Stories of everyday heroism and selflessness emerge amid the horror of the Boulder King Soopers mass shooting

Editor's Note: The following story recounts the events of a mass shooting and may be disturbing to some readers. Discretion is advised.

A gunman was roaming the grocery store, chasing and killing anyone who tried to escape, when the deli's assistant manager was overcome by an urgent, selfless impulse.

He had to get as many people out of the store as possible.

Chris Tatum, now 27, worked behind the counter at the South Boulder King Soopers grocery store on Table Mesa Drive on March 22, 2021. He had worked there since 2018, preparing pizza and chicken for the typical after-school and work rush.

When the shooting started, Tatum didn't want to believe the worst, he said. But when it became clear that people were panicking and running for cover, he told all of his colleagues behind the counter to take cover. Then he went to the loudspeaker and shouted: “Active shooter! Active shooter, get out, get out, active shooter!”

Tatum's moments of courage included not only loudly telling people to leave the store, but also picking up a 76-year-old woman from the ground who had fallen facedown and broken her spine. He also went back into the store four times to evacuate as many customers and employees as possible who were hiding in restrooms and behind displays, using emergency exits and the back door so they could escape.

For a moment, Tatum wondered why he kept going back to the store.

“Why am I here?” he told a jury in Boulder this week. “I wanted to make sure people were OK, I didn't want to leave anyone behind and I didn't want to leave anyone behind here.”

Tatum's story is just one of many remarkable tales of heroism and fearlessness among civilians and police officers in the darkest minutes of a mass shooting that have come to light in the first week of the trial of the suspected gunman who is accused of killing 10 people in the store three years ago.

Prosecutors have called dozens of witnesses, customers, police officers and King Soopers employees, all of whom have described what they did and how they tried to help amid panic, confusion and horror.

Many ran out of the store without thinking, no matter how, which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommends as the first course of action in the event of a mass shooting. Others hid – the second recommended course of action.

However, some people – both those who are paid to protect the public and those who are not – have put aside their self-preservation and performed heroic acts to save other people's lives.

Logan Smith, a Starbucks employee at the store, came out first but then decided to go back in to get an employee who was paralyzed with panic and unable to move. He crouched with her under the coffee counter next to the trash cans for nearly an hour.

A University of Colorado police officer, Brandon Braun, initially thought he had been shot in the face because glass shards flew into his face and he temporarily lost his hearing. He spat out shards of glass. He then helped 30 desperate people huddled in the back of the store to safety at a pizza place in the same shopping center. He was not wearing a bulletproof vest in the store at the time because he did not have one on hand.

A mother and her 21-year-old son were buying strawberries at the self-checkout and crouched on the floor. The mother, Sarah Moonshadow, listened for the shooter and watched him carefully. When she saw him hit a COVID-19 plexiglass barrier with the muzzle of his gun, she yelled at her son to run away. Both narrowly escaped from the store as gunshots rang out behind them.

Richard Steidell, another Boulder police officer, shot the gunman in the leg in a grocery store aisle as he lay on a floor littered with broken glass. Steidell then actually commandeered an RTD bus with passengers inside so that victims and survivors inside the store could flee the area as quickly as possible.

“Let me ask you this,” Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty said to Logan Smith, who was working at Starbucks at the time with another co-worker named Helen. “Why did you go back into the store at that time?”

“Honestly,” Smith said. “For Helen, for my other colleagues. I wanted to escort the people out that I could, and my attitude and reaction changed quite a bit when I walked in and saw Helen standing there motionless… Helen was rooted to the spot and I knew I wasn't going to leave, I wasn't going to leave her. I wasn't going to flee the store. We dug in behind the garbage cans.”

Eric Talley was a 51-year-old Boulder police officer and father of seven who lost his life in the store that day.

A video from Talley's dashboard camera, played to the jury, showed Talley hastily jumping from the police station into his patrol car with his lights and siren on. He yelled to himself as cars wouldn't move out of his way as he headed to the grocery store, and dodged them by driving on the shoulders of the roads and US 36. He arrived at the store on Table Mesa Drive with screeching tires. Two bodies could be seen lying on the ground outside in the parking lot.

He didn't hesitate.

Talley ripped open the car door and ran into the car at full speed. There, two other police officers who were about to enter the car shot him in the head and died instantly.

Julie Keeton, a senior sales clerk at King Soopers, also thought of other people first. She was checking out dog food for a customer when the gunman started shooting. In particular, Keeton told the jury that she was trying to look after the assistant sales clerks with special needs – three of whom were working at the store that day.

One of them, Teri Leiker, was shot.

“I turned around and looked at my people, as if I wanted to know what my responsibility was here,” Keeton told the jury. “There were customers walking between the stalls and the aisles, and I said, 'Those are gunshots, there's a shooter, let's go!'”

Keeton began walking down the aisle, trying to get people to follow her out the back door. When she reached the back of the store toward the double doors, it was crowded and dark and people were panicking. An elderly woman shuffled to the back and Keeton stopped and asked, “Want me to carry you?”

The woman's husband said they were fine and urged them to move on.

Hart Van Denburg/CPR News

As people took cover or looked for exits, Boulder police Officer Richard Steidell and other officers slowly entered the store to find the shooter.

He heard another officer yell, “There he is!” and the glass behind the officers was shot out and shattered on them. Steidell testified that he fired one or two shots and then lay prone on the ground to take cover. His arms were fully extended and he had his gun drawn. From the ground, he looked down one of the hallways and waited.

“That gave the police officers behind me time to quickly run away and take cover. I knew where he was coming from and I didn't want to see him with my own eyes,” he told the jury. “I wish I had a rifle with me that day, but I had my pistol. I felt outgunned.”

He said he lay on his stomach and waited, “it seemed like an eternity,” he told the jury. Finally, he saw the shooter again.

“At that point, I fired maybe five to 10 shots into the hallway,” he said, noting that the shooter had pointed his rifle at the police officers.

He hit the suspected shooter, Ahmad Alissa, in the leg. No further shots were fired in the store itself.

Steidell then called a bus for the victims and survivors who had crowded into a pizzeria and a nearby brewery.

“I found the nearest patrol car, just jumped in and sped up South Broadway with lights flashing and sirens blaring. We tried to find the first bus that came our way,” he told the jury, noting that they eventually found one near the CU campus. “I don't even know what I looked like, but I jumped out and into the bus and told the bus driver, I thought, hey, we need this bus. We had an incident down south and I need this bus for the victims… I said, I'm sorry, but I need the bus. You need to get off. And they were understanding at that point.”

Colorado Attorney General Webex

During the shooting, as he was getting people out of the building and checking the men's and women's restrooms to make sure no one was hiding there, Chris Tatum saw an elderly woman fall hard onto the tile floor between the sushi area and the deli. He didn't know why she fell facedown so quickly and hoped it wasn't because of the gunfire. He went over to her and pulled her up by her arm. He described her as feeling like “dead weight” but conscious.

The woman, Elan Ri Shakti, now 79, had broken a bone in her back. She and Tatum are now friends.

“What concerns did you have when you approached her?” prosecutor Ken Kupfner asked Tatum on the witness stand.

“She was somebody's grandma,” he said. “That was my main thought. That's my grandma there, so I picked her up. I didn't think about anything else.”

CPR is covering the King Soopers shooting trial. You can read our statement on the case here.. You can read previous coverage of this case here.