I tackled gunman at drag show – and they joined in with stilettos

A FORMER US army officer has told of how he stopped the Colorado gay nightclub shooter with the help of a fellow patron who clobbered the attacker with their stilettos.

Richard Fierro was at Club Q, south of Denver, with his wife, daughter and friends to watch a drag show on Saturday when the gunman opened fire.

Mr Fierro’s instincts – from four combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and 15 years as an officer – instantly kicked in.

He told the New York Times: “I don’t know exactly what I did, I just went into combat mode. I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us.”

After the first shots, Mr Fierro, 45, raced across the room, grabbed the attacker by his body armour and knocked the military-style rifle out of his hand. Mr Fierro then saw the gunman reach for a pistol. “I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him on the head, over and over.”

Holding the man down as he did so, Mr Fierro, a former platoon leader who left the military in 2013, yelled for another patron to start kicking the gunman in the face. He remembered in the chaos ordering a trans woman to pummel him with her high-heels. Once the attacker was subdued, Mr Fierro, who now owns a local brewery, looked around for his friends and family to find one shot several times in the chest and arm. Another had been shot in the leg.

He took tourniquets from a police officer once they arrived and put them on his bleeding friends. John Suthers, Colorado Springs mayor, said at a press conference: “He saved a lot of lives.”

Mr Suthers was struck by Mr Fierro’s humility. “I have never encountered a person who engaged in such heroic actions and was so humble about it.”

The attack has shaken the LGBTQ community in this mostly conservative city of about 480,000, 70 miles south of Denver. Hundreds of people, many with candles and wiping away tears, gathered in a park to honour those killed.

Suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, has remained in hospital since the attack in which five people died and 17 were wounded. Authorities have yet to reveal a motive. Preliminary charges include those for hate crime. No formal charges have been filed in court so far.

The assault has raised questions about why police did not seek to take Mr Aldrich’s guns away in 2021 when he was arrested after threatening his mother with a homemade bomb and other weapons.

It was the sixth mass killing in the United States this month.

‘I have never encountered a person who engaged in such heroic actions and was so humble about it’