A U.S. district judge has handed down 55 concurrent life sentences for a Colorado mass shooter who killed five people at a nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022.
Along with the five deaths, 19 people were injured in the shooting, carried out by Anderson Lee Aldrich at an LGBT venue called the Club Q, prosecutors had said. On June 18, Mr. Aldrich pleaded guilty to dozens of felony crimes as well as felony hate crime charges, according to court reporters.
Mr. Aldrich’s guilty plea was entered under a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to avoid being sentenced to death. U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney sentenced him to 55 concurrent life sentences plus 190 years.
After the sentencing was handed down, Attorney General Merrick Garland released a statement saying that Mr. Aldrich’s 55 life sentences “makes clear that the Justice Department is committed to protecting the right of every person in this country to live free from the fear.”
“The Justice Department will never stop working to defend the safety and civil rights of all people in our country,” Mr. Garland said in a Department of Justice (DOJ) statement.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, meanwhile, said that the bureau had “worked tirelessly towards this sentencing, but the true heroes are the patrons of the Club who selflessly acted to subdue the defendant.”
Before sentencing on June 18, the DOJ described the shooting as “calculated” and added it was a “bias-motivated, premeditated, mass-casualty attack.”
“Mx. Anderson Aldrich, by and through counsel, makes the motion to the Court demanding their right to a preliminary hearing,” the filing stated.
The shooter’s father was a former UFC fighter, Aaron Franklin Brink, who had also appeared in pornographic films.
In several phone calls from jail to an Associated Press reporter last year, Mr. Aldrich didn’t reply to questions about whether the shooting was a hate crime. He only said that such descriptions were “completely off-base” and didn’t say why he did it. He also never stated a motive in any of his court appearances.
While Mr. Aldrich remained silent on the matter, prosecutors on June 18 described the shooting as a hate crime. Prosecutor Alison Connaughty said in a statement that Mr. Aldrich’s “admission that these were hate crimes is important to the government, and it’s important to the community of Club Q.”
In court papers, Mr. Aldrich’s lawyer David Kraut stated that there was no singular explanation for why the shooter carried out the mass shooting at the club. He blamed childhood trauma, his mother, and drug problems as some of the reasons why.
Daniel Aston, Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, and Derrick Rump were named as the five victims who were shot and killed in the incident, officials said. Police and prosecutors said that Mr. Aldrich was arrested about five minutes after he started firing, after people at the bar were able to subdue him.
Last year, Mr. Aldrich was sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison on state charges in connection to the attack. The June 18 sentencing pertained to the separate, federal charges that he also faced.
“That is the longest sentence ever achieved in the Fourth Judicial District and the second, to my knowledge, longest sentence ever achieved in the state of Colorado, second only to the sentence achieved in the Aurora theater shooting case,” Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen said last year during a news conference.
