BOULDER SALUTES SLAIN HEROIC COP
Tears for Talley, who tried to stop massacre
The streets of Boulder, Colo., were lined Wednesday with mourners who saluted and wept at a procession honoring slain Officer Eric Talley, the hero cop gunned down when he raced into a crowded supermarket during a bloody massacre.
First responders flashed their lights and bowed their heads as the black hearse carrying Talley’s body traveled from the coroner’s office to a funeral home in Aurora so relatives, including Talley’s wife and seven children, could lay him to rest.
The suspected gunman behind the mass shooting at the King Soopers supermarket, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, was due to make his first court appearance Thursday morning with officials releasing an access code for people to watch the hearing online.
Alissa, 21, is facing 10 counts of first-degree murder for his senseless slaughter of 10 innocent victims at the Boulder supermarket.
Meanwhile, more chilling details about Alissa’s background surfaced Wednesday.
Former teammates on his wrestling squad at Arvada West High School described Alissa as alarmingly volatile. One recalled to the Denver Post an incident
in which Alissa allegedly threatened mass murder because he didn’t like the outcome of a bout.
“His senior year, during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was, like, going to kill everybody,” Dayton Marvel told the newspaper.
“Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it,” Marvel said, describing Alissa as “kind of scary to be around.”
A different ex-teammate also
recalled how Alissa allegedly got into a fight with another wrestler after losing a match.
“He was always talking about [how] people were looking at him and there was no one ever where he was pointing people out,” Angel Hernandez told the Denver Post. “We always thought he was messing around with us or something.”
Alissa was one of 11 siblings in a family that emigrated from Raqqa, Syria, when he was still a toddler, according to The Washington Post.
He frequently discussed his Muslim religion on his now deactivated Facebook page but did not express “any radical or extremist view,” according to the SITE Intelligence Group.
Alissa reportedly worked at his family’s Arvada restaurant, the Sultan Grill, and posted “#NeedAGirlfriend” online in September 2019. A cousin told the Washington Post that his parents were trying to find a wife for him without success.
Alissa’s family told investigators they believed he was suffering some type of mental illness, including delusions, a law enforcement source told The Associated Press.
Authorities continued their hunt for a motive Wednesday, a process expected to include a search of Alissa’s digital devices and social media.
In an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by the Daily News, investigators said Alissa purchased a Ruger AR556 semiautomatic pistol — essentially a shortened version of a rifle — on March 16.
The attack, which followed a week after a gunman killed eight people including six Asian women at three spas in the Atlanta metro area, was the nation’s deadliest mass shooting since a 2019 assault on a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, killed 22 people.
The suspected gunman in the Texas attack, 21, allegedly wrote a manifesto with white nationalist themes.