Dying to Believe The doctor is in: I’d like to comment on Eileen Welsome’s October 12 article about the First Born Church, “Born to Die.” There’s a joke that goes like this: A city is being flooded, so a man climbs a tree and starts praying to God. Another man…
Patsy Ramsey: I want you to look at me and tell me what you think happened. Steve Thomas: Actually, I’ll look you right in the eye. I think you’re good for this. I think that’s what the evidence suggests. — Larry King Live, May 31, 2000 For Steve Thomas, an…
The race for Boulder County District Attorney is taking place under the shadow of Alex Hunter, who has held the job for 28 years. For the past four of those years, Hunter and his previously off-the-radar office have come under glaring public scrutiny for the DA’s handling of the murder…
Penelope Jones was born with spastic cerebral palsy and is unable to control the right side of her body; she is also deaf in one ear and mentally retarded. When she enrolled in a special-education class at Denver’s George Washington High School seven years ago at the age of twenty,…
Bob Sylvester doesn’t want to go back to prison. He knows too much about prison and what it does to you. On October 23, Sylvester will find out just how much prison time lies ahead when he appears in a Denver courtroom to be sentenced on charges of racketeering, extortion…
The old adage says fences make good neighbors, but Aurora’s plan to fortify its image by building brick walls around some neighborhoods could cause divisions between people who do and don’t want the new boundaries built. The Neighborhood Fence Replacement Program, unveiled October 2, lets Aurora residents pay the city…
No matter how scary this Halloween becomes, it can’t be as frightening as the vision of Halloween 1995 conjured up by Suzanne Galante, at the time a 22-year-old Channel 7 intern. At a party at a house in Boulder, she fell upon a longtime fantasy: a fellow with “peach-fuzzy sideburns,”…
Only the largest of cars will do. Thus, there were no road trips during the energy crisis of the ’70s. Before and after that, however, for better and worse, my father and I got to know each other during long drives in his 1971 Impala. No matter how rocky a…
As you and I know, polling has been an intrinsic part of election coverage for years now — but the 2000 campaign has taken things to a new (and notably ludicrous) level. A prime example: Immediately after the conclusion of the debates this month between presidential candidates Al Gore and…
Americans don’t give a damn if Slobodan Milosevic goes nuts and murders half of Eastern Europe. They don’t care if bubonic plague decimates Philadelphia, Homer Simpson gets elected president as a write-in or Firestone starts putting its tires on baby strollers. No, what most of America really worries about is…
His and Hearse A tisket, a casket: I enjoyed Harrison Fletcher’s October 12 “Death Takes a Holiday,” on the goths with the hearses. It brought back a lot of memories for me. Around 25 years ago on the East Coast, a friend acquired a 1964 Caddy hearse. It was extremely…
Even in the glare of the noonday sun, the Pea Green cemetery feels like a haunted place. Situated on a rocky bluff overlooking a highway in rural Montrose County, the cemetery is a parched jumble of tombstones and rock, drained of all life except for a copper-colored horse that lives…
At eighteen, Scott Zuviceh wanted to be just like a Secret Service agent. He’d grown up in Granby, mostly, and was one of the town’s more notable troublemakers, a bona fide hellraiser. When he was eleven, he’d been removed from his parents’ home and sent to live in a progression…
The past few months have not been the best of times for the folks at Halaby, Cross & Schluter, the private law firm hired to defend the City of Denver in cases of alleged police misconduct. Blasted by a federal judge last spring for failing to comply with his order…
When Colorado Public Radio woke up on September 29, it hadn’t exactly turned into a cockroach. But that didn’t makes its fall subscription drive — or, as one CPR host called it on the air, the “Franz Kafka fundraiser” — any less surreal. For the second time during the ever-growing…
So there he was, Eric Pabst, sitting behind the wheel of his hearse in a cemetery, wearing black jeans, black shirt and black boots, when a black bird flew in the window. “It came in the passenger side, bounced off the windshield, flew in front of me and my friend…
When members of the local journalism fraternity first heard that Bernie Lincicome would be filling the Rocky Mountain News sports columnist slot vacated by Bob Kravitz, the majority responded with variations on a single question: Why would Lincicome do it? After all, he’d spent the last sixteen years writing for…
That’s Life No sympathy for the devil: Regarding Harrison Fletcher’s October 5 article about inmate Alfred Madson Jr., “Hard Times,” it infuriates me to read comments by ignorant people (such as his attorney) who feel that this twice-convicted killer should be released from prison simply because of his old age…
Things have been awfully muddy the past week or two over at KBPI — but when haven’t they been? Ever since the FM rocker became part of the Jacor kingdom (which transitioned seamlessly into the corporate coffers of Texas-based Clear Channel), the station has courted an outrageous image with the…
Dick Berger, executive director of Living Support Network, doesn’t want to be interrupted, so he takes the phones off the hook, one by one. His personal line. The Youth Support Line. The Suicide and Crisis Hotline. “It’s okay,” Berger explains, his voice competing with the insistent, high-pitched beep of handsets…
He is dying in here. He is sitting alone in his white prison cell with his library books and his Ramen noodles, losing control of his body. He is sleeping nine hours a night and waking at six the next morning but feeling like he hasn’t slept at all. He…
A few weeks ago, Don Gilmore, a member of Friends of Eulipions, walked past the Eulipions theater group’s former home in the massive El Jebel Shrine Temple, at 1770 Sherman Street, and glanced through one of the windows. He saw nothing. The offices had been cleared out; costumes, props and…
