Crime & Police

Inside Six-Person, One-Death Shooting at Denver Crime Hot Spot

The gunfire rang out during broad daylight.
The crime scene.

Courtesy of Denver7

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Six people were shot, one fatally, in a November 1 attack near the intersection of Verbena Street and East Colfax – the East Colfax neighborhood identified by the Denver Police Department as a crime hot spot. At last report, three of the surviving victims were fighting for their lives and a trio of suspects remains at large.

The incident follows a violent weekend in Denver, during which gunfire killed eight people across the metro area – and the scene after the shooting, which took place near the Michael Convenience Store, was so chaotic that DPD Twitter updates changed the number of victims twice over two hours.

The first tweet, time-stamped at 2:19 p.m., noted that officers were “investigating a shooting in the 1400 block of Verbena. Six victims located.” Less than an hour later, at 3:12 p.m., the department issued an update: “Five victims located; four transported to the hospital and one pronounced deceased.” Then, at 4:31 p.m., another bulletin noted that “the victim count is six – 4 men and 2 women. One of the males was pronounced dead at the scene.”

Prior to this last dispatch, Commander Matt Clark of the DPD’s major-crimes unit staged a press conference. Just after 1:50 p.m., he said, Denver police had received an alert about the Verbena-Colfax area from ShotSpotter, a tool used to “pinpoint gunshot locations in different parts of the city identified based on the high frequency of gun violence and directs officers in real time to where the gunfire occurred.” Shortly thereafter, agency dispatch received 911 calls reporting multiple victims.

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According to Clark, officers and emergency personnel from Denver Health raced to the scene and located five victims: one adult male who had already died, plus two adult males and two adult females who were still alive. Three of those victims were in critical condition, he said, and the fourth was stable and not in a life-threatening situation. After the news conference, the DPD confirmed that a sixth person, an adult male, had also been hospitalized with less serious wounds.

Investigators, assisted by witnesses on the scene, soon determined that three individuals in a vehicle traveling northbound on Verbena stopped at Colfax, close to where a group had congregated on a curb. “They were just standing on the sidewalk,” Clark stressed. “There was no apparent conflict.” Nonetheless, the trio in the car exited and opened fire, squeezing off multiple shots before climbing back into the vehicle and heading eastbound on Colfax. Near 12th and Yosemite, they abandoned the auto and split in another one, a black SUV seen in the photo below:

The dark vehicle in this photo shared by the Denver Police Department is believed to have been taken by the suspects in the shooting.

Clark acknowledged that investigators hadn’t established a connection between the victims and “the offenders,” and were unclear on a potential motive for the shooting. As for the vehicle switch, he stressed that no carjacking was involved; the black SUV was unoccupied when the suspects took off in it. At that point, the DPD didn’t know if it belonged to one of them or had just been stolen.

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“It’s concerning that this occurred in broad daylight,” Clark said in response to a question, noting that the area of the shooting has been identified as “one of the city’s hot spots” for crime, resulting in a “higher volume of uniformed patrol officers and undercover officers” assigned nearby.

The Denver Crime Map, which tracks offenses of all types throughout the city, associates the East Colfax neighborhood with 130 violent crimes from January 1 to October 31, for a crime density of 121.61 per square mile.

“We are concerned with the violence we’re seeing,” Clark said at the conclusion of his remarks. “The homicides – and this homicide, particularly.”

Here’s a video of the complete briefing.

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