A Colorado state court jury found Thursday that the movie theater chain Cinemark was not liable for the 2012 shooting at a multiplex in Aurora, Colo., the Los Angeles Times reported.
Attorneys representing the 27 plaintiffs had argued that Cinemark failed to take sufficient security precautions—such as having armed security, closed-circuit TV and roving patrols at the theatre—to prevent the attack in which a deranged madman murdered 12 victims. However, the jury agreed with Cinemark that the crime could not have been precluded, in part because the killer was "unpredictable, unforeseeable, unpreventable and unstoppable."
A more interesting question for a jury to resolve would be whether Cinemark's "no guns" policy—which disarmed victims, thereby leaving them defenseless against the Aurora killer—could leave the theatre chain liable for the disarmed victims' deaths.
