Evidence mounts against mass shooter as trial's third week ends

Mountains of evidence, terrifying testimony, and expert police analysis filled the courtroom in the third week of the dramatic Batman movie mass murder trial.

James Holmes, 27, a Ph.D. Neuroscience student, has admitted to the shooting, that killed 12 and injured 70 others inside of a Century movie theater in 2012 in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado.

Holmes has plead "not guilty by reason of insanity," and will avoid the death penalty if his defense team can convince a jury that schizophrenia made him insane the night of the July 20, 2012 shooting.

The week ended with gripping testimony from Dion Rosborough, a supervisor for the postal service, who attended the midnight Batman movie alone the night of the shooting.

Rosborough described trying to flee after the shooting began, but could not get past the lifeless body of another theater victim, as the black-clad, "armored" shooter walked slowly toward him.

As the shooter moved to five-feet away, Rosborough looked up in terror.

"I thought to myself 'I'm about to be shot,' and so I tried to cover up my face ... and that's when he shot me," Rosborough said.

In a dramatic moment, Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler had Rosborough walk from the witness box toward the jury, the same way he was being stalked by Holmes.

"I was lying there, coughing up blood. I'm about to die," he remembered thinking, fortunate to survive the gunshot wound to the shoulder.

The prosecution again mixed expert police testimony with riveting personal accounts of the night of the massacre, called the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

Another victim, Heather Snyder, who worked at Red Robin restaurant with friend Alex Sullivan, one of the dozen killed in the attack.

Snyder said about 15 minutes into the movie, she heard popping noises and saw orange flashes to the right of the screen, then felt a burning sensation to her right forearm.

Snyder was shot several times, had two fingers blown off, and was hit in the knee so hard it spun her around in her chair.

Snyder showed her mangled hand to the jury Thursday, in another poignant moment of the trial.

CONTRADICTING TESTIMONIES FROM WITNESSES

The week began with testimony from the fourth and possibly the last University of Colorado (CU) neuroscience professor, Dr. Curt Richard Freed, trained at Harvard University, who had Holmes in his lab in February-May 2012.

Freed's testimony bolstered the prosecution's case that Holmes was coherent, lucid, and performing well in the months preceding the mass shooting.

Freed, whose work on Parkinson's Disease with colleague Dr. Wenbo Zhou, from the Shanghai Institute of Neurosciences, is world renowned, said Holmes did an "excellent job" and his final project in May was "thoughtful."

Freed's praise contrasted with the next witness, Jessica Cummiskey, doing post-doctoral scientific research at CU when Holmes was there.

Cummiskey said she saw Holmes' eyes "blown out," meaning his pupils were very enlarged. In class, he would "stare through the desk" and appeared "zoned out," she recalled.

"(Holmes) literally never made eye contact with me," she said, and his presentations were awkward and "painful to watch."

According the Cummiskey, Holmes seemed unmotivated and "annoyed " during his final project, admissions that may help the defense's position that Holmes' schizophrenia was accelerating with observed aberrant behavior just before the massacre.

Two days of testimony this week centered on the investigation of the Century 16 bullet-riddled theater.

The Aurora Police Department (APD) and FBI counted evidence of 240 ballistic impacts during their investigation inside the Century 16 complex.

Investigators spent more than a week working inside the theater, led by Maria Pettolina, a crime-scene investigator with the APD, who catalogued evidence like spent bullet casings and impact holes from the fired rounds.

For the past two weeks the prosecution has produced more than 20 pages of receipts for items related to the shooting purchased by Holmes.

This week, receipts for protective body armor, road spikes and chemicals Holmes rigged to create a flash fire, including Magnesium Promagnenate that he purchased only a few days before the massacre were introduced as evidence with the court. Endite