Accused movie shooter James Holmes wasn’t always the whip-smart whiz kid he’s being made out to be, at least according to one former supervisor.
And he certainly wasn’t lucky in love.
John Jacobson helped guide Holmes during a 2006 summer internship at the University of California’s prestigious Salk Institute in San Diego and said the suspected gunman in the Colorado movie theater massacre was thickheaded, uncommunicative and irresponsible.
“He should not have gotten into the summer program,” Jacobson, 37, told the Los Angeles Times. “His grades were mediocre. I’ve heard him described as brilliant. This is extremely inaccurate.”
Holmes’ high school transcripts showed B’s and B pluses, and no Advanced Placement classes, Jacobson told the Times.
He was accepted because his résumé indicated he had done some computer programming while he was a student at Westview High School in San Diego, Jacobson said.
Holmes had had not yet started his undergraduate studies at UC Riverside when he was assigned to write computer code for a Jacobson experiment.
The problem is, he refused to follow the grad student’s instructions.
“My experience with him was quite bad,” said Jacobson, who is now a Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego in philosophy and cognitive sciences.
The experiment — involving a game of rock paper scissors — was designed to be programmed in Flash, a multimedia computer platform, but Holmes insisted on using an older program.
For two weeks, “He was absolutely stubborn. I was at a loss to how to get him to program in an object-oriented way,” Jacobson said. “Finally, I said, ‘Do it any way you can.’
For the next six weeks, Jacobson dropped by the lab each day to make sure Holmes was present. He determined that Holmes was extremely receptive to compliments, and that was “how I got him to do the little that he did,” Jacobson said.
But Holmes failed to finish the task.
“He never completed the project. What he gave me was a complete mess,” Jacobson told the Times. “I basically fired him.”
He described Holmes as “a shy, pretty socially inept person,” and said he tried at one point to introduce Holmes around the institute, taking him to another floor where a high school girl was working.
“He just had no interest,” Jacobson recalled. “I attributed all this to adolescent shyness, maybe feeling intimidated [by] people around him.”
In a now widely distributed video presentation from the end of that summer — one that shows an awkward but seemingly confident Holmes discussing temporal illusions — Holmes named Jacobson as his mentor.
“That is not true. That’s almost slanderous,” Jacobson told the Times. “I was never his mentor.”
On Monday, it was also learned that Holmes was turned down by three women on the casual sex website Adult Friend Finder shortly before he allegedly perpetrated the Colorado movie massacre.
The grad school dropout opened an account on the no-strings-attached sex site on July 5, and quickly reached out to three lusty ladies — but all said, “No thanks” to a hookup, the unidentified women told TMZ.com.
One of the horny honeys told TMZ that Holmes was rather innocent in his approach, claiming he was “just looking to maybe chat . . . nothing sexual.”
She rebuffed his advance because she just wasn’t into him, she told TMZ. And now she’s taking no chances.
“Please do not take it personally if I am hesitant to talk to anyone. I just found out that someone I friended on this site shot (dozens of) people,” a 24-year-old woman from Fort Collins, Colo., wrote on her AdultFriendFinder profile.
The woman used the screen name “Wynter11” when she accepted Holmes as a friend two weeks ago, according to her time line.
A federal law enforcement source confirmed to the Daily News that the picture on the AdultFriendFinder profile was indeed an image of Holmes, 24.
Using the screen name “classicjimbo,” Holmes said he was straight and looking for “casual sex,” either one-on-one or with a group of three or more.
“Will you visit me in prison?” read a haunting line at the top of his profile page.
His account, which has been taken down in the wake of the horrific attack, lists Holmes as single, athletic and a light drinker. He described his “male endowment” as “short/average.”
“Am a nice guy. Well, as nice enough of a guy who does these sort of shenanigans,” read his introduction.
“After the TMZ incident, I am hesitant to continue using this site. Never know who’s on the other end,” a 30-year-old from Steamboat Springs, Colo., who goes by the screen name “fancydarling,” posted at the top of her profile Monday.
But just because a man is a bad worker and an unappealing sex partner doesn’t make him a killer, Holmes’ mother said in a statement Monday that rebutted an earlier story that she suspected that her son was capable of such a crime.
In a statement read by her lawyer Lisa Damiani, Arlene Holmes clarified that she had been awoken from a deep sleep by a reporter at 5:45 a.m. on Friday, and asked if she knew anything about a shooting in Aurora. Holmes said she did not know what she was being asked when questioned if she had a son named James Holmes in Colorado.
The bleary mom responded, “Yes, you have the right person,” referring to herself, she claimed through her lawyer.
The subsequent media report suggested that Holmes’ mom saw the massacre coming or that her son was unstable.
Classmates who knew Holmes at Westview High told The News they had no recollection of the accused killer ever having a girlfriend.
On Monday, his high school buddies were shocked that the clean-cut brainiac had morphed into the wild-eyed, mop-haired man they now saw.
“He looked so dazed. Then it was like his eyes were going to pop out of his head. I never saw that look from him before. This is not the kid I knew playing soccer back in high school,” Brandon Wanda, 23, told The News.