Police Have Disabled Booby Traps
KAYE: Welcome back to Aurora, Colorado. It was a little over 48 hours ago that the nation first heard of the news of the Colorado shooting massacre. And, finally, this morning, residents here in Aurora are waking up knowing that the threat is over. Bomb technicians have cleared the apartment of shooting suspect James Holmes. Inside were pipe bombs, trip wires and plenty of ammunition, and lots and lots of it. Just before noon yesterday, officers shouted fire in the hole and then this --</s>KAYE: A controlled detonation as they called it of the last rigged explosion. Joining me now retired FBI agent, Ray Lopez, an expert in dealing with exactly this type of situation. Good morning, Ray. Thank you for joining us. I want you to listen to this statement by Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates first.</s>CHIEF DAN OATES, AURORA, COLORADO POLICE: I have personally never seen anything like what the pictures show us what is in there. I'm a layman when it comes to the bomb stuff. I see an awful lot of wires, trip wires, jars full of ammunition, and jars full of liquid, some things that look like mortar rounds. We have a lot of challenges to get in there safely.</s>KAYE: We don't yet know, of course, all of the details of Holmes' apartment. But police say they found 30 explosive devices. I mean, this apartment was just 800 square feet. How unusual do you think it is for someone to rig an apartment, a home like this?</s>RAY LOPEZ, RETIRED FBI AGENT: Well, it is very unusual. I don't think that, you know, this may have been one of the first times that I can remember that someone has actually done this outside of other instances in the case of people who produce narcotics or other illegal substances in their homes or drug dealers in the past who have booby trapped their stash or their money or their drugs or other information where they would booby trap in the case of just trying to give them a warning of law enforcement showed up to go out the backdoor, to burn everything and leave the house kind of anti-forensics. But this is the first time in the U.S. that has been rigged to blow up, especially targeting the first responders or anyone who opened up the front door.</s>KAYE: Yes. Police say that the traps actually may have been a deliberate move to, quote, "attack" whoever may have opened up the door of his apartment. They say that he actually designed this to kill. But could he have possibly also been looking to destroy evidence?</s>LOPEZ: Well, I think it's a -- you know, in the case of the bomber and the suspect in this case, it's kind of a win-win for him, irregardless of who opens the door, he does two things, he gets rid of the individual who could be a witness to this and at the same time destroy the evidence that's in there forensically and it can't be used against him later on down the road.</s>KAYE: Right. Yesterday, I want to share with you that we saw the bomb technicians shooting explosives brought from the apartment. What exactly were they doing here? Why was that so significant?</s>LOPEZ: Well, those are -- those are controlled destruction of the explosives and the incendiary materials. You only really need a small, you know, literally ounce amounts of the originals for core purposes. You only need to take small samples to the laboratory which is critical to identify what these substances are. The rest of it is a danger, because we don't know the state of the chemicals. And -- so, between the hazmat officers and the bomb technicians, they get together. They pull the samples that they need to properly using forensic techniques to identify where they were, who confiscated them and took them into custody and then small samples provided to the laboratory and the remaining mixtures have to be destroyed properly for the safety of the public.</s>KAYE: Just one thing very quickly, I wanted to ask you about that they said they found sort of a homemade brand of napalm. I mean, how deadly could this have been if he had succeeded?</s>LOPEZ: Again, it could be very deadly. In the sense of not only to the humans, but more importantly, but also to the property, and again, some of these mixtures are unknown. Some of them are provided from some of the darker Web sites online, and there is really no validation or testing. This is somebody's idea of something they may believe worked or saw work one time, and they put it out on the Internet as fact and some people sadly take it out and try to use these things, and they don't really know what the mixture is themselves.</s>KAYE: Well, certainly not. Thank you, Agent Lopez. Appreciate your insight this morning.</s>LOPEZ: Thank you.</s>KAYE: James Holmes hasn't formally been charged. But he is scheduled to make his first court appearance tomorrow. The 24-year- old former doctoral student is being held in solitary confinement under suicide watch at the Arapahoe detention center. Police still don't have a motive for Friday's massacre. All this violence and horrible stories about what happened inside of the theater, and how do you explain this to your children when they ask about it? We'll get some tips from a psychologist in just a moment when we return live from Aurora, Colorado.