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Club Q shooter spent $9,000 on gun purchases before attack, FBI say
The attacker who killed five people and injured 22 in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022 spent $9,000 on gun-related purchases in the two years before the attack, federal prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday.
Anderson Aldrich, 24, visited at least 56 different vendors between September 2020 and November 19, 2022, the day of the attack on Club Q. He then assembled an “AR-15 style assault rifle” from several privately made weapon parts that were missing. serial numbers and carried out the mass shooting.
Aldrich has already pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder and is serving five consecutive life sentences plus 2,208 years in prison on state convictions. But Aldrich also faces 74 federal charges, including hate crimes and weapons counts, and will plead guilty and be sentenced on June 18 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
Aldrich has agreed to be sentenced to life plus 190 years in prison on federal charges, according to court records. In a 13-page filing justifying the sentence, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office pointed to the $9,000 in gun purchases as evidence of Aldrich’s careful planning before the mass shooting.
As evidence of premeditation, they also cited two items found in Aldrich’s home after the attack: a hand-drawn map of Club Q with an arrow pointing to the building’s entrance and exit, and a black folder of training materials entitled “How to to deal with an active man’. Shooter.”
“The defendant amassed weapons and made significant efforts in the years leading up to the shooting to ensure that the defendant had the skill with weapons to commit the attack,” prosecutors wrote in the motion.
They noted that Aldrich visited Club Q at least eight times before the shooting, including a brief visit about 90 minutes before the attack, in which Aldrich killed 28-year-old Daniel Davis Aston; Kelly Loving, 40; Ashley Paugh, 35; Derrick Rump, 38; Raymond Green Vance, 22.
Much of the motion to convict focused on Aldrich’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric before the attack on Club Q. Aldrich sent a “barrage of emails containing anti-gay insults and comments” to a former supervisor, who was gay after being fired from a job at Goodwill Industries less than a month before the mass shooting, the motion said.
Aldrich also expressed anti-gay sentiments online on numerous platforms and shared a photo with a gun sight aimed at what appears to be a gay pride parade with the comment “lol” (meaning “laugh out loud”), prosecutors said.
Aldrich identifies as non-binary and uses pronouns, attorneys say. In state court, Aldrich told a judge she would prefer “Mx. Aldrich.” Prosecutors have cast doubt on that claim, saying there is “zero evidence” that identified Aldrich as non-binary before the mass shooting.
Aldrich also posted videos of a mass shooting, shared an alleged manifesto written by a mass shooter, and sent a file of documents claiming to be related to another mass shooting at an LBGTQ establishment in the weeks before the attack, the motion said.
Aldrich pleaded no contest to the hate crimes charge at the state level, acknowledging that prosecutors could likely prove the attack was at least partially motivated because Club Q was an LGBTQ bar frequented by people who identify as LGBTQ.
In interviews with the Associated Press, Aldrich previously denied that the attack was motivated by hatred of the LGBTQ community.
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