The young woman took the stand, looked at her younger brother and smiled.

It was the first time Aisha Alissa had been in the same room with the man on trial for allegedly murdering 10 people at a Boulder King Soopers three-and-a-half years ago.

“We were shocked,” she said of the day she got the phone call about what police said her brother had done.

“I’ll never forget the morning call I got the next day. Oh, my God. I was running in the house back and forth. Shocking, sadness,” she told public defender Kathryn Herold during the ninth day of testimony in Ahmad Alissa’s murder trial in Boulder County.  

In that nine days, jurors have heard from two forensic psychologists who testified that Ahmad Alissa was sane on March 22, 2021. In addition, every mental health professional who attended to him since the mass shooting agrees that he suffers from severe schizophrenia. Five members of his family testified this week that his mental illness seemed to start in 2019 and got worse during COVID.

The defendant’s older brother, Mohammed Alissa, told the court Tuesday that March 22, 2021 — the day of the shooting — he was “completely degraded to the floor.” He said that one of his biggest regrets is that he did not call the police to investigate his brother.

“He should not have had weapons at all,” said Mohammed Alissa, 27. 

Alissa’s family never wrote him a letter or tried to see him in jail for the three-and-a-half years since the shooting, although there has been reference during trial that they spoke on the phone. 

No one, including Alissa’s lawyers, disputes he was the shooter that day. Alissa has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The defense says he should be found not guilty because he was legally insane and unable to tell the difference between right and wrong at the time of the shooting.

Prosecutors and forensic psychologists who evaluated him for the trial said that, while mentally ill, Alissa knew that what he was doing was wrong when he launched what prosecutors described as a meticulously-planned attack.

What is a ‘jinn’?

On Tuesday, Mustafa Alissa — Alissa’s father — described what life was like in the family’s crowded Arvada home as his son’s schizophrenia worsened. 

Through a translator, the elder Alissa recalled one instance when, at 3 a.m., the two met in the hall during a bathroom break.

“Ahmad came out of the bathroom, and asked, ‘What are you doing? Why don’t you go to my room to talk to the guy who’s in my room?’” Mustafa Alissa said. “I said to him your door is open and no one is in there.”

Alissa testified that he believed that his 25-year-old son was possessed by a spirit called a jinn.

“I told you I’m not a doctor. I don’t know. But when a person behaves like him, we say they are possessed by a jinn. I don’t know the term they are using — schizophrenia. I don’t know what that is,” he said. 

According to Islamic Studies professor Andrea Stanton, a jinn is a “creature mention in the Qur’an who is considered lower than humans and with a ‘capricious’ nature.”

A 2018 National Institutes of Health study examining how prevalent the attribution of mental health problems were to a jinn in Muslim cultures found that of the 118 people studied, 43% were positive that their psychiatric symptoms were caused by a jinn. Twenty-seven percent thought not and just less than a third of the respondents doubted it.

Dougherty asked Mustafa Alissa why the family never took him to see a doctor when he started his strange behavior.

“It’s shameful in our culture if we say our son is crazy,” he replied.

The alleged shooter was never treated for mental illness until a year after he was taken into custody. For roughly the first year, he refused treatment and at times thereafter — once he was placed in Pueblo’s Colorado Mental Health Institute — would not meet with groups.

He was treated with two medications once he was transferred to the institute, but none of them worked until he was prescribed Clozapine in March 2023. By this summer, he had gone from being introverted and unable to express emotions to becoming more engaged with health care personnel and was even participating in karaoke.

“I have to assume that the Clozapine had a role in his change,” testified Michelle Colarelli, a clinical psychologist who saw the defendant from March to July 2023.

Patricia Westmoreland, who saw the alleged gunman in November 2022, nine months after the shooting, testified that he suffered from schizophrenia and that “a diagnosis does not equal insanity.”

When pressed by District Attorney Michael Doughtery, Westmoreland said that she was not asked by the defendant’s attorneys to conduct a sanity evaluation.

Twentieth Judicial Chief Judge Ingrid Bakke, who reminded observers in the courtroom at one point not to distract each other, said she expects to deliver jury instructions and to hear closings by Friday.