It was one of the strangest stories of 2015: The arrest of Julieane Jablonski after Austin Essig, her nineteen year old son, jumped out a window, allegedly under the influence of a marijuana edible she provided. Now, a jury has ruled on Jablonski’s case — and while she reportedly avoided…
In a post published yesterday about the decision not to charge the cop who gunned down Adrian Moya in December, we noted the high number of officer-involved shootings in Colorado of late — including one that killed a man in Lakewood on April 26. Add another incident to that number…
Pueblo is perceived to be a marijuana-friendly city — so much so that in March, High Times attempted to move its Cannabis Cup there before eventually relocating it to California. But in recent weeks, a slew of arrests related to allegedly illegal marijuana grows have taken place in the community, including the…
Massage therapist Marcos Duran has been arrested on suspicion of two sex crimes for allegedly going way over the line. A woman maintains that during a massage, he touched her genitals in so deliberate a way that police in Fort Collins fear there may be additional victims. Most of the…
Graffiti is so common in metropolitan areas that the crime seldom makes the news. But what happened overnight in the Washington Virginia Vale neighborhood is the sort of exception that makes the rule. An estimated 25-35 cars and buildings on or near the 700 block of South Hudson Street were vandalized with, among other…
Last summer, a family member of Camille Harrell, who was murdered in June, told us that the “gentle giant” was killed after defending her twin sister, Carmen, at East Colfax’s Sand & Sage Motel. Now, in the wake of Brandon Foote’s conviction for the crime (Merita Curry, who’s also charged in…
There was a very strong reaction to our recent post about Thomas LaPerch after he was found guilty of killing William Burchett, who he met on Craigslist. Over the years, we’ve written about numerous crimes with ties to Craigslist, including robberies and even shootings. However, the Burchett matter turns out to have…
Some folks remain uncomfortable with the prevalence of HALO cameras on Denver streets, typically because they don’t like the idea that Big Brother is watching them. But law enforcers counter that the cameras help them catch criminals who might otherwise go unpunished. A case in point: Former taxi driver Hidet…
In recent days, we’ve been reporting about attacks on the 16th Street Mall, as exemplified by two stabbings this month — incidents that raise fears of rising violence in the iconic area and questions about the lack of emphasis City of Denver officials seem to be putting on the problem…
This morning, I can definitely identify the concept of a crime happening close to home. During the wee hours, a clerk was shot during a robbery attempt at a Diamond Shamrock Corner Store across the street from Westword’s 969 Broadway offices — and at this writing, the suspect is still…
Branden Harms is said to have watched his girlfriend’s baby for a few hours earlier this month. What happened over that span is unclear. But one thing is certain. Just over a day later, the child was dead — and Harms has been arrested under suspicion that he was responsible…
Earlier this month, we told you about a stabbing on the 16th Street Mall. The incident raised fears of increasing violence along the iconic strip, which was the setting for a string of troubling incidents last summer. Included among them was an attack on a tourist after he complained about…
Arrests of teachers for sex crimes is quite rare — but sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. Case in point: Jeffrey Falk, a veteran math teacher at ThunderRidge High, has pleaded guilty to three sexual exploitation of a child counts committed after he stepped down from the school — shortly…
In recent months, we’ve been reporting about Ralph Candelario, who was convicted of killing his wife, Pam Candelario, in Walsenburg after initially claiming that she was slain by intruders who also injured him. The Candelario case was featured this past Friday on Dateline NBC — and the impact of that national…
There’s plenty of aggression evident on Joshua Owings’s Facebook page. Mixed in with photos of a child who appears to have been at the center of a custody dispute are images like the one above and plenty of in-your-face text, including Owings’s 2014 claim to have graduated from a college…
Most burglaries are committed with a motive of stealing things. But that apparently wasn’t the case when it came to a home in Jefferson County. According to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, the burglars who broke into a residence on the 8700 block of South Jellison Court sometime between April…
At first, the cause of death for Oklahoma’s Joshua Foster and Zach Moore in northern Colorado last year appeared to be a vehicle fire. But further investigation suggested that they’d been murdered, with the fire presumably set to cover up evidence of the crime. And now, months after their passing,…
On the day after Christmas in 2011, as we reported, father-of-five Youn Malual was murdered in an incident that shattered the local Sudanese community. More than four years later, Brandon Jackson — the first of five men thought to have been responsible for the slaying — has been found guilty…
Just what did Colorado taxpayers get out of the Justice Review Project, a four-year program that required state prosecutors to review more than 5,000 criminal cases, in search of possible wrongful convictions? The result was one exoneration through DNA testing — the only case in which DNA was tested at…
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on The Colorado Independent, whose Susan Greene has written definitive work about the case of Clarence Moses-EL; he served 28 years in prison for a 1987 rape case to which another man has confessed before the convictions were lifted and he was granted a new trial last…
We’ve been reporting about the murder of Pam Candelario in Walsenburg, a small community in southeastern Colorado. Her husband, Ralph Candelario, was charged with the crime despite an elaborate tale in which he claimed that intruders had broken into the couple’s home, killed Pam and roughed him up before he could…
It was one of the most shocking and brutal allegations of early 2015. And now, Joseph Romero, the man at whom the finger was pointed, has admitted it was true. Romero has admitted guilt in the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend, Phenia Martinez, when she was eight months pregnant. The acknowledgment…
