After two weeks of testimony from survivors, forensic mental health professionals and the gunman’s family, a Boulder jury on Monday found Ahmad Alissa guilty of all counts in the mass shooting at a King Soopers in Boulder in 2021.

Alissa was found guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder, 38 counts of attempted first-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault, six counts of felony possession of a prohibited large capacity magazine, and 38 crime-of-violence sentence enhancers in connection with the shooting.

The jury deliberated for six hours before finding Alissa guilty of all 55 counts.

As 20th Judicial Chief District Judge Ingrid Bakke read the 10 murder counts, slain Boulder police officer Eric Talley’s sister looked to the sky and gave a slow salute. Beside her, the woman’s husband rolled a stress ball in his hand and lowered his head.

“We did it,” Talley’s mother, Judy, said into the ear of a police officer as she walked down the hall of the Boulder County Courthouse to a room reserved for victims’ families.

Robert Olds, Rikki Olds’ uncle, did not miss a day in court.

“Thank you,” he said, and shook the hand of an officer waiting outside of the courtroom.

There were sobs in the courtroom.

The defendant drank from a paper cup and swiveled in his chair as the verdicts were read, often whispering with one of his defense team. His mother, who sat directly behind him next to two of his brothers, sobbed.

As they left the proceeding with a defense team escort, one brother cried.

Some members of the jury looked in Alissa’s direction. Some met eyes with victims’ family members. One wiped his eyes.

The defense did not contest that Alissa shot the 10 victims on March 22, 2021.

The shooter, 25, has schizophrenia, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the attack.

Prosecutors have said that schizophrenia is separate from mental illness.

The court immediately proceeded to the sentencing phase and the defendant was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

One of the most definitive pieces to the defendant’s insanity plea involved “killing voices,” which he said he heard in his head. He dropped clues as to what he meant by that in forensic interviews with mental health experts.

“He often told us about the voices yelling,” said Loandra Torres, one of the forensic psychologists who treated him. “He wasn’t able to give us more information about how voices yelling led to his behaviors.”

How the day went

On Friday afternoon before they left for the day, jurors appeared to be looking for clarity. They asked the court to provide them Monday morning with the eight minute video of the actual shooting, an interview with the court-appointed forensic psychologists and the body-worn camera of one of the responding Boulder Police officers.

They got to work. Four hours later, they had a verdict.

One of the issues that could have been a turning point for the jury may have been “the killing voices” which he said he heard.

During one of the forensice interviews with Dr. Loandra Torres, a court-appointed psychologist, the defendant said, “I heard voices talking to myself.”

“Can you make out what they’re saying?” Torres asked on the video.

“I can’t make out what they’re yelling,” he answered, looking down and shaking his head. “I have voices in my head.”

Torres noted that these comments were important because in her experience, almost always, she said, patients who had audial psychotic experiences told her the words they heard. Alissa, who she last saw April 29, 2024, told her that the voices in his head used only select words: “Ah,” “Oh,” and “Hey.”

Torres testified that many of the defendant’s behaviors proved to her that he was not insane. Included in those behaviors was the fact that days before the shooting, he searched on his phone for crowded events, that he thought about committing a mass shooting during gun practice and also that he bought a carrier vest to protect himself.

“It demonstrates carrying out an action in a reasonably logical manner,” Torres testified.

However, though the defendant’s attorneys acknowledged he was the shooter, they insisted he was legally insane — that he could not have known that shooting 10 innocent people was wrong under social norms.

In the end, the jury discarded the defense claims that the defendant was not sane at the time of the mass shooting returning a verdict of guilty on all counts.

The defendant was also charged with multiple counts of attempted murder and other offenses, including having six high-capacity ammunition magazine devices banned in Colorado.

Mental illness is not the same thing as insanity under Colorado law. State law defines insanity as having a mental disease so severe it is impossible for a person to tell the difference between right and wrong.

During two weeks of trial, the families of those killed saw graphic surveillance and police body camera video. Survivors testified that a man parked his Mercedes sedan next to a service van at around 2:30 p.m., ran around the back and shot his first victim through the windshield and the driver’s side window.

During two weeks of testimony, survivors testified about how they fled, hid or helped others to safety. An emergency room doctor crawled onto a shelf and hid among bags of chips.

Testimony began on Sept. 5, three-and-a-half years after the shooting.

It took so long to get to trial that some of the witnesses have died since the attack, including a 90-year-old man who wheeled his cart around the store, oblivious to the chaos around him.

Prosecutors keyed on Paul Roter’s story, noting that Alissa chose not to shoot Roter even though he met up with him several times.

This, District Attorney Michael Dougherty argued, proved that the defendant was making choices during the shooting, which he told the jury proved that he knew right from wrong.