The suspect in a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBT+ nightclub in the US last year has pleaded guilty to five counts of murder.
Monday’s plea by Anderson Lee Aldrich comes seven months after the shooting and spares victim’s families and survivors a long and potentially painful trial.
Aldrich faces life in prison on the murder charges under the plea agreement. The agreement also calls for guilty pleas to 46 counts of attempted murder and two counts of bias-motivated crime.
“I intentionally and after deliberation caused the death of each victim,” Aldrich told Judge Michael McHenry.
People in courtroom wiped away tears as the judge explained the charges and read out the names of the victims.
The plea entered during a court hearing follows a series of jailhouse phone calls from Aldrich to the Associated Press expressing remorse and an intention to face the consequences for the shooting.
Several survivors told the AP about the plea agreement after being approached about Aldrich’s comments to AP. They said prosecutors had notified them that Aldrich, who is non-binary and uses they and them pronouns, would plead guilty to charges that would ensure a sentence of life behind bars.
Aldrich was originally charged with more than 300 state counts, including murder and hate crimes. The US Justice Department is considering pursuing federal hate crime charges, according to a senior law enforcement source.
The attack at Club Q came over a year after Aldrich had been arrested for threatening their grandparents and vowing to become “the next mass killer”, but those charges were ultimately dropped.
Victims’ family members and survivors are expected to speak at Monday’s hearing about how their lives were forever altered by the terror that erupted just before midnight on November 19 when Aldrich walked into Club Q and indiscriminately fired an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.
Aldrich hinted at plans to carry out violent attacks at least a year before the Club Q assault. In June 2021, Aldrich’s grandparents told authorities they were warned not to stand in the way of a plan to stockpile guns, ammo, body armour and a homemade bomb to become “the next mass killer”.
Aldrich was then arrested after a standoff with officers that was livestreamed on Facebook and the evacuation of 10 nearby homes. Aldrich eventually surrendered.
The charges against Aldrich were thrown out in July 2022 after their mother and grandparents, the victims in the case, refused to cooperate with prosecutors, evading efforts to serve them with subpoenas to give evidence, according to court documents unsealed after the shooting.
Other relatives told a judge they feared Aldrich would hurt the grandparents if released, painting a picture of an isolated, violent person who did not have a job and was given $30,000 that was spent largely on the purchase of 3D printers to make guns, the records showed.
Aldrich was released from jail then and authorities kept two guns — a ghost gun pistol and an MM15 rifle — seized in the arrest, but there was nothing to stop Aldrich from legally purchasing more firearms, raising questions immediately after the shooting about whether authorities should have sought a red flag order to prevent such purchases.
El Paso County Sheriff’s Office said it would not have been able to seek a court order stopping Aldrich from buying or possessing guns because the 2021 arrest record was sealed after the charges were dropped.
There was no new evidence they could use to prove that Aldrich posed a threat “in the near future”, the sheriff’s office said.
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.
Aldrich told AP in one of the interviews from jail they were on a “very large plethora of drugs” and abusing steroids at the time of the attack, but did not answer directly regarding the hate crimes charges.
Asked whether the attack was motivated by hate, Aldrich said only that was “completely off base”.
Some survivors who listened to the recorded phone calls saw Aldrich’s comments as an attempt to avoid the death penalty which still exists in the federal system. Colorado abolished it in 2020 and life without prison is now the mandated sentence for first-degree murder in the state.
They objected to Aldrich’s unwillingness to discuss a motive and use of passive, general language like “I just can’t believe what happened” and “I wish I could turn back time”.
