A day of remembrance in Colorado

AURORA, Colo. — Amid the continuing investigation of Friday morning's mass shooting at a movie theater, Sunday was a day for healing and remembrance in Aurora, with President Barack Obama arriving to visit with families of the victims and a vigil held later in the evening.

Twelve moviegoers were killed when a masked gunman opened fire at a midnight show; 58 others were injured. Among the dead was a 6-year-old girl and a man who died on his 27th birthday and a day before his wedding anniversary. Families grieved and waited at hospitals, with police reporting 11 people still in critical condition as of Saturday.

Congregations across Colorado prayed for the shooting victims and their relatives. Churches sent out social-media appeals for neighbors who wanted to join in remembrance. Elderly churchgoers at an aging Presbyterian church within walking distance near the suspect's apartment joined in prayer, though none had ever met him.

Obama told the families of the victims “all of America and much of the world is thinking about them.”

Obama met with the family members at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, which treated 23 of the people injured in the mass shooting; 10 remain there, seven hurt critically.

He told reporters after the meeting he came “not as president but as a father and a husband.” He said “we can all understand what it would be to have someone taken from us in this fashion.”

Hundreds gathered for prayers and healing at the vigil Sunday night, where a banner said, “Angels Walk With Those Who grieve.”

“You're not alone, and you will get through it,” said the Rev. Kenneth Berve, pastor at Grant Avenue United Methodist Church and a witness to Friday's horrors. “We can't let fear and anger take control of us.”

Aurora resident Heather Lebedoff, 24, placed a rose on each cross that had been erected in memory of those killed. She said she didn't know anyone in the theater, but she felt connected to her neighbors and all the pain they have gone through.

“This is the city I live in, and I know there are a lot of people affected by this. Stuff like this really shows what love and community is all about.”

Across the street from the movie theater, a man who placed 15 crosses near Columbine High School after a 1999 massacre there has returned to Colorado with 12 crosses for the victims of Friday's shooting. Greg Zanis, of Aurora, Ill., put up the 3½-foot-tall crosses Sunday on a hill near the Century 16 theater.

The suspect, James Holmes, was being held in solitary confinement at a Denver-area county detention facility and was not cooperating with authorities, Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said. He is scheduled for his first court appearance today.

“He lawyered up. He's not talking to us,” the chief said.

Authorities are working with FBI behavioral analysts and are looking into the suspect's relationships to figure out a motive, which could take months, Oates said.

The gunman's semiautomatic assault rifle jammed during the attack at the Aurora movie theater, forcing him to switch to another gun with less firepower, a federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press. That malfunction and weapons switch during the shooting rampage might have saved some lives.

The owner of a gun range told the AP that the suspect applied to join the club last month but never became a member because of his behavior and a “bizarre” message on his voice mail.

He emailed an application to join the Lead Valley Range in Byers, Colo., on June 25 in which he said he was not a user of illegal drugs or a convicted felon, said owner Glenn Rotkovich. When Rotkovich called to invite him to a mandatory orientation the following week, he said he heard a voice mail message that was “bizarre — guttural, freakish at best.”

He left two other messages but eventually told his staff to watch out for the suspect at the July 1 orientation and not to accept him into the club, Rotkovich said.

Three days after the massacre, it still remained unclear whether Holmes' professors and other students at his 35-student Ph.D. program noticed anything unusual about his behavior. His reasons for quitting the program in June, just a year into the five- to seven-year program, also remained a mystery.

The university declined to release any details of his academic record, citing privacy concerns, and at least two dozen professors and other staff declined to speak with the AP. Some said they were instructed not to talk publicly about Holmes in a blanket email sent to university employees.

Jacque Montgomery, a spokeswoman for the University of Colorado medical school, said that police have told the school to not talk about the suspect.

The university also took down the website for its graduate neuroscience program on Saturday.

Dan Keeney, president of DPK Public Relations in Dallas, said asking for silence from university employees because of a police investigation was appropriate, but taking down the website was “indefensible” for a publicly funded university unless the school believed it contained inaccurate information relating to the suspect.

“It's an indefensible action,” he said. “It's disappointing to hear that they would take that action because it suggests that it's not in the public's interest to have access to that information and I think it is in the public's interest.”

The school took down the neuroscience department's site at the request of faculty and staff who had privacy concerns, Montgomery said

The University of Colorado also disclosed it was cooperating with police who were looking into whether the suspect used his position as a graduate student to order materials in the potentially deadly booby traps that police said they found in his apartment.

The apartment was booby trapped with jars of liquids, explosives and chemicals that could have killed “whoever entered it,” Oates said, noting it would have likely been one of his officers. Investigators spent hours removing the explosive materials Saturday.