[News] G@y club ‘monster’ who k!lled five people gets life in prison

Anderson Lee Aldrich, the man who opened fire at an LGBT+ nightclub in Colorado last November, k!lling five people, has been sentenced to life in prison.

This came after he pleaded guilty to five counts of murder and 46 counts of attempted murder. He also pleaded no contest to two hate crimes.

The 23-year-old steroid-abusing shooter who is nonbinary and uses them/ they pronouns could be seen visibly shaking as victims’ loved ones angrily addressed their pain and anger.

Aldrich who has admitted in interviews to abusing steroids and a “very large plethora of drugs”, pleaded guilty after saying they wanted to spare survivors and victims’ families the added pain of a trial.

People in the courtroom wiped away tears as the judge read out the names of the five murdered: Kelly Loving, 40, Daniel Aston, 28, Derrick Rump, 38, Ashley Paugh, 34, and Vance.

Before handing out the life imprisonment sentence, the Judge, Michael McHenry told the mass killer;“You are targeting a group of people for their simple existence.

“Like too many other people in our culture, you chose to find a power that day behind the trigger of a gun, your actions reflect the deepest malice of the human heart, and malice is almost always born of ignorance and fear.”

 

The Justice Department is still considering federal hate crime charges which could leave Aldrich potentially still facing the death penalty.

Before the plea deal, Aldrich had been charged with 323 criminal counts for the slaughter carried out with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle when the shooter was just 22.

 

 

The mass shooting came over a year after Aldrich was arrested for threatening his grandparents and vowing to become “the next mass killer.” He was arrested after a standoff with SWAT officers that was livestreamed on Facebook,  telling officers, “If they breach, I’m a f—-ing blow it to holy hell!”

 

Aldrich eventually surrendered. However, the charges were thrown out in July 2022 after Aldrich’s mother and grandparents, the victims in the case, refused to cooperate with prosecutors.

 

Investigators later revealed that the two guns Aldrich had during the Club Q attack, the rifle and a handgun appeared to be ghost guns, or firearms without serial numbers that are homemade and do not require an owner to pass a background check.