The journey of war veteran Rich Fierro, a ‘hero’ of the Club Q shooting

Valor

He drifted from the crowds to vape away his hangover, but strangers kept coming to him, wanting to touch him. People collapsed in his arms and wept. People hollered from a distance.

“Thank you,” they said, over and over, and he would try to reflect their gratitude back, because it was too much to absorb.

“We love you, Rich!”

“Appreciate you very much.”

“May I give you a hug? You probably hate this shit.”

He was always on the move these days, in 2023, because people wanted to see him, hear from him, talk at him — here at the Pride parade in Colorado Springs, where he wore a rainbow sash and banged a drum from his gold-colored ’85 El Camino, then a few weeks later, three stories underneath West 46th Street, in the wings of a hot, underground ballroom in Manhattan, where he waited to receive a “medal for valor.”

“How many times did they ship you over there?” asked a police detective, making chitchat before the start of a gala for LGBTQ+ officers of the New York Police Department.

“Three times in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.”

“And then they brought you back to do the same thing.”

“Yep, and now we’re all fucked up!”

Rich Fierro’s military service had spanned four deployments in America’s war on terror. It had taken him years to recover — to truly come home. And that’s where another war had found him.

“The winner, in November of this past year, was in a nightclub with his wife, Jessica, his daughter, Kassy, and her boyfriend …”

The muzzle flashing white.

“… Without hesitation, Thomas James and Richard Fierro sprung into action, saving countless lives …”

The smell of blood and gunpowder.

“… and stopping what surely would have been one of the most horrible massacres in this nation’s history …”

The garble of music and screaming.

“… Tonight, it is our honor to thank you, sir.”

Was he supposed to say something? He was never sure, at these things. He was, in his own words, “a fat old vet,” with a long ponytail pulled into a pink scrunchie. He had worn some kind of team uniform since he was 4 years old — first for baseball and football, then for the U.S. Army — but now he wore the outfit of an honoree, singled out from everyone else: a blue suit, a yellow paisley tie and a white rose lanced to his lapel.

When Rich stooped to receive the medal, the audience clapped for 70 long seconds. People on stage gestured to the microphone. Cabernet and hard seltzer were running through his veins.

He didn’t tell them exactly what happened the night he became everyone’s hero. That was just part of a longer story, which had started decades earlier and wasn’t over yet.

“At the end of the day,” Rich told the audience, near the end of his remarks, “I don’t think I did anything worth a shit — sorry for my language — because five of us did not go home that night.”

Afterward, stout officers with iron handshakes asked for selfies. “I know you don’t want to be a hero,” one said, “but thank you for what you did.”

People brought him drink after drink from the open bar. “How are you caring for yourself?” one woman asked him. “I just can’t imagine.”

Around midnight, after most of the attendees had left, Rich was alone on the dance floor, spinning, drunk. He swung his jacket over his head like a lasso. His dress shirt was fully unbuttoned. His pants sagged under his gut. He had a hard seltzer in one hand and a vodka cocktail in the other. Rose petals dropped from his lapel. The medal for valor swung across his tank top, in time to Cardi B.

From their table, Jess glared at her husband.

“Let’s go,” Kassy said to her father.

Rich, not wanting the night to end, evaded Jess and Kassy and went to a bar at street level, next door, and ordered a Modelo. He thought he’d seen Jess roll her eyes as he was giving his speech. “Not out of anger,” Rich said, “but out of — whatever she’s feeling.”

His words slurred, but his thoughts were clear.

“Here’s your story,” Rich said. “That old classic scene: the Green Beret coming home, and his wife jumps in his arms.”

A pause.

“But now his wife has been through the same thing.”

He meant war, but this wasn’t the kind you sign up for. This wasn’t the kind you come home from. It was the kind of war that turns home into the battlefield.

Jess and Kassy eventually found Rich. They’d all been drinking for hours. Rich and Jess fired off some harsh, hushed words, as the piano riff to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” began playing in the bar.

As he sat there with his medal, Jess called him a “farce.”

“You’re treating me like a piece of dog shit,” Rich said, and he needled her for an explanation, though he already knew what it was.

“Don’t come at me like that,” she said.

“Oh, I can’t come at you,” Rich said, “but you can come at me all day, every day?”

“I will.”

“Fucking ignore me for fucking weeks.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will.”

“You have a problem, not me.”

“I don’t care.”

“That’s right. You don’t care.”

Jess didn’t hear the next thing he said, so Rich repeated himself: “It’s a fucking nightmare.”

At different points, Rich and Jess both said “I’m done,” as if — after decades of fighting for their family, and for each other — they’d finally had enough.

Love

Freshman year of high school, in 1992, Jess Martinez wanted an easy elective class and chose drama.

In walked Rich Fierro, in his Nike Cortez sneakers, socks to his knees.

Jess thought: Who’s the brown boy?

They fell into a conversation that never stopped. Jess liked to ditch classes, make trouble, hang with the cholas. Rich looked like the guys she’d grown up with in the “ghetto” of the Logan Heights neighborhood of San Diego. He spent his teens lifting his shirt for suspicious cops, but he was a great student, an athlete, a peacekeeper. He loved being on a team.

At the end of freshman year, Rich’s grandfather died. When he told Jess, the grief and vulnerability on his face — she had never seen that before, in the guys she knew. She could feel Rich’s feelings, and sense the heaviness of his loss.

“When you get your braces off, ask me out, and I’ll say yes,” she told him. He did, and she did.

They balanced each other. She kept her guard up, and had a small circle of friends. Rich had an energy that could command a room. To Rich, Jess was a model of toughness. To Jess, Rich felt like home.

They were both the descendants of Mexican immigrants. Rich’s forebears picked grapes or mined copper, and they climbed into the middle class of San Diego through blue-collar trades and small patriotisms: a passion for Corvettes, a love of the Padres. His father was a union carpenter, a get-the-job-done kind of guy. His mother worked for the San Diego public school system and was a fierce advocate for her sons’ education. Both parents were disciplinarians who wanted their children to have a clean shot at the American Dream.

Jess’s family was larger and poorer. Her grandfather ran a landscaping business. Her father wasn’t around much, and her mother found strength through a group of girlfriends who boosted one another’s self-confidence. “No matter who you’re with,” her mother would say, “be true to who you are.”

Junior year, when Jess was 16, she got pregnant.

Rich said: “Tell me what you want to do.”

Little Ricky was in their senior prom photos: Rich in a white jacket and white fedora, Jess in a royal-blue skirt, the baby wearing white shirt sleeves and tiny black lace-up shoes.

Rich and Jess now had something to protect: a family unit.

They worked at a Pizza Hut call center together. Jess put in years at Starbucks, rising from barista to manager. In the summer, Rich worked construction during the day and restocked Kmart shelves at night. During the school year, he went to San Diego State University through ROTC. Rich was commissioned in the Army in 1999, and the young family moved to Oklahoma for officer school, to an apartment across from a cow pasture.

Things were stable enough to try for a second kid. Nearly six months into her pregnancy, Jess learned that the placenta had a deep fissure. The doctors told her that if she continued her pregnancy, it could come down to her life or the baby’s.

Rich couldn’t imagine life without Jess. But again he left the decision to her.

Kassy was an emergency Caesarean section. Rich arrived in his uniform, was put into scrubs and saw Jess half-sedated, a curtain covering everything below her neck.

“I can’t feel anything,” Jess told him. “Is she okay?”

The doctors were making noises about an abnormality. But then there was a burst of crying. Rich counted the baby’s fingers and toes.

“She’s perfect,” he told Jess.

Rich liked the discipline and camaraderie of the Army, but Jess was wary of military life. She had grown up blocks from a Navy base and saw how men were gone for months at a time, sometimes years.

That’s what had happened with the military men in Rich’s family. His grandfather served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. His father was sent to Vietnam as an artilleryman and came home with the war in his eyes — a hard look that seemed to say: Not now. Rich’s father never forgot being entombed by the blackness of the jungle, unable to tell where the enemy was, knowing that an attack could come from anywhere.

But it was peacetime, and Rich and Jess saw the Army as a steppingstone. Rich’s plan was to do his four years, then maybe become a teacher. Resettle in San Diego.

Then, early one morning on his way to physical training, Rich heard on the radio about the World Trade Center. When he got home, Jess was crying on the couch, holding 13-month-old Kassy.

The TV showed smoke billowing from the Pentagon.

War

In Iraq, Rich was the logistics guy, the big-picture thinker, the smartest officer with the biggest heart, according to one fellow soldier.

“My very first impression: This dude’s a lot, when you compare him to the stereotypical stoicism among military officers,” says George Hamilton, a lieutenant colonel who deployed with Rich to Iraq. “He had a knack for emotionally connecting with his soldiers. That didn’t come naturally to me. I would love them, but he was just very able to connect with them. He just loved his soldiers unconditionally.”

Rich thrived on leading people to accomplish something together that they could never envision individually. He learned how to provide battle tracking for four artillery brigades, and how to endure an 18-hour firefight. He learned how to handle salty generals who thought they knew everything, and how to snap back at officers who made comments like “I’ve never seen a Mexican major before.”

During Rich’s first and second deployments, from 2003 to 2007, the Fierros lived in Patrick Henry Village, an Army housing complex near Heidelberg, Germany. Many locals were hostile toward America’s war, and Jess learned to downplay her Americanness whenever she ventured off campus. When Rich deployed, he told Ricky that he was the man of the house. On the phone, their conversations were short and simple. His children didn’t need to know what being at war was like.

That was the mission, wasn’t it? To go to war so they wouldn’t have to know.

In 2007, the Fierros moved back to the United States, to Colorado Springs, but Rich stayed in the Army, stationed out of Fort Carson. Before deploying again, Rich left hundreds of sticky notes, one for every day he would be gone — “BE SAFE,” “BE GOOD FOR YOUR MOM” — for Jess to give 8-year-old Kassy, who didn’t understand why her dad was away so much.

On his third deployment, in 2008, Rich was a commander, which meant that he was in charge of both the mission and making sure soldiers got home from it. His post was a few hours south of Baghdad: Convoy Support Center Scania, a refueling point for vehicles moving between Baghdad and Basra.

Home was made of T-walls and razor wire. The air stank of diesel. Mortar rounds came like clockwork.

On Christmas Eve 2008, a convoy went out to fire warning flares at an origin point of mortar attacks. On the drive back, an old bridge gave way. An Army vehicle flipped into six feet of muddy canal water. Three soldiers from Fort Carson drowned. There had been no explosion, no ambush. Just a bad break on a soggy embankment. But three men didn’t come back, and Rich and his fellow soldiers had to live with that.

This was war, but it was also limbo. Soldiers were on their third, fourth, fifth tours. Sand grouted the cracks of their dried palms. Exhaustion and doubt corroded a sense of mission. The Army chaplain at Scania had persuaded high-end cigar makers to send supplies, and Rich and other soldiers would gather every Friday night to decompress with a smoke and an O’Doul’s. Is this what protecting the homeland from terror really was: fake beer and $80 cigars at a crummy outpost in a wayward war?

For his fourth deployment, in 2011, Rich went to Afghanistan, where the war on terror had started a decade earlier. Rich, then 34, was the operations officer for the special troops battalion of the 4th Infantry Division.

“The backbone of the unit,” his commander would say, years later. “The glue of that deployment.”

Rich planned every operation to the smallest detail, to the point where he had to be reminded to eat and sleep properly.

They were stationed in Farah province, a remote western area blanketed with poppy fields and Taliban strongholds. The bases and villages were spread out, but the violence was up close and personal.

On July 15, 2011, Rich put together a search operation, and the unit stepped into a six-hour firefight with insurgents. One of his guys was killed by small-arms fire: a 40-year-old staff sergeant from Rapid City, S.D., who became Fort Carson’s 323rd casualty of the war and the 1,550th U.S. service member to die in Afghanistan.

At the end of the summer, Rich was on a patrol to a combat outpost when a young Afghan began trotting on a donkey beside their convoy.

“He’s pacing us,” Rich said over the radio.

After a couple of hours at the outpost, the convoy doubled back. The road in was the only road out.

As they passed a village, an intel report came about nine improvised explosive devices on the route. Rich asked the lead truck to fire up its infrared kit. If roadside bombs had just been placed, the dirt would come through a different color.

“Roger that, sir,” came the reply from the lead truck, which was then rocked by an explosion.

Rich ordered the convoy off the road and into the poppy fields, which were clear after the harvest.

Another convoy arrived. One truck didn’t follow instructions to avoid the road, and hit an IED.

That was two IEDs so far. Were there seven more?

The vehicles were totaled, but the soldiers were okay. Rich’s team was angry, anxious, frustrated. One of his soldiers turned to him and said, with a look he wouldn’t forget: “Sir, we’re never getting out of here.”

Rich, amped and furious, prepared to secure the village without adequate backup — a few soldiers trying to root out an unseen enemy in an unfamiliar place — until his commander reminded him of the stakes over the radio: “I’m not calling Jess.”

Home

Even when Rich was gone, Jess could sometimes feel his presence in bed, as if they were falling asleep together. But his deployments had turned her into a single parent. At any given point, she didn’t know exactly where he was, or whether he was safe.

And every time he came back, his fuse was shorter. Every time, he was a different person.

His son and daughter were different, too, because of the growing up they’d done without him.

By the time Rich went to Afghanistan, Ricky was on the verge of adulthood, smoking weed, skipping school, throwing parties at the house. The downrange discipline that Rich tried to impose on his son spurred resentment and rebellion instead, and their relationship deteriorated.

Rich’s soldiers may have seen him as a caring leader, but with his family, he could be “a fucking asshole,” his son would tell him.

One morning before dawn, Ricky sneaked into the house to avoid disturbing his parents. But Rich was awake and, like usual, on a hair-trigger setting. Rich had wanted a gun in the home, but Jess had vetoed it. In time he would understand what that meant. “I really realized, ‘Oh, shit, I would have shot him,’” Rich would recall later. “I would have literally shot him, because he was crawling into my house. It was a wake-up call: I can’t have a weapon in the house when I’m ready to go at all times.”

The minefield in Farah province was the final straw for Rich. When his commander spoke Jess’s name over the radio, Rich realized that he was putting his family second — and for what? Another roll of the dice, every time he went out on patrol? Another soldier lost, no matter how thoroughly he planned? A decade at war was enough.

He signed his separation papers from the Army in 2013.

But going home wasn’t that simple.

He had grown accustomed to being the person who America’s wars required him to be. In uniform, Rich knew who he was, and so did everyone around him. Back in Colorado Springs, he was a leader with no unit, a man without a mission.

At first, he had trouble finding a civilian job. He spun around the house, looking for projects. A flood-prone basement became an enemy to vanquish. Kassy would glance out the window, and there was Dad in the backyard, installing, piece by piece, a sort of flagstone quad they didn’t really need.

He drank. He raged. He broke down.

“When he first got back, I was very scared,” says Rich’s mother, Frances, “because I didn’t see my son. It wasn’t him. It was another person. And I was very scared I had lost him because of all this. He was not smiling. He was mean.”

His anger shot out in all directions, for no real reason — mostly at strangers, whom he viewed as a threat.

“Man, you might want to see somebody,” his brother, Ed, would tell him.

Rich’s former commander was also trying to kick Rich’s ass into therapy. “You got a beautiful wife, two great kids, and they don’t understand,” he told Rich.

The vulnerability that Jess had seen in his face when they were kids in San Diego, that had attracted her to him, had become a stubborn machismo. Bickering was their love language, but now they were fighting. Rich thought hiding his pain was a form of leadership, a way to protect the family unit. Instead, it was splintering the Fierro household.

Rich was also falling apart physically. The discipline he tried to impose on his environment did not translate to himself. He ate his way to 450 pounds. He was diagnosed with diabetes, with sciatica. As he neared 40, Rich went to the doctor for a checkup, and his blood oxygen level was alarmingly low. He was sent home with an oxygen tank. From a commanding officer fighting terrorists to an overweight diabetic who needed help to breathe — it was humiliating.

He looked at Kassy when he got home and said: “I’m going to die. I need your help.”

She made him low-sugar recipes all summer. Plain chicken, rice and broccoli.

And Rich finally started seeing a therapist.

He was among a legion of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and returned with a warped sense of physical security and emotional intimacy. Combat vets forged deep bonds in harsh environments, and they returned to their families in a disorienting peace that could be dogged by anger, depression, paranoia, survivor’s guilt and thoughts of suicide. Some had a hard time determining when they were safe and when they weren’t. Family members had become strangers, and strangers became potential adversaries.

“Thank you for your service” went only so far.

Veterans could recover from trauma with treatment, but neither therapy nor medication was a cure. They had to find a way to connect to the people in their lives. Just showing up for someone, being there for them, or allowing someone to be there in return — that could be key.

Rich’s therapist gave him basic homework to reenlist with his family: express his feelings, compliment Jess. Rich’s mom was relieved to see her son start smiling again.

Rich began to recognize how hard he’d been on Ricky, just like his own father had been on him.

“I was putting all this shit on him, and he was 9,” Rich says. “I finally told him later, when he was older, ‘I love you, and I’m proud of you.’ I still continue to tell him I screwed up a lot of shit, and now I don’t judge him. Whatever he’s going through, I’m there for him.”

That pattern of bringing combat home, a cycle of trying to toughen up a child for a dangerous world — Rich was aiming to break it.

Danger

“My life, up to this point, has not been easy.”

The defendant was 21 years old, 6-foot-4 and around 270 pounds, but they presented themself to a district judge as a wounded child.

“My father left my mother and I as an infant after much violence and turmoil. And, as a result, I struggled to get by for most of my early childhood.”

Anderson Lee Aldrich wasn’t their given name. In 2016, when they were almost 16, they changed it to “protect” themself from any connection to their birth father and “his criminal history,” according to a petition granted in Bexar County, Tex. (Aldrich would later also change their pronouns to they/them, and identify as nonbinary; Aldrich’s father died in 2023.)

Aldrich told the judge that their mother worked hard to keep them safe but that their father was abusive. Aldrich’s maternal grandmother and step-grandfather took custody of them, cared for them. They managed to make the honor roll in fourth and fifth grades, they said, despite struggling with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder.

Throughout high school, they refused to take prescribed medications, because they wanted to join the military.

“How could I take care of a brother in arms if I couldn’t even take care of myself?” Aldrich said to the judge on Aug. 5, 2021. “The cold realization of these facts, at around 18 years old, truly broke my heart for years. It had been my only directive and my only goal in life.”

Maybe they’d never join the military, but Aldrich found shooting guns to be therapeutic. They received their first firearm as a gift when they were 16 and started going with their mom to a shooting range eight miles outside the city limits of Colorado Springs.

Then their grandmother’s health declined. She planned to move to Florida. Aldrich was undone by this impending change. They began to struggle at community college. They began to drink heavily. They quit their job. They found relief by smoking enough heroin to fall asleep.

“I began to shrink into myself,” Aldrich told the judge. “Every day I would use, I found myself caring less and less.”

The reason they were in court was because of what happened about two months earlier.

On June 18, 2021, their grandmother called 911 to report that Aldrich was making a bomb in the basement of their home. Aldrich told her that they were going to be the next mass killer, she later told police, and that they were stockpiling ammunition, firearms and body armor. Aldrich told her that they were going to “go out in a blaze” with a mass shooting and bombing.

When she called a family meeting, Aldrich came up from the basement with a handgun and began loading it with bullets.

Their grandmother remembered Aldrich saying: “You guys die today, and I’m taking you with me.”

Aldrich chugged vodka to steel themself for “what he’s about to do,” their grandmother said. They then went back down to the basement. Their grandparents ran for the car and called 911 while driving away.

A SWAT team surrounded the house. Aldrich told a negotiator that they were “ready to go to the end.”

A short time later, Aldrich walked out of the house, barefoot and unarmed, with their hands up. A search warrant was requested “to prevent a reported planned terrorism attack.”

Aldrich was jailed and charged with felony menacing and first-degree kidnapping, and their firearms and ammunition were seized.

Now, on Aug. 5, 2021, the district judge had to decide whether to release them on bond.

Aldrich addressed the judge in a spirit of surrender. “I am more than willing to enter rehab to seek psychiatric counseling,” they said, adding: “I’m not able to access any firearms, and I won’t make any effort to do so in the future.”

Aldrich’s mother approached the microphone next.

“A lot of the things that he’s gone through have been directly because of me and my past, and about people that were around, you know, that were abusive to my son,” their mother said. “And I wish I could take it back. … I really think it’s important for him to be treated, because there’s something in him that’s really hurting.”

She pleaded with the judge to give Aldrich another chance. Aldrich’s grandmother called into the proceeding to say that her grandchild was “a sweet young man,” that her planned move to Florida had frightened them, that they kept their pain inside, that alcohol unleashed something “out of control,” and that she had called 911 because she “wanted help” for Aldrich, not to see them locked up.

The judge would entertain releasing Aldrich, pending trial, only if there was a robust mental health program to treat them and prevent a recurrence. “We need to put him in a position where he’s set up for success,” the judge said, adding: “If we have a slip-and-fall and mess up on this one, it’s going to be so bad.”

Two days later, Aldrich was released from custody. They soon began treatment, with both therapy and medication.

At a follow-up court appearance in October 2021, Aldrich’s lawyer told the judge: “He’s doing really good.”

“You got to hang in there with the meds,” the judge told Aldrich later in the hearing. “I know it’s weird at first, but it will — ”

“It’s an adjustment period, for sure,” Aldrich replied.

“Yeah, it will settle,” the judge said. “Don’t worry. Good luck.”

Work

While Rich had been downrange, Jess would pull on pink galoshes and head to the garage, where she’d set up kegs and hoses and hops and propane tanks next to Rich’s El Camino.

Jess developed a taste for beer in Germany. In Colorado Springs, she developed a passion for brewing her own. She loved the creative process, and how it shared some traits with cosmetology, her previous vocation: the color combinations, the range of taste and flavor. Her palate tended toward coriander and grains of paradise. She liked beers that were earthy, peppery, winelike. Kassy was around 8 years old when she started brewing alongside her mom.

When Rich came home for good, Jess wanted to start a brewery.

“I followed you across the world,” she told him. “It’s my turn now.”

She volunteered and apprenticed at breweries. She organized meetups of women who loved beer. The men in the industry would sometimes scoff at her manicured nails or assume that Rich was the budding brewer, but Jess focused on her mission: to create a women-led brewery for untapped clientele, such as women and Latinos.

In 2017, she appeared on a TV show called “Beerland,” a contest of home brewers, and won with a pale ale spiced with tamarind, the fruit that her grandmother had candied and sold in Sonora, Mexico.

In 2018, Jess and Rich opened her brewery in the crook of an L-shaped strip mall, 20 minutes from their home, between a carpet company and a dent-repair shop called Hail Mary’s.

Jess wanted patrons to feel as if they were stepping into Mexico. She turned one interior wall of the brewery into a vista of Oaxaca. The tap handles for beer were made out of 50-caliber bullet casings, a nod to the Fierros’ military background. The brewing system in place wasn’t automated, so Jess and her small staff wielded the mash paddles, hoisted 55-pound bags of grain themselves, and took temperatures with old-school thermometers.

Jess named the brewery Atrevida, the feminine form of the Spanish word for “daring.”

“She knows what she wants,” says Tasha Bestwina, who was a trivia host for the building’s previous tenant and, under Jess’s guidance, would become the lead brewer for Atrevida. “She doesn’t take shit from anybody. She’s straightforward, honest, but caring. There’s no way I could’ve walked into any other brewery in the world and said: ‘Hey, I know nothing. Teach me.’”

The brewery became a project for the Fierros: something to focus on and build together.

“That’s kind of when everything started coming together, or making sense again,” Ricky says.

The Fierro unit had gotten out of the war intact, and it was growing. Rich and Jess had become close friends with another couple, Chip and Joanne Law, who loved beer and were becoming parents themselves.

“It’s very rare for both my mom and my dad to like another couple, because they’re such insane personalities, and very bold,” Kassy says. “They met their match with Chip and Joanne, who are just as bold and hilarious, and who love just as hard.”

And Kassy had fallen for a boy named Raymond Green Vance, who was assigned to her table during study hall in ninth grade. The summer between junior and senior year, they became a couple.

Raymond was 6-foot-4 and played football and basketball, but Kassy loved him because he was also “an absolute dork” and a master of stupid dad jokes. He had a gorgeous, wide smile and a cheery, calm vibe that balanced her hyper, anxious streak. He drew her out, and she drew him in.

“He would drop everything and just run to her,” says Adriana Vance, Raymond’s mother. “He always wanted to be around her. It was hard to get Raymond off those video games sometimes, but when Kassy called, he’d forget he was playing.”

He and Kassy met at the same age as Rich and Jess did.

Rich told his daughter: “I love him because you love him.”

Colorado Springs had plenty of megachurches and military infrastructure, but precious few safe spaces where queer residents could congregate. One was Club Q, in a squat building across from a mini-golf course, about 10 minutes from Atrevida. For 20 years, in an area that was largely hostile to queer people, the club had been a space where anybody could go and feel that they belonged.

Rich and Jess didn’t face the same dangers and prejudices as that community, but they knew what it meant to be in the minority: Jess as a female brewer among beer industry dudes, Rich as a “Mexican major” among White officers. They tried to make Atrevida welcoming to everyone. The brewery’s slogan crowned the building in big black letters: “Diversity, it’s on tap!” Inside were posters with messages such as “Trans people belong here!” Beer names honored women (Dolores Huerta was a Mexican lager) and needled machismo (Toxic Mezcalinity was a dunkel with notes of cherry, oak and mezcal). Kassy’s dear friend Wyatt Kent performed at Atrevida as Potted Plant, his drag persona; he called Jess and Rich “Mom” and “Dad,” because they’d always accepted him.

In 2021, Rich finished his MBA at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs while working at Fort Carson as an operations manager for the mission training complex. He had gotten his weight, anger and depression under control. Things were stable, even joyful.

Raymond had started a job with FedEx, with an eye on joining the Air Force. He and Kassy were turning 22 in 2022, and they were making plans.

“I am so proud of you for going to college and pursuing what you love,” Raymond texted Kassy after she won a scholarship to study craft brewing at San Diego State.

But Kassy also felt an unease about being separated. She texted Raymond very early one morning in August 2022: “im scared of losing you. really scared.”

When Raymond woke up, he replied: “Hello my love sorry I passed out I thought you fell asleep but why would you lose me??”

Freedom

“We feel certain that if Anderson is freed that he will hurt or murder my brother and his wife.”

The letter to the judge painted a dark picture of Aldrich’s home life. The siblings of Aldrich’s step-grandfather claimed that Aldrich had attacked him and sent him to the emergency room and that Aldrich punched holes in the walls at home, prompting their grandparents to lock their own bedroom door at night and keep a bat by the bed.

Aldrich’s step-grandfather “lived in a virtual prison,” his siblings wrote in November 2021. “Even the neighbors would not come near their home due to the shouting and atmosphere.”

Aldrich needed therapy and counseling, the siblings agreed, but also needed to be locked up.

“He’s going to be really starting the meat of his trauma therapy,” Aldrich’s attorney said during a hearing on Dec. 16, 2021.

“He’s made some really great progress,” the attorney told the judge on Jan. 27, 2022.

“Defense is ready for trial,” the attorney said on May 19, 2022.

But the prosecution was not, and was granted a continuance. Aldrich’s grandparents had moved to Florida, and their grandmother was “basically bed-ridden,” according to her attorney. She had no desire to testify against her grandchild, even over a video call, according to Aldrich’s legal team, which later added that both the defense and the district attorney’s office were having “major difficulty” reaching Aldrich’s family members, who did “not want to be a part of this process at all.”

Multiple attempts were made to serve subpoenas, to no avail.

On the day of Aldrich’s trial, July 5, 2022, the prosecution said that a subpoena had been left at the front door of Aldrich’s grandmother’s home in Florida, not served to her personally. The prosecution wanted more time and asked the judge for another continuance.

The defense objected, noting the looming speedy-trial deadline. The judge concurred, and denied the continuance.

The judge then asked a prosecutor: Are you able to proceed without Aldrich’s grandmother as a witness?

“No, your honor,” replied the prosecutor.

The defense then moved to dismiss the case, and the judge granted the motion.

Aldrich had a right under Colorado law to be tried within six months of their not-guilty plea. Without an alleged victim willing to testify, the prosecution had nowhere to go, and time was up.

In cases of family violence, victims often recant, or otherwise avoid cooperation with prosecution — usually out of love, guilt or fear, or some combination of the three. In this case, for whatever reason, the witnesses — Aldrich’s family — were not going to show up (and could not be reached to comment for this article).

“Mr. Aldrich,” the judge said, “you’re free to go.”

Over the next four months, police responded to at least three calls from the apartment shared by Aldrich and their mother. A detective from the Colorado Springs Police Department would later testify that these calls involved alleged domestic disturbances, according to responding officers. On the third occasion, Nov. 10, 2022, Aldrich had apparently been pepper-sprayed by their mother, and the mother was then verbally combative with officers, according to the detective. A police officer asked Aldrich, who was crying, whether they felt safe in the apartment. They said no, but refused to leave.

Authorities would later determine that Aldrich was on a diet of many drugs, both illegal — meth, cocaine, heroin — and prescription, including medications typically used to treat bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, heroin addiction and nightmares related to PTSD. They would also determine, through interviews, that Aldrich administered a website that hosted neo-Nazi material and mass-shooting videos; that Aldrich was obsessed with videos showing murder; and that Aldrich shared an image online of a rifle scope centered on a rainbow-clad person at a Pride parade.

And since their release from custody, Aldrich had been visiting Club Q. Between August 2021 and October 2022, Aldrich went to the club on at least seven occasions. The first time they went with their mother and spent $127 at the bar, and the pair took a smiling selfie near the dance floor. The seventh time, Aldrich tipped a bartender $5.20 for a double shot of well vodka, a single shot of Absolut and an order of fries.

And at some point, Aldrich acquired both a 9mm handgun and an AR-15-style rifle, mostly in unserialized parts — a manner of obtaining weapons that didn’t require a background check or alert authorities.

At some point, Aldrich drew what looked like a crude outline of Club Q on a piece of white paper.

At some point, they wrote on a yellow legal pad: “Today, I disregard life, for life has disregarded I. … Today, I wish for war, for I have fought a thousand wars.”

Terror

Kassy’s friend Wyatt was turning 23, and for his birthday on Nov. 19, 2022, he was going to perform in drag at Club Q, where his partner, Daniel, was a bartender. Kassy was home for Thanksgiving, and the Fierros and their expanded family unit — Raymond, Chip and Joanne — headed to the club to celebrate.

There was singing. There were Jell-O shots. As midnight approached, people were smoking by a fire pit on the club’s outdoor patio.

Inside, the Fierros and their friends had the run of the dance floor. Raymond headed for the bar, in a separate area, while Chip and Rich sat and laughed at a table. Jess, Kassy and Joanne danced to Ciara’s “Goodies.” Lights swept over them — blue, purple, white — and bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.

The noise sounded like part of the music, to people in the room, but Rich knew exactly what it was.

Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.

The noise got louder. It sounded like a heavy garage door being slammed shut, over and over.

BANG BANG BANG BANG.

BANG BANG BANG BANG.

BANG BANG BANG BANG.

BANG BANG BANG BANG.

Jess, Kassy and Joanne stopped dancing. They looked past Rich and Chip toward the sound. It was coming from a ramp that connected the main room to the enclosed bar area. Kassy covered her ears.

At the top of the ramp were flashes of white.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

Down the ramp came a towering figure holding a semiautomatic rifle and wearing a tactical vest strapped with a grenade-type device, a 9mm handgun and extra magazines.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

The Fierros, Chip and Joanne were grouped together in the center of the room — five easy targets in a single line of fire.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

The sonic blast of each shot was taking down ceiling tiles, clouding the air with snowy debris.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

The music kept playing.

Rich dropped to the floor.

The lights kept swirling.

Kassy ran toward the back of the stage, slipping and injuring her knee on the way.

Jess fled up the steps to the patio, where people were bottlenecking, trying to force their way through a fence into the parking lot.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

Jess emerged into the cold air, and the glass door shattered behind her.

In the door frame, she saw the muzzle of a gun.

There were still people trapped on the patio. One was Tom James, a 30-year-old Navy man who found his queer family at Club Q after moving to Colorado Springs a year earlier. Tom, an information systems technician who had never been in combat, had tried to flee but now realized there was only one option that could buy time for his friends.

Tom flew at the shooter, raining punches, screaming “FUCK YOU FUCK YOU” while grabbing the white-hot muzzle of the rifle.

Tom and the shooter fell on the landing of the steps leading to the patio.

As they wrestled over the rifle, the shooter drew his handgun and fired, hitting Tom in the chest.

On the other end of the dance floor, Rich got his bearings, saw the commotion at the patio door, jumped to his feet and charged toward the fight.

Tom and the shooter tumbled off the steps to the floor. Shot through the ribs but still conscious, Tom tried to pull the rifle from the shooter, whose bulk was weighing him down.

Rich stood over the pair and began to claw his way into the fight.

The shooter raised the handgun toward Rich and pulled the trigger.

Combat

Click. The gun didn’t fire.

Rich snatched it away, aimed at the shooter’s torso and pulled the trigger.

Still nothing. It was a homemade weapon, and the magazine had dropped onto the stairs during the fight.

So Rich raised the handgun and brought it down on the shooter’s head — over and over, as a bludgeon, in a rush of adrenaline and alcohol, as the lights kept spinning and the clapping beats of Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” rolled into TLC’s “No Scrubs.”

After about a minute of fierce struggle, Tom took control of the rifle, slid it away and crawled out from under the shooter. Rich dropped his full weight on the shooter, and kept swinging downward with the handgun.

The music stopped, and Rich could be heard loud and clear.

“YOU FUCKING DIE, ASSHOLE.”

He hacked away at the shooter’s head, as if the handgun were an ax.

“SOMEBODY CALL THE COPS.”

Rich brought the gun down, over and over and over. Police would later find human hair stuck in the chamber.

“WE’RE GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU RIGHT HERE.”

Tom was bleeding and losing strength. Rich was issuing orders.

“KEEP KICKING HIM, DUDE,” Rich told Tom, whose kicks were getting weaker. “GET THE FUCKING AR!” he yelled at a dazed patron, who walked by without intervening.

The shooter kept struggling, so Rich kept hacking at his head. The fight was endless, graceless — like nothing out of a movie. Rich’s pants had fallen down. No one was coming to help. The shooter wouldn’t stop reaching for the weapon.

Four minutes into the fight, sirens could be heard in the distance.

Across the empty dance floor, Chip called: “My wife’s bleeding out!”

Then in from the patio came a patron, Drea Norman, who had heard Rich’s calls for help. She sailed down the steps and joined the fight, where the shooter was trying to get out from under Rich.

Rich was ready with instructions: “STEP ON HIS NECK.”

Drea pulled her hair back and stomped on the shooter’s head with her black platform shoes. Over and over, maybe 10 times in all. The shooter’s head was pouring blood.

“YOU TRIED TO KILL US,” Rich shouted, as he hacked away with the handgun. “NOW I’M GONNA KILL YOU.”

At 12:02 a.m., nearly six minutes into the fight, three police officers entered the main room of the club, guns drawn, flashlights trained on Rich.

“Put your hands up!” one of the officers said. “Put that gun down!”

Rich dropped the handgun. The officers took over. Rich, exhausted, draped his arms over the railing of the stairs, then remembered Chip and Joanne. He hurried back across the dance floor.

A bullet had blown through Chip’s left knee, exploded, and sprayed fragments into his right knee. Chip didn’t have enough hands to stanch Joanne’s wounds. She was shot once in the lung, twice in the left leg, twice in the left arm.

Rich knelt. “It’s okay, Joanne,” he said, even though it wasn’t. “Look at me. Look at me.” Rich turned toward the officers: “NEED FUCKING TOURNIQUETS NOW.”

The shooter, head swelling with bruises and lacerations, began muttering about Rich being the bad guy. An officer joined Rich and began to put on black latex gloves.

“LET’S GO, LET’S GO,” Rich said, swiveling his attention between the officer, Joanne and the growing number of first responders. “TOURNIQUET. I GOTTA FIND MY FAMILY. It’s okay, Joanne. You’re okay, Joanne. KILL HIM. FUCKING KILL HIM. Joanne, stay with me. Look at me. It’s okay. Chip’s right here with you. … TWO SHOT. LET’S GO.”

Chip, now on his back, extended his arm toward Joanne. Rich took Joanne’s arm and put her hand in Chip’s. Their fingers entwined weakly. In the weeks and months after, Rich would think about this moment, and hold on to it.

But right now, he was trying to make time speed up.

“LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO. I’VE GOT FOUR WOUNDS. … Joanne, hang on. Joanne, hang on. … GET A FUCKING AMBULANCE. LET’S GO.”

Jess walked into the room. She had left the patio and circled back to the dance floor, which had become a triage spot for Chip and Joanne.

“Jess, stay right there!” her husband shouted. “You don’t want to see this!”

Seemingly in a daze, Jess left the room but returned moments later. “I’m looking for my daughter,” she said. Her tone was flat.

An officer told her: “You need to get out right now.”

“Joanne, stay with me,” Rich was saying. “Joanne, stay with me. … WOULD YOU MOTHERFUCKERS GET US A GODDAMN AMBULANCE.” It had been nearly 17 minutes since the first shots were fired.

First responders were now tending to Joanne, so Rich got to his feet. He was raging, pointing, trying to take control of the scene. There were now 12 officers on the dance floor, and they began inspecting Rich. They asked whether he was injured. They lifted his shirt.

Jess watched Kassy emerge from backstage, sobbing, walking with a broken knee. Rich went to hug her, and the officers tried to corral him. Rich bellowed: “I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW SHE WAS ALIVE.”

Jess moved toward Kassy, who cried out: “My boyfriend!”

Raymond was nowhere to be seen. Jess put an arm around Kassy.

Then officers began to pull Rich’s hands behind his back.

“ARE YOU FUCKING CUFFING ME. ARE THEY CUFFING ME. ARE YOU KIDDING ME.”

Officers muscled Rich out of the club in handcuffs, into the frigid night air and a blaze of red and blue lights.

Covered in blood and struggling with the cops, Rich looked like the enemy. Some people yelled at him, spat at him.

By the time the officers got Rich to a squad car, they were carrying him, face down, by his arms and his pant legs. His belly grazed the icy gravel on the ground.

They loaded him into the squad car and shut the door.

Rich heaved for breath. The windows fogged. He screamed. He felt like he was running out of oxygen.

He didn’t know whether Chip and Joanne were going to make it, and his brain didn’t register having seen Jess and Kassy alive.

He was trapped and alone with a terrible notion: that everyone in his unit was dead.

Pain

It was a war zone.

Approximately 60 bullets had been fired in the 38 seconds before Tom James intervened. People had been shot point-blank, and they had been shot running away: in the back, the hand, in every limb, in the neck, in the face. The bullets had pierced lungs, pulverized bones and strafed intestines, creating wounds so large that surgeons would not be able to sew them closed.

People tried to save their friends’ lives. People told each other to play dead. People dragged the injured away from the building, leaving behind smears of blood in patches of snow. Police would eventually collect at least six extra magazines, indicating that perhaps hundreds of bullets went unfired.

Tom was loaded onto a stretcher, then insisted it be used for someone in worse condition.

“Please don’t let me die,” Joanne told a medic, as she and Chip were put in different ambulances.

The shooter’s SUV was in the parking lot with the engine on, its interior littered with pill bottles, drug paraphernalia and equipment that indicated a plan to live-stream the massacre.

Survivors, huddled in the parking lot, reunited with frantic friends and arriving family members.

But Raymond wasn’t answering his phone.

After Rich was freed from the squad car and Kassy was treated at the hospital, she asked her father to drive the route between the club and their house in case Raymond, injured or disoriented, had tried to walk home.

Later that day, Jess got the call from Raymond’s mother, Adriana. From across the room, Kassy could hear the intensity in Adriana’s voice.

Jess looked at Kassy.

Kassy lay down on the couch.

Rich came to her and shook his head.

Kassy didn’t know her body was capable of making such a scream.

Losing a soldier downrange, then trying to rally the troops, had been hard enough for Rich. Losing a future son-in-law at a nightclub in Colorado, then telling his own daughter? It was inconceivable.

Ricky came home from Los Angeles. Rich’s brother, Ed, came in from Houston. They saw a shellshocked family unit. Jess and Kassy seemed to be holding everything in; they focused on Chip and Joanne in the hospital. Rich was letting everything out, sometimes in bouts of hard sobbing.

After coming home from war, Rich worked for years to control his anger, for the sake of his family. At Club Q, with his family under attack, he had to unleash it.

Rich “had to fight for his life,” Ed says. “That took a toll on my brother. He’s not a violent person. He’s the guy who was always trying to stop the fight from happening. He was not the bully. … He got put in a position where he had to do something to somebody else. ‘Am I human? Am I able to do this? And if I am, am I a monster?’”

In the hours after the shooting, Rich contacted the only people who could comprehend what he did: his Army buddies. “Hey,” he texted, “I had to go G.I. Joe mode, bro.” On the phone, his former commander told him that he did the right thing, that he should’ve killed the shooter.

The police department identified Anderson Lee Aldrich as the suspect, and Rich and Tom as the “two heroes” of Club Q. Seventeen people survived their gunshot wounds, according to police. Five were killed, including Raymond: Wyatt’s partner, Daniel Aston, 28, and another bartender, Derrick Rump, 38, who were pillars of the area’s queer community; Ashley Paugh, 35, a mom who worked with foster children; and Kelly Loving, 40, a role model to her friends. Daniel and Kelly were transgender; so was Drea Norman, who survived and came to Rich’s aid after Rich came to Tom’s. The shooting had started four minutes before Transgender Day of Remembrance.

The media swarmed Rich. He was uninjured and willing to talk, and he made a good headline. “I wish I could have saved everybody in there,” Rich told the journalists assembled outside his house, two days after the shooting. He looked at Ed, who was standing with him. “That was the wrong word to say. I wish I could have done more. Okay? But those people aren’t home tonight. I am. And I’m really upset by that.”

After Raymond’s funeral, Rich watched from a distance as Kassy, her knee braced, stood on crutches beside the casket and placed a red carnation on top.

All those years trying to keep war away from his family, and now his wife and daughter had come under heavier fire in 38 seconds than many soldiers ever did.

“That level of violence — I’ve never seen that,” says Rich’s Army buddy George Hamilton.

Every few days, George texted Rich: “mental health check.”

“He did a lot of work to get better from his deployments,” George says. “Those wounds — they never truly heal. You just kind of put them to rest. And as long as something doesn’t come back and rip the wound open, you’re usually okay. Well, what Rich went through ripped those wounds open.”

Story

As the weeks and months went on, Rich talked about the shooting in a manner he was familiar with.

“We went in as six and came out as five,” Rich would tell people, in the clipped cadence of a soldier. “We lost Raymond.”

But America wanted to celebrate Rich, in a way that never happened when he was a soldier.

He threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a San Diego Padres game. The Chargers invited the Fierros to a practice, where players gave them hugs and high-fives. Rich, a lifelong fan, was ecstatic. The head coach told him: “It’s been amazing to tell the team about your story, and, you know, what a hero looks like.” On game day, the team brought Rich and Jess on the field, where Hall of Fame running back LaDainian Tomlinson gave him a gift.

As he unwrapped it, an announcer said: “Richard, you are going to Super Bowl LVII!”

“Oh shiiit!” Rich bellowed, hoisting the oversize tickets and doing his own end-zone dance, as Jess covered her mouth in surprise. “Touchdown, baby!”

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) invited Rich to President Biden’s State of the Union address. “I hope that by sharing my story, others will be empowered to stand up to hate and speak out on this deadly gun violence epidemic,” Rich said in a statement when he was welcomed to the U.S. Capitol.

He received plaques for heroism from the Red Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Corporations invited him to speak about teamwork and diversity. He and Jess received a minute-long standing ovation on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” where Rich told the audience about the connection between Chip and Joanne on the floor at Club Q.

“I saw his hand reaching for her, and we both looked at her and didn’t think she was going to make it,” he said. “So I put her hand in his hand, so that they both had that moment. … That’s love. That, to me, was like — beyond all this hero crap, that’s what is important.”

Barrymore, shaking off tears, said: “Thank you for telling that story.”

Everyone wanted a story from the hero.

But a hero’s story is never that simple.

When Rich came home from war, Jess and Kassy had helped him find a way out of the dark. This time, they were all in the dark.

A flood of new customers found Atrevida’s website and bought merchandise, eager to support the Fierros, but Jess couldn’t fulfill the thousands of merch orders. They were a small brewery with a handful of employees, not a T-shirt company. Charity yielded to suspicion. Jess’s inbox was swamped with angry people accusing her of a scam.

“You are a piece of garbage,” wrote one person. “You have stole millions and are still taking orders. You live up to your stereotypes.”

One person texted Rich: “You are criminals,” then sent him the Fierros’ home address.

Rich fell back on his old crutch: alcohol. He also dove back into therapy. Rich knew that Jess and Kassy were hurting, in a way he used to hurt, but he could barely stand to ask about it. His therapist observed that after years of being away, he was accustomed to being on the periphery of his own family, even when he was around.

Kassy’s grief spilled onto her Facebook page, where she wrote about how Raymond’s arms were the only place she ever felt safe.

December 2022: “i have seen way more than i ever was supposed to see. heard way more than i should.”

February 2023: “most/almost all days i have to just pretend he lost his phone or something.”

May 2023: “everything hurts. life doesn’t feel worth living.”

Rich was scared to talk to Kassy about it. Her loss showed Rich a version of his life that was impossible to contemplate: What if he had lost Jess when he was 22? He believed that he relied more on Jess’s strength than she ever had on his. Where would he be now, without her?

Here’s your story: the Green Beret coming home, and his wife jumps in his arms …

Jess had repressed so much feeling over the years, when Rich was deployed, to stay focused on the mission: keeping the family together. But now those emotions were erupting, and it felt as if everything could come apart. At one point, months after the shooting, Jess went to urgent care because she thought she was having a heart attack. Her blood pressure tripled in a matter of minutes. It was a panic attack.

But now his wife has been through the same thing …

Rich already had an understanding of his own trauma responses, and an established support system of government services and fellow military veterans. Jess and Kassy did not.

At the gala in New York — where strangers toasted his valor and Jess called him a farce — Rich would offer a diagnosis of the Fierros’ new reality after a long night of drinking: “How about a whole family with PTSD?”

How do you survive that?

Pride

The air smelled of sweat and Max Factor. Armed men guarded the front door.

Inside a distillery down the road from Atrevida, Wyatt, as Potted Plant, and other drag queens performed to Lady Gaga and Destiny’s Child and Taylor Swift. The drag-show fundraiser was jubilant and defiant. The Fierros cheered alongside their brewery family.

“I stand here as a trans person in America — that’s a hard thing to do right now,” Z Williams, an advocate for Club Q survivors, told the crowd. “All y’all’s lives are worth living, and fighting for.”

It was Saturday night of Pride weekend in Colorado Springs, almost seven months since the shooting, and the queer community was making time for joy during its journey of pain: the memorials, the surgeries, the medical bills and lost wages, the elimination of a treasured space, the disbelief and anger over Aldrich’s attorney telling the court that they were nonbinary, and all the debates — about how fundraising was being used, about the proposed reopening of a more fortified Club Q, about whether the authorities bore legal responsibility for the shooting. Aldrich’s prior encounter with the law made the shooting seem entirely predictable in hindsight. But the district attorney stated that Aldrich had been prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, given that their family wouldn’t testify; he also said their weapons from that incident had remained in custody.

Tom James chose seclusion in the months after the shooting — he was injured, he was enlisted, he was grieving — but now he was emerging. Earlier that day, at a Pride memorial for the shooting victims, he wore a rainbow flag and a bulletproof vest, as a message that his community would no longer be a soft target.

“Your family is out there,” Tom had said from the hospital, shortly after the shooting, in a statement addressed to his queer brethren. “You are loved and valued. So when you come out of the closet, come out swinging.”

Tom’s furious counterattack at Club Q made possible Rich’s acts of heroism. And Tom, in turn, credited Rich for saving his life.

But Tom was less comfortable with the attention. He had tried to get a photo with a performer, and the crowd chanted his name — which, though well-meaning, made him feel like an object. Tom knew that people liked comfort food and comfort TV, and now he was beginning to think that in times of tragedy, people liked comfort people.

Having a hero helps ease the badness. But being a hero is its own burden.

Tom wasn’t giving any talks, receiving any plaques or throwing out any first pitches, but he was here on the patio outside the drag-show fundraiser. “When I called for help, he was there,” Tom was saying about Rich, and Rich tried to deflect the praise.

Tom’s friend Jasper Oranday interrupted: “But you know what, Rich? If you hadn’t stepped in like that. If Tom hadn’t stepped in like that. Los dos. Accept it. It belongs to you.”

“She has done things beyond what I have done,” Rich said, motioning to Jess, who was out of earshot. “I had a moment. She had 10. She does amazing things, and I’m so proud of her. She made a family out of her business. They’re all in there. Because of her. Not me. Her.”

Jasper said: “But you also have to realize the way that you love her allows her to be that.”

Rich laughed, and said: “Tell her that shit.”

The next day, Rich arrived at the brewery at 9:30 a.m. in his El Camino. The engine growled.

“I’m hungover as shit,” Rich said, as he looped a rainbow sash over his head.

He was grand marshal of the Pride parade, an honor that made him feel like part of a team. Jess and Kassy would be with him in the bed of the El Camino, while Chip drove and Joanne rode in the passenger seat.

Rich and Kassy wore purple scrunchies in their hair. Rich fixed an Atrevida flag onto the back of the car, and they drove to the parade route, past a billboard tribute to Raymond, Daniel, Ashley, Kelly and Derrick.

On North Tejon Street, throngs of people cheered. There were dogs in tutus, women giving out “mom hugs,” a rainbow parasol patrol blocking a handful of homophobic protesters. It was the type of scene that the shooter had depicted online through the sight of a rifle.

In the driver’s seat, Chip was still nervous about crowds. “For us, it’s still November 19th,” he would tell people. “We haven’t left that moment yet.” Joanne, who had spent a month in the hospital, was still pulling out flecks of metal from her skin. Chip had thought about getting a concealed-carry permit. But now, at the head of the parade, he could actually feel the love, coming in waves from the sidewalks. This is healing, he thought.

“I feel like the queen,” Jess yelled to her family, waving to the crowds.

Kassy shook a tambourine. Her knee had healed enough that she’d gone back to brewing. Her T-shirt said: “YOU ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU NEED TO BE.”

The Fierros finished the parade route and wandered around the Pride festival.

“That’s the guy,” a police officer said to his partner. “That’s the hero of Club Q.”

“Mr. Rich, can I get a picture?” asked a man in a Broncos jersey.

“I just want to meet a hero,” a teenager said, and Rich replied: “I’m not a hero.”

The THANK-YOUs kept coming all afternoon.

“Thank you,” they said.

“It wasn’t me,” Rich said.

“Thank you,” they said.

“We all did our part,” Rich said.

“Thank you.” “Thank you.” “Thank you.” “Thank you.”

At one point, a person in a “BLESSED” shirt came up to Rich, hugged him and told him that they were in the Club Q parking lot before the shooting, that they saw the shooter putting on the vest, that they were drunk and didn’t realize what was happening, that they wished they could’ve done what Rich did. Rich comforted them, reassured them, and when they walked away, he wondered aloud: “How do you respond to that?”

It started to rain. Rich kept receiving hugs. Never turned down a conversation. People needed to meet him, to say things to him, as if they were seeking goodness or reassurance. It was exhausting. But Rich didn’t want to turn anyone away, precisely because humans were good at turning away from one another. Connect, he thought. Connect.

Jess agreed that Rich deserved to be celebrated, but the relentless attention, and how other people romanticized their story — she thought that it put a weird sheen on pain and death. The outpouring of love provided comfort, moment to moment. But Jess, who had worked for years to lower her guard with people, had raised those walls back up after the shooting.

Everyone had too much beer. Kassy was tired. Jess was over it. But Rich didn’t want to go home. “I like activity, so I don’t have to deal with my own shit,” he said under a beer tent.

Jess and Kassy left to call an Uber.

Rich, in his rainbow sash, sulked and wandered around in the rain. THANK-YOUs came at him from every direction.

Veterans

Two weeks after the Pride parade, the shooter sat in a courtroom packed with wounded survivors and broken family units. One by one, they approached the microphone to talk about the minefield of their new lives.

“Sound has become a personal enemy to me right now …”

“I have had issues, including a constant need to know where the exits are …”

“I’m scared to go to the gas station, to my car, because I think: ‘Is this the day when my surroundings are going to get shot up?’”

The shooter wore a tie with an untucked dress shirt and said little during the hearing beyond, “Yes, your honor.” Their attorney said that they were “deeply remorseful,” and they pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder and 46 counts of attempted murder, and “no contest” to hate-crimes charges, meaning they did not admit guilt. In an interview from jail with the Associated Press, the shooter blamed their actions on drugs, not hate. The district attorney, and many survivors, scoffed at this claim.

“Not only have I lost my partner, my sense of safety, but I’ve also lost a massive sense of safety for our community as a whole,” Wyatt said at the microphone, Aldrich to his right. “We, as queer people, were attacked on November 19th.”

Wyatt paused for a few seconds, then said: “I forgive this individual, as they are a symbol of a broken system, of hate and vitriol pushed against us as a community. It is inexcusable, the action. And the pain and trauma and holes that have been created from this tragic evening. What brings joy to me is that this hurt individual will never be able to see the joy and the light that has been brought into our community as an outcome of this.”

Others spoke of the dead.

“A kind, loving, gentle man” is how Adriana Vance, Raymond’s mother, described her son. The court heard about the “burning blue eyes” of Daniel Aston, a “gifted poet.” About how Derrick Rump was “a light to so many people.” About how Kelly Loving “loved herself and wanted others to unapologetically be themselves.” How Ashley Paugh gave children and parents “new hope and love” through her work in foster care.

When it was Rich’s turn, his words came sharp and fast.

Sept. 11, 2001, “was my first 9/11,” he told the court, as Kassy rubbed his back. “It sent me and my family to war. On 11/19/22, my second 9/11, my family and my friends were forced into combat together.”

Rich said that he had more respect for the terrorists he fought abroad than he did for the Club Q shooter.

“That night, I was forced to act in a way that was inhuman. I hope the words I yelled into the back of your head echo for the rest of your life.”

Rich was the only speaker to look repeatedly and directly at the shooter.

“I want him to know his evil was stopped by a person of color, by LGBTQ folks. By a transgender woman.”

He was here to rally the troops.

“We survivors will rise to meet our lives in a new light.”

He was telling everyone: There is a way out of this.

“We will achieve great things. We, as survivors, will triumph.”

The judge sentenced the shooter to five consecutive life sentences, plus 2,208 years, without the possibility of parole. “The power found behind the crosshairs of a rifle is ultimately impotent,” the judge said, in closing. “True power is found in the legacy of those people who teach their children empathy.”

The Fierros left the courthouse and met Chip and Joanne for tacos. For months, the five of them had been processing together, healing together, and now they talked about how the day brought relief but not closure.

The world would move on, to wherever the war erupted next. By the end of 2023, there would be 39 mass shootings resulting in four or more deaths — a record number of such fatal events in a year, according to a Washington Post database going back to 2006.

Each event would create combat veterans who never enlisted, and mass trauma in spaces meant to be safe.

The rest of the summer was a blur of activity for the Fierros: the gala in Manhattan that ended in a fight, family trips to Denver and Raleigh, N.C., and Chicago for beer confabs. A new brewing system for Jess, a planned return to school for Kassy, more honors for Rich.

In late September, Rich was invited to speak at a reunion of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, at the Embassy Suites in Colorado Springs.

“We went in there as six and we left as five,” Rich told the room, sharing his war story yet again. He talked about the connection between veterans. “There’s a camaraderie, there’s a kinship there, amongst all of us — that we understand what we went through, what we lost, and what we earned. Right? And we all came back different.”

Jess traded pleasantries with her table mates, talked about beer, commiserated over the hardship of a spouse’s deployment. But she was no longer just a war wife.

Her war story, which no one really asked about, went like this: The patio door shattered behind her, and the muzzle of the rifle appeared in the frame. This is how I die, Jess thought. But then Tom drove the shooter back into the club, and she was left with other survivors, in a mess of glass and blood, saying their goodbyes to a fallen friend. She said one, too, even though she didn’t know him. She touched his face and asked the universe to take him to a place of love.

Then Jess felt totally alone. She didn’t know that Kassy was hiding, that Raymond was dead, that Chip was trying to save Joanne, that Rich was beating the hell out of the enemy. It would be 14 minutes before Jess got back to the dance floor, and saw her husband and friends smeared with blood. Much later, she would settle on a word to describe what she felt that night.

“Utter defeat,” she’d call it. “Human defeat.”

Family

The brewery was strung with garlands of marigold, to invite the dead. Altars held photos of loved ones: Jess and Rich’s grandparents. “Little P,” an Army medic in Rich’s unit who overdosed after returning from a deployment. An Afghan police sergeant who partnered with the U.S. military and was killed by the Taliban.

One altar was dedicated to Raymond, Daniel, Ashley, Kelly and Derrick.

Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — was ingrained in Rich and Jess from a young age as a moment for grief to flower into memory. On Nov. 3, they welcomed the community into the home they’d built, in that little crook of a strip mall, for a seated dinner, with linens and gold-colored flatware and a six-course tasting menu with beer pairings.

Kassy was in charge of the event. She had come back from San Diego, where she was finishing her professional certificate in the business of craft beer. For the dinner, she brewed a beer called Panecito, a hefeweizen with notes of pan dulce, in honor of her great-grandfather, who used to take her to coffee shops. Kassy loved to “liquefy a memory,” as she put it.

As the Fierros readied the brewery on the day of the event, President Biden was visiting Lewiston, Maine, the location of the most recent mass shooting. Rich saw on the news that familiar image: a man with a weapon of war, ambushing the home front. A bowling alley. Eighteen lost. More wounded and traumatized. And again Rich thought: How are we supposed to fight this war?

Guests trickled into the brewery. A woman introduced herself to Rich as an ICU doctor who helped respond to Club Q casualties. “I wanted to meet you,” she said. Rich promptly took her to Chip and Joanne, who were already seated. “These two are our heroes,” Rich said. “Chip kept Jo alive.” Under his shirt, Chip now had a phoenix tattooed on his chest. Joanne had another surgery soon, to keep patching up her left arm.

The Fierros’ friends brought out the courses from their taco truck. Jess poured beers. Rich took orders, washed glasses and stayed in the background. Kassy introduced the beer pairings.

For a final toast to the dead, the Fierros distributed Nana Neta, a Belgian tripel that Jess brewed with tamarind, which reminded her of summers in Mexico with her grandmother.

Guests praised the event as they were leaving.

“It was all Kass,” Jess said.

“This is Kassy’s,” Rich said. “She put it all together.”

After everyone was gone except friends, Rich stripped down to his tank top, revealing the tattoo he got earlier in the year: a face that was half Aztec warrior and half skull-faced soldier, captioned with the words “SOMOS UNIDOS,” and ornamented with four red claw marks, for each of his deployments with the Army. A smaller red slash made the third “O” into a “Q.”

Four and a half deployments now.

Rich sipped from a shot glass of beer. “I have to manage my intake,” he said. He looked at his wife and daughter, laughing with Chip and Joanne at the bar, under an arch of marigold. “Unreal,” Rich said. It had been just about a year. After a moment, he said to himself: “I think we’re in a better place.”

Jess knew they’d have to keep moving, as they always had, through it all: getting pregnant in high school, relocating to a foreign country, enduring deployment after deployment, as well as stress on top of trauma, starting a business and then navigating it through a pandemic, and then Club Q.

For decades now, Jess had wondered: How does all this hold together?

And she kept coming back to a simple, complicated reason.

“Love,” Jess says. “It’s ugly, beautiful, romantic, hideous, hurtful. It’s all of those things. But it’s how you choose to deal with it all. I think, for Rich and I, it works because we’re both very challenge-driven. And we both challenge each other a lot. … We constantly bicker, but we’re very grounded in, foundationally, who we are as a unit.”

There was a better way to put it.

“I frickin’ love the idiot. I frickin’ love him.”

Kassy wrote on Facebook that she’d started 2023 in a wheelchair, “faking every bit of ‘happiness,’” but was ending the year with a “mostly real smile on my face.” She was proud of herself, her brother, her parents, her friends — for showing up for one another. “My dad says this is stuff that breaks people apart in an instant,” she says. “And we’ve been able to survive and also grow.”

She still worried that Raymond’s death would hit her one day, all at once. Kassy was 23 now — the age her parents were when they’d chosen, at great risk, to double down on family, to welcome her into the pain of the world, and to demonstrate the love that makes it bearable.

“As close as they are is as close as they fight,” Kassy says of her parents. “They both just love very intensely. And it’s kind of — not a battle, but a test to see where that intensity lies. And that has been the journey of their love: ‘Just how hard do we have to love each other right now, to survive?’”

Hero

At the Seattle airport, heading home with yet another award in his luggage, Rich had a full-blown anxiety attack. The lines, the people — everything was pissing him off. He clenched his fists. He yelled at people. Maybe it was the upcoming anniversary of the shooting.

Rich and Jess got separated going through security. After they found each other, Rich said: “Where the fuck were you? We’re fucking late.”

Jess did not respond in kind. They made their flight, but Rich couldn’t stop twitching.

Jess reached for Rich’s hand. She didn’t say anything. She just held his hand.

Rich told his therapist about this episode. His therapist said to him: “Do you know how hard it was for her to do that, having endured the same trauma as you?”

Rich spent two days working up the willpower to tell Jess what he was feeling about this. When she came into the house and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a serious look on his face, she thought yet another bad thing had happened. He asked her to sit with him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Rich said: “Dude, I want to say something — ”

He couldn’t get it out. His eyes watered.

“Why is it so hard?” Jess asked.

“I don’t know, when it comes to you,” Rich said.

But this time, he did it. He told her about how he felt when she took his hand. That gesture, that moment — that’s what makes him happy. That’s what feels like home. And that’s what she had been doing all these years, through wars and peace. Jess was there for him, holding it all together.

And what he wanted to say now — he heard it so many times, from total strangers.

And he didn’t say it enough to her.

Jess deserved to hear it as often as he did.

And so Rich looked at his hero, and said: “Thank you.”