MMA fighter and porn actor Aaron Franklin Brink reacted immediately when he learned that his 22-year-old son had been charged with slaughtering five people and injuring 18 others in a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs nightclub catering to the LGBTQ community last weekend -community.
A defense attorney called Sunday night and told Brink, who lives in Southern California, that Anderson Lee Aldrich had been arrested for the Club Q massacre.
“They started telling me about the incident, a shooting involving multiple people,” Brink said in an interview outside his San Diego home with CBS 8 on Tuesday. “And then I find out it’s a gay bar. I said, “God, is he gay?” I got scared, ‘Shit, is he gay?’ And he’s not gay, so I said, ‘Phhhewww…’”
Brink, who has appeared in films as My MILF Boss 8, I want to get tit fuckedand Latina Slut Academy, told CBS 8, “You know Mormons don’t do gays. We don’t do gays. There are no gays in the Mormon church. We don’t do gay people.” (The Mormon Church has confirmed that Aldrich was a member, but had been out of action for some time.)
In a lawsuit filed late Tuesday, lawyers for Aldrich, who changed his name from Nicholas Franklin Brink in 1986 to escape his father’s sordid past, said Aldrich is non-binary, saying “they use she/they pronouns.”
However, the booking records state that Aldrich’s gender is male. Additionally, in text messages from the day of the shooting, shown to The Daily Beast by a source close to Aldrich, Aldrich’s mother referred to her son as him and him.
The Daily Beast could not reach Brink for comment. A call Wednesday morning to a number in the name of Brink’s wife was answered by a woman who declined to give her name, saying she was a “relative.”
“We’re taking it day by day,” she told The Daily Beast. “There’s really nothing to do after all is said and done.”
Aldrich reportedly opened fire on Club Q shortly before midnight on November 19 before being subdued by two bystanders. Aldrich was initially hospitalized with unknown injuries, but was transferred to the El Paso County Jail on Tuesday, according to authorities.
Anderson Lee Aldrich appeared in court on Wednesday, via video link.
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Anderson Lee Aldrich appeared in court via video link on Wednesday.
El Paso County Court
Aldrich, Brink and Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel, among others, have long raised red flags in the family, a family member told The Daily Beast shortly after Aldrich’s arrest.
“I don’t want anything to do with that part of the family,” the relative said, and asked that their name not be used to avoid contact with them again. “They’ve always had problems, lots and lots of problems… I’m totally disgusted with that side of the family now.”
In Brink’s interview with CBS 8, he apologized for Aldrich’s alleged actions, saying that “there is no excuse for killing people. When you kill people, something is wrong. It’s not the answer.”
Simultaneously, Brink, a recovering methamphetamine user who once appeared on the reality show Interventionhe said “praise [Aldrich] for violent behavior very early. I told him it works. It is direct and you get immediate results.”
Brink also said he didn’t know Aldrich was alive, telling CBS 8 that Voepel called him in 2016 and said their son had changed their name to Anderson Lee Aldrich and then committed suicide.
“I thought he was dead,” said Brink. “I mourned his loss. I had a breakdown and thought I had lost my son…His mother told me he changed his name because I participated Intervention and I had been a porn actor.
A notarized affidavit filed in a Texas court almost exactly one month before Aldrich, still Nicholas Brink, turned 16, states, “Minor wants to protect himself + his future from his birth father + his criminal history. Father has had no contact with a minor for several years.”
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