‘Tragedy And A Nightmare For Boulder’: 10 Killed In Colorado Shooting

A 21-year-old man was arrested and faces 10 counts of murder after he allegedly used an assault rifle to attack shoppers on Monday at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

Police have identified the suspected shooter as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the Associated Press reported.

Alissa, who is from Arvada, a Denver suburb, was expected to be booked into the Boulder County Jail after being treated for a gunshot wound to the leg he sustained during the assault.

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said authorities have not yet determined a motive for what happened, according to the AP.

“This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder County,” Dougherty said. “These were people going about their day, doing their shopping. I promise the victims and the people of the state of Colorado that we will secure justice.”

The Tragedy Claimed 10 Lives

Authorities have identified the victims of the mass killing 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

Jody Waters, 65

Officer Eric Talley, 51

How the Deadly Attack Unfolded

In an affidavit from the Boulder police obtained by The Washington Post, Detective Sarah Cantu said authorities were alerted to shots fired at the King Soopers supermarket on Monday, March 22, at about 2:40 p.m.

Ryan Borowski, who was in the store at the time, told CNN that when he first heard shots fired he thought that “maybe somebody dropped something.”

“The second shot came. And then after that, it was, 'Bam, bam, bam!' And I was running,” Borowski recalled of escaping out the back of the building with around a dozen other people. “The employees looked at us with shock. We had to tell them, 'Gun, gun, gun! Run, run, run!' And they made sure we didn't go down any dead ends.”

“Boulder feels like a bubble, and the bubble burst,” Borowski noted. “This feels like the safest spot in America, and I just nearly got killed for getting a soda and a bag of chips.”

The affidavit stated a wounded Alissa, who purchased the Ruger AR-556 pistol six days prior to the shooting, surrendered to a SWAT team outside the supermarket. Detective Cantu wrote Alissa allegedly refused to answer tactical teams’ demands to know if there were other gunmen inside the store but he asked to speak with his mother.

Who Is The Suspected Shooter?

Alissa graduated from Arvada West High School in 2018, and classmates claimed he seemed paranoid and was short-tempered, The Denver Post reported.

“He was kind of scary to be around,” said Dayton Marvel, one of Alissa’s wrestling teammates. “His senior year, during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was like going to kill everybody. Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it.”

“I just know he was a pretty cool kid until something made him mad, and then whatever made him mad, he went over the edge — way too far,” Marvel noted.

Angel Hernandez, another wrestler who knew Alissa, told the newspaper the suspect “was always talking about [how] people were looking at him and there was no one ever where he was pointing people out” and “we always thought he was messing around with us or something.”

“The sad thing about it is that if you really were to get to know him, he was a good guy,” Hernandez said. “Whenever you went up to him, he was always so joyful and so nice. But you could tell there was a dark side in him. If he did get ticked off about something, within a split second, it was like if something takes over, like a demon. He’d just unleash all his anger.”

The Boulder attack is the country’s seventh mass killing in the past seven days, according to CNN.