A man leaves flowers
on a police cruiser parked outside the Boulder, Colo., Police Department in honor of police officer Eric Talley, who was killed Monday in the mass shooting at a King Soopers grocery store that left nine other people dead. The suspected shooter, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, purchased a rifle only six days before the attack, authorities said.
BOULDER, Colo. — The suspect accused of opening fire in a crowded Colorado supermarket was a 21-year-old man who purchased a rifle less than a week earlier, authorities said Tuesday, a day after the attack that killed 10 people, including a police officer.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa bought the weapon March 16, just six days before the attack at a King Soopers store in Boulder, according to an arrest affidavit. It was not immediately known where the gun was purchased.
Alissa, who is from the Denver suburb of Arvada, was booked into the county jail Tuesday on murder charges after being treated at a hospital.
Investigators have not established a motive, but they believe Alissa was the only shooter, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.
A law enforcement official briefed on the shooting said the suspect’s family told investigators that they believed Alissa was suffering some type of mental illness, including delusions. 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. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The attack was the nation’s deadliest mass shooting since a 2019 assault on a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a gunman killed 22 people in a rampage that police said targeted Mexicans.
In Washington, President Joe Biden called on Congress to tighten the nation’s gun laws.
“Ten lives have been lost, and more families have been shattered by gun violence in the state of Colorado,” Biden said at the White House.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer vowed to push forward two Housepassed bills to require expanded background checks for gun buyers. Biden supports the measures, but they face a tougher route to passage in a closely divided Senate with a slim Democratic majority.
The shooting came 10 days after a judge blocked a ban on assault rifles passed by the city of Boulder in 2018. That ordinance and another banning large-capacity magazines came after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 people dead.
A lawsuit challenging the bans was filed quickly, backed by the National Rifle Association. The judge struck down the ordinance under a Colorado law that blocks cities from making their own rules about guns.
Supermarket employees told investigators that Alissa shot an elderly man multiple times outside the Boulder grocery store before going inside, according to the affidavit. Another person was found shot in a vehicle next to a car registered to the suspect’s brother.
After the shooting, detectives went to Alissa’s home and found his sister-in-law, who told them he had been playing around with a weapon she thought looked like a “machine gun,” about two days earlier, the document said.
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, then 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 read. Alissa complained that the student had made fun of him and called him “racial names” weeks earlier, according to the affidavit. He was sentenced to probation and community service.
The slain officer was identified as Eric Talley, 51, who had been with the force since 2010. He was the first to arrive after responding to a call about shots fired and someone carrying a gun, authorities said.
Homer Talley, 74, described his son as a devoted father who “knew the Lord.” He had seven children, ages 7-20.
“We know where he is,” his father said. “He loved his family more than anything. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He was afraid of putting them through it.”
The other dead ranged in age from 20-65. They were identified as Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jodi Waters, 65.
Leiker, Olds and Stong worked at the supermarket, said former co-worker Jordan Sailas.
Monday’s attack was the seventh mass killing this year in the U.S., after the March 16 shooting that left eight people dead at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.