Colorado’s accused mass shooter, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, had a violent temper that would explode “like a demon” – and once threatened to kill everyone in a fight, his former colleagues said.
“It was kind of scary to be around,” Dayton Marvel told The Denver Post about his former wrestling buddy at Arvada West High School, where the accused Syrian-born mass murderer graduated in 2018.
“His senior year, during the fights to see who gets to the varsity team, he really lost the match and left the team and shouted in the fight room that he was going to kill everyone,” Marvel told the newspaper.
“Nobody believed him. We were all a little scared about it, but nobody did anything about it, ”he said.
“He was a very nice boy until something made him angry, and then whatever made him angry, he went further – too far,” said the former teammate.
Another teammate, Angel Hernandez, told the newspaper that he once saw Alissa fight with someone who was “just playing”.
Alissa, “I just lost. He started punching him, ”Hernandez told the newspaper.
Hernandez insisted that the accused killer was mainly “a good guy” who was “always so cheerful and so nice”.
“But you could say that there was a dark side to it. If he got angry at something, in a split second, it was like something took over, like a demon. He just released all his anger, ”he recalled.
Alissa often seemed paranoid, echoing her own fears and those expressed by her family, Hernandez said.
Marvel also said that Alissa “would talk about him being a Muslim and as if someone tried something, he would register a hate crime and say they were making it up”
Alissa was convicted of criminal assault in 2018 and sentenced to parole and community service for attacking a classmate the year before, blaming racist abuse for the attack, court documents show.
Alissa, 21, now faces 10 counts of first-degree murder for the violence he allegedly unleashed on Monday afternoon at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder. The 10 victims included police officer Eric Talley, a father of seven, 51, who was one of the first police officers to respond.