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…
Silvia Johnson just wanted to be a “cool mom.” From September 2003 to September 2004, she held innumerable parties at her Arvada home, where she provided alcohol, marijuana and methamphetamines to kids from Arvada West High School — the school her elder daughter attended. She also had sexual relations with…
Jenni Przekwas is a self-proclaimed angel living on Capitol Hill. Her home is decorated in deep reds, calmed by candles and soft music. Quotes such as “On a good day I am so filled with love, I feel like my heart might burst” surround her kitchen. The 34-year-old single mom…
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…
A few years ago, when Off Limits referred to the Paper Tiger as the place where strippers go to die, we caught hell. “I think that you have been very rude to the ladies that currently work there,” wrote a bartender and occasional Tiger dancer. “I’ll bet you’ve never even…
Loyal readers will appreciate just how hard it was for What’s So Funny to fox-trot through the doors of Home Depot on South Colorado Boulevard a few days ago. In a way, it was like trying to sex up a former lover since graduated from The Swan, now far too…
In November 1959, when Denver-based photographer Rich Clarkson heard about four murders in rural Holcomb, Kansas, he didn’t foresee a blockbuster of national proportions. At least one of the Topeka newspapers where he was employed at the time ran an account of the crime on page one, but, he says,…
Boards in the Hood Powder burns: Congratulations on Jared Jacang Maher’s story on Marc Frank Montoya, “One Wild Ride,” in the November 10 issue. It is a beautifully written documentation about what it means to come from the hood and what it means to make it out of the hood…
“Do you guys have any weapons or drugs or anything I should know about?” For Marc Frank Montoya, denial comes instinctively when confronted by law enforcement. He shakes his head. “Nah,” he replies. “Nah, we don’t got nothin’ like that.” “I can smell marijuana,” says the officer. “Do you have…
Prepare to get snowed, Keystone, because Marc Frank Montoya is headed your way. On November 1, the Denver homeboy-turned-professional-snowboarder and his business partner (and brother-in-law) Liko S. Smith finalized an agreement to purchase the 58-room Arapahoe Inn from Chicago businessman Roman Kowalewitz for $4.2 million. They plan to spend another…
Sprinting through a light agenda in a matter of minutes, the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners seems eager to adjourn its weekly meeting. But first there’s the pesky matter of public comment — now restricted to the first Tuesday of every month, the better to keep a certain loudmouth…
Late November 1, shock and awe spread through the minds of city leaders as they learned that voters had actually passed Initiative 100, which changes city ordinances to legalize the possession of an ounce or less of marijuana — and state laws be damned. People expect such shenanigans from San…
Some people would argue that the rise of the Internet, and e-mail, in particular, have killed the art of letter-writing. And those people would not be far off. Whereas scholars and biographers can still pore over the famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence and Mark Twain’s eloquent dispatches home from the frontier, contemporary…
Kids say plenty of things about the press. And most of them are disapproving. “There’s a lot of bias in newspapers,” declares Ashley, a student at St. Pius X School in Aurora. “They only get part of the story.” “I like to read the sports,” adds Curtis, her schoolmate, “but…
Rocks and Roll She’s needled: After thinking all day about John La Briola’s otherwise interesting Tarantella article (“Twice Bitten,” November 3), I have to say I am a bit offended by his reference to the “so-called heroin-rock scene” in Denver. Heroin-rock? So-called by whom? I’ve heard the scene called “folk…
“Today we are trying for the Mount Everest of hamburgers,” says Steve Bigari, aiming a confident smile at a TV camera. Bigari is standing in the middle of a drive-thru lane scrubbed so clean the asphalt shines in the morning sunlight. High above, a giant yellow M — the fabled…
Jack Preiss stands outside his McDonald’s in southern Cheyenne, looking up in the air. “What are you doing?” asks a man driving a pickup through a nearby drive-thru lane. “Waiting for hamburgers to fall out of the sky?” Almost. The burgers won’t really be falling from the sky — more…
At 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, October 21, Sherri Daye Scott, editor of QSR Magazine, the trade journal for the quick-service-restaurant industry, and a panel of fast-food luminaries start a much-anticipated webcast. Across the country, executives at Dunkin’ Donuts, Dairy Queen, Steak ‘N Shake, Taco Bell and other…
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…
The flier said 10 p.m. sharp, but by 10 p.m. sharp last Friday, only a handful of pillow fighters had taken up positions on opposite sides of 13th Avenue at Washington Street, in front of Wax Trax. The trash-talking had begun in earnest, though, as the north-siders and south-siders prepared…
There comes a point in everyone’s life when you realize you’ve made it. I recently experienced such a moment. In a scene my future biographers will no doubt reconstruct in the glorious colors of autumn, I found myself standing in Kiki Vandeweghe’s kitchen, swigging cold Pabst Blue Ribbon with Ernie…
“New Owner for Westword.” That was the headline over an October 24 Denver Business Journal item about plans to merge New Times Media, the parent company of this newspaper, with Village Voice Media. And while an argument could be made that the banner wasn’t technically wrong, it’s certainly misleading, as…
