Club Q bartender: Shooting was ‘aimed directly at my community’

A bartender at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colo., said early Monday that he believes the gunman who committed a mass shooting there over the weekend was targeting the LGBTQ community.

During an appearance on “CNN This Morning,” Michael Anderson noted that the gunman came to one of only two gay clubs in the city.

“I don’t know what was wrong with this man,” Anderson said. “I don’t know why he needed to act in this way, but he obviously had some some feelings towards — I don’t know if it was transgender people, gays, lesbians, I don’t know — Club Q is a safe place for everybody, everybody in the spectrum of the rainbow.”

“So I don’t know who he was targeting, but I definitely feel that it was something aimed directly at my community, yet again another time in our country,” he continued.

Authorities are looking into whether the shooting, in which five people were killed and 25 others injured, constitutes a hate crime, although officials have not yet applied the label and indicate a motive remains unclear.

The shooting began just before midnight on Saturday evening. Authorities say at least two people confronted the gunman and stopped him from further carnage, and police detained the suspect within about five minutes of the first emergency call.

Anderson on CNN said his supervisor, Daniel Aston, was one of the five people killed.

“He was the best supervisor anybody could have asked for,” Anderson told co-host Don Lemon. “He made me want to come into work and he made me want to, you know, just be a part of the positive culture we were trying to create there. He was an amazing person. He was a light in my life, and it is still surreal that we’re even talking about him in the past tense like this.”

President Biden and other prominent political figures have condemned the shooting, with many tying it to attacks on the LGBTQ community.

“While no motive in this attack is yet clear, we know that the LGBTQI+ community has been subjected to horrific hate violence in recent years,” Biden said in a statement on Sunday. “Gun violence continues to have a devastating and particular impact on LGBTQI+ communities across our nation and threats of violence are increasing.”

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