Crime & Police

Freshly assembled data provides a new angle on Colorado places with the most arrests for intoxicated driving even as it offers fodder in the debate about whether stoned drivers are as big a threat as drunk ones. Areas with the largest number of marijuana businesses tend to have among the lowest rates of filings for driving under the influence or driving while ability impaired in the state. Additionally, less populous regions are apt to have more per capita DUIs and DWAIs than counties with big cities and crowded highways.

While opioid addiction is widely understood to constitute a national crisis, there’s disagreement about how best to tackle the problem, with some advocates arguing in favor of a health-care focus and others backing get-tough law enforcement tactics. But the latter approach fell short in the high-profile case of Sam Brunelus, who was busted on suspicion of manslaughter in the deaths of two men to whom he allegedly provided heroin laced with carfentanil, an extremely powerful synthetic opioid best known as an elephant tranquilizer.

The latest figures in regard to the most stolen vehicles in Colorado reveal a definite correlation between the rides most likely to be swiped in Denver and the state as a whole. And while the two most frequently targeted cars have remained the same for years, trucks have made major moves up the list.

Last night, November 9, the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office revealed the discovery of two men who’d been shot to death west of Simla, Colorado at what’s characterized as an illegal marijuana grow. The incident feeds into the law-enforcement narrative that cannabis sales have led to increased violence in the state days after the fifth anniversary of Amendment 64, the 2012 measure that sanctioned the practice in regard to recreational pot.

According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, 375 drivers in the state were arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence throughout Halloween weekend. That’s a huge increase from the same weekend last year. And the numbers are also way up for for busts over what CDOT refers to as its “Fall Festivals DUI Enforcement Period,” with law enforcement agencies averaging a staggering 47 driving-under-the-influence arrests per day during that span.

Since early 2015, authorities in Aspen have sought to make Landin Smith pay for two separate incidents in which he kicked members of the local police department. But in the end, Smith received no jail time for giving officers the boot, even though he’s committed similar acts so often that he was nicknamed the Aspen Cop Kicker. Moreover, Smith has spent plenty of time behind bars for his previous actions.

Jennifer Reali, popularly known as the “Fatal Attraction” killer, has reportedly been granted parole following a bumpy ride through the criminal justice system. In 2011, her sentence for murder was commuted by then-Governor Bill Ritter, but the state parole board subsequently rejected three appeals centered largely on the depth of her Christian faith.

The day after former Colorado resident Devin Kelley murdered 26 people at a Sutherland Springs, Texas church on November 5, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that this tragedy has pushed the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, the subject of his 2002 Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, from the list of America’s ten worst mass shootings.

On Sunday, November 5, just over a month after Stephen Paddock killed more than fifty people at a Las Vegas country music concert, and less than a week since Scott Ostrem gunned down three at a Thornton Walmart, a man named Devin Patrick Kelley murdered at least 26 parishioners at a church in tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas. We’ve subsequently learned that Kelley is a former member of the Air Force and a onetime resident of Colorado Springs who appears to have been fueled by strong feelings about religion, as were at least two killers who shook the community in the past.

Yesterday, November 2, as we reported, 47-year-old Scott Ostrem was arrested for allegedly killing three people at a Thornton Walmart the previous evening. In the hours since then, we’ve learned much more about Ostrem’s victims, Victor Vasquez, Pam Marques and Carlos Moreno, and the man who apparently took their lives at random. Far from being a terrorist, Ostrem appears to be another angry, frustrated white man taking out his failings on innocent people.

The Thornton Police Department has announced that Scott Ostrem, the only named suspect in a triple murder at a Walmart store yesterday, November 1, has been taken into custody.

According to a recently filed lawsuit, Michael Bailey spent 52 days in jail because the Colorado sheriff’s office where he was wanted for a minor offense didn’t bother to pick him from the facility that held him. And a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is backing the complaint, says his story is far from unique.

Fifty years after the Summer of Love, it’s still a little-known fact that Denver had been home to two major LSD laboratories. Even though the operations were short-lived, they created significant repercussions — not just legally for their operators, but for the psychedelic movement as a whole.

The headline of a post published in this space last year posed the question, “Is Pueblo the Drug Bust Capital of Colorado?” And in recent months, law enforcement in the community has answered this question with a resounding “yes,” particularly when it comes to marijuana crimes with an international flavor. In a series of raids over the past four months, the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, working in conjunction with other agencies, has seized more than 8,000 cannabis plants at allegedly illegal grows associated with foreign nationals. Among those arrested as part of the operations were eight men from Mexico and four from Cuba.

Denver police officer Ryan Burke was arrested last month after allegedly harassing his former girlfriend so persistently at an area hotel that representatives from the business called his fellow cops on him. But this is hardly the first time he’s been in trouble with either his employer or local officials. He’s been suspended twice during the past four years by the Denver Police Department, and the Denver City Council paid thousands to settle an excessive-force lawsuit that named him. The latter was used to help establish a pattern and practice of law-enforcement brutality by attorneys for the family of Marvin Booker, whose death in Denver jail resulted in a $6 million settlement — and the Booker case was recently sent to a grand jury because of new information about a potential coverup.

Last week, as we’ve reported, a charge of domestic violence via telephone was dismissed against Steffan Tubbs, the longtime host of KOA’s Colorado Morning News, who subsequently wrote on social media that he was “always innocent” and identified himself as a domestic-violence victim. Now, Tubbs’s attorney and his accuser are speaking out and sharing startling and sometimes contradictory details about the incident and the relationship from which it sprang even as the Denver City Attorney’s Office confirms that the case is currently under appeal.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, dubbed the Underwear Bomber after a failed attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas 2009, was imprisoned at ADX Florence, aka Supermax, in 2012, immediately making him one of the most notorious terrorists housed in Colorado. Now, Abdulmutallab has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the federal Bureau of Prisons in which he claims that he’s been prevented from properly practicing his Muslim faith, force-fed during hunger strikes staged to protest his treatment and belittled by guards who showed him photos of nude women during prayer time.

Through the first three quarters of 2017, violent crime as a whole in Denver is up, with the most worrisome leap coming in the homicide category. And while a significant number of neighborhoods in the city have registered few violent offenses, five sport totals in excess of 100 combined episodes of murder, robbery and aggravated assault.

Former Commerce City police officer John Reinhart, who was accused last year of being a serial groper, has been found guilty in two of the three charges against him. And he’s hardly the first metro-Denver-area cop to be accused of sexual impropriety.

As we’ve reported, Montrose County, on Colorado’s Western Slope, pulled its sex-offender list offline following a recent court ruling in which U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch found that such registries constituted cruel and unusual punishment in the case of three plaintiffs. The ruling is specific to the complainants in question, rather than everyone on the roster, and Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has announced her intention to appeal. So why make the move now? According to a representative from the sheriff’s office in Montrose, a fear of lawsuits.

Last year, we told you about the tragic death of Jack Splitt, the fifteen-year-old namesake of Jack’s Law, a landmark bill that allowed young medical marijuana patients in Colorado, like him, to take their cannabis-based medication at school. More than a year later, Mark Pedersen, who made MMJ suppositories that helped alleviate the pain suffered by Splitt as a result of a condition associated with his cerebral palsy, faces five felony pot possession and manufacturing charges in Jefferson County that flowed from the investigation into Jack’s passing despite the fact that there’s no evidence the medication harmed him in any way.

John Ramsey, father of JonBenét Ramsey, who was murdered in her Boulder home on Christmas Day 1996, has filed a $350 million lawsuit against CBS and assorted individuals associated with The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, a 2016 docuseries in which a panel of experts concluded Burke Ramsey, JonBenét’s brother, killed his sister with a blow to the head. In an interview on view below, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood, who also represents Burke in a similar complaint filed late last year, maintains that the suit isn’t specifically intended to prevent news organizations from making such claims in the future, but he’s fine if it has that effect.