WRITING.- This Monday Anderson Lee Aldrich, the suspect in a mass shooting that killed five people in a nightclub LGBTQ+ de Colorado Springs in 2022, he pleaded guilty to after seven months of the Club Q shooting.
After seven months in the El Paso County, Colorado jail, Aldrich, who considers himself non-binary and uses “they” as his pronoun, decided to plead guilty to the murders and 46 attempted murders to avoid the death penalty. Despite that, Aldrich pleaded no guilty to two counts of hate crimes, one a felony and the other a misdemeanor.
“I tried to finish it”, the story of the Hispanic veteran who subdued a gunman from a gay club in Colorado Springs until the Police arrived. “Intentionally and after deliberation, I caused the death of each victim,” Aldrich told Judge Michael McHenry as he pleaded guilty.
The statement was made during a court hearing following a series of phone calls from the Aldrich prison to the US news agency, The Associated Press expressing remorse and intent to face consequences for the massacre.
Originally, the young man was charged with more than 300 state charges, including murder and hate crimes. However, the Associated Press reported that the US Department of Justice is considering filing federal hate crime charges, even though Aldrich was able to avoid that charge because he accepted responsibility for him in fact.
Joseph Archambault, Aldrich’s defense attorney, said in court Monday that Aldrich’s behavior after this incident says they are sorry, upset and emotional for what they did, intentionally using the plural to refer to their client.
