One by one, they stood up in court and recalled the moment when Molotov cocktails exploded around them.
They described how they tried to beat out the flames that scorched their clothes and burned their friends. How, nearly a year later, they remain haunted by the smell of gasoline and burned hair.
On Thursday in Boulder, Colo., many survivors of the antisemitic firebombing attack there spoke publicly for the first time at a hearing in which the assailant pleaded guilty. The defendant, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, said he accepted responsibility for what he did, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison.
Mr. Soliman pleaded guilty to 101 charges, including one count of murder for the death of Karen Diamond, 82, in the attack against a group of marchers calling for the release of hostages captured by Hamas in its October 2023 raid on Israel.
The firebombing attack wounded more than a dozen other people, horrified Boulder’s tightknit Jewish community and intensified fears of the rising antisemitic violence in the United States.
It sowed “terror, fear and death,” District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.
Some survivors said they now searched for threats wherever they went. Others worry they could be targeted again.
“When I’m alone and close my eyes I can vividly see Karen’s body in flames,” Orrie Gartner, who was at the march, said in court.
One man said he scanned for exits whenever he left home. Another said he now hid his Star of David necklace, while one woman said she wore hers in defiance of hatred. Others said the attack had pierced their illusions that the college town of Boulder was a safe place.
“We learned the full meaning of the expression ‘Living Hell,’” Ms. Diamond’s sons, Ethan and Andrew, said in a letter read in court on Thursday.
Ms. Diamond’s husband, Lou, was also severely burned in the attack and spent a month in excruciating pain recovering in a hospital burn unit, next door to his wife’s room, their sons said. Ms. Diamond died there three weeks after the attack.
Their sons said the Diamonds had just run together in the Bolder Boulder 10K race, where Ms. Diamond had placed fourth in her age group. The couple loved hiking, gardening and attending symphony performances, and they had been planning a trip to France.
“Now, none of those things will happen,” their sons said in their statement.
In the gallery, victims and their families cried and clutched tissues handed out by courthouse staff.
After the victims’ statements, Mr. Soliman, an Egyptian national who immigrated to the United States in 2022, spoke publicly for the first time, saying in Arabic that he regretted carrying out the attack and that he deserved the death penalty.
But he denied that his crimes had been driven by anti-Jewish hatred, then launched into a rambling diatribe against Zionism, which he described as “the enemy.” He also condemned the deaths of children during the war in Gaza.
“Yes, I am against Israel, and I can’t deny that,” he said. “And that’s my right.”
Chief District Judge Nancy W. Salomone told Mr. Soliman that his “choices were acts of terror, and they victimized an entire community.”
“You chose to victimize these people because they were members of the Jewish community,” she told him.
Mr. Soliman also sought to absolve his wife and five children from any connection with the attack, saying they would have tried to stop him if they had known his plans.
His family was taken into federal custody after the attack and held for months in a Texas immigration detention center before being released less than two weeks ago. Lawyers for Mr. Soliman’s family are trying to prevent their deportation.
The hearing on Thursday began when Judge Salomone went step by step through each charge and named each victim to verify Mr. Soliman’s pleas.
He answered her questions tersely in Arabic, acknowledging that he was giving up his rights to a trial and appeal. “Guilty,” he said, over and over and over, to charges of attempted murder, assault and other crimes.
Because Colorado abolished the death penalty, Mr. Soliman’s sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole was the harshest possible state-level sentence. He could still face the death penalty in an ongoing federal prosecution.
Prosecutors say Mr. Soliman spent a year planning the attack against Run for Their Lives, a group that met every Sunday in downtown Boulder to demonstrate for the release of hostages seized by Hamas during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
Many of the marchers were members of Jewish congregations in Boulder. That day, their numbers included an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, at least one child and a person in a wheelchair.
“They were completely defenseless,” Mr. Dougherty, the district attorney, told the judge.
Mr. Soliman disguised himself as a gardener to get close to the group, and then hurled homemade Molotov cocktails at the marchers and shouted “Free Palestine,” law enforcement authorities have said. An F.B.I. affidavit in the case said Mr. Soliman had wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”