Man who livestreamed Colorado store shooting response acquitted of obstruction
BOULDER, Colo. — Dean Schiller had just left a Colorado supermarket after shopping last year when he heard gunshots and saw three people lying face-down. The independent part-time journalist began livestreaming the incident on his YouTube channel before officers arrived, and later refused dozens of police orders to move away.
He learned later that a friend who worked at the supermarket was one of the 10 people killed inside the King Soopers store in the college town of Boulder. The suspect, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 23, is accused of killing customers, workers and a police officer who rushed into the store to try to stop the March 22, 2021, attack.
On Wednesday, jurors acquitted Schiller of obstructing police, a misdemeanor, after Schiller’s lawyers argued that being a temporary distraction does not equate to keeping police from doing their job.
In closing arguments, defense attorney Tiffany Drahota told jurors that the case was not about being polite to the police, about the courage shown by officers that day or about honoring the lives of those lost in the shooting.
“You can mourn the victims of the King Soopers shooting and still find Dean Schiller not guilty,” she said.
Prosecutors argued that Schiller ignored 60 commands to move farther away from the store over 1½ hours, becoming a distraction from police efforts to save lives and secure the crime scene. Deputy Dist. Atty. Myra Gottl said his priority was to keep streaming to gain more viewers on his channel.
An LAPD officer is under investigation for arresting a teenager who was filming officers as they detained a friend.
“It was a calculated decision to get attention and he liked it,” she said in closing arguments at the trial, which opened Tuesday.
Clips of the video during Schiller’s trial showed several officers telling him to move back for his safety and for officers’ safety. At one point he does get behind the police tape eventually strung around the store but refuses to cross to the other side of the street. He also curses at some officers and makes an obscene gesture when he tries to gain access from a different direction.
While Drahota pointed out that Schiller was not arrested, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ryan Day said a commander had testified that police did not have time to do that and to keep him secure while responding to the shooting.
After the verdict, Schiller, who has often recorded police activity in Boulder, said he felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest. He said his prosecution made it hard to fully mourn the loss of his friend, Denny Stong, who worked at the store and who lagged behind him in leaving because he knew so many people there. He said he was responding to a public need in livestreaming the shooting response.
A shooting at a Colorado supermarket Monday killed 10 people, including a police officer, and a suspect was in custody, authorities said.
“It wasn’t that I was creating something. It was real news, and I needed to show people as long as they wanted to watch,” said Schiller. He added that his heart has not been into filming as much since losing Stong and being prosecuted.
In a statement, Dist. Atty. Michael Dougherty said that police responded to “an incredibly challenging and difficult crime scene” and said his office prosecutes those who obstruct and interfere with law enforcement’s responses to crises.
Schiller’s case is part of a larger judicial reckoning taking place around the U.S. about how far people can go in filming police while officers work.
In July, a Denver-based U.S. appeals court that oversees four Western and two Midwestern states became the seventh appellate court to rule that people have a right, protected by the 1st Amendment, to film police while they work. In September, a federal judge blocked enforcement of a new Arizona law restricting how the public and journalists can film police.
The prosecution of the man charged in the supermarket shooting has been on hold since December after a judge ruled that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial. Alissa is being treated at a state mental hospital. During a hearing last week, Judge Ingrid Bakke said there was still a substantial probability that he could be treated to be made competent in the “foreseeable future,” an outlook she first detailed in March.
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