Social media provides Colorado movie theater shooting timeline

(WXYZ) - Social media sites like Twitter and YouTube help provide a timeline for the shootings at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater.

We can look back at tweets coming from the theater for what was going on shortly before the shooting.

Zach Eastman tweets “everyone’s dresing up as Batman, I’m going dressed as Bruce Wayne, albeit a short, stubby unsexy Bruce Wayne.”

Jessica Redfield is tweeting to a friend—complaining that the movie doesn’t start for 20 minutes.

A short time later Jessica would be dead - Zach an eyewitness to mass murder:

“Have evacuated our theater in Aurora,” Zach tweets at 3 minutes past midnight, “There was a shooting in our auditorium. I am safe.”

Our sister station in Denver, KMGH picked up on the news within minutes.

“We’re hearing multiple people have been shot.  We have a crew on the scene,” the station account tweeted.

The networks start tweeting the news within hours.

Someone inside the theater posts a cell phone video on YouTube. It’s picked up by news outlets across the country—viewed by millions.

By midday—the hash tag #theatershooting had gone viral - the stream virtually unreadable.

Remember Jessica Redfield who’d tweeted from the theater first. Her story has emerged as the most emotional of the tragedy.

She was born here in Detroit, moved to Texas and aspired to be a sports reporter.

Last month she was in Toronto at a food court in a mall literally moments before a gunman opened fire there.

She wrote in a blog shortly after that “I know I truly understand how blessed I am for each second I am given.”