Press "Enter" to skip to content

Police report active shooter at Colorado supermarket

By Joe Rubino | Denver Post

A shooter opened fire inside a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder on Monday afternoon, but there were few details hours after the first reports came in.

Authorities haven’t provided any information about possible deaths or injuries, or the status of the shooter.

Around 5:10 p.m., police tweeted that they were asking people living near 17th and Grove streets in Boulder to shelter in place while officers responded to a report of an “armed, dangerous individual.” Police said they were trying to determine whether it was related to the King Soopers shooting.

Police have surrounded a home on 17th and blocked the street. Two armored vehicles are parked outside.

Video live-streamed by a bystander at the King Soopers earlier in the afternoon showed a man wearing only shorts being removed from the store in handcuffs after police went in. One of his legs was covered in blood. It’s not clear if the man was a shooting suspect or whether he was arrested.

“He didn’t say (expletive),” said one of them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He just came in and started shooting.”

The other witness said the gunman “let off a couple of shots, then was silent, and then he let off a couple more. He wasn’t spraying.”

The two men were able to escape out the back of the store.

Boulder Police Department officials tweeted a warning at 2:49 p.m. Monday for people to avoid the area because of an active shooter. A public information officer was on the way to the scene. Further information was not immediately provided.

Feeling gunfire

Sarah Moonshadow and her son, Nicolas Edwards, had just finished paying for strawberries when two shots rang out. She told her son to get down.

“We just ran,” Moonshadow said.

They felt the concussions of shots as they sprinted out. Outside, a body was lying in the parking lot and Moonshadow started toward it. “My son said, ‘No, Mom! We can’t do anything.’”

By the time they got outside, Edwards said police were flying into the parking lot and pulled up next to the body.

“I knew we couldn’t do anything for the guy” he said. “We had to go.”

They got across the street and hid behind a rock at an apartment

Moonshadow and her son were waiting outside the crime scene because their truck was still in the lot. Their 3-year-old pit bull, Rollo, was inside the truck

James Bentz said he was inside the store when the shooting happened. He said he was in the meat section when he heard what he thought was a misfire, then a series of pops.

“I was then at the front of a stampede,” he said.

Bentz said he ended up jumping off the back loading dock to escape. He said younger people in the store were taking care of older people, helping them off the dock.

“It seemed like all of us had imagined we’d be in a situation like this at some point in our lives,” he said.

Neven Sloan and his wife, Quinlyn, said they were in the store when shots were fired. He was in produce; she was in dairy. They ran to find each other and then escaped.

The shots “were muffled at first and then I heard it echo in the store and I knew we needed to get out,” Neven Sloan said.

He ran back inside to help others out once he knew his wife was safely outside.

“I felt an impulse to go back,” he said.

Quinlyn Sloan said she didn’t know what the first big noise was, and then “people started running. A few stood still like they didn’t know what was happening. Then it (the shooting) went rapidly.”

Video shot at the scene

A YouTube user was live-streaming from the scene starting at roughly 2:30 p.m. His video showed what appear to be shooting victims, and police approaching the front of the badly damaged store in an armored vehicle.

During the video, a man wearing a King Soopers’ employee uniform said the shooter was inside the store, and then what sounded like two gunshots could be heard.

The bystander then retreated, passing by a light-colored Toyota SUV that was parked at the base of an entrance ramp to the store. As he fled, the bystander shouted at others outside to get away.


Source: Orange County Register

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *