Colorado mass shooter stopped by ‘heroic’ people inside club

COLORADO SPRINGS – The gunman who

opened fire inside an LGBTQ Colorado nightclub, killing at least five,

was stopped by “heroic” people inside the club, authorities said on Sunday.

At least one person inside the nightclub, Club Q, tackled and subdued the man, who was shrouded in body armour and wielding an AR-15-style rifle, authorities said, helping to prevent further bloodshed. At least 25 people were injured in the incident.

Mayor John Suthers of Colorado Springs said a man had grabbed a handgun from the gunman and then hit him with it, subduing him. When police burst into the club, the man was still on top of the gunman, pinning him down, Mr Suthers said.

The owners of the club, who had looked at surveillance tape, lauded the actions of two patrons whom they said they did not know but who, together, had overpowered the gunman and held him on the floor until police arrived.

“One customer took down the gunman and was assisted by another,” said Mr Matthew Haynes, one of the club owners. Referring to the first person who acted, Mr Haynes added, “He saved dozens and dozens of lives. Stopped the man cold. Everyone else was running away, and he ran towards him.”

Police officials identified the gunman as Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22. He was injured and treated in a hospital.

Police recovered two guns at the club, said Mr Adrian Vasquez, chief of the Colorado Springs Police Department. Authorities said they were working to determine who owned the long rifle used in the shooting, as well as other weapons found at the scene.

Mr Vasquez said the suspect had not spoken with investigators and did not appear to have said anything at the crime scene. He said the shooting lasted barely a minute.

The local district attorney, Mr Michael J. Allen, said in a statement that his office expected that “the case will officially transfer to my office” for a charging decision in the coming days. He said the shooting appeared to have been carried out by a single person. The FBI was also involved in the investigation.

The exact number of injured victims was uncertain. Some people had driven themselves to seek treatment, police officials said, and not all injuries were from gunshot wounds. Some may have suffered injuries while fleeing. At least two remained in critical condition on Sunday morning, doctors from two hospitals said.

The shooting erupted minutes before midnight, as revelers enjoyed a night out in a club considered a safe haven for the LGBTQ community. It was painfully reminiscent of the 2016 massacre at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida,

where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others

after proclaiming allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group.

Mr Joshua Thurman, who had gone to Club Q for an early birthday celebration, thought the first gunshots were part of the music. He stayed on the dance floor, but when he heard more shots and saw a flash from the muzzle of a gun, he ran to a dressing room at the rear of the club. He stayed there with a drag performer and another patron and described hearing the “pow! pow!” of gunshots.

“When we came out of the dressing room, we saw bodies,” he recalled Sunday morning, choking back a sob. “There was broken glass, blood – I lost friends!”

Mr Thurman, 34, spoke to reporters outside the club, where he had gone to retrieve his car from the parking lot. He said he had worked at the club as a go-go dancer and that a bartender whom he had come to know over the years was among those killed.

Mr Thurman said Club Q was a “safe place” for its patrons: “This is a place we love, a place of peace, a place to be ourselves.”

The motive behind the attack at Club Q was unknown. Mr Suthers said the shooting “has all the appearances of being a hate crime,” but he said investigators were combing through the gunman’s social media history and doing interviews to determine a motive.

US President Joe Biden denounced the apparent targeting of the LGBTQ community.

“Places that are supposed to be safe spaces of acceptance and celebration should never be turned into places of terror and violence,” he said in a statement. “We cannot and must not tolerate hate.”

Mr Biden also renewed his call for a federal assault weapons ban, although there is not enough support in Congress to enact one. “When will we decide we’ve had enough?” he asked. “We must address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms.”

A man with the same name and age as the club shooting suspect was arrested in June 2021 after the man’s mother had called police and said that she was not with her son and did not know where he was, but that he had threatened to hurt her with a bomb, ammunition and other weapons. Police negotiators persuaded him to walk out of a house and surrender – but not before police had evacuated residents from about 10 nearby houses in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Colorado Springs, because of the bomb threat.

Police have not said whether the shooting suspect and the man arrested in 2021 are one and the same.

The man was charged with several crimes after that arrest, including felony menacing and three kidnapping charges. It is unclear whom he was accused of kidnapping.

Police said in 2021 that they had not found any explosives. A spokesperson for the local district attorney declined to say on Sunday how the charges were resolved.

The mother of the Anderson Aldrich involved in that case had been renting a spare room from Ms Leslie Bowman, who said in an interview Sunday that she had been away at the time.

“His mom had called me and said, ‘Don’t come home right now, there are some people looking for Andy,’” Ms Bowman recalled, using the man’s nickname.

On Sunday, after the shooting, Ms Bowman was left wondering why the man may have been at large and able to get ahold of a rifle, if he had been accused of the bomb threat.

“Why is he not in jail, after that happening?” Ms Bowman asked. “After that initial day, police never reached out to me for additional information. I’m a Second Amendment supporter, don’t get me wrong. But for him to be out there, and have access to weapons after that incident, I don’t understand it.”

Efforts to reach family members of the Aldrich arrested in the shooting Sunday were unsuccessful.

Colorado Springs, a city of about 500,000 people south of Denver, is a Republican stronghold, and for decades it was a center for conservative Christian efforts to pass laws limiting the rights of gay people.

But the city, which has long had a small but vibrant LGBTQ community, has become more diverse. It now hosts an annual Pride parade, and its fast population growth has diluted the influence of far-right conservatives.

Club Q stands on a major commercial boulevard, next to a Walgreens drugstore and a Subway sandwich shop. The club first opened in 2002, in the inconspicuous location behind a strip mall that the founder chose in part because, at the time, patrons needed an entrance where they could come and go without being seen, said Mr Nic Grzecka, who co-owns the club with Haynes.

The owners said that when they reviewed surveillance video of the shooting, they saw the gunman pull up heavily armed and wearing a military-style flak jacket. Mr Haynes said the gunman had entered the nightclub with “tremendous firepower” – a rifle and what appeared to be six magazines of ammunition – and began shooting.

Police officers arrived and took the gunman into custody within six minutes of receiving an emergency call about the shooting. Mr Grzecka and Mr Haynes got there a few minutes later. “It was chaos,” Mr Haynes said.

Hours before the shooting, Club Q posted on Facebook about a “musical drag brunch” on Sunday to mark the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors the memory of those who lost their lives to anti-transgender violence.

After the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, Haynes said he and Grzecka were “vigilant” about security at their club.

“We’ve worked with the Colorado Springs Police Department and the FBI in response to various threats over the years,” he said. “But there had been no known recent threats toward Club Q.”

After the Pulse shooting, Grzecka said, the gay community in Colorado Springs had come together, “thinking we were taking a stance.”

He added, “We had this vigil, standing in our parking lot, never thinking this was going to happen in our community.” NYTIMES