Josh Beckius was fourteen years old when Dayton James was killed in an armed robbery at Boulder’s Basemar Cinema Savers; prosecutors believe Beckius served as a lookout. He was sixteen when he was sentenced — as an adult — to forty years in prison. By contrast, the three teenagers who…

Dayton James’s daughters were the center of his life, and he was the strong and certain linchpin of theirs. Although he and their mother divorced when the girls were small, James saw Darcy and Daytona every week. He took them bowling or to dinner; he let them select movies. Sometimes…

Joshua Beckius is 21 years old and living in limbo. When he was sixteen, he received a forty-year sentence for second-degree murder and was immediately placed among adult prisoners in the Buena Vista Correctional Facility. There, he attacked another inmate. The next stop was the Colorado State Penitentiary, where he…

Feminists say men rape to assert dominance over women. But a new book co-authored by a University of Colorado instructor suggests that while the immediate motivation for rape may be anything from the need to impress other males to rage over a breakup, the deep-seated and essential spur is man’s…

Since its opening, entertainers have been a crucial part of the mall. Policy regarding what they may do, where they may do it and what, if anything, they should pay the city for the privilege has varied over the years. One longstanding controversy involved Evan Ravitz, a slack-rope walker who…

Like most attractive public spaces, the Pearl Street Mall has been the site of an ongoing battle between merchants and transients. Sometimes it seems that unusually belligerent or obstreperous street people have made themselves at home on the mall. But Boulder also has more than its fair share of merchants…

1963: Crossroads Mall opens at 30th and Arapahoe streets in Boulder; JC Penney and Montgomery Ward stores promptly move there from downtown, which soon falls into decline. Rents become depressed; many downtown stores are boarded up; streets are deserted in the evening. By the early Seventies, “Tumbleweeds could go down…

Dick Schwarz has had enough. His family has been selling books, antiques and art in Boulder County since his parents opened a shop in an old stage house in Lyons back in the late Fifties. But his Stage House Two, on Pearl Street just west of Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall,…

Kate Lacroix is a strong and outspoken young woman, a performer by training. Yet the assault she suffered almost a year ago shook her to the core. It was the kind of attack some people have difficulty even classifying as rape: She was taken in her sleep by a roommate…

At the end of August, a twenty-year-old University of Colorado student was kidnapped by six Asian gang members as she walked home in the gray pre-dawn light. They pulled her off the street and into their van with such unexpected force that her feet left her shoes, then drove her…

When Coors Brewing Company worker Homer James was summoned to a meeting with his supervisors in April 1996, he thought it was because he’d been called “nigger” by a co-worker. Instead, to his surprise, the topic was sexual harassment. Coors had been sued over the issue in 1994 and –…

The Bobolink — named for a small brown and white bird that frequents the area — is a bucolic trail meandering alongside Boulder Creek. In the marshy water near the trail’s head stand tall yellow narcissus or, later in the year, bulrushes with their hard, brown bottle-brush tops. Farther along,…

A Sentence or a Question It was an outcome with which no one was entirely pleased. On July 30, Boulder judge Frank Dubofsky sentenced Michael Furlong to twenty years’ probation for criminally negligent homicide in the January death of his wife, Deanna (“Dead Reckoning,” July 15). As part of his…

By the beginning of this year, Deanna Furlong had been thinking about divorcing her husband, Michael, for over two years. On the afternoon of January 5, she left work early and returned to their Longmont home, intent on getting him to sign divorce papers. By evening, she lay dying at…

Linda McLaughlin sits on an examining table in the blood- and marrow-transplant unit of Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers. Though she’s a heavyset woman, there’s a fragility about her. Her voice, sweet and light like a child’s, trembles between exultation and grief and sometimes explodes in a mini-burst of laughter. She…

Michael Robert Grainger, who in April 1998 pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter in the death of his wife, was considered for parole last week and rejected. He will, however, be recommended for placement in Boulder County Treatment Center; it will be six to eight weeks before the final decision on…

Gardeners tend to be an unobtrusive breed, most often found grubbing in soil and mumbling in Latin while presenting their rumps to a peaceful blue sky. But threaten a garden and you find in its creator an opponent as implacable, as blindly persistent, as any plant pushing its roots through…

From the beginning, there was something different about Matthaeus Jaehnig. According to his sister, Jelena, he lay so inert in his mother’s womb while she was carrying him that she once went to the hospital, afraid he had died. And when Jelena helped her father take care of her baby…

Freeze this image in your mind. It’s the afternoon of November 12, 1997. Lisl Auman, 21 years old, is standing in front of a boxy condominium, part of a sprawling complex on Monaco Parkway in southeast Denver. Behind her is the hulking form of Matthaeus Jaehnig, struggling frantically with the…

The woman is hunched over in her wheelchair, a pillow supporting her torso, head lolling, body clenched in on itself, feet tensely touching. Someone smooths her hair, gently tilts up her head. She grimaces, though whether from grief or pain–because of an involuntary reflex–it’s impossible to tell. Now the people…

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease eats holes in your brain and causes you to stagger, twitch, cry out in your sleep, lose control of your bodily functions, go mad and die. The disease may have been hidden in a hamburger you ate in Europe ten years ago, a corneal transplant or your own…

Mark is looking after a friend’s three-month-old baby. “I’m her godfather,” he says proudly. Mark is a young man with fair hair and fresh coloring, sipping an iced mocha in a downtown Peaberry’s, the baby sleeping in a carrier at his feet. Mark, now twenty years old, is one of…