James eagan holmes biography

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JAMES EAGAN HOLMES was good at being invisible. He spoke only when spoken to, said little about himself, and spurned his close-knit group of college classmates for a solitary life in his small apartment in a rough section of Aurora, Colo.

Holmes' shyness seemed to cut him off from the world, said those who knew him. He was slow to smile in conversations with strangers, seemingly tucked away inside himself.

But the quiet, awkward man who allegedly went on a killing rampage last week in a Colorado movie theater once seemed bound for big things.

A science student from Southern California who won scholarships and internships, Holmes graduated "at the top of the top" from the University of California, Riverside, and moved to Colorado to take the next logical step in a promising academic career: a doctoral program in neuroscience.

Holmes had procured a highly coveted appointment at the university under a one-year neuroscience training