Across Boulder -- on campus, at churches, in homes -- the emotional wounds remain raw.
A gunman turned what should have been any given Monday afternoon at a grocery store from mundane to terrifying. Ten people had died by the time the shooting stopped.
“It’s numbing. It’s hard to grasp that it’s the grocery store that we went to,” said Molly Frommelt, president of the University of Colorado Boulder’s student body. She spoke to the Denver Gazette outside Boulder police headquarters Tuesday, where she went to leave flowers and a card on the patrol vehicle of Officer Eric Talley, 51, who was killed in the attack.
Frommelt knew Talley personally. She said he worked to strengthen the relationship between students and the Boulder Police Department. Police Chief Maris Herold said Talley, who joined the force in 2010, was the first on the scene following reports of a man with a gun at the store.
“Students feel safe knowing that officers like Officer Talley were willing to be there and put themselves on the front line,” Frommelt said. “There were students in the store when it happened, working and shopping.”
College students in their late teens and early 20s have not known a time without a mass shooting ripping through a Colorado community every few years. Many of them weren’t born when the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton happened, but they know what a reference to “Columbine” means. They’ve lived through the 2012 Aurora movie theater massacre, a 2013 shooting at Arapahoe High School that killed one student, and a 2019 shooting at a STEM school in Highlands Ranch that left a student dead.
"This is all just insane. This is the second city I’ve ever lived in and the second time I’ve lived five minutes from a mass shooting,” said CU Boulder senior Shane Wisneski, who said he was about to go to work at the Whole Foods next to King Soopers at the time of the attack. “I just can’t believe that we go through this so frequently but no one in state or federal government does anything about it.”
The attack’s aftershocks will impact the campus for a time, he said, but “sadly” will fade in time like other shootings.
“We’re all so numb to this now and it's terrifying to think that,” Wisneski said.
Some are turning to their faith for solace.
CU Boulder sophomore Max Robbins, 20, went to a weekly gathering at The Point Café, which was founded by pastors of Reach Church in Broomfield. Like many others, he was processing the shock of the deadly attack at a store where he often shops.
Robbins said faith has played a “massive” role in helping him cope.
“I feel like without my faith in Jesus and that relationship, I don’t feel like I’d be a very hopeful person," he said. "In pursuing that relationship and pursuing the community that comes with it, and hearing other people’s stories is so massive in that aspect [of] bringing hope to me. And I feel like then I can spread that hope as well to other people.”
Others chose to gather, to be around others.
Throughout the day Tuesday, a steady stream of people clutching bouquets of flowers and candles approached the chain-link fence surrounding the bullet-ridden grocery store to mourn the dead and to try to make sense of the previous day's violence.
By nightfall, two sets of 10 wooden crosses graced the front sidewalk, along with countless roses, sunflowers and carnations.
"You can't even go grocery shopping now," said Raelene Johnson, 64, of Erie. "You can't live your life in fear, but you have to know the exits wherever you go."
Investigators spent the day continuing to comb through the sprawling crime scene, at times in snow showers that quickly melted.
The grocery store had been a community hub, a place where people visited and became friendly acquaintances with employees restocking produce and serving coffee at the indoor Starbucks, neighbors said.
A Boulder resident of 20 years, Lisa Molbury, 52, marveled in sadness at how such a picturesque store -- set against the backdrop of Bear Peak and Green Mountain looming to the west -- could be a site of such a "devastating" national tragedy.
"It's devastating," Molbury said. "We all come here."
Gazette contributor Jakob Rodgers participated in this reporting.
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