Xavier Kraus’ bizarre friendship with a future accused mass shooter started with the most neighborly cliché: a knock on his apartment door for a borrowed cup of sugar.

Just over a year later, his life has become a nightmare of attorneys, FBI agents and reporters who are counting on the Colorado Springs resident to fill in the blanks on Anderson Lee Aldrich over the past spiraling months.

Wednesday, the alleged assailant’s public defenders told Kraus that he was Anderson Aldrich’s “only face-to-face friend.”

Bomb threat case against accused Club Q shooter was dismissed because officials were unable to serve subpoenas

Aldrich faces 305 charges – including 10 counts of first-degree murder, 86 counts of attempted first-degree murder and 48 counts of bias-motivated crime – in the Nov. 19 shooting at Club Q.

Kraus is scratching his head over the phone call from Aldrich’s attorney. He said it felt like Aldrich asked them to reach out to him. Though he’s conflicted, he said would meet with his jailed former neighbor “to have closure.”

Kraus said Aldrich’s attorneys wanted him to dish about their client, as if they haven’t already had a comprehensive conversation with them.

“It sounds like they’re letting him recover. They haven’t really probed him a lot. I guess he took a pretty bad beating to the head,” said Kraus.

Still Kraus said he hasn’t heard from the socially awkward friend he called “Andy” since mid-September.

“He ghosted me,” Kraus said.

Details released concerning Club Q shooting

Kraus is still scratching his head over a text message he received Sept. 9 after Aldrich and Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel, moved out. He said he believes it may be a clue to whether Aldrich was hiding a double life: one as a homophobic racist , Kraus said, and the other, coming to grips about who they were sexually.

Sept. 9, 2022, Aldrich ended a text to Kraus with a LGBTQ Pride flag emoji. Kraus never deleted the texts.

In the text exchange, the two were clearing the air over a falling out after Kraus failed to return a borrowed tool kit and near-empty bottle of Windex. A message from “Andy” replied to Kraus’ explanation:

“That’s one perspective for sure, man. I see it differently. Either way, it’s over now so,” according to the text from Aldrich. That was followed with six emojis including the Pride flag, a thumbs up, an “OK” hand sign and three blue talking head symbols.

In a court filing, Aldrich’s attorneys announced that their client is nonbinary and requested for the court to refer to them as “Mx. Aldrich.”

Kraus does not believe a word of it.

“Nobody that I know who is going through an identity crisis is going to commit this horrible crime and then only after they’re arrested come out as their true identity,” he said, refusing to refer to his former “intelligent and socially awkward” neighbor as a “they” or a “them.” 

The visits from people who want to mine Kraus’ brain for information about Aldrich haven’t stopped since the morning of Nov. 20 at 3:30 a.m. when police came to his door. They asked him about the neighbor who lived in Apartment 104 until this past September.

Kraus told The  Gazette that trouble seemed to follow Aldrich, but especially his mother, Laura Voepel.

Last week, Kraus visited the Colorado Springs office of the  FBI to discuss two disturbing websites, first reported by NBC News.

Last spring, Kraus’ reclusive neighbor called him over to show him the beginnings of a website they had created. What Kraus saw was a virtual platform dedicated to freedom of speech; but he said the site took liberties with a blatantly disturbing showcase box.

The alleged Club Q shooter invited people to his website with a violent video clip from the horrific 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooting in which 51 people were killed.

Kraus said that the video set the tone for what quickly became a vitriolic chat room.

FBI confirms Gazette report that it received tip in 2021 about Club Q suspect

“It was not good. It was racist, homophobic. There was murder. Anything under the sun,” Kraus said. He said the website had a good number of dedicated followers.

The website has not been seen by The Gazette, but Kraus said there were links on the first platform to a second “brother site” which featured four short videos which he believes were taken by the alleged assailant. He showed a Gazette reporter all four videos from his phone, including one pan of an untidy dark apartment which Krauss believes was taken when they lived across the hall. There are also three more mysterious videos taken in a Toyota.

It’s unclear when the nighttime Toyota videos were posted, but in one of them, a voice which Kraus said sounds like the alleged shooter says, “Shout out to professional seven sins,” a reference to a video-game site. In another a voice in the front seat of the vehicle says “OK” and in another what appears to be the same voice sighs and says “All right.” Kraus told The Gazette that the forced breath sounded just like what his neighbor used to do.

Investigators may not know other tidbits of information Kraus knows: that Aldrich, whom he called “Andy,” slept with a gun, paranoid that there may be a home invasion in case “he needed to defend himself.” The alleged assailant once showed Kraus a pistol and two assault rifles, one of which Kraus thinks was made partly on a 3D printer.

He said the 22-year-old did not have a job, slept until late in the afternoon, and was a recovering opium addict who would go through painful withdrawals and depression.

Their mother, Voepel, was obsessed with smoothing over her 22-year-old’s depression, routinely relying on Kraus to come over and cheer him up.

Kraus said that when their Toyota SUV broke down, he ran sensitive errands for Voepel and her son, picking up medications, and even used Voepel’s medical marijuana card to pick up pot for them from a nearby dispensary.

Kraus described Aldrich as paranoid, intelligent, lonely and “not all socially ‘there.'”

He’s racked with guilt and can’t sleep because he wonders if, with some forethought, he could have done anything to stop the murders.