CENTENNIAL, Colo.—James Holmes came home for winter break from graduate school looking haggard and making odd facial expressions that looked similar to the wide-eyed smirk he flashed in one of his first jail booking photos after he opened fire on a crowded Colorado movie theater seven months later, his father said.
Robert Holmes testified that he never suspected his son was mentally ill before he killed 12 people in the July 2012 attack, but he and his wife became increasingly concerned in the months before the shooting.
They rarely spoke to their son by phone, but he had stopped returning their calls entirely. The phone call they received instead was from their son’s psychiatrist, saying he Holmes was dropping out of his prestigious neuroscience program.
