Planned Parenthood shooting suspect Robert Dear, 57,  made his first appearance in a Colorado Springs courtroom this afternoon via video conference. Stephen J. Sletta was the presiding judge for this appearance.

Dear was accompanied by the state’s chief Public Defender, Dan King. That name may be familiar to some. King was the lead defender for the Aurora Theatre shooting trial this summer.

Now he is tasked with handling yet another high profile case that is receiving world-wide attention.

As the proceedings were finished, Judge Sletta issued orders to have court documents sealed. These included the search warrant for Dear’s home and the arrest warrant. Dear is being held on investigation of first-degree murder and formal charges will be filed next Wednesday.

In the meantime, El Paso County District Attorney Dan May has not made a decision about seeking the death penalty. However, other legal pundits believe this should be a death penalty case considering that three people were killed by Dear: Jennifer Markovsky, Ke’Arre Stewart, and Officer Garrett Swasey.

“The murder charges in this case are absolutely death penalty qualified,” 9NEWS legal expert Scott Robinson said. “There’s a statutory aggravator on terms of killing more than one person, of creating an ambush, and killing a police officer. All of those aggravators apply.”

However, that does NOT mean that federal charges are going to apply. Never mind Hillary’s weird supposition that a no-fly list would’ve stopped Dear.

Clinton goes farther than any D tonight on PP shooting: "If you are too dangerous to fly in U.S, you are too dangerous to buy a gun." #FITN

— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) November 30, 2015

Teeny tiny problem with that Hillary…

Remember @GStephanopoulos Senator Ted Kennedy was put on No Fly List? Would @TheDemocrats violate his Gun Rights?https://t.co/BkwYmsQfPa

— Jay Medina (@JayMedina) November 23, 2015

Oh and Hillary? Better not forget that your pals at the ACLU absolutely hate the No-Fly list. Oh but that’s not relevant! Neither is Obama’s “enough is enough” grandstanding that he’s done for every single major shooting event in the last few years (Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, etc) with zero accomplishments.

https://youtu.be/TJH4RpNyAxw

Oh and lets not forget that he pushed for similar types of gun control just over a month ago after the tragedy at UCC in Roseburg, Oregon. Fact is, federal laws might not solve this problem!

U.S. Attorney John Walsh says officials could pursue federal charges in addition to state homicide ones. He says investigators have been in touch with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights and National Security divisions.

Robinson said he doesn’t expect federal charges to be filed.

“Unless there are federal firearm charges that qualify because of the nature of the weapons or the history of the accused,I do not anticipate federal charges will be filed,” Robinson said.

“The suspect is charged with state law crimes,” Robison said. “The crimes he allegedly committed took place on private property, not on federal land. At this point, we don’t know what political motivation he had, if any.”

That’s a key point right there. At this time NO ONE knows why this guy went on the rampage that he did. We DON’T know what set him off. We don’t know what his motives were. Period. In fact, I’d say that the only supposition we CAN make is that this guy is indeed half a bubble off plump given what has been uncovered thus far. Yet no one, not even the Governor of Colorado are even looking at the mental health issues of these shooters. Unfortunately its far too easy to focus on guns rather than deal with the mental health elephant in the room that Jennifer wrote about last month.

So, while the investigators on the local/state/federal level continue their work and the attorneys start navigating the legal channels, let us remember this. The families of the five officers and four civilians who were wounded in the attack, and for the Swasey, Stewart, and Markovsky families…

…have a long road of recovery, of grief and pain, of finding strength and grace to go on, and perhaps even finding peace. Let us think of them while the wheels of justice turn.