Shortly after his arrival in the Colorado prison system, a mentally stable teenager named Sam Mandez landed in solitary confinement for a series of minor rules infractions. He soon began to experience auditory hallucinations and other signs of mental illness, and his erratic behavior made it impossible for him to…
If you happened to tune into cable news or talk radio or any other variety of media late last week for the first time in fourteen or fifteen years, you might think things were stuck in an endless loop. There was that harpy Nancy Grace, grilling forensic whiz Henry Lee…
It was eleven years ago today — October 18, 2002 — that inmate Edward Montour Jr. attacked Eric Autobee, a 23-year-old correctional officer, in the kitchen of the Limon prison, fatally bludgeoning him with a heavy ladle. To mark that grim anniversary, the victim’s parents have made a startling plea…
This week’s cover story, “Saving Jackson,” follows the staggering array of medical challenges faced in his first year of life by Jackson Holbrook, a baby born with a serious heart defect. It’s a journey most families will never have to contemplate, but one that’s more common than you might think:…
Last week, we reported that the oil and gas industry has already donated enough cash in opposition to a proposed five-year moratorium on new drilling in Boulder to outspend backers of the measure 30-1. As the November election draws nearer and more campaign finance reports trickle in, it turns out…
Jackson took his first trip to Costco the other day. He sat in the cart wide-eyed, an explorer drinking in the lights and color and motion. He paid no attention to the stares, the whispers and pointing fingers. His mother, Traci Holbrook, could not ignore them. People came up to…
The first retail sale of recreational marijuana in Colorado has yet to be rung up, but the state is already reaping some convention business as a result of its groundbreaking reforms of drug laws. Next week more than a thousand elected officials, health care professionals, students, drug war veterans and…
When the League of Women Voters recently made an analysis of issues on the November ballot, it couldn’t find a group to make the case against 2H, a proposal to extend the City of Boulder’s moratorium on new oil and gas drilling for another five years. “There is no organized…
Our workaday world is so minutely mapped and Googled that we sometimes forget just how much of it was, until fairly recently, unknown and feared — particularly the sea, home of seals mistaken for mermaids and even more fantastic creatures: the sea serpent and the kraken, whales as big as…
When you’ve dropped two or five or ten million on that second or third home in one of the more desirable Colorado mountain resorts, there are a few items that you take for granted will not be next door. Walmarts, trailer parks and rendering plants are probably high on the…
At public hearings, Denver Public Schools officials have expressed the hope that a new elementary school to be built in southeast Denver, on an undeveloped site formerly designated as a natural area, could offer a curriculum built around teaching kids about the environment. Prospective students got their first lesson in…
A new report on access to public records in Colorado scolds state agencies for excessive fees, failing to put records online so more citizens can make use of them, and for “pre-digital age thinking.” On the same day, attorneys for James Holmes file a motion in the Aurora theater shootings…
Over the past two weeks, the Facebook page for the Village, a nondenominational “seeker” church in Denver’s RiNo district, has seen a trickle of heartfelt farewells and laments, from “Gonna miss yall” and “This is sad” to one fan’s plaintive “Why??????” Nine months after its launch — and less than…
Our September 12 cover story, “The Cruelest Cut,” examined the growing controversy over a pet surgery that’s common in the U.S. but banned in many other countries — the declawing of cats. Some veterinarians and anti-cruelty activists would like to see the procedure, which involves removing a section of toe…
Last month, two new reports on Colorado’s prison system urged officials to get smarter in how they spend precious tax dollars — specifically, in how they classify and monitor high-risk offenders, while figuring out which inmates are more in need of rehab than expensive cell time. Now, a pilot program…
In the devastating aftermath of our recent floods, it’s easy to forget that water has typically been a scarce resource in Colorado, battled over by competing interests, even as its rivers feed into eighteen states, from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi. But The Great Divide, a recently announced documentary…
The swarm of international media buzzing around the tiny hamlet of Deer Trail in recent months doesn’t know what to make of the much-discussed proposal that would allow shooting down drones out of the skies above the town. Some have treated it as a symbolic protest against government spying, others…
There are plenty of reasons to read Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile, Nate Jackson’s breezy account of his struggles as a mostly backup player for six seasons. It’s grimly funny, surprisingly well-written, bristling with backstage stuff without seeming gossipy, rueful without…
This week’s cover story, “The Cruelest Cut,” traces the evolution of the documentary The Paw Project, the story of Jennifer Conrad’s decade-long campaign to ban the declawing of cats — a common procedure in America but one that many veterinarians and animal rights activists regard as an unnecessary and obsolete…
Over the years, Jennifer Conrad has come to see her fight as one against greed and stupidity, a nasty pocket of the stuff festering deep in the heart of her own profession. When her crusade began, though, Conrad wasn’t thinking that way. She was focused on one patient, Drifter, a…
Boulder County is known for leading the state in matters of open space, animal rights, environmental protections and all-around tree-hugging. But next week may present the acid test for local officials’ greeniness. On September 18 the county planning commission will listen to a presentation from staff and ponder whether to…
It’s been a long, long 25 years since Donny Andrews, barely out of his teens, ended up behind bars for a string of burglaries he embarked upon to support his cocaine habit. But that quarter-century represents less than a third of the sentence heaped on Andrews, one of the harshest…
