CENTENNIAL, Colo.—For nearly 14 weeks, they sat in a suburban Denver jury box, listening for hours as witnesses described the searing pain of gunshot wounds and the terror they felt as they fled the movie theater, the gunman still firing at them.
They sat feet from a poster-sized photo of a 6-year-old girl’s bullet-ravaged body. They held the murder weapons. And when the jurors announced they couldn’t agree that James Holmes should die for his crimes, they heard the cries of his anguished victims.
Four months later, they are still haunted—their struggles showing how the scars of a mass shooting can stretch from the victims, to the first responders and even to the jurors who must decide what to do with the perpetrator.
One juror cut her hair, fearing she'd be recognized by a victim she saw at a grocery store. Another can no longer hunt with her husband, worried the sound of a gunshot will trigger her post-traumatic stress disorder. Another can’t sleep without nightmares.
Some started seeing therapists as they work through the shame they feel for the flashbacks and anxiety they suffer despite never having set foot inside the theater in July 2012, when 12 were killed and scores of others injured.
“I wasn’t actually in that theater, but I listened to and felt the experiences of everyone who was, from every angle,” said a 36-year-old marketer who is still so worried she wanted only to be known by her juror number: 1009. “I felt their sorrow and their sadness.
“And when I left the courtroom,” she said, “I took it all with me.”
