Daniel Brenner / New York Times
A mourner prays outside Club Q, where a deadly shooting took place on Saturday night, in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022. At least five people were killed and at least 18 were injured late Saturday in a shooting at the LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, officials said on Sunday morning, praising patrons inside the club for subduing the gunman.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022 | 2 a.m.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Whether it was bingo night on Wednesdays, karaoke night on Thursdays or drag shows on weekends, Ed Sanders looked forward to seeing Derrick Rump and Daniel Aston as they tended bar at Club Q.
Sanders, a longtime regular, had come to know Rump and Aston, and they knew him — that his drink of choice was rum and coke, and that they should make them weaker for him as the night wore on. Occasionally, when Sanders could not find an available Uber, Rump would drive him home.
The bartenders looked after him. They looked after everybody.
And now, Rump and Aston were gone, two of the five people killed when a gunman opened fire Saturday night in the club that was a cherished hangout for the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs.
“It’s a family,” Sanders said Monday as he lay in a hospital bed, recovering from gunshot wounds to his back and a leg. “Everybody knows each other. Friendly, safe space. Definitely, it was my space.”
The rampage desecrated a club that had become a haven, providing comfort and community for people who yearned for those things but also welcoming just about anyone who was looking for a lively night out.
The Colorado Springs Police Department confirmed the names of the five victims late Monday afternoon: Aston and Rump, as well as Kelly Loving, Raymond Green Vance and Ashley Paugh, all patrons of the club.
The surge of anguish that has been unleashed in Colorado Springs and across the country reflects not only the sadness over the lives lost, but the immense pain from what many saw as an assault on a community that has long been marginalized and threatened with violence.
The crowd at Club Q on Saturday night was celebrating Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration that underscores the grave danger that transgender, gender-nonconforming and gay people who openly embrace their identities can face.
“They were doing, like, a celebration of life for those people that had died,” Sabrina Aston, Daniel Aston’s mother, told The Associated Press. “And instead, they lost their lives.”
Loving, 40, visited Club Q for the first time Saturday night during a weekend trip from Denver, where she had moved about a month ago.
“She was loving, always trying to help the next person out, instead of thinking of herself,” said her sister, Tiffany Loving. “She just was a caring person. I was really close with her.”
Natalee Skye Bingham, 25, said she had first met Kelly Loving about seven years ago when they worked together at a club in Florida. Bingham said that Loving had been like a mother to her, encouraging her at an uncertain time.
“When I first started to transition, I wasn’t confident at all,” Bingham recalled. “She reminded me that you are not doing the wrong thing by being trans, that it was OK to embrace it because you are a beautiful person.”
“Without her giving me the confidence,” Bingham went on, “I don’t know where I would be today.”
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Bingham said that Loving, like many trans people, had been beaten up before, even stabbed and shot at, but that she was a “fighter.”
Lately, Loving had been depressed, but she was starting to feel better when she went to Club Q. A few minutes before the shooting, she had been showing off her outfit — black skirt, black top, newly colored red hair — over a FaceTime call.
“It was nice to see her so confident in herself,” Bingham said. “It was so relieving to know that she felt beautiful that night.”
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Shadavia Green, 38, had also gone to Club Q for the first time on a visit to Colorado Springs. It was a few years ago, and she could immediately sense that the space was special.
“You didn’t feel like you were going to a bar,” she said Monday. “It felt like you were going to see family.”
A few months later, Green moved to the city from Georgia and became a bartender at the club. From 2018 to 2021, she worked behind the bar with Rump, who had started before she arrived, and later with Aston, who was hired about two years ago.
Green said Rump had a biting sense of humor, yet he was also “very empathetic.”
On busy nights at the club, which could attract as many as 200 patrons, Rump took care to make them feel at ease and check in with anyone who seemed particularly quiet.
“He genuinely loved Club Q,” Green said. “He was the bar.”
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Jerecho Loveall, 30, a former dancer at the bar who had spent nearly every Saturday night there before he was shot in the leg Saturday, remembered Rump as “a clean-cut kind of guy” who embraced everyone. Loveall is a straight man in a polyamorous relationship with his wife and a girlfriend.
“And when he found out about all of that, there was no judgment,” he recalled of Rump.
Aston was the “warmest, most loving person,” Green recalled, adding, “He had friends that would come by the carload just to come and see him bar tend or just to hang out and support.”
“Daniel had this smile that you would see from across the club,” Green said, “and you would literally be like, ‘Let me find a reason to walk over there,’ just to be closer to Daniel.”
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Aston, a 28-year-old transgender man, moved to Colorado Springs two years ago. Club Q gave him his first job as a bartender. He loved the work, and would often perform at the venue, his mother told The Associated Press.
“He would get crazy wigs and outfits and he would jump across the stage and he could slide on his knees,” Sabrina Aston said. “And he was quite entertaining. Everyone started hooting and hollering.”
“It’s just a nightmare that you can’t wake up from,” she told The Associated Press. “And I keep thinking it’s just, it’s a mistake. They’ve made a mistake and that he’s really alive.”
Vance, 22, had never been to Club Q when he went Saturday with his girlfriend since middle school, her parents and her parents’ friends to celebrate a birthday. In a statement, his family said that he was born in Chicago but spent his entire life in Colorado Springs. He had just gotten a new job at a FedEx distribution center and “was thrilled to have received his first paycheck,” the statement said. “He couldn’t wait to save enough money to get his own apartment.”
“Raymond grew up surrounded by cousins whom he was very close with, and they and the rest of his tight-knit family are still trying to come to terms with the fact he is gone,” Vance’s family said in the statement. “His absence will leave irreparable heartbreak in countless lives.”
Paugh, 35, stopped in at Club Q on Saturday to watch a show with a friend, said her nephew, Jaden Harris.
Paugh, who lived roughly 100 miles from Colorado Springs in La Junta, Colorado, was married to her high school sweetheart and had an 11-year-old daughter. She worked for Kids Crossing, an organization that helps foster children. “She’d always wanted better homes, better places for children,” Harris said.
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Even though many considered Club Q to be their safe space, some also worried that the threats and bigotry that existed outside the club could one day burst in.
“What makes me the most sad about this is that anybody who works in queer nightlife knows that in this country, they run the risk to be killed,” said Jade Cook, 37, a patron of the club who is transgender and saw how hard employees like Aston worked to make others feel at home. “And they still do it, because they know it’s important.”
Sanders, 63, has popped into Club Q regularly for about two decades, as long as it has been open. “I don’t think it’s hit me yet what really happened,” he said.
As he lay in the hospital, the harrowing ordeal remained vivid in his mind. He recalled ordering a rum and coke and handing one of the bartenders his credit card just as the shooting started. “I never got my credit card back,” he said.
But even as people fell to the ground, wounded and crying for help, Sanders could see what made Club Q so special. He heard people calling out for tourniquets. A woman next to him had been shot in the stomach; he and others applied pressure to stanch the bleeding and tried to comfort her.
“It was family helping family,” he recalled. “We took care of each other.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
