The 21-year-old suspect of the Colorado grocery mass shooting on Monday was known to be under FBI’s surveillance and vehemently complained about “racist islamophobes” hacking his phone.
Ahmad al Aliwi Alissa was charged with one count of first-degree murder for each of his ten victims, but his motives remain unknown.
His brother, 34-year-old Ali Aliwi Alissa, told interviewers that Ahmad has always been paranoid and would talk about “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”
“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Ali said.
The suspect’s older brother believed that the shooting was “not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness.”
“The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school. He was like an outgoing kid, but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social,” he continued.
In his now-deleted Facebook page, Ahmad had expressed his fears that someone with Islamophobic reasons had been targeting his phone.
“Yeah if these racist islamophobic people would stop hacking my phone and let me have a normal life I probably could,” he posted back in July 2019.
During the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, Ahmad posted his thoughts about the matter and said that the victims were not targeted by a lone shooter.
“They were the victims of the entire Islamophobia industry that vilified them,” he posted.
After the arrest, Ahmad was initially sent to the hospital to treat his leg wound, but he has since been released and is now in Boulder County Jail.