Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
Marcus Weaver was sitting in the fifth row of the Century Theater in Aurora, Colorado on the night James Holmes went on a violent rampage that would leave 12 dead and 70 injured.
Nearly three years to the day after the grisly massacre took the life of Weaver’s friend, Holmes was convicted of 24 counts of first-degree murder, 140 counts of attempted murder, and one explosives count.
Weaver told his story to Take Two’s Alex Cohen.
“My friend, Rebecca Wingo — she’d never saw Batman before,” he explained. “[We] went to the movie and [about] ten minutes into the movie, a smoke bomb went off … we were just perplexed. We thought it was just someone who lit off a smoke bomb … Once the gunman started opening fire on the crowd, it became really apparent it was not a Rocky Horror film show, or any of those pranks they do in theaters. It was a real event, and so something told me to get down on the ground.”
He pulled Rebecca down with him. A few minutes later, he realized she was hit during the first wave of gunfire.
When Holmes’ gun jammed, many moviegoers tried to flee. Weaver picked up his friend and started toward the exit. That’s when Holmes shot him in the arm.
“And so I tumbled over and she fell into the seat, and that was the last time I saw my friend Rebecca.”
Weaver didn’t notice he was hit until he made it out of the theater.
“A little girl came up to me and [said], ‘your arm is bleeding.’ And so I looked at my arm, and sure enough, I had two holes in my arm, and blood was just perfusing out of it.”
Weaver says the weeks following the shooting were ‘rough.’
Over the past three years, Weaver says the survivors have had to become ‘media experts’ at their stories. This hasn’t numbed him to the pain of that night, however. He says he cried when a juror read the name of the victims yesterday.
Even with the guilty verdicts, Weaver says Aurora won’t be able to put the memory of that night behind it for a long time.
“And so, was it a victory yesterday? I think it is, but I think it’s more or less a stepping stone as opposed to a ‘victory.’”
Press the play button above to hear more from Aurora shooting survivor Marcus Weaver.