AURORA, Colo. — Thursday marks 11 years since a mass shooting at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora.
13 souls were killed. 70 injured.
A sergeant with the Aurora Police Department was in charge of supervising that massive investigation.
Matthew Fyles, who has since retired from the department, was originally in the Major Crimes Unit as a detective. He became an Investigative Supervising Sergeant of the unit only about six months before the tragedy.
It would become the biggest case of his career.
“We had 11 people down and that was the information we had as we were responding,” said Fyles. “We knew it was going to be much worse, ultimately.”
He remembers getting the call that night. The day before the shooting Fyles' close friend was seriously injured in the mountains. That was on his mind as he went to bed.
“Going to bed and getting that phone call, thinking about that still having the weight of my friend if he was going to survive, I think all of that was difficult,” he said.
July 20, 2012 is a significant date for the City of Aurora.
Fyles described the days and weeks after the shooting as stressful and chaotic.
“It was fairly common for us to sleep in the office,” he said. “Guys and gals would just sleep in the office because it was easier than driving home and get four hours and get back to it. With Century 16 it was that way for weeks.”
He said the smell of popcorn for some of his coworkers became a trigger. To protect his officers, he remembers going to the third floor of the police department to ask people to enjoy their snack on the floor below.
Weeks of work turned into years as Fyles supervised the investigation from tragedy to trial.
“I think it was very difficult on my ex-wife and my daughter. She was young. She was 8 years old,” he said. “All suffered as a consequence of that night so that victimization was widespread. It is like ripples.”
He can’t forget the ones who suffered most – the families of the 12 people and the unborn baby killed, and the ones who were seriously hurt.
“The living victims who have to change the entirety of their lives, their relationships they had to that point and the relationships they have in the future are different,” said Fyles. “That was the hardest thing.”
With 70 injured, Fyles felt a huge responsibility to give those families a guilty verdict.
“I dream about that ... and I did early on that I would somehow miss something and fail in that regard,” he said. “It was a weight off my shoulder. I don’t remember all of the verdict. I just remember the first one of guilty, and the reading of all the rest of the charges was just noise to me.”
One of the most difficult parts of the trial, he says, is when he had to read all of the charges along with the names of each victim and their injuries. It took him 38 minutes to finish.
July 20 brings a moment of reflection. 11 years later, Fyles continues to think about the team who helped a city find justice.
“It’s important for everyone to reflect back and say what is representative of the Aurora Police Department? Well, 7/20/2012 is,” he said. “Whatever bad we hear it is a fraction and the majority of them are the ones who showed up on 7/20/2012.”
With over 200,000 pages of written discovery and more than 4,000 items of physical evidence, everything couldn’t be shared during the trial.
Fyles said one officer transported a woman who was pregnant at the time to the hospital. The couple ended up naming their baby after that officer.
Fyles stayed with the Aurora Police Department several years after the tragedy. Even though he’s no longer with the department, he has helped produce educational materials for other law enforcement agencies to teach them how to respond to mass casualty events.
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