Boulder King Soopers Shooting Trial Day 1: Prosecutors say suspect knew what he was doing; defense describes long struggle with mental illness

CPR is covering the King Soopers shooting trial. You can read our explainer of the case here. You can read previous coverage of the case here.

The man accused of killing 10 people at a Boulder grocery store hunted down his terrified victims in the parking lot and inside the store as they ran from him, the district attorney told a Boulder jury on Thursday. 

For months, he studied previous mass shootings while purchasing weapons and bomb-making materials, prosecutors said. And he turned himself into a proficient marksman. Everyone he targeted in the King Soopers was killed. He left no injured behind.

Ahmad Alissa, 25, faces 55 felony charges and has been in custody since the shootings on March 22, 2021.

In his opening statement in the case against the 25-year-old, Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty used the word “intent” or “intentional” 25 times in the first half of his presentation to the jury. 

That is because Alissa’s public defenders aren’t trying to convince anyone that he didn’t commit the crime. Rather, they are arguing he was clinically insane on the day he did it and shouldn’t be sent to prison. 

Alissa pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In Colorado, the law requires that in order to secure that verdict a defendant must be so mentally “defective” in mind that they are unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

Dougherty showed a number of still camera images of the shooter inside the store pointing an automatic rifle at cowering people in their last moments.

“You’re here because the person who killed these 10 people in cold blood is sitting at that table right there,” Dougherty said, pointing at Alissa, sitting next to his attorneys in a white striped dress shirt. “Yes, he was able to form intent and yes he could distinguish between right and wrong.”

Public defenders representing the defendant, though, attempted to portray an increasingly messy struggle with schizophrenia Alissa was afflicted with from his late teens until the 2021 shooting. 

That included delusions, auditory hallucinations, voices in his head, paranoia, disorganized thinking and reduced emotional expression, his lawyers said. 

In the months ahead of the shooting, Alissa withdrew from his family and when he did engage, he told them he could see people who weren’t there, defense attorneys said. His lawyers also said that Alissa never saw a doctor and that his illness was untreated.

“Don’t let the grief and suffering control your decisions in this case,” Samuel Dunn, a lawyer for Alissa, pleaded to the jury in his opening statements. “We understand what toll this could take on every single one of you, that is a difficult thing to square in a case like this, but that’s the oath you swore. You must use your evidence and common sense and you must apply the law.”

Dunn said Alissa had increasingly shrunk his world socially, including within his own home, where he lived with his family. 

Alissa’s mental illness was affecting every aspect of his life and no one was taking care of him, Dunn said. 

Alissa’s parents are immigrants from Syria and Denver-area restaurant owners. Alissa arrived in the United States at a very young age and graduated from Arvada West High School.

Dunn said Alissa’s father thought that he was “possessed” but didn’t get him help for his severe delusions.

In the courtroom on Thursday, victims packed four rows of seats behind the prosecution's table and frequently cried during Dougherty’s opening statements —  particularly when he went through a minute-by-minute account of how and when the victims died in the parking lot and inside the store.

Those people were Neven Stanisic, 23; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Denny Stong, 20; Teri Leiker, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; Jody Waters, 65; Rikki Olds, 25, and Boulder police officer Eric Talley, 51.

The defendant, who has been forcibly medicated for more than two years at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, sat next to his attorneys in dresswear and glasses. He sat hunched over in glasses, played with his beard and chewed his fingernails while he listened.

The mostly white jury, 15 people, more women than men, listened to the arguments without much emotion.

Prosecutors have, throughout years of hearings on this case, acknowledged that Alissa has schizophrenia. 

But to jurors on Thursday, Dougherty made the case that his diagnosis didn’t meet the threshold of clinically insane. He told jurors that Alissa worked 10 hours a day, six days a week at family restaurants and drove every day. He worked at a family restaurant the day before the shooting.

Dougherty also said he believed that the 25-year-old could have been “malingering” or faking his mental illness. 

At several points during his detailed account of that day, Dougherty stopped to tell the jurors that Alissa was acting normally throughout the shootings — including the moments before he left his house to pack up his car to head to Boulder.

“What you’re not going to see … is that the person looking up at the sky and ranting or hallucinating or staggering around because he’s confused,” Dougherty said, previewing ring camera footage from a neighbor’s house. “You’re going to see him heading to the place with the exact intent that he’s about to exercise in brutal fashion.”

He also pointed out that when Alissa was detained by police inside the store, he said, “I surrender, I give up.”

“That's how you're going to answer the question if he knows the difference between wrong and right,” Dougherty said.

At that moment, police said Alissa disrobed inside the store down to his underwear. Dougherty said on Thursday that was so police could tell he had dropped his weapons and was unarmed.

“They hear him say, I’ve stripped down to my underwear. What else do you want me to do?” Dougherty said. “There’s no hallucinating. There’s no delusion, there’s no confusion. There’s no question. The police are there and he’s trying to surrender to the authorities for the mass murder that he committed.”

Dougherty also pointed out that in the three years since the shooting, there hasn’t been any doctor who has said that he was insane that day. He showed a brief exchange between a doctor and the defendant while he was hospitalized.

“Did you think it was good behavior to engage in?” the doctor asked.

“No,” Alissa replied. 

Dougherty faced the jury. 

“He certainly knew the difference between wrong and right,” he said.

Dougherty said starting on Jan. 1, 2021, Alissa looked at 6,000 images of guns, ammunition, equipment and bomb-making materials on his computer and devices. He planned and prepared, he said, researching prior mass shootings, including one in New Zealand. 

“So January 1, I imagine some of the victims woke up saying, I'm going to go to the gym more. I'm going to read more. I'm going to spend more time with my loved ones,” Dougherty said to the jury. “He woke up January 1st and started planning a mass shooting.”

Alissa purchased assault weapons in January and March of 2021, ahead of the shooting. 

Some new details emerged in opening statements that the public didn’t know, including the confounding reason Alissa drove from Arvada all the way to Boulder, passing several grocery stores along the way, to commit the massacre. 

While those answers weren’t fully disclosed Thursday, Dougherty said through phone evidence that the man targeted Boulder and that searches on his phone for “Boulder” ticked up in the weeks before the shooting.

“And he’s going to pull into the first big place in south Boulder that he comes across on March 22,” Dougherty said. “And he  is going to kill 10 people and try to kill 25.”

Alissa’s attorneys countered that the man’s motivation “was his own insanity.”

“No verdict in this case is going to bring back the lives lost. That is a sad and sobering reality. No verdict in this case will stop the voices in Ahmad Alissa’s head,” Dunn told the jury. “But by returning a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, that will ensure a further injustice is not done.”

Dunn also tried to appeal to the sympathies of the jurors, all of whom had just seen and heard almost two hours of arguments about the victims and the lives they led and how abruptly and tragically they were cut short by Alissa’s actions.

“There has been enough suffering,” Dunn said. “Don’t compound the suffering with injustice. Find Ahmad Alissa insane, as he was.”