James Holmes Pocketed $26,000 Federal Government Education Grant

James Holmes, the suspect in the Dark Knight Rises shooting rampage at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater that killed 12 people and wounded 58 others, received a prestigious taxpayer-funded stipend from the National Institutes of Health that covered his graduate school tuition.

The federal government education grant that James Holmes received totaled $26,000 and “paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver,” reports CBS News.

James Holmes was one of just six students in the program to get free tuition via the NIH money. After taking an “intense” oral exam, Holmes apparently dropped out of the Ph.D program after the first year for reasons that have yet to be disclosed, however.

A Gather.com writer speculates that “this could explain how an unemployed college student was able to afford an AR-15, a shotgun, two pistols and 6,000 rounds of ammunition.”

The National Institutes of Health is a component agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

James Holmes will soon undergo psychiatric evaluations to find out if he is competent to stand trial. He made his first court appearance yesterday. Formal charges against Holmes in the Aurora shooting case are slated for a 9:30 a.m. hearing next Monday, July 30. Holmes is currently behind bars at the Arapahoe County jail on suspicion of first degree murder. Additional charges related to the massacre are likely.

Do you think it’s possible that the suspect financed his crime with taxpayer dollars or is it way too early or inappropriate to make this leap?