Crime & Police

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.

Prosecutor George Brauchler, who’s running for Colorado governor in 2018, is using Shawn Geerdes’s conviction for murdering Jason Dosa nearly three years ago as an opportunity to criticize legal pot even though the marijuana grow in which the two partnered was illegal.

For years, the tragic 2012 murder of Dylan Redwine shared one major element in common with the JonBenét Ramsey case. In both slayings, a parent or parents were under suspicion, yet law enforcers never brought criminal charges. But that changed on Saturday, July 22, when Mark Redwine, Dylan’s father, was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, on suspicion of killing his son. And a grand jury indictment released in the wake of the bust and accessible below reveals why in greater detail than has been previously shared with the public.

As we’ve reported, alleged Capitol Hill white supremacist William Scott Planer was recently arrested in Colorado Springs on a charge that he put an anti-Semitic sticker on a synagogue, after which authorities discovered that he’s wanted in California on an assault charge. Now, the Traditionalist Worker Party, which has been described as an extremist group, is conducting an online fundraiser for Planer’s defense in which it claims he was merely defending himself and is being victimized because of political pressure from leftists.

The reward being offered for information about the person or persons who killed Travis Mason, a former Marine who was fatally shot while working as a security guard at a marijuana dispensary in June 2016, has been increased to $55,000, more than triple the original amount. Authorities hope the increase will help break the case that’s remained unsolved for more than a year.

Samuel Brunelus, a 23-year-old from Florida, has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and more in relation to 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.

Five years ago today, James Holmes killed twelve people and injured seventy others during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises at the Century 16 theater in Aurora. In the 24 hours afterward, Westword published twenty stories that, when viewed in retrospect, capture the terror and confusion unleashed by this horrific crime.

The July 10 death of William Anderson, a forty-year-old inmate at Denver’s main jail, has led to a war of words between the Denver Sheriff Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Anderson died during a fight with fellow detainee Ricardo Lopez-Vera, nineteen. But while the Denver District Attorney’s Office declined to charge Lopez-Vera in the incident, his undocumented status led to detention by ICE, which claims the DSD released him without properly informing the federal agency even though there was an immigration hold on him.

William Scott Planer, who was accused online of violent activity and affiliation with white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in the Capitol Hill neighborhood late last year, has been arrested in Colorado Springs. He was initially charged with a misdemeanor for placing an anti-Semitic sticker on the door of a synagogue, but he is currently being held on a $500,000 bond related to a felony charge in California, where he allegedly attacked a protester during a white supremacist rally in California last year.

Attorneys representing Austin Holzer, who killed Deputy Derek Geer last year after allegedly warning him, “Dude, you’re gonna get fuckin’ shot,” have filed paperwork suggesting that they may claim self-defense in the case.

According to a just-released report from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, crime in the state circa 2016 was up in every major category, including homicides, rapes, robberies, burglaries and motor-vehicle thefts. The percentage increases over the previous year vary from 0.8 percent to 22 percent.

Violent crime has gone up in Denver during the first half of 2017 as compared to the same period last year. But there’s a wide variation in the number of these offenses from area to area. Denver Police Department statistics for all 78 officially designated city neighborhoods, as shared below, show that two of them didn’t register a single violent crime through the initial six months of this year, while one was the setting for more than 150 offenses in this category.

Earlier today, on the morning of July 10, an inmate was killed at Denver’s main downtown jail. The incident, which a source says involved inmate-on-inmate violence, took place mere hours before speakers at a press conference scheduled to take place outside the facility are expected to demand an investigation into the death of Marvin Booker, who died at the jail on July 9, 2010, nearly seven years ago to the day.