Colorado suspect facing 10 charges
Club patron: ‘Went into combat mode’ to subdue gunman
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The man suspected of opening fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs was being held on murder and hate crimes charges Monday, two days after the attack that killed five people and left 17 others with gunshot wounds.
Online court records showed that Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, faced five murder charges and five charges of committing a bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury in Saturday night’s attack at Club Q.
He remained hospitalized 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.
In an account told to The New York Times, Richard Fierro said he was at a table in Club Q with his wife, daughter and friends Saturday, watching a drag show, when the flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub. He said his instincts from four combat deployments as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan kicked in and that he told himself to fight back.
In an interview at his house, where his wife and daughter were still recovering from injuries, Fierro, 45, who left the Army in 2013 as a major, according to military records, described charging through the chaos at the club, tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun.
“I don’t know exactly what I did, I just went into combat mode,” Fierro said, shaking his head. “I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us.”
Fierro’s description of what happened in those moments in Club Q matches accounts given by police and city officials and by the club’s owners, who have reviewed security footage from the massacre.
Fierro, who served in the Army for 15 years, said he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him.
The gunman, who Fierro estimated weighed more than 300 pounds, sprawled onto the floor, his military-style rifle landing just out of reach. Fierro started to go for the rifle, but then saw that the gunman had a pistol as well.
“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Fierro said.
As the fight continued, he said, he yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag performer wearing high heels stomped on the gunman. The whole time, Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter’s head while the two men screamed obscenities at each other.
When police arrived a few minutes later, the gunman was no longer struggling, Fierro said.
Fierro said he was covered in blood when police arrived, and officers tackled him and put him in handcuffs. He said he was held in a police car for more than an hour, and screamed and pleaded to be let go so that he could see what had happened to his family.
Police Chief Adrian Vasquez said patrons who intervened during the attack were “heroic” and prevented more deaths.
Detectives were examining whether anyone had helped the suspect before the attack.
Officials on Monday 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 hospitalized Monday, officials said. Five people have been treated and released.
Mayor John Suthers said there was “reason to hope” all of the hospitalized 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, gun control 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 felony kidnapping and menacing charges against Aldrich.
The violence pierced the cozy 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 Monday, 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. “This growing monument to people is saying that it matters what happened to you … We’re just not letting it go.”