Gay bar shooting suspect faces murder, hate crime charges
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 wounded many others.
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.
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.
Court documents laying out what led to Aldrich’s arrest have been sealed at the request of prosecutors, who said releasing details could jeopardize the investigation. Information on a lawyer for Aldrich was not immediately available.
A law enforcement official said the suspect used an AR-15-style semiautomatic weapon, but a handgun and additional ammunition magazines also were recovered. The official could not discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Of the 25 injured at Club Q, some were hurt trying to flee, and it was unclear how many were shot, a police spokesperson said.
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.
Mayor John Suthers said on NBC’s “Today” show that the district attorney would file papers in court to allow law enforcement to talk more about Aldrich’s criminal history.
Suthers said there was “reason to hope” all of the hospitalized victims would recover.
The shooting rekindled memories of the 2016 massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people. Colorado has experienced several mass killings, including at Columbine High School in 1999, a movie theater in suburban Denver in 2012 and at a Boulder supermarket last year.
It was the sixth mass killing this month and came in a year when the nation was shaken by the deaths of 21 in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
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.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/A4uGZ9h
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