Supermarket shooting spree
Hero policeman among 10 dead in US
A HEROIC policeman died after he ‘charged into the line of fire’ to confront a gunman who killed ten at a US supermarket.
Eric Talley was the first officer to arrive when suspect Ahmad Alissa allegedly began firing at a store in Colorado.
He was a married father-of-seven who left a job in IT to join the police because he ‘felt a higher calling’, said police chief Maris Herold yesterday.
Alissa, 21, is accused of using an AR-15-style assault rifle to murder ten people at the King Soopers store in Boulder. He bought the weapon six days before the attack, said police. The victims were aged between 20 and 65 and included the supermarket’s manager Rikki Olds, 25. Her aunt, Lori Olds, said of the suspect: ‘May his rotten a** fry and burn in hell.’
Alissa, who was born in Syria but raised in the US, was seen being led away from the scene shirtless and handcuffed with blood pouring from his right leg. He was charged with ten counts of firstdegree murder and was in hospital where his condition was ‘stable’.
The shooting was less than a week after eight people were killed by a gunman in Atlanta, Georgia.
President Joe Biden yesterday called for a ban on assault weapons and said Mr Talley, 51, was the ‘definition of an American hero’.
Shoppers at the store ran for cover after they heard gunfire. Ryan Borowski, 37, said: ‘It was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! Everybody was running’.
Dozens of armed officers arrived at the supermarket and were met with gunfire from the suspect. District Attorney Michael Dougherty said Mr Talley ‘died charging into the line of fire to save people who were trying to live their lives’.
The officer’s friend Jeremy Herko said Mr Talley, whose children are aged between five to 18, became an officer after a friend died in a car crash involving a drunk driver.
His father said last night that the policeman was looking for a job away from the front line. ‘He didn’t want to put his family through something like this,’ Homer Talley said. The suspect’s brother, Ali Aliwi Alissa, told the Daily Beast website that the shooting was ‘not a political statement, it’s mental illness’. Prosecutors have not confirmed a motive.
Colorado has suffered some of the nation’s worst mass shootings including the cinema attack in 2012 during a screening of a Batman film that left 12 dead. Boulder introduced a ban on assault weapons in 2018 – but it was overturned by a court last week after pro-gun activists, supported by the National Rifle Association, sued.