What is Anderson Lee Aldrich’s real name? Club Q shooter changed name because of dad’s ‘criminal history’
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO: Anderson Lee Aldrich, the Colorado Club Q mass shooter suspected of killing five people and injuring 18 more at Colorado Springs’ Club Q nightclub over the weekend had a rough childhood in California and Texas, which was mostly concealed by a full name change before his 16th birthday, reports say. Moreover, his mother, Laura Lea Voepel, 45, too had a past with law enforcement agencies.
Lee is also the grandson of a Republican assemblyman, Randy Voepel, 71, who lost his seat in the midterm elections, has represented the 71st District since 2016, and has compared the January 6 Capitol riots as to the "American Revolutionary War." His parents, Aaron Brink and Laura Voepel, divorced when he was a toddler in July 2001, and he lived about between Orange, California, and San Antonio, Texas, before landing in Colorado.
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Aldrich, now 22, was known as Nicholas F Brink until the age of 15. He is still a registered member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which labeled persons in same-sex marriages as "apostates" until 2019, the Washington Post reported citing records. Furthermore, his mother faced charges which include three outstanding warrants for her arrest out of California and an arson charge out of Bexar County, Texas in 2012 as per Gazette. There are three warrants open in three of four cases on Voepel’s California criminal record. Voepel was arrested in 2008 for false reporting, in 2010 for speeding and failure to appear, and in 2011 for driving under the influence. In 2008, she was arrested in Riverside for public intoxication and failure to appear, but that case was closed, the report said.
According to court records as per the report, Voepel was sentenced to five years of probation in August 2013 and did not fulfill the terms, which were supposed to expire in August 2018. “At the end of the day, the District Attorney made an offer of criminal mischief and probation,” her court-appointed attorney, James Oltersdorf said who never heard again from Voepel after he represented her. She also reported her son, Aldrich to EL Paso County Sheriff's on June 18, 2021, for making a bomb threat at Rubicon Drive.
Sharing the excerpts from a press release, the report mentioned that Voepel told authorities that her son was threatening to hurt her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition. The release said that Anderson Lee Aldrich was around a mile away from the Rubicon Drive address and that when deputies called him, he refused to surrender.
A YouTube channel in his name Nick Brink with 416 subscribers made in 2010, as per a report had only one video posted about two years later--which was a profanity-laden cartoon titled, “Asian homosexual gets molested by floating piece of f—le.” It mainly features characters dropping f-bombs. It further said that as Brink turned 15 he became the target of “a particularly vicious bout of online bullying.” Furthermore, a Wikipedia-like website featuring his name, images, and online aliases, as well as a false biography replete with insults and derision, was built, according to the article, without naming the site. But soon after he legally changed his name to the one he was arrested.