Colorado supermarket massacre trial expected to focus on competency

A fence outside a King Soopers store is lined with flowers and a banner reading "Boulder strong."

By Colleen Slevin

Sept. 3, 2024 Updated 3:16 PM PT

DENVER — A man sitting in his van after fixing a coffee machine inside a supermarket in the college town of Boulder, Colo., was the first person killed. In just over a minute, nine more people died in a barrage of gunfire inside and outside the store in 2021 as the shooter targeted and pursued people who were moving.

Survivors fled out of the back of the store. For more than an hour, others hid in shelves, checkout stands and offices.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, then 21, surrendered after being shot in the leg by a police officer in the store, emerging wearing only his underwear and repeatedly asking officers to call his mother. His attorneys don’t dispute he was the shooter.

But why he carried out the mass shooting remains unknown as his trial begins this week. Public questioning of potential jurors began Tuesday, and opening statements are expected before the end of the week.

Alissa is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, 15 counts of attempted murder and other offenses, including having six high-capacity ammunition magazine devices that had been banned in Colorado after previous mass shootings.

The closest thing to a possible motive revealed so far was when a mental health evaluator testified during a competency hearing last year that Alissa said he bought firearms to carry out a mass shooting and suggested that he wanted police to kill him.

Robert Olds, whose 25-year-old niece, Rikki Olds, was the manager Alissa fatally shot at close range near the store’s entrance, plans to sit in the front row throughout the trial.

He has sometimes wished Alissa had just died in the attack. But he has held out hope that he would one day learn why his niece, known for her sense of humor and outgoing personality, and the others were killed. He has become less hopeful of that but is certain Alissa knew what he was doing.

“I hope he goes to prison for the rest of his life, and then he’ll serve the real penalty when he has to meet God and answer for killing 10 people,” Olds said.

The trial is expected to focus largely on Alissa’s mental state at the time of the shooting. He has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers argue he should be acquitted because his mental illness prevented him from being able to tell right from wrong.

The defense argued in a court filing that his relatives said he irrationally believed that the FBI was following him, and that he would talk to himself as if he were talking to someone who was not there.

However, prosecutors point out Alissa had never been treated for mental illness and was able to work up to 60 hours a week leading up to the shooting, something they say would not have been possible for someone severely mentally ill.

Alissa’s trial has been delayed because experts repeatedly found he was not able to understand legal proceedings and help his defense. But in October, after he was forcibly medicated and showed improvement, Judge Ingrid Bakke ruled that he was mentally competent, allowing proceedings to resume.

Prosecutors will have the burden of proving Alissa was sane, attempting to show that he knew what he was doing and intended to kill people in the store.

Authorities have not explained why Alissa bypassed a King Soopers near his home in the Denver suburb of Arvada and drove about 15 miles to the store in Boulder, a city he had never visited before the shooting, according to the defense.

Prosecutors have presented evidence that in the months before the shooting, Alissa had researched things like how to move and shoot with an assault rifle and what kinds of bullets are the most deadly. One court document noted without elaboration that he had searched for information about the “Christ Church attacks,” an apparent reference to the livestreamed shooting attacks by a white nationalist on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people in 2019.

Alissa immigrated from Syria with his family as a toddler. He lived with his family in Arvada, where they owned a restaurant.

The only known legal problem Alissa had before the shooting was his conviction in the assault of a fellow high school student in 2018, according to police documents. A former classmate told the Associated Press that Alissa was also kicked off the wrestling team after yelling that he would kill everyone following a loss in a practice match.

A sister-in-law who lived in Alissa’s home told police that he had been playing with what she thought was a “machine gun” two days before the shooting but that two relatives had taken it away, according to court documents.

Several of Alissa’s relatives are listed as potential witnesses for the defense.

Both sides will rely on experts to testify about his mental health, possibly including videos of their interviews with Alissa, said defense lawyer Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor and University of Denver law professor.

If jurors don’t believe Alissa was legally insane, they could also consider whether his mental illness prevented him from being able to act with deliberation and intent, and find him guilty of second-degree murder instead, she said.

A sanity evaluation by experts at the state mental hospital concluded that the attack would not have happened but for Alissa’s untreated mental illness, according to details provided by the defense in a hearing this spring. Attorney Sam Dunn said Alissa’s schizophrenia includes “auditory hallucinations.”

Olds said he is bracing himself to learn more horrific details about the shooting, including from surveillance video not previously shown in public.

But he said having the trial behind him will help him and many of the victims’ families finally grieve what they’ve lost, he said.

“There’s no such thing as moving on. It’s finding other ways to live without your loved one,” he said.

Slevin writes for the Associated Press.