Crime & Police

A 2015 survey found that 86 percent of emergency medical services personnel reported critical stress; a job that entails frequent exposure to others’ once-in-a-lifetime tragedies takes a toll. But now programs like Building Warriors are teaching that culture is key to the mental health of these first responders.

Just over two years ago, we told you the shocking story of Desmond Smith, a fourteen year old allegedly murdered over a Cricket cellphone. More than two years later, three men have been sentenced in the case, which began with a particularly senseless act of violence and escalated into family drama in which a son agreed to testify against the father whose crime involved covering up for him and his uncle.

A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a man who suffered numerous seizures during a 20-day stay at the Douglas County jail last year claims that jail officials “purposefully destroyed” video evidence in the case.

News that two thirteen-year-olds who allegedly compiled a “kill list” related to their middle school have been arrested in Colorado Springs hardly qualifies as shocking at this point. In the more than eighteen years since the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School, folks in the state have seen far too many instances of young students being arrested for alleged school threats and violent plots, as documented below.

The State of Colorado, acting for the Department of Corrections, has agreed to pay a fairly modest $171,000 to settle a lawsuit in the torturous, slow-motion, completely preventable jail death of Dennis Choquette in November 2016. But Choquette’s estate has also reached confidential agreements with a slew of other defendants, including a giant private-prison company that owns the facility where most of the horrors took place. And given the disturbing facts of the case, which we first outlined this past February, after the complaint was filed, the sum of the settlements is almost certainly much, much larger.

Critics have long complained about the relatively light sentences given to some prominent white, privileged college students found guilty of sex crimes, and this week brings another example of the phenomenon. Jack Warmolts, a onetime Air Force Cadet who pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and unlawful sexual contact in October 2016, is now back on the streets after serving only eight months of a one-year term. However, ex-CU Denver student John D. Kennedy was sentenced to a minimum of nine years for sexual assault and more in part because his victim wrote an impassioned letter asking the judge in the case not to “allow another predator to go free.”

As seen in the photo above, Keith Hammock was once the driver for the Rasta Bus, a service that won a Best of Denver award in 2006. But if this recognition was a high point for him, yesterday marked an all-time low. On October 4, Hammock was sentenced to eighty years in prison for a 2016 shooting of two teens who invaded his home marijuana grow. One of the teens died in the incident.

Tanner Flores, nineteen, has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Ashley Doolittle, his girlfriend, in June 2016. Later today, October 5, he’s expected to be sentenced in the case. He faces a possible life term plus 32 years for kidnapping. As we noted in our previous post, on view below, Flores killed Doolittle near Berthoud, then transported her body across the state in his truck before being arrested in the Collbran area.

Christian Willis is the third person to be sentenced for playing a role in a robbery-gone-wrong that led to the fatal September 2015 shooting of Darren Bloomquist, a 49-year-old Air Force veteran who was moonlighting as a cab driver to support his disabled wife. According to the Denver District Attorney’s Office, the police report in the case remains sealed. However, we know that Willis and Nicholas McKinney, who were both juveniles when the crime took place, will spend decades in stir even though their older pal Dasean Perry actually fired the fatal shot.

At this writing, at least fifty people are reportedly dead and hundreds more were wounded after a mass shooting attack by Stephen Paddock during a Jason Aldean appearance outside the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas on Sunday night, October 1. These numbers make it the deadliest event of its kind in U.S. history, but hardly an isolated one. In the five years-plus since July 20, 2012, when twelve people were killed and seventy were injured during James Holmes’s attack at the Century 16 theater in Aurora, 1,864 incidents like it have taken place, according to online estimates.

Tony Blue’s 64-year prison sentence for armed robbery has been overturned after his attorneys discovered that the state’s star witness in the case had been found mentally incompetent in another criminal prosecution 20 years earlier.

Two years after we told you about Melvin Lewis’s arrest for punching his girlfriend amid an argument in which she killed a dog, he’s back in the news again. This time, he’s accused of stealing from bags at Denver International Airport, where he worked, and his specific focus is said to have been guns.

Aurora theater shooter James Holmes has been on the move within the prison system since a 2015 attack on him by Mark “Slim” Daniels, who apologized in a letter to our Alan Prendergast for being unable to send the man who killed twelve people and injured seventy others at the Aurora Century 16 theater on July 20, 2012, to “Satan’s lake of fire.” Now, for the first time in more than a year, we finally know his location. At present, he’s being held at the United States penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

Instead of ending his career, Matt Vogl’s raw honesty about his bipolar diagnosis and thoughts of suicide opened a new chapter. Four years later, he heads the National Mental Health Innovation Center, an Anschutz Foundation-backed, $10 million startup of his own design.

David Flores doesn’t mind if stories linger online about his 2010 arrest for bank robbery. He was definitely guilty of committing the crime, as he readily admits. But what pisses him off is that those articles portray him as an idiot who was literally caught red handed after trying to use stolen currency stained, along with his fingers, by a dye pack that exploded as he made his getaway. He insists that the truth is a lot more complicated, and a lot less dumb.

The Colorado Department of Corrections is recalculating the possible parole dates of close to 3000 inmates, in the wake of two court decisions indicating that the state is keeping prisoners behind bars for months or years longer than their intended sentences.

Montrose County, on Colorado’s Western Slope, has pulled its sex offender list offline, reportedly because of 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 action was taken despite the fact that 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.

Just shy of 4:30 a.m. today, September 20, the Denver Police Department tweeted about a shooting near the intersection of 31st and Marion Street. The condition of the victim, who was transported to a local hospital after reportedly being found in a car, isn’t known at this time. But the incident is one more indication that gentrification in the RiNo, Cole and Whittier neighborhoods hasn’t stopped the violence that has afflicted the area in the recent past.

On Sunday, September 17, as we’ve reported, the local animal activist group Denver Baby Animal Save posted a video about what it characterizes as a rescue of three chickens from Long Shadow Farm in Berthoud. Larry and Kristin Ramey, the co-owners of the farm, call it something else: theft that involved a demonstration they believe was staged as a diversion, “terrible” music, undercover operatives, lies and taking advantage of an eight-year-old.

Yesterday, September 17, Denver Baby Animal Save posted a Facebook video detailing what the activist group characterizes as the rescue of three chickens from a local business identified elsewhere online as Long Shadow Farm in Berthoud. The clip, on view below, has resulted in an explosion of responses on social media, prompting a debate about whether this action constituted a bold gesture on behalf of respect for all living creatures or criminal behavior.

A judge’s lengthy decision in the capital case against Sir Mario Owens a good indication of how complex the case has become through more than a decade of legal maneuvering.