Crystal Lake victim's grandma on Colorado shooter's sentence: 'I'm satisfied'
Hours after Joan Lavin heard that the man who killed her grandson would receive life imprisonment, the Wonder Lake resident said of the murderer, “As long as he is never free to hurt anybody else again, I'm satisfied, I guess.”
Lavin's grandson, John Larimer, and 11 other people were gunned down — and 70 wounded — in a darkened movie theater in July 2012.
John Larimer, a 27-year-old Crystal Lake South High School alum and Navy petty officer, died while protecting his girlfriend, Julia Vojtsek then of Algonquin, from the shooter's rampage at a midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Lavin, Larimer's maternal grandmother, said she has not been following the trial closely, although her daughter and John's mother, Kathleen, has called her every few days from Colorado, where she, John's father Scott Larimer and John's four siblings have spent time following the proceedings.
“I thought about going down several times, but I wasn't brave enough to do that,” she said. “I'm glad it's finally over and I'm hoping they will be coming home very soon.”
She said she has not seen Kathleen since April.
According to an obituary, John Larimer was a 2003 graduate of Crystal Lake South High School, where he was active in the speech team, theater, band and academic team. In middle school he was a member of the Future Problem Solvers. He was also active in Boy Scouts.
The obituary notes that Larimer's first job was at a movie theater.
After graduating in 2008 from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater with a dual degree in political science and history, Larimer, a fourth-generation member of the U.S. Navy, went through basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station, graduating in 2011, and then graduated from Cryptology Service School in Pensacola, Florida, ultimately serving as a cryptologic technician at Buckley Airforce Base in Aurora, Colorado.
“He was my oldest daughter's youngest child,” Lavin said, “and they were an extremely close family. And they just miss him terribly to this day.”
“What can you do?” she said. “Horrible things have happened since then, too. Sometimes I'm not sorry I'm as old as I am. Because the old people always say, ‘Things were better when I was younger.' Well, it does seem sometimes that the world is not in any better shape than when I grew up during the Second World War.”
Attempts to reach other family members were unsuccessful.
However, John's father, Scott, told the Daily Herald in July about the shooter after he was convicted, “Right now we know for a fact that he won't walk the face of the earth as a free man ever again.”
Larimer said at the time he would be content no matter what happens in the sentencing phase.
“The death sentence, I leave that up to Colorado,” Larimer said. “I'm an Illinois resident. I hate it when outsiders come in and tell us what to do here. So I leave that to them. Once I knew he was not going to walk the face of the earth, I had what I needed.”
Larimer said then it was “tearful” but important for the healing process to be a witness to the verdict.
“It's been up and down to be in the courtroom,” Larimer said. “Some of the testimony is pure terror.”
• Daily Herald Staff Writer James Fuller contributed to this story.