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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Lafayette Shootings Examined; Comparison Made to Holmes Shootings in Colorado; Gun Laws Discussed. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired July 24, 2015 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:33:23] POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Well, the tragedy in Lafayette brings back hunting memories of that movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado. The shooting was three years ago to this week. It has been seven days now also since the shooter in Aurora, James Holmes, was convicted of murdering 12 people there.

The jury convicting him, now weighing the death penalty versus life in prison yesterday jurors unanimously found the prosecutors in the case proved aggravating factors beyond the reasonable doubt, meaning that Holmes is eligible for the death penalty.

Now penalty phase of the trail moves in to its second face, that gives Holmes' defense attorneys a chance to present mitigating factors as they make the case to the jury to potentially spare his life.

Joining me on the phone now from Pueblo Colorado, is Tom Teves, he is the father of aurora shooting victim Alex Teves, who was just 24 years old when he was shot and killed on that July day back in 2012.

Just to tell you about Alex, you're looking at among the screen the way that his father has described him is simply good. Good to the core. Thank you for being with me sir, I appreciate it.

TOM TEVES, FATHER OF AURORA SHOOTING VICTIM ALEX TEVES: Yeah. Hi, Poppy I'm struggling a little bit to hear you.

HARLOW: OK, can you hear me now? Can you hear me all right?

TEVES: Barely, yes.

HARLOW: Why don't you tell us first of all in this trial of James Holmes at this point and time, as the penalty phase is under way. What should happen to the shooter?

TEVES: Quite honestly, at this point, from my perspective he has 12 lives sentences and 1,078 years. I don't know that the State of Colorado has ever put anyone to death.

[12:35:04] I think they've put one person to death in the last 70 years, I think that was about 40 years ago, so I don't think it's really relevant. I think what's relevant is that this thing got off the streets, he's no longer a public menace and that's what we need to do is stop focusing on him and start focusing on the victims, because as you saw yesterday this type of notoriety or infamy is creating other people out to call to action and go do it and all of the facts of it -- the facts are the facts like it's unequivocal that this motivates others to do these things. And we have to have these things stopped.

There's now two other parents of two young women in the prime of their lives, one in her early 20s, the other one on her early 30s that are now dead and that's not OK and it has to be stopped and there's a lot of different factors, but one of the means that they're always on television, you know, CNN themselves when they were showing pictures in the last couple weeks showed a three-year-old picture of the shooter with red hair and, you know, this look. He hasn't looked like that in three years and if you're going to be relevant, be relevant. Show exactly what he looks like in his little Kmart shirt and he doesn't look scary to anyone.

HARLOW: Tom, just so you know I know you -- I completely agree and so you see now what we're showing, the two beautiful lives you talked about being taken last night. Nine more people injured.

You have experienced this tragedy for people that know this family, love these families, what do you say to them? What can they do at this time to help most?

TEVES: Just be there for them and recognize that being there for them isn't today because everybody's going to (inaudible). I mean, the parents of that 21-year-old girl, they're not even able to comprehend that their daughter is dead, quite frankly. They'll be in shock for six months, but recognize that this is a life-long, life-changing event for all of these people.

Yeah, we'll never see Alex again and that hurts everyday and it took three years, we actually just found out recently from two people who were actually in the row with Alex that are trained law enforcement professionals, that are trained to observe everything exactly what happened to Alex.

Its three years later, so this thing doesn't go away and if you're their friends you have to realize that this pain is going to cut deep and it's going to be cut deep forever. And then they're going to be changed forever, you don't overcome this you learn to cope with it but the pain never goes away. It never really gets weaker, you just get stronger carrying the burden because you get more used to it.

HARLOW: Of course it doesn't go away, and we're looking at pictures of Alex right now. I reread a long piece about him this morning. How much everyone at his university loved him. How they even had a day to honor him in his name every single year. Just remind our viewers a little bit about your son.

TEVES: He was a terrific kid. I mean, he always took care of people and loved people. He well, when he was in college he is a huge Wildcats fan because he went to the USA but he would miss football games which were huge to him to mentor these kids, that he mentored kids in the barrio. He was trying to help kids. He was a terrific kid, you know, you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who would say a bad word about Alex and even these people that we talked to the other day, they didn't know him and they all of a sudden they thought he was a terrific kid because he was fooling around and having fun in the hallway and within the aisle way of the movie and that's just the way he was.

He loved people he likes to bring people together and it's funny because I know if Alex had that shooter when he was younger, Alex could have helped him.

HARLOW: If only there were more people like Alex out there. Thank you very much, Tom.

TEVES: Yeah, unfortunately, he's not out there anymore.

HARLOW: I know. Our thoughts are with you and all of these families both in the Louisiana and in Aurora right now. Thank you very much.

[12:39:59] All right we're learning more also about the shooter in this case, piecing together evidence from his troubled past. Putting together some of the forensics.

And we're going to talk about it with our experts next.

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HARLOW: All right, here's what we know about last night's shooting at that crowded movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana two young women are dead. Seven people remain hospitalized. The shooter is identified as 59-year-old John Russell Houser. He is from Phenix City, Alabama. He killed himself last night as police moved in.

Just this hour, we have learned that his family committed him in 2008 against his will to a mental facility. We also know that he was in such a bad state, his wife was so worried about his mental state that she removed all guns from the family home.

They say that he was a manic-depressive and that he had threatened violence at his own daughter's wedding.

Before that, in 2006, he applied for a concealed to carry permit. He was turned down over illegal issues.

CNN's Alexandra Field joining me now to talk about what else we know about him.

And when you look at these mass shootings, so often they are carried out by white men. He is that but doesn't follow the exact profile.

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right, he fits the demographic in terms of race in terms of the fact that we do so often see male shooters. More than 60 percent of these mass shootings are carried out by white men according to these statistics put together by Mother Jones and analyzed by CNN. You see the next highest category black, then Asian, then Latino. The numbers are disproportionately high based on population for Asian, disproportionately low for Latino.

What is different about this man, John Russell Houser, is that he was 59-years-old that is higher than the typical age that you would see for these mass shooters. Usually we're looking at someone who is 20s, 30s.

Police have defined him as something of a drifter. We know he lived in Alabama. A sheriff in Alabama explaining that he had been evicted a year ago, no real understanding from investigators though on why he was in Louisiana, why he decided to target the movie theater that he did target, why he went to that movie, why decided to open up gunfire last night?

[12:45:18] We have been looking back trying to see what we can learn about him. We know that he was denied a concealed carry permit back in 2006 at the time because of an arson arrest although it appears that that case may have been dismissed.

This is a man who graduated from Faulkner University back in 1991.

And Poppy, we have found that he was very active for some period of time on a political forum making hundreds of posts. Those posts stopped back in 2013. But there is an area of this website where he was able to describe himself a little bit and here's what we're learning from it.

He defines his occupation on that website as hustling. He says his interests are hustling. He says that he has no political affiliation, believes media government censoring.

He also says, Poppy, that he believes the U.S. will be MAD MAX in less than five years. It seems to be a reference to the apocalyptic movies. And he goes on to say that no family is safe in the U.S. environment and he says don't vote, waste of time.

That's him in his own words for whatever it's worth off. I mean because we should be very clear, investigators have not laid out any kind of motive. They have been working hard to speak to people who knew him to try and understand what could have prompted them to do this.

We do know however from that protective order that his family is saying there was a history of mental illness there.

HARLOW: Right, clearly a long one and a very troubling one. 116 people interviewed so far in this investigation.

Alexandra Field, thank you.

Let's talk more about it with Larry Kobilinsky, he's a Forensic Scientist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice also Jonathan Gilliam is with us, he's a former Navy SEAL, Former FBI Special Agent, he's also been a Police Officer and a Federal Air Marshal. Thank you guys for being here very much.

When you look at this case, the police response, it was so immediate. So spot on it seems, Jonathan.

JONATHAN GILLIAM FORMER NAVY SEAL, FBI SPECIAL AGENT: Right. I think law enforcement is learning now that this can happen anywhere. And they have plans, you know, after columbine the active shooter training that law enforcement goes through changed to where law enforcement goes -- whatever to cop arrives, he's going to go to that scene and then she's going straight to the shooter and try to eliminate that threat.

I think we saw the best case scenario in the way that this works in this incident even though they didn't shoot the individual, they -- it sounds to me looking at this that their sheer presence and the speed which they got there confused his plan his step back end took his own life.

HARLOW: Larry, so many questions here -- motive is there even one does it even matter frankly we need to be focusing on the victims. But what they found in his motel room, wigs, glasses, disguises.

What could that tell us potentially about his state of mind?

LARRY KOBILINSKY, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well I clearly think his intention was to go in there, do a mass shooting and escape. There are a number of reasons why we know that. We know his vehicle had a switched license plate. We know it was situated near the exit of the theater. We knew he was prepared to disguise himself with this wig and glasses in his hotel room.

So I think the plan was to go in, do his shooting, escape, go back to the hotel room and flee back to Alabama perhaps. That was his intent.

HARLOW: And why he was even there, Mafia, right. Why he was even there.

KOBILINSKY: Why he choose that he has windows. I think this is a copycat situation.

HARLOW: It is three years to the week of that Aurora, Colorado mass shooting.

Jonathan, 116 people we just learned in that last press conference have been interviewed by police. Walk me through what they're asking these people right now. Are they talking to people who are in that theater because you can imagine how traumatized they are. Maybe not ready to talk to the authorities.

GILLIAM: You know, it's important to talk to as many people as you can, as quickly as you can because you'd be very surprised at what people think that they see versus what really happened. So the more people you talk too, the quicker you talk to them the faster you can develop a picture of exactly what happened. In that this case that's important because you want to know if there's multiple shooters. You want to know -- if there's what, you know, if he was in other theaters, for instance that he just stay in that one theater and shoot people there?

So then as people start to calm down they may get a little more of a clear story from some of these different witnesses.

HARLOW: Yeah, all right, thank you very much Jonathan Gilliam, Larry Kobilinsky, as always, we appreciate it.

Coming up next, President Obama calls the lack of new gun control in this country one of his biggest frustrations as president.

What laws, though, could prevent a shooting like what happened last night?

[12:49:56] I will speak with one of America's leading researchers on gun violence.

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HARLOW: Two people senselessly killed in a movie theater last night.

The man who did it killed himself after he tried to escape. According to a group with the Grim Task of trying to count this type of crime, there have been more than 200 mass shootings in America in this year alone. Not all of those results -- it result in mass casualties. But still, there have been many, many attempted ones.

Let's remind you of a few more horrific mass killing statistics and mass killings committed with guns in just the past few years. Those are the faces you see on your screen and you see they reflect a breakdown.

I want to read you some of that. It was researched done by Mother Jones studying "Who commits mass shootings? Overwhelmingly 64 percent of shooters are white."

You see that there. It is an overwhelming amount.

President Obama has not yet commented publicly about Thursday's movie theater shooting. He is traveling overseas. But he made his frustration with mass shootings in this country and his sadness very, very clear and he's done it many, many times over the years when this type of gun violence happens.

He did so just a few hours before this last one in his interview with the BBC.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The one area where I feel that I've been most frustrate and most stymied, it is the fact that the United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common sense gun safety laws. [12:55:10] My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded. So at this time I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping all the victims and their families, including Gabby in our thoughts and prayers

I'm sure that many of you who are parents here have the same reaction that I did when I heard this news.

As a country we have been through this too many times, whether it's an elementary school in Newtown or a shopping mall in Oregon.

These are men and women who were going to work, doing their job, protecting all of us.

We're heartbroken that something like this might have happened again.

I've had to make statements like this too many times.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: No question about that.

Daniel Webster, Director of the John Hopkins Center for Gun Policy Research joins me now. He's also the Co-author of Reducing Gun Violence in America. Thank you for being here.

This conversation can so often get so political and heated. When you look at just the numbers, just the research, walk me through the one thing that you think is so important that people aren't talking about.

DANIEL WEBSTER, JOHN HOPKINS CENTER FOR GUN POLICY RESEARCH: Well, I think it's most important that people understand that we actually have policies that work, that significantly reduce gun homicides as well as suicides. And those policies are actually supported by not only the vast majority of Americans but the vast majority of gun owners as well.

The basic idea, I think, is something that's not hard to grasp. We need standards for legal gun ownership that correlate with the risk that someone.

I think our policies generally in many places, and certainly in Louisiana, we have relatively lack standards for being able to not only possess a gun but to be able to carry it wherever you like.

And we also make it way too easy for dangerous people to get guns by not having comprehensive background checks. In states that have higher standards for legal gun ownership and have more rigorous means to have comprehensive background checks. And in particular handgun licensing laws for purchasers we found in our own research to significantly affect homicide rates.

In a recent study that we published, when Connecticut adapted its handgun purchaser licensing law, in the following ten years their firearm homicide rate was 40 percent lower than what is predicted had they not passed that law. The mirror opposite happened when Missouri repealed a similar type of law that was designed to keep guns out of dangerous people's hands. And they saw their gun homicide rate go up by 25 percent.

This is consistent with a larger body of research that shows that these policies can work, they can save lives. And the opinion surveys that we have done and others have done show that these are really not controversial. The vast majority of gun owners support them.

HARLOW: That's a critical part, right, seeing that the vast majority of gun owners support them.

When you look at the increasing amount of information that is online, look what the authorities have found online on these public profiles about this gunman in just less than 24 hours, how do you think or is your team looking at how that should be implemented into gun policy in America? What people say, frankly, online when there is, you know, complete freedom of speech to write and say what you want?

WEBSTER: Well, we know from the background -- we can't deny people access to guns based on their political views. But we certainly can and should adapt policies that are based upon their behavior, are they engaging in risky, violent behavior?

This man apparently did have such a history, he should have been prohibited from possessing guns and there should be more comprehensive laws to keep guns from individuals like him.

HARLOW: Daniel Webster with Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. Thank you for being with us for some of that insight. I want you and your team have found, I appreciate it.

WEBSTER: Thank you.

HARLOW: All right, thank you all for being with me this Friday.

I'm Poppy Harlow in New York. Have a great weekend.

Wolf begins right now.