"Aurora" by Dr. Lynne Fenton and Kerrie Droban

"Aurora" is the painful recollection of one of the nation's mass shootings, this one at the Aurora, Colo. theater outside Denver in 2012 when a troubled grad student opened fire on a packed movie house, killing 12 people and injuring 70.Dr. Lynne Fenton is the psychiatrist who had six sessions with gunman James Holmes before the shooting took place. Fenton relates the bizarre behavior that Holmes exhibited, noting that from their first meeting, Holmes struck her as deeply troubled and someone she sought to help.As a psychiatrist on the University of Colorado's School of Medicine and director of the Student Mental Health Center, Fenton provided counseling to Holmes, one of the academically-gifted students in the college's prestigious neuroscience program.When he talked of killing people, Fenton noted that such destructive and violent thoughts were not abnormal for a depressed patient.As she sought to help Holmes in subsequent sessions, Holmes was gathering guns and making plans--unbeknownst to Fenton.After the horrific shooting in which Holmes survived to stand trial, Fenton's name was accidentally released to the public. Death threats followed. You should have known, anonymous callers demanded.Fenton quit her job as a result and went into seclusion. Today she continues to work at the medical school and has raised her voice in the raging debate about mass shootings in this country.She told Steve Tarter that more mental health screening is necessary but that alone won't solve the problem. Fenton said society would be better off if the age when someone can purchase a gun was raised from 18 to 21 because of the mental state of young males who are often the perpetrators of the mass shootings.