Club Q shooting suspect changed his name just before his 16th birthday

Mirna Alsharif and Andrew Blankstein and Polly DeFrank and Matthew Mulligan
·2 min read
10

The suspect in the Club Q mass shooting changed his name just before he turned 16, court documents show.

Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was Nicholas Franklin Brink until 2016 when, for reasons unknown, he filed a request to change his name.

The case was filed in Bexar County, Texas, where he may have lived at the time, and names two of his relatives as petitioners.

In 2021, a man with the same name, age and date of birth as Aldrich was arrested after he allegedly threatened to harm his mother with "a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammunition," according to a news release from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office in Colorado Springs.

The 21-year-old man was booked on suspicion of two counts of felony menacing and three counts of first degree kidnapping. Aldrich was also 21 at the time.

When asked about the 2021 criminal case, a spokesman for Colorado’s 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, which includes El Paso County, told NBC News it was part of the criminal investigation into the Club Q mass shooting.

“Additional information will be released as appropriate,” spokesman Howard Black said. He did not specify the charging decision or charges in the case.

Police would also not officially link the shooting suspect to the case involving an Anderson Lee Aldrich, then 21.

At this point, it’s not immediately clear how the case was adjudicated, if a sentence was recommended, or if the case was dropped or delayed. Official documents concerning the case are not readily available.

Because a formal judgment on the 2021 case is not clear, there’s no way to tell if Aldrich would have been deemed a person prohibited to carry a weapon under federal law.

A gunman entered a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club and immediately began firing with a semiautomatic rifle Saturday, killing five people and injuring 19, officials said.

The suspect, identified by authorities as Aldrich, was arrested on suspicion of five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of bias-motivated or hate crimes.

In a tweet Tuesday, the Colorado Springs Police Department said it had “turned over custody of the Club Q suspect to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office at the jail.”

CORRECTION (Nov. 22, 2022, 2:12 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people injured at Club Q. It’s 19, not more than two dozen.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com