The New York Times
BOULDER, Colo. — They came to the King Soopers grocery store on a gray Monday afternoon fulfilling life’s little missions: One woman was picking up a prescription. A retiree was fetching an online order for her side gig delivering groceries. A 25-year-old manager was at the front of the store, as always, happy to help. Then, for the second time in less than a week, another workaday American scene was shattered by a gunman’s deadly rampage — this one more than 1,000 miles from Atlanta, where families of the eight people killed in another shooting incident are still planning funerals. By the time it was over, 10 people were dead, including a Boulder police officer and at least three King Soopers employees. And people across Colorado, a state scarred by the legacy of the 1999 Columbine High School attacks and a barrage of other mass shootings, wondered in grief and fury how it had happened again, in their state, their college town of Boulder, their neighborhood supermarket. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “It’s overwhelming,” said Frank DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine High School, whose phone rings so often after new mass shootings that he has become the state’s grief-counselor-in-chief. “Colorado’s been through so much.” Law-enforcement officials said the 21-year-old suspect, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, had been armed with a handgun and military-style semi-automatic rifle and was wearing an armored vest when he carried out the attacks. In a detailed affidavit, investigators said the gunman began the rampage in the store’s parking lot, then pushed inside. Officer Eric Talley, 51, an 11-year veteran of the Boulder Police Department, was the first officer to reach the scene. Officers who swept into the store soon after found him with a bullet wound to the head and dragged his lifeless body back outside. The authorities identified the nine additional victims as Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65. Relatives and friends reached for celestial metaphors to describe the victims Tuesday, calling one woman a comet flaring across the sky and another a beam of light. Chief Maris Herold of the Boulder Police struggled to hold back her grief at a news conference in which she hailed Talley as “heroic” in his final call as a police officer. King Soopers workers said their slain colleagues had diligently worked on the front lines throughout the pandemic only to find themselves in the cross hairs of America’s relentless plague of mass shootings. Maggie Montoya, a pharmacy technician, was helping with coronavirus vaccinations when gunshots boomed through the aisles at about 2:40 p.m. Monday. A bullet cut down one of the patients who had been waiting in line. “Active shooter!” screamed a manager, and the workers and customers scrambled for their lives. As the gunshots drew closer to the room where Montoya, 25, and a colleague huddled together in hiding, she said she stopped trying to dial 911 and instead called her parents. “I wanted to hear their voice, for them to hear my voice in case it was the last time,” she said in an interview Tuesday. Alissa, who was shot and wounded in his leg, was charged with 10 counts of murder and was booked into the Boulder County Jail on Tuesday after being released from the hospital. He faces a possible penalty of life in prison without the chance of parole if he is convicted. Colorado abolished the death penalty last year. Law-enforcement officials did not offer a motive for the attacks, and said they were just beginning to sift through a sprawling crime scene and unravel Alissa’s past and his actions in the days leading up to the attack. Court records show he was born in Syria in 1999, his birth date happening to land just three days before the Columbine attacks in Littleton, Colorado. Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney, said Alissa had lived “most of his life in the United States.” Two classmates from Arvada West High School, where he had been on the wrestling team and graduated in 2018, said he had a short temper and anger problems. They recalled an incident in which Alissa punched another student during school. The Arvada Police Department said that Alissa had been convicted of third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, in 2018 for a November 2017 incident in which Alissa “cold cocked” another student during class, then punched him in the head several more times. Alissa said the classmate had called him “racial names” weeks earlier, Arvada records show. He was also arrested on a criminal mischief charge in 2018. Brooke Campbell, 20, who managed the high school wrestling team while Alissa was on it, said he would get angry after losing wrestling matches or at seemingly unimportant things. “It’s scary, you know, looking back — that you knew someone that was capable of those things, or is now,” she said. “It kind of makes me sick.” Posts on the suspect’s now-deactivated Facebook page referenced wrestling, his martial arts achievements and Islam. In 2019, he shared a post that referred to passages from the Quran about the importance of being humble, kind and restraining anger, saying that the lessons were “What Islam is really about.” Another post from 2019 said simply, “#NeedAGirlfriend.” His brother, Ali Aliwi Alissa, 34, told CNN that the suspect had grown increasingly paranoid starting around 2014 and believed he was being followed, chased or investigated. He once covered his computer’s camera with duct tape to keep from being spied on, his brother said. Family members did not respond to several messages seeking comment. According to an arrest affidavit from the Boulder police, Ahmad Alissa bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol on March 16 — the same day as the mass shootings at three massage parlors around Atlanta and just six days before the police say Alissa stormed into the supermarket. The gun is a short-barreled variant of an AR-15 carbine that is marketed as a pistol. A woman married to one of Ahmad Alissa’s brothers told investigators that she had seen the suspect playing with what she described as “a machine gun” two days before the attack at King Soopers, according to the affidavit. It was unclear whether she was describing any of the weapons used in the attack. The shooting touched off anguished new cries for tougher gun laws that reverberated Tuesday from Colorado, where Democratic lawmakers are pushing for a five-day waiting period on gun purchases, to the White House. President Joe Biden, saying he and the first lady were “devastated” by the attacks, made a new call to impose laws banning assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines. “This is not and should not be a partisan issue — it is an American issue,” Biden said. “We have to act.” The shootings in Boulder, which appear to be the deadliest in Boulder County’s history, cut a deep gash across Colorado communities that have been jolted again and again by sickeningly familiar active-shooter alerts. Since Columbine, there have been deadly public shootings at multiple high schools, a movie theater in Aurora, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. And on and on. Colorado politicians talked Tuesday about how they had shopped at the market that was now a bloody crime scene, or personally known a victim. They struggled to describe the grief and outrage of confronting a mass shooting in their backyard just six days after the shootings in Atlanta. “Flags had barely been raised back to full mast after the tragic shooting in Atlanta that claimed eight lives, and now a tragedy here, close to home, at a grocery store that could be any of our neighborhood grocery stores,” Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, said at a news conference. State Rep. Tom Sullivan, whose son, Alex, was among the 12 people killed in the Aurora theater attack in 2012, said the Boulder shooting demonstrated the urgency of passing new gun-control measures. The state Legislature is considering bills that would require guns to be locked or secured in houses with children, and to require gun owners to report any lost or stolen guns to the police. Sullivan is also pushing for Colorado to pass a five-day waiting period on gun purchases. “I know what last night was like,” he said, referring to the long wait before some families learn they will never be reunited with their loved ones. Across Boulder, the shoppers and workers who barely escaped the gunfire said they were still raw and numb and could barely begin to grieve. Kimberly Moore, 35, a pharmacy technician, said the gunman’s rampage ended not far from the room where she and her co-workers were hiding. For a half-hour, she said, they stayed as quiet as they could, hoping that their face masks muffled the sound of their breathing. Moore said she could hear the gunman firing what sounded like two deliberate shots into people: Bang bang. Bang bang. “You’re sitting there, completely exposed, listening to him kill everyone you know,” she said. Deb Grojean, a victims’ advocate with the Boulder Police Department who spent hours with witnesses Monday night, said one woman who survived the attack had recently moved from Dallas to Colorado in hopes of finding a safer place to live. The woman told Grojean that she and two other employees hid upstairs in a storage closet. “We think it’s inconceivable that this could happen in Boulder, but it’s proof it could happen anywhere,” Grojean said, and then asked a question swirling like the snow that crept over the mountains late Tuesday. “When is enough, enough?” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
