TEN PEOPLE KILLED IN COLORADO SUPERMARKET MASS SHOOTING
▶ Police charge man with 10 counts of murder after shoppers ran for their lives in Boulder store
Ten people, including a police officer, were killed on Monday in a mass shooting at a supermarket in the US state of Colorado.
Police yesterday said a 21-yearold man was charged with 10 counts of murder.
“This suspect has been identified as Ahmad Alissa, 21,” Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold said.
“He is charged with 10 counts of murder in the first degree and will be shortly transported to Boulder County Jail.”
Police commander Kerry Yamaguchi said officials were still investigating the shootings and did not have details on the gunman’s motive.
One witness said he heard gunshots and saw three people lying face down, two in the King
Soopers supermarket’s car park and one near a doorway.
Video posted on YouTube showed one person on the floor inside the building and two more outside on the ground, but the extent of their injuries was not clear.
Two gunshots can be heard at the start of the video.
One person was taken from the scene to Foothills Hospital in Boulder, said Rich Sheehan, spokesman for Boulder Community Health, which operates the hospital.
Mr Sheehan said they had been told they “would not be receiving any additional patients”.
Law enforcement officers, including Swat teams, gathered outside the supermarket. At least three helicopters landed on its roof.
One witness, Sarah Moonshadow,
told The Denver Post that two shots rang out just after she and her son, Nicolas Edwards, finished shopping. She said she told her son to get down and then “we just ran”.
Once they were outside, she said they saw a body in the car park. “I knew we couldn’t do anything for the guy,” Mr Edwards said. “We had to go.”
Another witness, James Bentz, told the Post that he was in the meat section when he heard what he thought was a misfire, then a series of pops.
“I was then at the front of a stampede,” he said.
Mr Bentz said he jumped off a loading dock at the back to escape and that younger people were helping older shoppers to get away.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis said his heart was breaking as he watched “this unspeakable event unfold in our Boulder community”.
Boulder Police Department told people to shelter in place amid a separate report of an “armed, dangerous individual” about five kilometres from the supermarket shooting.
They said they were investigating if that report was related to the gunfire at the King Soopers supermarket but later said it was not.
The FBI said it was helping in the investigation at the request of Boulder Police.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted that US President Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting.
The killings come just a month after Mr Biden called on the US Congress to enact “commonsense” gun-law reforms.
This is not the first shooting to hit Colorado. The western state was the scene of two of the most well-known and deadly shootings in the US: the Columbine High School massacre and the Aurora cinema shooting in 1999 and 2012 respectively.