Families of Club Q shooting victims bring wrongful death claims against sheriff and club owner to state court

COLORADO SPRINGS (CN) — Families who lost loved ones in the 2022 mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs are suing the county’s former sheriff and the venue’s owner on wrongful death claims in the District Court for El Paso County.

People gathered at the LGBTQ nightclub Club Q in Colorado Springs to celebrate Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 19, 2022, not knowing Anderson Lee Aldrich would attack the attendees, killing five people and injuring 25 others.

Derrick Rump, 38; Kelly Loving, 40; Daniel Aston, 28; Ashley Paugh, 35; and Raymond Green Vance, 22, were all killed in the shooting.

After pleading guilty, Aldrich was sentenced to five concurrent life sentences in June 2023. Aldrich received 55 subsequent life sentences in federal court.

Adrian Vance, who lost her son in the attack, is leading a dozen other families and survivors in suing Bill Elder, who was El Paso County’s sheriff at the time, along with the club’s owners and landlord, claiming the entities could have done more to prevent the shooting.

“The Club Q shooting was not solely the result of the violent actions of a single individual,” the families wrote in the 54-page lawsuit filed Tuesday. “This tragedy was also enabled by systemic failures: a refusal by law enforcement to utilize Colorado’s Red Flag Law to prevent the shooter from possessing firearms, and inadequate security measures at Club Q.”

Between the 2016 Pulse tragedy in Orlando, Florida, and threats Club Q received throughout 2022, Vance argues the business owners should have been aware of growing security risks. Besides being undertrained, the club’s security guard also doubled as a barback and server, leaving patrons to protect themselves. When Aldrich attacked, it was a patron, Richard Fierro, who leaped into action and subdued the assailant with their own weapon.

Additionally, Vance argues in the lawsuit, law enforcement ignored a key tool at their disposal that allows for the removal of weapons from individuals like Aldrich, who had told their mother they aspired to be a mass shooter while stockpiling body armor and ammo the year before the Club Q attack.

Aldrich has identified as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, although many victims dispute and refer to Aldrich as “he” throughout the complaint.

In 2021, local law enforcement arrested and charged Aldrich with felony menacing and kidnapping following an incident at their grandparents’ apartment. The county dropped the charges when the relatives moved to Florida.

A local judge dismissed a protection order along with the case in July 2022, which was sealed until after the November attack. Although the sheriff’s office declined to return the confiscated firearms, Aldrich was then able to obtain new firearms without restriction.

When Colorado lawmakers signed the Colorado Violence Prevention Act in 2019 enabling law enforcement to remove firearms from individuals deemed likely to carry out “future dangerous acts,” then-Sheriff Elder vowed to restrict his office’s use of the legal tool citing Second Amendment concerns. The county commission passed a supporting resolution pledging to resist implementation of the law.

The state lawsuit follows a pair of federal complaints filed last year, which were dismissed in July.

When Senior U.S. District Judge William Martinez dismissed the claims against the government parties, he suggested the public take notice of the elected officials’ “conscious and intentional disregard of a known and unjustifiable risk, something which in the court’s view amounts to an abdication of local officials’ moral responsibility to protect the public.”

The families are represented by Colorado Springs attorney Bradley Bufkin, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

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