Nearly one year after one of the worst mass shootings in United States history, the movie theater where the massacre took place has reopened for business but a memorial has yet to take shape and some, including one employee of Cinemark, are unhappy about it.
According to a BuzzFeed report, a Reddit user claiming to be an employee of the Aurora theater where 12 died and 70 were injured last summer during a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" hosted an Ask Me Anything chat.
Asked whether the theater had built a memorial to the victims of the shooting, the user named Rorschachismyhubby replied that there isn't and expressed a a wish to have one.
We get crap for this alot (sic), the mayor asked us not to as he wanted to handle it as a community event and not a commercial business' memorial. Besides, the company would have to buy the land to put the memorial on, making it not a public space. So no we don't :( ... I would like one because I feel like right now it seems like we are trying to pretend like it never happened. Alot of people come in simply to pay respects and all I can do is show them the fancy new chairs we used to replace the ones people had died in.
Rorschachismyhubby also claimed to be working on the night of the shooting but said she was clocking out and was getting into her car as the 911 calls were coming in.
Six months after the shooting, Cinemark reopened the theater and renamed individual theaters with letters rather than numbers. The theater where suspected gunman James Holmes opened fire has been renamed Theater I and has been turned into an "XD" or an "extreme digital cinema" with a screen that stretches wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling.
Though a decision on a permanent memorial has not yet been announced, Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan had said that reopening the theater would be "part of the recovery process" and said the Aurora community had expressed support in reopening it.
Some 5,000 potential jurors are expected to get a summons for Holmes' trial which is expected to begin in February.
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