This morning’s web posts indicate the shooter had a $26,000/year fellowship, but at the end of last year (a couple of months ago), his college professor met with his peers at an after-finals pizza bash. The shooter was absent sparking inquiries from his peers who were told by the professor that the shooter had resigned from the fellowship because he couldn’t keep up academically.
This implies the school had forced the hand of the shooter to resign his fellowship, but will claim he resigned on his own.
If true, then this probably occurred about the same time the shooter was starting to buy the handguns. Employment opportunities for an undergrad in neuroscience who drops out of grad school probably aren’t very high. He already had suffered the labeling as a loser, when he might have been giving all he had.
News reports this morning also indicate the only reason he was captured was that his groin and neck protection wasn’t usually worn by the Aurora responders. I suspect he was wearing them as camouflage to walk away unidentified in the mayhem.
The clincher seems to have been his oral exams, a major hurdle, actually a total obstacle, to a high-IQ guy with (looks like to me) Asperger’s Syndrome or a similar pathology.
I know a lot about this for personal reasons I don’t need to go into here, but the “symptoms” reported by classmates scream this out to me. As long as he can do papers or type his thoughts one way or the other, he’s an A+ student.
But his classmates reported he NEVER spoke, except when directly questioned, and then his answeres were the bare minimum. He never “offered his thoughts.” This is a red rocket flare to anybody who knows about Aspergers, or to be PC and use the current terminology, “high functioning autism.”
He would have known from his life experience that he would totally bomb the critical oral exams he had looming. That was when he dropped out. I’ll bet a dollar that he never went to take his oral exam in front of a panel. That was his wall, his barrier.
Just my dos centavos. We shall see what we shall see.