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Colorado rang in 2014 with a bit of a mellow buzz — a certain relaxed attitude — and it was a feeling that lasted throughout the year. Sure, that mellow was harshed by continuing problems with police and sheriff’s deputies, as well as a very contested (and expensive) election season. But there were no major natural disasters to speak of, no mass shootings, no economic meltdowns — so we were able to tune out the background noise a little and focus inward, man. In fact, the year provided several thought-provoking civics lessons. After hard-fought legal battles, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take action on same-sex-marriage appeals — and suddenly wedding bells were ringing all over Colorado. So were school bells, as students launched protests across the metro area, starting in Jefferson County, where the Jeffco school board attempted to rewrite our nation’s history by erasing any education about civil disobedience. Students all over town then moved on to actual civil disobedience, walking out of class to show solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City, who were reacting to police brutality. In the end, though, our minds remained tuned to the biggest story of the year, which was, uh…wait, what were we just talking about? Oh, yeah: legalized marijuana. The first retail sales of recreational pot on January 1 brought out the media hordes and attracted attention from politicians and pundits worldwide. What will 2015 bring? Who knows? Anything can happen when you’re a mile high.
For proof, here are our strangest Colorado stories of 2014, compiled from news sources across Colorado — including Westword.
The Four Strangest Airplane Stories of 2014
Talk about strange: This airplane story is full of heroes! In July, after storms rerouted a Washington, D.C.-to-Denver flight from DIA to the airport in Cheyenne, a Frontier Airlines pilot decided to order Domino’s pizzas for all 160 passengers who were stuck on board. The Domino’s location, which was about to close, stayed open to accommodate the stranded travelers, and employees there made 35 pizzas, then delivered them to the plane.
The Frontier Airlines plane that had carried Ebola patient Amber Joy Vinson to Texas in October, then made several other trips around the country, eventually ended up in a Denver hangar after concerns were raised as to whether it had been fully decontaminated. The Airbus A320 had its seat covers and carpet replaced and was given a thorough scrubbing. Eventually it was returned to service after Frontier CEO David Siegel highlighted its safety by plopping himself in the spot where Vinson had been seated.
On October 27, an FBI special agent in Denver was informed of a disturbance aboard Delta Flight 2525 from Atlanta to DIA. But “disturbance” was a major understatement, considering the comments of two female flight attendants who were molested on board. One told police that the suspect, Vadym Pecherskyi, 42, of Ukraine, “put his lips on her neck and later touched her back and then moved his hand to her buttocks. At one point during the flight, he sat next to her on her jumpseat, put his hand on her thigh, and then started to move his hand up and under her dress,” according to reports. The other flight attendant, who tried to help the first, said that Pecherskyi fondled her, placed her in a headlock and jerked her toward him. Pecherskyi was arrested in Denver.
A United Airlines flight from Newark to DIA had to make an unscheduled landing in Chicago in August after two passengers got into a heated dispute. When one woman tried to put her seat back, she found it blocked by a man who had installed a new device called the Knee Defender on his tray table. United doesn’t allow the gadgets, but when a flight attendant asked the man to remove it, he refused to comply. According to news reports, the woman in front then stood up and threw a cup of water at the man. No arrests were made, but the two passengers were removed, and the flight continued to Denver without them.
The Four Strangest Political Stories of 2014
Rocky, the Denver Nuggets mascot, showed up at a GOP rally at Heritage High School in Littleton with Republican candidates Bob Beauprez and Cory Gardner, along with Mitt Romney — a move that the team hadn’t sanctioned and didn’t appreciate. (Rocky isn’t a political animal.) The performer who plays the popular mascot had to do backflips to get back in the good graces of Kroenke Sports Enterprises, which owns the Nuggets.
Colorado’s Republican Party likes to offer voters a pretty picture of the future, but it sometimes has trouble depicting the present accurately. The latest gaffe came in August, when a state GOP-funded website, coloradocore.org, featured photos of both Monument Valley and the Colorado River taken in Arizona, rather than photos of actual Colorado. The pictures were quickly replaced, but in the meantime, the GOP had perpetuated a tradition boosted in 2008 when Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer showed Alaska’s Mount McKinley in an ad rather than Pikes Peak, and in 2009 when an ad for Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis highlighted Canada’s mountains rather than Colorado’s own Rockies.
Denver Post reporter Lynn Bartels writes many of the stories that subsequently appear on our year-end Strange but True list. But this fall, she became part of a national story when she uttered this at a senatorial debate: “Mr. Udall, your campaign has been so focused on women’s issues you’ve been dubbed ‘Mark Uterus.'” She’d gotten the nickname from a state lawmaker who’d gotten it from a GOP strategist — and now it was stuck to the Democratic incumbent, who lost the War on Women-obsessed election to Cory Gardner. But not before the moniker inspired a fake Twitter account, @MarkUterus. One of the most recent posts: “Insult me if you will, but it worked. I went out as the guy who ripped the CIA, and not as the guy who campaigned incessantly on lady parts.”
No truly good list of crazy politicians would be complete without someone from Colorado, a state that’s had more than its fair share of nutjobs. But state representative-elect Gordon Klingenschmitt, who’ll represent the people of House District 13 in Colorado Springs come January, might be the nuttiest so far. GQ certainly thinks so: In December, the magazine laid out its list of America’s 20 Craziest Politicians, ranking Klingenschmitt as eighth with this: “Has repeatedly bragged about performing a gay exorcism (he’s a former Navy chaplain) to rid a woman of ‘the foul spirit of lesbianism,’ and also tried to perform a long-distance exorcism on President Obama because of something about the NSA. Believes that Obamacare ’causes cancer’ and that Obama’s former FCC chairman was driven by the Devil to ‘molest and visually rape your children.'”
The Six Strangest Mistake Stories of 2014
A man who was cleaning his gun while sitting in traffic in Lafayette accidentally shot himself in the leg in August. The 53-year-old man was on his way to a sporting-goods store, where he planned to trade in the gun; he was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
Steven Paula, 43, and Mason Deal, 18, got into a road-rage altercation after a November fender bender in Parker that ended with Paula being charged with assault. How did police find the suspect? Paula’s daughter recorded the incident on her smartphone, then posted the video to Snapchat. A friend of Deal’s saw the post and called police, who were able to identify Paula.
In February, a ten-year-old girl got into the driver’s seat of a car after her mom got out to go into a Department of Motor Vehicles building in Parker. Then the child drove the car right into the building, smashing through the windows into the lobby. According to authorities, no one was injured and the damage was minimal. The girl was cited for careless driving.
During somber coverage of a horrible Seattle helicopter crash in March, Denver’s Fox 31 was showing a Twitter stream live on the air. The feed showed a picture of smoke rising from the crash before switching to a picture of Edward Scissorhands, some food and, finally, an image of a gigantic penis hanging out the front of a pair of pants. The Good Day Colorado crew members were momentarily startled but managed to collect themselves quickly. Fox 31 later issued the following apology: “While reporting breaking news about the crash of the KOMO-TV helicopter in Seattle, Fox 31 Denver accidentally broadcast an offensive photo while scrolling live through a Twitter feed of pictures from the crash scene. The photo was mistakenly broadcast by our control room. It did not come from the tablet many viewers saw being used by one of our anchors. We apologize for the inadvertent broadcast of the image, and we are taking immediate steps to prevent such an accident from happening again.”
Most of us don’t have to wear our mistakes on our backs like a scarlet letter. But ever since the Colorado Rockies handed out 15,000 jerseys with Troy Tulowitzki’s name misspelled as Tulowizki, fans have been able to sport their team’s big blunder. The Coors Field giveaway, which took place in July, was sponsored by King Soopers, and the team was forced to apologize both to the supermarket chain and to fans, saying: “The Colorado Rockies offer our sincere apologies to the fans for the misspelling of the Troy Tulowitzki King Soopers jersey that was distributed tonight. The Rockies would also like to apologize to longtime corporate partner King Soopers, who was not involved in the production of the jerseys. Acknowledging that many fans came to the game for the jersey, rather than disappoint them, we decided to go ahead and hand them out. We have made plans to reproduce the jersey, and fans wishing to exchange will be able to do so at a future date…. In addition, fans exchanging the jersey will receive a complimentary ticket to a future game in 2014 or 2015.”
What is it about Aspen that brings out the worst in famous people? In August, popular Dallas TV morning-show anchor Brendan Higgins, of CBS11, was arrested at the tony Little Nell hotel after employees there reported to police that he had punched a driver and was being violent with staffers — staffers who were apparently carrying the ultra-drunk Higgins from a car to the elevator. Later, the anchor continued his antics at the police station. Here’s a report from an officer: “Higgins then attempted to strike me using a swiping motion with his hands. I pushed Higgins towards the elevator doors, which he was standing a few inches from. Higgins hit the elevator with his head and then pretended to pass out and slumped to the floor. I could tell that Higgins had not actually passed out, because he was giggling.” Higgins later threatened to beat the police “till they die.”
The Three Strangest School Stories of 2014
Every day is ‘Merica Day for some people, but when the student council at Fort Collins High School tried to add ‘Merica Day to its lineup of Spirit Week festivities in February, school officials rejected it, saying that the slang word is usually used to make fun of overly patriotic dimbulbs. Well, they didn’t say it exactly like that, but close enough. Anyway, some of the dimbulbs themselves, including Fox News, objected to the school’s decision not to make fun of them, so the principal relented and decided to allow the students to change it to American Day. God bless.
The Caprock Academy charter school in Grand Junction sent a nine-year-old girl home in March because she had shaved her head in support of an eleven-year-old friend who was facing chemotherapy treatments to fight cancer. The reason for the school’s actions? Kamryn Renfro was violating its dress code. “Caprock Academy does have a detailed dress code policy, which was created to promote safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students. Under this policy, shaved heads are not permitted,” Caprock board chairwoman Catherine Norton Breman told KUSA-TV. The school reversed its position after a public outcry.
A 24-year-old teacher at STRIVE Preparatory Schools SMART Academy in Denver was charged with assault in October and fired from his job after police said he’d caused an explosion during a classroom demonstration that injured four students, one of them critically. Officials said the teacher should have known better than to pour methanol on a fire.
The Five Strangest Animal Stories of 2014
An eighteen-year-old and two seventeen-year-olds were arrested in April and charged in connection with the killing of a llama that had been roaming around Trinidad State Junior College. The story began in April, when police were asked to removed the llama from the campus. They succeeded, but the animal later turned up dead near Atchison Canyon. A necropsy revealed that the llama had been shot with a crossbow and then had its throat slit. The accused teens had posted pictures of the crime on Facebook.
During a November cold snap, someone tweeted a picture of a dog curled up outside someone’s front door in snowy, five-degree weather and asked, “What can we do? Called 311 & animal control, owners arent home 5°F #cowx #viral #help.” The story did, in fact, go viral as people retweeted the post and news stations reported on the situation. Police eventually contacted the owner and reported that the person had taken the dog inside.
In November, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department warned Durango residents that “deer are entering the mating season, and residents are reminded to put away equipment in which big game animals can become tangled. Residents are also asked to be careful how outdoor Christmas decorations are hung.” On November 8, a large mule-deer buck had apparently gotten stuck in the ropes of a batting cage at Durango High School; a wildlife officer had to cut off the animal’s antlers in order to free it. “Every year, big game animals get hung up in items such as volleyball nets, hammocks and Christmas ornaments,” advised Matt Thorpe, area wildlife manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife in Durango. “When that happens, it’s very stressful for the animal, sometimes fatal, and it can be dangerous for people.” Yeah, and if you’re not careful, it can win you a trip back to Walmart for more lawn snowmen and icicle lights.
A grand-champion goat at the Weld County Fair mysteriously disappeared in July in the middle of the event — and just a few hours before it was supposed to be shown at the Junior Livestock Auction. The red and white Boer goat still sold for $5,500, even though the buyers knew the animal was missing. Police investigated, but didn’t come up with any leads.
Two men who live in a Lakewood apartment building got into a dispute in July, and one of them shot the other’s dog. But in an apparent bit of karma, he also managed to accidentally shoot himself in the leg. The police cited the man, who wasn’t seriously injured. The dog, a Chihuahua named Princess, was also expected to survive.
The Six Strangest Police Stories of 2014
Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft swept into Denver in 2014, delighting the public, infuriating the cab companies and confusing politicians and cops. In July, a Denver police officer pulled over an Uber vehicle near DIA, told the driver and passenger — Dave Cook, of Seattle — that Uber was illegal, then lectured them about Colorado law…incorrectly. Ride-sharing was officially authorized here in June, though Uber had been operating before that. The DPD later apologized to the man, repeatedly, and created a new officer-training program.
Denver sheriff’s deputy Paul Della Rosa, 52, earned ninety days in the slammer and four years of probation after supplying a group of fourteen-year-old girls with booze at the Ameristar Casino in Black Hawk. He was also accused of sending sexually suggestive and inappropriate messages to one of the girls on Facebook. Court records said that Della Rosa and the girls had partied in a hot tub, and that one of them got so drunk she threw up in it.
Denver sheriff’s deputy Roberto Roena was suspended for ninety days in July after he started a fight with an inmate, broke out some tae kwon do moves and then lied about what happened, according to news reports. A former tae kwon do instructor, Roena had apparently been discussing the martial arts with fellow deputies when an inmate began taunting him about it. Roena then used his moves on the inmate before the situation devolved into a brawl.
Lakewood cops who were conducting a prostitution sting in April watched a “known prostitute” enter a car on West Colfax, but when they stopped the car, they discovered that the man with the prostitute was an off-duty Denver cop. The officer was placed on leave until both police departments had a chance to investigate.
Booze, cops, guns and swinging. The headlines don’t get any better than that, and in June, those headlines told the tale of two Denver police officers, Steve Sloan and Jeremy Ownbey, their wives, and a party that quickly went downhill. According to the Aurora police, who were called to bust things up, the two officers had gotten into a fistfight, as had their wives. The fighting started at an alcohol-fueled party at which the couples also talked about swapping partners for sex; eventually, the Sloans asked the Ownbeys to leave. When they wouldn’t, Sloan pulled his piece. But the details of what happened next changed over the next few months. The Sloans were never charged with any crime, and charges against Jeremy Ownbey were dropped in December due to a lack of evidence. Only Ownbey’s wife, Jamie, is still facing legal action related to the wild night.
An Arapahoe County sheriff’s deputy faced disciplinary action in June after she apparently showed up drunk to a training session at an immigration detention center. Fellow deputies notified their supervisor when they smelled alcohol on her breath.
The Seven Strangest Marijuana Stories of 2014
Although many government and tourism officials in Colorado are still uncomfortable with marijuana legalization, many businesses hopped on board last year. One of the first was Spirit Airlines, which lit up this advertising campaign in January: “The no smoking sign is off. Get Mile High with $10 off your next flight. Fares so low they’re barely legal in some states.” It continued: “If you want to make a beeline for Colorado right now, we don’t blame you — but we’re up to take you to plenty of chill destinations…. Book today…and be sure to pack some munchies.”
In the old days, people liked to steal Corona Street signs because of their reference to beer. But times have changed, and in January, the Colorado Department of Transportation got tired of replacing I-70’s 420 mile-marker sign, located about 25 miles west of the Kansas border, which kept getting stolen. In its place, workers installed a mile 419.99 sign.
Lots of people from outside Colorado weighed in on this state’s legalized pot in 2014, everyone from talk-show hosts to newspaper pundits, comedians, musicians and politicians — like the Pennsylvania lawmaker who took an official trip here to smoke up. But New Jersey governor Chris Christie prompted the biggest outcry when he bashed marijuana legalization in April and took a few pot shots at Colorado while he was at it, saying, “Go to Colorado and see if you wanna live there. Head shops popping up on every corner and people flying in just to get high.” It was enough to inspire even our own pot-disapproving governor, John Hickenlooper, to fire back at Christie with a list of eight reasons why Colorado is better than New Jersey.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd flew to Denver to get stoned — and boy, did she ever, writing a column that was widely mocked for its childlike naiveté. Please don’t eat more than one large pizza, either, Maureen, or you might get a tummyache. Here’s an example of Dowd going to pot after eating an edible: “I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.”
The Denver Broncos faced off against the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl last February, and although the results of that game were infinitely forgettable for Denver fans, the rest of the country will remember the game for its various nicknames: the Pot Bowl, the Stoner Bowl and so on. The joke caught on because Colorado and Washington were the only two states at the time to have legalized recreational marijuana.
On a visit to Denver in July, President Barack Obama was walking through a crowd when a man asked, “Do you want a hit of this?” Obama laughed (but didn’t say “No”), and the video went viral. The president did stop for beers at the Wynkoop Brewing Company on the same trip.
The Denver police and some media outlets whipped residents into a frenzy in the days before Halloween with dire predictions about people dropping THC-infused edibles, many of which look exactly like real candy, into the bags of unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. The DPD even poured out the paranoia on Facebook, posting images of regular candy — like chocolate bars, gummy bears and lollipops — and similar-looking THC edibles side by side. “Can you tell which candy is a marijuana edible?” the photos asked. That question mirrored one posed by local nonprofit Smart Colorado on billboards around town. But after all that fearmongering (the story went national and international as well), there wasn’t a single report of a kid being dosed with anything but sugar.
The Eight Strangest Stories of 2014
Unusual people have been associated with carnivals and fairs for hundreds of years. But times may be changing, at least in Boulder County. In August, the Boulder County Fair shut down a sideshow featuring Little Liz, the World’s Smallest Woman, after a couple of fair-goers complained that the sideshow, which allowed people to take pictures of themselves with the 29-inch-tall Liz, was inappropriate. Similar sideshows — or freak shows, as they used to be called — have been closed in other states because people claim they are exploitative. But fair organizers pointed out that Liz, who is from Haiti, can’t earn money if her show is closed.
Police officers were suckered into a video-game-playing hoax in August when someone reported an active shooter in an office building in Greenwood Village. It turns out that someone had called in the hoax, saying there was a shooting with hostages taking place inside the offices of The Creatures LLC. The online gaming company is run by gamer Jordan Mathewson, who happened to be playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at the time and streaming it live. As a result, the video of a SWAT team bursting into the office, detaining Mathewson and searching the room ended up all over the Internet and eventually went viral.
In May, pilot Brian Veatch, who worked for Drag ‘n’ Fly Banners, accidentally crashed his small plane into a home in Northglenn after losing most of his power during a flight. Luckily, Veatch was able to walk away from the crash and no one on the ground was hurt. Turns out that Veatch had lived in the house, on Livingston Drive, about ten years earlier; Veatch told news outlets he had no idea it was his old house until after he’d gotten out of the plane and walked around.
For some unknown reason, Colorado has had more than its share of would-be terrorists. The latest story involved three teenagers who allegedly tried to join ISIS in October. Students in the Cherry Creek School District, the teens, two of them sisters, told friends of their plan to fly to Germany, Turkey and then Syria to join the radical cause; officials stopped the girls at the airport in Frankfurt after the school district alerted them to the situation. The girls had apparently taken money from their parents, paid cash for their tickets and then flown out of DIA; their parents reported them missing when they didn’t return home from school. Although school-district officials say they believe the teens were victims of online predators who were looking for recruits, an outside monitoring agency told news outlets that the girls had been talking with jihadists for a year via e-mail.
Two ten-year-olds were injured in June when the inflatable bouncy castle they were playing in was picked up by a gust of wind and tossed about 300 feet across a field in Littleton. The story was picked up by national news outlets, which found several additional cases of bouncy castles being blown by wind and injuring children over the past year.
Colorado State University student Stefan Sortland had a rough Halloween. According to police and news reports, the eighteen-year-old took some ecstasy and cocaine and then headed off to a party and a concert. But he was kicked out of the show’s venue and sometime later stole an unoccupied ambulance on campus — the paramedics were apparently treating a student having a seizure — and took it for a joyride, all the way to Loveland. That’s where police found the vehicle in the middle of Highway 34, completely wrecked. Sortland was standing nearby, wearing an EMT vest and holding a box of crackers. The cops shot him with a stun gun when he wouldn’t obey their commands. And the fireworks didn’t end there: Down at the station, Sortland kicked the walls and masturbated before telling the police that his friends and roommates were all dead. They weren’t. Sortland is facing a mental-competency hearing in court.
A man who was busted in October for spray-painting houses and dumpsters in Capitol Hill inspired a new feature on the Denver Police Department’s Facebook page. The initial post read: “This is the first edition of ‘What in the Wednesday’ — where we share some of the weirdest things our officers encounter while on the streets…. Friday, Denver Police — District 6 officers responded to the 1100 block of N. Clarkson Street, on a report of a party in a ‘Tony the Tiger’ costume spray painting the victim’s home. Before that, the suspect was also seen spray painting the pillars in from the victim’s home and the sidewalk in the 1000 block of N. Clarkson Street. When officers arrived on scene, they found the suspect still in costume spray-painting a city dumpster. The suspect, 29 year-old Timothy Heckler, was arrested, and officers also recovered several cans of spray paint on him.”
We’re sure that cops have a sense of humor when they’re off duty. But when they’re on the job, they can be twitchy. So when a Grand Junction man idiotically pointed a banana at a pair of Mesa County sheriff’s deputies in November, things didn’t go well. According to news and police reports, the hilarity began when a deputy saw Nathen Channing “reach into the left side of his coat with his right hand and pull out a yellow object, pointing it in the air, then in my direction…. He drew the object in the same manner someone would draw a standard handgun from a concealed holster.” When the deputy called for backup, Channing pointed the banana at the second deputy, who was about to pull out his gun when Channing yelled, “It’s a banana!” Indeed. Charges of felony menacing were eventually reduced to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a peace officer by Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger, who was blunt when he spoke with local news: “I decided while Mr. Channing’s conduct was felony stupid, it didn’t really deserve a felony charge, so we have filed one count of a misdemeanor obstructing a police officer. I think that’s what fits best with his incredibly dumb conduct.”