The Colfax Center Deli enjoyed a brisk business during its three years at 1245 East Colfax. Located just south of Columbia Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital and across the street from the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition (CCDC), the deli and its owners, Michael Roberts and Daniel Dufresne, got…

In the spring of 1998, bail agent Jolene Martinez and her brother, bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman, were allies in a cantankerous price war on Denver’s Bail Bond Row. Siblings united to protect the family business. What a difference a year makes. This past April, Chapman and his common-law wife,…

As the condo craze hits Uptown, one of its major players, Triton Development, again finds itself wearing a bull’s-eye. Condo owners in a new 24-unit Triton project known as the Washington Condominiums, at 1747 Washington Street, are grumbling about delays that have lasted for almost a year and have come…

The middle-aged man lives in Kansas. It’s early 1997, and he recently finished parole for a sex offense he committed years ago, but he responds to a sex ad in a local publication. Within a few months, he’s trading letters with a Colorado woman named Ann. Ann is into the…

Hold On for the Ride Denver District Judge Michael Mullins ruled on July 12 that Deborah Lee Benagh, who claims she was injured on Six Flags Elitch Gardens’ Mind Eraser, will get her day in court (“Twists and Shouts,” June 17). Elitch’s had asked the judge to dismiss the suit,…

This past March, Denver Voice reporter Harold Chapman went undercover. The newspaper by and for Denver’s homeless community sent him to a house at 535 Colorado Boulevard that’s rented by a California-based homeless shelter called United States Mission. Like its branches in other cities, the mission is not located near…

Wednesday, May 6, 1998 4:45 p.m. It’s hot outside when Stan Israel arrives at his Lakewood apartment. He takes off his shoes, sits down, turns on the TV and unwinds. He calls his girlfriend, Patricia, and they make a dinner date. She loves to cook, so later on he’ll drive…

Life hasn’t been the same for J. Stewart Jackson IV since 1996, when he sold Denver Burglar Alarm, the business his family had run since 1917 (“Who Stole Denver Burglar Alarm?” September 17, 1998). An effort to start a new company last summer–Jackson Burglar Alarm–has resulted in a lawsuit filed…

Bob Appel is an early-morning kind of guy. A two-time state truck-driving champion who’s been hauling freight for Roadway Express for nineteen years, he usually slips behind the wheel of his orange-and-blue semi a little after 3 a.m. On this morning, April 15, a monsoon of snow is falling, the…

What’s a guy gotta do to fire up some barbecue in this town? For the Reverend William Harris, who runs the Gethsemane Pentecostal Temple at the corner of 26th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, the answer isn’t easy. For years the reverend has been cooking up ribs in five large pits–in…

One night in August 1975, Colorado lieutenant governor George Brown stepped to the podium to give a speech at the National Lieutenant Governors Conference in Alabama. He almost ruined his own political career and certainly hastened its end. Brown, a Democrat, was one of the first two black lieutenant governors…

The turks of Wellington Webb’s generation were bound by common threads: Almost all were lawyers, they were close in age, and they worked together in the Sam Cary Bar Association and the Colorado Black Caucus. In the more free-spirited ’90s, things have changed. Here are six men poised to take…

Homeless people need good credit, too–that is, if they want some local agencies to help them get off the streets. Members of Humanity for Homeless, a homeless advocacy group, are angry about a policy that requires homeless individuals to pay $15 when they apply for transitional housing through Catholic Charities…

Sue LaBella lives in a two-level home in Westminster, with white siding, a wooden fence, and two Labradors playing in the yard out back. It’s the classic picture of the suburbs. Inside the house, however, you won’t find the typical nuclear family. Six-year-old Ray, a boy with thick black hair…

In the last few years, the Denver Housing Authority has been home to controversies involving its executive director, Sal Carpio, including his well-publicized drinking problem and a sexual-harassment suit. Now another sexual-harassment complaint has the agency scrambling to cover its tracks. In September 1996, seeking to confirm reports from employees…

The warriors are in trouble when the tale begins. Their leader has accidentally broken their vow never to kill anyone and has exiled himself. Their only hope may be young Ryan Jeffers, a kid with a limp, parents who are never around, and low self-esteem. His sole friend is a…

The company that Velma Gilbert worked for was called Caring Hands, but it didn’t seem to care much about one very important thing. Last summer, Gilbert, a licensed practical nurse, quit her job with the Littleton home health-care company after her employers continually refused to pay her wages. When Gilbert…

Robert Cunningham, who is white, remembers when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his yard. Now he has launched a personal crusade: He wants to get fliers apologizing for slavery into the hands of all Colorado slave descendants. “It’s like building a field and getting two teams to…

June 5, 1998 “What you have,” begins attorney Derry Rice, “is a sixteen-year-old, a new driver from a nice family, driving on Broadway and Highlands Ranch Parkway.” The first driver–we’ll call her Pam–and the second driver, another sixteen-year-old we’ll call Cynthia, are both turning left onto northbound Broadway. While turning,…

Bus driver Glenn Bowen hurt his shoulder on the job, and his workers’ compensation claim against the Hertz Corporation has dragged on unresolved for more than a year. Now that claim may be tied up in another case against the company, one brought by several of his black co-workers. Bowen’s…

The large hangman’s noose hanging in an engineering room at Denver Health Authority was the final straw for Don Atkinson. The African-American grounds worker says he had been subjected to more than a year of passed promotions, racially derogatory remarks and hostile co-workers when he encountered the rope. “As far…