General
Boulder Mass Shooting Trial Focuses on Accused Gunman’s Mental State
Lawyers for the accused gunman are using the state’s insanity defense, arguing that he was mentally ill at the time of the 2021 shooting that left 10 people dead at a supermarket.
It has been more than three years since a gunman rampaged through a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killing 10 people before surrendering in the parking lot, bleeding from his leg and asking to speak with his mother.
The man charged in the 2021 attack, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, was 21 at the time and has been in custody ever since. But he is going on trial only now in a somewhat unusual case that has little to do with whether he carried out the killings — his lawyers do not dispute that he did — and everything to do with his mental state at the time of the crime.
Mr. Alissa, now 24, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, setting up a battle between prosecutors and defense lawyers over whether he is responsible for the crimes. A jury will ultimately decide the matter, and its verdict will determine whether Mr. Alissa is sentenced to life in prison or confined indefinitely to a state mental institution.
No firm motive has been outlined for the attack at the King Soopers grocery store in March 2021, though one doctor testified at an earlier hearing that Mr. Alissa, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after the shooting, told her that he bought the guns for the purpose of committing a mass shooting and then being killed by the police.
The shooting’s victims included a Boulder police officer and several store employees, and it turned a cloudy Monday afternoon at a neighborhood grocery store into a day of unimaginable loss.
For more than two years after the attack, Mr. Alissa was considered too mentally ill to stand trial. He was ordered to take medication, and a judge later decided that he had improved enough for the case to proceed.