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Massacre Suspect's First Court Appearance; Disarming Holmes' Booby-Trapped Apartment; NCAA Sacks Penn State; Romney and Obama Talk Foreign Affairs; 14 Dead In Texas Pickup Crash; Peres: Iran In "Open War" With Israel; Don't Jump To Conclusions About Suspect; 25,000 At International AIDS Conference; The Man Who Was "Cured" Of HIV; Bad Behavior Reaches College Loans
Aired July 23, 2012 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: And, hello. Happy Monday to you. I'm Brooke Baldwin.
And we are keeping our eye today on the Dow, which if you've been looking at the numbers, you can see it's really been in the red -- deep in the red all day. It's a little bit better than the last time we checked on it. One hundred and twenty-two points here. Two hours away from the end of the trading day. And that drop, why you ask? Over fears that Spain -- Spain may need a government bailout. We're watching those numbers for you on Wall Street.
But first, I want to begin with this. This image. You likely were with CNN this morning when you saw this man, James Holmes, in the flesh. We are laying eyes on him for the very first time after the massacre he is accused of committing at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, early Friday morning.
Look at this with me. He sat quietly. His hair dyed flame red. Almost looking dazed as the judges gavel began what promises to be a very long journey to justice. Holmes wasn't arraigned. He wasn't charged. The is set to happen one week from today.
But you see the woman sitting next to him. That is his public defender. And during this entire process this morning, he never spoke a word, but he didn't just sit there blankly either. Look at these photos we've freeze-framed for you. His face really kind of cycled through a number of cryptic expressions during his short appearance. And after just a few minutes, he was taken back to solitary confinement without bond.
You know the story. This man is accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 others at the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" last Friday. Eight victims remain in critical condition. Police say they caught him outside wearing a gas mask and a body armor from head to toe.
Now, the district attorney here in this case is not ruling out the death penalty in Colorado, but she warns this is still very much so an active investigation. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) CAROL CHAMBERS, ARAPAHOE COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Is a slam dunk case. It is a case where we will -- we're still looking at the enormous amount of evidence. And we would never presume that it would be slam dunk. We will work very hard on this case to prosecute it just like we would any other case.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: Want to go to Don Lemon. He's been covering this since it really broke on Friday. He's just outside the courthouse for us today, where Holmes appeared this morning.
And, Don, I mean, I took a good, long look at him. I know our viewers did. I mean he stared ahead.
DON LEMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes.
BALDWIN: Almost -- I tweeted, almost looking like he was falling asleep. His head dropping. His eyes closing.
LEMON: Yes.
BALDWIN: You know, I don't know if he was on a sedative or what. It's hard to get a good read on him. How -- you've talked to people who have been in that courtroom. How did they describe his demeanor?
LEMON: Yes. And I saw the same thing that you did. They described his demeanor as a little bit -- a lot unusual, I should say. They said, you know, he was staring off, as you saw. We all saw what he looked like, not just inside the courtroom, though. According to inmates who have been recently released from the detention center just over my right shoulder here, they say that in custody he is acting strangely.
BALDWIN: Huh.
LEMON: Police say he's uncooperative. The inmates who were just released said he is spitting at guards and spitting through the door. They're keeping him, Brooke, in solitary confinement at -- because they're afraid that the other inmates will harm him because they'll want retribution. So he's acting a little bit odd.
But just a caution there, Brooke.
BALDWIN: Yes.
LEMON: Some of the family members believe that that's somewhat of a put on because he's trying to get the death penalty off the table, because if he's -- you know if he is mentally incompetent, at least deemed (ph) that, then the death penalty may be off the table. So they believe he's acting somewhat. We don't know.
BALDWIN: OK, but that's interesting that you're saying from within jail you're hearing these accounts that, you know, in jail he's acting oddly. He's been in solitary confinement. He's back in solitary confinement now. And, you know, if we look at him with his prison garb on, it looks almost like he has a vest on. You tell me if you saw a vest. And also wasn't he --
LEMON: He does, yes.
BALDWIN: Wasn't he taken through a tunnel.
LEMON: Yes.
BALDWIN: So they have to be very, very careful with him, do they not?
LEMON: Yes. It is a bullet proof vest. And Jim Spellman -- our Jim Spellman was in and he saw -- and you can see the -- you know, he's wearing the suit and under that, you know, sort of burgundy, whatever colored suit, you see the black part and that is the top of that bullet proof vest.
Yes, they're being very careful about it. I don't think that it's unusual that they would take someone from the detention center to the courtroom in the tunnel. It's there. So that means that they use it from time to time. I'm not sure how often they use it. But, yes, painstakingly there's security. We had to go through several security checks. Police are standing out in front of the courthouse and out in front of the detention center and asking for identification and telling people where to go or that they can or cannot go in.
BALDWIN: And here we are looking at these images of him sort of closing his eyes, bobbing his head up and down. I do want to ask you --
LEMON: (INAUDIBLE).
BALDWIN: And correct me. He did not have a family member inside this courtroom in Aurora today. Instead, we understand, Don, they're going to be making a statement vis-a-vis the family attorney in San Diego, what, 4:00 Eastern Time, yes?
LEMON: Yes, that's what we're hearing now. I mean no one officially from the family inside of the courtroom that, you know, but we don't know. We're thinking not because the family has chosen to do this press conference or at least have a representative speak for them. We're not exactly sure what's going on. The person handling that part of the story would have to tell you. But we're not sure if he had someone in the courtroom, but we do know, again, that the family's going to speak. Because right afterwards they released a statement saying, hey, we want -- I want to talk about this. We want our privacy. Obviously we feel terribly -- terrible about what happened, but right now is not the time.
BALDWIN: What about, quickly, I imagine there were some victims families in the courtroom. Have you talked to any of them?
LEMON: Yes, I have. I have spoken to victims themselves who were in the courtroom and also the brother of Jessica Ghawi, who was just here. As a matter of fact, he's right over to my left here. He said he didn't come on purpose because he might do something stupid because he's so angry about this. He watched it on television. He's the one that said, I think he's putting on. There were two young ladies who were victims who were -- who were inside there -- the courtroom. And she has a bullet fragment stuck in her -- still in her chin and she has a gash right here. And she said that they couldn't be -- they were told that -- to try not to be emotional in the courtroom. Try not to be. It wasn't guaranteed, of course, considering what happened. But then afterwards they took the -- took the family members and the victims into another room, Brooke, so that they could watch the proceedings over again on videotape and then they could be more emotional and they could support each other.
BALDWIN: Gosh, trying not to be emotional. If I were one of those family members, that, I imagine, would be easier said than done.
LEMON: Yes. Yes.
BALDWIN: Don Lemon, thank you so much, for us in Aurora, Colorado.
I also now want to bring in Randi Kaye. She is at the movie theater where this awful massacre happened Friday morning.
And I want to talk to you, Randi, just about, you know, about this danger, it didn't end when police caught him, you know, really without a fight in the theater parking lot last Friday morning. He left behind this house of horrors. Booby-trap after booby-trap. Live wires we heard from the police chief. Tell me, how did they eventually get in and defuse the apartment?
RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the apartment is just about four miles, Brooke, from where I'm standing here at the movie theater. And on Friday, they tried to send in a robot, which they did do, because it was too -- it wasn't safe enough for the investigators to get inside. So they sent in this robot to assess the situation. They also broke the windows of the third floor apartment so they could see what they were dealing with.
And then on Saturday morning, you had the ATF, the FBI, the bomb experts, even chemists came and they all devised a plan to try and get inside once it was safe. So, again, Brooke, they sent the robot back in and the robot was able to spray water on the control box, which was in the kitchen. And that control box was wired to all kinds of things. According to police, it was wired to about 30 homemade IEDs. There was a homemade version of napalm (ph), which would have just made an explosion and fire even bigger if it did happen.
BALDWIN: Oh.
KAYE: Yes. The IEDs had fire cracker shells attached to them. There were cans of gasoline and black powder. But it was really all because of these robots that were able to go in, take pictures and then do the work of the humans that couldn't go inside until it was much safer.
BALDWIN: And, you know, I know there was a young woman who was very much so thanking her lucky stars. She's the one -- there was -- you know, he left this loud, you know, techno music blaring in his apartment --
KAYE: Right.
BALDWIN: And she noticed the door was unlocked, right, and decided not to go in.
KAYE: Right. I mean he had left when he came to the theater that night. According to police, he had left this techno music to go off. She was -- she lived below him. Wanted to complain to him. So she went to his door. She realized it was open. She almost opened that door. And she could have exploded that whole building by doing so. Listen to what she said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAITLYN FONZI, HOLMES' NEIGHBOR: And I went upstairs and knocked on the door quite a few times and realize that it was possibly unlocked. And so I thought about peering my head in there. I had my hand on the door handle and just yelling at them to say, hey, turn it down. And I just decided -- I decided not to do that. I just had a trepidation and a little voice told me, no, just let the cops handle it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KAYE: Well, that little voice saved her life and probably a whole lot of other lives because if you listen to the police chief, Oates, he was talking very emotionally about how this was designed to kill. This trip wire at the front door was designed to kill. And he thought that it was designed to kill a police officer because likely that would have been a first responder after they picked him up at the movie theater. So this guy had this place rigged according to authorities.
BALDWIN: They say listen to that little voice inside of you. Thank goodness she did.
Final question to you, Randi. You mention all these IEDs, the napalm. What did police ultimately do with these bombs?
KAYE: Well, it was a tricky situation because they were in the -- they had to sort of deal with trying to preserve some of it as evidence and then they were also trying to get rid of it safely. So they took a lot of it and we actually had some really amazing pictures. They took it just outside the city limits and blew it up. They detonated a lot of it. And then they took a lot of it that they were able to preserve and they sent it to the FBI lab at Quantico, Virginia, to try and look at that.
But also very interesting, Brooke, one thing to mention. Besides all that evidence and the explosives and the ammunition that they were able to get. They also took his computer. So they may be able to find some type of motive. And they took a Batman poster and a Batman mask that they found inside his apartment.
BALDWIN: Randi Kaye, thank you so much, in Aurora. Do not forget to watch Randi's reporting tonight. It's a special edition of "AC 360." They're going to, once again, be live from Colorado, 8:00 Eastern, right here on CNN. Do not miss that In just a couple minutes, we're going to speak live with Dave Collun (ph). He is a man who has spent years, 10 years, researching the teenage killers in the Columbine massacre. He was there the day that story broke. He is telling everyone, do not jump to conclusions about the suspect here in this case. We're going to ask him what rushes to judgment he's seeing here.
But first, more news unfolding right now. Take a look at this.
They're calling it a wake-up call. Penn State is not too big to fail. And the NCAA just dropped the hammer. But the question is, is the hit hard enough?
I'm Brooke Baldwin. The news is now.
A new study shows the same bad behavior involved in home loans reached college loans. And now many students are in trouble.
Plus. As fears grow over Syria's chemical weapons, a new offer for President Bashar al Assad, step down and you'll be guaranteed safety.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: Well, talk about breathtaking speed. Early yesterday morning Penn State University removed the Joe Paterno statue from outside its football stadium. That statue was hauled away and is now being stored at what we're told is an undisclosed, secure location.
So, fast forward 24 hours. Monday morning, NCAA sanctions stemming from the Jerry Sandusky child sex scandal that Paterno allegedly helped conceal. Proud Penn State is now being fined some $60 million. $60 million. With all the money going toward child abuse detection and prevention.
Penn State also is having to vacate 111 football wins. All football wins from 1998 onward. So, '98 being the year that the cover-up began. This is all according to that probe by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. In addition to those 111 wins, the school also has to forfeit 20 football scholarships each of the next four seasons.
And it's tough to believe. This was the coach and this was the school that ran the model football program, or so a lot of us thought it was a model program. Joining me now live from San Francisco, former Penn State player Matt Hahn. Matt played four years for Coach Paterno, ending in 2008.
And, Matt, I just -- I have to ask, what's your reaction to what we've seen over the course of the last 24 hours. The statue is now gone. Is this the end of Penn State football as we know it?
MATT HAHN, FMR. PENN STATE FOOTBALL PLAYER: Well, it's been a lot to take in. You know, I don't think it's the end of Penn State football. I think that it's going to be hurting for a while. I think that, you know, there needs to be focus put on the victims and, you know, on their healing process, first and foremost, and then the university needs to be into its healing process. And then I think football will take its rightful place. And I think football will be back, but I think that there's some things that are bigger priorities than that right now.
BALDWIN: We've just gotten a statement, Matt. I want to read this. This is a statement from the Paterno family and it talks about the sanctions leveled this morning by the NCAA. They say, quote, "these sanctions defame the legacy and contributions of a great coach and educator without any input from our family or those who knew him best."
He was your coach. What's your reaction to that?
HAHN: Well, I know for me personally, my relationship with Coach Paterno was excellent. He did a lot for me. He was a father figure. He never lied to me. He always told me the truth.
That being said, I don't really know what went on behind closed doors. I don't know how much information he did or did not know. So it's hard for me to comment on that. I can only -- I can only talk about my personal experience with him. And I can understand how the Paterno family would be very upset by the sanctions that have come down and basically kind of, you know, wiping out a lot of his life's work.
BALDWIN: I mean they talk about defaming the legacy. The statue was taken down, Matt, with little to no fanfare. I mean this man was the winningest coach in football. In college football. Now no longer. How do you feel today about all that? Are you sad? Are you mad? Do you understand it?
HAHN: You know, again, it's a mixture of emotions. I'm definitely sad. I don't know where I stand right now as far as if the statue should be there. If it should -- you know, if it should be there, if it should not be there. I think that, you know, the people that were affected by Jerry Sandusky's actions, I feel like they should have say in, you know, what -- how do they feel about the statue. Should they leave it up? Do they -- you know, does it hurt them that it's down? Does it hurt them that it's staying up? What brings back the memories for them? And I think whatever they say should be taken into account too. Or should have been.
BALDWIN: Let me throw this question -- let me throw this question at you and just sort of, if you can, put yourself in these guys shoes, the current team right now, because also out of this whole news conference with the NCAA this morning, the fact that they announced -- in announcing these sanctions, they are allowing Penn State players to transfer to other schools. Typically, you know, you have to -- you don't have to play -- you don't get to play for a year. You're penalized. Now they're saying you can play that first year. Is the NCAA -- are they doing the right thing by the players who, through no fault of their own, have seen their careers very much so threatened?
HAHN: Yes, absolutely. I mean these guys, they've got to do what's best for them at the end of the day. I mean, you know, some of these guys have grown up dreaming about playing Penn State football and I'm sure some of them will stick it out and try and bring the school back and bring the football program back. But then, you know, there's other guys that have a lot riding on this, you know, professional football careers, where, you know, this could be something that affects them way down the line as far as guys that are eligible to get drafted and could have a career in the NFL and making a lot of money. So I think the NCAA is doing the right thing by releasing them.
BALDWIN: Final question to you. Had this been your year, would you have left?
HAHN: Oh, gosh, I don't know. I think it -- I think it would -- don't really know. You know, it's hard to say. I think that with the relationships that I formed with my teammates, the bond, the brotherhood that I had with the guys that were there, I think I would have liked to stick it out and played -- if this was my final year -- I would have stayed and stuck it out and played and, you know, helped the healing process and helped, you know, move on.
BALDWIN: Been a leader on the team. Matt Hahn, former Penn State football player in San Francisco. Matt, appreciate it. Thank you.
HAHN: Thank you.
BALDWIN: As the president today gets ready to address veterans, live during the show, I want you to listen to this. Today, the president's campaign released a video touting the end of U.S. involvement in Iraq. He said he would end that when he was running for president in 2008. But also today, dozens were killed in Iraq. One of its deadliest days of the year. We're going to break down what that means as Mitt Romney gets ready to head overseas.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: President Obama and Mitt Romney, they are returning to the campaign trail. Although the tone and mood of their events will likely be different in the wake of the deadly Colorado theater shooting from Friday. At the top of the agenda, foreign affairs.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words, and I know your families agree, welcome home. Welcome home. Welcome home.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: This is a web video that President Obama's campaign released today reminding Americans of his efforts to bring the troops home. He is touting his achievements in Iraq just hours before his address at the annual veterans of foreign wars convention in Reno, Nevada. He's going to be speaking in little over an hour. We will take that live for you.
But this video here, it comes the very same day that at least 82 people were killed in attacks across Iraq, marking this as one of the deadliest days in that country since 2006. Our senior congressional correspondent Dana Bash joins me now from Washington. And I want to just focus on Mitt Romney with you, Dana. I know he is set to speak at the VFW convention tomorrow. And then he is headed abroad. Where abouts?
DANA BASH, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: He's going to take an interesting trip. You mentioned, of course, that foreign policy does seem to be on the front pages, so to speak, of the presidential campaigns and it hasn't been, understandably, given how the economy has and should be the focus of these candidates because that's what Americans tell pollsters they care most about.
Where is he going to go? He is going to go to England. He is going to go to Poland. And he is going to go to Israel. Those are stops that are not without importance for several reasons.
Let's just start, first of all, with England. England also happens to be, Brooke, the place where the Olympics are going to be.
BALDWIN: The Olympics. Yes.
BASH: And you remember that Mitt Romney ran the Olympics, the Salt Lake City Olympics, back in 2002. So this is a way for him to remind people that he did that. This is something that people in this country are proud of, the Olympics, no matter who's running it, no matter where it is. And so this is a good thing for him to remind people of.
And then he is going to go -- let's just fast forward to Israel a little bit. This is something that is I think pretty cleaver politically because it is not a secret that the Jewish community here in the United States has been a little bit unsure about President Obama. The Jewish community has critical votes in swing states, like Florida. So this is a trip that Mitt Romney is going to take to try to make it clear to those very small but important sector of the electorate here in the United States that he is with them, particularly meeting with Netanyahu, who has not had the greatest relationship with Barack Obama.
BALDWIN: His old friend. Yes, his old friend. And we know today Mitt Romney just wrapped up this town hall in Costa Mesa, California. He's hammering Obama, once again, over, you know, how he handled small businesses.
BASH: That's right. And I think we have a picture of the banner that was behind Mitt Romney at this event that just wrapped up. It said, "we did build it." That is something that is new from the Romney campaign. And it is up there to try to take a little bit of a whack at President Obama, which they've also done in an ad, for saying -- just a short clip of him saying, if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
Well, like many of these short clips that these candidates give, that was taken out of context. It's not -- maybe not necessarily what he meant. It was a long riff about making the point that this is a society where everything matters and every road that is built, every bridge that is build helps you get ahead. But the Obama campaign has done the same exact thing to Mitt Romney. And for Mitt Romney, this is a perfect thing to pick at and say, ah-ha, you see, he doesn't understand business. I do. And that's why he had that banner up behind him, meeting with small business owners today in California.
BALDWIN: It is how it works, as it is an election year.
Dana Bash, thank you.
Again, a quick reminder, we will be taking the president, Reno, Nevada, in just a little over an hour from now.
Have you heard about this? The 23 people -- 23 crammed into one pickup truck, crashes on a Texas highway, killing more than a dozen. But why?
Plus, an exclusive. Israel's president tells CNN that Iran is in, quote, "open war with Israel." And Shimon Peres says there is evidence.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: A catastrophic truck crash in South Texas kills 14 people including two children in total. Look at this, in total there were 23 people inside this Ford F-250 when it crashed.
This is according to the Texas Highway Patrol. Investigators still don't know why the truck left the road and slammed into two trees. The people who stopped to help started screaming because the scene was so horrific.
This is according to our affiliate there, KHOU. Christina Reyes was among those who tried to do what she could.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRISTINA REYES, WITNESS: That was the first thing that came to my mind was to start counting bodies, trying to check for pulses, trying to see who was not breathing and who was breathing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: The crash happened in the small town of Berclair. It's about two hours drive to south east of San Antonio. Troopers believe the people killed are illegal immigrants.
Immigration officials confirmed the 14 killed were from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The F-250 according to Ford seats six at maximum. One highway patrolman said with 38 years on the job, he's never seen that many people crammed into one single vehicle.
In this exclusive interview here with CNN, the president of Israel says Iran is in, quote, "Open war with his nation." Shimon Peres points out to last week's attack in which a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists on that bus in Bulgaria.
Mr. Peres says Israel has the evidence to link the blast to Iran Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon. He spoke with CNN's Elise Labott today. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ELISE LABOTT, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT REPORTER: In this specific attack, is there hard intelligence that says that Iran was involved?
PRESIDENT SHIMON PERES, ISRAEL: I would say yes. Enough information to accuse them.
LABOTT: Do you believe that more attacks are being planned?
PERES: Yes. I think Iran is the center of terror.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: President Peres went onto say that Israel will act to prevent further attacks saying the policies of prevention rather than retaliation.
My next guest spent years researching the killers in the Columbine massacre. He's now warning all of us do not jump to conclusions about the suspect here in the movie theatre.
In fact, he says the killer in these cases is rarely who he seems. Don't miss this conversation. Dave Cullen next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: For so many, the horror in Aurora, Colorado immediately invokes memories of Columbine, the 1999 massacre at the high school just 20 miles away from this movie theatre. The details, they are sort of slowly eking out about this man, James Holmes, the suspect in Friday's shooting spree.
But police say he's not cooperating. So it could be months, it could be years before really the motives are known in this case. I want to welcome journalist and author, Dave Cullen back to the show. He wrote "Columbine," perhaps the definite account of that 1999 attack. So Dave, welcome back.
DAVE CULLEN, AUTHOR, "COLUMBINE"": Thanks.
BALDWIN: You wrote this incredibly thoughtful op-ed in the "New York Times" just yesterday about this movie theatre massacre. You called it don't jump to conclusions about the killer. So what jumps -- what leads in judgment have you already seen in the last three days?
CULLEN: You know, for the most part the media has been pretty good this time. I think we really learned our lessons from Columbine. Though there's some definitely creeping in.
I definitely saw this morning of people to read a lot into whatever you want to call the body language or whatever of the suspect -- yes, in court. That's totally understandable.
Obviously, we're going to learn things over time. Seeing him we all make judgments. That's reasonable to see if he was lethargic. His behavior was strange.
The problem is only when people start taking the strange and trying to pinpoint what was going on in his head to drive that strangeness. It could be all sorts of things.
I mean, it could be something as simple like people asked, you know, whether he had medications. But it could also be, you know, maybe incredibly highly stressed. Maybe he hasn't slept in two or three days.
BALDWIN: We don't know and that's the point.
CULLEN: Exactly. We have no idea. So when we start making assessments, that's when we get in trouble.
BALDWIN: OK, well, I won't sit here and ask you to pontificate on what strange means in your book so I want to move on. I want to quote actually part of your op-ed.
You wrote this, over the next several days you'll be hit with all sorts of evidence, fragments suggesting one motive or another. Don't believe any one detail. The killer is rarely who he seems. You say, Dave, that is precisely the kind of mistake journalists including yourself made in 1999 with Columbine.
CULLEN: Exactly. We take little bits of fragments of information and we try to put it together in a whole. Now think about your own life. You know, say we interviewed, you know, eight or ten different people from your life.
You know, one of your parents, a sibling, an aunt, people from who knew in high school. And even people who do know. They are still going to all have different -- you know, they see you in different capacities and different moods.
Some people like you more than others, right? You know, we all have our flaws. Some people you probably irritate. I'm sure I irritate some people. Those people are going to have a certain opinion.
That's going to be different. You know, police, like in Columbine, they interviewed more than 2,000 people. I'm sure they are going to do that here too. They interviewed everyone in the school.
But once they send out huge teams and interview everyone imaginable, they can get a pretty clear picture of the full picture of your life.
But when we're getting that little bits and pieces, this guy or that woman that met him at different times. That's little bits. You know, it's not enough to go on. If we interviewed one of your neighbors, you know, who knows what they would say about you.
BALDWIN: Well, hopefully, have decent things, but you never know and that's precisely I think your point. But to get the whole picture, you know, I want to talk to you about Eric Harris in Columbine because you write in your piece. You remind us that Eric Harris was the cold blooded psychopath. That it was Clevel who was an extreme depressive and you based much of that and these pages that they write.
And if you will hold up the heart, Dave, because this is the Clevel I had forgotten this. He had big fluffy hearts that he would write in journals. You said his biggest enemy was himself. He wasn't bullied.
CULLEN: Yes, I don't know if that one is coming through. There are ten pages of these in his journal. You know, the phrase I love you stencilled across them. Love was really the most common theme in his entire journal.
That wasn't the only thing. There were lots and lots of anger in there. He's at war with himself. He's very conflicted. That's the point. As a complex person who's having a lot of different emotions, but he was kind of really a sweet, loving kid.
He mentioned suicide on the very first page two years before it happened. He was dealing with a lot of pain. He had incredibly low self-esteem and was looking for love.
He got involved unfortunately with a psychopath who drew him into his plan, but more of the killers. The psychopaths are the exceptions. They are quite rare. It actually usually turns out to be deeply depressed people like Dolan Clevel.
BALDWIN: And you can understand to a degree, Dave, why so many people do, they want the answer to the question why, right? There's so much talk of a motive. Why did, taking it back to Aurora, Colorado.
Why did James Holmes allegedly do these horrendous, horrendous things? You talk in your piece about how, you know, police through the investigation, they need to keep it close to the vest and then be transparent for everyone else.
But once they are transparent, we do have a sense of a motive, is there anything really satisfying once we do know the why?
CULLEN: You know, there really is. You know, I've talked to a lot of the families of the killers, excuse me, victims who said they got great relief. I don't know how to say this without -- I'm not trying to make it sound self-serving.
But several people have written, family members of the victims have written me to tell me that they read the book and it really helped them. They finally understood why this happened and they understood why their dad or their brother or their child, why they were killed.
Because it's very, very frustrating to go 10 years wondering. You know, it's terrible to lose obviously your child or your husband. But then to wonder like and not even get it and for it so seem perplexing that's really difficult. It really helps the families to have an answer.
BALDWIN: Dave Cullen, he wrote in the "New York Times" just yesterday, the op-ed, don't jump to conclusions about the killer. It's fascinating. Dave Cullen, thank you so much.
CULLEN: Thank you very much, Brooke. I really appreciate it. You're doing a great job with your coverage.
BALDWIN: Thank you. For the first time in decades, the global conference on AIDS is being held right here in the United States. We're going to focus on the one man believed to be cured. You heard me, cured of HIV.
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BALDWIN: In 2009, the Obama administration lifted a ban that prevented HIV-infected people from entering the United States. Fast forward three years and now the world's largest gathering on the disease, the International AIDS Conference is in the United States for the very first time since 1990.
You see all these people, more than 25,000 people have converged in our nation's capitol to listen to a power house line up of speakers. I'm talking Bill Gates, even Elton John.
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ELTON JOHN, MUSICIAN: Everyone, everyone, everyone deserves to love. Why am I telling you this? Because the AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fuelled by stigma, by hate, by misinformation, by ignorance, by indifference.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: There is one speaker who out shines all of the rest. His name is Tim Brown also known as the Berlin patient and the only person known to be cured of HIV.
Senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins me now. We're sitting in our morning meeting and one of our producers pitched the story about the Berlin patient. She said, you know, he's cured. I immediately thought of you because you're always so careful about the cure word.
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: I'm going to use it because he uses that word. He says that he is cured. Doctors say this as well that when they go to look in his body for evidence of HIV, they don't find it. He's the only person in the world like this.
BALDWIN: Do we know why he's called the Berlin patient?
COHEN: Well, because he's from Berlin. He was living in Berlin. He was diagnosed with HIV in the 1990s and then years later, he got leukemia. He did a bone marrow transplant.
So he had a very smart doctor who said, you know, if I'm going to give you a bone marrow transplant I might as well give you cells from one of very few people in this world, it's a small percentage of everybody who is resistant to HIV. There are people out there who were genetically, extremely resistant to HIV. So he found someone and gave him that transplant. He doesn't have HIV anymore.
BALDWIN: So I imagine his cure helps others with HIV and with AIDS?
COHEN: Perceptually it does. No one else has been cured because of this. He's the only one. There are various universities that are trying to learn from him.
And what they're trying to do. They don't want to give people bone marrow transplants because they are dangerous. They can kill you. So you don't want to get a bone marrow transplant unless you have a disease like leukemia.
So for everyone else what they are trying to do is they are trying to take a patient's, an HIV patient's cells out and then give them a genetic therapy, gene therapy, treat them and then put those cells back in and hope that the same thing will happen to them as this happened to Tim Brown.
Now we haven't heard that that's worked yet. So I'm assuming that it hasn't so far, but the hope is that it will.
BALDWIN: Tim Brown, the Berlin patient.
COHEN: Right, a name to remember.
BALDWIN: Yes, thank you. Elizabeth, thank you so much.
Upset neighbors set fire to a dumpster. They are tossing rocks. They are tossing bottles at police. Officers fire back with tear gas.
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BALDWIN: Protesters in Anaheim, California react to a police shooting that killed a 24-year-old man. People threw rocks. They threw bottles. Set trash dumpsters on fire.
Police responded with pepper spray and rubber bullets. Here's the scene. The police dog gets loose from a patrol car, grabs a guy, and bites his arm.
At least one person in the crowd has been bitten. Anaheim Police Chief John Weltzer apologized for the dog being loose and says the shooting is now under investigation.
By the way, CNN affiliate, KABC is reporting that it's not known if the man who was killed was armed or not.
At the top of the hour, we're going to take you back to Aurora, Colorado where the suspect here in the nation's largest mass shooting appears in court.
Also a financial crisis unfolding. Up next, there's more outstanding student loan debt than credit card debt in this country. Did you know that? What lies ahead for students who don't repay their loans, next?
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BALDWIN: Want to talk about risky lending. You know, risky lending has caused loan debts to skyrocket in the last decade. Many Americans are just trying to pay off loans they just simply cannot afford.
According to this new government study private lenders gave out money without considering whether borrowers could actually repay that money and then what they did was bundle and resell the loans to investors to avoid losing money themselves.
Did I mention, we're talking student loans here of college students. I'm not talking about the financial crisis of 2008. Many of these college students here are making their very first big financial decision.
So joining me now is Terry Savage. She is a financial columnist at the "Chicago Sun Times." Terry, when I really started digging deeper in the story, I realized when you add the private student loan debt to the federal loan debt that equals $1 trillion, that's more than that what we owed in credit card debt.
TERRY SAVAGE, FINANCIAL COLUMNIST, "CHICAGO SUN-TIMES": Yes, it's amazing and it's the next bubble to burst. Private student loans are about 15 percent of the total. Federal student loans have a vast majority.
There are two big problems. The first is the way those loans work and the second is the fact that we have students graduating now into an economy where there are no jobs so they can't begin to rethink about repaying the loans.
You know, you don't have student loans, they have you. They've got you when you have a student loan.
BALDWIN: You know, it's interesting though that the study said is the students don't really understand or they didn't understand when they were applying the real difference between private, right, versus federal. Could you go through them for me? What are the differences?
SAVAGE: Sure, I mean, they are both student loans and they both have one important thing in common. You cannot get out of them through the bankruptcy process. You can't get out of the student loan by filing bankruptcy.
Now private student loans are made directly from banks. They make those loans based on your credit scores not based on financial need. They may are may not require a co-signer. They may have hidden fees.
They can have any kind of interest rate and might be adjustable rates. Federal student loans pretty much stick to a formula. They are primarily based on need. The first step for any student looking for a loan is a federal student loan.
But you see there are two big problems with either of these loans. The first is that the government has protected the lenders when their banks and protected lenders that used to be made by banks.
Now the government makes them direct. So there are no losses so private lenders don't care of really too much about the credit scores --
BALDWIN: Terry, let me just jump in. If I'm a student, I'm listening to all of you and I'm saying, well, that's well and great, but I owe all this money and granted I'm the one who applied and got this private student loan, but I owe this money. I can't pay it back. I can't file for bankruptcy. What do I do?
SAVAGE: OK. Well, now, if you have a federal student loan, you go to IBR Info, if you have a federal one. There are forbearance to the federal government and income base repayment. Private student loan there's no way out.
They have no incentive to consolidate your loans or cut your rates. But, you know, it's not that private student loans are really that much worse than federal loans.
Think about this, the federal government today borrows for 90-day treasury bills at less than one-tenth of one percent and yet they may students repay at 6.8 percent. The federal government should be doing more.
Not only to encourage the private lenders to do some lower cost consolidations, but the federal government itself should be cutting rates on student loans. Until five years ago, student loan rates were based on the 90-day T-bill.
Today they would be less than a quarter of a percent repayment instead of 6.8 percent. Private student loans you don't have much leverage. Go to your parents and see if they will co-sign and pay off your loan.
Maybe they will take out a mortgage loans. I hate parents to borrow from their retirement accounts, but those high rate private student loans you really don't have way out except for paying them back.
BALDWIN: Well, at least, the good thing according to the study I was reading you mentioned, you know, co-signers, they are requiring a lot more co-signing as it sounds like they did not before. Terry Savage, thank you.