Bomb squad experts will try Saturday to enter a gunman’s booby-trapped apartment, hours after a late-night vigil for the 12 killed in a US cinema massacre that also injured 70.
Hundreds of mourners held candles, many sobbing and hugging each other in an outpouring of grief for those who died when the gunman opened fire in a packed cinema showing Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.”
The shooting drew expressions of concern from political leaders led by President Barack Obama, and revived the perennial debate about gun control in the United States.
On Saturday, Obama promised justice to the residents of Aurora, Colorado, saying: “The federal government stands ready to do everything necessary to bring whoever’s responsible for this heinous crime to justice.”
He said the government “will take every step possible” to ensure the safety of all Americans.
Bomb squad experts had been trying for much of the day Friday to gain entrance to the apartment since shortly after the shooting in the town of Aurora just outside Denver. But they gave up shortly before sundown, and said they would resume again Saturday, when they hope to make a breakthrough that could also reveal clues as the motives of 24-year-old gunman James Holmes.
“It is a very vexing problem how to enter that apartment safely. I personally have never seen anything like what the pictures show us is in there. I’m a layman when it comes to bomb stuff, said Aurora police chief Dan Oates. “I see an awful lot of wires, trip wires, jars full of ammunition, jars full of liquid. Some things that look like mortar rounds. We have a lot of challenge, to get in there safely.”
Late Friday the town gathered for two vigils, including a midnight one, as it emerged that Holmes bought more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet, and four guns, in the two months before the shootings. The masked, black-clad shooter burst into a movie theater barely 20 minutes into the midnight screening, throwing two tear-gas type devices before opening fire. Police arrested Holmes — who was wearing full body armor and a gas mask, apparently to protect him from effects of his own tear gas — without encountering resistance by his car at the rear of the theater.
Holmes, who reportedly attended the University of Colorado medical school until last month, had no criminal record aside from a citation for speeding in October 2011, according to police.