A Federal judge last week dismissed a suit brought by survivors of the 2022 Club Q shooting, saying that while the law left him little choice, El Paso County Commissioners’ and former County Sheriff Bill Elder’s “collective role in refusing to at least try to thwart what most likely was a horrific but preventable tragedy should weigh heavily on their individual consciences, and most certainly will not be forgotten by the people of Colorado.”
Club Q in Colorado Springs was the site of a November 2022 massacre, in which Anderson Aldrich murdered five people and injured more than two dozen others. The plaintiffs said that although Aldrich previously had built a bomb, threatened to kill [Aldrich’s] grandparents with a firearm and caused a SWAT standoff, the County and Elder failed to seek an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) against Aldrich, creating the danger that Aldrich would commit the shooting.
Colorado’s 2019 ERPO law permits certain parties, including law enforcement, to petition a court to temporarily remove firearms from someone posing a danger to themselves or others. At the time of the law’s passage, El Paso County commissioners adopted a resolution committing to “actively resist” the ERPO law, and Elder said his office would only ask a court for an ERPO under “exigent circumstances” and where “probable cause can be established.” Elder told KOAA News at the time that he “want[ed] gun owners in unincorporated El Paso County to know he [didn’t] plan to pursue ERPOs on his own,” and that “The Sheriff’s Office isn’t going to run over and try to get a court order.”
Former El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder
Colorado Politics reported that in dismissing the suit because the defendants ‘failed to act,’ rather than affirmatively acting to create the danger of the shooting, U.S. District Court Senior Judge William J. Martínez wrote the “Defendants defiantly did nothing, contemptuously ignoring the will of the people, and refused to avail themselves of the critical tool the legislature had just equipped them with—the tool that might have prevented the monstrous and bloody act… these allegations amount to much more than mere negligence—they represent a conscious and intentional disregard of a known and unjustifiable risk, something which in the Court’s view amounts to an abdication of local officials’ moral responsibility to protect the public.”
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