Club Q shooter faces more than a century in prison for hate crime charges

9 months ago 75
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Club Q was the scene of a violent deadly shooting in 2022Image source, Getty Images

By Brandon Drenon

BBC News, Washington

The mass shooter who killed five at a Colorado LGBT nightclub in 2022 now faces dozens of federal hate crime charges, court documents show.

Anderson Aldrich is expected to plead guilty and may be sentenced to more than a century in prison for the Club Q shooting.

Aldrich already pled guilty to state charges and is currently serving five life sentences.

The 23-year-old was transferred to Wyoming's State Penitentiary last year.

Federal prosecutors in Colorado have filed 74 hate crime and weapons charges against Aldrich, about 50 of which are related to alleged hate crimes, according to the BBC's media partner CBS News.

Aldrich has made a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to the new charges, allowing him to avoid the death penalty in exchange for "multiple concurrent life sentences", according to the US Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado.

Last week, the federal government announced it would seek the death penalty for the Buffalo mass shooter, a seeming reversal in its position on lethal punishment that now hangs as a threat over other cases.

Sentencing for the new federal charges against Aldrich could total up to 190 years, according to CBS.

Aldrich, whose lawyers say identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they and them, visited Club Q multiple times before the attack and had previously expressed hatred for police, LGBT people and minorities, according to prosecutors.

On the night of 19 November, Aldrich entered Club Q, one of Colorado Spring's most popular LGBT bars, and fatally shot five people. Altogether 25 were injured, 17 by gunfire.

The five who died were Daniel Aston, 28; Kelly Loving, 40; Ashley Paugh, 35; Derrick Rump, 38; and Raymond Green Vance, 22.

The shooting rampage ended after the night club's patrons subdued the attacker until police arrived.

Aldrich had used "computers, internet service providers, web-based retail platforms, web-based financial payment process platforms, and interstate commercial mail carriers, to acquire firearm components, ammunition, and tactical gear" to prepare for the attack, the US attorney's office said.

The owners of Club Q have said they will reopen in a new location as The Q sometime this year.

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