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 "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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