After a jury rejected his claim of insanity and found him guilty of murder, a Colorado man who shot and killed ten people at a Boulder grocery in 2021 was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Monday.
In the attack at King Soopers on March 22, 2021, Ahmad Alissa, 25, was convicted guilty of all 55 charges, including ten counts of first-degree murder.
Chief Judge Ingrid Bakke of the Twenty-twentieth Judicial District sentenced Alissa to ten consecutive life sentences without the possibility of release, one for each conviction of murder, along with additional jail terms for the other offenses.
Before Bakke handed down the sentence, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty stated, “This was not about mental illness. This was about brutal, intentional violence, for which he deserves the maximum.”
Armed with a Ruger AR-556 handgun, Alissa started shooting at shoppers at the grocery store before being shot in the leg by police and taken into custody.
After receiving the case on Friday afternoon, the jurors deliberated for almost six hours. As the findings were announced, Alissa stayed sat and didn’t seem to react in any way. For the most part of the procedure, he seemed to communicate with his defense team.
Although Alissa’s defense attorneys did not refute their client’s guilt as the shooter, they argued for a not guilty by diminished capacity conviction, claiming that Alissa was incapable of telling right from wrong at the moment of the shooting. Schizophrenia was later diagnosed in him.
On Monday, friends, family, and victims of the deceased said in court that their lives had been irrevocably altered. They talked of being unable to sleep, and one police officer claimed that she left from her beloved career of thirty years because she was so distressed by post-traumatic stress disorder.
The last time Madeline Talley saw her deceased father, Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley, was the evening before the shooting.
“I told him I was going to bed, and he gave me a hug. He told me, ‘OK, good night,'” she stated. “That was the last thing he ever said to me. The next time I saw him, he was in a casket.”
The first law enforcement officer to arrive at the King Soopers was 51-year-old Eric Talley. He had served as a Boulder police officer for 11 years and was a father of seven children.
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Denny Stong, age 20; Neven Stanisic, age 23; Rikki Olds, age 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, age 49; Suzanne Fountain, age 59; Teri Leiker, age 51; Kevin Mahoney, age 61; Lynn Murray, age 62; and Jody Waters, age 65, were the other fatalities.
Six days prior to the incident, Alissa, a resident of the Denver suburb of Arvada, purchased an assault rifle, as per the arrest affidavit.
After the judgments were read outside the court, his brother argued that family members had no reasonable way of knowing about his violent tendencies.
By: nbcnews.com
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