Crime & Police

On November 20, Kenneth Banks pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the death of Fallon Graham, a mother of two shot down outside Aurora’s Montview Bar & Grill two years to the day earlier. He did the same late last month in regard to two Denver murders, including the slaying of D’Andre Mayfield in a drive-by shooting. All three crimes took place during the same three-day period in 2015, and each is said to have been gang-related. Indeed, the prosecutor who effectively handed Banks the third of three life sentences without the possibility of parole says he opened fire on Graham because her companion had chosen to wear the wrong color shoes.

Family members of Alfredo Chavez, 17, fatally shot outside an Adams County grow house last year, are far from satisfied with the official investigation into this death.

Jose Ocampo, the first of two men convicted of murder in the death of aspiring rapper Michael House, has been sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 36 years for his actions. Danielle House, Michael’s sister, is pleased by this punishment, but it hasn’t lessened her sense of loss over the slaying.

Millions upon millions of people have bought and sold items on Craigslist without a problem. But that doesn’t mean horror stories involving the service are unknown, as Anthony Mott understands very well. Last year, the Jefferson County homeowner was tied up, threatened with a knife and robbed by two men who responded to a Craigslist ad, one of whom Mott managed to kill after freeing himself. Now, David Mascarenas, the surviving partner in crime, has pleaded guilty and faces decades behind bars for his role in this nightmare scenario.

Last week, authorities in Pueblo conducted a new series of searches in the case of Kelsie Schelling, a onetime resident of Denver (she lived in the Larimer Square area) who vanished more than four years ago after heading south to tell her boyfriend, Donthe Lucas, that she was pregnant. The searches focused on locations associated with Lucas, a person of interest in Schelling’s disappearance, and while they turned up no new evidence linking him to the disappearance, he was arrested days later at Denver International Airport for an unrelated robbery case — although one commenter on the Help Find Kelsie Facebook page saw a connection anyhow.

Freshly assembled data provides a new angle on Colorado places with the most arrests for intoxicated driving even as it offers fodder in the debate about whether stoned drivers are as big a threat as drunk ones. Areas with the largest number of marijuana businesses tend to have among the lowest rates of filings for driving under the influence or driving while ability impaired in the state. Additionally, less populous regions are apt to have more per capita DUIs and DWAIs than counties with big cities and crowded highways.

While opioid addiction is widely understood to constitute a national crisis, there’s disagreement about how best to tackle the problem, with some advocates arguing in favor of a health-care focus and others backing get-tough law enforcement tactics. But the latter approach fell short in the high-profile case of Sam Brunelus, who was busted on suspicion of manslaughter in 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.

The latest figures in regard to the most stolen vehicles in Colorado reveal a definite correlation between the rides most likely to be swiped in Denver and the state as a whole. And while the two most frequently targeted cars have remained the same for years, trucks have made major moves up the list.

Last night, November 9, the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office revealed the discovery of two men who’d been shot to death west of Simla, Colorado at what’s characterized as an illegal marijuana grow. The incident feeds into the law-enforcement narrative that cannabis sales have led to increased violence in the state days after the fifth anniversary of Amendment 64, the 2012 measure that sanctioned the practice in regard to recreational pot.

According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, 375 drivers in the state were arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence throughout Halloween weekend. That’s a huge increase from the same weekend last year. And the numbers are also way up for for busts over what CDOT refers to as its “Fall Festivals DUI Enforcement Period,” with law enforcement agencies averaging a staggering 47 driving-under-the-influence arrests per day during that span.

Since early 2015, authorities in Aspen have sought to make Landin Smith pay for two separate incidents in which he kicked members of the local police department. But in the end, Smith received no jail time for giving officers the boot, even though he’s committed similar acts so often that he was nicknamed the Aspen Cop Kicker. Moreover, Smith has spent plenty of time behind bars for his previous actions.

Jennifer Reali, popularly known as the “Fatal Attraction” killer, has reportedly been granted parole following a bumpy ride through the criminal justice system. In 2011, her sentence for murder was commuted by then-Governor Bill Ritter, but the state parole board subsequently rejected three appeals centered largely on the depth of her Christian faith.

The day after former Colorado resident Devin Kelley murdered 26 people at a Sutherland Springs, Texas church on November 5, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that this tragedy has pushed the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, the subject of his 2002 Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, from the list of America’s ten worst mass shootings.

On Sunday, November 5, just over a month after Stephen Paddock killed more than fifty people at a Las Vegas country music concert, and less than a week since Scott Ostrem gunned down three at a Thornton Walmart, a man named Devin Patrick Kelley murdered at least 26 parishioners at a church in tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas. We’ve subsequently learned that Kelley is a former member of the Air Force and a onetime resident of Colorado Springs who appears to have been fueled by strong feelings about religion, as were at least two killers who shook the community in the past.

Yesterday, November 2, as we reported, 47-year-old Scott Ostrem was arrested for allegedly killing three people at a Thornton Walmart the previous evening. In the hours since then, we’ve learned much more about Ostrem’s victims, Victor Vasquez, Pam Marques and Carlos Moreno, and the man who apparently took their lives at random. Far from being a terrorist, Ostrem appears to be another angry, frustrated white man taking out his failings on innocent people.

The Thornton Police Department has announced that Scott Ostrem, the only named suspect in a triple murder at a Walmart store yesterday, November 1, has been taken into custody.

According to a recently filed lawsuit, Michael Bailey spent 52 days in jail because the Colorado sheriff’s office where he was wanted for a minor offense didn’t bother to pick him from the facility that held him. And a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is backing the complaint, says his story is far from unique.

Fifty years after the Summer of Love, it’s still a little-known fact that Denver had been home to two major LSD laboratories. Even though the operations were short-lived, they created significant repercussions — not just legally for their operators, but for the psychedelic movement as a whole.

The headline of a post published in this space last year posed the question, “Is Pueblo the Drug Bust Capital of Colorado?” And in recent months, law enforcement in the community has answered this question with a resounding “yes,” particularly when it comes to marijuana crimes with an international flavor. In a series of raids over the past four months, the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, working in conjunction with other agencies, has seized more than 8,000 cannabis plants at allegedly illegal grows associated with foreign nationals. Among those arrested as part of the operations were eight men from Mexico and four from Cuba.

Denver police officer Ryan Burke was arrested last month after allegedly harassing his former girlfriend so persistently at an area hotel that representatives from the business called his fellow cops on him. But this is hardly the first time he’s been in trouble with either his employer or local officials. He’s been suspended twice during the past four years by the Denver Police Department, and the Denver City Council paid thousands to settle an excessive-force lawsuit that named him. The latter was used to help establish a pattern and practice of law-enforcement brutality by attorneys for the family of Marvin Booker, whose death in Denver jail resulted in a $6 million settlement — and the Booker case was recently sent to a grand jury because of new information about a potential coverup.

Last week, as we’ve reported, a charge of domestic violence via telephone was dismissed against Steffan Tubbs, the longtime host of KOA’s Colorado Morning News, who subsequently wrote on social media that he was “always innocent” and identified himself as a domestic-violence victim. Now, Tubbs’s attorney and his accuser are speaking out and sharing startling and sometimes contradictory details about the incident and the relationship from which it sprang even as the Denver City Attorney’s Office confirms that the case is currently under appeal.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, dubbed the Underwear Bomber after a failed attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas 2009, was imprisoned at ADX Florence, aka Supermax, in 2012, immediately making him one of the most notorious terrorists housed in Colorado. Now, Abdulmutallab has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the federal Bureau of Prisons in which he claims that he’s been prevented from properly practicing his Muslim faith, force-fed during hunger strikes staged to protest his treatment and belittled by guards who showed him photos of nude women during prayer time.