Victim's daughter says family 'broken' by Colorado movie gunman

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[August 06, 2015]  By Keith Coffman
 
 CENTENNIAL, Colo. (Reuters) - The teenage daughter of a Colorado movie rampage victim broke down repeatedly on Wednesday as she described how she saw her father murdered beside her, and told jurors how her family was "broken" by James Holmes' 2012 massacre.

"I'm a mess up here," Cierra Cowden sobbed on the witness stand. "It's selfish to say, but I just miss him being my dad ... I just miss him being there."

The jury has heard from more than a dozen victims in two days of testimony in the penalty phase of Holmes' trial. The nine women and three men will next hear closing arguments before deciding if the 27-year-old convicted mass killer should be put to death for murdering 12 people and wounding 70 in his attack.

Cowden was 16 years old and sitting with her elder sister and their father Gordon at the Century 16 cinema in Aurora when Holmes opened fire inside the crowded midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises."

She said that earlier, her dad had joked that he bought them tickets to a Disney movie, but she wanted to see Batman. She recalled everyone's excitement during the previews, and how they laughed together. Not long into the movie, the shooting began.

Prosecutor Lisa Teesch-Maguire asked Cowden, now a 19-year-old college student, for her last memory of her father.

 

"When the shooting started, he started to get up .... he started to move forward, then he hesitated and turned to make sure we were coming too," she replied, wiping away tears.

She said she tried to "wake up" her father after he was shot. "When I touched him, I thought immediately that he was dead," Cowden said, still crying.

But she still did not know for sure her dad had been killed when she and her sister were taken to a nearby high school with other survivors.

'ANGELIC LITTLE GIRL'

Later, a police officer drove them to their father's home, but had to break the lock to let them in because the keys were still in their dad's pocket.

Eventually, they reached their mother by phone and she came over. All they could tell her was that their father had not run out of the theater with them.

"She was crying so hard, it was like she couldn't breathe," Cowden said of her mom. "She was hysterical almost. She was calling all these hospitals."

They were later notified that he was dead.

The jurors also heard emotional testimony from the grandfather and mother of the youngest victim, six-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan. Holmes shot her four times.

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They also watched videos of Veronica unwrapping gifts next to a Christmas tree, surrounded by relatives.

"She was an angelic little girl," her grandfather, Robert Sullivan, told the hushed court.

Veronica's mother, Ashley Moser, had just learned she was pregnant on the day of the rampage and was shot herself. She also lost her unborn child. Testifying from a motorized wheelchair, Moser said her daughter had just learned to read.

"She was my best friend," she wept. "She was my life."

Asked by Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos Samour if he would testify in the final part of the trial's sentencing phase, Holmes replied: "I choose not to testify."

The former neuroscience graduate student, who has shown almost no reaction throughout the proceedings, also opted not to make a written allocution statement. That would have let him address the jurors without exposing himself to cross-examination by the district attorney.

Both sides will make closing arguments on Thursday afternoon, then the jury will deliberate one last time.

If they vote unanimously for the death penalty, Holmes will be executed by lethal injection. Otherwise, he will serve life with no possibility of parole.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman; Additional reporting and writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by David Gregorio)

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