Crime & Police

Darius Ratcliff has committed a lifetime’s worth of crimes before he could legally order a beer or possess an ounce of marijuana in Colorado.

As we’ve reported, a December 15 hearing that could have given additional freedoms to Bruco Eastwood, who’s lived at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo since being found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 2010 shooting at Deer Creek Middle School, was canceled at the last minute. Among those relieved by this turn of events was Eastwood’s prosecutor, Steve Jensen, who channeled his frustration over a judge’s refusal to allow his psychiatric expert to interview the gunman into legislation requiring that court-ordered mental health examinations be recorded on audio and video. Believe it or not, doing so wasn’t mandated until the bill became law nearly seven years after the shooting. Here’s the story of Jensen’s quest and Eastwood’s role in it.

Mark Wray, who was arrested this week for alleged sexual assault against a woman at a Boulder gas station, has been in trouble with the law before. We first wrote about Wray seven years ago, when he was busted for, among other things, pissing on his wife’s head.

This morning, December 15, a hearing in Jefferson County court was scheduled to determine if Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting and injuring two Deer Creek Middle School students seven years ago, would be allowed to leave the grounds of the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, his current residence, without supervision. But at the last minute, the session was canceled, and there’s no indication when or if it will be rescheduled.

Big cities aren’t well represented in a new survey of the safest places in Colorado. Of the twenty communities considered the state’s safest, only three are in the Denver-Boulder metro area. Moreover, all of the latter are suburbs or outlying localities, and two fall toward the bottom of the roster.

Entrepreneur Scott Pack is the target of an amended lawsuit that builds on a complaint about what the attorney who filed the first one called the largest marijuana fraud case in Colorado history. Pack was also the subject of a surprising attack on the website of his old company, Harmony & Green, in which what were described as former employees juxtaposed apologies for his actions with photos that portrayed him as living it up after being indicted by an Arapahoe County grand jury for allegedly ripping off investors for as much as $10 million.

The mystery behind the death of Colorado mountain-biking pioneer Mike Rust has finally been solved. Yesterday, December 7, a jury in Saguache County, found Charles Moises Gonzales guilty of killing Rust, whose remains weren’t found until nearly seven years after he vanished in 2009 under mysterious circumstances.

On December 17, 2016, during a psychotic episode, Ryan Partridge, an inmate at Boulder County Jail, tore his own eyeballs from his head. Partridge survived this horrifying example of self-harm, and he’s now suing Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle and more than twenty other named defendants. David Lane, the attorney who filed the lawsuit, accessible below in its entirety, stresses that this shocking incident isn’t isolated.

As we’ve reported, Colorado Representative Lori Saine was arrested at Denver International Airport on December 5 on suspicion of introducing a firearm into a transportation facility. Since the publication of our previous item, the Denver Police Department has released a probable cause statement that reveals the make and style of Saine’s weapon: a Kahr Arms 9mm semi-automatic handgun that’s the subject of consistently positive online reviews and a YouTube video that’s been viewed more than 67,000 times at this writing.

As we’ve reported, Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood will learn during a December 15 hearing if he’ll be allowed to venture unsupervised off the grounds of Pueblo’s Colorado Mental Health Institute, where he’s resided since being found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 2010 shooting at Deer Creek Middle School. First Judicial District DA Pete Weir is among those objecting to this plan, and he offers as one reason for caution the awful story of David Lynn Cooper, who brutally killed his ten-year-old daughter mere months after being released from the state mental hospital because he’d supposedly regained his sanity.

According to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Colorado doubled during the first nine months of 2017 as compared to the same period last year. And while an ADL representative doesn’t directly blame President Donald Trump for mainstreaming such behavior, he makes it clear the Commander in Chief isn’t helping the situation.

In some ways, the Tuesday, December 5 arrest of Representative Lori Saine, a Weld County Republican from Dacono, for bringing a gun to Denver International Airport is no surprise. After all, she’s among the state legislature’s most prominent advocates for allowing guns in public places, including schools.

Next week, on Friday, December 15, a judge will determine if Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood will be allowed to venture unsupervised off the grounds of the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, where he’s resided since being found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting and wounding two students at Deer Creek Middle School seven years ago. Among those who strongly oppose this idea are Pete Weir, current DA in the First Judicial District, where Eastwood was prosecuted, and the family of Matt Thieu, who survived after Eastwood shot him in the torso.

Steffan Tubbs will not be rehired by KOA radio, which fired the longtime Colorado Morning News host  in August after he was arrested and accused of domestic violence by telephone. This decision was made even though the charge against Tubbs was subsequently dismissed and his accuser was herself busted on November 17 for allegedly stalking him and violating a protection order that forbade her from making contact.

Barely two weeks after Pueblo’s Donthe Lucas was arrested on robbery charges, the former Northeastern Junior College basketball star was served with an arrest warrant in the February 2013 disappearance of Kelsie Schelling, a Denver resident who vanished after heading south to tell her boyfriend, Lucas, that she was pregnant. The bust took place on the same day his mom, Sara Lucas, was taken into custody in regard to the aforementioned robbery, suggesting that authorities are trying to ratchet up the pressure on mother and son to reveal the whereabouts of Schelling’s body, which has not been found as of this writing.

On November 25, Denver TV stations prominently identified Javeon Brown when the Denver Police Department sent out an alert about the thirteen-year-old in relation to a Thanksgiving Day triple shooting near Manual High School. The outlets stopped doing so the following day after Brown’s arrest because he has not been charged as an adult for the crime. However, their reports continue to link to his name, and at this writing, a CBS4 item that scrubbed his moniker from its text sports a video that includes it.

Colorado’s Brock Franklin has been ordered to serve 472 years in prison for heading a violent child sex ring. The punishment is believed to be the longest-ever sentence for a sex trafficker in U.S. history.

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.