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“Some guys jumped on the shooter and saved some people,” she said. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t Daniel. He never made it to the hospital.”
Police said at least one attendee at Club Q in Colorado Springs, about an hour’s drive south of Denver, subdued the shooter before he could harm more people.
Aston said her son’s partner, a drag performer, was behind the bar when the shooting erupted. Two people shielded him and he was not injured.
Aston was transgender and raised in the Tulsa suburbs but followed his family to Colorado two years ago, finding a job and community at Club Q, his mother said. As a child, she said, “I just thought he was going to grow out of it, that he was a tomboy. Then he got really depressed during high school, and he came out to me.”
He started hormone treatments at age 19, while attending Northeastern State University, where he led the LGBTQ student group, she said.
Aston was nervous about the hormone replacement therapy but said her son’s doctor reassured her about it, and she came to realize “he was a man, always had been, just his body didn’t fit who he was.”
A year ago, her son got top surgery, and she remembers how happy he was to go swimming afterward at a family wedding. He was saving money and planned to finish college, which he had left after two years. He wore his hair in a mullet, she said — “Like Steve in ‘Stranger Things’” — and she often brought people to see him at Club Q, where he recently performed a campy ’80s hair band show.
“We’d bring our friends and family every time they came in town to show off Dan. It’s family friendly,” she said. Her son took pride in how the shows raised money for a local LGBTQ youth group, like one he had volunteered with in Oklahoma.
“Not many parents go to those shows, but we were king and queen when we went there. They fawned over us — we never had to worry about drinks,” Aston said.
Aston said she and her husband were woken up by a phone call from one of Aston’s friends about 2 a.m. Sunday and rushed to UCHealth Memorial Hospital, which was on lockdown because it was also treating the suspected gunman. The Astons spotted a few other parents of the injured and welcomed them into their car. Eventually, hospital staff ushered the group inside.
By 5 a.m., a detective arrived and told the Astons their son wasn’t at the hospital, that he might be at another facility, and sent them home to wait for news. About 11:30 a.m., she said, “they showed up at the door, and I knew that was not good news.”
She said her son’s body was being held for an autopsy, and it wasn’t clear how soon it would be released.
Sunday was Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to honor those killed by acts of anti-transgender violence. Aston suspects the shooting was a hate crime, but none of her son’s friends seems to have known the suspected gunman, she said.
“I’m still numb,” Aston said. “I’m still in denial mode. I’m just not thinking it’s happened. Just some big mistake, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and it’s just a bad dream.”
She had been texting with her son recently about Thanksgiving plans, when he and his partner were going to be off work. “I guess that turkey’s going to stay in the freezer,” she said.
At first, Aston said she didn’t want to speak about her son’s death. But then she started to think about other mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary and the Pulse nightclub. “I don’t want anybody else to go through this. I feel bad for the families who have lost their children through this senseless violence,” she said. “We want to know what happened.”
Bryan Pietsch contributed to this report.
