Crime & Police

On August 27, the Colorado Department of Corrections revealed the death of inmate Benjamin Davis, one of the state’s most notorious prisoners, at Wyoming State Penitentiary, to which he’d been transferred. Davis, who is is suspected of committing suicide, was the reputed leader of a white-supremacist prison gang known as the 211 Crew and a potential player in the 2013 execution-style murder of CDOC executive director Tom Clements.

Patrick Engle has been sentenced to 96 years in prison for a March 2016 crash that killed young mom Jessica Holman. He’s one of four people sentenced in the case, which involved a stolen truck, a police pursuit, a lying mother and grandmother and Engle’s past as a habitual criminal.

Yesterday, August 22, a U.S. District Court judge sentenced Highlands Ranch resident Caroline Zarate Boyle after she pleaded guilty to ripping off her former employer, the U.S. Postal Service, by pretending to have cancer. This admission and the punishment she’ll receive as a result, outlined below, have earned her a place in the Colorado Cancer Faker Hall of Fame, which has inducted seven members in the past eight years.

The July 25 post “Shawn Geerdes’s Marijuana-Grow Murder Used to Attack Legal Pot” asserted that 18th Judicial District DA and 2018 Colorado gubernatorial candidate George Brauchler had attempted to score political points with anti-cannabis critics by way of post-prosecution statements such as, “Here is yet another violent crime related to marijuana. Whatever benefits there may be from the legalization of marijuana, eradicating violent crime associated with it is not one of them.” Here’s his response.

Tattoo artist Brian Pattison has been found guilty of killing Shane Richardson last year, then starting a fire that closed Rosenberg’s Bagels & Deli, an iconic eatery located in the same structure, for months. Prosecutors say Pattison came to Denver from his home in Colorado Springs for a “tattoo party” at Richardson’s place that went terribly wrong, and surveillance footage from Rosenberg’s proved key in solving the case.

Donald Lucero has been arrested for a series of assaults Tuesday, August 15, on the 16th Street Mall, including the alleged punching of a man for laughing. It’s the highest-profile crime on the Mall since last year, when multiple fights and random attacks were caught on video. Authorities responded by instituting a new safety plan that appears to have lessened but not eliminated violence in the iconic shopping area.

One year ago today, we published a post about outrage over the light sentence given to convicted rapist Austin Wilkerson, a former CU Boulder student. Turns out, though, that Wilkerson’s punishment was even more modest than originally advertised. He’s already a free man, after reportedly being released from a two-year work-release obligation twelve months early.

David Batty, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for killing Tonya Lei Webster last year, has been sentenced to 48 years in jail. It’s the maximum punishment possible in Colorado for the crime. But the horrific nature of Batty’s actions, which included sodomizing Webster with a novelty baseball bat after strangling her to death, was only one reason for the length of this jolt.

A man living in the metro area says the response of the Denver Police Department to the recent theft of his vehicle was so slow, rude and ineffectual that he decided to search for it himself. He adds that many hours later, after finding the vehicle on his own, the officer he called to clear the case was more polite than his predecessors. But the cop’s comments about the charges and fees he’d incur for an investigation and the long odds of catching the culprit ultimately convinced him that the DPD would be of no help. So he took the vehicle home and shared his experiences on a neighborhood Internet bulletin board, prompting plenty of similar tales from folks living near him.

Steffan Tubbs is out at KOA’s Colorado Morning News following his July 30 arrest on suspicion of domestic violence, disturbance by phone. Late last night, after word of the split broke, Tubbs went on Facebook to share the thoughts of his fourteen-year-old son, who told him, “It’s just too much.”

Ignacio Luque-Verdugo received the maximum sentence in a 2014 triple shooting at Aurora’s Bronco Bar that the judge in the case described as an execution. Prosecutors said a man killed in the incident was shot six times, with five of the bullets fired into his back after he was already down.

An Alamosa judge has ordered a new trial in the case of Krystal Voss, who was convicted of child abuse in the death of her 19-month-old son and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The reversal is another setback for advocates of “shaken baby syndrome,” a diagnosis that’s been attacked by skeptics as junk science.

After suffering three grand mal seizures in a nine-hour period, Justin Stieb was placed in an observation cell, where he was supposed to be closely monitored by camera. But was he?

His obituary describes Kabelman’s death as “a tragic accident,” but Lakewood police detectives have declined to declare it an accident or a suicide.

Gun violence is a common occurrence in Colorado. In July, at least 67 incidents involving guns took place across the state. Not all of them resulted in injury or death, but each could have. See where they happened here.

This week siblings of Michael Blagg went to court to try to get information released in the state’s tight-lipped attempt to convict Blagg a second time around for murdering his wife — including defense documents that they believe identify a possible alternate suspect.

Keith Hammock has been found guilty of second-degree murder and more for killing one teenager and wounding another last October after they’d jumped a fence into his backyard, where he was growing marijuana. The verdict demonstrates the limitations of Colorado’s famous Make My Day law, especially when it comes to pot grows deemed illegal.

Darius Ratcliff has been found guilty of first-degree assault against the peace officer who shot him on July 31, 2016, the day before his twentieth birthday. Exactly a year later, on this July 31, he’ll be back in court for a hearing related to a separate murder charge. And that prosecution will be followed by four more related to multiple counts of attempted murder and burglary, as well as a failed escape attempt.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has affirmed the conviction of Harold Henthorn, who authorities say killed his second wife, Dr. Toni Henthorn, by pushing her off Deer Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park in 2012. In so doing, the jurists unanimously rejected Henthorn’s argument that the original court biased the jury against him by allowing testimony about the suspicious death of Henthorn’s first wife, Lynn, and a serious accident suffered by Toni the year before her death.

Convicted meth dealer Raymond Cordova has pleaded guilty to desecrating a human body in the tragic case of Kelly Mae Myers, an eighteen-year-old Grand Junction resident. Authorities now believe Myers, who went missing in late 2014, died of an overdose while in the company of Cordova, who cut up her body and stuffed it into a suitcase that was found several months later.

Thirteen people associated with Hoppz’ Cropz stores in Colorado Springs, including co-owners Joseph Hooper, also known as “Joey Hops,” and Dara Wheatley, nicknamed “Boss Lady,” have been indicted on charges that they illegally distributed nearly 200 pounds of marijuana in a variation on the sort of “free” pot giveaway schemes that date back to the days before and just after the launch of legal recreational cannabis sales.

The ACLU of Colorado has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking a dramatic change in the Colorado Department of Corrections hepatitis C policy, calling its approach to rationing treatment a violation of constitutional guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment.