The right click opens up your Windows options, Paul Verizzo tells his computer class. “It opens up your life.” But that window’s about to slam shut. A week from now, Verizzo will be gone from the Curtis Park Community Center, where he’s been director of the technology program since last…
Two weeks until summer begins, and already the dog days are upon us. They’re snapping at our most exquisitely sensitive spots. As might have been predicted, the most rabid area is Boulder, a town literally going to the dogs — and the cats, and the ferrets, and the parrots –…
Last Friday, John Bray landed on the ground outside our office, a bullet in his chest. On Saturday, his killing landed on the front pages of both dailies, already labeled “road rage” — the first such deadly instance in Denver. But by Sunday, Bray’s death rated just an inside mention…
Pity the poor Denver City Council members who get caught napping after Monday night’s meeting. On Tuesday, May 2, “the City will begin enforcing ordinances that prohibit trespassing, including sleeping overnight, at any City and County Building,” according to an April 20 memo from the Department of Human Services. “Notices…
All of Denver’s neighborhoods have character. Few have clout. Not the clout of Hilltop, certainly, which ten days ago wrested from Denver City Council a moratorium that temporarily bans lot-splitting in the pricey neighborhood, where the stuff inside the residents’ wallets is as green as those big, broad lawns that…
With a Republican in the governor’s office — a Republican who, during his 1998 campaign, told the Christian Coalition he supported banning tax money from going to organizations that provide abortions — and Republicans dominating both sides of the Colorado Legislature, I thought by now we’d be teaching creationism in…
On Tuesday, his last free day in this country, Loi Nguyen frantically tries to salvage what he can of the rest of his life. At the end of this week, the INS will revoke the bond that has kept him out of its Aurora detention center for the past year…
And you thought Pedro Astacio had problems with the INS. Even as the justice system debates whether the confessed wife-beater — confessed, at least, until Astacio’s lawyers realized that their plea bargain could result in the Rockies pitcher (and now hitter) being kicked out of the country — can withdraw…
Connections count. In early January, US West filled a time capsule with tidbits about how the telephone had changed our lives. “In 1900,” the company chirped, “telephones were considered luxury items.” But in certain parts of Colorado, where potential US West customers have been waiting weeks, months, years for service,…
This week the Colorado Legislature passes the point of no return, when bills must either move on to the other house for ten more weeks of bickering or disappear altogether. But even before this session started — when Senator John Andrews declared that the Ten Commandments should be posted in…
Tom Tancredo is back from Washington, back home in Colorado after his first year as a freshman representative, wondering if the snow now smothering D.C. will somehow prevent him from attending the State of the Union address. Could he be so lucky? So far, the conservative congressman from Colorado’s Sixth…
There may not have been fireworks on New Year’s Eve, but all hell’s been busting loose since we woke up Saturday morning and found ourselves living in Loserville. Denver was so dull, so dead on Friday night that local TV anchors pleaded for something, anything, to put on the air…
It could have been so easy. Had Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone just asked Tim Roche, the Time magazine reporter, for a couple of bucks before he handed over the basement tapes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, that reporter might be sitting in the hoosegow right now. According to…
Nathan Thill. Aaron McKinney. Dylan Klebold. Eric Harris. Their short lives drip with hate, the liquid courage that enables them to commit unimaginable crimes. Their anger runs so deep that it cannot be contained. It spills over, poisoning everyone and everything around them. And the source of all this rage,…
The tabloids could not have made up this story. In the almost three years since JonBenét Ramsey’s lifeless body was found in the basement of her family’s Boulder home on the day after Christmas 1996, Jon Morris was sent away for life for the murder of kindergartner Ashley Gray, whose…
As told to Patricia Calhoun, by Patricia Calhoun If you think it’s embarrassing to be caught in a checkout line with nothing but a lime and four supermarket tabloids — and indeed it is, even if the tabs are all for work! Really! — imagine being caught testifying on behalf…
Just before 1 p.m. on Thursday, September 23, Arlyn Shapiro was at the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Exposition Street, preparing to walk across Colorado. Heading south back to work and stopped at the crosswalk was Natalie Madrigal, behind the wheel of her 1962 Pritschenwagen, a restored VW truck that…
Back in January 1997, the worst crime imaginable in Boulder, Colorado, was not the murder of a six-year-old girl, but the publication in a national tabloid of several pilfered autopsy pictures of that little girl. And so the good citizens of Boulder called on local supermarkets to cease and desist…
The circus is back in town, transforming Boulder into a bigtop stuffed with big-time media stars. They’ll be in the center ring, fighting for interviews and airtime, until Boulder’s grand jury finally disbands on October 20, thirteen months after it began investigating the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. The grand jurors…
Sam Riddle was right. About one thing, at least. Back in June, the shoot-from-the-lip Riddle complained that his $250-an-hour consulting contract with then-secretary of state Victoria Buckley would not have been subject to the same scrutiny if he’d made the deal with a white man. And in fact, while Riddle’s…
Saturday night in a packed, smoky ballroom large enough to park a 747. The music is loud, the crowd even louder. She shouts that she’s 21; he tells her he’s a doctor. They’re both lying. She’s a minor who barely needed to wave her fake ID in order to enter…
Like it or not, sports have brought Denver its greatest fame. And its greatest infamy. No matter how often city cheerleaders jump up and down to praise Denver — its scenery, its 4,000 days of sunshine each year, its swell new airport (with newly swelled fares), its astounding arts attendance…
