He “entered the box and immediately started shooting”: a 22-year-old man killed at least 5 people and injured 18 overnight from Saturday to Sunday in an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs in the United States.
The establishment, which bears the name “Club Q”, thanked Sunday on Facebook “the heroic customers who subdued the shooter and put an end to this hateful attack”.
At least two firearms were found at the scene. “I can confirm that the suspect used a rifle,” Colorado Springs City Police Deputy Chief Adrian Vasquez said.
Authorities have identified the suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, without specifying whether he acted alone. The man was arrested and taken to hospital.
“At least two people in the box confronted him and fought with him. They managed to stop the suspect,” said Adrian Vasquez.
“I was on the dance floor when I heard shots. I thought it was the music […] then I realized what was happening, “said Joshua Thurman, a witness quoted by the local channel KRDO 13.
“I rushed to the locker room and another customer followed me. We locked the door, we got down on our stomachs and we turned off the light, ”he added with tears in his eyes.
The US Federal Police (FBI) has also been asked to assist local police officers in the investigation.
The injured were transported to various hospitals in Colorado, a state in the center of the country.
The management of the nightclub also said it was “shattered by this senseless attack on our community”.
“We must not tolerate hatred,” President Joe Biden reacted from Washington in a statement, while Colorado Governor Jared Polis, the first openly gay governor elected in the United States, said he was “horrified and devastated” .
Club Q had announced an LGBTQ+ event on Saturday, a party “with all kinds of gender identities and numbers” on the occasion of Transgender Day of Remembrance, celebrated internationally on November 20.
This day of mobilization finds its origin in the assassination in 1998 in the United States of the transgender woman Rita Hester.
Authorities have given no indication of the possible motive for the attack attributed to Anderson Lee Aldrich. A 21-year-old man of the same name threatened his mother with a pipe bomb and multiple weapons last year in a town a 30-minute drive from Colorado Springs, the El County Sheriff’s Office reported. Paso, which includes the city.
This new drama is part of a context of resurgence of acts hostile to transgender people, according to statistics from associations and the FBI.
On June 12, 2016, an American of Afghan origin, Omar Mateen, had killed 49 people and injured about 50 others in an Orlando, Florida gay club, the Pulse.
The killing also illustrates the soaring mortality linked to firearms in a country where they circulate in very large numbers.
Since the beginning of the year, 601 mass shootings have been recorded in the United States, including the tragedy in Colorado Springs on Saturday, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive. A mass shooting that she said meant four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants and has a death rate from firearms that is incomparable to that of other developed countries.
About 49,000 people died from firearms in the United States in 2021, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.
Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, without any place of daily life seeming to be sheltered, from the company to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport .
Any attempt at truly binding legislation, however, comes up against the very powerful lobbying of the National Rifle Association, which has powerful parliamentary levers, as well as the fierce opposition of many conservative parliamentarians, supporters of a very broad interpretation of the constitutional right to hold gun.