All was quiet in the Boulder courtroom as the King Soopers mass shooting trial, three years in the making, finally began.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was the sole gunman in the killing spree that killed 10 people on March 22, 2021: Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; Rikki Olds, 25; Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Boulder police officer Eric Talley, 51; Teri Leiker, 51; and Jody Waters, 65. Alissa faces 10 first-degree murder charges, along with multiple counts of attempted murder, assault and weapons offenses.
This trial is focused not on guilt, but on the role of Alissa’s mental health in determining his legal responsibility.
Read: BRL’s updated, ongoing coverage of the trial, starting on Aug. 26, 2024.
Alissa was brought into the courtroom Thursday morning, Sept. 4, by two officers who seemed to shrink his already short but stocky appearance. Wearing a striped button-up shirt and small black plastic-rimmed glasses, Alissa had a fidgety energy about him. He looked around the room, eyebrows twitching up and down seemingly uncontrollably, picking at his beard, swiveling his chair and speaking quietly with his team.
Alissa is not the average criminal defendant. Doctors agree he has a severe case of “treatment-resistant” schizophrenia, which his attorney says has caused paranoid delusions, auditory hallucinations and other symptoms. In his opening statement, the soft-spoken defense attorney Sam Dunn presented a video clip of Alissa during one of the insanity evaluations earlier this year. Alissa cocked his head to look at the big screen on the wall above him. From just behind his balding head, it almost seemed like he was part of the audience, curiously watching this man on camera referring to the voices in his head. At one point, a witness was asked to tell us if Mr. Alissa was in the courtroom. The witness pointed and described Alissa’s shirt, and Alissa looked down at himself as if to see if the witness was describing him.
The trial officially began with District Attorney Michael Dougherty. He seized the opportunity to use the stage to summon emotion from the jury by detailing the heinous attack Alissa committed. He spoke about each victim, one by one, in their order of death, showing their faces and personalities through pictures. The Kleenex came out. Although it took a while to detail what happened, Dougherty pointed out that the first eight killings were done in just 68 seconds.
The defense objected twice during his presentation to the use of phrases that were said to be meant to inflame the jury’s passions. The judge, Ingrid Bakke, agreed. They also filed a motion for a mistrial at one point after Judge Baake held a short off-the-record conference with the parties regarding connecting each witness with one of the 55 charges. The judge corrected the record and denied the request.
Dougherty went about establishing the prosecution’s case by pointing to a few key points they’ll be focusing on. The first was that Alissa had planned the mass murder starting in January 2021, months before, when he was researching weapons, ammo and gear. Records show he looked at 6,000 pictures of guns and 400 pictures of bomb-making materials on his phone. He researched things like, “Are 30-round magazines legal in the state of Colorado?” (Answer: no, but that didn’t stop him from buying them) and details about other mass shootings, including the Walmart shooting in El Paso, Texas. This premeditation, argued the prosecution, is proof that he wasn’t having a mental break, but was meticulously preparing for what was to come.
Another point Dougherty wanted to make was that Alissa knew right from wrong that day because of who he chose to kill and who he chose not to. An elderly man who didn’t realize what was happening during the incident, who just kept pushing his cart through the aisle, was confronted by Alissa, but his life was spared — twice. The same goes for another man who is mentally disabled and was confused to see a dead body on the ground when he came into the store from gathering carts in the parking lot. Alissa encountered him more than once and chose not to shoot. However, when the first policemen arrived, including the fallen Officer Talley, he hid and shot.
Dunn followed with the defense’s opening statement, which focused on presenting Alissa’s humanity and his mental health history. He had no documented issues before he finally was sent to the hospital in December 2021, after apparently demanding he be put in isolation while in jail. Dunn addressed the question as to why he had not been treated for his condition, even though his family members say he showed signs of withdrawal and hallucinations. At one point, his father found him quietly in the living room at 3 a.m. When asked what he was doing, Alissa asked his dad if he’d seen the man in the bathroom. No one was there. According to Dunn, Alissa wasn’t taken to a doctor because they believed his son was possessed by a demon. It was a supernatural phenomenon, not a mental health condition that could be cured by a doctor.
Throughout his presentation, Dunn was looking to show that although schizophrenic people are not necessarily insane, Alissa was influenced by the world of voices and delusions in his head, not reality, and that no weight should be placed on his lack of diagnosis before the shootings.
The second half of the day consisted of a number of witnesses who were at King Soopers during the attack. One had hidden on a shelf of chips, concealed by her yellow jacket that matched the bags. Another hid behind trash cans, one escaped out the back, and all of them saw or heard people die. Logan Smith was working that day and went back into the store to usher people out after witnessing two people get shot outside. As he was calling 911, his best friend, Rikki Olds, was shot down right beside him.
The defense isn’t pushing back on the charges in the typical way, so they aren’t compelled to call the witness testimonies into question so far. Things moved quickly today with no cross-examinations. But as witnesses are called who can speak to the potential mental health issues leading up to the day, cross-examination will not be passed up.
Boulder Reporting provided daily coverage of the King Soopers trial. Find our week one coverage here. Follow week two’s coverage here. Week three is here. Week four is here.
Another “I’m crazy” defense, despite facts he was sane enough to plan the whole massacre and travel to the target. Drawing and quartering in public would be too good for this monster.