Jamaal Edwards, who was charged with two counts of first degree murder after a double murder in January 2015, has been found guilty of a lesser charge in one of the deaths. In the second slaying, the jury failed to reach a verdict, resulting in a mistrial. A new trial has been ordered in the latter case, which took place amid an ugly incident that Edwards is quoted as summing up with the two-word phrase, “Shit happened.”
Cesar Reyes-Marquez has now been found guilty a second time for killing Servando Morelos-Avila nearly seven years ago. The long delay occurred because the first judgment was tossed out over improper jury instructions. The result was a second trial, during which Reyes-Marquez was convicted of similar charges stemming from a fight that spun out of control, with at least two other people winding up seriously injured.
This week’s episode of Showtime’s Dark Net devotes a segment to how Denver financial adviser Steve Talley’s “life was ruined after facial recognition technology tied him to a crime he didn’t commit.”
Denver Police Department personnel took part in twelve officer-involved shootings last year, the most in at least half a decade. On average, a shooting took place once per month in 2016. Six people were killed in the incidents, but no police officers were injured, and neither have any cops been criminally charged to date.
Rocky Allen, an HIV-positive surgical technician sentenced last year to six-and-a-half years behind bars for allegedly swapping out needles in order to inject himself with a powerful opioid, has been ordered to spend an additional year in captivity for taking an unauthorized trip before reporting to prison.
Paralyzed in a police shooting, Darrell Havens fought the system tenaciously — until he passed away, at age 29, in a Colorado Springs hospital.
Brock Franklin has been found guilty on 30 of 34 charges originally pressed against him in an indictment over a violent child sex ring. In addition, five of six alleged Franklin associates accused of taking part in the scheme, which involved physical abuse, a pistol-whipping, forced sex and the use of drugs to maintain loyalty, have received punishment of their own, ranging from deferred sentences to an eighteen-year prison jolt. In the last case, charges were dismissed.
Tyrone Richardson has been sentenced to a jaw-dropping 1,888 years in prison for Lakewood’s 2015 Scream bank robbery. Richardson is the third and final suspect in the heist and subsequent crime spree to receive punishment. Myloh Mason, who was captured after becoming the twelfth Coloradan to be placed on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list, received 1,200 years in prison, while conspirator Miguel Sanders earned a mere 371 years behind bars.
The Denver Police Department provided Westword with the final total of arrests and/or citations for the 2017 version of the Denver 4/20 Rally. The numbers are considerably higher than what was initially reported — twenty citations and five arrests — but fewer than in previous years when the festival was held on a weekend and sometimes covered multiple days.
Denver Police Department statistics reveal the ten Denver neighborhoods with the most crimes per square mile during the early months of 2017. But while the numbers are higher than residents would wish, they’ve actually declined over the past two years in many, if not all, of the areas.
Ignacio Luque-Verdugo has been found guilty of murder and more over a triple shooting at Aurora’s Bronco Bar that forever changed the life of Sergio Cinto-Duran. Sergio’s younger brother, Andres Cinto-Duran, was killed in the incident, and Sergio suffered horrific injuries that have left him paralyzed from the chest down.
All too often these days, we hear about police violence against suspects, as in the 2015 fatal officer-involved shooting of seventeen-year-old Jessie Hernandez, which recently led to a City of Denver settlement of just under $1 million. But there are plenty of times when cops are the victims of violence from individuals they encounter, as is made clear by some startling statistics assembled by the Colorado Springs Police Department. According to FBI data detailed in a series of graphics on view below, more than 1,000 Colorado police officers have been assaulted annually in recent years, with most of those attacks taking place late at night or early in the morning.
Four years after the brutal murder of 22-year-old Christopher Bryant Jr. outside an Aurora sports bar and the serious wounding of his friend, Demetrey Adams, the last of three people charged in the shooting has finally been sentenced. Daeshaun Howard, who is now 22, is the second conspirator to be given life without the possibility of parole for a crime that prosecutors say took place after Bryant danced with a woman who’d been with Howard and company.
Richard Kirk has been sentenced to thirty years in prison for murdering his wife, Kristine Kirk, nearly three years ago, shortly after he’d consumed a marijuana edible. During the hearing at which this punishment was formalized, Kirk implied that the pot candy had spurred the killing, saying, “I had no idea how it would affect me…. I’m so sorry that I became the monster that I was supposed to protect them from.” But a major cannabis business organization maintains that legal marijuana actually reduces crime instead of increasing it.
Jessie Oliver, 34, has been convicted of a September 2015 double shooting that killed Bobby Brown, also 34, and critically wounded a teenage girl. An arrest affidavit in the case reveals that he was arrested in near-record time because a Denver police officer just happened to be close enough the gunfire to see the scene of the crime and hear what went down.
As many as eight possibly gang-related shootings have taken place near the booming RiNo area over the past two weeks or so according to Mark Ungar, president of the Whittier Neighborhood Association, including a thus-far-unsolved broad daylight gun-down near 31st and Gilpin earlier this month that resulted in serious injuries for two men.
Adam Ruiz, 23, has been found guilty of strangling his half-sister, Samantha Welch, and her girlfriend, Celia Reyes, and setting fire to their apartment in a cover-up attempt. The crime took place in Chicago circa October 2014, and Ruiz confessed to the crime in Denver the following July.
CBS has formally asked a court to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of Burke Ramsey over a 2016 docuseries in which a team of analysts concluded that he’d murdered his sister, JonBenét Ramsey, in their Boulder home on Christmas Day 1996. In response, Ramsey family attorney Lin Wood summarily rejects the arguments made by CBS and Dr. Werner Spitz, a participant in the docuseries being sued separately for comments he made last September during a WWJ-AM/CBS Detroit interview publicizing the program.
An opioid epidemic is sweeping across the country and ravaging Denver’s drug addicts. It’s motivation enough for the Harm Reduction Action Center to push for a safe injection site in Denver, and has staff at the Denver Library, whose Central branch has seen six overdoses this year, training on how…
Rocky Pedersen, who has been charged with 35 criminal counts, including attempted first-degree murder, for a series of robberies at marijuana businesses over the past five months, once owned a medical marijuana dispensary that was itself the target of a high-profile robbery back in 2013.
Julian Archuleta resigned as a Denver police officer after pleading guilty to stealing money from the scene of a car crash, a crime documented by his own body camera. But his punishment is a relative wrist-slap.
Zachary Mueller has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Greeley’s Pedro Adrian Dominguez, whose body was stuffed inside a barrel found floating in a creek at a remote location in Nebraska.
