Editor’s note: The following story recounts events of a mass shooting and may be disturbing to some readers. Discretion is advised.
A gunman was roaming the grocery store, chasing down and killing anyone who was trying to get away when the assistant manager of the deli had an urgent, selfless impulse.
He needed to get as many people out of the store as possible.
Chris Tatum, now 27, was working behind the hot bar on March 22, 2021, at the south Boulder King Soopers grocery store on Table Mesa Drive. He’d been working there since 2018 and was prepping pizzas and chicken for the typical after-school, after-work rush.
When the shooting started, Tatum said he didn’t want to believe the worst. But when it became clear that people were panicking, ducking for cover, he told all of his colleagues working behind the deli counter to hide. Then, he went over to the loudspeaker and paged, “Active shooter! Active shooter, get out, get out, active shooter!”
Tatum’s moments of bravery included not only paging loudly that people needed to get out of the store but also picking a 76-year-old woman up off the floor who had fallen face down and broken her back. He also went back into the store four times to evacuate as many customers and employees hiding in bathrooms and behind displays out emergency exits and the back door so they could escape.
For a couple of moments, Tatum wondered to himself why he kept going back into the store.
“Why am I in here?” he told a jury in Boulder this week. “I wanted to make sure people were OK, wanting to not leave anybody behind and I didn't want to leave anybody in there.”
Tatum’s story is just one of many remarkable tales of heroism and fearlessness among civilians and law enforcement in the darkest minutes of a mass shooting that emerged in the first week of trial for the alleged gunman accused of killing 10 people at the store three years ago.
Prosecutors have called dozens of witnesses, customers, law enforcement officers and King Soopers employees. They have all recounted what they did and how they tried to help amid utter panic, confusion and horror.
Many, without a thought, just ran out of the store any way possible, which is what the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommends as the first course of action in the event of a mass shooting. Others hid — the second recommended course of action.
Some people though, both those paid to protect the public and those who aren’t, shoved aside instincts of self-preservation and carried out acts of heroism in trying to save other people’s lives.
Logan Smith, an employee working at the Starbucks inside the store, initially got out but decided to go back in for an employee who was paralyzed with panic and wasn’t able to move. He huddled with her under the coffee counter by the trash cans for almost an hour.
One University of Colorado police officer, Brandon Braun, initially thought he was shot in the face because glass shattered into his face and he temporarily lost his hearing. He spit up glass. Then he went on to help 30 distraught people huddled in the back of the store out to safety at a pizza place in the same strip mall. He wasn’t wearing a ballistic vest at the time in the store because he didn’t have one immediately available.
A mother and her 21-year-old son buying strawberries at the self-checkout huddled on the floor. The mother, Sarah Moonshadow, listened for the gunman and watched him carefully. When she saw that he bumped the barrel of his weapon on a COVID-19 plexiglass barrier, she yelled at her son to run. They both narrowly escaped the store, gunfire ringing behind them.
Richard Steidell, another Boulder police officer, shot the gunman in the leg down a grocery store aisle while lying on a glass-strewn floor. Then, Steidell actually commandeered an RTD bus with passengers in it so that victims and survivors inside the store could get away from the vicinity as quickly as possible.
“Let me ask you this,” said Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty, addressing Logan Smith, who was working at the Starbucks at the time with another colleague named Helen. “Why was the reason you went back in the store at that point?”
“Honestly,” Smith said. “For Helen, for my other coworkers. I wanted to usher who I could usher out and my mindset and how I was going to react pretty much adjusted when I came in and saw Helen standing there motionless … Helen was frozen in place and I knew that I wasn’t going to leave, I wasn’t going to leave her. I wasn’t going to escape the store. We buried ourselves behind the trash cans.”
Eric Talley was a 51-year-old Boulder police officer and father of seven who lost his life inside the store that day.
Video played to the jury from Talley’s dashboard camera showed an urgent Talley jumping inside his patrol car from the police station, lights and sirens blazing. He yelled to himself at the cars not getting out of his way as he made his way to the grocery store, dodging them by driving on the shoulders of roads and Highway U.S. 36. He screeched up to the store on Table Mesa Drive. Two bodies could be seen lying on the ground outside in the parking lot.
He didn’t hesitate.
Talley swung open his car door and ran at full speed inside where, joined by two other officers who were preparing to go in, he was shot in the head by the gunman and killed immediately.
Lead King Soopers clerk Julie Keeton’s first thought was also about other people. She was checking out dog food for a customer just as the gunman started shooting. Specifically, Keeton told the jury that she tried to look out for the courtesy clerks with special needs — three were working in the store that day.
One, Teri Leiker, was shot and killed.
“I turned around and looked around for my peeps, like what is my responsibility here?” Keeton told the jury. “There were customers walking between the stands and the aisles and I said, ‘Those are gunshots, there’s a shooter, let’s go!’”
Keeton began to move down the aisle and tried to get people to follow her out back doors. As she got to the back of the store, toward the double doors, it was crowded and dark and people were panicking. An older woman was shuffling towards the back and Keeton stopped and asked, “Do you want me to carry you?”
The woman’s husband said they were fine and urged her to keep moving.
As people were hiding in place or heading for exits, Boulder police officer Richard Steidell was moving slowly into the store with other officers to try and find the gunman.
He heard another officer yell out, ‘There he is!’ and the glass behind the officers was shot out, shattering on top of them. Steidell testified that he fired one to two shots and hit the floor for cover in the prone position on his stomach. His arms were fully extended with his weapon out. From the floor, he looked down one of the aisles and waited.
“It gave the officers behind me the time to run and grab cover really quick. I knew where he came from and I didn’t want to leave it with my eyes,” he said to the jury. “I wish I would have had a rifle that day but I had my handgun. I felt outgunned.”
On his stomach, he waited for “it felt like forever,” he told the jury. Eventually, he caught sight of the gunman again.
“At that point, I shot maybe five to 10 rounds down the aisle,” he said, noting the gunman was pointing his rifle toward the law enforcement officers.
He hit the alleged gunman, Ahmad Alissa, in the leg. No other shots were fired again inside the store.
Steidell then went to get a bus for the victims and survivors who were huddling in a pizza restaurant and a nearby brewery.
“I found the nearest patrol car and just jumped in it, raced up South Broadway with lights and sirens and tried to look for the first bus we encountered,” he said to the jury, noting they eventually found one near the CU campus. “I don't even know what I looked like, but I jumped out and jumped on the bus and told the bus driver, I was like, hey, we need this bus. We had an incident down south and I need this bus for victims … I was like, sorry, but I need the bus. You need to get off. And they were understanding at that point.”
During the shooting, while getting people out and checking both the women’s and men’s restrooms to make sure no one was hiding there, Chris Tatum saw an older woman fall hard on the tile floor between the sushi area and the deli. He didn’t know why she fell so fast, face down, and hoped it wasn’t because of gunfire. He went over and pulled her up by her arm off the ground. He described it as feeling like “dead weight” but that she was conscious.
The woman, Elan Ri Shakti, now 79, had fractured a bone in her back. She and Tatum are now friends.
“What were your concerns when you approached her?” prosecutor Ken Kupfner asked Tatum, on the stand.
“She was somebody's grandma,” he said. “That was my main thought. That's my grandma there, and so I picked her up. I wasn't really concerned about anything else.”
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.
