REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 COLORADO TOWN REELS AS YOUNG MAN IS CHARGED FOR MURDERING 10 COLORADANS

 

                                …Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is an immigrant from Syria

 

In his senior year, this young man severely assaulted another student while in a class.

 

Maybe he didn't quite fit in at his midsize high school in this Denver suburb of Arvada, Colo.  But Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa certainly didn't stand out. One of 11 siblings in a family that emigrated from Raqqa, Syria, two decades ago.  Alissa it seems, had some issues in his early teens.  He was a usually quite young man who perhaps wanted for friends.

“He was a pretty chill kid from what I can remember,” said Mark Dorokhov, who said he often ate lunch with Alissa during the short period that Dorokhov attended Arvada West High School. “He wasn’t like a popular kid or anything. And he wasn’t like the high school loser, either. He was just kind of in-between.”

His mild persona soon unraveled, in his senior year in November 2017.  This same young man is now accused of killing 10 people in a Boulder, Colorado grocery store this week   In 2017, Alissa stood up in class and assaulted an unsuspecting student.  He pummeled the student in the head and face, all for an alleged ethnic slur.  He then pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to probation and community service.

About this same time, Alissa threatened one of his wrestling teammates after losing a match. “He got super mad and started throwing his head gear. He was saying, ‘I’m going to kill you guys’ and walked out,” Angel Hernandez said. His teammates were all stunned.

“We were kind of quiet about it. We kind of went ahead and went along with practice. Coach was like, ‘What the heck just happened?’” Hernandez said.

Alissa never returned to the team.

Less than three years later, a month shy of his 22nd birthday, the anonymous high school wrestler became the short, bearded suspect in the second mass shooting in the United States in less than a week.

“Are they seriously saying he killed 10 people? This doesn’t make sense,” said a cousin in Syria who spoke on the condition that he only be identified by only his first name, Abdullah. “How can this be true?

“Ahmad’s whole family are good people. They never had problems, not in Syria or in the U.S.”

The Alissa family appeared to prosper after arriving in the United States, opening and acquiring several restaurants that served Middle Eastern food, according to an old video from a local news channel.

The family lives in a suburban neighborhood in this town of more than 100,000 people just northwest of Denver, with well-kept homes and upscale cars in the driveways. According to the affidavit released by police, Alissa lived on the top floor of a large two-story house. On Tuesday, the house occupants covered the windows and occasionally peeked out at the media gathered on the street outside. No one answered the door.

Steve Weber, a neighbor, said the suspect’s family moved in about a year and a half ago and has many visitors, but little interaction with the neighbors.  He described the community as being, "crime-free."

The police affidavit said that Alissa bought the murder weapon on March 16, the same day the Georgia shooting left eight people dead.  Another resident of his home described it as a “machine gun.”

A Facebook profile that appears to be Alissa’s contains posts about martial arts and Islam, with no evidence of “any radical or extremist views,” according to an analysis Tuesday by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors on-line extremism.  Analysts there reviewed an archived version of the Facebook page, which has since been removed from the platform.

The profile shows that Alissa “was born in Syria and came to the U.S. as a toddler in 2002. He studied computer science and expressed an interest in wrestling and mixed martial arts (MMA).  Alissa also frequently discussed PlayStation 4, Islam, and his stance against same-sex marriage.”

“We still don’t know what his motive was, or if he had one at all. But what I can say is that based on what I’ve seen of his social media presence, he didn’t even remotely suggest having radical Islamist leanings, or really radical leanings of any kind,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE. “There are already some suggesting he was a jihadi or anti-Trump terrorist, but social media posts they cite as evidence don’t really back it up.”

From the school in Columbine, to the theaters in Aurora, to the King Sooper Market in Boulder, Colorado mass shootings have a long, painful history.

Alissa did complain about hostility toward refugees and Muslims. In a PBS link about the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy, Alissa wrote about, “Why refugees and immigrants are good for America.”

One post by Alissa said, “God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve… just saying.”

Another post said “What Islam is really about” and listed virtues such as “decency, humility and forgiveness”.

In September 2019, when Alissa was 20, he posted “#NeedAGirlfriend.” The cousin in Syria said Alissa’s family was trying to find a wife for him, but without success.

His Facebook account slowed down dramatically after October 2019. There were only three publicly accessible posts in 2020, with the last in last September.

In Merrill Middle School, one woman said Alissa “was the sweetest kid ever. Really quiet and respectful. He got along with everyone. And he talked to everybody. He would play with everyone.” She spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing for her own safety.

A classmate in a 10th-grade English class remembered Alissa as almost painfully being anonymous.

“In high school, he didn’t really have a lot of friends, and that’s why the other student and I tried to reach out and make him welcome,” said the classmate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment on social media. “He was alone and he was just kind of shy.”

Dorokhov and other students remembered having lunch occasionally at one of the Alissa family’s restaurants, the Sultan Grill, not far from Arvada West High School.  But little about Alissa himself stood out.

“I had a Volkswagen; we talked about my car,” said Dorokhov, who is an immigrant from Ukraine who is an auto mechanic.

According to the arrest warrant affidavit, police found a black Mercedes sedan in the parking lot of the King Soopers market. The vehicle was registered to one of Alissa’s brothers.

One of Alissa’s brothers, Ali Aliwi Alissa, 34, told the Daily Beast in a phone interview that his brother was mentally ill and paranoid, adding that in high school he would talk that someone was looking for him. He added that his brother was bullied in high school.

Angel Hernandez was a friend and a year behind the suspect in high school. The two competed on the same team for three years. Hernandez, who graduated in 2019, said the team was like a family.  He was not close to Alissa, he said, but bonded with him through the sport, as teammates often do. He struggles to reconcile the teenager he remembered as “genuine and super nice.”

He recalled, however, that Alissa’s mood could grow dark in an instant. Hernandez said he was aware Alissa had “some problems with anger.”

“If something made him mad, within a split second, he’d change,” Hernandez said. “When he got mad, it was scary, I won’t lie.”

About a month ago, Hernandez ran into Alissa at a restaurant and said he seemed “100 percent fine.” The two spoke for a few minutes and Hernandez asked how Alissa was doing.  “He said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing pretty good.’ He said life was tough with the covid situation, but that was pretty much it. He seemed happy.”

That interaction makes events even more difficult to understand, he said.

“I’m in shock,” he said, “and I’m sad about it.”

This is a perfect example why some states require that no one can buy a gun without a background check, and a waiting period before you can actually receive the firearm.

Copyright G. Ater 2021