Shooting suspect said to be prone to rage, delusions
BOULDER, Colo. — Law enforcement officials and former associates of a 21yearold man accused of killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket have described the suspect as prone to sudden rage — and disclosed that he was suspended from high school several years ago for a sudden attack on a classmate that left the student bloodied.
Ahmad al Aliwi Alissa, from the Denver suburb of Arvada, was booked into jail Tuesday on murder charges a day after the attack at a King Soopers grocery in Boulder and is scheduled to make his first court appearance Thursday.
He will be advised at the hearing of the charges he faces and his rights as a defendant. He would not be asked to enter a plea until later in the judicial process.
Alissa bought a Ruger AR556 pistol — which is technically a pistol though it resembles an AR15 rifle with a slightly shorter stock — on March 16, six days before the attack, according to an arrest affidavit. Investigators have not established a motive, said Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty.
Authorities have not disclosed where the gun was purchased. An AR15style gun was recovered inside the supermarket and is believed to have been used in the shooting, said a law enforcement official briefed on the shooting who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A green tactical vest and a handgun were also recovered inside the grocery store after the suspect removed most of his clothing shortly before he was taken into custody.
The law enforcement official who was briefed on the shooting said the suspect’s family told investigators that Alissa had delusions and that they believed he was suffering some type of mental illness. The relatives described times when Alissa told them people were following or chasing him, which they said may have contributed to the violence, the official said.
After the shooting, detectives went to Alissa’s home and found his sisterinlaw, who told them that he had been playing with a weapon she thought looked like a “machine gun” about two days earlier, according to an arrest affidavit.
No one answered the door Tuesday at the Arvada home believed to be owned by the suspect’s father. The twostory house with a threecar garage sits in a relatively new middleand upperclass neighborhood.
When he was a high school senior in 2018, Alissa was found guilty of assaulting a fellow student in class after knocking him to the floor, climbing on top of him and punching him in the head several times, according to a police affidavit.
Alissa “got up in classroom, walked over to the victim & ‘cold cocked’ him in the head,” the affidavit said.
The dead were identified as Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Boulder police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Teri Leiker, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jodi Waters, 65.