With less than an hour left, the plan had gone wrong. The three of them were supposed to steal five cars and place them at five police substations around Denver. Each car would contain a homemade bomb, and each bomb would explode as police chiefs from around the world sipped…

The courtroom was quiet. Vivien Spitz walked toward her station beneath the panel of four American judges and, as protocol required, sat directly across from the defendant’s box. Military policemen stood ready. The tension was palpable. Vivien placed her court reporter’s notebook on the full-length desk, clicked her headset to…

If you didn’t know better, you might think Carnell Green is hurting, the way he sits on stage in his black suit and shiny shoes, stiff-backed and stone-faced, squeezing the life from his 73-year-old thumb. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a woman announces from the podium. “Thank you for coming.” Carnell and…

Way back when, a cantankerous old guy named E.H. “Brownie” Brown climbed atop his taxidermy shop south of U.S. 85 near what would become Highlands Ranch and posted a sign painted in big red letters: “Hellsville, USA.” Brownie wanted the world to know exactly what he thought of the DuPont…

Until the cops slapped on the cuffs and loaded her into a paddy wagon, Dellena Aguilar had only heard the stories about police rousting teens on the 16th Street Mall for nothing more than petty infractions. But after she was jailed for simply watching one of these episodes, she saw…

After his girlfriend left and he had a nervous breakdown, quit his teaching job and stopped taking his medication, John the Depressed Guy lived in “the hatchback hotel.” For six months he slept in the back of his 1985 Honda Accord, making a home in RV lots, city parks, roadsides,…

Polly Sullivan kept lighthouses in her window, rows of miniature beacons that illuminated the old military dormitory at Lowry that is now Crooked Tree, a shelter for the formerly homeless. It was nice, tenants say, comforting. No matter what else was going on in their lives, and there was usually…

Bryan Scheferkort left behind a hundred bad memories on the streets of Denver, but he can’t shake one image that will always remind him of the year he spent without a home. One night last spring, at about 2 a.m., he and three friends were smoking pot under the 20th…

Somewhere over Denver, moments after the fire, Cindy Andrews’s heart stopped for two minutes and thirty-two seconds. As she faded from consciousness, she could hear the whump, whump of a rescue helicopter and the frantic shouts of paramedics, and she said to herself, “I’m not ready to die. I have…

He isn’t saying it was a miracle, that an angel of God guided him to a particular place at a particular time and said, “Here she is.” He’s not saying that at all. But he’s not saying it was entirely coincidental, either. After one coincidence leads to another, and then…

Lucero’s is the kind of place you have to be looking for to find, which is understandable, since there are no signs on the building, unless you count the black spray-painted scribble of a street gang. Which most people don’t. Instead, most people follow their noses, which lead them along…

Leon is late, as usual, and Lloyd is early, as usual, and they both know this about each other, but it seldom changes their estimated times of arrival. This is the way they are, and they seem to like it fine. When the ex-con meets the corporate executive, which is…

It used to be so simple. Each fall, when the leaves turned and you wanted chile, real chile, the kind that made your sinuses clear and your belly warm, you’d drive past the tracks and beyond the highway to an empty lot in the country, where an old farmer wearing…

Maybe it was the flea-market matador that sparked the lightbulb over Henry Whittaker’s head. Or the wooden tiki mask. Or the Fisher-Price dollhouse. Or the plaster conquistador figurine. Heck if Henry knows. Besides, even if he could remember what inspired his collection, it’s hard to explain the appeal of a…

Somewhere between fumbling potatoes onto his mother’s kitchen floor and bowing on stage with the B.B. King Holiday Revue, George “Guy” Mosley discovered that juggling was his ticket to the bigtime. But that was many years and many miles from the corner of 16th and California, where today the old…

If she’d followed her heart instead of her mother’s orders, Antonia Figueroa del Sol could have been famous. As it happened, though, she married Ernie from the old neighborhood, moved to Denver and wound up packaging chicken thighs, T-bones and hamburger meat at King Soopers. Now and then, whenever a…

The surgical team gathers early one Saturday morning, not exactly hiding what they’re doing, but not advertising it, either. The procedure is still in its experimental stages, and who knows how people will react. Dr. Stanley Biber stands beside the operating table, white light shining down, the patient’s chest rising…

Moments after the cuffs clicked shut around his skinny little wrists, Lamont knew he was in trouble. The handcuffs were a gift from his dad, a Boulder County sheriff’s deputy, who’d finally relented after months of pestering. The set was cheap, made in Japan, with flimsy alloy keys, but perfect…

It seemed like a good idea at the time. In May, when state senator Bob Martinez stood before the General Assembly and asked lawmakers to strike Sand Creek from a state capitol statue commemorating Colorado’s Civil War battles, he was commended. After all, what happened on the banks of Big…

Ideas come to Henry Badgett. While he’s watering flowers in his front yard. Taking a shower. Sleeping. Standing. Making meatloaf. Suddenly a lightbulb flashes over his head. A fairy taps his shoulder. A tree falls in the forest. A mushroom cloud blasts through the stratosphere. “It just happens, man,” he…

HOW IT ALL BEGAN “I was selling portraits door-to-door, and the boss died, so I decided to go to the mall and play the clarinet. On my first day, I sat on a bench and made $60 playing one song after another. I didn’t look up at anyone. I just…

Bringing a paring knife to school accidentally. Giving an elementary-school classmate a vitamin C tablet. Signing a yearbook “Have a kick-ass summer.” Distributing an “unknown substance”–organic lemon drops. From Longmont to Colorado Springs, schools, neighborhoods, police and prosecutors are cracking down on juvenile crime. And as the dragnet is cast,…