Suspect faces hate crime charges
Five murder counts after Colorado gay nightclub targeted
The man suspected of opening fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs was being held on murder and hate crimes charges yesterday, two days after the attack that killed five people and left 17 others with gunshot wounds.
Online court records showed that 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich faced five murder charges and five charges of committing a biasmotivated crime causing bodily injury in the attack at Club Q. He remained hospitalised with unspecified injuries, police said.
The charges were preliminary, and prosecutors had not filed them in court. The hate-crime charges would require proving that the gunman was motivated by bias, such as against the victims’ actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.
The attack was halted when a patron grabbed a handgun from Aldrich, hit him with it and pinned him down until police arrived minutes later.
Court documents laying out what led to Aldrich’s arrest have been sealed at the request of prosecutors, who said releasing details could jeopardise the investigation.
A law enforcement official said the suspect used an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon, but a handgun and additional ammunition magazines also were recovered.
Officials yesterday clarified that 18 people were hurt in the attack, not 25 as they said originally. Among them was one person whose injury was not a gunshot wound. Another victim had no visible injuries, they said.
Thirteen people remained hospitalised. Five people have been treated and released.
Mayor John Suthers said there was “reason to hope” all of the hospitalised victims would recover.
Questions were quickly raised about why authorities didn’t seek to take Aldrich’s guns away from him in 2021, when he was arrested after his mother reported he threatened her with a homemade bomb and other weapons.
Though authorities at the time said no explosives were found, guncontrol advocates have asked why police didn’t use Colorado’s “red flag” laws to seize the weapons his mother says he had. There’s no public record prosecutors ever moved forward with kidnapping and menacing charges against Aldrich.
The shooting rekindled memories of the 2016 massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people. Colorado has experienced several mass killings, including at Columbine High School in 1999, a cinema in suburban Denver in 2012 and at a Boulder supermarket last year.
It was the sixth mass killing this month, and it came in a year when the nation was shaken by the deaths of 21 in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
The violence pierced the cosy confines of an entertainment venue long cherished as a safe spot for the LGBTQ community in the conservative-leaning city.
A makeshift memorial that sprang up in the hours after the attack continued to grow, as a steady stream of mourners brought flowers and left messages in support of the LGBTQ community. The shooting site remained cordoned off.
“It’s a reminder that love and acceptance still have a long way to go,” Colorado Springs resident Mary Nikkel said at the site.