Colorado Springs shooting suspect was known to authorities from previous arrest

The man detained in Saturday's mass shooting at a Colorado Springs nightclub is a 22-year-old city resident who was charged by law enforcement officials last year in connection with a bomb threat in a neighborhood about 15 miles from the scene of the deadly rampage.

Anderson Lee Aldrich was identified by Colorado Springs police as the suspected gunman who walked into the Club Q bar shortly before midnight and opened fire with a long gun and perhaps a second weapon, killing at least five victims before being tackled by people inside the bar. He was detained by police minutes later.

Police, assisted by FBI agents, are investigating whether the shooting was a hate crime. Club Q is popular with the area's LGBTQ community.

Aldrich's previous encounter with law enforcement came on June 18, when he was arrested following a disturbance in the Lorson Ranch community, a suburb of modest single-family homes on the southeastern outskirts of Colorado Springs.

A woman called the El Paso County Sheriff's Office to say that her son was threatening to hurt her with a homemade bomb and other weapons, according to a sheriff's office report at the time. Sheriff's deputies ordered an evacuation of the neighborhood and confronted Aldrich, then 21, at another house a mile away.

Aldrich refused at first to back down, but after a nearly one-hour standoff, he surrendered without incident. No bomb was found, but Aldrich was charged with multiple offenses, including felony menacing and kidnapping. The ultimate disposition of the case was not immediately clear.

It was also unclear whether any petitions had been filed against Aldrich preventing him from possessing a firearm. Colorado's 2019 "red flag" law gives local judges the authority to order the confiscation of firearms from individuals with a history of mental illness or violence.

As of Sept. 28, there have been 348 "red flag" cases in Colorado, the majority filed by police departments. The Colorado Springs Police Department has filed two petitions in that time.

In this gun-saturated community, more than 7,000 firearms have been stolen since 2017 in Colorado Springs alone, according to police department data, more than 20 times the national rate of firearm thefts, according to Department of Justice statistics. One of those stolen guns was used to shoot a Colorado Springs officer in the head in 2018. He survived.