Two weeks ago, when Kmart officials announced that their stores would stop selling handgun ammunition, they described the decision as a shift in “merchandising strategy” that had been in the works for some time. It was just a coincidence, they suggested, that Kmart executives had met with filmmaker Michael Moore…
Cynthia Devereaux is on the phone, calling everybody who’s anybody in Costilla County. She calls Father Pat Valdez, the parish priest in San Luis. She calls Patti Swift, the county judge. She calls her father, Ernesto Sandoval, the former county sheriff. She calls the neighbors. Her message is simple, delivered…
Judging from the Denver dailies, the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission completed a masterful bit of finger-pointing last week. Following the long-awaited release of the commission’s final report at a Statehouse press conference on May 17, both newspapers featured front-page photos of Governor Bill Owens stabbing a forefinger at the cameras…
This much is certain: On the morning of November 27, 1989, Avianca Airlines Flight 203 took off from Bogotá, Colombia, headed for the city of Cali. The Cali run is a journey of a few hundred miles over mountainous terrain, requiring less than an hour in the air. Flight 203…
This all started over twenty-five bucks. Maybe if his jailers had let him keep his money five years ago, Robert Wirtz Jr. wouldn’t have embarked on his seemingly endless campaign against the powers that be in Grand County. But they took his money, and Wirtz wants his payback. Over the…
For a moment last Friday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock sounded like one of the Brothers Karamazov — the brooding, metaphysically challenged one. “If you’re confronted with evil, what do you do about it?” he asked the attorneys gathered in his courtroom. “If you do nothing, doesn’t that become evil…
The last two weeks have not been the best of times for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The agency has been in serious damage-control mode since the court-ordered release of hundreds of pages of police records that indicated the JCSO was telling something less than the whole truth about its…
David Gelber adjusts his tie. He tugs it left, then right again. It’s as if he’s trying to get more oxygen without disrobing, as if what’s needed right now is a little fresh air, something to cleanse his lungs of the bad odor wafting through the halls of the Jefferson…
Terry Akers feels like death warmed over. His back throbs. His testicles ache. His gut — dude, don’t even ask. It’s like he’s living in an old Road Runner cartoon, and someone just shoved a keg of nails down his swollen throat. He’s got a bad case of cottonmouth and…
Standing at a makeshift podium in a field outside the Florence federal prison complex, Jim Davis gestured angrily at the stark walls encased in razor wire. Dozens of listeners sat on hay bales, many of them broad-shouldered men clutching signs calling for “Fair and Equal Treatment” and wearing T-shirts that…
Hunched over the counter of the only 7-Eleven in Widefield, an elderly black man named Leo mulls over what could be his most consequential purchase of the day. You never know; this could be the time, the magic moment, that life-altering, red-letter, once-in-a-lifetime lucky day. You just don’t know. This…
Bob Sylvester doesn’t want to go back to prison. He knows too much about prison and what it does to you. On October 23, Sylvester will find out just how much prison time lies ahead when he appears in a Denver courtroom to be sentenced on charges of racketeering, extortion…
The past few months have not been the best of times for the folks at Halaby, Cross & Schluter, the private law firm hired to defend the City of Denver in cases of alleged police misconduct. Blasted by a federal judge last spring for failing to comply with his order…
In pursuit of the good life, Mr. Deep Pockets takes the highway. The big silver automobile cruises through the thinning evening traffic with hardly a whisper of effort. The soundtrack from Local Hero plays softly on the CD system. Mr. Deep Pockets turns up the volume, as if to fill…
The teachers and students of Columbine returned to school last month to the welcome sounds of silence. There were no news photographers to record the moment, no live cable coverage of hundreds of suburban teens streaming into the building. No pep rallies, no speeches about “taking back the school,” no…
In an effort to streamline what promises to be a lengthy legal process, all fourteen lawsuits filed by families of people injured or killed in the shootings at Columbine High School have been moved to federal court in Denver. But an attorney for two of the families says his clients…
A key defendant in the bizarre Aspen crime spree of last summer, the first to take his case to trial, has been found guilty on two felony counts and now faces at least a ten-year prison sentence. And for two other suspects in the resort town’s violent youthquake who are…
Poor Dave Robicheaux. After years of solving crimes too close to home, the brash, volcanic homicide detective carries more psychic baggage than even a cop ought to expect: one wife murdered, another with a mobbed-up past, the crushing toll of his own epic struggles with the bottle and with the…
Cody Wille stands flat-footed outside the back door of Clark’s Market in Aspen. He fumbles with his mask, trying to get the eyeholes right with one hand while clutching a BB gun in the other. The gun is a surprise. His friend Moses Greengrass handed it to him moments before…
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Last year, when several individual defectors from the Aryan Brotherhood, the notorious white-supremacist prison gang, expressed an interest in cooperating with the government against their own, federal officials rose to the occasion like Shriners at a testimonial dinner. They…
One of the most glaring deficiencies of the sheriff’s report is its cursory treatment of the circumstances that led up to the attack. “While this report establishes a record of the events of April 20,” it states, “it cannot answer the most fundamental question — WHY?…The evidence provides no definitive…
What may have been the defining moment in the history of the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission unfolded last month. Consigned to a small meeting room in the basement of the Jefferson County Justice Center, struggling to make sense of the worst school massacre the country has ever seen and faced…
