Editor's note: Denver7 has chosen to not include the defendant's name in our coverage of the trial to respect victims and their loved ones, and to not glorify the defendant. This trial aims to determine if the defendant was insane or not at the time of the shooting — not if he shot and killed people at the King Soopers, which the defense is not contesting. Therefore, we have removed words such as "alleged" and "suspected" from our trial coverage when referring to him.
BOULDER COUNTY, Colo. — The jury trial is underway to determine if a defendant accused of shooting and killing 10 people at a King Soopers store in Boulder on March 22, 2021 was insane at the time of the shooting.
The defendant was arrested the same day as the mass shooting, but the case was stalled by several competency hearings. He was found competent to stand trial in August 2023 and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity three months later. He faces a slew of charges, including 10 counts of first-degree murder, 38 counts of attempted murder, first-degree assault, and six counts of using a large-capacity magazine in a crime, plus multiple crimes of violence.
The 10 people who lost their lives that day were Suzanne Fountain, Rikki Olds, Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley, Jody Waters, Denny Stong, Tralona Bartkowiak, Neven Stanisic, Kevin Mahoney, Lynn Murray and Teri Leiker. Read more about them here.
Opening statements began on the morning of Sept. 5. Denver7 will follow each day of this trial. Read the latest below.
Denver7's Coverage of the Boulder King Soopers Shooting
Monday, Sept. 9
After a full day of hearing from survivors and witnesses on Friday, the prosecution continued to call up witnesses on Monday.
The first person to testify on Monday morning was Christopher Tatum, who was working at the Table Mesa King Soopers in 2021 as the assistant deli manager. In the beginning of 2023, he left the Table Mesa King Soopers store and now works at a different location.
He recalled that there was "a panic" in the store at the time of the shooting, but also "an unsurety of what to panic about" as people tried to decipher what was going on.
“I didn’t want to assume the worst immediately," Tatum said. "And then I saw customers running and being afraid, as they should have been. And that’s when it started to hit."
Once he realized somebody was shooting in the store, he told two associates to hide and tried to move customers toward an emergency exit. In the process, he picked up an older woman — Elan Shakti, who testified about the experience on Friday — who had fallen down and walked her outside.
“She was somebody’s grandma — that’s my main thought," he said. "And so I picked her up. I wasn't really concerned about anything else. Was just getting her out."
Tatum then ran back inside — "For one last look" because "I didn’t want to leave anyone in there," he said — and rescued a panic-stricken associate and several other customers, including one with a walker, he testified.
The prosecution asked him how many times he went back into the building. Tatum said he believed it was four times.
The defense did not cross-examine Tatum, and he was dismissed.
The second witness of the day was Paul Johnson, a former head clerk of the Table Mesa King Soopers. He had started working there in the summer of 2020, but left the job after the March 2021 shooting.
On the afternoon of the shooting, Johnson explained that he was near the checkout area, where Rikki Olds and Denny Stong — both victims in the shooting — were working. When they heard the loud bangs of gunshots outside, they weren't sure what it was and "tried to rationalize it," Johnson remembered, adding that he thought perhaps it was somebody working on the supermarket roof.
Once they realized the noises were gunshots — which became clear once the shooter was inside the building — there was an "immediate sense of 'run, get out of here,'" he recalled.
While he said his memory from that day is fuzzy, he believes that he ran straight to the back of the store, outside and behind a bush next to another employee. As people streamed out of the building yelling, "Run!" he said he decided to keep running away, crossing a busy intersection.
Johnson was diagnosed with PTSD after the shooting, he told the court. That manifested into nightmares and an inability to go outdoors, he said.
The defense did not cross-examine Johnson, and he was dismissed.
Mark Suban was the third witness of the day. He works as a scientific and technical photographer for the FBI, and clarified that he is not an FBI agent. He was submitted as an expert witness in photography for the trial.
Following the shooting, Suban was deployed to fully document the crime scene. It took his team about a week to process the scene. He also reviewed camera video from the store and body-worn camera footage, which were used to create a timeline of the events.
Using these resources, Suban made an animated map that showed how the shooter, victims and witnesses moved around during the shooting.
Following a mid-morning break, Suban continued his testimony. Prosecutors brought up the animated map he made and played it in the courtroom, having him explain the moving parts and what they represented.
The defense did not have any questions for Suban, and he was dismissed.
Watch Denver7's previous coverage of the Boulder King Soopers shooting in the video playlist above.
The fourth witness was Sarah Cantu, who was a major crimes detective with the Boulder Police Department from October 2013 through November 2023, when she retired and moved to work at the district attorney's office as a senior investigator. She responded to the shooting on March 22, 2021.
She will testify multiple times throughout this trial, but this marked the first time.
In the courtroom, she recalled conducting witness interviews, following up on tips, looking into the suspect's background, writing an arrest affidavit and more. The team has continued to gather new information over the years, with details uncovered as recently as July 2024.
Like Suban, Cantu scoured through hours upon hours and terabytes upon terabytes of video related to this case. Using the animated map Suban had created, Cantu walked the courtroom through the events of that day on a split screen, with the other half of the screen showing surveillance footage.
The court then paused for lunch.
After court resumed from lunch break, prosecutors continued hearing testimony from Cantu, who continued to walk the courtroom on the events of that day with the use of the animated map, showing how the shooter moved through the store as he targeted the victims inside.
All of the first victims were killed in just over a minute, with most of them being in the shooter's line of sight, Cantu told the court Monday.
During the presentation, Cantu showed moments in which the defendant passed by several people inside the store without shooting them, including 90-year-old Paul Rotar and another man named Clint Posford, who at the time was a courtesy clerk at the King Soopers on Table Mesa.
Cantu testified that at this point, after about five minutes since the shooting began, the defendant "is looking for people... passing each aisle, and looking up and down" before he stopped at one of the aisles, raised his rifle and started shooting, the bullets hitting a victims.
She also testified that among the commotion, many people were hiding inside the store, either at the clinic area of the pharmacy or behind the pharmacy shelves, as well as upstairs and in semi-trailers behind the store.
Many of them were calling 911, but the calls came in as the shooter went inside the store, not while he was in the parking lot.
The courtroom was then presented with dash cam video from inside Boulder Officer Eric Talley's patrol car, which at one point showed the shooter looking at Talley's vehicle "intently."
As there was no cross-examination from the defense, Cantu was excused from the stand and the next witness was called — Nicholas Edwards, Sarah Moonshadow's son. Moonshadow testified on Friday.
During testimony, Edwards told the courtroom he was "paralyzed with fear from that first shot" and told the court he could smell gunpowder.
His testimony was short and he was excused from the stand.
The next witness to take the stand was Bryan Capobianco, a police officer with the Boulder Police Department and one of the first three officers at the scene of the shooting.
Capobianco said he was on patrol that day and recieved a call to head to the Table Mesa King Soopers as there was an active shooter inside the store. As he arrived, he said he didn't recall seeing anyone running out the store and that he expected to see more people outside.
He "assumed there were more people possibly hiding inside the store and I just didn't want to wait... I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I was outside when another gunshot went off," he told the courtroom.
Inside the store and armed with a patrol rifle, he recalled smelling "vividly" the scent of gunpowder as elevator-type music played inside an otherwise quiet store.
Then, he heard loud gunshots from inside the store but he couldn't discern where they were coming from at first.
Capobianco then described how, as the officers pushed into the store, more shots rang out, shattering glass around him and the other officers. He described how some officers pulled back and retreated to a patrol car in the driveway to cover the roof as they didn't know how many shooters were at the scene in total.
He then testified about when he realized that Officer Talley had been shot and killed. Capobianco told the courtroom that as the second wave of officers arrived, he saw what he presumed to be Officer Talley and realized it was him because of his uniform. Office Talley, Capobianco said, liked to wear a more standard, old school uniform, which Capobianco recognized.
Capobianco described Officer Talley as someone very humble, who "always showed extreme humility." He said Officer Talley, "always went out of his way to help other people."
The Boulder officer was excused from the stand after there was no cross-examination from the defense.
