13 Investigates sits down for extensive interview with El Paso County DA on Club Q prosecution
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) -- After the Club Q shooter was handed the longest criminal sentence in El Paso County history, five consecutive life in prison terms, and an additional 2,208 years, 13 Investigates sat down with the elected District Attorney for the 4th Judicial District, Michael Allen.
Below is a question-and-answer dialogue covering a variety of topics ranging from the historic plea deal and Anderson Aldrich's non-binary declaration, to how Aldrich obtained the guns used in the mass shooting.
Here's the video version of this extended conversation:
SEAN: DA Allen, tell me how you're doing. You just finished this big case. How are you doing as the DA?
DA ALLEN: "Pretty good. Obviously, some big stressful cases, but the good thing about this office is we've got fantastic staff here, really good attorneys that are working these cases alongside of me. In other big cases that we're working, our support staff is phenomenal and they make sure that we're in the right place at the right time and equipped with the right tools to get the job done. So all in all, really good."
SEAN: I want to get into how this kind of plea agreement worked out. I think it might have caught some people by surprise that a case of this magnitude would have gone in that direction. I know the plea talks between a defense attorney and prosecutor are done behind closed doors. But in this case, how did that plea agreement come to fruition?
DA ALLEN: "So just to give some background, when I've got a homicide case, I'm always thinking that we're going to a trial. So we're preparing the case for trial, not thinking that we're going to make plea offers in the case. I kind of put it on the defense side, If you want to start that process, reach out to us and let us know. That's what happened in this case. Defense reached out to us first sometime around the beginning of this year, and we started those negotiations. One of the things that I make sure that we do is reach out to the victims in every single case when we start this process. So when defense reached out to us and said that they were interested in negotiating, we reached out to all the victims, got meetings set up, and then saw if they even had an appetite for this or if they wanted a day in court. If they wanted a day in court, we're happy to proceed down that path. But we have obviously some pretty, you know, illuminating our answers to them about what this process is going to look like, how frustrating it's going to be at times, especially as it drags out over potentially years. Almost every person, they were all in support of the idea of 'let's see what we can do to resolve this case as early as we possibly can and achieve the biggest sentence that we possibly can.' Even more importantly, they really wanted to make sure that they were communicating to us and that we understood how important the bias-motivated charges were because it was so important to them. It was important to me as their representative in the courtroom. But also, I think it's important for this community to know exactly why this particular defendant did what he did."
SEAN: Was there any pushback on the defense side of things to say, we don't want to plead guilty to the bias-motivated crimes because maybe Anderson Aldridge didn't feel as though it was a bias-motivated crime. Was that at all a talking point?
DA ALLEN: "So that was actually the main talking point from the very beginning. They they were willing to plead to all of the substantive charges but wanted to avoid the bias-motivated convictions. And I don't think, of course, if you ask the defense, I'm sure they're going to say they didn't feel like it was a bias-motivated offense. I think the motivation was different actually than that. I think it was really to avoid the potential for any death sentence proceedings in the federal system was really the main driver on that."
SEAN: Some evidence was outlined in the preliminary hearing about just how much planning went into this night. Could you outline for us how much planning you perceived went on for this crime?
DA ALLEN: "I think the planning for this was ongoing for potentially months. It took some time for him to assemble all the parts, especially for that .233 rifle weapon that he carried into the club. The effort that he had to go to get uncivilized parts, to even get some 3D printed parts for those weapons, that indicates that it took some time, took some effort. The fact that he had been visiting the club many times over the past several months prior to the shooting, had hand-drawn maps of the club to indicate good areas of attack and ways that he could enter the club and exit the club and potentially inflict the most potential damage. So I think there was a lot of planning that was going on. He was cloaking those activities in darkness, essentially meaning that in a way that we wouldn't detect that he was planning this sort of thing out. The fact that he was getting these weapon pieces while also evading any ATF background checks for those pieces indicates, again, wanting to keep this secret as much as he possibly could. The only person that may have been able to highlight or let somebody know this is somebody that he was living with, which was his mother at the time. She had to have witnessed a lot of this stuff. Of course, the law doesn't require somebody to report this kind of thing, but I think there's there's probably a lot of second-guessing from some people regarding that relationship."
SEAN: You mentioned the weapons. I think that's a big part of this case that, for good reason during a prosecution, was withheld from the public. You mentioned it, but outline for me the weapons that were used, how Aldrich got their hands on those weapons, and how culpable were the family members, specifically the mom, in providing those weapons.
DA ALLEN: "Yeah, well, let me address that second part first, the culpability aspect of it. Any time we are going to press charges against somebody, file charges, we have to have a good faith basis, meaning that we've got evidence to support charging somebody. If we start engaging in charging someone without that evidentiary basis, we're now violating what makes the criminal justice system in the United States the best criminal justice system in the world and really violating what the Constitution stands for. So while it's clear that she got the nine-millimeter handgun frame sometime prior in a purchase from Florida, there's not really anything to indicate that she provided this firearm to the defendant to carry out the shooting or anything like that. We don't know exactly when that exchange may have happened. It could have just been in the house, and so to get to that culpability level where we could file charges, just not enough evidence to get to that level, despite looking into it pretty extensively."
SEAN: When it comes to the 3D printer, is there any evidence as to how the defendant got their hands on a 3D printer?
DA ALLEN: "It's unclear whether the defendant himself printed off parts or if he was able to obtain these parts from other places. But it's clear that some of these pieces were 3D printed on pieces of firearms. There was at least a particular period of time when he had two 3D printers. Whether they were of sufficient quality to do this kind of work is not known to me and maybe even to the investigation, but certainly some of these pieces were 3D printed."
SEAN: There has been a lot of talk after the mass shooting that a red flag order or an extreme risk protection order would have done something to prevent this shooting. Can you outline for me why that's not the case?
DA ALLEN: "Essentially for a red flag order or an extreme risk protection order to be effective, you have to have either a family member or somebody in law enforcement or some other person that says this person is a threat of harm to either themselves or to somebody else in the near future. It's the language in the statute that 'near future' is key. If a party has that issue and they bring that forward and file something with the court, the court can issue that protection order, which would show up as a flag. When you get a background check for an ATF background check on firearms purchases, the mandatory protection order that enters on any felony case does the exact same thing. So there's that aspect of it. But more importantly, the actions of this particular defendant, when you're talking about obtaining firearms pieces that are not serialized, that are purposely being obtained to evade ATF background checks, there's no way, even if a red flag had been in existence, that would have stopped him from getting these parts, assembling these weapons and doing exactly what he did on November 19th. And that's the unfortunate reality of the world we live in today."
SEAN: Is there anything that can be done to prevent this shooting? Is there anything that could have been done to prevent this defendant from in any number of ways, getting their hands on ways to build guns or be provided parts of guns that we can learn from in the future? Or is there really nothing that can be done?
DA ALLEN: "Yeah, you know, I hesitate to say that nothing can be done because I think, you know, there's a lot of smart people that can figure out ways to maybe make this better. I think ultimately, though, it comes down to what do we want as a society. Unfortunately, violence is rampant in this society these days. And that's really the bigger issue until we address the societal issues where we're breeding people that are willing to dehumanize people, turn people into political slogans or that kind of thing, and then they become targets because now they're not as much as a human as they were before, we're going to continue to see these things. I think really that's where the answer lies, is to somehow get respect for each other back into popular culture. Hopefully, that will shut it down to some degree. But that's a big change, probably a generational change. Secondarily, I think we've got to be really smart about what we're doing with criminal justice reform. We've had some eroding of the ability of people that have been convicted of felonies can now lawfully obtain weapons to a degree that wasn't in existence just a few short years ago. So I think we've got to be smarter about what we're doing legislatively, too. That could potentially help in situations like this."
SEAN: The thing I've heard over and over again from victims when they've wanted to speak to us is they didn't feel like life in prison without the possibility of parole was considered a just punishment in this case. What are your feelings on whether or not that is a just punishment for a crime of this nature?
DA ALLEN: "What I think is important to note there is that justice can look like any number of different things. What we're really talking about there is what is a just result based on the law that's available at the time. I think the people that you're referring to were really adamant about the idea that the death penalty should have been an option. I agree with them. I think the death penalty should have been an option in a case like this. Unfortunately, we don't have that anymore. It went away back in 2020. Any time you're committing these sorts of what I'm going to call a terror attack in a community, you should have the ultimate punishment available. It's important to note, too, that when you're talking about going after the death penalty in a case like this, that you're first presenting the facts to a jury to determine whether somebody's guilty or not guilty. These are people from the community. So the community is actually weighing in on whether this person should be held guilty based on those facts. Then once that guilty phase is completed and they find somebody guilty, you go back to that same jury and you now are presenting death penalty information to them and the community, again, is making a determination whether they think the death penalty should apply. That's the way the statute was prior to it being abolished back in 2020. That seems like a really good system because you're really allowing people of the fourth judicial district to hear the facts of the case, to hear all of the aggravators and mitigators that might be present in any given case. Then they make a community decision to decide whether something like that should be carried out or not. That's important. It gives people a role to play in the criminal justice system that we simply don't have today."
SEAN: Something that actually just happened last week that I think it plays right into this conversation, is the Supreme Court decision, which I'm sure you're aware of, which gives people accused of first-degree murder the right to bail. What ramifications does that have on public safety for potentially heinous crimes like this?
DA ALLEN: "Even the fact that this case was pending when that decision came down, if we were headed on a trial track, I'm sure that the defense attorneys in this case would have come back and said, hey, we need to get in front of the judge and get a bond set in this case. He was being held without bond since the night that he was arrested back on November 20th is when he was actually arrested. That's the ramification. Now people that are committing the most heinous offenses in a community, whereas we had been able to hold them without bond, meaning that we're going to stay in jail until the case was tried to a jury, are now going to have the chance to bond out of jail and be out in the community again. I think that's a travesty and something that was certainly contemplated at the time that the death penalty was being talked about being abolished and yet ignored and not really looked at as a ramification. It certainly is and it will have a detrimental impact, I think, on public safety. We will have people that are charged with first-degree murder get out of custody on bond as a result of this opinion, and that puts people in jeopardy. It also means that these are the types of offenses where a defendant who's charged with first-degree murder, especially if they've killed multiple people, those are exactly the kinds of cases that defendants would want to flee from. We see that all the time. We saw that with Letecia Stauch case, where she fled the state and was eventually arrested in South Carolina and then fought with deputies in the transport back. So these are dangerous people who are not afraid to carry out violence against others, including people that are apprehending them and will be back out on the street potentially if the bond is low enough."
SEAN: Can be done with that decision? Is it because that's a Supreme Court decision that it's binding on all state cases and that really nothing can be done? Or is there something that can be done on a county-by-county basis to amend that at all?
DA ALLEN: "Because it's a state Supreme Court decision that's binding on the entire state. That means that every person charged with first-degree murder in the state of Colorado that was being held with no bond at the time that decision came down, now we're going to be going back in front of judges and getting bond set on their cases. So it's got huge ramifications. The only way to change that is to do some statutory change in the future that says these types of cases potentially can be held without bond if certain conditions are met, similar to what we had in place before."
SEAN: To go back to the bomb threat case, which was much talked about in the lead up to preliminary hearing time. I'd asked you a question yesterday about the reason why you were not able to subpoena family members to come testify. Is there a way that we can improve our state-to-state subpoena process that maybe could get them served in the future in a case that maybe happens in the future?
DA ALLEN: "So the thing that's tough about that is that each individual state is its own jurisdictional entity. There's no real connection between the states as far as that goes, other than interstate agreements. That's what was in place here. We actually complied with all of that, got in front of state authorities in Florida to get grandparents under service, and have subpoenas issued under Florida law that would require them to come back, just couldn't get them served with actual subpoenas. I'm not sure necessarily that there is a good fix for that because there is this idea that this is a republic of states, right? That each state has their own inherent jurisdictional powers and to force something on them from a top-down approach, I don't know that that would go over very well from a state-by-state basis. For the most part, it works. We had to do that with Letecia Stauch's case. We subpoenaed people from other states and had to go through that interstate subpoena process. Most times it works just fine. There are occasionally times when it doesn't work, especially when people are effectively in consistently working to evade service of subpoenas."
SEAN: I want to dive a little bit more into how they weren't able to be served. Was it the fault of a process server in Florida who, in your opinion, was truly at fault for not being able to serve them?
DA ALLEN: "I think it's important to note that we've got to be somewhat careful about this so that grandparents of this defendant, mother of this defendant, don't fall under threats from other people because they hear that we're talking about these kinds of things. Ultimately, the fault really lies on the person that's trying to evade service. The process servers in Florida and also locally went to extensive efforts to get subpoenas. It's also important to note, too, that when the case was dismissed, our prosecutors were in court asking for more time to get that service of subpoenas achieved and the court denied that request and dismissed the case despite us asking for more time. So really, it's just part of what the criminal justice system is built to be like. We still have constitutional protections that we have to abide by that help all of us. If any of us find ourselves in the seat of being charged with a crime, it's important that our constitutional rights are protected. Same with this particular defendant. So if we can't get service on somebody because they're actively evading, that happens on occasion.
SEAN: With this case, another hotly contested state statute or law was the sealing of criminal records right after a case is dismissed. There's been some talk about amending that a bit. What do you want to see change to that law specifically to help us avoid a situation like we experienced in this case?
DA ALLEN: "That was, from our perspective, very frustrating because what we know is that a prior case existed. It was covered in the media at the time. There were media reports out there about it. People were in the courtroom when it happened. Yet because of this change in the statute that says if a case is dismissed, the only thing that you can say from a prosecutor's standpoint or really anybody in the criminal justice system is that no such record exists. So what that leads to is people in the community hear that they know something happened prior, and now you've got a prosecutor or a sheriff or somebody like that saying it doesn't exist. It can lead to distrust. It can lead people to think that we're trying to cover something up when that's not the case. We're really just following statute. That was one of my big pushes in that press conference we had in December of last year was we've got to get somebody to take this up and change this law so that we don't have this ridiculous scenario any longer where we have to lie to the public because statute says we have to lie to the public and didn't catch any ground. It didn't catch any traction from any legislators, either locally or across the state. We didn't see anything in the last legislative session. I think there's probably very little appetite similar to the issue we just talked about on bond from the state legislature to fix that either, which is really unfortunate and really is a disservice to the public."
SEAN: Why do you think there's not that buy-in on some of these big hot topic issues, which I feel like in the media we cover over and over and over again, especially with the bond issue and parole issue and various different issues? Why is there not that buy-in at the state legislature level? Have you had conversations with those who represent our community to say, hey, can you help us out?
DA ALLEN: "I have conversations with our local legislators all the time, both informally and formally, especially during legislative sessions. I'll talk to them quite a bit and testify in front of different committees. I'm not sure why specifically those two particular issues won't likely gain any traction more than what they have already. Other than we've certainly seen a lot of criminal justice reform over the last several years. I think some of it may be just a realization that there won't be any success on any bills addressing those two issues. Also, I think it would be counter to some of that criminal justice reform effort that's gone on over the last several years. So the likelihood that we can get something crafted and pushed through in the current legislative setup is just, frankly, not very likely. Really, that's the thing that I think, you know, I wish we could just get to more balance in the state. I think any time you've got one political party that has total domination in the state legislature and all other states statewide offices, you're setting up a situation like this where bad ideas can become law and really do bad things to the community."
SEAN: I remember reading that motion that was filed in court shortly after charging where there was the non-binary declaration where Aldrich wanted to be called MX Aldrich. You have remained steadfast that you're calling the defendant 'He' and that you didn't really buy in, that there was this non-binary declaration because there was no evidence beforehand that they were non-binary. Explain to me your thought process working through how you were going to decide what to call this defendant.
DA ALLEN: "That's the first time I've had to deal with that in a case that I'm lead prosecutor on. It gets back to what you just said, that there was no evidence at any time prior to the shooting or really prior to the criminal proceedings getting underway, that this particular defendant ever told anybody that he was non-binary or that he identified as non-binary or wanted to be identified as MX Aldrich. So it seemed to me to be a stilted attempt to avoid the bias-motivated charges in state court. It seemed to be a very intentional attempt to avoid federal prosecution on hate crimes charges, which is how the federal government actually has nexus into this case, is based off of civil rights violations. So if the defense could somehow short-circuit that analysis and say this isn't really a hate crime case, then they avoid completely the federal system and avoid also the bias-motivated offenses in our case. So really, I think it was a big picture strategic attempt by them to avoid that potentiality."
SEAN: Would you support additional federal charges in this case that would then potentially lead to a death sentence for this defendant?
DA ALLEN: "I think this case is the epitome of what a death sentence case should look like. Any time you attack innocent people in a way that you know, he went in armed for combat. He had a .233 caliber rifle. He had a nine-millimeter handgun. He had a tactical vest on with at least two flashbang devices attached to that vest. And you go into a place where you know that there is nobody there that's going to be able to withstand your overpowering firepower. This is exactly the kind of case that the death penalty should be applied to."
SEAN: In the last 6 to 8 months, what are your feelings towards this defendant? This was a member of our community for however long of a time that chose to carry out an attack like this. What are your feelings post-conviction and sentencing towards this defendant?
DA ALLEN: "You know, it really gets back to just the extreme cowardice of this particular defendant. Like I just described, attacking unarmed people who are just out having a good time. Just complete cowardice. Every single one of us has an inherent right to public safety, an inherent right to live life. This defendant, in the most cowardly way, took that away from five individuals and attempted to murder every single person in that club. It's just complete cowardice."
