by Jennifer Smith, Emily Crane and Daniel Bates at Daily Mail
Ahmad Alissa, the 21-year-old gunman responsible for a mass shooting at a Colorado grocery store on Monday, was known to the FBI and had ranted online about ‘racist islamophobes’ hacking his phone.
Alissa asked if he could speak with his mother after surrendering to police on Monday, having stripped off and laid down his down his Ruger AR-556 rifle, handgun and tactical vest in the supermarket’s aisles.
A high school wrestler who has been described by his family as ‘mentally ill’, was born in Syria and moved to the US when he was three.
He now lives in Arvada, Colorado, around 30 miles from the grocery store he targeted.
At 2.40pm on Monday, he opened fire on the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, killing ten people.
He was taken into custody at 3.28pm and was transported to the hospital to be treated for a leg wound. He has since been released from the hospital and is now in Boulder County Jail.
Police have not yet confirmed his motive. He has been charged with ten counts of murder.
In Facebook posts over the last 18 months, he complained about not having a girlfriend, ranted about President Trump and talked about his Islamic faith.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that he was known to the FBI because he was linked to another person who has been under investigation for something else. They didn’t give any more details.
In July 2019, the gunman ranted about racist islamophobic people ‘hacking his phone’. His motive hasn’t been confirmed by police
His brother confirmed he was the shooter in an interview with The Daily Beast on Tuesday, saying he was ‘paranoid’ and ‘very antisocial’.
He insisted that the shooting was not politically-motivated and said:'[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,’ he said.
Another told The Denver Post that Alissa was ‘violent’, ‘scary to be around’ and once threatened to kill teammates.
‘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, he ranted: ‘Yeah if these racist Islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could.’…
Continue Reading