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James Eagan Holmes was sentenced to life without parole for the Aurora, Colorado, theater attack that killed 12 people and injured 70 during a midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" on July 20, 2012.

The attack began in theater 9 at the Century 16 theater. Aurora, Colorado, police officers reached the theater roughly a minute after the first 911 calls came in early that morning and had the gunman in custody behind the building about seven minutes later.

The first dispatch went out shortly after 12:39 a.m. "At least one person has been shot, but they're saying hundreds of people are running around," a dispatcher said, then directed all available units to the theater. Officers arriving in the parking lot reported wounded moviegoers streaming out of the exits, and one asked over the air for gas masks to be brought to theater 9, saying, "We can't get in it." The gunman had set off gas canisters inside the auditorium before opening fire.

Ambulances could not get close because the lot had filled with patrol cars and vehicles driven by people trying to leave. Officers loaded the wounded into the back seats of patrol cars and drove them to hospitals themselves. A review later commissioned by the city found that 27 of the 60 patients taken to hospitals that night were carried in police cars rather than ambulances.

Officer Jason Oviatt found the gunman standing beside a white car near an exit door at the rear of the theater. Oviatt testified at trial that he first took the man for another officer because he was wearing a gas mask and helmet, then realized he was standing calmly apart from the officers working to get inside. Oviatt and Officer Jason Sweeney arrested him without resistance. Asked whether anyone else was involved, the man said, "It's just me." Police recovered a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle, a Remington 12-gauge shotgun and a .40-caliber Glock pistol, and a fourth handgun was found in the car. Investigators said the weapons had been bought legally at three Colorado stores in the weeks before the shooting.

The after-action review, prepared for the city by the Arlington, Va., consulting firm TriData, concluded that "no one died who could have been saved" but faulted commanders for not establishing a unified police and fire command in the first minutes. It found that the patrol-car transports likely saved lives by getting victims past the blocked lot, and said the rapid movement of gunshot victims in police cars rather than waiting for ambulances might become more widely accepted practice. Reviewers also noted that paramedics did not use the ribbon system that marks the dead and sorts the wounded by severity.

Holmes, then 24 and a former neuroscience graduate student, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. On July 16, 2015, an Arapahoe County jury rejected that defense and convicted him of 24 counts of first-degree murder, two for each person killed, along with 140 counts of attempted first-degree murder and one explosives count. Jurors deadlocked on the death penalty on Aug. 7, 2015, and because Colorado requires a unanimous verdict to impose a death sentence, the outcome was life without parole. He was formally sentenced on Aug. 26, 2015, to 12 consecutive life terms plus 3,318 years.

The recording is Aurora police radio traffic from the night of the shooting, running about thirty minutes. It is the first of three logging tapes of roughly equal length released from the response, and it covers the initial dispatch, the arrival of officers at the theater, the calls for gas masks and additional units, the movement of victims to hospitals in patrol cars, and the report that a suspect was in custody. Because it is a logging tape rather than an edited excerpt, it also carries routine and unrelated traffic from other calls on the same channel, along with stretches of dead air.