Anderson Lee Aldrich, 23, has been charged this Tuesday with 50 new federal counts of hate crimes for the shooting he carried out in November 2022 at a nightclub in the LGTBIQ community in Colorado Springs (Colorado). The murderer of five people, who is already serving a life sentence in a Wyoming prison, pleaded not guilty this morning to the accusations made by federal authorities and to 24 other charges for the use of firearms.
The not guilty plea has been a splash of cold water for the families of the victims. “This was a cowardly, horrible, stupid and hateful act,” Jeff Aston, the father of Daniel Aston, who died in the attack, told the AP agency. “The closest thing I can imagine to justice is that [Aldrich] “he had to suffer as much as the suffering he has caused to the victims and their families,” Aston added.
Aldrich was sentenced to life in prison in June 2022. He then pleaded guilty to five counts of murder and 46 counts of attempted murder for the victims of his attack on Club Q on November 19, 2002. The location was considered a sanctuary for the community, located 114 kilometers south of Denver. The punishment, awarded by a state judge, came seven months after the shooting, a new blow to the LGTBIQ population of the United States. In 2016, another massacre left 49 dead at the Pulse club in Orlando.
The sentencing was not the end point of the legal problems for Aldrich, who identifies as non-binary and uses we/them pronouns. The District Attorney's Office believes that this is a hollow statement that calls into question, as it considers it a strategy to avoid the arrival of hate crime charges. Prosecutors say there is no evidence that Aldrich called himself nonbinary before the attack.
The FBI announced last summer that it was conducting an investigation into the events. The federal institution had to correct its record, since it had received information that warned that Aldrich represented a danger to society. The suspect's grandparents reported him with a call in June 2021, claiming that he was building a bomb in the basement and had threatened to kill them. Aldrich was arrested, but the Federal Investigation Agency closed the case in July of that year because family members refused to cooperate with authorities. The subject had made public his intention to become a serial killer.
During last year's trial, the killers did not explain what motivated their actions. Aldrich had gone to the club on at least six occasions, including the night of the mass murder. That evening, after being at the club, they went outside and headed to the car. They then returned dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 rifle with which they began to open fire. The shooting ended when a soldier who was at the scene grabbed the barrel of the gun and hit the shooters until the police arrived.
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In telephone calls with the press, the murderer justified his actions by stating that at the time of the attack, when he was 22 years old, he was abusing a large amount of drugs and steroids. In a conversation with AP journalists he assured that the shooting was not provoked by his hatred of homosexuals. Prosecutors showed during the trial that Aldrich managed an Internet site that allowed the publication of a shooting practice video with supremacist and neo-Nazi content. A detective assured that in some forums the murderer made clear his hatred for minorities, including the LGTBIQ group.
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