COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) – On a typical night at the Club Q, a bastion for LGBTQ people in the largely conservative city of Colorado Springs, Daniel Aston was seen breaking free and sliding across the stage to his knees, followed by his louder to whoops and screams .
The venue provided Aston, a 28-year-old transgender man and self-proclaimed “Master of Silly Business,” with the liberating performances he had long sought. But on Saturday, it became the site of the latest mass shooting in the US when a gunman with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire, killing Aston and four others. Twenty-five others were injured.
His mother, Sabrina Aston, wavered between past and present as she spoke about her son at their Colorado Springs home on Sunday night. Aston’s father, Jeff Aston, sat nearby listening to his wife’s stories, alternating between firmly folding his hands and forming his forehead.
“We’re in shock, we cried for a bit, but then you go through this phase where you’re just kind of numb, and I’m sure it will hit us again,” she said. “I keep thinking it’s a mistake, they made a mistake and he’s really alive,” she added.
Her son’s eagerness to make people laugh and cheer began as a child in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he donned elaborate costumes including the beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” cycled through weird hats, and wrote plays that were acted out by neighborhood children.
Aston preferred to dress as a boy at a young age, until teasing from other children prompted him to try on girl’s clothes. While Sabrina Aston enjoyed helping her son style, she said the fashion led to weight loss. “He was miserable,” she said.
After coming out to his mother, he attended Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and became president of the LGBTQ club. He organized fundraisers with increasingly flashy productions (“He wasn’t just lip syncing,” Sabrina Aston pointed out) and fanned out 1980s hair ties.
Two years ago, Aston moved from Tulsa to Colorado Springs – where his parents had settled – and started at Club Q as a bartender and entertainer, where his parents would cheer on his shows.
“(Daniel’s shows) are great. Everyone should see it,” said his mother. “He lit up a room, always smiling, always happy and crazy,” she said.
Members of Colorado Spring’s LGBTQ community say Club Q is one of the few havens where they can be completely authentic in one of the state’s more conservative metro areas. Sabrina Aston said that’s why her son went to the club; it gave his identity room to breathe and “he loved helping the LGBT community.”
She first learned of the attack and that her son had been shot at 2am on Sunday when the phone rang. It was one of her son’s friends who broke the news that there had been a shooting at Club Q and that their son was in Memorial Hospital.
Sabrina and Jeff Aston rushed to the hospital, where they first had to wait outside, then in a waiting room, and finally in a private room where the detective questioned them as authorities worked to identify the bodies.
Sabrina Aston told the detective about her son’s tattoos, which included a heart on his left arm pierced by an arrow and wrapped in a ribbon that read “Mom.”
The pair were sent home without any update and sat in a stupor, their minds circling hope, then the worst, then hope it wasn’t the worst.
“We thought he was just hurt – you can recover from pain,” his mother said.
When a detective and a patient advocate knocked on their door later that morning, Sabrina Aston said she thought of the wartime soldiers who walked to the homes of unaware widows. She knew what had happened.
The parents went into shock, tears flowed and they became numb.
“It’s just a nightmare you can’t wake up from,” she said.
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Bedayn is a member of the Corps of The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists on local newsrooms to report on undercover issues.
