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. 16
Monday morning started with Dr. Loandra Torres, director of training at the Court Services Department.
Before that position, she was a clinical director for the department and had worked at the state hospital for a couple years prior. Part of her responsibilities included working with people who had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. Torres explained she has been doing this kind of work for 12 to 13 years and over that time, has performed about 800 evaluations and testified in court in Colorado 37 times.
She was admitted as an expert in forensic psychology.
Torres, as well as Thomas Gray, who testified on Friday, were selected to conduct the sanity evaluation of the defendant. At the time, both were board-certified in forensic psychology. Gray has since retired.
She first sat down with the defendant in September 2021, about six months after the shooting. Torres believes he has a mental disease or defect, specifically schizophrenia, but that alone is not sufficient to find somebody insane, she explained.
Given information she gathered from the defendant's actions in 2019, she told the jury that he had started to exhibit "odd behavior" that year, which included hearing voices and paranoia. His family members told Torres that they sometimes saw him talking and laughing to himself, and that he was sloppy at work.
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Torres said two family members told her the family had been followed by the FBI at one point in time, but this was not expanded upon in the courtroom.
It was "hard to know where reality ends and delusion begins" as far as the defendant's paranoia about being followed, Torres said. She added that the family had no reason to believe he was being followed.
He seemed to shut off the following year — 2020 — and withdrew from his family, Torres testified. She saw similar symptoms when she spoke with him in September 2021, when he barely spoke during the initial two-hour interview. It was not a "very meaningful" conversation, Torres recalled, and he said "I don't know" and "I'm not so sure" multiple times with little emotion. The defendant appeared "quite uneasy," fidgeted and appeared annoyed with the doctors' questions. She noted that isolation can exacerbate mental illness.
He was not medicated at the time and had not undergone any sort of mental health treatment.
Schizophrenia impacted his perception of reality, but did not establish him as insane at the time of the shooting in March 2021, Torres said.
In October 2021, he was ruled incompetent to stand trial, and again in early December 2021, and as a result was transferred to a state hospital to undergo treatment.
At the hospital, he received psychological medication, though he sometimes refused, and he attended some, but not all, meetings with his treatment team, Torres said. She recalled that it was difficult to determine how much he refused to speak based on his schizophrenia versus his lawyers advising him not to talk.
Watch our coverage of the eighth day of the trial in the video below.
Torres explained to the jury that doctors take a careful look at how an individual in the state hospital is engaging — if somebody consistently demonstrates the same behavior in different settings, that is likely a symptom. This is not as true if doctors observe inconsistencies, which are easier to attribute to a choice.
The prosecution then jumped ahead to January 2023 and asked about the defendant's condition at that point in time. Torres said that staff had seen a decline in his condition. He was, for the most part, still taking medication but there were concerns because he was not eating appropriately. As a result, in March 2023, his treatment team sought a court order to administer involuntary medication. They were able to administer an antipsychotic medication and as a result, the defendant began to engage more and would provide "spontaneous information," Torres said.
By August 2023, he was in a "pretty good place," the prosecutor confirmed with Torres. Torres added that he was attentive, responsive and was able to converse in a more normal way. He seemed calm and smiled sometimes, she said. He also provided a "good amount" of info about the shooting, she said, though there were some aspects of it that he said he did not want to talk about, or couldn't remember. He also made statements about not being able to justify his actions from the shooting. He denied the paranoia that his family had told the doctors about.
When it comes to determining sanity in relation to criminal charges, Torres said she needed to evaluate if he was sane at the time of the shooting — not in its immediate aftermath or years later. The prosecution asked why she did not find him insane, and she explained that she had to consider the impact of mental health symptoms in two ways:
- His capacity to form culpable mental states. He demonstrated the capacity to plan and carry out a task for both work and purchasing items used in the shooting, as well as researching mass shootings, she said.
- If his mental health symptoms made him incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. The defendant said he knew what he had done was wrong, she said.
While the defendant had said that he purchased the firearms and opened fire at the King Soopers because of voices screaming in his head, he added that the voices were not commanding him to do so, but he thought he could quiet them with the shooting. Further questioning did not yield any answers about why he thought that, Torres said.
She told the courtroom that there was a lack of evidence to suggest his mental health symptoms made him incapable of distinguishing what was right and wrong at the time of the shooting, but she could not rule out some sort of psychotic process going on. During her meetings with the defendant, she never heard him say something that came off delusional and could not identify any clear tie between a delusional thought process and the crimes.
Torres said following the defendant's arrest in 2021, the jail had records indicating the defendant had made suicidal statements, but there did not seem to be any indication he would attempt it. In the following interviews with Torres, he had indicated that he would rather die than go to jail, and that that was his decision and unrelated to the voices in his head. Torres said this demonstrates some understanding about the legality of what had happened — namely, that the defendant knew the shooting was not "correct behavior."
The defendant pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in November 2023.
Ultimately, the doctors opined in April 2024 that he was not insane at the time of the shooting, but they noted challenges within their interview process due to the defendant not providing much information.
While Torres' last interview with the defendant was April 9, 2024, additional doctors outside of the state hospital interviewed him in June 2024. Torres said she watched those recorded interviews and believed he appeared slightly more engaged than he had in April, providing some more details that he had refused to talk about with state hospital doctors, including buying the weapons and practicing using them. Torres said after watching those interviews, she felt a "little more confident" than before about their opinion that the defendant was sane at the time of the shooting.
The prosecution then played a video from the June interviews in court, where he was questioned about the voices in his head. He said they "just yell" in both of his ears but he cannot decipher any actual words. Once every couple weeks, it keeps him up at night, he said in the video. He said he never had thoughts that were not his and never thought that anybody was following him.
In another video clip of the June interviews, a doctor tried to determine why the defendant had targeted Boulder. The defendant answered the questions in simple phrases — no, he did not frequently go to Boulder; he did not know why he targeted Boulder; he did not know why he targeted the King Soopers. He contradicted himself at one point, saying the voices in his head said "King Soopers," but then he said he randomly picked the supermarket. This happened again when he referred to the "voices" and then backtracked to say there is just one voice. He added that he thought the voice wanted him to commit a mass shooting, and the first time that thought entered his head was the end of October in 2019. He said the thought did not surprise him.
The prosecution pulled up a third video clip from June, where a doctor asked the defendant about what he was thinking about as he practiced using his newly purchased weapons. "Nothing much, just practice," the defendant is heard responding in the video. The doctor asked if the mass shooting was related to his practice, and he responded, "I was practicing shooting the guns related to mass shooting so guns don’t jam." Torres noted in court that this falls into the capacity to form a culpable mental state.
In a fourth video from June, the defendant said he purchased the most popular type of body armor from Amazon because "it protects you from bullets" in case "I got shot by the cops or something like that," but he said he didn't know why he would need protection from bullets. He said he believed he made the purchase in January 2021, about two months before the shooting. He said he did not know why he didn't commit the shooting in January, but was practicing using the firearms in February — something that Torres said was new information from her last interview with him in April. The defendant is heard on the video saying that the voices were becoming more frequent around that time and he was not trying to resist it. The thought of a mass shooting did not bother him, he told the doctor, but it did make him anxious with "racing thoughts." The doctor asked him if, at the time of the shooting, he knew murder was wrong, and he responded, "Yeah" and blamed the thoughts in his head.
In the courtroom, the prosecution asked Torres how the defendant's thoughts around a mass shooting are different from delusion. She explained that she, as well as Dr. Gray, interpreted this as the defendant's way of making sense of the voices — or voice — that he was hearing, which he consistently said were not commanding him to do anything.
A fifth video from the June interviews was played in court. In this one, the defendant said he had planned to die in a shoot-out with police. When the doctor asked why he took off his clothes in the King Soopers after police shot him, he said it was so the officers would know he was surrendering. The doctor asked if he was happy to be alive as an ambulance transported him to a nearby hospital, and he answered no. In the video, the doctor is heard asking him if the thought of a mass shooting left his head after the shooting, and he said he still hears voices, and while the thought went away to some extent, he still sometimes has thoughts of it.
The prosecution stopped the video in the courtroom and asked Torres about her thoughts on the defendant's decision to take off his clothes to avoid being shot again. She said she believes this demonstrates his capacity for planning, exercising judgment to some degree and distinguishing right from wrong, particularly when it comes to approaching police and holding a weapon. She added that his surrender is indicative of his understanding that what he had done was wrong.
Another video clip from the June interviews was played, and the defendant was seen saying that he "stopped hearing everything when I started shooting," which he attributed to an adrenaline rush that "felt like nothing at all," though it was a "pretty good" feeling, he said in the video. In the courtroom, Torres said this is a "classic coping tactic" — using a distraction to avoid auditory hallucinations.
In another video from the same set of interviews, the defendant said he felt anxious as he drove to Boulder. When asked about how it felt to shoot the first person, he replied, "I don't have any feelings." Torres told the courtroom that this reply is consistent with what the defendant's family experienced before the shooting, and what doctors saw afterward. She noted it is a symptom of a mental illness, but does not necessarily make him insane.
The prosecution played another video, where the defendant again said he did not feel anything when he shot two more people. In short phrases, he said he shot people in the entrance of the store and then began walking up and down the store's aisles. He recalled finding a man in the middle of one of the aisles but did not shoot him and could not explain his reasoning. Shortly after this, he was shot by Boulder Police Officer Richard Steidell, who testified on Sept. 10.
Torres reminded the jury that the defendant only shot at people who were running and hiding, and the older man in the aisle was doing neither, however she could not be sure what this meant without more information from the defendant.
Just ahead of a lunch break, Torres said there was nothing in those interviews that made her believe the defendant was experiencing psychosis, and reiterated her opinion that he was sane at the time of the shooting.
Court then broke for a lunch recess.
Watch Denver7's previous coverage of the Boulder King Soopers shooting in the video playlist above.
After court returned from their lunch break, the defense began its cross-examination of Dr. Torres.
The defense attorney confirmed that the defendant wasn't, and isn't, likely to verbalize the depth of his psychosis, and that he provided little information about it — which Torres agreed with when looking at her nine court-ordered evaluations and 15 individual meetings with the defendant.
She described for the court that after the defendant began taking medication in March 2023, his engagement increased, he went to more treatment groups, would spontaneously offer up information and appeared to be taking better care of himself. It was only after his condition improved that they could complete the sanity evaluations, she said.
The defense asked about her first meeting with the defendant, in September 2021, where he appeared distracted and uneasy. Torres said he seemed to be "internally focused" so he may have been hearing voices at that time.
The defense attorney confirmed that at one point, the defendant had referred to the noises in his head as "killing voices" and that he had heard the voices on the day of the shooting as he drove to Boulder and parked in the King Soopers parking lot.
The defendant had been experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia from late 2018 up until that day, and Torres said he had a serious form of the mental illness for several years prior. She agreed with the defense attorney when asked if the defendant was in the throes of a psychotic episode during the shooting.
Torres later added that the defendant was not "feigning symptoms." A psychological test called Test of Memory Malingering, or TOMM, was administered in April 2023 as part of a court-ordered evaluation and also found that he was not exaggerating his symptoms.
The defense attorney asked if the defendant had a disorganized thought process during the shooting that left him confused. Torres responded that it was possible, and that the doctors tried to make the distinction between the voices and the thought of a mass shooting. She said his limited insight into his own mental health would also impact his ability to describe what was going on with him at the time of the shooting. He does not have insight into this, she said she had opined. He denied having paranoid thinking, even though that seems counter-intuitive for a person on trial for the murder of 10 people, the defense attorney said.
Given the significance that the defendant put on hearing a screaming voice, Torres said the doctors believe it played some sort of role in the shooting, but without his mental illness, it would have not happened. The voices did influence him committing the mass shooting, Torres told the courtroom.
The prosecution, on a re-direct, reflected again on Torres' expertise on the subject and the multiple hours of interviews she had done with the defendant. In their questioning, they reiterated that the severity of mental illness does not impact if somebody is sane or not when they committed a crime.
The prosecution also revisited the fact that the defendant said throughout the interview that the voices never issued commands or used words — it was just yelling.
Torres was then dismissed. The prosecution said she was their final witness, and they rested their case.
The defense then brought up their first witness: Dr. Hareesh Pillai, a psychiatrist at the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Pueblo. He has worked in that capacity for about three years and was the defendant's primary psychiatric provider. He was submitted as an expert witness. He testified during the defendant's restoration hearing in September 2023.
In court Monday, he said he first met the defendant in December 2021 and helped to diagnose him with schizophrenia, which is a life-long chronic illness so there is no cure. He explained that the best treatment is antipsychotics. If it goes untreated, and the person undergoes major stressors, the more common and severe symptoms can develop, like hallucinations, paranoid and delusion. An example of a major stressor in this case could have been the COVID-19 pandemic, Pillai said.
One of the main symptoms he noticed in their first meeting was "thought blocking" — an interruption to normal flow of thought, such as when somebody stops talking mid-sentence. He also recalled noticing that the defendant appeared to respond to internal stimuli, and often looked over his shoulder like he was hearing something behind him that Pillai did not hear.
Pillai said despite the antipsychotic medication, the defendant still had some symptoms, but there was an improvement compared to that first meeting in December 2021. One of the medications results in "aggressive impulses in the unit," where the defendant said he felt like he wanted to harm other people, Pillai said. A few weeks later, he began developing a side effect that can be permanent, so they switched medications again.
However, the defendant did not want this other medication, so Pillai sought, and obtained, an involuntary med court order in March 2023. He has been on that medication since then.
Pillai said after three years, the defendant still does not believe he has schizophrenia most of the time, though he has said once or twice that he has the illness. Pillai said the defendant's judgment is so poor that if he stopped taking medication, that brief insight would disappear. He will have a low level of functioning throughout the rest of his life, he said, and despite treatment, will continue to have symptoms of schizophrenia.
During the prosecution's cross-examination, Pillai confirmed that he was not asked to conduct a sanity evaluation, which was completed by Dr. Torres and Dr. Gray.
In response to a question, Pillai said he believed the defendant had one call with a family member at some point, but otherwise refused to speak to them.
Pillai said that after the state hospital obtained a court order to force the defendant to take medications, and the doctors told him such, they never had to force him to take it. Pillai recalled one time where the defendant said he did not want the medication and was told the doctors would put a tube in his nose to administer it. He then agreed to take it orally, Pillai said.
In July 2023, Pillai observed the defendant in a better state: He was watching movies, going to the gym, holding eye contact and did not have any hallucinations or delusions. During that time, Pillai and the defendant talked longer about topics other than treatment, such as music and his goal to become an engineer.
During the defense's re-direct, Pillai said the defendant was receiving the most intensive treatment possible in the field of psychiatry while at the state hospital.
Pillai was then dismissed.
The defense's second witness was Khadija Alhidid, the defendant's mother. She testified with an interpreter.
Defense attorneys began by asking about the defendant's childhood. Alhidid said he was a cute, smart child and the defense brought up some photos of him as a baby and a teenager.
She said her son started "changing" in 2019, claiming that people were chasing him and growing paranoid about being watched.
In November 2020, the whole family tested positive for COVID-19, Alhidid said. Denver7's reporter in court noted that the defendant was coloring with colored pencils during his mother's testimony. Alhidid said her son was tired, put on weight and "changed a lot." Those changes continued after COVID.
Alhidid said the day before the shooting — March 21, 2021 — was Mother's Day in Syria, where the family is from, and they all celebrated together. The following morning, she recalled having breakfast with the defendant and telling him to shave and get a haircut. She said that was the last time she saw her son before Monday in the courtroom.
The defense attorney asked her if she believed her son could have known the difference between right and wrong at the time of the shooting. She replied that he was sick and did not know the difference, as no sane person would do what he had done.
"Normal people don't do that," she said through the interpreter.
During a cross-examination, the prosecution asked if she noticed the multitude of packages that the defendant was receiving in the mail prior to the shooting — 10 deliveries in one month. She said with a big family and many people ordering different items, she wouldn't have noticed or known the contents. And he did not talk to his family or initiate any conversation to share that information, she said.
"We didn’t know what he was up to," Alhidid said.
The prosecutor asked if she recalled seeing her son come home with a large box — a skinny white rifle box. She said she remembers thinking it was a musical instrument, and perhaps he was picking up a new hobby, but did not know what was inside it. When the prosecutor asked if she realized it was an assault rifle "a little while later," she said no.
The prosecutor pushed back, asking if Alhidid previously told investigators that she heard a banging noise upstairs, and that the defendant's brothers had gone to check on him and they brought down a rifle. Alhidid said she did recall that, and said her son had a round jammed in the firearm. She said the defendant was going to return the firearm the following day.
During her testimony, the defendant appeared to be wiping his eyes with a tissue.
Alhidid was then dismissed and court ended for the day just before 5 p.m.
