Feature: Prosecution's case in movie theater shooting trial ends with crippled mother who lost daughter, pregnancy

Prosecutors trying to convince jurors to execute James Holmes saved the worst victim for last -- a crippled mother who lost her fetus and six-year-old daughter.

As the prosecution's last witness to testify, Ashley Moser, who took the stand Friday, spoke softly from her wheelchair, telling the packed courtroom of her tragedy that hot summer night in 2012 when Holmes ripped hundreds of bullets into an unsuspecting movie theater crowd, killing 12 people and wounding 70 more.

Moser, who took three bullets, one still lodged in her spine, is considered the survivor "who lost the most" in the massacre. She went to the movie that night to celebrate her new pregnancy with her daughter Veronica, the only child killed in the attack. Moser remembered hearing gunfire erupt, thinking at first it was a "prank," but then reaching for her daughter's hand to flee.

"Did her hand reach back?" asked Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler, the lead prosecutor.

"No, I couldn't feel it .. it just slipped through my hand," Moser recalled tearfully, as heads bowed in grief across the courtroom.

Holmes, the former neuroscience Ph.D. student sat shackled to the floor only 15-feet away and swiveled slowly in his chair, never making eye contact with the mother of his youngest victim.

Moser then described "getting hit in the chest" by a bullet and "falling on top" of her little girl.

As she lay prone, paralyzed, and helpless on top of her daughter, she heard the booms of gunfire and people screaming around her in the smoky, dark, terror-filled theater.

"Did you feel her moving?" Brauchler asked Ashley about the 60- pound Veronica, who was hit by four bullets, one entering her abdomen that caused her to bleed to death.

"No," Moser replied, as the spellbound courtroom paused in sadness. "I got shot three times," the mother said, "one in my thigh and two times in my back."

"One (bullet) went all the way through my chest. The other one ricocheted off my shoulder blade and went into my spine," she told the jury, explaining her permanent paralysis.

Moser's wounds also caused the miscarriage of her baby. Now 28, she spent four months after the July 2012 shooting in a hospital learning how to sit upright, use a spoon, and dress herself. She will never walk again. As court recessed Friday, Veronica Moser's smiling, kindergarten picture was flashed on the courtroom monitor for the permitted "three seconds."

Judge Carlos Samour, Jr is attempting, under U.S. law, to hold an "impartial" trial and has carefully restricted images that will serve to sway the jury emotionally. However, once-happy little girl has become the prosecution's poster child for the pain inflicted by Holmes that night.

The prosecution's eight-week case started and ended using scarred victims as emotional appeals to jurors, with the Moser tragedy serving as the last and perhaps most poignant example of the damage done.

Ashley Moser's losses and daughter's death have triggered widespread angst throughout the community and the nation, and even Holmes testified to a psychiatrist last year that it is "wrong to kill children."

Since the trial began April 17, prosecutors have mixed expert testimony with gripping victim and responder stories, but have returned repeatedly to the argument that Holmes was sane when he carefully planned and enacted the mass shooting.

Holmes is trying to escape the death penalty by claiming he was insane when he opened fire at the midnight premiere of a Batman movie with three weapons to kill "as many people as possible."

Two lead psychiatrists have testified that although mentally ill, Holmes was legally sane at the time he pulled the triggers.

"The defense is facing an uphill battle," said former prosecutor and criminal defense expert Craig Silverman, who noted the state has done an excellent job of presenting its side.

The Holmes defense team will open its case next week with an expected parade of psychiatrists who will say Holmes suffers from a lifelong struggle with schizophrenia and was in the "throes of a psychotic episode" when he committed the act. If found insane by the jury Holmes will spend the rest of his life incarcerated and will avoid execution, against the wishes of most family members, who desire his death. Endite