Psychotic break or deliberate massacre? Boulder King Soopers shooting trial opens with focus on killer’s mental state

A man holds a rifle above a cowering woman in a grocery store checkout line. Three police officers duck as bullets explode glass above their heads. An intellectually disabled man stares in confusion at a bloody body.

Prosecutors on Thursday showed jurors image after image of the mass shooting inside a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, as they delivered opening statements in the long-delayed jury trial for Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 25, who is charged with killing 10 people in the March 22, 2021, attack.

Alissa’s attorneys do not dispute he carried out the mass shooting. But Alissa has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he should not be held legally responsible for the murders because he was either so mentally ill at the time of the killings that he could not tell right from wrong or so mentally ill he could not form the criminal intent to carry out the massacre.

Alissa has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and began experiencing symptoms in his late teenage years, including hearing voices, experiencing visual hallucinations and feelings of paranoia, defense attorney Samuel Dunn said. Alissa frequently heard voices screaming and yelling in his head and believed he was being followed by the FBI, Dunn told jurors.

“Prior to the offense, and on the day of the shooting, Mr. Alissa was in the throes of a psychotic episode,” Dunn said.

“He targeted Boulder”

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty told jurors Alissa was sane during the mass shooting, and pointed to Alissa’s months of planning and preparation, the lethality of the attack and Alissa’s surrender to law enforcement as evidence of his sanity.

Alissa, who lived in Arvada, started to research mass shootings in January 2021, Dougherty said. He looked at more than 6,000 images of guns, ammunition and equipment on his phone between January and March, including 400 photos of bomb-making materials.

On Jan. 20, 2021, he visited a webpage with a URL that read, in part, “what-is-the-most-deadly-type-of-round-bullet.” Alissa then purchased the type of bullet highlighted on that page, Dougherty said, and used it in the killings.

In the same timeframe, Alissa also researched other mass shootings and began to zero in on Boulder, Dougherty said.

“We know he targeted Boulder,” he said.

Alissa is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of King Soopers shoppers, employees and a responding Boulder police officer. He faces dozens of other charges connected to the attack.

Those killed in the shooting: Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Teri Leiker, 51; Boulder police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65.

In court Thursday, Alissa sat with his defense attorneys, frequently fidgeting in his chair and looking around the courtroom. Dunn argued to jurors that Alissa could not tell right from wrong when he carried out the attack because of his untreated schizophrenia.

“He thought people were following him, thought people were surveilling him,” he said. “He became delusional.”

Dunn recounted a story in which Alissa’s father found him sitting on a couch at the family’s Arvada home in the middle of the night. Alissa believed there was a man in the bathroom, Dunn said, but Alissa’s father could not find anyone there.

“Ahmad Alissa was insane,” Dunn said. “…The motivation was his own insanity. …He could not cognitively distinguish right from wrong.”

“I heard someone die”

Several witnesses described the mass shooting when testimony began Thursday afternoon, including Alison Sheets, a now-retired emergency room doctor. She’d stopped at the store to pick up supplies after skiing, and wore a bright yellow jacket. When the shooting started, she hid on a bottom shelf among bags of potato chips, lying on her stomach.

“Fortunately many of the potato chips are colored yellow,” she said. “I did just look up, seconds after I hid, and saw the gunman walk past that aisle I was in. I looked away pretty quickly after that. I didn’t want to be seen in any way.”

Within a minute of hiding, Sheets heard a person shot in the aisle next to her, she said.

“I heard someone die — just a little breath of exhalation of someone collapsing and dying, and I smelled blood after that,” she testified.

Alissa shot and killed eight people in 68 seconds, Dougherty said.

“The victims are completely random, but the murders were absolutely planned, deliberate and intentional,” Dougherty told jurors, citing Alissa’s lethality as evidence of his intent: nine of the 10 victims were shot multiple times. No one who was shot survived.

“If he hit the person, he then moved in and executed them by shooting them again and again,” Dougherty said. “Anybody that got hit, he finished them off.”

Dougherty also argued that Alissa’s surrender when police surrounded the building shows his sanity: He put his weapons and ammunition down, stripped down to his underwear and put his hands up, the prosecutor said. Alissa later told mental health evaluators that he’d expected to go to jail and hoped he might die instead of being incarcerated.

The trial comes after years of delays because Alissa was too mentally ill to participate in his own defense — a different question than his mental state during the shooting. The trial will focus on Alissa’s mental condition at the time of the attack, rather than whether or not he carried out the shooting.

Testimony is expected to last several weeks. The trial is being streamed live: Visit this link and select Boulder Courtroom G.

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