not her own. Her face was wet, and she figured it was spilled soda. Gravelly described how she huddled between rows of seats when the gunshots began. “I kept thinking I didn’t want to trip over my words.” Yet when it was her turn to testify, she almost didn’t get out of her chair. She spent months obsessing over what to say. More than a year before the trial, prosecutors gave Munirih Gravelly a rundown of questions they might ask. “I didn’t get to see him again like that, so it was a little heart-wrenching,” she said. But they didn’t tell her until that day that they would be showing pictures, including one of Sullivan, smiling and alive. Prosecutors had told her to remember to breathe. And as she glanced down at him between questions, she realized she wasn’t nervous about him anymore. “I didn’t want to let him see any kind of emotion, anything he could feed off of.”īut Holmes wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I was shaking because I was trying to hold composure,” she said. But when she took the stand, only about five feet from where Holmes sits, she was a bundle of nerves. “This trial sets a lot of people back and forces them to relive an awful night.”īlache offered to be among the first to testify, eager to put it behind her. ![]() “This is an incredibly resilient group of people who have worked really hard to get their lives back,” Anderson said. Two team members have been in the courthouse daily, coaching victims on managing their emotions on the stand and coping thereafter. The agency formed a community support team that has served more than 1,700 affected people, said the agency’s disaster coordinator, psychologist Kirsten Anderson. And the Aurora Mental Health Center, the lead agency helping the victims, spent more than $2 million responding to the shooting before the trial began. On a local level, the Aurora Strong Resilience Center opened to offer therapy to victims of trauma. The shooting fostered a new push to address mental health issues nationwide, and in Colorado, lawmakers funded a $20 million expansion of state mental health services, creating a 24-hour hotline for those in crisis and a dozen drop-in counseling centers. A monumental public and private effort has helped survivors cope in the nearly three years since Holmes killed 12 people and injured 70 others at the packed premiere of a Batman movie.
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