James Holmes speaks: ‘I just considered them numbers really, not people’

In 22 hours of interviews with a court-appointed psychiatrist, James Holmes talked haltingly about his childhood, his “broken brain,” and one of the worst mass shootings on American soil. Holmes killed 12 moviegoers and wounded 70 others on July 20, 2012, and the prosecution is playing the video in its entirety during his trial, which is being live streamed.

Holmes on knowing right from wrong:

“I knew it was legally wrong. You get punished for killing people.” But these were “not real people. It was just kind of amorphous people who were going to get hurt....I just considered them numbers really, not people.”

On the difference between the wounded and the dead:

“The dead can’t be repaired or come back to life or be normal again. It’s irreversible.” The wounded are “like collateral damage, I guess. I regret that they had to be wounded rather than the bullets just missing them or something.”

On killing Veronica Moser-Sullivan, age 6:

“I tried to minimize child fatalities. I chose the night showing. ... It was sad that a child had died. I don’t know how it could have been avoided though, other than changing the plan into something else. ... It wasn’t my intention to kill children or leave them parentless or that stuff.”

On how killing people increased his self-worth:

“I just designated arbitrary value of, like, one to each person. One value unit. ... As a human being they have this value, and I take that value. ... I increased my self-worth, and I didn’t have to die.”

On the origin of his system:

“I think it came from economics. You take countries, measuring their GDP of a given population and say, ‘this is the value we place on our nation’s output.’ And you can do the same to individual people and say, ‘this person has a value and would do this output.’ Then it goes to me afterwards, after killing them.”

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