Suspect in attack that killed 5 at Colorado Springs gay nightclub pleads guilty

The suspect in a mass shooting that killed five people at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ nightclub last year has pleaded guilty in the attack. Monday’s plea by Anderson Lee Aldrich comes just seven months after the shooting and spares victims’ families and survivors a long and potentially painful trial.

The defendant pleaded guilty to five counts of murder. The defendant faces life in prison on the murder charges under the plea agreement. The accused shooter also pleaded guilty to 46 counts of attempted murder and two counts of bias-motivated crime.

Victims’ family members and survivors were speaking at Monday’s hearing about how their lives were forever altered by the terror that erupted just before midnight on Nov. 19 when the suspect walked into Club Q and indiscriminately fired an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle.

The line to get through security early Monday snaked through the large plaza outside the courthouse as victims and others queued up to attend the hearing. One man wore a T-shirt saying “Loved Always & Never Forgotten” in honor of victim Daniel Davis Aston, a 28-year-old bartender and entertainer at Club Q who was killed in the shooting.

In addition to Aston, the victims of the shooting were identified as Kelly Loving, Derrick Rump, Ashley Paugh and Raymond Green Vance.

The suspect, who is nonbinary and uses they and them pronouns, had been arrested over a year before the attack for threatening their grandparents and vowing to become “the next mass killer.” But charges in that case were ultimately dropped.

The defendant faced more than 300 state counts, including murder and hate crimes. The U.S. Justice Department is considering pursuing federal hate crime charges, according to a senior law enforcement official familiar with the matter who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing case.

The defendant hinted at plans to carry out violent attacks at least a year before the Club Q assault. In June 2021, the defendant’s grandparents told authorities that they were warned not to stand in the way of a plan to stockpile guns, ammo, body armor and a homemade bomb to become “the next mass killer.” The defendant was then arrested after a standoff with SWAT officers that was livestreamed on Facebook and the evacuation of 10 nearby homes, telling officers “If they breach, I’m a f—-ing blow it to holy hell!” The defendant eventually surrendered.

However, the charges against the defendant were thrown out in July 2022 after their mother and grandparents, the victims in the case, refused to cooperate with prosecutors, evading efforts to serve them with subpoenas to testify, according to court documents unsealed after the shooting.

Xavier Kraus, a former neighbor, told CBS Colorado that the defendant got their guns back following the 2021 incident.

“We had a conversation that time too about, you know, I expressed my fear of guns,” Kraus said. “He tried to assure me, ‘It’s not the gun you have to be afraid of, bro. It’s the people behind the gun.'”

The defendant told the AP in an interview from jail they were on a “very large plethora of drugs” and abusing steroids at the time of the attack. But they did not answer directly regarding the hate crimes charges. When asked whether the attack was motivated by hate, the defendant said only that was “completely off base.” The defendant’s attorneys, who have not disputed the accused shooter’s role in the shooting, have also pushed back on hate being the reason.

Some survivors who listened to the recorded phone calls saw the defendant’s comments as an attempt to avoid the death penalty which still exists in the federal system. Colorado abolished it in 2020 and life without prison is now the mandated sentence for first-degree murder in the state. They objected to the accused shooter’s unwillingness to discuss a motive and their use of passive, general language like “I just can’t believe what happened” and “I wish I could turn back time.”