The father of one of the people killed in July 2012 in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shootings, Tom Sullivan was invited by The Newtown Foundation to speak to guests at their fundraising event last Saturday morning. The invite was sent because of a friendship that blossomed between the Colorado resident and a number of Newtown residents after they met in Washington, D.C., where they had gone to speak with members of Congress.

Mr Sullivan is part of a growing number of people in the United States to lose a family member in a mass casualty shooting incident. He shares a terrible bond with the 20 Sandy Hook families, and six additional Connecticut families, directly affected by 12/14. He knows what they have gone through as well as what it feels like to have media descend on one’s hometown for intense coverage of a heartbreaking event.

Five months before the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, residents in and around Aurora were overwhelmed by their own grief. On July 20, 2012, a man entered the Century 16 movie theater there and opened fire on those watching a midnight screening of The Dark Knight. Twelve people were killed, and 70 more were injured.

Among those killed was 27-year-old Alex Sullivan, who was in Theater 9 for the screening of The Dark Knight. 

Alex was “a big comic book fan, and a superhero fan, and a movie buff,” his father said Friday, September 11. Mr Sullivan made time to visit The Newtown Bee office shortly after his arrival in Connecticut the day before the Newtown Foundation fundraiser.

At the time of his death, Alex was working as a bartender at a Red Robin, as well as at The Movie Tavern, a movie theater that also featured a restaurant. He was surrounded by friends and co-workers, celebrating his 27th birthday, his father said. Alex, who shared his birth date with his maternal grandmother, was also two days away from his first wedding anniversary.

“Of course he was there that night because of the Batman movie,” Mr Sullivan said last Friday afternoon. “Three superhero movies come out each year. That had always been something he enjoyed. The year before, it was the Captain America movie that came out right around his birthday.”

Six of Alex’s friends were also fatally shot in that movie theater. Nine other friends were among those injured.

When 12/14 happened, the Aurora community was just five months removed from its shooting. Tom and Terry Sullivan’s daughter Megan heard about the SHES shootings first, called her parents — who were watching a movie, or something other than the news, Tom recalled last week — and told them to turn off their television. She was on her way to their house, he said, and when she arrived they watched the news unfold along with the rest of the country.

“I certainly remember all of those days, and it was the exact same thing,” he said of the national media that descended upon Aurora and Newtown. “It was so fresh in my mind. The same people were there — CNN, MSN, they were all there. They were the same people that were setting up outside our movie theater, and had their cameras up in all of that kind of stuff.

“As much as I wanted to offer them some support, or tell them something about what I had been through, it was still too raw with what I had been through,” he said. “I think, between the two events, we’re probably learning about this at the same pace.”

‘We Have The Same Stories’

Prior to his son’s death, Mr Sullivan was a sports junkie. He loved his games, and pregame shows. Sports Center was his program of choice.

The morning of July 20, 2012, Tom Sullivan woke up at his normal time of about 2:40 in order to be at his job at the post office by 4 am.

His regular routine was to “get up, make coffee, pack my lunch, and catch up on the scores,” he said. The television was usually on his sports channel. That morning, however, the television was already tuned to a news station.

“Terry must have had MSNBC on [before she went to bed the night before], because when I turned the TV on, there was the news, and there they were, outside the theater,” he recalled. “Police lights were flashing, and they said a shooting in a theater in Aurora, Colorado, and I was like...” he voice trails off.

Mr Sullivan watched the coverage for a little while, and it dawned on him that Alex was probably at the movies the previous night.

“When they showed the Century 16, well, he worked at The Movie Tavern, so if he was going to go, he’d probably go to that one. So I thought, ‘Well OK,’ but I wasn’t too worried.”

Mr Sullivan needed to head out to work, he said. Terry Sullivan was still sleeping, so Tom decided to just give Alex a call so that he could then let his wife know their son was fine.

“When she wakes up, it’s still going to be on,” he said of the breaking news coverage. So Tom called Alex, and got his voicemail.

“I said ‘Hey, I see that this is going on, I don’t know if you’re aware of it. I’m assuming you’re sleeping, just give me a call when you get up,’” he recalled. “I said ‘Your mom’s going to be worried, and I want to let her know.’

“And then before I hung up I said Happy Birthday,” he continued.

Mr Sullivan then left for work. His regular route took him past the movie theater where the shootings had happened just a few hours earlier.

“As I drove by, there’s helicopters in the air, and I had the radio on, and the radio keeps talking about it,” he said. The number of those who had been killed at the theater remained the same while he listened to the radio, but the number of injured people kept increasing.

“Driving by the theater I called [Alex] again, and I told him ‘Look, this looks like it’s pretty bad. Call me. I’m going to keep calling you every half hour until you call me, because we need to know where you are,” said Mr Sullivan.

He kept calling his son’s phone, he said, until 6:30, when his phone rang. It was Terry Sullivan. She had received a call, said Tom, from someone who already knew about Alex, “either his wife’s sister or mom, somebody.”

“She was screaming, on the other side [of the line], that Alex has been shot, and [I] need to get to Gateway High School,” he said, his voice quivering. “I said OK.”

Alex’s friend, said Mr Sullivan, didn’t know how to find Tom and Terry for a few hours.

“He was with all these kids, and we didn’t know the people that he worked with,” he said. “They knew of us, but they didn’t know us to be able to call us, to tell us any of that kind of information.”

Mr Sullivan said he and the parents of Newtown, “We have the same stories.”

Where SHES parents and family members were sent to Sandy Hook Fire & Rescue’s main station on 12/14, family and friends of those killed or injured in Aurora were sent to a nearby high school.

“They had the firehouse,” he said, “I had Gateway High School.

“We all, as you ran in, you were going in, and you could go in further because these other people had found somebody or had been attached to somebody, or had information about somebody, and as you don’t have any information you keep going in further.

“That was what we had a Gateway,” he said, his voice dropping.

Mr Sullivan has become very involved with a number of groups, including Colorado Ceasefire, Everytown For Gun Safety, The Brady Campaign, and Aurora Rise.

The latter group is a nonprofit “that came out of the comic book store that was just two blocks away from the movie theater,” he explained. Tom and Alex Sullivan were regular customers of the store before the shooting; many of those injured were also customers. Aurora Rise is concerned with helping “on smaller things,” Mr Sullivan said.

“We try to get them school books, or gift cards, groceries and gas money, those types of things,” he said. “These were a lot of middle school and high school kids, who were there, or maybe with their parents.”

A Small Amount Of Closure

The trial of the movie theater shooter began this past April, and concluded last month. The shooter confessed to his crimes, but pled not guilty by reason of insanity.

He was convicted in July, and then sentenced on August 7 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

On August 10, The Aurora Sentinel published a passionate column by Mr Sullivan. In it he said that a plea deal would have robbed him of learning about the final happy hours of his son’s life.

“I would never have met his friends and co-workers who went with him to celebrate his 27th birthday,” Mr Sullivan wrote, adding an “Aurora theater shooting plea deal would have robbed me of my son’s legacy.”

Mr Sullivan would not have learned, he wrote, about his son’s final meal (“popcorn and lousy nachos”) nor how Alex had run “into Theater 9, most likely one of the first, and laying claim to the 12th row, all 20 seats for his friends to have and enjoy with him,” the column continued.

The courthouse in Centennial, Colo., where the hearing took place, is about 10 minutes from the Sullivan home, also in Centennial. The hearing was televised, so Terry and Tom Sullivan did not feel they had to be in the courtroom for every moment of the hearing, he said.

“We made sure we were there any time one of Alex’s friends testified,” he said. “We were also there when the first responders were talking, because some of them helped Alex’s friends get out that night.”

The Sullivans did not watch any of the shooter’s taped interviews.

“They went through 22 hours of tape, watching the killer being interviewed by the psychiatrist,” he said. “I didn’t go, or watch, any of that. But of course we were engaged.”

The hearing gave the Sullivans, and other families and friends of those killed, something that the families left behind by the victims of 12/14 will never be able to attain: some amount of closure.

“The people here didn’t have to go through a trial,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It was a good thing for me, to get a lot of questions answered.”

These days Mr Sullivan still watches some of his favorite sporting teams and events, but Sports Center is a thing of the past.

“I honestly don’t think I’ve watched that since that morning,” he said.

He also has not returned to work. An employee of the USPS in July 2012, Mr Sullivan was about a year and a half away from retirement but had enough vacation time stacked up that he used some of that after the shootings. The USPS also offered him an early retirement package following the shootings, he said, which he accepted.

Mr Sullivan has been “a union guy forever,” so it was not difficult for him to become involved in speaking up and fighting for what he sees as “common sense legislation” concerning guns, which Colorado passed in February 2013.

“When something like this came up, now it’s much more personal to me and I can speak on it with a more personal approach to it,” he said. Terry Sullivan is not as comfortable with public speaking, he said, but she givers her husband “the strength to go on,” he said.

Tom Sullivan has been back to the theater where his son was killed. He and his family, the AP reported August 4, look “for the very spot where his son Alex was killed.”

As details about the final hours of Alex’s life, and the other 11 who died, and the 70 who were injured, came out during the trial of the shooter, the Sullivans learned which seat Alex had been in that evening.

“We go up and we sit in Alex’s row, and we’re sitting in row 12, and we leave seat 12 open for him,” Mr Sullivan told the AP. “We sit next to him.”