People gather outside the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., at the scene of a mass shooting July 20.(Photo: By Karl Gehring, AP)
A new lawsuit on behalf of victims of the July 20 Aurora theater
shooting alleges that Cinemark Century 16 theater and its employees were
negligent the night that a gunman propped open an exit door and
returned with guns and ammunition for a shooting rampage.
The
lawsuit alleges the Cinemark failed to provide sufficient security and
training for a theater where shootings had occurred in the past, failed
to provide alarms on "emergency exits" that would have alerted staff to
the open door and failed to evacuate customers once the shooting began.
MORE: $5 million to be split among theater shooting victims
James
Holmes, a former neuroscience graduate student, has been charged in the
July 20 shooting that resulted in 12 deaths and 57 injuries during the
Aurora premier of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. Police
say the gunman entered the theater after buying a ticket, then propped
open an emergency exit door and returned with weapons for the rampage.
"It's
negligence," attorney Marc Bern of the firm Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik
said after filing the lawsuit in Arapahoe County District Court. "We
think that after discovery, we'll be able to prove their conduct was
willful and wanton and we'll be eligible for punitive damages as well as
compensatory."
Cinemark would not comment on the lawsuit. In
motions to dismiss other lawsuits that were previously filed in
connection with the shooting, it said the incident was not foreseeable.
In previous motions, Cinemark has said the exit doors were not
emergency exits and that no previous shooting had occurred in the
theater.
Several other wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits
have been filed in federal court alleging security lapses in the
theater that night.
The lawsuit names Century Theaters, Cinemark
USA and two theater employees and 10 unnamed employees listed as John
Does 1 through 10.
USA Today