Everyone knows that banjos are awesome. But are they also deadly? According to Colorado law, that depends on how you use them. If you use your banjo for, say, pickin’, you’re all good. If you use it for hittin’, such as in the case of 33-year-old Joseph Stancato, you’re not…
Pierre Werner, aka Dr. Reefer, is one tough hombre. “I’m a convicted felon, so I can’t have any guns,” he says. “The only weapons I have are my fists.” And Werner used them early yesterday morning, when two men broke into the Boulder building, at 1121 Broadway, where his medical…
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Remember that beautiful day in October when Balloon Boy Falcon Heene puked on the Today Show as his dad, Richard Heene, tried to convince America that the entire fiasco involving his runaway “experimental craft” had been genuine? Well,…
Gino Rael, 26, is a registered sex offender who received a four-year deferred sentence in 2006 for enticing a child. So what did he allegedly do while in Boulder County Jail this summer on unrelated charges? Sent letters to young girls whose photos he and a couple of buddies saw…
Early on January 5, a man now identified as Douglass Singleton, 59, was gunned down on the 2600 block of North Leyden Street in what Denver Police continue to insist (despite doubts from many observers) was a medical-marijuana-related transaction gone wrong. Now, the Denver DA’s office has charged Peter Bellar,…
Raul Gaucin-Valenzuela’s children know him well — even when he’s wearing a bandana over his face. That’s how Gaucin-Valenzuela was reportedly rolling this past weekend when he and a buddy broke into a home in Evans with an important mission — to beat the shit out of a man who…
The number of bank robberies in the metro area of late has apparently reached such heights that mainstream media can’t keep up. Example: Last evening, my wife and some of her colleagues were dining at restaurant off Wadsworth when the credit union next door was held up — and even…
Tomorrow, Jacob Garcia will appear in court to answer charges leveled by the Denver DA’s office. They are: first degree murder and child abuse resulting in death. Seems Garcia was watching his girlfriend’s year-and-a-half old son and something went wrong — terribly wrong. Garcia told authorities it was all a…
You knew Richard Heene had to have a helluva nerve (or severe brain damage) to even attempt to pull off his now-infamous October stunt — insisting that his son, Falcon Heene, was inside an inflatable silver chef’s hat that floated away from his Fort Collins home. But even the guilty…
Murders were down within Denver’s city limits last year — but the homicide roundup released by the Denver Coroner’s Office yesterday remains a grim roster of pain and death. Below, find an accounting of all 45 homicides totted up by the DCO last year, complete with basic information the victims,…
View Larger Map The hard-boiled tale seems straight out of a gripping detective novel: Last night, just a few hours after Denver City Council discussed new regulations for the city’s flourishing dispensary industry, a man was shot dead from what the cops are saying was a medical-marijuana transaction gone awry…
Former UNC professor Vance Fulkerson once taught a class called “Self-Defense Singing” — and among the folks from whom his students needed protection was him. In July, Fulkerson was charged with sexual exploitation of children related to a video system set up in (eeesh) his bathroom. Nine more counts followed…
View Larger Map We still don’t know the name of the seventeen-year-old male arrested in connection with a January 3 homicide near 4th Avenue and Utica Street, an area captured in the graphic above (if you have problems seeing the image, click “View Larger Map”). But the Denver Coroner’s Office…
View Larger Map That news about Denver’s murder decrease in 2009 rings hollow in the face of recent bloodshed. There have ben eight homicides in the metro area since December 22, and three in Denver proper between January 1 and today, including an early hours shooting that reportedly involved a…
View Larger Map Update, 3:51 p.m.: A juvenile has been arrested in connection with this crime. Get more information after the original item… More irony in news that the falling 2009 murder rate in Denver. This is the seventh blog we’ll publish today about a homicide in the metro area…
As noted in our first Mile High Murder No. 59 blog, murders in Denver proper were down in 2009. Unfortunately, though, the first homicide of 2010 took place mere hours after the start of the next decade. The incident took place on January 1 at 1434 North Lipan Street. Although…
View Larger Map There are more questions than answers thus far in the death of a woman found dead on December 30 in a Sixth Avenue West subdivision — an area captured in the graphic above (if you have problems seeing the image, click “View Larger Map”). Contacted this morning,…
Homicides aplenty took place in the waning days of 2009, as is clear from our reports about Mile High Murders No. 59, No. 60 and No. 61. The 62nd victim? Michael Canada, 55, who was reportedly killed in his Edgewater home, at 2547 Harlan Street, by James Alan Clark, 49,…
View Larger Map More holiday-season cheerlessness: a December 29 murder at the Riviera Motel, 9100 East Colfax Avenue — an area captured in the graphic above (if you have problems seeing the image, click “View Larger Map”). The victim in the shooting was identified as Kendrick Anthony Williams, 25, and…
View Larger Map Another Aurora homicide took place on December 22 in addition to the killing of Eleanor Joann Sears, 75, allegedly at the hands of her own daughter. The victim in the second incident was found in an alley near the 2500 block of North Joliet Street, an area…
View Larger Map This morning’s Denver Post leads with a report about the decline of Denver’s murder rate in 2009, mirroring a national trend. But that hardly means slayings have become rarities in the metro area. Indeed, there were several during the last two weeks of the past decade, and…
Last time I checked, Aspen was still nominally associated with the rest of Colorado. But its legal system sometimes has about as much to do with what happens elsewhere in the state as, well, the microstate of Liechtenstein has to do with Madagascar–not much. And that’s plenty of reason for…
