A mentally ill man who killed 10 people at a Colorado supermarket told psychologists he heard “killing voices” right before opening fire, a psychologist testified Friday during the gunman’s trial.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, who has been diagnosed with a severe case of schizophrenia, repeatedly failed during about six hours of interviews to provide any more details about the voices or whether he heard them saying anything other than that they were yelling, forensic psychologist B. Thomas Gray said.
“I started hearing voices, like killing, like killing voices,” Alissa said in one portion of the videotaped interviews shown in court. The clips showed Alissa fidgeting, yawning and stretching at times and speaking in a soft voice that was often difficult to hear over a hum on the recordings.
After the interviews, Gray and fellow forensic psychologist Loandra Torres determined that at the time of the 2021 shooting in the college town of Boulder , Alissa was legally sane — able to understand the difference between right and wrong.