Club Q planning permanent memorial to honor slain and injured victims
In Colorado Springs, Club Q serves a meeting place for the LGBTQ community and has for many years.
That club was the site of a massacre in November 2022 and now it plans to reopen in the fall and is planning to build a permanent memorial that will sit outside of the club.
"Everybody in their group has a place where they can gather with other people in their group. Being gay or LGBTQ is not a religion so so there's no church or there's no sort of religious venue for us to gather. It's the same thing as gathering together with other peoples of your community, but for us it happens to be a nightclub," said Michael Anderson, vice president of Club Q.
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He says the community needs to have their place back. The club plans to reopen in the fall, nearly one year after the deadly shooting, but they aren't going to ignore that lives were lost of changed forever at this place.
Now, organizers are raising money to build that memorial. Five tall stone pillars will represent the five lives lost and 17 boulders will surround them to represent the people injured in the shooting.
"To remember, you know who these people these incredible five people were and also recognize each person that got shot that night," said Anderson. "The community deserves somewhere they can go gather and just process this."
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Anderson says they never want people to forget the people killed in November's shooting because all too often as a society we move on too quickly.
"It seems like there are mass shootings almost every day in this country and they just kind of become normal. They become casual, and they become forgotten. We don't want that to be the case here," he said.
The memorial will also have a seating area and a security wall to provide protection and privacy for visitors.
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