The mass murderer who slaughtered five people with an AR-15 type assault rifle and left dozens injured inside a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club just days before Thanksgiving in 2022 will now face federal hate crime charges.
Anderson Lee Aldrich, who says they are nonbinary, was 22 at the time they opened fire inside Club Q. In June of 2023 they pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder and 46 counts of attempted murder. They were sentenced to five consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, an additional 2208 years in prison, and another four years for state bias-motivated charges, CNN reported. The judge at the time noted it was the second-longest sentence handed down in Colorado.
Aldrich, now 23, “appeared in federal court to face federal hate crimes Tuesday,” The Associated Press reports. They pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, which “follow an FBI investigation into the shooting that was confirmed after Aldrich’s sentencing in state court. At the time, District Attorney Michael Allen said the threat of the death penalty in the federal system was a ‘big part of what motivated the defendant’ to plead guilty to the state charges.”
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Aldrich did not say “why they hung out at the club, then went outside and returned dressed in body armor. Aldrich began firing an AR-15-style rifle as soon as they came back in,” the AP added. “In a series of telephone calls from jail, Aldrich told The Associated Press they were on a ‘very large plethora of drugs’ and abusing steroids at the time of the attack. When asked whether the attack was motivated by hate, Aldrich said that was ‘completely off base.'”
Colorado District Attorney Michael Allen “said Aldrich’s claim of being nonbinary is part of an effort to avoid hate crime charges, saying there was no evidence of Aldrich identifying as nonbinary before the shooting.”
Prosecutors, according to the AP, also said “Aldrich administered a website that posted a ‘neo-Nazi white supremacist’ shooting training video. A police detective also testified that online gaming friends said Aldrich expressed hatred for the police, LBGTQ+ people and minorities, and used racist and homophobic slurs. One said that Aldrich sent an online message with a photo of a rifle trained on a gay pride parade.”
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On the day of their sentencing in 2023, “victims called the shooter a ‘monster’ and ‘coward’ who hunted down revelers in a calculated attack on a sanctuary for the LGBTQ+ community,” the AP reported at the time.
Colorado Public Radio profiled those who were killed. Their names are Derrick Rump (38), Daniel Aston (28), Kelly Loving (40), Raymond Green Vance (22), and Ashley Green Paugh (35).