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.
On Thursday, the prosecution and defense gave opening statements in a trial that could last into late September. Potential witnesses include Mr. Alissa’s family members, F.B.I. agents, local police officers and mental health experts.
In his address to the jury, Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney, said Mr. Alissa “wanted to kill as many people as he possibly could” and had planned and prepared for the attack, including by researching the deadliest ammunition.
He showed videos of shoppers going about their daily routines just moments before gunfire sent people fleeing for their lives. And, to bolster his argument that Mr. Alissa had calculated the massacre, he noted that everyone who was struck by gunfire had died.
“If he hit someone, he executed them,” Mr. Dougherty said.
One of Mr. Alissa’s lawyers, Samuel Dunn, said in his opening statement that Mr. Alissa had heard voices, withdrawn from society and grown paranoid in the years before the attack. Mr. Alissa was hearing a screaming voice “between his ears,” the lawyer said, but his schizophrenia went untreated.
“Is that a person who is sane?” Mr. Dunn asked the jurors. “Is that a person who can distinguish right from wrong?”
Aya Gruber, a criminal law professor at the University of Southern California, said trials over a person’s mental state often become a battle of dueling experts. Jurors are often skeptical of the insanity defense, she said, particularly in cases with a large number of victims and gruesome crime scenes.
“Here, the claim that the person couldn’t distinguish right from wrong is going to be weighed against a slaughter,” said Professor Gruber, who previously taught at the University of Colorado and recalled driving near the grocery store on the day of the shooting and seeing a swarm of police cars. “I’m sure the defense attorneys know that this is an uphill battle.”
In cases like this, she said, key pieces of evidence can include the gunman’s statements to police after he was arrested, how he was acting in the days before the crime, experts’ evaluations and any previous mental health treatment.
Under Colorado law, the question of insanity comes down to whether Mr. Alissa, at the time of the shooting, had “so diseased or defective” a mind that he could not know his actions were wrong, or that his mental illness made him incapable of the premeditation that is a necessary component to a murder conviction. The burden is on the prosecution to prove that the defendant was sane at the time of the crimes.
If the defendant is found not guilty by reason of insanity, he would be held in a mental institution and regularly evaluated for potential release, but with no guarantee that he would ever be freed. In such a violent case, Professor Gruber said, it is very likely that he would be held in state custody for many decades, if not life.
Nearly a decade ago, jurors in Colorado rejected an insanity defense from another mass shooter, James Holmes, who killed 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora in 2012. That trial featured opposing testimony from various medical experts about his mental illness, as well as wrenching testimony about the victims. Mr. Holmes was convicted and sentenced to life in prison (the state has since abolished the death penalty).
In addition to the 10 counts of first-degree murder, Mr. Alissa is also charged with a rash of attempted murder charges and with possessing outlawed large-capacity gun magazines. Court documents indicate that he used a Ruger semiautomatic gun in the attack, essentially a shortened version of an AR-15-style rifle that is marketed as a pistol.
The shooting came less than a week after a mass shooting in Atlanta that killed eight people and left a lingering well of grief in Boulder, a city of about 100,000 people between Denver and Rocky Mountain National Park.
Witnesses at the time described Mr. Alissa wearing an armored vest and firing at victims from the parking lot of the store before moving inside.
The officer killed in the shooting, Eric Talley, was the first officer to arrive at the scene. The victims ranged in age from 20 to 65. Employees, some of whom had been administering Covid-19 vaccines at the store’s pharmacy, heard shouts that there was a shooter and ran for safety. One pharmacy technician said she stopped dialing 911 and instead called her parents, wanting them to hear her voice one more time in case she died.
Little has emerged about Mr. Alissa in the time since the shooting. He was born in Syria and moved as a child to the United States, where his family eventually settled in Arvada, a city about 30 minutes from Boulder. In high school, he was part of the wrestling team and often went to the gym, classmates said.
One day in 2017, when he was a senior in high school, he began beating a classmate in the head, later telling the authorities that he had “blacked out” during his attack; he claimed it was in response to bullying, something the victim denied. He pleaded guilty to a charge of misdemeanor assault and was suspended from school.
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