Crime & Police

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.

Through the first three quarters of 2017, violent crime as a whole in Denver is up, with the most worrisome leap coming in the homicide category. And while a significant number of neighborhoods in the city have registered few violent offenses, five sport totals in excess of 100 combined episodes of murder, robbery and aggravated assault.

Former Commerce City police officer John Reinhart, who was accused last year of being a serial groper, has been found guilty in two of the three charges against him. And he’s hardly the first metro-Denver-area cop to be accused of sexual impropriety.

As we’ve reported, Montrose County, on Colorado’s Western Slope, pulled its sex-offender list offline following a recent court ruling in which U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch found that such registries constituted cruel and unusual punishment in the case of three plaintiffs. The ruling is specific to the complainants in question, rather than everyone on the roster, and Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has announced her intention to appeal. So why make the move now? According to a representative from the sheriff’s office in Montrose, a fear of lawsuits.

Last year, we told you about the tragic death of Jack Splitt, the fifteen-year-old namesake of Jack’s Law, a landmark bill that allowed young medical marijuana patients in Colorado, like him, to take their cannabis-based medication at school. More than a year later, Mark Pedersen, who made MMJ suppositories that helped alleviate the pain suffered by Splitt as a result of a condition associated with his cerebral palsy, faces five felony pot possession and manufacturing charges in Jefferson County that flowed from the investigation into Jack’s passing despite the fact that there’s no evidence the medication harmed him in any way.

John Ramsey, father of JonBenét Ramsey, who was murdered in her Boulder home on Christmas Day 1996, has filed a $350 million lawsuit against CBS and assorted individuals associated with The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, a 2016 docuseries in which a panel of experts concluded Burke Ramsey, JonBenét’s brother, killed his sister with a blow to the head. In an interview on view below, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood, who also represents Burke in a similar complaint filed late last year, maintains that the suit isn’t specifically intended to prevent news organizations from making such claims in the future, but he’s fine if it has that effect.

A 2015 survey found that 86 percent of emergency medical services personnel reported critical stress; a job that entails frequent exposure to others’ once-in-a-lifetime tragedies takes a toll. But now programs like Building Warriors are teaching that culture is key to the mental health of these first responders.

Just over two years ago, we told you the shocking story of Desmond Smith, a fourteen year old allegedly murdered over a Cricket cellphone. More than two years later, three men have been sentenced in the case, which began with a particularly senseless act of violence and escalated into family drama in which a son agreed to testify against the father whose crime involved covering up for him and his uncle.

A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a man who suffered numerous seizures during a 20-day stay at the Douglas County jail last year claims that jail officials “purposefully destroyed” video evidence in the case.

News that two thirteen-year-olds who allegedly compiled a “kill list” related to their middle school have been arrested in Colorado Springs hardly qualifies as shocking at this point. In the more than eighteen years since the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School, folks in the state have seen far too many instances of young students being arrested for alleged school threats and violent plots, as documented below.

The State of Colorado, acting for the Department of Corrections, has agreed to pay a fairly modest $171,000 to settle a lawsuit in the torturous, slow-motion, completely preventable jail death of Dennis Choquette in November 2016. But Choquette’s estate has also reached confidential agreements with a slew of other defendants, including a giant private-prison company that owns the facility where most of the horrors took place. And given the disturbing facts of the case, which we first outlined this past February, after the complaint was filed, the sum of the settlements is almost certainly much, much larger.

Critics have long complained about the relatively light sentences given to some prominent white, privileged college students found guilty of sex crimes, and this week brings another example of the phenomenon. Jack Warmolts, a onetime Air Force Cadet who pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and unlawful sexual contact in October 2016, is now back on the streets after serving only eight months of a one-year term. However, ex-CU Denver student John D. Kennedy was sentenced to a minimum of nine years for sexual assault and more in part because his victim wrote an impassioned letter asking the judge in the case not to “allow another predator to go free.”

As seen in the photo above, Keith Hammock was once the driver for the Rasta Bus, a service that won a Best of Denver award in 2006. But if this recognition was a high point for him, yesterday marked an all-time low. On October 4, Hammock was sentenced to eighty years in prison for a 2016 shooting of two teens who invaded his home marijuana grow. One of the teens died in the incident.

Tanner Flores, nineteen, has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Ashley Doolittle, his girlfriend, in June 2016. Later today, October 5, he’s expected to be sentenced in the case. He faces a possible life term plus 32 years for kidnapping. As we noted in our previous post, on view below, Flores killed Doolittle near Berthoud, then transported her body across the state in his truck before being arrested in the Collbran area.