Alleged mass shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa has been booked into the Boulder County Jail on 10 counts of first-degree murder.
The 21-year-old was processed by jail personnel after initially receiving treatment for an injured leg—an apparent result of a firefight with law enforcement on Monday afternoon.
Boulder Police and investigators have released scant little information about the highly-publicized mass shooting at the King Soopers grocery store in the Table Mesa Shopping Center that occurred yesterday in the typically sleepy college town.
Ten people are now dead: Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowika, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; Jody Waters, 65; and Eric Talley, 51, a member of the Boulder Police Department who was among the first to respond to what Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold termed a “barrage” of 911 calls about the shooting.
Alissa was taken out of the store by authorities on Monday afternoon wearing just his underwear.
Police say he came to the supermarket equipped in tactical gear including a green tactical vest, a rifle similar to an AR-15, a semiautomatic handgun, a pair of jeans and a dark, long-sleeved shirt.
According to the Daily Beast, Alissa’s brother described him as “very anti-social” and said he complained of “being chased, [that] someone is behind him, someone is looking for him,” often during high school.
“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Ali Aliwi Alissa told the outlet. “The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school. He was like an outgoing kid, but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social.”
The brother stressed that the shooting was “not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.”
According to court documents obtained by local Fox affiliate KDVR, the suspect pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault in 2018 after “cold clocking” another student in a classroom because the other student “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier.”
A student at Arvada West High, the suspect was on the school’s wrestling team. In a Facebook page attributed to him but quickly taken down following the incident, Alissa described himself as “born in Syria 1999 came to the USA in 2002. I like wrestling and informational documentaries that’s me.”
Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty noted that Alissa has “lived most of his life in the United States.”
Local CBS affiliate KCNC reported on Tuesday that “[i]nvestigators who searched the suspect’s home on Monday spoke to a woman who identified herself as his sister-in-law. She told police it the suspect was seen playing with a gun she thought looked like a ‘machine gun’ about two days ago. She said she thought he still had access to the gun.”
According to an arrest affidavit released by the police on Tuesday, Alissa recently purchased a Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic pistol just last week. It is currently unclear whether or not that weapon was used during the attack because police have remained tight-lipped in both charging documents and in their public statements thus far.
Dougherty has refused to comment on a possible motive and police are reportedly still attempting to obtain statements from the suspect.
Alissa has also apparently remained quiet and did not immediately answer questions “though he asked to speak to his mother,” the affidavit says.
[image via Boulder Police Department]
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