Colorado shooting: Chaos, horror, then sorrow on social media

As Colorado reeled from a late-night mass shooting at a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” social media offered glimpses of the chaos as it occurred -- and of the horrific aftermath.

Early this morning, a Denver Twitter user named Caitlin (@dingos8myTARDIS) tweeted “Shots fired in the theater.”

“It was my theater,” she told a friend. “I’m outside, one of my friends is still inside. No one knows what’s going on.” She added, “Oh God, I don’t know what to do.”

Photos: Scene of the shooting | Hollywood reacts

A YouTube video showed the scene outside the doors of the movie in the wake of the shooting; there was no screaming, but moviegoers can be seen filing out of the theater, including one man covered in blood around the 0:50-second mark of the video. He walks under his own power but with a limp, helped along by an emergency official.

A Denver sports station, 104.3 The Fan, said that one of the victims killed was an intern, Jessica Ghawi, who tweeted and wrote under the name @JessicaRedfield.

@natalietejeda tweeted a photo of Ghawi: “My friend Jessica Ghawi was killed in the #Aurora Shooting-she was an aspiring sportscaster-she will be missed https://yfrog.com/oc7ruuhj”

Ghawi, who also went by the last name of Redfield on her blog, had recently survived a close call in Toronto, according to the most recent post. She narrowly avoided the Eaton Centre shopping-mall shooting in Toronto in June that killed two people.

“I rushed through my dinner,” she wrote of being in a Toronto sushi restaurant. “I found out after seeing a map of the scene, that minutes later a man was standing in the same spot I just ate at and opened fire in the food court full of people. Had I had sushi, I would’ve been in the same place where one of the victims was found.”

Her final tweet was apparently from the theater in Aurora, which she directed at Jesse Spector, a New York hockey writer for the Sporting News: “MOVIE DOESN’T START FOR 20 MINUTES.”

Spector (@jessespector) tweeted the next morning, “Words are useless. Guns more so. If you ever had any interaction with @JessicaRedfield, you know the world is much worse off without her.”

A poster on Reddit posted images of what he said was a gunshot wound he suffered at the Aurora theater (https://www.reddit.com/tb/wvbbk). The (slightly graphic) images show a bleeding wound, a bloody shirt and a shot of the Reddit poster in a hospital bed.

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nation@latimes.com