Colorado Springs Shooting: Patrons Subdued Gunman Who Killed at Least 5 at Colorado Club (Published 2022) (2024)

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The mass shooting at Club Q also left more than two dozen people injured.

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 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 toward him.”

Police officials identified the gunman as Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22. He was injured and treated in a hospital. The police recovered two guns at the club, said Adrian Vasquez, chief of the Colorado Springs Police Department. The authorities said they were still 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 had lasted barely a minute.

The local district attorney, 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 F.B.I. 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 L.G.B.T.Q. community. It was painfully reminiscent of the 2016 massacre at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others after proclaiming allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group.

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 on 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 still unknown. Mayor Suthers said the shooting “has all the appearances of being a hate crime,” but he said that investigators were still combing through the gunman’s social media history and doing interviews to determine a motive.

President Biden denounced the apparent targeting of the L.G.B.T.Q. 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 renewed his call for a federal assault weapons ban, though 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 the 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 the police had evacuated residents from about 10 nearby houses in a suburban neighborhood just outside of Colorado Springs, because of the bomb threat.

The 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.

The police said in 2021 that they had not found any explosives. A spokesman 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 Leslie Bowman, who said in an interview on 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 hold 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 Mr. Aldrich arrested in the shooting on 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 L.G.B.T.Q. 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 Nic Grzecka, who co-owns the club with Mr. 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 morning 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, Mr. Haynes said he and Mr. Grzecka were “vigilant” about security at their club.

“We’ve worked with the Colorado Springs Police Department and the F.B.I. 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, Mr. 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.”

Jack Healy reported from Colorado Springs, Mitch Smith from Chicago, Adam Goldman from Washington and Patricia Mazzei from Miami. Reporting was contributed by Noel Black, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Charlie Brennan, Emma Bubola, Emily Cochrane, Jill Cowan, Eliza Fawcett, Eduardo Medina, Dave Philipps, Víctor Manuel Ramos, April Rubin, Ava Sasani, Mindy Sink, Luke Vander Ploeg, Daniel Victor and Cassandra Vinograd. Alain Delaquérière and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

For a victim’s friend, the loss will be visible at the Thanksgiving table.

“She was loving, always trying to help the next person out instead of thinking of herself. She just was a caring person,” she said. “I was really close with her.”

Natalee Skye Bingham, who said she was a close friend of Ms. Loving, said that they had known each other for years, going back to when they both lived in Florida.

“I’m so devastated because she was such a good person,” said Ms. Bingham, 25. “She was going to be at my house for Thanksgiving this upcoming Thursday and, now, it’s one less person at my table.”

Ms. Bingham said that Ms. Loving had only recently moved to Denver.

“She was a tough woman,” Ms. Bingham said. “She taught me how it was to be a trans woman and live your life day to day.”

Ms. Bingham said that she had been on a FaceTime call with Ms. Loving, who was speaking from inside Club Q, just minutes before the shooting began. She said the last words that she said to Ms. Loving were, “Be safe. I love you.”

“She was like a trans mother to me. I looked up to her,” Ms. Bingham said. “In the gay community you create your families, so it’s like I lost my real mother almost.”

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A man called his father to say he had just been shot.

His son, Jerecho Loveall, 30, survived the massacre and knew some of the people who were killed, John Loveall said.

Jerecho Loveall went to St. Francis Hospital after he started to feel pain in his leg, which he at first thought was a scratch. There, he recalled, he “was informed there was a through and through bullet wound in my leg,” meaning that the bullet had passed through.

He was discharged from the hospital around 6 a.m. Sunday morning and was recovering at home, his father said.

Jerecho Loveall had been at the nightclub to support a cousin who organizes shows and sometimes performs there, said John Loveall, who described Club Q as a refuge for the queer community of Colorado Springs.

“It’s one of the few places that the gay community can go to that they felt fairly safe at, without issues from other people,” he said. “It’s unfortunate. Nobody should have to worry when they go out to dance.”

“It doesn’t make any sense that stuff like this is still going on,” he said, adding that the mass shooting emphasized certain weapons “don’t need to be out for the common people to have.”

‘We have done this before’: People offer prayers and express despair at a vigil.

“This club was a refuge for our community,” said Bird Berg, 31, a produce manager at a grocery store who attended the vigil with her wife, Kourtney Berg, 31. “I’m completely devastated at how this can happen again and again.”

The Bergs, who grew up in Colorado Springs, said they had been frequenting the club, which was open to underage patrons some nights each week, since they were in high school. They both knew two of the victims who were fatally shot, they said.

Kourtney Berg, who works at a medical marijuana dispensary, said Club Q was considered one of the few venues where young people in the L.G.B.T.Q. community could feel welcome and safe in a city known for its conservatism.

Kourtney said the latest tragedy brought back memories of another mass shooting in Colorado Springs in 2015, when a gunman with anti-abortion views opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing three people and injuring nine.

“To be honest, I don’t see a solution to these things,” Kourtney said after the vigil, wiping tears away. “Access to guns is never going to go away.”

Others at the vigil were grasping for ways to understand what had happened.

The Rev. David Petty, the pastor at St. Paul’s, recited a meditation that he wrote five years ago in the aftermath of another mass shooting, when a gunman killed 58 people at a music festival in Las Vegas.

“After all, we have done this before,” Rev. Petty said, reading from his pages as people wiped their tears away. “We will talk about mental health, and terrorism, and we’ll talk about hate and love.”

“We will shout opinions across the internet, and we will unfriend those who make us upset,” he added. “There will be memorials, and vigils, and thoughts and prayers. We have done this before.”

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The suspect in the shooting rampage has not spoken to authorities, the police said.

He said investigators had recovered a handgun and long gun with an AR-15-style platform at the scene as well as additional rounds and magazines, but he did not offer more specifics or give any details on when or where the guns had been purchased.

Chief Vasquez said there did not appear to have been any prior threats against Club Q, and said the club had long been a low-key presence from a law-enforcement perspective.

“It’s not a club that from a police perspective we got to a lot,” Chief Vasquez said in an interview. “It’s not on our radar as a high volume of calls or anything like that.”

Mr. Vasquez got the job of chief of police in April after spending more than 25 years with the Colorado Springs Police Department. He is familiar with the long trauma of mass shootings in a community, having been the homicide lieutenant during the shooting rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic, also in Colorado Springs, in November 2015.

“The emotional impact on people carries on for years and years,” he said.

He said he had been asleep when he received a page and then a phone call alerting him to the shooting at the nightclub. He spent hours at the crime scene early Sunday morning.

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A patron ‘saved dozens and dozens of lives’ by tackling the Club Q gunman, an owner says.

Mr. Haynes and the club’s other owner, Nic Grzecka, said they had reviewed surveillance video that showed the gunman enter the building and immediately begin firing. Customers and staff members were among the five dead and more than two dozen wounded, they said.

Mr. Grzecka estimated that the shooting lasted no more than two minutes before a patron subdued the gunman, and another helped hold him down. Police arrived about three minutes later, he said.

“I don’t even know the names of these people,” Mr. Grzecka said. “But what they did is incredible.”

Mayor John Suthers of Colorado Springs said the person who subdued the gunman had grabbed a handgun from him and hit him with it. “It was quite something,” Suthers told The New York Times in a phone interview. “It happened quite quickly.”

Mr. Haynes said Club Q had an active shooter protocol, which he said had been “followed to the letter.” The two owners arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting ended, they said.

Neither would describe in detail what they saw. “It was a crime scene,” Mr. Haynes said, but he added that he noticed people trying to help each other in those first minutes.

“There were lots of mini-heroes who were taking people home, making sure people were safe,” Mr. Haynes said.

The crowd inside Club Q on Saturday night was smaller than usual, Mr. Haynes said, because of the colder weather that had recently set in.

“We were moderate to light,” Mr. Haynes said. “We were very fortunate we did not have our usual Saturday night crowd last night.”

Recordings from surveillance cameras inside the club have been turned over to investigators, and the club’s owners have scoured their records to see if the man who has been identified by police as the suspect had ever visited the club.

“To our knowledge, he has not entered our building before,” Mr. Haynes said.

Jack Healy contributed reporting.

Medics and fire crews quickly mobilized, dispatch audio shows.

Emergency dispatch audio, archived by Broadcastify, showed how a mass mobilization of ambulances and fire trucks came together early Sunday after a gunman opened fire at the L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub. As the victim count steadily increased, and dispatchers scrambled to find ambulances to carry the wounded, the horror of what had just happened started to become clear: At least five people were dead and 25 injured.

Minutes after the first call went out, someone on a fire engine asked over the radio if dispatchers knew the number of victims. A man responded that they were on the phone with a victim and said, “We are getting reports of four to seven possibly injured.”

He said two ambulances from a private company were heading to the club, along with several police units. He added: “No indication a suspect has been detained yet.”

Not long after, as fire crews were arriving at the scene, medics were told they were clear to enter the building — a directive that the fire chief, Randy Royal, later said was given immediately after the gunman was subdued.

As the first medical crews arrived, dispatchers radioed that they were still working on finding more ambulances from other departments to head to the scene. “They’re trying to get seven” ambulances, a dispatcher said. “They do want you guys to go in, and they’re still working on getting their seven.”

All the while, the scope of the crisis continued to grow.

“Reports of 10 people shot, which makes it a mass casualty,” a man said over the radio. “Seven ambulances. We’ll let you determine how many more fire apparatuses you need.”

Firefighters and paramedics relayed grim accounts of the scene: “We have one gunshot, through and through,” one person said. Another said there “are at least four patients that we’ve found.” An incident commander directed some responders to a “casualty collection point.”

“Start doing triage,” the commander said. “I’m bringing you gurneys on foot.”

Firefighters and dispatchers were composed and matter-of-fact in their radio discussions, but the transmissions also describe complications caused by vehicles blocking the road and a sprawling crime scene. At one point, a commander at the scene directed an ambulance to a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store where a victim with seven gunshot wounds was being treated.

As the search continued, the casualty count continued to climb. Dispatchers contacted hospitals, which had activated their trauma teams, to make sure they had enough room. Commanders gave a mix of parking advice and medical instructions to the ambulances racing to the scene.

“At this point, I’ll give you an approximate number of 12, one-two, victims, that’s obviously tentative at this time,” a man said in one transmission. “We do have multiple criticals.”

After roughly 40 hectic minutes, as ambulances set off for hospitals, someone asked for a count of remaining victims. A man responded that he believed everyone was out of the building.

“We have nobody in the casualty collection point,” he said, “so we believe everyone is accounted for.”

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Someone grabbed a weapon from the gunman, then hit him with it, the mayor said.

“It was quite something,” Mr. Suthers said in an interview with The New York Times. “It happened quite quickly. This individual was totally disabled by 12:02. That had a lot to do with the intervention of these patrons.”

It was unclear whether the gunman had fired the handgun, Mr. Suthers said.

Mr. Suthers said the shooting “has all the appearances of being a hate crime,” but that investigators were still going through the suspect’s social media history and conducting interviews in search of a motive.

He said the club had been operating for 21 years, and had not reported any threats before Saturday’s attack.

Mayor Suthers said the shooting “has all the appearances of being a hate crime,” but he said that investigators were still combing through the suspect’s social media history and doing interviews to determine a motive.

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The owners of Club Q say the suspected gunman is a stranger to them.

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 suspected 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.

He said Club Q had been “a safe place for the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and their allies for 21 years.”

After the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a crowded gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where 49 people were killed, Mr. Haynes said he and Mr. Grzecka were “vigilant” about security at their club.

“We’ve worked with the Colorado Springs Police Department and the F.B.I. 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, Mr. 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.”

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The suspect appears to have been accused of threatening his mother with a bomb in 2021.

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

In the earlier incident, the man’s mother had called the 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.

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

The police said in 2021 that they had not found any explosives. A spokesman for the El Paso County district attorney declined to say on Sunday how the charges were resolved.

Leslie Bowman said in an interview that the frightening 2021 incident took place at her home, where she had been renting a spare room to Mr. Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel. Ms. Bowman said she was away from the house during the 2021 incident.

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

Two days after the incident, Ms. Bowman arranged to have Ms. Voepel move out of her home. “Once she was gone, I changed the code on the door, and I never saw or heard from her again,” Ms. Bowman said.

But about a month ago, she said, the police visited Ms. Bowman and said they were looking for Ms. Voepel to check on her welfare, though Ms. Bowman did not know why.

Ms. Bowman said she believed that Mr. Aldrich had been living nearby in a house with his grandparents while Ms. Voepel was renting the room. He would sometimes visit his mother and watch movies with her.

Ms. Bowman also remembered that Mr. Aldrich appeared to have an “aggressive side,” and recalled one instance in which his mother had a complaint about a repair issue in the bathroom. Mr. Aldrich slammed a door in Ms. Bowman’s face in anger over the incident, she said.

On Sunday, after the shooting, Ms. Bowman was left wondering why Mr. Aldrich may have been at large and able to get hold 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.”

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Mr. Biden renewed his call for a federal assault weapons ban, though there is not enough support in Congress now 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.”

‘I lost friends,’ says a patron who fled the Club Q shooting.

He stayed in the dressing room 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, choking back a sob, on Sunday morning. “There was broken glass, blood — I lost friends!”

Mr. Thurman, 34, spoke to reporters Sunday morning outside the club, where he had come to retrieve his car from the parking lot. He said he used to work at the club as a go-go dancer, and that a bartender who had become a close acquaintance over the years was among those who were killed.

Mr. Thurman, whose apartment is nearby, 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.”

Angelo Patino, 18, a drag performer who left the club about a half-hour before the shooting, said Club Q was a place where he could express himself the way he wanted, within a community that “will be happy for you.”

He woke up on Sunday to reports that at least one person he knew had been killed.

“I always felt protected there, no matter what,” Mr. Patino said. “It hurts me that I could not protect my friends when they needed it.”