As gunshots peppered the grocery store, a pharmacist heard the alleged Boulder mass shooter shout: “This is fun! This is such fun!”

Sarah Chen, her voice shaking from nerves, told a rapt jury on Thursday that the defendant repeated the shocking statement at least four times.

“I grabbed a chair because I didn’t want to die not doing everything I could,” she said during the murder trial in Boulder County.

Thursday was Day 6 of testimony.

Ahmad Alissa, 25, faces 55 counts overall, including 10 counts of first-degree murder, 38 counts of attempted first-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault and six counts of possessing large-capacity magazines during the commission of a felony in connection to the mass shooting that occurred at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive on March 22, 2021.

The defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his attorneys have admitted to jurors that he was the shooter who killed the people in the parking lot and in the store.

During some of the most sensitive testimony Thursday, the accused twisted in his chair, often looked down to his lap, and even stretched his arms and yawned. One of his public defenders, Samuel Dunn, said that he is taking Clozapine to help control treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Side effects of Clozapine include unusual tiredness and shakiness, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The first witness of the morning was an FBI special agent, who testified about the initial search of the alleged gunman’s home. It started just before midnight on March 22, 2021, the day of the shooting, and lasted around 5 hours.

Agent Stephanie Benitez referenced a night-time photo she took of the alleged shooter’s family’s two-story suburban house in Arvada, a black sedan parked in the driveway in front of a three-car garage. Snow blanketed the front lawn.

Inside the house, Alissa’s sisters, brothers-in-law, a grandmother, his parents and various nieces and nephews were separated as investigators searched the defendant’s upstairs bedroom. In the closet, they found an AR pistol with six loaded magazines, an SAR 45 caliber pistol with three loaded magazines, and shipping labels for both weapons showing they were bought in January and February 2021.

Also on the closet shelf were a rifle scope and a reflex site, which advertised that it was shock proof, lightweight and good for “quick target acquisition.”

Investigators also found bottles of hydrochloric acid and five bottles of acetone which, Benetiz said, is consistent with bomb-making. In the defendant’s bathroom trash were three empty ammunition boxes.

The weapons and ammunition found in the alleged shooter’s home did not include those which he took with him to the King Soopers. 

‘Gun stores near me’

The morning of the shooting, the alleged gunman searched Boulder in the maps application on his cellphone.

Stephanie Sears, a Boulder police forensic digital examiner whose job it was to search the defendant’s iPhone, found 6,000 cached images connected to the mass shooting dated in the three months leading up to it.

Among searches on the cellphone were “Closest gun store near me,” a YouTube video titled “Can a semi-automatic gun be made fully automatic with a shoe lace?” and “are 30-round magazines legal in Colorado?” as well as articles on mass shootings which happened roughly two years before the King Soopers massacre.

The map recording in his phone showed that as Monday, March 22, 2021, grew closer, the defendant was increasingly viewing maps of Boulder, and was especially interested in businesses there including a Safeway, a Target and a Petco. Four days before the shooting, someone viewed a picture of the Flatirons, Boulder’s iconic mountain range.

During a rare cross examination, public defender Kathryn Herold questioned whether the searches she found “went directly to Mr. Alissa.” Sears admitted that she was unable to find anything on the phone which would explain why he committed the mass shooting.

Critical witness

Witness number two Thursday was Jennifer Jacobsen, who screamed for a pen and paper as soon as she careened into her driveway, to write while her memory was fresh.

Jacobsen was a critical witness for the prosecution, as she watched the first three of 10 victims die in the parking lot of her neighborhood grocery store, a horrifying experience which took less than 40 seconds, prosecutors said.

One minute Jacobsen was just another grocery customer carrying bags of coleslaw in her arms and the next, she heard “a whooooosh-pop, like a firework coming out of a cannon.”

She saw the alleged shooter fire into the windshield and driver’s side window of a service van, and then go after a man she befriended while they were checking out and whom also happened to be parked next to her.

She told the jury that she and Kevin Mahoney walked out of the store together and had just had a chuckle over his automatic trunk opener when he walked away to return his cart and into the path of the alleged shooter.

“He (the alleged shooter) went walking straight towards him very determined and I immediately put my hands on my head and went straight under my steering wheel,” she said.

She later described the way Alissa moved as “almost like a hunter,” prompting objections from the defense team.

He shot three people in the parking lot in just 38 seconds, and then spent the next 68 seconds “hunting and killing seven more,” 20th Judicial District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in opening statements.

Defense attorneys plan to argue that Alissa was suffering from mental illness, and, thus, not capable of discerning right from wrong at the time of the shooting.