Crime & Police

Last week, the body of Jeanna Leslie was found in her downtown Denver apartment. The former San Antonio, Texas schoolteacher, who’d moved to Colorado mere months earlier and quickly fallen in love with the Mile High City, had been stabbed to death. Now, Terry Dunford, described as a homeless man she’d been trying to help, has been arrested for her slaying, and according to an arrest affidavit accessible below, he made investigators’ job easy by leaving behind a staggering number of clues to his identity.

Jeanna Leslie, 49, was a vibrant free spirit who recently moved from Texas to Denver and quickly fell in love with the community, as she documented in words and photos on her Facebook page. But her obvious joy and excitement over moving into a downtown apartment and starting a new adventure now echoes with poignancy. The page has become a heartbreaking memorial to Leslie, who was stabbed to death in her Mile High City home.

On February 28, Colorado’s Senate’s State, Veterans & Military Affairs committee will consider a bill that would repeal a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines, which allow guns to shoot more than fifteen rounds of ammunition.

Reporters and anchors covering yesterday’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, frequently mentioned the disturbing similarity between images from the latest tragic event, during which seventeen people died, and those from the April 20, 1999 attack on Columbine High School in Littleton. But Columbine’s terrible legacy has been felt consistently over the intervening eighteen-plus years. As documented below, the Parkland incident was at least the 208th school shooting to take place in Columbine’s wake.

A Denver Police Department commander says that the cop at the center of an officer-involved shooting on the 2200 block of South Clermont Street, east of the DU campus, late on Tuesday, February 13, would have been justified in immediately shooting the suspect he encountered, since he was threatening his aged father with both a gun and a knife. Instead, the officer tried to convince the man to give up peacefully and only fired after the man shot his dad in the head. Both father and son died shortly thereafter.

At this hour, investigators are at the scene of an officer-involved shooting on the 2200 block of South Clermont Street, in a neighborhood not far from the University of Denver. At last report, the person shot by a member of the Denver Police Department is in critical condition. The incident marks the fifteenth officer-involved shooting along Colorado’s Front Range since New Year’s Eve, as well as the sixth in nine days. It’s also the second DPD officer-involved shooting since February 5.

Counting the New Year’s Eve gun battle that killed Douglas County Deputy Zackari Parrish, there have been fourteen officer-involved shootings along Colorado’s Front Range over a span of 42 days. This total includes a traffic stop on Saturday, February 10 in Aurora during which an adult male was killed by a member or members of the Aurora Police Department — the fifth OIS in less than a week. During these incidents, eight suspects and three officers have been killed and at least eleven injuries took place involving law enforcers and others.

Last month, we looked into a question posed in the post “Mailing Marijuana Out of Colorado: Are Your Odds of Getting Caught Going Up?” The answer is not yet in, but there’s new evidence that arrestees may be treated severely under the Justice Department of pot hating attorney general Jeff Sessions: Arvada’s Mark Koenig has been sentenced to just over a year in federal prison for the offense.

The defendant in a lawsuit filed by a Muslim inmate in Colorado who was made to shave off his beard in violation of his constitutional right to wear one is referred to as John Doe for an unusual reason. According to the lawyer in the case, the Colorado Department of Corrections has refused to identify the employee who gave the order.

The Denver Office of the Medical Examiner has identified the two victims of a double homicide in Montbello on February 3 as Byron Ware, seventeen, and Abisai Ponce Gutierrez, eighteen. As their loved ones mourn their shocking deaths, which took place on the same block where the burning body of a murder victim was dumped just eighteen months ago, members of the community are scheduled to take part in a march today, February 6, that will call to an end of violence in the fast-growing neighborhood.

As we’ve reported, Montbello, which was recently named Denver’s fastest growing suburb, has been fighting a reputation as a magnet of crime and recently scored a success on that count when a Sav-a-Lot grocery store opened in a neighborhood previously been a food desert. But this weekend brought a far less happy development. On Saturday night, February 3, a double homicide occurred on the same Montbello block where the body of another murder victim was dumped approximately eighteen months earlier.

Back in 2013, we told you about Boobies Rock!, which sent hot girls into bars to sell merchandise emblazoned with the company’s name that supposedly raised money to fight cancer — although many if not most of the proceeds allegedly went into the pocket of the organization’s founder, Adam Shryock. Over the years that followed, Shryock went to jail several times for reasons related to this and other scams, and now, he’s headed back again, for failing to file a tax return in regard to his ill-gotten gains.

Mere months after getting a tattoo on the left side of his chest that read, “Save Your Heart for Someone Who Leaves You Breathless,” Corey Clemons’s heart stopped. In the immediate aftermath of his fatal shooting in Aurora two years ago, few details were released, and that remained the case even after Lloyd Rickey Henderson was arrested and charged with the crime days later. But now, in the wake of Henderson’s conviction and sentencing, we know that the gunman felled Clemons in front of his mother after using a bullet to intervene in a clash between her son and her live-in boyfriend that both parties would have otherwise survived.

Harold Mortis has been sentenced to forty years in prison for the 2016 murder of Tyrone Adair Jr., a performer better known to local music lovers as BossMan Goodie. But Mortis’s senseless act also played a major part in the death of Cold Crush, the hip-hop club where the slaying took place, even though the nightspot didn’t close for good until nearly a year later.

On Halloween night of 2015, 34-year-old Richard Darling allegedly committed a truly horrific crime. He was accused of murdering an acquaintance, Rey Pesina, then dismembering and “filleting” his body before putting it in a barrel and setting it ablaze. More than two years later, Darling has been found guilty of first degree murder, and in the wake of the verdict, the 18th Judicial District DA’s office released his arrest affidavit, which offers shocking details on the circumstances that led to Pesina’s death.

After Joshua Cummings was arrested for the January 31, 2017, execution-style slaying of RTD security officer Scott Von Lanken, his statements about being a soldier for the Islamic state suggested that the killing might have been an act of terrorism. But at trial, the simple, shocking facts of the case, not ISIS, took center stage, and at the conclusion of a brisk three day’s worth of hearings, Cummings was found guilty of first-degree murder.

Hours after the January 24 murder of Adams County Deputy Heath Gumm, the name and a past booking photo of arrested suspect Dreion Martise Dearing began to surface in local and national media reports. But in the wake of a tweet asking several Denver outlets to remove the mug shot or any reference to Dearing, Adams County Sheriff Mike McIntosh essentially castigated the press for compromising the Gumm investigation, even though all of the information appears to have been obtained from official law enforcement sources.

The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld a lower court’s decision to reverse David Bueno’s first-degree murder conviction because evidence that might have helped him was withheld in his death penalty case. To attorney David Lane, who represents Bueno, the ruling casts shame on prosecutors with the 18th Judicial District DA’s office currently occupied by Colorado Attorney General candidate George Brauchler even as it and other controversial cases, including those pertaining to death row residents Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray, undermine the argument for capital punishment in general.

A manhunt continues at this writing in the fatal shooting of Adams County Deputy Heath Gumm while on duty in Thornton last night, January 24. Two suspects are being sought in the second slaying of a metro-area law enforcer in 25 days, and a fundraiser for the Gumm’s family has already been launched.

Aidan Zellmer, fifteen, has been charged as an adult for the June 2017 murder of Kiaya Campbell, a ten-year-old from Thornton. Zellmer, who had not previously been identified by name owing to his age, will be among the youngest individuals in recent Colorado history to be prosecuted for a homicide in the adult system.

Detectives with the Denver Police Department decline to provide anything other than the most basic details about the January 5 double murder at RiNo’s New Welcome Inn bar, which remains under investigation at this writing, and the Reverend Leon Kelly, a prominent anti-gang activist who’s been in contact with the DPD regarding the thus-far-unsolved case, is also cautious with his words. But following the January 19 funeral for victim Guillermo Ornelas, which saw a slew of police officers strategically deployed in the neighborhood around the church where it was held as they kept a watchful eye on mourners, Kelly acknowledges that the incident has “gang overtones.”

A year ago this month, a homicide outside Players Club in Adams County anchored a roundup of eight slayings or attacks at Colorado strip joints. And the violence connected to such venues didn’t end there. In recent months, there have been two more incidents at metro-area strip clubs, with the latest, at Dandy Dan’s on South Federal Boulevard, resulting in a first-degree murder charge against Jared Chavez.