There’s only one word to describe Rikki Olds: bubbly.
The 25-year-old supermarket manager was genuinely friendly and had a laugh that could fill the room, friends and family said. Her favorite color was black, but she also loved cats, unicorns and octopuses. And like a true Coloradan, she loved to hike.
“She was a beautiful person,” her grandmother Jeanette Olds said. “She was a beautiful soul.”
Olds was her first grandchild and she helped raise her.
“We’re all taking it pretty hard,” Jeanette Olds said. “She was a big part of our life here.”
Olds was one of 10 people killed Monday after a man walked into the King Soopers grocery store at 3600 Table Mesa Drive in Boulder and began shooting. The suspect now faces 10 counts of first-degree murder.
An employee at the store, Olds was born on July 28, 1995, in Louisville and grew up in Lafayette.
Her family and friends said Olds was a hard worker and loved her job at King Soopers. She graduated from Centaurus High School in 2013 and briefly took classes at Front Range Community College after considering nursing as a career.
“She gave her life to that company,” said Brittany Tubbs, a roommate and former co-worker, adding that Olds used to make her coworkers laugh when she knew they were frustrated.
“She had one of the bubbliest personalities that anyone could have,” Tubbs said, adding, “She literally made friends no matter where she was.”
Olds was a front-end manager at King Soopers, according to her aunt Lori Olds, who said the family was notified around 3 a.m. Tuesday, more than 12 hours after the shooting, that her niece was dead.
“Thank you everyone for all your prayers but the Lord got a beautiful young angel yesterday at the hands of a deranged monster,” Lori Olds wrote in a public post on her Facebook page Tuesday morning.
Olds was a King Soopers employee at least since February 2016, when she began working as a deli clerk at one of the supermarket’s stores in Louisville. At the time, she also joined Local 7 of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which she was a member of until December 2018, said Kyle Welsh, retail director for the union.
He said Olds also worked for a period at a King Soopers in Arvada before returning to the Louisville store. She eventually became an assistant deli manager, and then, a deli manager for the supermarket, he said. She was not part of the union during her time at the Boulder store.
“She was a go-getter; she did well within the company,” said Erik Cornell, a representative for the union who first meet Olds when she worked at the Arvada location. “Everyone definitely thought highly of her and had good things to say.”
When Olds clocked in for work, her laugh would reach “all the way across the store” where Darcey Lopez, 46, worked in the cheese section of the deli.
The two first met when they worked at the King Soopers store in Louisville and ended up working together again at the Boulder location.
Lopez said Olds was in a training program with the company that eventually would have qualified her to become a store manager or to travel to help other stores in the region.
Lopez saw Olds working in the store before the shooting began, when Olds showed off her new tattoo. It wasn’t until later, when Lopez was at the police station, that she was told by another coworker that Olds had been shot.
“She was a shining star,” Lopez said. “She was at the top of her game when she died.”
Tubbs also first met Olds at the King Soopers in Louisville in 2016. The two were coworkers, but soon became friends. The two lived together in Firestone and Olds was going to be maid of honor in Tubbs’ upcoming wedding.
“She was supposed to help me plan out my wedding,” Tubbs, 27, said. “I just know that if I ever have a child and it is a girl, I’m naming her ‘Rikki’ — or a boy.”
