A gunman opened fire inside a King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday afternoon, killing 10 people, including a police officer who was first to respond to reports of shots being fired at the grocery store.
The shooter, who carried out the attack using an AR-15 assault rifle, has now been identified as Ahmad Al Issa, 21, of Arvada, Colorado. Al Issa has been charged with 10 counts of murder in the first-degree in connection with Monday's massacre.
Video footage from the scene showed Al-Issa in handcuffs, being escorted out of the building by police officers. The suspect could be seen bleeding down his leg from a gunshot wound and is currently stable. receiving treatment at a hospital. He is will be taken to the Boulder County jail once he is discharged.
Was Al-Issa a Muslim Extremist?
Shortly after the shooter's identity was released to the public, his social media activity grabbed the attention of social media users. Internet sleuths were quick to share screenshots of posts shared by Al-Issa on his now-deleted Facebook profile. In the posts, he not only criticized former President Donald Trump but also sympathized with the Muslim victims of the mosque shootings in New Zealand.
In one of his posts, he called Trump a "d*ck" over his administration's treatment of refugees and in another, claimed the former president "won because of racism." In other posts, he made references to Islam and Allah and expressed solidarity with the victims of the mosque shooting in Christchurch and denounced "racist Islamophobic people."
"The Muslims at the Christchurch mosque were not the victims of a single shooter. They were the victims of the entire Islamophobia industry that vilified them," he wrote. In March 2019, a white supremacist, shot and killed 51 people in an attack carried out at two separate mosques where the Muslim victims were attending Friday prayers. The attacker, Brenton Tarrant, live-streamed the attack on Facebook.
Al-Issa's Brother Described Him as Mentally Ill, Anti-Social and Paranoid
Although the motive behind the shooting is not yet known Al-Issa's brother, Ali Aliwi Alissa, described his sibling as a deeply disturbed individual who was mentally ill. Ali said his brother was "very anti-social" and paranoid before adding that, in high school, he would describe "being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him."
"When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, 'People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.' She went out, and there was no one. We didn't know what was going on in his head."
