Crime & Police

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.

Rich Wyatt, the star of American Guns, a once-popular Discovery Channel program that showcased him, his telegenic family, including wife Renee and kids Paige and Kurt, and his business, Wheat Ridge’s Gunsmoke Guns, has been sentenced to 78 months, or six-and-a-half years, in prison for conspiring to deal firearms without a license and multiple tax charges. The verdict, which comes nearly a year after he was found guilty of these offenses, represents the ultimate comedown for a once-prominent TV personality who rubbed shoulders with celebrities such as rock star Ted Nugent and even a former President of the United States, George W. Bush.

In early 2016, we told you about the Western Slope arrest of former Texas death-row resident Claude Wilkerson for allegedly keeping a woman chained to his bed and repeatedly raping her. Just over two years later, Wilkerson has agreed to a plea deal in the case, and it’s a sweet one. He’s admitted guilt to a pair of lesser charges, for which he’ll serve just six years behind bars and three on probation — an astonishingly brief sentence given the initial description of his crimes.

One of the most disturbing crime stories in the nation right now involves Vincent Terry, who was arrested in Florida for allegedly killing his pregnant wife, Chrystal Terry, and taking photos of her corpse. But a Colorado connection to the case that we reported about nearly four years ago makes the latest events even more horrific.

Earlier this month, Richard Darling was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for allegedly killing, dismembering and “filleting” the body of Rey Pesina in an Aurora homeless encampment on Halloween of 2015. The sentence would seem to offer some solace to Candace Chamberlain, who was romantically involved with both men before getting caught in the middle of their fatal conflict. But more than two years later, she’s still struggling to deal with her memories from that awful day.

In 2016, as we’ve reported, at least eleven women accused nurse Tom Moore of improperly touching them while he was supposed to be providing medical care. Now, he’s been given a twelve-year sentence for unlawful sexual contact in the 17th Judicial District, to run concurrently with a dozen year jolt previously doled out in Weld County. But according to one of Moore’s multiple arrest affidavits, the amount of time he’s been ordered to serve is only a little longer that the decade during which he allegedly used his profession as a means to violate one female victim after another.

In March 2017, as we’ve reported, former Longmont medical marijuana dispensary owner Rocky Pedersen was arrested for an AR-15-toting pot-shop robbery spree. He’s now been sentenced to fourteen years behind bars for a series of crimes that he blames on his switch from cannabis to heroin.

An attendee at a town hall in Erie held following the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida says pro-gun state representative Lori Saine supported her argument that teachers should be armed by claiming Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had supported gun control and lobbied the state legislature to make schools gun-free zones to prevent return fire during the lethal April 20, 1999 attack that took the lives of twelve students and a teacher. Moreover, the account is backed by two others who were also at the town hall.

As we’ve noted, reporters and anchors covering the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have frequently mentioned the disturbing similarity between images from the latest tragic event, during which seventeen people died, and those from the April 20, 1999, attack on Columbine High School in Littleton. But there’s another tie between these tragedies beyond bloodshed and heartache. Politicians and stakeholders desperate to deflect calls for tougher gun laws are once again suggesting that violence in popular culture is more responsible for what happened in Parkland than are easily procured automatic weapons. And as was the case after Columbine, one of the main whipping boys is actor Keanu Reeves.

The February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida has sparked numerous threats in Colorado, where student arrests and increased security at various facilities have occurred statewide during recent days, as well as plenty of conversation about whether new gun-control laws are needed. Against this backdrop, Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario has stirred controversy aplenty by way of a Facebook video on view here in which he suggests that blaming weapons for such incidents is flat-out nonsensical.

The number of Colorado students arrested for making threats in the wake of the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida continues to grow. By our count, there have been at least five busts of this type in the state over the past week, including one involving a fifth grader, with three additional incidents leading to increased security measures at other schools. Four of the threats took place in metro Denver, which is known worldwide for the 1999 attack at Columbine High School, whose April 20 anniversary is scheduled to be marked by a national student walk-out.

To battle drugs smuggled in the mail, the Colorado Department of Corrections will no longer allow inmates to receive post cards, greeting cards, or “any items containing drawings.”

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last week has inspired plans for marches and student walkouts to call for tougher gun laws, including one scheduled to take place on April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. But it also appears to have motivated a number of threats at Colorado schools, with three arrests taking place in recent days. Those taken into custody include a Jefferson County High School student whose social-media joke went terribly wrong.

Despite blustery comments from President Donald Trump on Twitter, it’s now difficult to refute that Russia influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The 37-page indictment that emerged from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation on Friday, February 16, was a political bombshell; the stunning document charges that three…