Online court records show that the suspected Club Q shooter is facing multiple murder and hate crime charges.
Anderson Aldrich is facing five counts of first degree murder and five counts of a bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury, according to the online docket in El Paso County Courts.
Aldrich remains hospitalized following injuries sustained during the incident, and charges have not been formally filed, Colorado Springs Police Chief told CNN on Monday.
So, sadly surprising no one at all, it was a targeted hate crime beyond any reasonable doubt based on the charges soon to be filed.
My synagogue has been locked and has paid for professional security since about 2017. We’ve always had some security, but this is a new level, and we pay a new security assessment.
What is interesting to me is that in the article they talked about various bad guys attacking a Taiwanese Christian congregation, a black Christian congregation, and two Jewish congregations. Which is a bit different and more focused targeting than the “US houses of worship…” headline would imply while shown over a picture of what’s evidently a recent construction suburban (so presumably white & Protestant) church.
IOW the article’s title & pic seem to say “Mainstream Christian white churches have a security problem”, while the contents say “Only non-white and/or non-Christian churches have a security problem.”
I’m not accusing you of bad faith in posting the cite. I think the cite itself has some internal shortcomings.
I’m a white atheist. I have no direct personal care which religious groups are attacked because I’m a member of none of them. But I’d much rather the answer be “no groups”, because any group is a group too many. And I’d much rather the answer be “no attacks” because any attack is an attack too many.
I do find it interesting that the article enumerates a list of shootings at Christian churches (with name of the church, location, and date for each), but then lumps everything else into a secondary paragraph, in which it says “including at a Jewish synagogue” – that use of the singular, alone, is deceptive, as there have been two fatal shootings at American synagogues in the recent past (Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, California in 2019), plus the hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue by a gunman earlier this year, and shootings at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement community (so, not technically synagogue shootings) in Kanas in 2014.
It is an article on a Christian website for and about Christian concerns, why would barely mentioning “the other guys” come off as odd to you? My point was, that sign LSLguy posted seemed to be implying that Jews had to be concerned about security at their houses of worship while Christians had the privilege of not having to worry. And that sentiment is, quite simply, horseshit. Security is very high on the minds of Christian churches.
In part that it relegated non-Christian churches to a parenthetical point (but, yeah, it’s a Christian church site, so not too surprising) but what bothered me was that it also seemed to be minimizing what’s also happened at synagogues and Jewish centers, by making it sound like there had been “a shooting” (singular) only.
The article has a publication date of February, 2020; the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was in October, 2018, and the California synagogue shooting was in April, 2019.
Just wanted to provide a cite for this, which I wasn’t sure was true at the time posted but apparently a man did tackle the gunman and hit him with one of his own weapons. Substantiated by video footage of the attack at the club. That’s a brave, badass dude, to take on a gunman when he himself was unarmed. I’m glad he survived.
The sad thing is that Mr. Fierro thought he was done with war and violence and never expected he’d have to deal with this at home, with his family beside him. His wife and daughter were both injured during the attack but are recovering.
Just a reminder that this is a breaking news thread for discussion of the Colorado Springs nightclub attack.
While related incidents like church shootings are definitely discussions that are worth having, this is not the thread for these discussions. Please try to keep all posts in this thread directly relevant to the Colorado Springs attack.
Also, keep in mind that breaking news rules apply.
AFAIK, all the people who died in this disaster were white, and ISTR that he chose this church because he knew some of them! The picture is of a parishioner who took him down.
I can’t believe they let him into the military, but for a while there, they were letting in pretty much anything that could fog a mirror.
When the shooting started, Mr. Fierro said, he hit the floor, pulling a friend down with him. As bullets sprayed, he saw the gunman move through the bar toward a door leading to a patio where dozens of bar patrons had fled. Mr. Fierro, who served in the Army for 15 years, said he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him.
“Was he shooting at the time? Was he about to shoot? I don’t know,” Mr. Fierro said. “I just knew I had to take him down.”
The gunman, who Mr. Fierro estimated weighed more than 300 pounds, sprawled onto the floor, his military-style rifle landing just out of reach. Mr. Fierro started to go for the rifle, but then saw that the gunman had a pistol as well.
“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Mr. Fierro said.
I don’t know if he was associated with the bar or was a patron.
The Washington Post article says he was there with his family because his daughter’s friend was in the drag show
Richard Fierro went to Club Q in Colorado Springs on Saturday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday with his family, enjoying a drag show that included a performance by his 22-year-old daughter’s best friend.
…
“I had my whole Colorado Springs family in there. I had to do something. He was not going to kill my family,” Fierro said. “I just want people to take care of people, the people who are hurt and no longer with us. I still got two of my best friends who are in the hospital. They still need prayers; they still need support.”
It’s probably paywalled, but it’s a very moving article, with a lot of details from taking with him and others who were there.