Colorado Shooting Papers Reveal Holmes' Threat to Psychiatrist
ByThe court documents unsealed Friday show James Holmes, accused for opening fire at Denver premiere of batman movie killing 12 and wounding 58, had threatened University of Colorado psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist reported these unspecified threats to university police before the Aurora shooting rampage took place.
This new information was found in a court document unsealed Friday. The psychiatrist could not be identified due to heavy revision of the documents. Hence, it is not clear whether Lynne Fenton is the psychiatrist being referred to in the documents.
The bulk of the unsealed documents focused on the prosecutors and defenders arguments over the access to a notebook Holmes sent in mid-July to University of Colorado psychiatrist Lynne Fenton, who had treated Holmes for undisclosed issues.
According to a July Fox TV report, the notebook contained plans and drawings of a mass shooting. But, defense lawyers have long maintained the notebook must be remain sealed as, they argue, it falls under patient-therapist confidentiality.
In the last hearing, prosecutors dropped their request for the package to be unsealed as they are hopeful if and when the defense takes the insanity plea, which has already been hinted at in the previous hearings, they will have to allow the prosecutors to go through the package.
In the meantime, the prosecutors are planning to use a series of text messages sent to a fellow student as evidence against Holmes, who was a student at the university's Ph.D program at Anschutz Medical Campus, USA Today reports.
The unsealed documents show that he had sent a series of text messages to an unidentified fellow student before he went on a killing spree.
But, the content and nature of these text messages are not specified in the documents and the request filed by several media outlets to release the information was not obliged. The text messages could shed some light on the mental state of Holmes that led to the shooting.
While prosecutors are building up a revenge motive, that Holmes was angry at the university and the shooting was pre-meditated, defense are eyeing on the insanity plea.