âI Know Sheâs Gone, but Why?â: Love and Loss at a Boulder Grocery Store
Funerals for the victims of the mass shooting in Colorado were being held this week. Teri Leiker, a beloved employee at the King Soopers store for 31 years, was among them.
A memorial at the King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colo., where a gunman killed 10 people in March.Credit.Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
April 9, 2021, 5:48 p.m. ET
BOULDER, Colo. â Teri Leiker and Clint Ponsford shared a love story that began and ended at the grocery store.
They spent more than 30 years working at the same King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, where Ms. Leiker charmed customers with her big laugh and Mr. Ponsford could spot the peaks of the Flatirons when he went outside to wrangle shopping carts. They had both competed in Coloradoâs Special Olympics and helped each other get through a lot: deaths, a breakup and the challenges of navigating this world as two people with cognitive disa