If you want to add something special to your holiday toast, try a wine produced by the Winery at Holy Cross Abbey in Cañon City. At around $15 a bottle, it’s a good deal for the wallet — and for the Colorado Department of Corrections: The grapes used to make…
No one in City Park had ever seen anything like Alvin Maxie. In the summer of 1970, fresh from a twelve-year stint in the U.S. Army, he came rolling through town on a green British motorcycle, wearing knee-high moccasins and a Davy Crockett-style cap. Other black bikers hung out in…
An anonymous call led police to Robert David Cline’s body, tucked inside a concrete cave under the on-ramp for westbound Interstate 70 at York Street, where the traffic backs up and the air smells like dog food. Cline had been living under the ramp for some time. There was a…
Instead of the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear that Baby Girl normally felt when she sat on the wooden bench for prisoners in Denver County courtroom 12T, she beamed with pride as she waited for the judge to call her name. Baby Girl no longer walks Colfax. Gone are the…
Peggy Jo Freeman puffs her cigarette to the butt and lights up another as she talks about her four incarcerated sons. She chain-smokes when she’s mad, and right now she’s irate about the state penal system’s latest decision. On November 1, the Colorado Department of Corrections changed the way people…
SUN, 10/30 The Walnut Room, 3131 Walnut Street, hosts the weekly Entertainment Industry Night to give film and music laborers a place to belly up to the bar with their own type. Most Sundays they bring in DJ K-Nee, and every fourth Sunday they feature “Movieoke,” where cinephiles can act…
The stench of Vail’s wealth was getting to Anthony Prince. Luxury surrounded the twenty-year-old. He saw it on the slopes and in the parking lots, on the tourists wearing designer clothes and diamond rings, on the menus of the gourmet restaurants. Prince and his friend, nineteen-year-old Luke Carroll, worked at…
FRI, 9/30 “Some of my greatest friends from college were people that I considered comedy hippies,” says Boulder-based writer and comedian Dave Burdick. “They got into worshiping Del Close and the Upright Citizens Brigade and the spirit of improv. Lately, I’ve been realizing I’m a comedy hippie, too. I just…
On the last Saturday in June, eighteen-year-old Timothy Kemp was headed home after a visit to Six Flags Elitch Gardens. It was Gay Pride weekend, and the bus he usually caught at 16th and Broadway had been rerouted to Colfax and Logan. That shady corner was hopping at 11 p.m.,…
A bullet ripped into Brad Braxton’s body but left him standing, waiting for the next bullet to end his life. He put a hand on his gut wound and tried to keep his balance so that he could die standing up. The second bullet never came. The shooter ran. Brad…
FRI, 8/19 When I was growing up, pretty much every kid I knew received a brand-new remote-control car for Christmas. This was not because of some vast improvement in remote-control-car technology, but because by the end of the year, our old cars were so devastated through use that they were…
Chris LaFore begged the judge’s forgiveness for using the present tense when she talked about her dead son Jason in a Jefferson County courtroom last Tuesday. Almost nine months earlier, Gregory Nester had pulled his truck and trailer out in front of Jason; Jason’s motorcycle had collided with the truck,…
The air conditioner was too noisy, so someone shut it off and let the hundred or so people packed into the cafeteria sweat it out. The heat is on in the immigrant community, anyway. Already controversial, the subject of immigration boiled over in May, after a Mexican dishwasher in this…
Immigration is personal to Lilian Shea. She understands it as no citizen of the United States can. But immigration’s so close to her heart that she doesn’t quite grasp the magnitude of the animosity surrounding the issue today. “I understand immigrants and I understand citizens,” she says. “I understand black…
Terry Graham is fighting a losing battle. Last July, the anti-immigration activist was in the audience for an immigration reform panel at North High School’s auditorium where, she claimed, another audience member assaulted her (“Trial by Wire,” March 3). The program was hosted by First Data Corp., a Greenwood Village-based…
While Congress fights over what promises to be the nation’s energy policy for the future, a University of Denver law student is fighting to make the federal government keep its energy promises of the past. Last fall, Kathleen Booth signed up for DU’s Environmental Law Clinic Partnership, a semester-long course…
The files of the Pendulum Foundation overflow with cases of people convicted of committing crimes when they were juveniles and who are now in prison for life. Many of those crimes were less gruesome, and much less cut-and-dried, than the murder of Julie Ybanez. Back in 1991, a sixteen-year-old black…
The boys played together in a punk-rock band, Troublebound. They went to high school together at Highlands Ranch. They worked together at Einstein’s bagel shop. And when Nate Ybanez decided to murder his mother, he went to his frontman, Erik Jensen, for help. On June 5, 1998, Erik got stoned,…
SAT, 6/25 Ever dreamed of bumping into a porn star and buying her (or him) a drink? Well, tonight’s your chance, at the Pleasure’s Second Annual Adult Film Star Ball, being held at La Bohme Gentleman’s Cabaret, 1443 Stout Street. “I think it’s going to be a crazy, crazy night,”…
Lisa Olken has never eaten menudo. She’s a guera (“white girl”) who doesn’t speak Spanish and has never been south of the border. The traditions involved in quinceañeras and Mexican weddings and funerals are foreign to her. But that didn’t stop her from producing, directing, writing and editing La Raza…
The Chrysalis Project is the latest in a long line of innovative city programs designed to deal more effectively with miscreants, and at the same time de-clutter courtrooms and free up jail space. Denver was the first jurisdiction in the country to devote a courtroom to domestic-violence restraining orders, and…
Baby Girl got deep into the game. She calls the women who bought crack from her “mommies”; the homeless men on the corners are “uncles.” Everyone on the lookout for crack along Colfax knows Baby G, everyone from the dope man to the hustlers, the hookers, the crackheads and the…
