Michael White Sr. lifted his head just enough to peek through the ribbon of space between two theater seats in front of him.

“I saw him climbing the stairs, coming toward us, shooting. I thought, ‘This guy’s gonna shoot me.’ ”

The fire alarm was bleating by then, and White remembers thinking, “What’s taking the police so long?”

He kept peeking between the seats. The shooter kept coming.

“I thought about Farrah and my son. I thought, ‘He’s going to shoot me, but he’s not going to get them. He’s not going to get both of us.’ So I laid over Farrah to cover her, and I tried to keep her quiet.”

He lay there, his body shielding his son’s wounded girlfriend and listening to the pop-pop-pop of semi-automatic rounds spraying around the dark theater, where up on screen, “The Dark Knight Rises” was still playing.

“I was waiting for the bullet to come.”

White figures the killer was about two rows away, still firing, when the lights came on. “And he stopped shooting. He turned and started to head out.”

The father waited a few seconds to make sure he hadn’t just imagined the shooter leaving. “Then I told Farrah I was going to go get help.”

Midnight-movie premieres had become something of a White family tradition. For this particular Batman premiere, though, only two of White’s four children — his oldest son, Mike Jr. and his daughter, Paula Adams — could make it. Mike Sr.’s girlfriend, Michelle Baker, came, along with Mike Jr.’s girlfriend, Farrah Soudani, who mixed her boyfriend’s family with a group of her friends and co-workers from the nearby Red Robin restaurant. Between the Whites and the Red Robin employees, the group claimed pretty much the entire seventh row.

The previews were over, the opening credits had rolled, and Bruce Wayne was in the Batcave talking to Alfred when Michael White Jr. saw a canister fly through the air across the front of the theater.

“I chuckled because I thought, ‘Somebody lost their Batman prop.’ “

His dad saw the canister too.

Mike White Sr. also saw the exit door down at the front of the theater open. And when light from the movie playing on screen flickered just right, White saw the man dressed in black.

“I thought it was a Batman costume, something the theater was doing,” he said.

He still believed that when the man fired a shotgun.

Then, White watched as he switched from a shotgun to a semi-automatic rifle.

“That’s when I realized it was real.”

At that moment, it was as if a switch had been flipped. Everyone in the theater seemed to come to that realization at once. People started screaming, and all over the theater, the Whites could see people hitting the floor — either because they were hiding or because they had been shot.

Michael White Jr. heard his father yell, “Get down!” but by then, the 33-year-old was already hit.

So was Soudani.

” ‘I’m hit!’ ” Mike Jr. heard her scream. ” ‘My guts are on the floor.’ “

He tried to crawl across the floor to his girlfriend, but he couldn’t move. “I remember seeing Farrah trying to work her way toward us. I remember watching bodies drop.”

At that point, the shooter’s gun jammed, although at the time, the elder White figured he must be reloading.

“I thought, ‘This is gonna take him a minute,’ ” so the elder White grabbed his daughter and his girlfriend by the hair, pulled them toward the back door and told them to run.

“I turned back to see about my son and Farrah. That’s when I realized Farrah was hurt.”

Mike Sr. took off his shirt and held it over a hole on Farrah’s side.

“I started talking to her. She was saying, ‘I’m scared. I don’t want to die,’ so I told her, ‘I’ve got you. I’m not going to leave you.’ I told her, ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ “

He didn’t believe that last sentence for a second.

It was about that time, White said, that he looked through the sliver of light between theater seats and saw the man in black gunning for them a second time.

At that moment, White stopped comforting Farrah and set about saving her life.

When the shooting stopped and White finally left the theater to get help, police were in the lobby. They ordered him to get down, to crawl out the door, and he did.

A police officer took Mike White Jr. to the hospital in his patrol car, and that same officer — the Whites think his name was Mike Hawkins, and they would like to thank him — came back to the scene and found Mike Sr. a shirt to put on.

In the days since, as the critically wounded Soudani has been recovering at University of Colorado Hospital, White said he has asked himself why he risked his life to save that of a woman he’d met only once before.

He spent 20 years in the Air Force, but it wasn’t his military experience kicking in. He never saw combat or got shot at in two decades of service that took him to Japan and England and all over the U.S. It wasn’t instinct, either, or some innate tendency to heroics. Asked if he had ever saved anyone’s life before, White joked that he had maybe saved a teddy bear from drowning as a kid, but that was the closest he had come.

It’s definitely not that he was ready to die that night.

The best answer he has come up with might make sense only to another parent.

“I was thinking of my son, and of how much they are in love. I didn’t want that to end.” His son loved her, White said. “I couldn’t let her get away.”

Mike Jr. spent four days at University. He was shot in the arm, but the bullet grazed a lung and broke a rib before exiting his back.

Six days after the shooting, White took his son to the dusty corner across the street from the Aurora theater that had been filled with flowers, candles and good wishes. His right arm was still in a sling, and he moved a little slowly in the blistering heat, but he stopped in front of each victim’s name. He was surprised, he said as the two men walked away, at how much the pile of teddy bears and the kind words people had written moved him.

Then someone asked him what he thought of his dad, and Mike White Jr. broke into a grin.

“He’s pretty great. But I always knew that.”

Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or twitter.com/karenauge