Audio By Carbonatix
part 1 of 3
A little after noon on April 16, 1993, an office worker at Paddock Center, a vocational education school in Boulder, peered out the window as she dialed the police. “I want to report a gang fight,” she said.
A few minutes earlier, she had watched as sixteen-year-old Dominic and fifteen-year-old Jason were leaving the school grounds to have a smoke. Another group of youths in a brown Subaru wagon had pulled into the parking lot and stopped them.
Joey was the first one out of the car. “Whassup, Avalon?” he asked, referring to Dominic’s affiliation with the Alfa 60s 3-3 (Tre-Tre), a Denver Crips gang. A tattoo on Dominic’s upper right arm and another in the web of his left hand proclaimed his allegiance.
Although the Crips are a largely black gang, Dominic and Jason are white. But the two boys were wearing the blue clothing and bandannas of the gang and sagging heavy–slang for the baggy-pants-halfway-down-your-ass look favored by gangsters and the skateboard crowd that emulates them.
“Whassup?” Dominic answered, as three more boys piled out of the Subaru. Andy, the driver. Kurt. And Ben Giltner. They had dropped by Paddock to pick up a friend, Ryan Rushing, when they spotted the pair.
Joey claimed affiliation with the Crips’ arch rival, the Bloods, whose color is red. When Dominic made disparaging remarks about the Bloods, Joey took Jason’s blue bandanna, tossed it to the ground and spit on it.
That’s when Ryan, who was wearing a red-hooded sweatshirt, walked up to join his friends. He lightly slapped Dominic’s face, chiding him for his gang affiliation. Taunting him, Dominic would later tell police, as though challenging him to fight. Dominic recognized Ryan as a student in Paddock’s drafting classes.
Dominic and Jason backed away from the older boys. Their antagonists were bigger than them, but not by much: Ryan and Ben were about 5’6″ and 125 pounds each; Andy was even smaller. But their shaved heads and punk hairstyles (those who could also had the whisper of a goatee) gave them a white-boy-tough aura.
The older youths continued to bully the younger ones until a teacher came out to break it up and the police arrived. Neither side would cooperate with the cops, so it went down in the books as just another contact with some bad boys of Boulder.
As his friends drove him back to finish the rest of the day at Fairview High School, Ryan laughed about the police being called to a “gang fight.” It was no big deal–just harassing some little wannabe gangsters. They were lucky it was only Ryan and his friends who caught them posing.
“It was just a group of guys. Friends,” he says now. “We didn’t call ourselves anything. No gang name. No colors. We didn’t claim any territory as ours.
“It was mostly hang out and get drunk on the weekends.”
Ryan and his friends started hanging out and drinking beer as soon as school let out that afternoon. Andy was one of his oldest pals in Boulder–he’d known him since the Rushings moved to town in 1989.
On this particular day, Andy’s head was shaved, and he was wearing the same sort of baggy clothing the rest of them were. But it was anybody’s guess what Andy, whose stepfather was a computer wizard of some sort, would look like next.
There were pictures of him with a mohawk when he was no more than eight or nine. Next it was death rock, wearing black clothes, dying his hair black, being moody. Then it was punk rock and brightly colored hair shaped into huge spikes. There were times when Andy’s hair was bigger than Andy.
Another pendulum swing took him into the camp of the skinheads–angry white boys who shaved heads in solidarity and wore Doc Marten steel-toed boots. But it didn’t take long for Andy to swing back the other way and join the Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, whose main purpose was to oppose the racist Skinheads.
That was in the eighth grade, when Andy met Ryan, who also joined the SHARPs. For younger, smaller SHARPs like these two, membership consisted mostly of looking the part and attending meetings. The violence was left to the larger, older skinheads.
The two friends soon moved on from the SHARPs. Ryan went back to the skateboarder scene, while Andy continued to search for an identity that would last.
Others were moving on as well. In the summer before ninth grade, Ryan noticed that a lot of his peers were beginning to adopt gang attire. They wore Starter jackets with the logos of professional ball teams, baseball caps turned backward, shirts sized for their big brothers, baggy pants. More than that, they were imitating inner-city black mannerisms and gang slang–all stuff they had seen on television and in the movies.
“It was all you saw on MTV at that point,” Ryan says. “Rap, gangster hip-hop. At first it was just the image; nobody was actually in a gang. But later in that school year, it started to change.”
By high school, he knew of white boys from well-off Boulder families who were involved with black gangs like the Crips in low-income areas of Denver. Or Hispanic gangs like the North Side Mafia, on the outskirts of Boulder. Or TRG, an Asian gang. Or one of their own, like the Nasty-Ass White Boys, the NAWBs.
Ryan was doing a little searching of his own. Knee injuries had knocked him out of skateboarding and soccer, his favorite sport, leaving him a lot of time to get in trouble.
In 1991 he was hanging out with several friends when they were invited to a party. He knew better than to go; some of the kids there belonged to the NAWBs, and at least one had a history of car-theft convictions.
His instincts were right, but his judgment wasn’t. Ryan was at the party ten minutes when the police arrived. It turned out the house belonged to the family of one boy’s girlfriend, who had given him the keys before she left on vacation. A neighbor called the police, and the boys were arrested.
Ryan was represented in court by the stepfather of one of his friends. The lawyer worked out a deal in which Ryan pleaded guilty to criminal trespass in exchange for probation. It was a felony conviction, but the attorney assured Ryan and his parents that it would be wiped from his record when Ryan turned eighteen in a few years. So long as he behaved, it shouldn’t affect his future.
But Ryan didn’t behave. A year later he and a friend got into an altercation with an Asian kid at a bowling alley. Ryan was charged with misdemeanor assault for head-butting the youth, although he claimed the other boy started the fight.
For the second time in two years, Ben Rushing received a call from juvenile detention. He bailed his son out of jail, told him he didn’t approve of fighting no matter who started it, and grounded him. When Ryan was allowed out again, it was under strict orders to let his parents know his whereabouts.
Ryan accepted the lectures and the punishment. He loved his parents, who had always been there for him. And he resolved to stay out of trouble, which meant avoiding some of his old friends who had a tendency to do the opposite.
He didn’t succeed.
By that evening, Ryan and his pals were good and drunk. It was boys’ night out. They had arranged to meet their girlfriends, who had plans of their own, at about 11:30 p.m.
With time to waste, they were driving around guzzling beers, checking out the scene on the Hill. About 10:15, Andy’s pager–the latest status symbol–went off. It was his girlfriend; she and several of her friends wanted a ride to a party.
Ryan and Ben agreed to meet Andy later, and got out of the Subaru. Ryan was fighting with his girlfriend, and she would have hit the roof if she found out that he had gone along with Andy to take a bunch of girls to a party. But as his friend left, Ryan regretted not going along. He didn’t like the Hill much. Too many ways to get into trouble.
The Hill rises above the southwest corner of the University of Colorado campus, a collection of bars, coffeeshops, bookstores, sandwich shops and businesses catering to the latest fad–from head shops in the Sixties to skateboards in the Nineties. Through the years, day and night, the sidewalks and street corners have been a gathering place for the young and restless: college students, high school kids, even younger children. Hippies. Frat boys. Punk-rock skateboarders. Skinheads in suspenders. Sometimes when these tribes rub up against each other, there is friction. After all, boys have been duking it out since Cain brained Abel. Over girls. Over territory. Over nothing more than a dirty look.
Andy drove off, and Ryan and Ben were invited into a sleek, cherry-red Pontiac Firebird driven by Ian Graber, a tall, skinny twenty-year-old Ryan knew through Ian’s brother, Justin, who was also in the car.
Justin was more acquaintance than friend. He had only recently moved with his family from Los Angeles to Boulder. Although he went to Fairview for a while, he’d dropped out that spring. Eighteen years old, he was bigger than the others–about 5’10” and 165 pounds, muscular and imposing with his shaved head, earrings and Doc Marten boots. He had told Ryan that he’d grown up in a rough neighborhood and was well-acquainted with L.A. gangs but hadn’t joined.
In the back seat of the car was Ryan’s old friend Forest Timothy, who’d lived in the neighborhood when the Rushings first moved to town.
Forest was the same size and age as Ryan, but he was the leader. His choirboy looks belied a wild streak. Loud and obnoxious, he often didn’t know when to shut up or how to stay out of trouble.
Since June 1991 when his juvenile record began, Forest had been charged four times for theft, once for car theft, once for burglary, six times for trespass, twice for criminal mischief, twice for driving under the influence, once for reckless endangerment, and twice for third-degree assault.
And 1993 was shaping up as a banner year. In January he was accused of Macing another young man outside a pizza parlor. On March 11 he allegedly threatened a female King Soopers employee who accused his group of shoplifting, telling her, “I’ll kick your ass.” On March 12 he was blamed for inflicting $3,000 worth of damage on a Mercedes-Benz owned by a man who earlier that night had come to the aid of a kid assaulted by a group of Forest’s friends, including Andy and Joey. Then, on March 14, he wrecked his mother’s dark-green Volvo and was arrested for DUI.
But so far, Forest had managed to escape much in the way of punishment. In fact, he often bragged to friends about how his stepfather, lawyer Ted Waitkus, could get him out of any mess. Forest even gave them legal advice: “Don’t tell cops anything.”
This night he was drunk and in classic loudmouthed form. Wearing a flannel shirt, baggy pants and a hat with a large marijuana leaf emblazoned on it, he welcomed his old friend into the car.
A couple of blocks away from the Hill, James Atwood, 22, and Patrick Wells, 20, were partying at their house with two girls–Erin Loughlin, who went to CU, and Mary, a student at Boulder High. Paul Kelly, 20, and Ty Ferley, 23, arrived shortly before 10 p.m.
James had met Patrick, and through him Paul, when they lived in a dormitory on the CU campus. Patrick and Paul were both from Little Rock, Arkansas, and had known each other since the seventh grade.
The connections had brought them to the attention of the Boulder police a year earlier.
On March 26, 1992, a college student had come home to discover that his stereo, television, VCR and about 300 compact discs were missing. He saw two men, whom he described to the police, run away from the scene. Boulder police soon arrested William “Bo” Adair, another son of Little Rock, hiding in the back of a van–Paul Kelly’s.
Adair told the cops that James Atwood had boosted him into an unlocked second-floor window and that after they’d stolen the stuff, they’d taken it back to the house that Adair rented with Paul. Adair and Atwood had been returning for more loot when the resident saw them.
James Atwood ended up turning himself in. His lawyer claimed he hadn’t participated in the burglary and had only sat in the van; the case against him was dismissed for insufficient evidence. Adair pleaded guilty to theft. There was no indication that Paul Kelly had any involvement in his roommate’s misadventure.
When Paul arrived at James’s house that night, he caught up with the others by knocking down between a half and a full pint of vodka mixed with cranberry juice. Then the four young men and two young women headed out into the cool April night for another party.
They never made it.
At about 10:30 p.m., Ina Herrin and her boyfriend, Travis Stinson, were on their way home to watch The Late Show With David Letterman after a concert on campus. They pulled up in the left lane at a stoplight at Pennsylvania and Broadway, at the bottom of the Hill. Ina was driving. Travis spotted Paul Kelly, whom he had met the previous summer.
Paul fit right in with the eclectic population of the Hill. His head was shaved, he’d grown a goatee and he was wearing an Army jacket.
Travis yelled out the window. “Hey, Paul. How’re you doing?”
Paul seemed disoriented, and it took him a moment to locate the owner of the voice. Finally, he spotted Travis and told his other friends to go on across Broadway without him. He’d catch up.
Paul stumbled off the curb and into the street just as a cherry-red Pontiac Firebird full of high school boys pulled up in the right lane.
“What the fuck,” Paul yelled, “you almost hit me,” and touched–or hit–the car with his hand.
As Paul leaned over to talk to Travis, the boys in the Firebird rolled down their windows and cursed him back.
Nervously, Ina Herrin watched four of the boys get out and stand near the back of their car. They were obviously young, all wearing baggy pants, gangster-style, and three of them were really small. The fourth was taller than the others, maybe 5’10” and well-built; his head was shaved, like Paul’s.
“You want a piece of this?” yelled Forest Timothy, his arms akimbo.
“Oh, you’re brave, four on one,” Travis retorted, then tossed in, “Why don’t you get driver’s licenses?”
He looked at Paul, who had obviously been drinking, and asked his friend if he wanted a ride away from the hostilities. “Are you gonna be all right, brother?” he asked.
“I can handle it,” Paul replied as the light changed.
Ina and Travis headed home. They could see the boys continue to yell at Paul.
The Firebird turned south onto Broadway as Ian Graber sought a place to park so that he could join his group. In the meantime, Paul crossed Broadway to the campus, where his friends waited. The four boys followed him.
From there, the stories diverge. Some witnesses say Paul hurried across the street without further engaging Ryan, Forest, Ben or Justin. But most witnesses say the word-slinging continued.
A middle-aged man who watched from the sidewalk later told police that he heard Paul, whom he described as “classically… skinhead,” call the boys “gangster pussies.” Another witness reported that Paul invited the teenagers to come along to where his friends waited if they wanted to get it on–and the younger boys responded.
Erin Loughlin watched Paul jog across the street. Not as though he were frightened, she later told police, but simply to get out of the way of approaching traffic. At one point, she saw him turn as though to say something to the boys. She was about to tell the males in her group that she thought there was going to be trouble, but her friends were already on their way to Paul’s side.
“I got mad, because I thought that they were being stupid guys who were just going to go and talk, you know, shit,” she told police. “Just get up in each other’s faces and call each other names and push each other.”
The two groups–college boys on one side, high school boys on the other–faced off on the bike path like two packs of dogs disputing the local fire hydrant. Everybody was stiff-legged, bowed out. Invective flew back and and forth.
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
“You want to fight?”
“Do you want to fight?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you!”
The college boys thought the high school boys looked like a bunch of little wannabe gangsters. And said so.
The high school boys thought the college boys looked menacing. They didn’t say so.
Ty Ferley, with his long hair, seemed to be the only peacemaker in either group. But they had all been drinking, and neither side was backing down.
As usual, Forest was doing most of the talking for the high school boys. “You don’t want to fuck with us!” he yelled.
Emboldened by six beers and a vodka and tonic or two, James Atwood took the lead for his group. At 5’10” and 180 pounds, he was a lot bigger than Forest or Ryan. He grabbed Ryan, who was mouthing off, by his hooded sweatshirt and tossed him to the ground.
Ryan got up, but Patrick Wells, 5’10” and 160 pounds, restrained him by pinning him against a tree. Wells later told police that he merely held him there with his forearm on Ryan’s chest. Ryan says Patrick had him by the throat and asked, “What are you going to do now, pussy?”
“I was scared,” Ryan says. “The guy was bigger. I was drunk. I thought, `Whoa, he’s going to beat the shit out of me.'” But Wells let him go, and Ryan found himself next to Ty, who kept trying to calm things down.
“Then tell your friend to shut up,” Ryan said, referring to James, who was by now confronting Forest.
But James tossed Forest to the ground, and when the younger boy got up, his mouth still motoring, he did it again. “You guys are gonna get hurt if you wanna screw around.”
Then Justin Graber stepped in, eye to eye with James, who suddenly realized a real fight might be at hand. They were about the same size. Witnesses reported that James touched his short, shorn hair as if to signify that he and Justin had something in common. But mostly they stood there growling at one another.
Then Justin reached behind his back, intimating he had a gun. That didn’t frighten James–he grabbed Justin and reached around him. “Oh, what are you, the tough guy?” James asked.
Patrick Wells stepped between the two and dragged his friend down the bike path.
Meanwhile, Ryan found himself facing off against Paul Kelly, 5’10” and about 160 pounds. Ryan had already been accosted twice, and when Paul pushed, he pushed back.
“He kept saying, `What are you claiming? What are you claiming?'” Ryan recalls. “I knew then that he was not just some joe-shmoe college guy. Looking at him, I figured he was a skinhead.
“So I asked him, `What are you claiming?'”
Ryan says Paul didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed Ryan’s sweatshirt and pulled it over his head, effectively blinding Ryan and pinning his arms. According to witnesses, Paul then pushed Ryan to the ground and struck him in the back of the head with his fist. Ryan panicked and backed away into a bushy area off the bike path. As he did, he heard a loud smack, and then another and another.
When he finally got free of his sweatshirt, Ryan looked up, angry as a bee and wanting revenge for the knot on his head. What he saw was Paul lying face-up on the ground. Ryan stepped forward and delivered a soccer-style kick with the side of his foot to the right side of Kelly’s head.
“I yelled, `Get up’ when I kicked him,” Ryan says. “I didn’t know he was unconscious. I wanted him to get back up and fight.”
When Paul didn’t move, Ryan stepped to the side for a better view. That’s when he saw the disfigured face–and the blood. Paul wasn’t moving.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Ryan yelled. The high school boys began running as a pack.
Down the path, Patrick was trying to calm James when he heard Ty say something about Paul being in trouble. He looked up in time to see the high school boys on the move.
James didn’t hear Ty’s comment but jumped up anyway and gave chase. He caught the boys but found himself surrounded. Striking out wildly, he was hit and then saw a black boot that landed in his ribs.
He staggered out toward Broadway.
A woman driving down the road saw James and hit her brakes. “Oh, God,” she thought as she saw the youths surrounding him. “A bunch of young skinheads!”
Then the boys were off and running again.
Climbing into the Firebird, the high school gang exulted in their victory over the college boys. Each recounted his heroic role in the battle, which was growing in ferocity by the second. Justin bragged about how he had stepped in to save Ryan and dropped the goateed guy with a single punch. “The guy was a skinhead,” Ryan told his friends. “He kept asking what I was claiming.”
They drove to Wendy’s, where they paged Andy and the girls to join them. When the others arrived, they retold their story; more friends were called and told of the fight. The college guys had started it, they said, and Justin had stopped a skinhead from beating up Ryan.
The bragging did not go unnoticed by other customers, some of whom knew the boys.
Back at the bike path, a crowd had gathered around Paul Kelly.
James, believing that he was seeing his friend’s brains mixed with the large pool of blood that now spread on the path, freaked out. “I got a big mouth sometimes,” he told a security cop who had run across the street from a convenience store. “It’s all my fault.”
Boulder police patrolling the Hill quickly reached the scene and began piecing together conflicting stories of who had done what to whom. Because the incident occurred on university property, the campus police were put in charge.
“This is a very serious assault right now,” one officer called in over his radio. “Looks like twelve people took turns kickin’ this guy in the head.”
An ambulance arrived to take Paul to Boulder Community Hospital. The paramedics could see that the left side of his face was caved in, and his nose was out of place. There was a bloody, two-inch round spot on the back of his head where it had struck the cement.
At the hospital, Paul’s condition worsened as internal bleeding created pressure on his brain. He was placed on a respirator.
Police located Paul’s nineteen-year-old brother and roommate, Matt, and brought him to the hospital. The situation was extremely serious, Matt was told: His brother might die. The boys’ father, Paul Kelly Sr., was called in Florida. Their mother, Margie Holcomb, who still lived in Little Rock, got the bad news. Both parents headed to Boulder. It was, as Holcomb told the newspapers, “a mother’s worst nightmare.”
Patrick and James waited at the hospital for word on Paul. A little after 1 a.m., they were surprised to see a high-school-aged male in a flannel shirt walk into the emergency room with his mother. He was holding his right hand, as if injured.
They recognized him as one of the boys involved that night and told CU police detective Gary Arai. They couldn’t say for sure that the kid, who had sauntered by without making eye contact, was one of the youths who had hit or kicked Paul–they hadn’t actually seen the attack–but they knew he was one of the boys engaged in the verbal battle that preceded it. The officer urged James to be calm while he approached the boy and his mother. It was Forest Timothy and his mother, Susan Adams.
Arai took Adams aside and told her what had happened. He asked if he could talk to Forest. She called her husband, Ted Waitkus, who told her not to allow Arai access to Forest unless the cop guaranteed that his stepson would not be arrested. Arai could make no such guarantee.
During this conversation, Forest approached. Arai could see that he was intoxicated; he was also profane and belligerent. He indicated that Arai should know him by reputation. “I’m always being harassed by the cops,” he said.
Forest left to get a cast on his hand. Adams started telling Arai that her son had arrived home an hour earlier, but then she thought better about saying too much and clammed up. “She seemed primarily worried that Forest was involved with some local problem,” Arai wrote in his report, “and feared retaliation against herself.”
Paul’s parents arrived on Saturday. Dr. Gene Bolles, a Boulder neurosurgeon, told them that the injury might have already caused irreparable damage that could leave him with a severe disability.
“It was felt at this time if we did not do surgery, it was looking like we were no longer going to be able to control the intracranial pressure and that he may, indeed, die,” Bolles noted in his report.
Surgery was performed to remove blood clots from the frontal lobe. Paul was then placed in a drug-induced coma to help him heal.
That afternoon, campus detectives interviewed James, who said Paul had not been drinking–despite the hospital’s report that Kelly’s blood alcohol content was over .150, well over the .10 that marks intoxication. “We don’t know how Paul got into a fight with these guys,” he said, “if he was talking shit to them or not.”
All he knew, James said, was that his friend appeared to be in trouble with the high school boys, so he stepped in.
“I was verbally confronting several of these kids saying, `You guys better keep walkin’, you know, or else you’re gonna get hurt’…and one of the guys pushed me, so I pushed him back, and then I was like, `Oh, whatever.'”
James described the incident as “a running fight.” And he said he chased the teens not because he was aware that Paul was hurt, but because “I was just caught in the heat of the action.”
Other witnesses told police that James started the physical part of the confrontation and that Paul had pulled Ryan’s sweatshirt over his head prior to punching him. They described how Justin’s first punch seemed to have knocked Paul out. As one fourteen-year-old witness put it, “His head hit the concrete before his feet did. Then everyone just, like, walked by and kicked him in the face.”
“That’s how they end their fights,” another young girl told the police, not knowing how important her statement would become. “They kick the guy.”
There was no mention of the fight in Sunday’s Boulder Daily Camera. But the lifestyle section of the newspaper ran a New York Times article about the rise of violence and hate crimes on college campuses. An accompanying story noted that violent crimes on the University of Colorado campus, however, were decreasing.
Alcohol, according to a CU spokesman, is the biggest contributor to violence: Half of all assaults and criminal mischief on campus were committed under the influence.
By that evening the police had been given the names of the high school boys who might have been involved, including the four who were there, as well as Andy, Joey and several others who knew of the incident.
A young man who in the past had been in trouble with the police and complained that he was having a hard time living down his reputation, told detectives that Forest was involved with a group that liked to start fights with skinheads in Denver. Another boy said he was afraid of retaliation because Forest had friends in the North Side Mafia and the Grape Street Crips.
The boy’s mother, who attended the interview, interjected, “I think they’re just a bunch of snotty little rich brats that have been given everything and think that they don’t have to do anything.” She warned her son that he’d better be telling the police the truth about not being involved.
“If you are lying right now, you are a sociopath and you need to be locked up.”
Later, a young woman told the detectives that Forest had admitted to her that he had broken his hand fighting one-on-one with a college boy.
Forest’s group was popular at Fairview High School, she added. “They’re…the in crowd?” asked Detective Brett Brough, one of CUPD’s lead investigators.
“I don’t know how you would, like, stereotype them,” the girl responded. “Juvenile delinquents, maybe you’d call them. Punks.”
“Rebels without causes,” the girl’s mother added.
“Irish,” the girl said.
The boys still didn’t know how badly Paul Kelly was injured, she added.
“They’re gonna know,” Brough said. “It’s gonna hit the papers tomorrow.”
On Monday, April 19, the Daily Camera ran its first account of the Paul Kelly incident–at the top of the front page under the headlines: “CU student beaten on the Hill” and “Brutal attack by 5 or 6 leaves 20 year old with serious brain damage.”
“Twenty-year-old Paul Kelly was a gentle peacemaker–a lover, not a fighter, he once said with a smile,” wrote the reporter, “which is why his family and friends were all the more shocked after the University of Colorado freshman was brutally attacked on the Hill this weekend…”
“That area’s just a really weird place on a Friday night–young kids wanting to be tough and prove something,” Patrick Wells told the newspaper. “I don’t know what they proved.”
The paper reported that surgeons had removed the frontal lobe of Kelly’s brain and warned that if he lived, a full recovery should not be expected. The newspaper also said that Kelly was attending CU to study philosophy–although he was actually only taking one night class. It noted that he was an artist and enjoyed skiing, hiking and rock climbing.
end of part 1
