James Eagan Holmes, Aurora shooting suspect, ‘seemed like he was a normal dude’

AURORA, Colorado – Soda bottles littered his apartment, the top floor unit of a three-story red brick building in a run-down neighborhood, what seemed typical quarters for a 24-year-old doctoral student with one critical exception: Police now believe it to be booby-trapped.

Just four miles away from his Aurora, Colorado, apartment, James Eagan Holmes became a national figure on Friday, identified by police as the gunman who opened fire in a movie theater, killing 12 people and wounding dozens more while dressed in body armor, black gloves and a gas mask.

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Police say Holmes, who was taken into custody by police in a parking lot behind the cinema, booby-trapped his apartment with sophisticated explosives, creating a hazard for law-enforcement and bomb squad officers who swarmed to the scene.

The living room of the suspect's apartment was crisscrossed with trip wires connected to what appeared to be plastic bottles containing an unknown liquid, said Chris Henderson, Aurora's deputy fire chief.

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A picture of Holmes released on Friday reveals nothing unusual: Instead of a bulletproof vest, he is photographed wearing a burnt-orange crewneck T-shirt. He is a handsome young man with dark hair, sloping and uneven eyebrows and long sideburns. There is a slight smile across his face; stubble covers his chin.

Among those who recognized the picture was Jackie Mitchell, a 45-year-old furniture mover who lives about a block away and said he met Holmes at the Zephyr Lounge, a bar a few blocks away, on Tuesday afternoon.

"I was like, man, I know that dude!" he said, recalling his reaction to the picture.

Mitchell said they drank a couple of beers together — there was a two for $2 special that afternoon — and talked about the Denver Broncos NFL team. Holmes wore jeans, sunglasses were propped backwards on his head and he brought along a backpack.

The young man came off as smart, Mitchell said, and carried himself with a swagger.

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Indeed, Holmes, appears to be intelligent and studious. Born Dec. 13, 1987, Holmes spent at least part of his childhood in San Diego, where his parents still live on a quiet suburban street. His father holds a patent for technology that can be used to detect telecommunications fraud.

After high school, James Holmes received a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from the University of California, Riverside, but couldn't find a job after returning to San Diego several years ago. For a year or so, he worked part-time at a McDonald's, according to Tom Mai, who lives near the Holmes family in San Diego.

One Christmas, Mai said, James Holmes served him soft drinks at a Christmas party. "He was very kind to my children," Mai said.

By June 2011, Holmes was in Colorado, where he enrolled in a doctoral program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus. In a statement, the school said on Friday he had been in the process of withdrawing.

Before Friday, his only other brush with police was a traffic ticket, authorities said.

When not in school, Holmes would sometimes hang out on the stoop of his building, located in an part of Aurora where drugs and gunshots were not uncommon, according to one neighbor.

Another neighbor, Rachel Reed, 25, saw him a number of times on the stoop, with his backpack. A couple of months ago she ran into him at the Zephyr, where she had put a Lil Wayne rap song on the jukebox.

Holmes disapproved, she said, preferring rock'n'roll music. He came over and "made some racially charged comments about rap," she said.

"He seemed like he was a normal dude," she said. "He was a little buzzed."

(Additional reporting by Edith Honan in New York and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Writing by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Eric Beech)