Boulder Shooting News: Live Updates

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Boulder Shooting Is a ‘Tragedy and a Nightmare’

The authorities said that multiple people, including a police officer, were killed on Monday at a supermarket in Boulder, Colo., and that a person of interest was in custody.

We had a very tragic incident today here at the King Soopers. There was loss of life. We have multiple people who were killed in this incident. And I am sorry to have to report that one of them was a Boulder police officer. I can share with the public today or this evening that there is no ongoing public threat, that we do have a person of interest in custody. That person was injured during the incident and is being treated for the injuries. This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder County. And in response, we have cooperation and assistance from local, state and federal authorities. This will very much be a coordinated effort. And we will stand united in support of the victims and their families to ensure that justice is done. As Commander Yamaguchi said, there is an individual in custody currently with multiple victims and we will be doing everything we can to fight for them and their families to make sure that we reach the right and just outcome.

BOULDER, Colo. — A day after a gunman opened fire Monday at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., killing 10 people, the police had publicly identified just one of the victims, one of their own, a 51-year-old veteran officer.

A suspect, who had been injured, was taken into custody, the authorities said. Videos showed a handcuffed man being escorted from the building by officers, shirtless and with his right leg appearing to be covered in blood. People inside the grocery, King Soopers, in the South Boulder area, described a harrowing and chaotic scene.

“I thought I was going to die,” said Alex Arellano, 35, who was working in the meat department at King Soopers when he heard a series of gunshots and then saw people running toward an exit.

The authorities identified the officer who died as Eric Talley, who joined the department in 2010. Officer Talley was the first to respond to the scene when reports of a gunman came in, the police said.

“He was, by all accounts, one of the outstanding officers at the Boulder Police Department and his life was cut far too short,” said the Boulder County district attorney, Michael Dougherty.

The Boulder shooting came less than a week after a gunman shot and killed eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — at three spas in the Atlanta area. Until that shooting in Atlanta, it had been a year since there had been a large-scale shooting in a public place.

“Atlanta was a week ago and now it’s Boulder,” said Meredith Johnson, a 25-year-old Boulder resident, as she was walking on a sidewalk across the street from King Soopers.

“What is it going to be two weeks from now?” she said. “We’re looking at it right in front of us — it’s not just something you see on your feed anymore and unfortunately that’s just a common experience in America. And especially for our generation.”

Vice President Kamala Harris commented on the shooting during the ceremonial swearing in for the new C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, in Washington on Tuesday morning. “It’s absolutely baffling,” Ms. Harris said. “It’s 10 people going about their day, living their lives, not bothering anybody. A police officer who is performing his duties, and with great courage and heroism.”

Quinlyn and Neven Sloan, 21-year-old newlyweds, had stopped into the store to pick up supplies for beef stroganoff when they heard the shooting. Ms. Sloan, a student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that at first she didn’t recognize the noise.

The couple had split up in the store — he was in produce, she said, and she was standing in front of the dairy case — when customers began running.

“It was muffled at first,” she said, “and I thought maybe someone had dropped something, but then it went again, probably about 15 to 20 shots, really fast. My husband came up and shoved me out the door, and yelled, ‘Call 911!’ Then he ran back in to make sure a couple of older ladies who were in the aisles got out OK.”

Sprinting across the parking lot, she said, she hid behind a building, to be joined minutes later by her husband. Only then, she added, did they look down and realize that, because they hadn’t bothered to use a cart, they had fled with their arms full of the meat, noodles and sherry they had intended to buy.

“These were people going about their day, doing their food shopping, and their lives were cut abruptly and tragically short,” Mr. Dougherty said. “I promise the victims and the people of the state of Colorado that we will secure justice.”

Among the 10 people who died in the attack was Eric Talley, an 11-year veteran of the Boulder Police Department, who was described as “heroic” by Chief Maris Herold at a news conference at the scene of the shooting on Monday.

“He was the first on the scene, and he was fatally shot,” Chief Herold said, holding back tears. “My heart goes out to the victims of this incident. And I’m grateful to the police officers that responded. And I am so sorry about the loss of Officer Talley.”

“He was by all accounts one of the outstanding officers of the Boulder Police Department, and his life was cut far too short,” said Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney.

“He took his job as a police officer very seriously,” his father, Homer Talley, said in a statement. “He had seven children. The youngest is 7 years old. He loved his kids and his family more than anything. He joined the police force when he was 40 years old. He was looking for a job to keep himself off the front lines and was learning to be a drone operator. He didn’t want to put his family through something like this and he believed in Jesus Christ.”

On Twitter, a woman who described herself as his sister, Kirstin, posted: “Officer Eric Talley is my big brother. He died today in the Boulder shooting. My heart is broken. I cannot explain how beautiful he was and what a devastating loss this is to so many. Fly high my sweet brother. You always wanted to be a pilot (damn color blindness). Soar.”

Law enforcement colleagues also praised him on social media. In a Facebook tribute that was later removed, Jeremy Herko, who described himself as a friend, also wrote of Officer Talley’s devotion to his family, community and Christianity.

“I cannot describe my level of devastation I feel right now,” he wrote. “My heart is heavy. So many things I would do differently. The person I was calling and messaging earlier, one of my best friends, died today in Boulder. He was the police officer killed. Eric Talley is his name, and he was a devout Christian, he had to buy a 15-passenger van to haul all his kids around, and he was the nicest guy in the world. I’ve known him since we went to the academy together, and we talked all the time. Please keep his wife and kids in your thoughts.”

In 2013, the local newspaper, The Boulder Daily Camera, featured Officer Talley and two other members of the force who had waded into a drainage ditch to rescue a trapped mother duck and 11 ducklings. “He was drenched after this,” Sgt. Jack Walker told the paper about Talley. “They would go into these little pipes and he would have to try and fish them out.”

Talley is the sixth on-duty death in the department’s history and the first officer killed in the line of duty since 1994, the paper reported.

As his body was taken by ambulance from the scene to the funeral home, a procession of emergency vehicles escorted it, and first responders stood by the side of Table Mesa Road, saluting.

The authorities have not yet released information on the other nine victims.

Sarah Moonshadow was at the checkout with her son, buying food while waiting for her laundry to be done nearby, when she, too, heard shots being fired.

“We ducked and I just started counting in between shots, and by the fourth shot I told my son, we have to run,” she said. As they were running, two shots were fired in their direction, she said.

When they made it out of the store, they saw a body lying in the road.

“I can tell that he wasn’t moving,” she said. “And so, I’m pretty sure he was gone. “And I just broke down across the street. I just couldn’t believe we were able to make it across.”

Ms. Moonshadow moved back to Boulder, her hometown, from Denver after she became concerned about Denver becoming unsafe. “I’m really surprised that it even happened here,” she said. “This isn’t how Boulder is, you know. This isn’t what happens here.”

Taylor Shaver, who works at Art Cleaners, a dry cleaning and laundry business near the supermarket, said in an interview that she heard at least 10 gunshots and saw people running from the grocery store.

“I’m in the bathroom hiding,” Ms. Shaver said. “I heard this loud boom. I instantly knew. There was a ton of shots. My stomach dropped.”

Ms. Shaver, 18, added that it was particularly unnerving because it was her first day working alone at the dry cleaning business. During a phone interview, she said she had left the bathroom to see what was going outside the business.

“Oh my gosh, you can see all these people walking with their hands up,” she said. “I’ve never seen this many police officers in my life.”

Jordan Crumby, a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said in an interview that she was about to get a tattoo with the word “warning” on her hip at Auspicious Tattoo, a shop across from the grocery store, when the shooting began.

“From here, I can see the window that is shattered,” she said. “Everyone is still on lockdown.”

Ms. Crumby, 31, said she stepped outside to record a video for her Instagram feed, when the police waved her away. In the videos, officers with tactical gear and rifles could be seen swarming the shopping center. People from the grocery store, she said, were being evacuated.

“They had their hands over their heads and they’re getting escorted out,” she said. “I said, ‘We should probably go inside.’”

Logan Smith, working in the Starbucks kiosk in the store, told NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday morning that two of his co-workers were killed in the shooting. He still had not heard back from a third friend, he said.

“It’s harder even than it was yesterday, just thinking about the friends that I’ve lost,” he said.

Mr. Smith said, he helped a co-worker hide in a corner with “some trash cans to cover her.” But he struggled to find cover himself, hiding behind another trash can but finding it “couldn’t really protect me,” he said.

“I was definitely in a life-threatening situation if the shooter came to the kiosk,” he said. He added that this was not his first experience at the company in the last year that an employees life was threatened, though the other two occasions were “not as severe.”

“But because of those other events, it’s been in my head that something like this could happen,” he said.

The deadly shooting on Monday in Boulder, Colo., where 10 people were killed including a police officer, was the second mass shooting in the United States in less than a week.

On Tuesday, a gunman shot and killed eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — at three spas in the Atlanta area.

Until that shooting in Georgia, it had been a year since there had been a large-scale shooting in a public place. In 2018, the year that a gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., there were 10 mass shootings in which four or more people were killed in a public setting.

The following year, when a gunman targeting Latinos in El Paso, Texas, killed 22 people, there were nine such shootings.

“Those were the worst years on record,” said Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., and a co-founder of the Violence Project, a research center that studies gun violence.

But before the shootings in Atlanta last week, there had been no such killings since March 2020, according to the Violence Project.

Other types of gun violence, however, increased significantly last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There were more than 600 shootings in which four or more people were shot by one person compared with 417 in 2019. Many of those shootings involved gang violence, fights and domestic incidents, where the perpetrator knew the victims, Dr. Peterson said.

The early research suggests that widespread unemployment, financial stress, a rise in drug and alcohol addiction, and a lack of access to community resources caused by the pandemic contributed to the increase in shootings last year.

The police did not say what might have motivated the Colorado gunman, who is in custody.

In Atlanta, the shootings touched off calls to stop hate crimes against Asian-Americans, which have been rising during the pandemic. Some have blamed that rise on words used by former President Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly called the coronavirus, which was first identified in Wuhan, China, “the Chinese virus.” The police have not ruled out a racial motive, even as the suspect denied racial animus, officials said.

The city of Boulder enacted bans on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines in 2018 following the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. But a state district court judge ruled this month that Boulder could not enforce the bans.

It was not known Monday night whether any weapons covered by the bans were involved in the shooting at the King Soopers grocery store.

Judge Andrew Hartman ruled that under a state law passed in 2003, cities and counties are barred from adopting restrictions on firearms that are otherwise legal under state and federal law, The Denver Post reported. Gun advocates made that argument when they sued to overturn the Boulder bans shortly after they were adopted.

The judge rejected the city’s arguments that the home-rule provisions of the state constitution gave it the power to adopt the bans as a matter of local concern, and that they were necessary because the state did not regulate such weapons. As of last week, lawyers for the city had not said whether they planned to appeal.

An assault weapons ban in Denver was allowed to stand by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2006. But the circumstances were somewhat different. Among other things, Denver’s ban, unlike Boulder’s, had already been on the books for years when the 2003 state law was passed.

An appeals court found that Denver had the right to adopt reasonable gun regulations despite that law. When the decision was appealed, the State Supreme Court deadlocked 3-3 with one recusal. That left the appellate decision, and the Denver ban, in place, but it did not set a binding precedent for other cases.

Boulder’s ban is also being challenged in federal court on constitutional grounds.

The shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., that left 10 people dead came after a year in which the pandemic made supermarkets a dangerous place for employees, who risked falling ill with the coronavirus and often had to confront combative customers who refused to wear masks.

“They’ve experienced the worst of the worst,” said Kim Cordova, who represents more than 25,000 grocery and other workers in Colorado and Wyoming — including those at the King Sooper store that was attacked — as the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7.

At least 853 grocery store employees in Colorado have had the virus during the pandemic, according to outbreak data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The state does not list any infections at the store that was the site of the shooting, but Ms. Cordova said that all grocery store employees had risked their safety when they came to work and were confronted by hostile shoppers.

“They’ve seen horrible behavior by customers — spitting on them, slapping them, refusing to wear masks — but they were the first to be heroes,” Ms. Cordova said.

The union, U.F.C.W., which also represents meatpacking employees and other workers, said in a statement that at least four of its members in Colorado had died of Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and that at least 155 grocery workers across the country have died.

Ms. Cordova said her union had pushed for more security in grocery stores as customers grew more aggressive. And while she cautioned that it was not yet clear what the motive of the gunman was, she said grocery store workers have increasingly come under threat on the job since the pandemic began.

“We have seen this behavior become more aggressive and violent,” she said, “and this has really traumatized these employees.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee, confronted with the mass shootings of 18 people in two states within the span of a week, will hold a hearing on the problem of gun violence on Tuesday morning as advocates of regulation raise a familiar plea for Congress to act.

Only hours after the shooting in Boulder, Colo., on Monday night, signs of a familiar partisan divide on guns began to appear. Some Democrats called for action, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who said, “This Senate must and will move forward on legislation to help stop the epidemic of gun violence.”

Some Republicans, including Representative Lauren Boebert, who made supporting gun owners’ rights a key part of her agenda while running for office in Colorado, expressed sympathy for the victims. “May God be with us as we make sense of this senseless violence, and may we unify and not divide during this time,” she said.

Advocacy groups quickly responded. The group Everytown for Gun Safety said the shooting in Boulder was at least the 246th mass shooting in the United States since January 2009, and that on average 805 people die by gun violence in Colorado every year.

“This is yet another in a long string of horrific tragedies, from Boulder today to Atlanta last week to the dozens more people in the United States who are shot every day,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, in a statement. “To save lives and end these senseless killings, we need more than thoughts and prayers — we need federal action on gun safety from the Senate and the administration.”

Gabrielle Giffords, the former representative from Arizona who was shot a decade ago, wrote on Twitter: “It’s been 10 years and countless communities have faced something similar. This is not normal.” She added, “It’s beyond time for our leaders to take action.”

A representative of her group, the Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence, was to speak at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, on a witness list that includes a fellow from the conservative group Heritage Foundation and the police chief of Waterbury, Conn., among others.

President Biden had been briefed on the shooting in Boulder and would be kept apprised of any further developments, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, tweeted on Monday.

In 2019, two national surveys found that vast majorities of Americans — Democrats and Republicans, men and women — support stricter gun laws. Polls also found that gun violence was beginning to scare people: a third of Americans reported that fear of a mass shooting stops them from going to certain public places, according to one survey by the American Psychological Association. Sixty percent said they were worried about a mass shooting in their community. Despite the broad support for action such as stricter background checks, Republicans in Congress have historically resisted attempts to regulate guns, and the issue has repeatedly fallen on lawmakers’ agendas.

The National Rifle Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Its last tweet, at 8 p.m. Monday night, hours after the shooting, repeated the text of the second amendment.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will examine gun control measures at a hearing on Tuesday morning, in the wake of two mass shootings in the past week that left at least 18 people dead and created mounting pressure for Congress to break a decades-long cycle of inaction on gun violence.

The hearing, scheduled by Senate Democrats before the Boulder shooting, comes as the party had already begun advancing stricter gun control measures that face long odds in the 50-50 chamber. House Democrats passed two bills this month aimed at expanding and strengthening background checks for gun buyers, by applying them to all gun buyers and extending the time the F.B.I. has to vet those flagged by the national instant check system.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee quickly signaled that the shootings had created a new sense of urgency on Capitol Hill to tackle an issue that has long bedeviled Congress, where a grim pattern of anguish and outrage followed by partisanship and paralysis has become the norm following mass shootings.

“Editing my opening statement for tomorrow’s hearing on gun violence only to look up & see the news reporting six killed by a gunman in Boulder,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Twitter before the death toll rose to 10. “How many more lives must be lost before we enact the gun violence prevention our country so desperately needs?”

But the twin pieces of legislation passed in the House have been deemed too expansive by most Republicans — only eight House Republicans voted to advance the universal background check legislation. The bills would almost certainly not muster the 60 votes needed to clear a filibuster in the Senate.

The renewed focus on gun control is expected to cast attention back on Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who opposes dismantling the legislative filibuster but has long labored — fruitlessly — to pass a bipartisan control proposal. Following the 2012 shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Manchin brokered a deal with Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, to close legal loopholes that allow people who purchase firearms at gun shows or on the internet to avoid background checks, but proponents were unable to pick up enough support to pass it.

Mr. Manchin told CQ Roll Call earlier this month that he opposed the House-passed universal background check bill, citing its provision requiring checks for sales between private citizens, but said he was interested in reviving the Manchin-Toomey legislation.