Ashtin Gamblin’s voice still quivers when she recounts the night of Nov. 19 when she was shot nine times while working as the “front door girl” at Club Q, an LBGTQ+ entertainment bar in Colorado Springs.

“It was a regular night,” she said of her job checking IDS, collecting a cover charge and strapping on wristbands. A drag queen was celebrating a birthday, and everyone was having a good time.

But shortly before midnight, Gamblin was “the first in the line of fire” when a lone shooter, whose case is before the Fourth Judicial District Court, walked in with a rifle and pulled the trigger.

Gamblin said she never lost consciousness and was fully aware of five bullets hitting her left arm, two searing her right arm, and the final two lodging in her left breast.

Two surgeries inserting rods, pins and plates in both arms repaired the damage, but physical and psychological scars remain. One arm is still fractured, she’s continuing intensive physical therapy for nerve injury and struggles daily with anxiety.

“I moved across town to a quiet neighborhood to feel safe, I bought a dog to be service-dog trained, we drained our savings after the shooting trying to pay bills and make things flow,” Gamblin said.

Daniel Aston, a transgender man who worked as a Club Q bartender, was shielding her body when he was fatally wounded. He was one of five victims who died. Gamblin said she was the only employee shot who survived.

“Daniel is the reason I’m alive,” Gamblin said.

He’s also one of the reasons she and some other survivors are upset about plans for the club.

Insult continues to be added to the injuries of survivors, they say, as they object to club owner Matthew Haynes’ plans to remodel and reopen Club Q in the same building, in part using donations from the public, and his new fundraising appeal to build a memorial to victims outside the club.

“We don’t want the club reopened

where our friends died,” Gamblin said. “It seems abhorrent for somebody to want to open it up and have people dance where people were bleeding out.

“It’s about doing the right thing.”

Haynes did not respond to a Gazette request for an interview. In a video that appeared online in May that marked five months since the shooting, Haynes said the LGBTQ+ community “needed its space back,” as a safe place, which he believes a complete overhaul of the building at 3430 N. Academy Blvd. will provide.

Also, “Moving logistically would be a very expensive proposition,” he said.

Michael Anderson, a shooting survivor who was working as a bartender that night and is now vice president of operations, said on the video that there’s a lot of excitement on social media about the club’s renovation plans, which Haynes announced a few months ago.

“People are really rooting for this from every corner of this country and even internationally,” Anderson said. “It’s like getting a hug from the world.”

An exterior tribute, with five 12-foot-tall pillars representing the five people who died, has the support of the families, Haynes said in an online video from April.

The memorial garden also will include 17 boulders in honor of the injured and a lighted, 40-foot flagpole with a gay pride flag visible to drivers on North Academy Boulevard, “to help everyone remember what happened,” Haynes said.

The memorial will be “a place to reflect, to remember forever what happens when hate is let loose and when a community comes together and rebuilds,” he said.

Gamblin said she wasn’t asked whether she wanted her name on a boulder or about the project in general.

She said she’d rather have the money the boulder will cost. Gamblin said she received $981 from Haynes’ Club Q fundraiser after the shooting, under a formula determined to equal three months’ wages.

Gamblin qualified for victims’ assistance from other funds, one of which reimburses victims after they submit receipts from payments for approved expenses. But she said she wasn’t reimbursed for costs such as replacing her lost wedding rings or replacing the ignition in her truck when her keys went missing during her six-day hospital stay.

Club Q workers released a public statement in late February, saying Haynes was using much of the public donations to renovate the club, and not to primarily benefit victims, as previously promised.

Patron Mason Camp, who wasn’t there the night of the massacre, said the club’s official Gofundme page originally was worded in such a way it seemed like all money would go directly to survivors — those dealing with physical and emotional trauma suffered on a job who no longer could pay their bills.

The language of the online pitch, he said, has since been streamlined and the official fundraiser now is dedicated to collecting money to create a tribute garden. As of Saturday, the appeal had collected $66,111 toward a $300,000 goal.

The memorial fundraiser also has been expanded to include sales of branded Club Q and gay pride merchandise, such as shot glasses.

Camp said many of those who have questioned the allocation of donations, or called out Haynes and members of his Club Q “advisory and development team” on social media, initially were met with engagement. When they persisted, exchanges ultimately got ugly, and then they found themselves blocked from commenting online.

Camp and others maintain that any money raised, including donations to the memorial, should go and were intended for survivors — to help them continue doing just that — rather than construct a tribute garden.

“Instead, Matthew (Haynes) is choosing to distribute the funds however he wants to, to a new building, to a memorial that not everyone agreed on, at all,” Camp said.

Other survivors, including longtime patron Ed Sanders, who was hit in the back and thigh during the shooting, support the project. Sanders donated $1,000, according to the online appeal, but he declined a request for an interview.

“I didn’t see it coming, but I’m a survivor,” he said on a video provided by Uchealth, which operates Memorial Hospital where he was treated.

“I’m not going to be taken out by some sick person,” Sanders said from his hospital bed in November. “This incident underlines the fact that LGBT people need to be loved.”

Disagreements over how donations should be used and plans for moving forward following mass tragedies aren’t uncommon.

A foundation created after 49 people were killed in 2016 at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, announced last month that a long-planned memorial won’t be located on the site after all, but at a different location yet to be determined.

A memorial to 12 students and one teacher shot and killed when two armed students attacked Columbine High School in 1999 is not on the school campus in Littleton, but in nearby Clement Park.

A permanent memorial to the 10 people, including a police officer, who were killed in March 2021 by a gunman at a King Soopers in south Boulder is being planned, but a location has not been announced.

The company did what it described as a complete interior and exterior renovation to the grocery store, with feedback from employees and the community, before reopening in January 2022.

Haynes said in his April video that input from people who were at Club Q on Nov. 19 was a driving factor in the memorial’s design.

He said his team consulted victims’ families and survivors before settling on a “public-facing” tribute area and boulder garden.

“We’ve taken hundreds of hours with family members, with victims, with designers to come up with a memorial that has a lot of meaning, and we feel it’s very important that the meaning is understood, not just, oh here it is,” Haynes said.

“It’s very, very important to Club Q and all of us around Club Q that, No. 1, this event is never forgotten, and that we don’t open the club and pretend like nothing happened there.”

The decision to resurrect the business, which Haynes opened in 2002 as the founding owner, was difficult, he said.

“Club Q was grieving, and we knew we had to rebuild,” Haynes said in the video. “An integral part of the rebuilding is a tribute to those lost, injured and an entire community that was impacted.”

Haynes’ business partner and co-owner since 2014, Nic Grzecka, recently parted ways with Haynes, according to recent social media posts. In 2021, some ex-employees accused Grzecka of sexual assault on social media and filed a report with Colorado Springs police, but it is unknown whether that matter was related to the split in Grzecka’s business relationship with Club Q.

Haynes said in last month’s video that the club received tens of thousands of emails, letters and cards of sympathy and support.

“The most important thing that kept coming back is that hate cannot win; we cannot let an individual full of hate and rage destroy something that’s been so lovely for the last 20 years,” he said.

The “top to bottom, wall to wall” rebuilding will include safety and security features such as “duck and cover” exterior cinderblock walls.

John Arcediano, a contracted Club Q bartender who wasn’t on duty that Saturday night and as a patron sustained cuts from shrapnel but nothing that required immediate medical attention, also disagrees with the distribution of public donations as well as what will happen to the scene.

He said he qualified for victims’ assistance not from the official Club Q fundraiser — because as a contractor he wasn’t considered an employee but has the tax forms to prove he was — but from the Colorado Healing Fund, one of three large public fundraisers that emerged after the shooting.

“It definitely helped me when I needed to step away from work and ensure I was able to pay my bills, get medical treatment, see therapists regularly,” Arcediano said.

He suffers from severe anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Things I was able to do very easily before I am not able to do now,” he said. “There’s a sense of a lack of security in my life, and I will never be the same person I was because of this event. My life has changed dramatically.”

The 35-year-old has a fulltime job and worked at Club Q as a side gig for just a few months before the shooting.

“I always agree people before buildings,” he said, “and that has not been the case here. It’s been more important for them to reopen a community space but not take care of the community that is going to support it or work for it.”

Sympathy has been lacking for survivors, Arcediano said.

“I would say there’s a very big divide on whether people who used to support the club would or would not in the future,” he said. “There was a good bunch of loyal followers that were there that evening and experienced this. The reality is people aren’t going to support a business when their friends and the people they care about have not been supported or respected.”

Club Q patron Camp said he’s part of a group that’s already planning a protest of the grand reopening, expected this fall.

“As soon as you walk through the door, that’s where Daniel (Aston) was shot, where Ashtin (Gamblin) was shot. … Then you go up to the bar area, that’s where three other people lost their lives, then out on the patio is where Derek (Rump) was shot and killed,” Camp said. “No one wants to party where their friends died.”

Gamblin, who still can’t drive or properly close the fingers on one hand or work at the fulltime job she had in addition to working as the front door girl at Club Q, still needs intensive physical therapy to heal her body and mind.

She doesn’t intend to patronize Club Q again, saying many former wcustomers have found other places to hang out and spend their free time together.

The repercussions of the way things have turned out for a community in mourning — a community that lost its safe space in a deadly act of violence and its solidarity in the ugly financial aftermath — are “just plain sad,” Camp said.

“Matthew had a real opportunity here to bring the community together at a time when it’s very tough to do so, when there’s so much hate and anger and violence going on. But instead, now the community is very divided,” Camp said. “Why are you putting your building first when it was the people who made Club Q what it is?”