The United States is recovering from its second shooting in less than a week and a city is suffering again, even as the country continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
The suspect was arrested after the violence that killed 10 people in a Colorado supermarket on Monday afternoon, but many questions about what caused the shooting are still unanswered.
Here is a look at what is known and what remains unknown:
LOST LIFES
Among the dead were the owner of a local clothing store, a man about to become a grandfather, a photographer and a Medicare agent who was also an actress.
Some victims were shot while collecting supplies; others worked a whole day. One of them, Eric Talley, was a police officer who ran to the store that day to rescue people from the deadly attack.
But why the sniper opened fire at that store and whether the attack was random or targeted is unclear.
REASON FOR THE SHOOTER
King Soopers supermarket was considered a community center by many in the southern part of Boulder, a liberal city of about 100,000 that is home to the University of Colorado.
But the shooting suspect, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 21, was from the Denver suburb of Arvada, 20 miles away. The two-story house believed to be owned by his father is in a relatively new, middle to upper class neighborhood.
Little has come up about a possible reason.
Her family told investigators that she believed Alissa was suffering from some form of mental illness, including delusions, according to a police officer who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. Alissa sometimes seemed to think that people were following or chasing him, a possible factor in the violence, relatives said to the officer, who was informed of the shooting but was not allowed to speak publicly.
THE GUN
The suspect bought the gun believed to have been used in the shooting six days earlier the murders. Authorities did not say where or how he bought it. The AR-15 style weapon recovered at the scene, a Ruger-AR-556, is technically a pistol, but it looks a lot like a rifle with a slightly shorter butt. Another weapon was recovered inside the store, as well as a green tactical vest that Alissa removed along with most of her clothes before her arrest.
He was playing with a gun that looked like a “machine gun” about two days earlier, his sister-in-law later told the police.
HIGH SCHOOL
Little is publicly known about Alissa’s daily life before Monday afternoon. A university spokesman he listed on his now-deleted Facebook profile said he was not enrolled there.
Some details came up about his high school years in Arvada. He was a fighter, although he was later expelled from the team after a furious speech that followed a lost game, a former teammate told the Associated Press.
He was also convicted in 2018 of throwing a colleague to the ground, climbing on top of him and punching him in the head several times, according to police documents. He was sentenced to probation and community service.
Alissa complained that the student made fun of him and called him “racial names” weeks earlier, according to the statement. Alissa was born in Syria, emigrated to the United States as a child and is now an American citizen, according to two police officers who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to speak publicly.
GUN LAWS
A judge overturned a Boulder city ban for possessing assault weapons 10 days before the murders. It is probably impossible to know if that could have prevented it, but the moment was tragic for city leaders who hoped to avoid a mass shootout of the kind that took over Colorado several times in the past two decades.
The state has a law that allows firearms to be taken from people who pose a danger. Family, household members or law enforcement officers can petition a judge under a measure known as an extreme risk protection order or “red flag law”.
It is not clear whether anyone close to Alissa was concerned enough about her behavior to initiate the lawsuit last week. Still, convincing a judge that weapons need to be seized or handed over usually requires evidence of an imminent threat, said Jacob Charles, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. Considering the importance of Second Amendment rights, general concerns about someone acting weird and having a gun are usually not enough, he said.
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Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington, DC contributed to this report.