Four Aprils ago, as investigators strung yellow crime-scene tape and boarded up bullet-riddled windows around Columbine High School, snow began to fall — a wet, heavy spring storm that masked the carnage in merciful white. But the snow couldn’t quite obscure the spontaneous memorials that were already surfacing on and…
Memo To: Jefferson County Sheriff John P. Stone Re: Columbine I know that you’re a busy man. You’ve got a lot on your mind and only a few weeks to go before you clean out your desk. So I’ll try to keep this short. I realize, too, that you’re tired…
In the digital age, it’s a simple matter for a police agency to record incoming calls for help. Every 911 call, from the most trivial to the most urgent — say, a call from a frantic cafeteria worker at a local high school reporting gunfire and three victims down –…
When a public official takes on duties that appear to be at cross purposes, it’s said that the job requires him to wear “many hats.” If that’s the case, then Dave Thomas sports more headgear than a marching band. As three-term district attorney of Jefferson County, Thomas is the lead…
Jefferson County just doesn’t get the message. When confronted with bad news, Jeffco inevitably decides to kill the messenger rather than contemplate the message. Which, almost as inevitably, is this: Someone screwed up. Again. The most recent screwup involves more leaked documents coming out of the Columbine investigation (the grand-champion…
The people have a right to know — but public officials have a slippery grasp on that basic tenet of democracy. On Monday, Attorney General Ken Salazar and Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas convened the first meeting of a task force designed to clear the air around Columbine –…
Four years ago, the race for Jefferson County sheriff attracted about as much attention as a quilting bee in Punkin Center. The campaign, which pitted a powerful Republican county commissioner against a little-known Arvada police commander running as an independent, produced few fireworks and had a predictable outcome. This time…
“Shame on you.” Like monkeys and reporters, state lawmakers can be a shameless bunch. But that didn’t stop Randy Brown from heaping shame on members of the House Civil Justice and Judiciary Committee last week. After four hours of emotion-charged testimony, including pleas by Brown and other parents to seek…
On a Monday in early January, Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Taylor was finally brought to account for the strange and disturbing story he’d been telling about the Columbine massacre for nearly three years. Summoned that morning to a meeting with internal affairs, Taylor admitted that the story was, in…
The families of the Columbine victims leave no stone unturned as they search for the truth. They keep looking under rocks, making dark discoveries — and then the worms start turning. The worms have been wiggling every which way since U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock threw out most of the…
A year before the shootings at Columbine High School, Eric David Harris already had the plan worked out in his head. He knew what time to attack the school in order to kill and maim the most students. He knew where he and fellow gunman Dylan Klebold, alias “V” or…
Last week’s dismissal of most of the lawsuits against police and school officials stemming from the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School left frustrated victims’ families contemplating a wide range of responses, from legal appeals and legislation to renewed calls for a grand jury to investigate possible police misconduct. If…
The Fire Last Time They dreamed of fire. It would be a cleansing fire, fueled by propane, gasoline, gunpowder, homemade napalm — and their own savage hatred. Explosion after explosion, building to a conflagration that would settle all arguments and consume hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives. At first, when the…
For the past eighteen months, ever since Columbine families filed nine lawsuits against him and his agency, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone has refused to talk to reporters about the school massacre. When other county officials deign to comment on the police response to the attack, they invariably parrot the…
Two weeks ago, when Kmart officials announced that their stores would stop selling handgun ammunition, they described the decision as a shift in “merchandising strategy” that had been in the works for some time. It was just a coincidence, they suggested, that Kmart executives had met with filmmaker Michael Moore…
Judging from the Denver dailies, the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission completed a masterful bit of finger-pointing last week. Following the long-awaited release of the commission’s final report at a Statehouse press conference on May 17, both newspapers featured front-page photos of Governor Bill Owens stabbing a forefinger at the cameras…
For a moment last Friday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock sounded like one of the Brothers Karamazov — the brooding, metaphysically challenged one. “If you’re confronted with evil, what do you do about it?” he asked the attorneys gathered in his courtroom. “If you do nothing, doesn’t that become evil…
The last two weeks have not been the best of times for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The agency has been in serious damage-control mode since the court-ordered release of hundreds of pages of police records that indicated the JCSO was telling something less than the whole truth about its…
David Gelber adjusts his tie. He tugs it left, then right again. It’s as if he’s trying to get more oxygen without disrobing, as if what’s needed right now is a little fresh air, something to cleanse his lungs of the bad odor wafting through the halls of the Jefferson…
In an effort to streamline what promises to be a lengthy legal process, all fourteen lawsuits filed by families of people injured or killed in the shootings at Columbine High School have been moved to federal court in Denver. But an attorney for two of the families says his clients…
What may have been the defining moment in the history of the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission unfolded last month. Consigned to a small meeting room in the basement of the Jefferson County Justice Center, struggling to make sense of the worst school massacre the country has ever seen and faced…
One of the most glaring deficiencies of the sheriff’s report is its cursory treatment of the circumstances that led up to the attack. “While this report establishes a record of the events of April 20,” it states, “it cannot answer the most fundamental question — WHY?…The evidence provides no definitive…
