Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac
Yeah, the boy’s a time bomb.
~ Rancid
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.
News media have been desperately trying to piece together information about Mr. Holmes’ life, 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.
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.