Crime & Police

Since being transferred to a men’s prison from a juvenile correctional facility for females, Lindsay Saunders-Velez, a nineteen-year-old transgender woman, has been raped twice within a matter of months, her attorney says. Yet thus far, Colorado officials refuse to place her into a women’s prison even though her most recent alleged attacker has been returned to the general inmate population at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, where she’s currently being held.

In a new video, Jordan Hancock, son of Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, behaves like an entitled asshat after being stopped for a traffic violation in Aurora. But was the performance enough to unseat reigning champion John Bowlen, ne’er-do-well offspring of Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, as the most douchebaggy celebrity son in the Mile High City?

With Colorado cycling season in full swing, we recently dug into City of Denver traffic data to learn which neighborhoods have been the setting for the most car-versus-bicycle accidents, and the numbers for the top ten were disturbing. In contrast, ten other Denver neighborhoods have a far better record, registering fewer than ten incidents of this type over the past six years.

With the weather improving, more and more cyclists will be hitting the streets of Denver. Unfortunately, in some instances, cars will also be hitting them. But which neighborhoods have been the setting for the most car-versus-bicycle accidents? Westword’s analysis of City of Denver traffic data provides the answers.

According to Denver Police Department data, crime in the Mile High City as a whole is up during the first part of 2018 compared to the same period last year. But the problem is more acute in certain areas than others, as is demonstrated by the following list, which spotlights the specific areas with the most crime reports during the initial three weeks-plus of this month.

More than a month has passed since the Office of the Independent Monitor revealed flaws in the investigative and disciplinary process in the sheriff’s office in response to the death of Michael Marshall, who choked to death on his own vomit while in policy custody more than two years ago while being held on a $100 bond. Now, the freshly appointed executive director of the Department of Safety is recommending changes to the sheriff’s department and a new task force to look into discipline. But does he have the right people in place?

Inspired by the acclaimed movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, the parents of Jessica Ghawi, who was among twelve people killed in the July 2012 Aurora theater shooting, are behind a campaign to use outdoor advertising to shame Representative Mike Coffman and other opponents of gun-control legislation.

A new lawsuit prompted by the fatal police shooting of Dion Damon two years ago this month deals with more than the facts of the tragic case. The document, on view below, also maintains that the incident exemplifies a pattern and practice of the Denver Police Department when it comes to excessive force and attempts to bolster its argument via a select history of ten controversial DPD shootings, many of which resulted in huge settlements funded by local taxpayers.

Her full name was Yevaeh Patrick-Moon, and she was nine when she was found unresponsive in the pool at Colorado Springs’ Hotel Elegante on December 16 of last year. What happened to Yevaeh involves a potential crime. Last month, Lynthia Washington, the grandmother of two young girls who accompanied Yevaeh to the hotel, was arrested and subsequently charged with child abuse — negligently causing death by the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office. She was supposed to be supervising the children at the pool but was allegedly nowhere to be found when Yevaeh sank beneath the waters for the final time.

This Colorado organization has become a national model for preventing school-related cataclysms of all sorts.

Five people, including the principal who retired after the cheerleading splits scandal, and four current administrators, have been charged.

Two leading civil-rights law firms have joined forces to sue the City and County of Denver and Denver police officer Jeffrey Motz in regard to the fatal shooting of Dion Damon, who was gunned down in broad daylight near the Denver Art Museum two years ago this month. The lawsuit alleges that Motz’s “grossly excessive” killing of Damon, a bank robbery suspect who was unarmed at the the time of the incident, was followed by an elaborate Denver Police Department cover-up, and adds that the officer had previously slain two people while on the job yet was only disciplined on a separate occasion when he didn’t squeeze his trigger.

Nearly two months after the tragic February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the debate over the proliferation of guns in the U.S. continues to rage. But while mass casualty events grab the headlines, individual incidents of gun violence, many of which attract little attention, result in fatality figures that are just as shocking. A disturbing example: Since last July, the same number of teenagers have been shot to death in Colorado as were slain at MSDHS.

A new lawsuit maintains that employees at the Summit County jail knew 31-year-old inmate Jacqueline Bickford was suicidal but ignored her medical needs for days prior to her death by hanging inside her cell. It’s at least the third suit this decade against Summit County over alleged institutional misconduct at the facility, with the previous two, including the in-custody death of Zackary Moffitt, resulting in big payouts.

Recent reports that Nikolas Cruz, who shot and killed seventeen people at Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, has been inundated with fan mail and inspired the forming of alternately sympathetic and worshipful social media groups echo some of the disturbing responses that followed the July 20, 2012 Aurora theater shooting, when James Holmes took twelve lives and injured seventy other patrons at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

“Never again” are words that have rung clearly since the death of Michael Marshall in police custody more than a year ago. Denverites are calling on the city of Denver to grant more powers to the Office of the Independent Monitor to keep both the Denver Police Department and the Denver Sheriff’s Department accountable and transparent.

The Colorado Supreme Court recently upheld a lower court’s decision to reverse David Bueno’s first-degree-murder conviction because evidence that might have helped him was withheld in his death-penalty case. Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado Boulder sociology professor and author of The History of the Death Penalty in Colorado, the definitive work on its subject, sees the Bueno case as a particularly compelling argument in favor of ending capital punishment in the state once and for all, and he sees multiple possibilities for how it might finally happen.

Safety on the 16th Street Mall remains a major concern, as evidenced by the large amount of media coverage related to last week’s stabbing death of 29-year-old Derek Sorenson at a 17th and Welton 7-Eleven just steps away from the iconic Denver attraction. And while the 2016 implementation of a new safety plan appears to have decreased crime in the area overall, there’s still a considerable way to go according to our analysis of Denver Police Department data. Over the past month, 46 crimes have taken place on the mall, with sixteen happening on a single block.

The Colorado page of GunMemorial.org is eloquent in its simplicity. Under a slogan that reads, “Real People, Not Just Statistics,” the site offers an online place to salute, celebrate, remember and mourn every single person in the state who dies from gun violence, no matter the circumstances. Included are photos, links and places for family and friends to share details about loved ones whose lives ended so suddenly. Each item stands as an individual tribute, as well as a single image in a larger mosaic that illustrates how much pain, bloodshed and heartache involving firearms takes place in our state on practically a daily basis.

Westminster’s James Mack is the latest Coloradan to be sentenced for mailing marijuana, and it’s no surprise that he earned considerably more than the one year in federal prison doled out to Arvada’s Mark Koenig for the offense last month. While Koenig was found guilty of shipping between 950 grams and 1.6 kilograms of cannabis during four incidents, Mack is said to have posted multiple pounds of pot to Kansas-based cohort Justin Polson on a weekly basis for nearly three years. And this won’t be Mack’s first trip to prison for a high-profile drug case. He was convicted in 2009 for his involvement in a cocaine deal that teamed him with former Denver Bronco Travis Henry.

In February 2016, as we’ve reported, Brandon Johnson and William Lancaster were charged with felony manslaughter for selling Mark Largay fentanyl, a powerful opioid that wound up killing him. Two years later, Johnson has been sentenced for a lesser crime, distributing a controlled substance, but still must serve five years behind bars because of an aggravating factor. Johnson was confined in a community corrections facility in Denver when he took part in what proved to be a fatal transaction.

At 10 a.m. today, March 15, the Northern Colorado Shooting Task Force, originally created to investigate a string of 2015 shootings that included two murders, will hold its first media briefing in recent memory. Law enforcers are expected to provide details about the arrest of Christopher Parker, a 35-year-old who made a court appearance yesterday in connection with one of aforementioned killings: the apparently random gun-down of William “Bill” Connole, Jr., 65, on a Loveland street in June of that year.