Crime & Police

Just shy of 4:30 a.m. today, September 20, the Denver Police Department tweeted about a shooting near the intersection of 31st and Marion Street. The condition of the victim, who was transported to a local hospital after reportedly being found in a car, isn’t known at this time. But the incident is one more indication that gentrification in the RiNo, Cole and Whittier neighborhoods hasn’t stopped the violence that has afflicted the area in the recent past.

On Sunday, September 17, as we’ve reported, the local animal activist group Denver Baby Animal Save posted a video about what it characterizes as a rescue of three chickens from Long Shadow Farm in Berthoud. Larry and Kristin Ramey, the co-owners of the farm, call it something else: theft that involved a demonstration they believe was staged as a diversion, “terrible” music, undercover operatives, lies and taking advantage of an eight-year-old.

Yesterday, September 17, Denver Baby Animal Save posted a Facebook video detailing what the activist group characterizes as the rescue of three chickens from a local business identified elsewhere online as Long Shadow Farm in Berthoud. The clip, on view below, has resulted in an explosion of responses on social media, prompting a debate about whether this action constituted a bold gesture on behalf of respect for all living creatures or criminal behavior.

A judge’s lengthy decision in the capital case against Sir Mario Owens a good indication of how complex the case has become through more than a decade of legal maneuvering.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch recently ruled that Colorado’s sex-offender registry violates the due-process rights of three plaintiffs, thereby amounting to cruel and unusual punishment. Boulder attorney Alison Ruttenberg, who’s kept the case going for the past four years, lauded this decision because it acknowledged that treating every person on the registry like a violent child predator was patently unfair. But she’s not surprised Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has announced her intention to appeal the decision, especially given rumors that she’s weighing a run for Colorado governor in 2018.

According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Ken and Lynn Kubic are facing 72 charges of cruelty to animals after authorities discovered that the conditions in their Adams County home were every bit as shocking as those that caused Jurassic Pets, their former business in Thornton, to be shuttered. This claim is supported by photos and a video on view here that makes the couple’s residence look like the set of a horror movie.

After more than two years, the prosecution of a massive federal drug investigation dubbed Operation Black Rhino is nearly over thanks to the conviction of Jorge Loya-Ramirez, a Mexican citizen living in Denver who allegedly used a taco truck as cover to deal nearly 200 pounds of methamphetamine and cocaine in kilogram quantities. And he wasn’t the only Black Rhino target to earn punishment. The U.S. Attorney’s Office reveals that of the 38 others named in one of four federal grand jury indictments related to the inquiry, only one had his case dismissed. Find out what happened to all the defendants below.

An Alamosa judge has dismissed all charges against Krystal Voss, who served more than a decade in prison in the death of her son.

Shawn Geerdes has been ordered to spend 144 years in prison for murder and arson in the death of Jason Dosa, his partner in a cannabis business. The length of the sentence speaks to the brutality of the crime, Geerdes’s hefty previous criminal history and the determination of the 18th Judicial District DA’s office, headed by 2018 gubernatorial candidate George Brauchler, who maintained in a recent Westword op-ed that at least eleven marijuana-related homicides have taken place in his jurisdiction since limited legalization of recreational pot in January 2014.

As our Alan Prendergast reported, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch has ruled that Colorado’s sex-offender registry violates the due-process rights of three plaintiffs, thereby amounting to cruel and unusual punishment. Boulder attorney Alison Ruttenberg, who filed the case in 2013, sees the opinion as the potential death knell for a law-enforcement tool that, in her view, perpetuates factually dubious notions that fall apart when examined in an evenhanded way.

Shortly after the in-custody suicide of Benjamin Davis, leader of the 211 crew, a notorious white-supremacist prison gang, alleged 211 member Kirk Boyd has been sentenced to decades in stir for a crime spree that prosecutors say stretched over a five-week period and was fueled by methamphetamines.

More than eighteen years after 18th Judicial District deputy DA Rebecca Bartee’s June 7, 1999 murder, authorities have made an arrest, booking Robert Lee Williams, a seventy-year-old who was still living in the apartment building where the slaying took place. The case was broken thanks to a tip received by CBS4 reporter Brian Maass earlier this year, yet multiple news agencies in Colorado aren’t giving credit where credit’s due.

Denver City Council has announced a plan to purchase PT’s All Nude II, a defunct strip club at 8315 East Colfax, for $1.3 million, in an effort to spur an economic revival in the area. The building was shuttered in 2016 because of numerous public-safety issues, with the most prominent among them being a September 2015 murder on an evening promoted as #SelfieSaturday.

On August 27, the Colorado Department of Corrections revealed the death of inmate Benjamin Davis, one of the state’s most notorious prisoners, at Wyoming State Penitentiary, to which he’d been transferred. Davis, who is is suspected of committing suicide, was the reputed leader of a white-supremacist prison gang known as the 211 Crew and a potential player in the 2013 execution-style murder of CDOC executive director Tom Clements.

Patrick Engle has been sentenced to 96 years in prison for a March 2016 crash that killed young mom Jessica Holman. He’s one of four people sentenced in the case, which involved a stolen truck, a police pursuit, a lying mother and grandmother and Engle’s past as a habitual criminal.

Yesterday, August 22, a U.S. District Court judge sentenced Highlands Ranch resident Caroline Zarate Boyle after she pleaded guilty to ripping off her former employer, the U.S. Postal Service, by pretending to have cancer. This admission and the punishment she’ll receive as a result, outlined below, have earned her a place in the Colorado Cancer Faker Hall of Fame, which has inducted seven members in the past eight years.

The July 25 post “Shawn Geerdes’s Marijuana-Grow Murder Used to Attack Legal Pot” asserted that 18th Judicial District DA and 2018 Colorado gubernatorial candidate George Brauchler had attempted to score political points with anti-cannabis critics by way of post-prosecution statements such as, “Here is yet another violent crime related to marijuana. Whatever benefits there may be from the legalization of marijuana, eradicating violent crime associated with it is not one of them.” Here’s his response.

Tattoo artist Brian Pattison has been found guilty of killing Shane Richardson last year, then starting a fire that closed Rosenberg’s Bagels & Deli, an iconic eatery located in the same structure, for months. Prosecutors say Pattison came to Denver from his home in Colorado Springs for a “tattoo party” at Richardson’s place that went terribly wrong, and surveillance footage from Rosenberg’s proved key in solving the case.

Donald Lucero has been arrested for a series of assaults Tuesday, August 15, on the 16th Street Mall, including the alleged punching of a man for laughing. It’s the highest-profile crime on the Mall since last year, when multiple fights and random attacks were caught on video. Authorities responded by instituting a new safety plan that appears to have lessened but not eliminated violence in the iconic shopping area.

One year ago today, we published a post about outrage over the light sentence given to convicted rapist Austin Wilkerson, a former CU Boulder student. Turns out, though, that Wilkerson’s punishment was even more modest than originally advertised. He’s already a free man, after reportedly being released from a two-year work-release obligation twelve months early.