Obama going to Colorado on Sunday to visit shooting victims' families

President Barack Obama will travel to Colorado on Sunday to visit with families of the victims of a deadly shooting rampage at a movie theater in a Denver suburb, the White House said on Saturday.   

Obama, who had been due to leave on Monday on a three-day trip out West, decided to make a stop in Aurora, Colorado, where a gunman killed 12 people and wounded more than 50 at a premiere of a Batman movie on Friday.  

Deliveries received by the man accused of the massacre suggest months of "calculation and deliberation" leading up to the shooting rampage that killed 12 people, police said on Saturday.
   
Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates discussed the shipments as local and federal authorities completed the painstaking process of disarming suspect James Holmes' apartment, which was found booby-trapped with explosive devices after the shooting at a multiplex theater several miles away.

The 24-year-old graduate student accused of the crime was being held in solitary confinement for his own protection from other inmates, authorities said on Saturday.    

"We typically do this in high-profile cases," Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told Reuters. "It has nothing to do with any specific threat."    

Robinson said Holmes would be represented at his initial court appearance on Monday by James O'Connor, head of the Arapahoe County public defender's office.  

Authorities detonated explosive material on Saturday that was removed from Holmes’ apartment. News helicopters spotted the blasts in a large sand pit. The material appeared to be detonated inside makeshift cinder block containers.

REUTERS