James Holmes (UPI)
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First came the gas cannisters, then the gunshots — creating a full-scale panic in a packed movie theater.
Audience members scrambled for their lives as deranged gunman James Holmes opened fire, randomly picking people off as he marched through the aisles.
“People started screaming and running,” said Elizabeth Sumrall, 23, who flung herself to the floor alongside her friend, Bonniekate Pourciau, 18.
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“Lord, please, protect us and help us,” her friend prayed, loud enough for Sumrall to hear over the gun blasts on screen and in the theater.
It seemed at first like an extension of “The Dark Knight Rises” itself, survivors recalled — an armed madman’s dramatic entrance in a cloud of smoke, timed perfectly with the movie’s own first shootout 15 minutes into the action.
“My gosh, some jerk has thrown a stupid prank, and now I’m going to miss the movie,” Sumrall remembered thinking at first, as she watched what looked like a spewing smoke bomb roll across the floor in front of the screen.
“Then we start hearing pops, and I’m thinking — firecrackers!”
Moviegoers described the first moments of yesterday’s Dark Knight massacre as a surreal mash-up of actual and cinematic carnage.
Some wondered at first if it was a promotion. Was it some idiot fan in a costume? A special effect?
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But as a neuroscience grad student named James Eagen Holmes — wearing a helmet, gas mask and body armor — fired a shot into the ceiling, and advanced, shooting up the packed theater’s center stairs, they realized death itself was stalking them.
“You could not see anything but the person’s eyes,” moviegoer Corbin Dates told a local TV reporter.
“He looked like he was a member of SWAT — he was fully geared out, fully decked out in guns,” remembered Kenneth “Tre” Freeman, 18, who was sitting in the fourth row.
“And then you just start hearing ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom!’ And people start screaming and running,” remembered Sumrall, a Baton Rouge, La., native who’d stopped in Aurora while traveling home from Seattle.
She and her friend, Pourciau, who would be shot in the lower leg, had gone to the midnight premiere on a lark.
Even then, she didn’t think the bullets could be real — “until I got out,” Sumrall said, “and saw people bleeding.”
“I felt something hit my left arm, and my first thought was, ‘At least it’s just my arm,’ ” remembered Adam Witt.
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Many cowered on the floor,. Others — including Freeman, who escaped unscathed from the fourth row — made the risky decision to run.
“He was literally just massacring anybody that got up that was trying to run away,” moviegoer Jennifer Seeger told a local TV reporter.
The first moviegoers to flee called 911, even as the tragedy, like the movie, continued to unspool.
“They’re saying somebody’s shooting in the auditorium,” came the first police radio dispatch, at 12:38 a.m., according to a transcript released by the authorities.
Arriving police reported seeing hundreds of people pouring from the theater, including the walking, bleeding wounded.
Inside, the dead lay in a lingering cloud of smoke that one witness compared to the smell of July 4th firecrackers.
“Get us some damn gas masks for Theater 9!” one cop shouted, according to the dispatch transcript. “We can’t get in!”
“I’ve got one victim eviscerated,” shouted another cop, at 1:15 a.m.
A minute later, another cop gave voice to the wishes of all the moviegoers — if only the carnage could have been contained to the screen itself.
“I need somebody to shut this movie off in 9,” the officer shouted. “How do we shut the movie off in 9?”
Additional reporting by Amber Sutherland and Jeane MacIntosh