Portrait of an Alleged Murderer

Aug 29
07:27

2012

Ramyasadasivam

Ramyasadasivam

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Who is James Holmes and why should you care? He’s the 24-year-old guy in Colorado who allegedly shot and killed 12 people in a movie theater more than a month ago, and left 58 wounded.

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News media have been desperately trying to piece together information about Mr. Holmes’ life,Portrait of an Alleged Murderer Articles because he had so little of a digital footprint. And because the neuroscience graduate program he attended at the University of Colorado, Denver has been tight-lipped about his short time there.

So the New York Times did some good old-fashioned reporting, digging into his friends, social life, and even talking to a few of his professors to cobble together a glimpse of the life and personality of James Holmes.

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What emerges is a list of traits that — while they could be associated with a mass-murderer — could just as easily be associated with any introspective, quiet person in America. And that’s what makes such arm-chair psychologist profiling especially dangerous.

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The overwhelming sense of the person who is James Holmes that you get from the Times profile is a very smart but very shy and somewhat awkward first-year graduate student. Interviews with people who knew or had contact with him before the attack tell a story of a man struggling with a mental illness and losing his footing, according to the Times story.

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