Where did he get all the money for all this???
Working at McD's?
Planned this for months???
He was in a doctorate program that covered tuition and provided an approximate $24K/year living allowance stipend (
pdf ). That's $2K untaxable dollars a month, in a town where cost of living is much more affordable than, for example, San Diego, California.
Moreover, did you know that you can buy kevlar vests on Amazon? Which run everywhere from as little as $24 to as much as $500 (
for the concealed sort). And gas masks appear to run between $20-30. They even sell 12-packs of "
flash-bang" grenades, which the purchaser can fill with whatever they want.
Whether he purchased his items from there (
or not), is of course, irrelevant. The point is, how easy and cheap this stuff is for any home-grown wanna-be terrorist type.
That said, it does appear that he was asked to leave the graduate program as per this UC Denver press release. (
link )
The 24-year-old man arrested in the shootings at an Aurora theater overnight was in the process of filling out the paperwork to voluntarily withdraw from a CU graduate program in neurosciences.
James Holmes enrolled at the University of Colorado graduate school in June 2011. He was not a medical student and would have been working toward a PhD.
Unfortunately, privacy issues prevent them from clarifying why.