Officials identify five killed in Colorado shooting

The Monday afternoon news conference on this weekend’s deadly mass shooting brought up questions surrounding the “red flag” law in Colorado and whether it was implemented properly in El Paso County.

Colorado Springs law enforcement and city officials did not confirm whether the suspect was the same man who threatened his mother with a bomb last year, despite sharing the same age and name.

They also did not comment on whether a red-flag law — through which authorities could remove guns from a person — should have been triggered in the previous incident.

COLORADO SPRINGS — At five before 6, a flame began to pass through a crowd of mourners along North Academy Boulevard, outside Club Q. Some volunteers passed out candles while others held signs offering hugs for anyone who needed a warm embrace on this cold and clear evening. It smelled like smoke and the large crowd stood nearly silent.

It was an awkward spot for a vigil, with people standing in the rightmost lane, blocked off with cones, on a busy city artery. With their backs to the rush-hour commuters, all looked toward the five crosses placed for the victims of the shooting two nights before. Beyond were the lights from cable news teams pointed at the crowd. And beyond that the plaza, where a community lost five loved ones in the shooting at Club Q.

Ajay Resha performed his first drag show, met his husband and got married at Club Q.

“I am who I am because of Club Q,” Resha told The Washington Post on Monday.

Resha said he is “absolutely torn apart” by the news of the shooting. “Yesterday I felt a lot of rage and today I feel a lot of hurt,” he said.

Resha, a 36-year-old transgender man, began frequenting Club Q in 2005. He said he was coming out as a lesbian at that time and the people at the club played a large part in his journey.

The first drag show he saw was at Club Q. He didn’t know at the time that the person performing the show would become his husband several years later.

When Vanderbilt University psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl learned that the perpetrator of the Uvalde, Tex., school massacre was a young man barely out of adolescence, it was hard not to think about the peculiarities of the maturing male brain.

Salvador Rolando Ramos had just turned 18, eerily close in age to Nikolas Cruz, who had been 19 when he shot up a school in Parkland, Fla. And to Adam Lanza, 20, when he did the same in Newtown, Conn. To Seung-Hui Cho, 23, at Virginia Tech. And to Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, in Columbine, Colo.

Kelly Loving, a 40-year-old transgender woman from Memphis, had been visiting friends in Colorado Springs when the violence began.

Earlier that day, she’d called a friend back home, Ariel Hill, who was driving and asked whether they could catch up later. But Loving didn’t answer her phone later. Her sister called Hill to break the awful news.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Hill, 30. “I wish I could tell her that I’m sorry. I wish I could tell her that I love her.”

Tiffany Loving said her sister was sweet, wonderful and beloved.

As the fire engines raced to the scene of Club Q, one crew spotted something unlikely on its path: an injured survivor who had been shot seven times, bolted from the club, jumped a fence and reached a nearby convenience store that was on the route, Colorado Springs Fire Chief Randy Royal told The Washington Post.

The firefighters immediately drove toward him and began administering medical aid, lifting him onto a transport rig and eventually facilitating his transportation to the hospital, Royal said.

Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez on Monday identified the five people killed, a public announcement typical in the days after such tragedies. What was not typical was the preface he gave in the name of sensitivity and respect for those who had died in the attack at the LGBTQ club.

“We respect all of our community members, including our LGBTQ community,” Vasquez said at a news conference. “Therefore we will be identifying the victims by how they identified themselves and how their families have loved and identified them.”

Adriana Vance said police notified her that her son Raymond Green Vance, 22, of Colorado Springs, was among those killed in the shooting.

“Even though my son didn’t discriminate against the LGBTQ community, he wasn’t a part of the community. That was his first time going to the club,” Vance said. “Unfortunately, Raymond was there at the wrong time.”

Vance, 42, who works at a skin-care and cosmetics company, knew her son was accompanying his girlfriend and her family to the club, which she had never been to but considered safe. The group was celebrating a birthday that night.