Last year, Dean Schiller was leaving a Colorado supermarket after shopping when he heard gunshots and saw three people lying face down. Before officers arrived, the independent, part-time journalist began live streaming on his YouTube channel, and he later refused dozens of police orders to leave.
Later, he learned that a friend who worked at the store was one of the ten people killed inside the King Soopers store in Boulder, Colorado. Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 23, is accused of murdering customers, employees, and a police officer who rushed into the store to try to stop the March 22, 2021, attack.
Schiller was acquitted by jurors on Wednesday.
During closing arguments, defence attorney Tiffany Drahota told jurors that the case was not about being polite to cops, about the bravery displayed by cops that day, or about honouring the lives of those killed in the shooting.
Schiller, who frequently records police activity in Boulder, said he felt a weight lifted from his chest after the verdict.
He claimed that his prosecution made it difficult to fully mourn the loss of a friend, Denny Stong, who worked at the store and was slow to leave because he knew so many people there. He stated that he was responding to public demand by live streaming the shooting response.
“I wasn’t in the process of creating anything. “It was real news, and I needed to show it to people for as long as they wanted to watch,” Schiller explained. He also stated that since losing Stong and being prosecuted, his heart has not been in filmmaking as much.
District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in a statement that police responded to “an incredibly challenging and difficult crime scene,” and that his office prosecutes those who obstruct and interfere with law enforcement’s response to crises.
Schiller’s case is part of a larger legal reckoning taking place across the United States about how far people can go to film police officers while they are on the job.
In July, the Denver-based United States Court of Appeals, which oversees four Western and two Midwestern states, became the seventh appeals court to rule that people have a First Amendment right to film police officers while they work. A federal judge blocked enforcement of a new Arizona law restricting how the public and journalists can film police in September.
The prosecution of the man charged in the supermarket shooting was halted in December after a judge ruled that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial. Alissa is receiving treatment at a state mental institution. During a hearing last week, Judge Ingrid Bakke stated that there was still a good chance he would be found competent in the “foreseeable future,” an optimistic outlook.
