(COLORADO SPRINGS) – 4th Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen says the Club Q shooter deserved worse after they were hit with the longest sentence in El Paso County history on Monday: five life sentences plus over 2,000 years on top of that.
“His intention was to kill as many people as he possibly could and then to get out of there,” Allen said about the shooter.
DA Allen sat down with FOX21 News to discuss the seven-month journey leading up to the Club Q shooter’s life sentence.
The morning after the Club Q shooting, Allen received a call he would never forget.
“It was early in the morning. I was asleep, obviously, and immediately started getting ready to come down here… It’s the worst nightmare kind of call,” said Allen.
The night of Nov. 19 is just as vivid for survivors and people close to the victims. Allen stood at the podium for over two hours with more than 20 people as they gave their impact statements at the shooter’s hearing on Monday.
“There were people that talked yesterday about celebrating their birthday that night and how they will never celebrate birthdays again… When you hear people talking, about remembering the exact details of a moment in time like that… That’s an indication that those wounds, even though you can’t see them, are just as powerful and just as impactful and just as hard to overcome as any physical wounds ever will be,” said Allen.
Allen pushed the importance of the death penalty, saying that if the state of Colorado had not abolished that sentence back in 2020, he would have pursued it without hesitation because the death penalty is what the Club Q shooter deserved.
Even though state law doesn’t allow it, Allen says the threat of the death penalty at the federal level is why the shooter took this plea deal. He explained that if a defendant takes full responsibility at the state level, that can sometimes aid in avoiding a federal death sentence.
“That sort of proves the point that the death penalty does still matter. The idea that defendants think about the death penalty and then make rational decisions based on that potential is an important thing to consider,” said Allen.
Allen says the four additional years the shooter received, for charges of bias-motivated hate crime, was just as important as the 2,208 they received for the charges of attempted murder.
“The why always matters in a case. For somebody like this particular shooter to carry out a hate-filled terror attack, essentially, on our community, it’s important to mark that in history, that we’re not going to stand for that kind of activity in our community,” said Allen.
The conviction of these hate crimes is why Allen believes the shooter now identifies as non-binary. Prior to the shooting, Allen says there is no evidence that they identified as non-binary.
“I think it’s another victimization of the LGBTQ+ community… The idea that he was doing this after the shooting in the court proceeding, I think was a very stilted and transparent way of him trying to really avoid those bias-motivated charges,” said Allen.
The FBI has opened a federal investigation, where the death penalty can be a sentencing option for the shooter. Allen says while a death sentence would achieve another measure of justice, nothing will bring back the victims or undo the harm this shooting has caused to this community.
Allen now only hopes that Nov 19. will forever be memorialized.
“I think if… we stop memorializing, I think that’s actually a disservice to this because once you stop recognizing what has happened historically, you then can potentially allow something like this to occur again,” said Allen.
