DENVER (CN) - After describing her son's normal, happy childhood, the mother of mass murderer James Holmes wept on the witness stand Wednesday as she told the jury, "I didn't realize that his loudest cry for help was silence."
Arlene Holmes said she was "totally shocked" when she learned that her son had killed 12 people and wounded 70 at a midnight premier of a "Batman" movie on July 20, 2012.
"I was totally shocked that he used a gun," she said. "We were never hunters or target shooters. When I heard, I thought, 'How does he even know how to use a gun?'"
The Arapahoe County jury convicted Holmes of all 165 charges against him, including murder. In the sentencing phase, they must sentence him either to death or to life in prison.
In day-long testimony, Arlene Holmes described a childhood that was almost preternaturally normal - good grades, church, nature hikes, loving relatives, a pre-college internship at a prestigious medical institute - then sudden mental disintegration.
His mother said her son stopped returning his parents' concerned phone calls in the weeks before the massacre at the Century 16 theater in Aurora, Colo. The last time they spoke was by phone on July 4, two weeks before the murders.
Arlene Holmes said her only clue was a call from Dr. Lynne Fenton, her son's first psychiatrist, who saw him for social anxiety in the months before the shooting. Fenton called her at her home in San Diego and told her that her son had dropped out of school.
"Did she ever tell you she had concerns he'd expressed homicidal ideations?" asked Rebekka Higgs, one of Holmes' five public defenders.
"No. Never."
"Do you wish she had?"
"Of course I do, of course," Arlene Holmes said through tears. "We wouldn't be sitting here if she had told me that."
"Would you have been out here the next day?" Higgs asked.
"I would have been crawling on all fours to get to him. He's never said that he wanted to kill people. She didn't tell me."
Arlene recalled her final Fourth of July phone call with Holmes, who spent much of the conversation asking after his sister Chris, who was having trouble in school.
"Quite a bit of that conversation was about her," Arlene said. "He wanted to know why she hadn't passed all her classes. He said, 'Please tell her that five classes is too many. She shouldn't have taken so much. It's too hard in college to do that much.'
"It lasted a long time. Usually he's quick on the phone or email. He must have talked to us for a good half hour. That's unusual."
Holmes' sister Chris on Tuesday told the jury about her good relationship with her older brother as they grew up. "We used to be very, very close. And ... I love him a lot," Chris Holmes testified.
On Wednesday, Holmes' defense team asked his mother about her son's relationships with relatives. She said his grandmother Helen, who was his first close family member to pass away, used to drive to San Diego from her home in Los Angeles and take James and his sister for days at a time.