Tenth Circuit Affirms Club Q Dismissals Under Colorado's CPLA

Tenth Circuit Affirms Club Q Dismissals and Holds Colorado's Premises Liability Act Is the Exclusive Remedy

The Tenth Circuit ruled on September 9, 2026 that survivors and families from the 2022 Club Q shooting cannot pursue federal state-created-danger claims against El Paso County officials, and that Colorado's Premises Liability Act supplies the only remedy available against the Club Q defendants for injuries arising from the property's safety and security conditions.

Information last verified on September 10, 2026.

Jurisdiction scope: This covers a published decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which sits over Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming. The Section 1983 holding is federal constitutional law binding within that circuit. The premises-liability holdings interpret Colorado statutes and Colorado case law and are not a ruling by a Colorado state court. This is not a criminal case, and it does not review the state or federal prosecutions of the shooter.

What Happened

Around midnight on November 19, 2022, Anderson Aldrich walked into Club Q, an LGBTQIA+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, carrying an AR-15-style rifle, wearing a tactical vest and ballistic plates, with a handgun strapped to the vest. Aldrich entered without restriction and opened fire, murdering five people and injuring twenty-five others. Club Q patrons subdued Aldrich and first responders arrived soon after. In state court, Aldrich later pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder and forty-six counts of attempted murder and no contest to two hate crimes; in federal court, Aldrich pleaded guilty to seventy-four federal hate crimes and gun offenses, receiving multiple life sentences. The opinion notes that Aldrich identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and that the court used Aldrich's surname throughout to avoid confusion with antecedents.

The civil plaintiffs are survivors of the shooting and the estates of Raymond Green, Kelly Loving and Derrick Rump. They filed two suits in the District of Colorado, Vance v. El Paso County Board of County Commissioners, No. 24-cv-03190, and Hudson v. Board of County Commissioners of El Paso County, No. 24-cv-3193. They sued two groups of defendants: the county defendants, meaning the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners and Sheriff Bill Elder, and the Club Q defendants, meaning G.I.G., Inc., Club Q, LLC, 3430 N. Academy LLC, Academy3430, LLC, and co-owners Matthew Haynes, Kenneth Romines and Nicholas Grzecka. The opinion notes it is unclear whether Romines was ever served, and that the case against Grzecka was automatically stayed by his bankruptcy, so neither was active in the lawsuits or appeals. A clerk's default judgment was entered against Aldrich on Hudson's assault and battery claims, and that judgment was not at issue on appeal.

Against the county defendants, the plaintiffs brought substantive due process claims under 42 U.S.C. 1983 on a state-created-danger theory, plus related wrongful-death claims. Their theory rested on Colorado's red-flag law. Colorado adopted its red-flag law in 2019, allowing law enforcement and others to request Extreme Risk Protection Orders. Before the governor signed the bill, the Board unanimously passed a resolution committing to actively resist the bill in its current and subsequent forms, and pledged not to fund or support it. The Sheriff's Office then issued a formal statement that, absent exigent circumstances and probable cause of a crime, it would not seek ERPOs. By the November 2022 shooting, the Sheriff's Office had never petitioned for a single ERPO.

The plaintiffs alleged that Aldrich had given county law enforcement good reason to seek one. In June 2021, according to the complaint, Aldrich held their grandparents at gunpoint, threatened to kill them and showed them a homemade bomb. The grandparents escaped and called 911. A grandmother told officers Aldrich had collected weapons and aspired to be the next mass killer, and deputies found bomb-making materials at the house. Aldrich was charged with several felonies, including first-degree kidnapping, but posted bond. Family members later told the state court Aldrich was 3-D printing gun parts. The charges were eventually dismissed for failure to prosecute after the grandparents moved to Florida and the district attorney had trouble serving them, and the records were sealed.

Against the Club Q defendants, the plaintiffs brought premises-liability claims under the Colorado Premises Liability Act plus negligence and wrongful-death claims, alleging the club had cut security from more than four employees including an armed guard down to two staff during the pandemic, had an unlicensed and overworked head of security with no formal active-shooter training, used no pat downs or metal detectors, stationed nobody outside the entrance, and left only one usable exit because the back door was blocked and the patio was fenced. They also alleged the club knew it faced heightened risk of violence as an LGBTQIA+ venue, that there had been a recent attempted stabbing at Club Q and a nearby shooting, that the club received repeated threatening phone calls in the weeks before, and that Aldrich visited at least seven times between August 2021 and October 2022, asking about evacuation procedures and security.

The district court granted the county defendants' Rule 12(b)(6) motion in full, Vance v. El Paso Cnty. of Comm'rs, 794 F. Supp. 3d 915 (D. Colo. 2025), and granted the Club Q defendants' motion in part, 789 F. Supp. 3d 1051 (D. Colo. 2025). It dismissed the CPLA claims for failure to plausibly allege causation but refused to dismiss the negligence and wrongful-death claims, calling CPLA preclusion a fact-intensive inquiry inappropriate at the pleading stage. With no federal claims left, the court declined supplemental jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 1367(c) and entered judgment. 2025 WL 2171839 (D. Colo. July 31, 2025). Both sides appealed, and the Clerk's Office consolidated three appeals.

The Tenth Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part. On the federal claims, the panel accepted part of the plaintiffs' framing before rejecting the claim:

"We agree that the County Defendants' adopting and maintaining the ERPO policies was more than 'mere negligence or inaction.'"

Vance v. Aldrich, Nos. 25-1326, 25-1328 & 25-1329, slip op. at 22 (10th Cir. Sept. 9, 2026)

That concession did not carry the claim, because the panel held the policies neither imposed an immediate threat of harm with a limited range and duration nor were directed at a discrete plaintiff. The policies, the court wrote, affected a broader populace, meaning everyone vulnerable to gun violence in El Paso County (slip op. at 26).

What the Law Actually Says

Two distinct bodies of law drove the two halves of this opinion, and they should not be run together.

The federal doctrine. Under DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989), a state actor's failure to protect someone from private violence generally does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The Tenth Circuit recognizes two exceptions, one for a special custodial relationship and one for state-created danger. To plead state-created danger, a plaintiff must satisfy two preconditions, affirmative conduct by a state official and private violence, and then six further elements from Matthews v. Bergdorf, 889 F.3d 1136, 1150 (10th Cir. 2018). The panel decided the case entirely on the affirmative-conduct precondition, which under Gray v. University of Colorado Hospital Authority, 672 F.3d 909 (10th Cir. 2012), requires conduct that imposes an immediate threat of harm with a limited range and duration and that is directed at a discrete plaintiff rather than the public at large. Generally applicable policies do not clear that bar, a rule the panel traced through Gray and Ruiz v. McDonnell, 299 F.3d 1173 (10th Cir. 2002). The court also treated the Sheriff's refusal to seek ERPOs, as opposed to the written policies, as pure inaction.

The red-flag statute has been permissive since it was enacted. Colorado created it in 2019 as HB 19-1177. The opinion refers to it as the Colorado Violence Prevention Act; the statutory short title, unchanged since enactment, is the Deputy Zackari Parrish III Violence Prevention Act. Colo. Rev. Stat. 13-14.5-101. Under the 2019 act in force at the time of the shooting, a petition for an extreme risk protection order "may be filed by a family or household member of the respondent or a law enforcement officer or agency." Colo. Rev. Stat. 13-14.5-104(1) (2019). Whether to seek one was discretionary. Colorado repealed and reenacted the whole article by SB 23-170, effective April 28, 2023, after the shooting, adding a "community member" petitioner class and a new subsection stating that the article "does not require a family or household member of the respondent, a community member, or a law enforcement officer or agency to file a petition" for an order. Colo. Rev. Stat. 13-14.5-113(4). That current codification is the one the Tenth Circuit cites, and it is not the text that was in force in November 2022. A petition must allege that the respondent "poses a significant risk of causing personal injury to self or others" by possessing, purchasing or receiving a firearm, supported by an affidavit stating the specific statements, actions or facts giving rise to a reasonable fear of future dangerous acts. Colo. Rev. Stat. 13-14.5-104(3)(a). Readers who want the civil-order landscape in that state can start with our overview of how Colorado protection orders are obtained and enforced, which sits alongside the ERPO track rather than replacing it.

The state statute. The Colorado Premises Liability Act, Colo. Rev. Stat. 13-21-115, has two features that mattered here. The first is exclusivity. Subsection (3) provides that in any civil action against a landowner by a person who alleges injury occurring while on the real property of another "and by reason of the condition of such property, or activities conducted or circumstances existing on such property, the landowner is liable only as provided in subsection (4) of this section." Under Jordan v. Panorama Orthopedics & Spine Center, PC, 346 P.3d 1035, 1041 (Colo. 2015), the test is whether the injury happened while on the landowner's real property and by reason of the property's condition or activities or circumstances existing on it. The Club Q defendants conceded at the pleading stage that they were landowners and that the plaintiffs were invitees, and subsection (4)(c)(I) lets an invitee recover for damages caused by the landowner's unreasonable failure to exercise reasonable care to protect against dangers the landowner actually knew about or should have known about. If you want the general shape of that framework, our guide to injury claims against property owners in Colorado walks through the invitee, licensee and trespasser categories the statute uses.

The second feature is the 2022 amendment. In Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, Inc. v. Wagner, 467 P.3d 287 (Colo. 2020), which arose from a 2015 mass shooting at a Colorado Springs clinic, the Colorado Supreme Court held the landowner had not established that the shooter's conduct was the predominant cause of the plaintiffs' injuries. Three justices dissented in part, writing that the premeditated and intentional actions of a mass shooter are the predominant cause of the injuries inflicted, so that any landowner negligence is not a substantial factor. Two years later the legislature added subsection (2)(e), which declares that the Wagner decisions "do not accurately reflect the intent of the general assembly regarding landowner liability" and must not be relied on to the extent the majorities determined foreseeability based on whether a landowner's goods or services are controversial, or held a landowner could be a substantial factor "without considering whether a third-party criminal act was the predominant cause of that harm, as noted by the dissenting justices and judge." That amendment was enacted by SB 22-115 and took effect April 7, 2022, months before the Club Q shooting.

Three of the plaintiffs here are estates suing under Colorado's wrongful-death framework. The panel treated those claims as rising or falling with the claims they were attached to, noting that the parties agreed the negligence and wrongful-death claims rise or fall together, and that the wrongful-death claims against the county defendants also relied on the state-created-danger theory and so needed no separate analysis.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The most consequential part of this opinion is the half that got the least attention in the disposition line. The Section 1983 holding is a straightforward application of Gray, which holds that a state's adoption of generally applicable policies does not impose the immediate, individually directed threat of harm the doctrine requires. That result was predictable from circuit precedent. The CPLA exclusivity holding is the one that changes how injury cases against Colorado property owners will be pleaded.

The district court had drawn a line that many plaintiffs' lawyers would have liked to keep. It suggested that allegations about targeted corporate decisions, training and staffing deficiencies might sit outside the CPLA, on the theory that those are corporate choices rather than conditions of land. The Tenth Circuit closed that door, reasoning that such allegations still relate to inadequate security and safety measures, and that the CPLA covers injuries caused by safety and security conditions. It pointed to Tolle v. Steeland, LLC, 541 P.3d 24 (Colo. App. 2023), on fire extinguishers and smoke detectors, and Grizzell v. Hartman Enterprises, 68 P.3d 551 (Colo. App. 2003), on inadequate security as a dangerous condition. It also noted the plaintiffs' own pleading defined the duty as a duty to ensure safety and well-being while on the premises, which the panel could not distinguish from a landowner's duty.

Read together with the causation holding, the practical effect is a narrow channel. A negligent-security claim against a Colorado landowner must be brought under the CPLA, and once it is in the CPLA, the 2022 amendment requires a court to weigh whether the third-party criminal act was the predominant cause. The panel was careful not to make that a categorical bar. It agreed with the plaintiffs that the amendment does not mandate dismissal of every CPLA claim involving a mass shooter, and said only that the amendment makes such liability difficult to plead, "hard, but perhaps not impossible" (slip op. at 43-44). But the panel then compared these allegations to the record in Wagner, where the plaintiffs had years of known threats, a part-time armed guard, no perimeter fence and expert testimony, and concluded the Club Q allegations did not play a more substantial role than Planned Parenthood's conduct had. Since the legislature disapproved the Wagner majority's treatment of those facts, the comparison is doing heavy work.

There is a second point worth flagging for anyone reading this as a template. The Tenth Circuit is a federal court construing a Colorado statute. Its reading of subsection (2)(e) is authoritative for federal courts in the circuit, but Colorado's own appellate courts have not yet interpreted the amendment in a published decision addressed by this opinion, and a federal court's construction of state law does not bind them.

Finally, the jurisdictional ruling deserves a note because it cuts against the defendants who raised it. The Club Q defendants argued the district court never had supplemental jurisdiction because the federal and state claims involved different defendants, duties, timeframes, witnesses and evidence. The panel agreed the claims involve different defendants, different duties and different evidence, and held that did not matter, because both sets of claims arose from the shooting and the events preceding it, which is enough for a common nucleus of operative fact under United Mine Workers v. Gibbs, 383 U.S. 715 (1966). The court did fault the district court for dismissing under Section 1367(c) without first deciding whether it had jurisdiction under Section 1367(a), citing Royal Canin U.S.A., Inc. v. Wullschleger, 604 U.S. 22 (2025), but held the sequencing error made no difference because jurisdiction existed. The panel also declined to adopt the Seventh Circuit's loosely connected test, saying it did not need to.

How This Affects You

If you are following this case, the accurate summary is that the plaintiffs lost their federal claims, lost their CPLA claims, and also lost the negligence and wrongful-death claims that had previously survived. The opinion states that the plaintiffs filed their remaining claims in state court, Vance v. GIG, Inc. d/b/a Club Q, Civ. No. 2025CV31959 (Colo. Dist. Ct. 2025), and that the state case is stayed pending this appeal. What happens next in either forum is not something this opinion decides.

If you are a Colorado property owner, tenant or business operator, the operative rule is that claims arising from injuries on your premises, including claims framed around staffing, training or security decisions, run through the CPLA rather than through ordinary negligence. That has consequences for pleading, for statutory duty definitions and for how the predominant-cause question gets litigated when a third party commits a crime on the property. Owners outside Colorado should not assume the same structure applies, since premises-liability statutes and common-law rules vary considerably from state to state, as our state-by-state premises liability index shows.

If you are considering a claim after an injury on someone else's property in Colorado, the categorization question, meaning which legal theory a claim is brought under, is now more consequential than it was before this decision, and the analysis is fact-specific. Nothing in this article evaluates any particular claim.

If your interest is in red-flag orders, the takeaway is narrow and doctrinal. The Tenth Circuit did not hold that a county may lawfully refuse to use a state protective tool, and it did not endorse the county's resolution. It held that a generally applicable policy is not the kind of affirmative, individually directed conduct the state-created-danger exception requires. Notably, the district court had suggested the plaintiffs adequately pleaded conscience-shocking conduct, describing the county as having defiantly done nothing while knowing what it knew. The Tenth Circuit did not disturb or endorse that characterization, because it resolved the appeal on a different element.

This article is general legal information about a published federal appellate decision. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it does not evaluate any individual claim. It addresses federal law in the Tenth Circuit and Colorado state law as construed by a federal court. Laws and case law change. Information verified on September 10, 2026. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction.

Related articles

• Colorado injury claims against property owners
• How wrongful-death actions work in Colorado
• Protection orders in Colorado and how they are obtained
• Premises liability rules state by state
• Wrongful-death law across the states

Last updated: 2026-09-10. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-09-10.