The oil and gas industry raised a massive war chest last year in anticipation of a showdown over anti-fracking ballot initiatives that failed to materialize — and then spent freely on advertising, contributions to PACs and candidate committees, as well as general promotion of the industry’s issues and causes across…
There was a time last summer when Andrea Carter thought she’d found her dream job. A certified nursing assistant and phlebotomist, Carter began working in June at an Aurora outpatient clinic operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs. She was a contract employee, meaning that she worked for a private…
It wasn’t hard to get all nostalgic about football players from bygone eras yesterday, amid the godawful and spiritless performance of the Denver Broncos against the workmanlike Indianapolis Colts — who, unlike their decrepit hosts, managed to seem at least mildly interested in heading on to the AFC championship game…
I’m still mulling over what point Indianapolis Star writer Gregg Doyel was trying to make in a bizarre column that appeared yesterday, entitled “Next to Broncos, a Mass Murder Suspect Awaits.” All sorts of motivational drivel gets written in the pimp-happy world of sports journalism this time of year, as…
UPDATE: Third Judicial District Attorney Frank Ruybalid has reached a settlement in a state ethics investigation of his office. Ruybalid admitted to thirteen violations of Colorado’s rules for professional conduct of attorneys, and received a suspended six-month suspension of his law license and 23 months of probation. According to a…
After ten years in the House of Representatives and six as a U.S. Senator, Mark Udall would prefer to go out known as a champion of individual liberty and the environment, rather than the faltering “Senator Uterus” who one-noted his re-election campaign and badly underestimated the Republican who unseated him,…
The battle over fracking in Colorado continued to attract national media attention in 2014, and with good reason. The use of hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas, and the attendant debate over economic benefits versus possible health and environmental risks, has been playing out here with more twists and…
A few weeks ago a 56-year-old hunting guide on the Western Slope was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for violations of the Lacey Act. Christopher Loncarich’s crime consisted of going to absurd lengths to insure that the slaughter of mountain lions and bobcats in Utah and Colorado would…
In the throes of the holiday season, even Tiny Tim’s charitable instincts can be severely tested by all the industrial-strength appeals to give, give, give. So it’s encouraging to report that some very local, decidedly grassroots campaigns on behalf of quixotic projects — call ’em labors of love — seem…
In a highly unusual case, a female correctional officer who worked at the state prison in Sterling has been charged with multiple counts of unlawful sexual contact, after inmates reported being groped by the officer during pat-down searches. And one prisoner who claims to have triggered the investigation says it…
Television shows like CSI have given us, the channel-surfing American public, an almost mystical faith in the crime-solving abilities of DNA. We expect the presence of foreign DNA in the victim’s bite wound to nail the perp, and the absence of any traces of the stuff to help absolve the…
This week’s cover story, “The Coldest Case,” looks back at the still-unsolved 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey — and the long, lonely battle waged by Fleet and Priscilla White, former friends of the Ramseys, to learn how the investigation got so badly derailed. The case had a devastating impact…
Update below: Some deaths are so brutal, so shocking to the public conscience, that they seem to cry out for retribution. That seemed to be the case in the fatal trauma suffered by thirteen-month-old Brookelynn Palmer, whose head injuries were so severe that prosecutors maintained she must have been swung…
In his preparations for his attack on his school last December, Karl Pierson developed a hit list of specific students he planned to target and even scoped out in advance the locations where his intended victims could be found. Yet those details were omitted from the official report on the…
He lost a tough, key race to rising Republican media darling Cory Gardner, but Mark Udall still has some unfinished business before giving up his U.S. Senate seat in a few weeks. And at the top of the list is Udall’s push for passage of S. 1794, his bill to…
This week’s Westword cover story, “The Snitch Who Stole Christmas,” examines the aftermath of a 2013 police investigation that led to the arrests of forty people in Trinidad for allegedly selling heroin, meth, and other drugs to two undercover informants. The cases were so riddled with legal and procedural problems…
UPDATE: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Trinidad police, alleging that two detectives fabricated and misrepresented evidence in the 40-person drug sting carried out in 2013. The organization brought the suit on behalf of two former suspects, probation officer Danika Gonzales and school employee Felicia Valdez,…
Six years after the drill-baby-drill crusaders of the Bush administration targeted one of Colorado’s most ecologically unique places for widespread energy leases, a surprisingly reasonable compromise has been hammered out over the fate of the Roan Plateau. The deal is being praised by state and federal officials as well as…
Two local authors will be celebrating their just-published novels at the LoDo Tattered Cover tonight — one in the flesh, one in spirit. And since the authors have an intertwined history and the novels involve the latest exploits of series characters, it’s important to keep things straight. Former Denver Post…
Three years ago, Colorado’s state prison system kept nearly 10 percent of its population held in solitary confinement, a rate that was about seven times the national average. That excessive use began to change under Department of Corrections executive director Tom Clements, until his 2013 murder by Evan Ebel, an…
A photography exhibit opening this weekend offers rare glimpses of an arduous journey: The long road taken by displaced people from Bhutan, many of whom have spent years in refugee camps awaiting resettlement opportunities, to strange new worlds — like Aurora, Colorado. The images were taken by young refugees themselves,…
After years of battling the Pentagon’s plans to expand the 367-square-mile Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, ranchers and other residents of southeastern Colorado thought they’d finally achieved peace with honor last fall, when a top Army official formally announced that the military was abandoning any land acquisition plans for PCMS. But…
