BOULDER — Prosecutor Ken Kupfner loaded dummy bullets into a 30-round magazine in a hushed courtroom Friday morning.
He slowly pushed each bullet into the magazine — the same type of magazine used by the man who carried out a mass shooting at a Boulder King Soopers grocery store in 2021, killing 10 shoppers, employees and a responding police officer.
One bullet. Then another. Then another. Another.
“You get the picture,” Kupfner told jurors. “…He was thinking about it. He knew what he was going to do as he put each of those bullets into each of those magazines.”
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 25, is standing trial on 55 crimes, including 10 counts of first-degree murder, in the March 22, 2021, attack at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive. His attorneys do not dispute that he was the shooter, but say he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity because he was so mentally ill at the time that he could not tell right from wrong.
Alissa was diagnosed with schizophrenia after the mass shooting and suffered auditory and visual hallucinations for several years leading up to the attack. In interviews after the shooting, he said that “consistent voices” in his head led him to carry out the massacre.
“Maybe if I commit a mass shooting, the voices will go away,” he said in a recorded interview played in court Friday. “I thought that is what the voices wanted, a mass shooting.”
Prosecutors and defense attorneys focused on Alissa’s sanity during closing arguments in Boulder District Court on Friday.
“Mental illness does not mean insane,” Kupfner, Boulder County’s first assistant district attorney, told jurors. “Schizophrenia does not mean insane.”
“This tragedy was born out of disease, not choice,” public defender Kathryn Herold countered. “What we know is that Mr. Alissa committed these crimes because he was psychotic and delusional.”
Alissa’s mental illness was untreated before the killings, which he planned for at least three months, prosecutors said. Alissa researched and purchased the “most-deadly type” of bullet, stocked up on guns and ammunition reviewed thousands of images of guns, ammunition and equipment, prosecutors said.
Alissa researched locations in Boulder in the days before the mass shooting, first looking up bars, restaurants and other public places. Then, on the day before the attack, he looked up several retail stores in Boulder, including a Whole Foods, Safeway and Petco.
“He’s not going to do it near his house in Arvada,” Kupfner said. “…He came to Boulder. And he stopped at the first grocery store coming into town off of (Colorado) 93.”
Jurors listened to 10 days of testimony that centered not only on the mechanics of the mass shooting but also on whether Alissa was insane when he carried out the killings. His parents took the stand and testified that his behavior was strange before the attack and they thought he could be possessed by an evil spirit. He suffered from paranoia and delusion, experts testified.
Alissa fidgeted in his seat as prosecutors described each murder and attempted murder to jurors during closing statements Friday. He at times bit his fingernails, pulled his hair and rubbed his eyes. He also spoke quietly with his attorneys.
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Herold told jurors that a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity would hold Alissa accountable for the murders and acknowledge that he committed the killings. She showed jurors a photo of a younger Alissa, smiling and coherent, side-by-side with a photo of Alissa after the killings, stone-faced and empty-eyed.
“The person on (the) right is so delusional, so psychotic, hearing voices — killing voices — over and over and over again,” she said, talking jurors through the severity of his schizophrenia and the difficulty doctors had treating him after his arrest.
She accused prosecutors of emphasizing the emotions of the killings in an attempt to distract jurors from the law and Alissa’s mental state.
Jurors are expected to begin deliberating Friday afternoon.
Those killed in the shooting: Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Teri Leiker, 51; Boulder police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65.
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