The true hero rises

At the end of a long day, the final news resonated in homes around the world: 12 lives were lost in the Colorado tragedy and several more are still in the hospital. The man who entered the theater with guns fully loaded told police later he was there as "The Joker." 

Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker whose Batman trilogy concludes with "Dark Knight Rises," responded to the connection and the event in a statement:

“Speaking on behalf of the cast and crew of ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ I would like to express our profound sorrow at the senseless tragedy that has befallen the entire Aurora community..."

"... I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.”

On a personal note, my sister is in the film business and I know that like Christopher Nolan, she has a special place for the theater. She is working in Hollywood around the likes of Nolan and many more. But more importantly she lost a friend in the shooting. She attended high school with him, he spent time in our home and she found out about his loss just this evening.

I love movies, my career is driven by the media and my family is inspired by music. Entertainment is a huge part of my life, but it raises a big dilemma. Here are the questions I raise to you:

1) How do you find a balance between entertainment and real life?
2) How do you teach and define that balance in your own home?
3) Do you think movies characterizing heroes and villains are inherently good or bad for society?

Waking up to nothing at home, chaos in Colorado

No alarm went off. No baby crying. I just woke up at 5:45 am and checked my phone, like I always do when I wake up at crazy hours, to see two alerts about a shooting in Aurora, Colorado. 14 dead, 50 injured. My first reaction was to turn the television on.

I'm downstairs watching cell phone video, witnesses, police officers at a movie theater playing the new Batman film. A gunman came in to a packed theater at a midnight showing. He was caught and is in his early twenties. He went in to the theater prepared to kill: wearing a bullet proof vest, a riot helmet, carrying three guns and setting off some sort of gas bombs.

All of this is early information, but as I sit and listen I have two thoughts:

First, the only thing I heard when I came downstairs was that a baby was shot, bullet holes in her back, and was carried out of the theater by a police officer. She was the first to leave the theater, before anything else was under control, but wasn't moving. That's when I thought, my baby. Every person in there is someone's baby and at some point I will do the same thing and let my baby go to a theater for some midnight showing, or go to the mall, or get on a plane by herself. Life is so unpredictable, not only for the people who tragically end up in these horrible places, but for the people who lose their loved ones.

Second, the same sick feeling came back to me that I felt on a cold morning in May when I covered a surprise shooting in Idaho Falls. It was on a much smaller scale, but the details seem so similar.

I was the first reporter on the scene. I was there right behind the first fire truck. A fire had been called in by a neighbor. The home sat in a small quiet neighborhood. The only evidence of something different was a car pulled up with out of town license plates. Just like in any breaking news situation the details came slowly, but during a 12 hour period I learned that the family inside was all killed by someone they knew. A man entered with the intention to kill his girlfriend and their two kids. They were found shot in their beds. Unfortunately, her sister was in the home at the time and she also fell a victim of his anger. He set the home on fire once he had finished what he came to do and shot himself.

In the early hours of the incident I discovered that one person was found alive, but injured by a bullet wound. Everyone seemed to be praying that it was one of the children, but it was the shooter. It was hard not feeling something horrible for him, but I didn't have to face that dilemma for long because he died quickly in the hospital.

The worst part of the day was interviewing the neighbors in the rural neighborhood. I learned upon interviewing just one or two people that most didn't know the family well, but what they did know is that the young mom's parents were away from the home where they all lived together. They were in Salt Lake City to get a special cancer treatment for the father. He was in the middle of it when they finally discovered the identity of the mother, sister and two kids. It wasn't until hours later that they told both the father and mother because they didn't want to interrupt his treatment.

People's hearts were aching all over the city as they watched this horrible scene unfold, just like I'm feeling right now for the people in Aurora, Colorado. As a reporter in Idaho at my own smaller scale tragedy, I felt like I was a part of the shooting. An outsider, yes, but in those 12 cold hours I had never felt more connected to a story I covered as I listened to the slow updates and the frightened neighbors, and prayed for the victims and their oblivious parents a state away.

The light in all this, which is often hard to find in the heat of the moment, is that the city rallied around these parents, like I had never seen before. I can only imagine the incredible stories that will come out of this shooting. People who carried the injured out. Men and women who covered their children or strangers next to them. Defenseless outsiders who ran in to help. Brave police officers and EMTs who entered the theater with no knowledge of whether the gunman was still shooting. And then there will be the stories that touch you for months, years to come, as the community recovers and grows.