Ahmad Alissa Boulder Colorado shooting suspect Facebook page paints portrait of Syrian born gunman as Incel, Islamist & anti Trump. Suspect harbored anti social tendencies and paranoia.
A disquieting portrait of the 21-year-old gunman responsible for the mass shooting at a Colorado grocery store has emerged in the aftermath of Monday’s massacre that left ten people dead, with troubling questions as to the extent of the Syrian born suspect’s sympathies and allegiance to his Islamic faith and claims he was racked by paranoia and social anxiety.
In the hours after Monday’s shooting rampage at King Soopers grocery store, which had left ten dead and countless families’ lives forever turned upside down, Ahmad Alissa asked if he too could speak with his mother.
The request came as Alissa surrendered to police, with the 21-year-old gunman stripped off his Ruger AR-556 rifle, a handgun and tactical vest, having incurred a bullet wound to the right leg.
A high school wrestler who has been described by his family as ‘mentally ill‘, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was born in Syria and moved to the US when he was three.
Alissa a Metro University computer science major according to his Facebook page — since taken down — was described as living in Arvada, Colorado, around 30 miles from the grocery store he targeted.
No known motive
Come Tuesday, Alissa was formally charged with ten counts of murder.
Police have not yet confirmed his motive.
Witnesses described Alissa who had quietly arrived at the King Soopers grocery shopping outlet, pointing his gun and without saying a word, taking two to three shots, before calmly before stopping and opening gunfire again. One survivor said he was not ‘spraying’.
When police arrived at the scene, they found two victims’ bodies in the parking lot.
Once inside, they saw another.
Authorities were heard over a loudspeaker telling Alissa to surrender before he emerged from the store in handcuffs. Alissa was eventually shot in the leg in a standoff with the cops.
In Facebook posts over the last 18 months, Alissa complained about not having a girlfriend, ranted about President Trump and talked about his Islamic faith.
Troubling Facebook posts
The ‘troubled’ man was known to the FBI as a result of Alissi being linked to another person who has been under investigation for something else the The New York Times reported. It remained unclear what the contact was being investigated for.
Alissi’s Facebook page also featured several posts with quotes from the Prophet Muhammad, a key figure in Islam. ‘Muslims might not be perfect but Islam is,’ he once wrote on his profile, according to Heavy.com.
Alissi’s brother in an interview with The Daily Beast told the outlet his brother was ‘paranoid’ and ‘very antisocial’.
The brother insisted that the shooting was not politically-motivated, saying: ‘[It was] not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.
‘The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school, he was like an outgoing kid but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social.’
Another told The Denver Post that Alissa — who was in a university wrestling team — was ‘violent’, ‘scary to be around’ and once threatened to kill teammates.
‘He was kind of scary to be around’
‘He was kind of scary to be around. His senior year, during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was, like, going to kill everybody.
‘Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it,’ Dayton Marvel said. Another, Angel Hernandez, recalled an incident where another wrestler teased him for losing and he just ‘started punching him’.
Alissa has been arrested at least once before including in 2017 when he punched someone who had made fun of his race.
In a July 2019 Facebook post, Alissi posted, ‘Yeah if these racist Islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could.’
Hernandez, the fellow wrestler, added: ‘He would talk about him being Muslim and how if anybody tried anything, he would file a hate crime and say they were making it up.
‘It was a crazy deal. I just know he was a pretty cool kid until something made him mad, and then whatever made him mad, he went over the edge — way too far.
‘He was always talking about (how) people were looking at him and there was no one ever where he was pointing people out. We always thought he was messing around with us or something.’
His arrest affidavit, which was released on Tuesday morning, reveals that after shooting a man once in the grocery store parking lot, Alissa then approached him while he was still laying on the ground and shot him again, repeatedly.
Witnesses described Alissa – who is 200lbs and 5ft 6 – as ‘fat’ and said he was wearing a green tactical vest. When police arrested him, he’d removed the vest, his top and his shoes, and was wearing shorts. He was shot once in the right leg in a standoff with police.
Playing with machine gun two days before shooting
Alissa’s sister-in-law told police she had seen him playing with a ‘machine gun’ gun in the days before the shooting but that she didn’t suspect anything.
He bought a Ruger AR- 556 pistol exactly a week ago on March 16, 2021.
To date it remained unclear why Alissi went on a shooting rampage or whether the gun he was using – described by witnesses as an AR-15 – was legally purchased.
In his arrest affidavit, cops described how he played with the weapon in front of family the dailymail reported.
‘Alissa was seen playing with a gun she thought looked like a “machine gun” about 2 days ago. She did not believe the gun looked like the rifles she has seen in old Western movies, and that she thought it looked like a “machine gun.”
‘Alissa had been talking about having a bullet stuck in the gun and was playing with the gun.
‘{Redacted] and [redacted] were upset with Alissa for playing with the gun in the house and took the gun,’ it read.
Monday’s bloodbath comes less than a week when an Atlanta man went on a shooting rampage slaughtering eight individuals, including six Asian spa workers. The latest episode of gun violence has led to wide contempt as America once again struggles with yet another mass shooting and the latest questions of what motivated a 21-year-old gunman to target random strangers…
