Attention, Denver! Please keep your wallet in your front pocket at all times, shred all documents, and ask your girlfriend for two forms of ID before you let her in your apartment. Because apparently it’s Really Brazen But Not All That Clever Scam Week. First, of course, it was reported…
Now that former Qwest CEO and convicted inside trader Joe Nacchio has been ordered to report to prison on April 14 — and presumably has to file his income tax return a day early — we want to make sure his stay goes smoothly, pending the outcome of his never-ending…
A mere sixteen months ago, Casey Holden’s life was neatly stored within seventy square feet of cell space in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Released in January 2007 directly to the street after four years of 23-hour-a-day lockdown and a decade spent mostly behind bars, the 26-year-old seemed to be facing…
When Casey Holden hit the streets last January, fresh from four years of solitary confinement and an adult life spent almost entirely behind bars, the odds of him going anywhere but right back to the Colorado prison system were extra-heavy. Sam-Adams-before-NFL-training-camp kind of heavy. How’s a 26-year-old ex-con with an…
When we last checked in with Casey Holden, he was scraping by as a wage slave at a pizza joint in Grand Junction. This was a better life than being locked down in the Colorado state pen, mind you, but a bit short of Holden’s dreams of getting an education,…
Casey Holden has a job, a bank account and an identification card issued by the State of Colorado. But in the eyes of many government agencies and private employers, he doesn’t quite exist. He lacks the essential paper trail. Holden, 26, lost track of his vital personal records — birth…
Locked down for years, Casey Holden hardly ever talked to anyone. He lived inside his head because there was no one around but the guards, and they were, well, guards. His social skills, never elaborate to begin with, devolved into a series of grunts and cold stares. Now Holden is…
Casey Holden and his parole officer seem to be getting along just fine so far. She approves of his decision to go to school, to try to make something of himself after spending most of the last decade behind bars. He appreciates that she treats him like a human being,…
Fresh out of prison and hunting for a job, Casey Holden has picked up a few dirty looks and plenty of don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-yous. Now 26, Holden has been locked up most of the time since he’s sixteen, including the last four years in Colorado’s supermax — not the best place to…
Sitting in a seven-by-ten-foot cell all day, every day, for four years, Casey Holden learned how to do a whole lot of nothing. Now the world expects him to be a go-getter, a self-starter, a juggler of appointments and budgets and mounting financial obligations. And he has only a very…
Casey Holden was sixteen years old when he got locked up on juvenile drug and theft charges. A series of problems while serving his time, including two assaults and cutting off his ankle bracelet when he was almost done, has kept him behind bars most of the last decade. For…
After Eric Harris shot him and left him for dead on the lawn of Columbine High School, all sixteen-year-old Mark Taylor could think about was seeing his family one more time before the life ebbed out of him. Fighting to stay conscious, he prayed, he babbled — and, with the…
Cradling a sawed-off shotgun in his lap, Eric Harris glares into the video camera. He takes a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and winces. Then he talks smack about the pathetic losers involved in school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky. “Do not think we’re trying to copy anyone,”…
It took five years, a state grand jury and key evidence from a reluctant witness, but families who lost children in the attack on Columbine High School finally had their worst suspicions confirmed: Top Jefferson County leaders knew something awful about prior police investigations of killers Eric Harris and Dylan…
In a belated effort to clear the air, the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office offered up its souvenirs of a massacre last Thursday. It was quite a show — but not quite enough to dispel the stink that has clung to the biggest criminal investigation in Colorado history. For a few…
The sign on the door at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office read: “News Conference: Go up stairs and turn right.” Reporters who followed the instructions found themselves in a parking lot. It wasn’t the first time that Jeffco’s finest have sent the press in the wrong direction since the 1999…
Four Aprils ago, as investigators strung yellow crime-scene tape and boarded up bullet-riddled windows around Columbine High School, snow began to fall — a wet, heavy spring storm that masked the carnage in merciful white. But the snow couldn’t quite obscure the spontaneous memorials that were already surfacing on and…
Memo To: Jefferson County Sheriff John P. Stone Re: Columbine I know that you’re a busy man. You’ve got a lot on your mind and only a few weeks to go before you clean out your desk. So I’ll try to keep this short. I realize, too, that you’re tired…
In the digital age, it’s a simple matter for a police agency to record incoming calls for help. Every 911 call, from the most trivial to the most urgent — say, a call from a frantic cafeteria worker at a local high school reporting gunfire and three victims down –…
When a public official takes on duties that appear to be at cross purposes, it’s said that the job requires him to wear “many hats.” If that’s the case, then Dave Thomas sports more headgear than a marching band. As three-term district attorney of Jefferson County, Thomas is the lead…
Jefferson County just doesn’t get the message. When confronted with bad news, Jeffco inevitably decides to kill the messenger rather than contemplate the message. Which, almost as inevitably, is this: Someone screwed up. Again. The most recent screwup involves more leaked documents coming out of the Columbine investigation (the grand-champion…
The people have a right to know — but public officials have a slippery grasp on that basic tenet of democracy. On Monday, Attorney General Ken Salazar and Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas convened the first meeting of a task force designed to clear the air around Columbine –…
