Club Q survivor shares the last love letter from partner who lost his life in the shooting

Friends at Club Q witnessed Wyatt Kent and Daniel Aston's love blossom over the months after the two met while working at the Colorado Springs LGBTQIAP+ venue. Their courtship was the stuff of chuckles and friendly envy. Wyatt Kent, a drag queen known as Potted Plant, met the love of his life, Club Q bartender Daniel Aston, when Aston assisted him in finding his way to the dressing room.

Kent claimed that the two would sit on the couch for hours talking. Aston would write poems for Kent and Kent would encourage him to look at the clouds and see what images they could come up with together. According to Good Morning America, about a week after Kent started working as a drag queen at Club Q, "another queen turned to me and said, 'So what do you think of Daniel?' I was like, 'I'm gonna marry that man.'"

"I would drop flowers at his door, with poems. It was like the most truly Hallmark movie, over-romantic, trash love," Kent told Gazette, recalling the moment earlier this year when both realized they needed to leave their current partners and be together. "He showed me a couple of poems one of the first times we hung out. I said, 'God, that’s such a beautiful poem.' He said, 'Really? I wrote it about you.'"

Aston's final message of love was a handwritten birthday note, delivered backstage at Club Q on November 19, 2022, with a cache of Kent's favorite berries, a vase full of red roses and baby's breath and the instruction not to open the letter until the show was over. Kent finally read the note after police returned it to him last week, just days after a mass shooting at the club injured 17 people and killed five, including 28-year-old Daniel Aston. 

Aston was a "Tulsa Oklahoma punk" and trans man who'd come to Colorado Springs on the spur of the moment. Here, he discovered a job at a larger-on-the-inside LGBTQIAP+ nightclub tucked behind a block of storefronts off Academy Boulevard, as well as a chosen family who changed his life. In a journal entry written in January 2021, he stated his desire for a companion.

"I feel oddly content but I am desperate for a companion who can engage in deep conversation." Wyatt Kent became that companion for him. Kent who was born and raised in Colorado Springs, recalled their first meeting. "He walked me back to the dressing room and showed me where I needed to be. He was there (at the bar) probably five days a week regularly — as was I, as was really everyone else at Q, (because) that was our family, that was our second home," Kent said.

"He was gorgeous. He was funny. He was witty. That man could match me, and we could go back and forth for hours. We only had 4½, five months together as partners. And boy did it move fast," Kent continued. "They say when you know, you know."

Aston had told Kent he was "just going to show up there, whisk you away and we’re going to go to the White Wedding Chapel and get married." They had confirmed their engagement. It was Kent's birthday the night of the shooting. Backstage in the wreckage leftover from the shooting was a love letter that Aston had written for Kent. After the horrific night of November 19 when Kent lost all five of his friends, he didn't find out about Aston's death until late the next morning, after hours of waiting and hoping he was among the injured who'd been taken to hospitals in the Springs area and had simply gotten lost in the chaos.

He got a text at 11 o’clock from Aston's dad: "Wyatt, I'm so sorry. He never left the scene." Kent was heartbroken and spent Thanksgiving with Aston's family. "Just the ability to tell stories and laugh and remember those, for me, five faces that I knew," Kent said. "I just feel overwhelmed with joy and love and luck to have had the time that I had with him."

The love letter from Aston reads, "Every day I am enamored by you. I know I've told you a hundred times but I've never felt this way about anyone ever. Since I've met you, I've been short of breath. Now you're all I think about. I love you. So crazy much. I'm so happy you exist, that today is a holiday for me too. Love always, Daniel."

"It's part of our queer identities to confront death," Kent said, adding separately, "You never think that it's going to hit that close."