EVERGREEN, Colo. (AP) – Ian Sullivan visits his daughter’s grave on her birthday every year since a gunman burst into a crowded Colorado movie theater and shot the 6-year-old as she sat with her mother in the third row.
And every year he finds a birthday card, put there by the man who was with Veronica when Sullivan wishes he could have been: The police officer who carried the dying girl out of the theater in his arms.
Sullivan’s is one of the many horror stories that emerged from the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, in suburban Denver, where James Holmes killed 12 people, including Veronica, and injured 70 others in July 2012.
Since then, survivors have been trying to reconstruct their lives, finding comfort in each other or seeking a higher purpose. A couple, wounded, got married. A father who lost his son became a gun control advocate. Others turned to faith.
Sullivan, 28, cut his ties to many of those who were closest to him before the attack, retreating to a home in Colorado’s mountains. A lifeline has been the police officer whom he only knows by his first name, Mike.