Three were shot while working a day at a Colorado supermarket. Another was a police officer who ran to try to rescue them and other people from the attack that left ten dead.
A day later an image of the victims of Monday’s shootings began to appear, when the suspect in the murders he was jailed on murder charges after being treated at a hospital.
Those who lost their lives at the King Soopers store in Boulder ranged from 20 to 65. They included a magazine photographer, a Medicare agent with a passion for theater, and others who spent their days in a busy square. commercial.
They were identified as Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; police officer Eric Talley, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jodi Waters, 65.
Leiker, Olds and Stong worked at the grocery store, said ex-companion Jordan Sailas, who never had a chance to take her son to the store to meet them.
ERIC TALLEY
He joined the Boulder Police Force in 2010 with a training that included a master’s degree in computer communications, his father said.
“At 40, he decided he wanted to serve his community,” Homer “Shay” Talley, 74, told The Associated Press from his ranch in central Texas. “He left his job at the desk. I just wanted to serve, and that did. He just enjoyed the police family. ”
Eric Talley was the first to arrive after a call about gunfire and someone carrying a rifle, Boulder police chief Maris Herold said.
Talley was “by all accounts one of the department’s outstanding officers,” said Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty.
Talley’s father said his son, who had seven children, ages 7 to 20, was a devoted father who “knew the Lord.”
“When everyone else in the parking lot ran away, she ran toward him,” Shay Talley said.
“We know where he is,” he added. “I loved his family more. He was not afraid to die. I was afraid to make it happen. “
Talley graduated from high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1988. The school superintendent expressed his condolences and praised “the example Officer Talley leaves us all.”
LYNN MURRAY
Murray was shopping at King Soopers, where a friend’s daughter had seen him. Word reached out to her husband, John Mackenzie, who drove to the store and began texting his wife.
After receiving no response in about five minutes, “I had just fallen into my chair,” he said, drowning.
Murray had a long career taking photos for magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue, Mackenzie said.
“I loved the pants” when they met in a photography studio in New York City years ago, she said. Computer backgammon games soon became a relationship and eventually two children.
“She is the kindest person I have ever met, with her hands down. It had an aura that was the funniest thing you would ever want to know. She was just a great chick, “Mackenzie said.” She had it all together, she really did. “
He said he spent hours consoling his children before “losing it” on Tuesday morning. Mackenzie offered a message:
“Don’t live in fear. My wife, none of the victims, would like you to live in fear. They want you to be bolder and live bolder. That’s what this place is about. “
SOURCE OF SUZANNE
Fountain was an actress and a mother who later won loyal clients as a Medicare agent, doing extensive research to find the right supplemental coverage for older adults enrolling in the federal health insurance program, she said. life partner Phi Bernier.
“He never skimped, he never did anything because it was easier,” he said.
Fountain graduated from Circle in the Square Theater School and the two first met while playing lead roles in “The Glass Menagerie” about 30 years ago, Bernier said. They went out for a while and reconnected after Fountain came to see him at a play in 2013.
Until the pandemic, Fountain was also the manager of eTown, a non-profit live music venue in Boulder.
“Suzanne was a shining light for everything she met and we were proud to represent eTown to our community as we welcomed people into our space hundreds and hundreds of times,” the organization said in a post to Facebook.
Fountain won praise for her performance from both critics and those who worked with her.
“She was absolutely lovely, natural, someone you just wouldn’t forget,” said Brian Miller, who worked with her on a show..
A Boulder Daily Camera review said her 2002 performance as a nurse in “Wit,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a woman dealing with cancer, brought “a simple but crucial compassion to the play.”
OLD RIKKI
Olds, King Soopers ’front-end manager, aspired to move into the store, his family said.
“I was 25, it was a kind of initial life, boisterous, energetic and charismatic,” his uncle Robert Olds said.
He said he still remembers his preschool niece who would participate with him and his children in baseball tournaments and ask to go to McDonald’s afterwards.
“We’re devastated,” Robert Olds said. He added that the family had heard from one of his friends that he had tried to close the store doors after the shooting started in the parking lot.
Her grandmother drowned on the phone when she described the young woman who played an important role in parenting.
“He was just a very kind and affectionate, bubble-loving person who lit up the room when he came in,” said Jeanette Olds, 71, of Lafayette, Colorado.
KEVIN MAHONEY
“It represents all the things of Love,” her daughter Erika Mahoney told a pungent tweet showing a wedding photo and drawing attention on social media.
“I’m so grateful that I was able to walk down the aisle last summer,” added Mahoney, who is the news director for a California public radio station.
She also posted that she is pregnant and that her father “wants her to be strong for her granddaughter.”
TERI LEIKER
The longtime King Soopers employee loved watching the University of Colorado band perform at a launch celebration called Pearl Street Stampede on Friday nights before home football games on the Boulder campus, he said. say the band’s director, Matt Dockendorf, to The Denver Post.
“She was there even before we started meeting, which is half an hour before the stampede started,” Dockendorf said. “She was just a staple. She was a kind of personal animator of the band.
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Associated Press writers Patty Nieberg in Boulder, Colorado, and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico collaborated. Nieberg is a member of the body of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a national nonprofit services program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on covert issues.