Shooting at LGBTQ+ club will be investigated as a hate crime 1:45
(CNN) --
As Colorado Springs residents and leaders embrace the 25 injured and other survivors of the Colorado Springs Club Q shooting, the families of the five fatalities remember their lives and the emptiness they leave.
Saturday night's attack could have been worse if it weren't for the heroes who subdued the attacker.
But that bravery didn't come in time to save everyone.
Colorado Springs police have not released the names of the people killed, but CNN has identified two of them as bartender Derrick Rump and his supervisor Daniel Aston.
At least 5 people dead and 18 injured in a shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs
Derrick Rump found a community he loved at Club Q, his sister said.
Aston's parents also confirmed his identity to a Denver newspaper, while Rump's sister, Julia Kissling, confirmed the identity to CNN and one of its affiliates.
"These two were polar opposites in many ways, but they worked so well together. They were just amazing, and every bar should have a Daniel and a Derrick," Tiara Kelley, who showed up at the club the night before the shooting, told CNN. .
Rump had "found a community of people that he loved very much, and he felt like he could shine there, and he did," Kissling told CNN affiliate WFMZ.
“He made a difference to so many people's lives, and that's where he wanted to be,” she added.
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Bartender Michael Anderson saw the gunman and ducked behind the bar where he and Aston were working as glass fell around them, he told CNN on Monday.
He thought he was going to die, said a prayer and as he moved to escape the scene, he saw two people he didn't know punching and kicking the attacker, he said.
Derrick Rump, left, and Daniel Aston worked at Club Q, according to their relatives.
Anderson was devastated to learn later that Aston had not made it out of the bar, which the Colorado Springs LGBTQ community considered a safe space.
Aston, 28, was a bar supervisor at Club Q, said Anderson, who had known Aston for a few years and considered him a friend.
Daniel Aston "had so much more life to give to us, to all his friends and to himself," his mother told a newspaper.
(Credit: Jess Dawn/Facebook)
“He was the best supervisor anyone could have asked for.
It made me want to work and it made me want to be a part of the positive culture that we were trying to create there,” Anderson said.
He added that Aston was an “incredible person.
He was a light in my life and it's surreal that we're even talking about him in the past tense like this."
Aston moved to Colorado Springs two years ago to be closer to her mother and father, parents Jeff and Sabrina Aston told
The Denver Post
.
The club was a few minutes from her house, and after one of Daniel's friends told them that he had been shot, they rushed to the emergency room, only to discover that he had never shown up.
What we know about the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub shooting
Daniel Aston was 4 when he told his mother he was a boy, and it was another decade before he came out as transgender, his mother told the newspaper.
He thought he was shy, but that wasn't the case, she said.
He never met a stranger, not even when he was a child.
"He had a lot more life to give to us, to all his friends and to himself," he told The Post.
“He always said, 'I'm shy,' but he wasn't.
He wrote poetry.
He loved to dress up.
He got into drama workshop in high school.
He is an artist.
That's what he really loved."
CNN's Don Lemon and Amanda Watts contributed to this report.
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