1993 Aurora, Colorado shooting
Mass shooting on December 14, 1993
On December 14, 1993, four employees were shot and killed, and a fifth employee was critically injured at a Chuck E. Cheese's (formerly a ShowBiz Pizza Place) restaurant in Aurora, Colorado, United States. The perpetrator, 19-year-old Nathan Jerard Dunlap, a former employee of the restaurant, was frustrated about being fired five months prior to the shooting and sought revenge by committing the attack. He fled the scene of the shooting with stolen money and restaurant items. At the time, the Chuck E. Cheese massacre was the deadliest mass shooting in Colorado, before being surpassed by the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.
Dunlap was found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and other charges, and was sentenced to death by lethal injection on May 17, 1996. A judge initially set an execution date for him in August 2013, but Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed a temporary reprieve that postponed Dunlap's execution date.
Dunlap's death sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole in 2020 after Colorado abolished the death penalty.
Shooting
Nathan Dunlap arrived at his friends' house at around 11 AM, with a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol. He told his friends that he was "Going to the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant to kill the people."
Nathan Dunlap entered the restaurant at 9:30 p.m., where he ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and played an arcade game. He then hid in a restroom at about 9:50 p.m.
“1993 Aurora, Colorado shooting” enters the record as mass shooting on December 14, 1993. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aurora, Colorado and shooting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “1993 Aurora, Colorado shooting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.