Big cities aren’t well represented in a new survey of the safest places in Colorado. Of the twenty communities considered the state’s safest, only three are in the Denver-Boulder metro area. Moreover, all of the latter are suburbs or outlying localities, and two fall toward the bottom of the roster.
Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board is calling on the Denver Sheriff Department to allow nursing mothers in custody to provide breast milk to their infants rather than discarding it in an approach known as “pump and dump.”
A new federal study shows that marijuana use among teens in Colorado has fallen below levels seen prior to the implementation of Amendment 64, the measure that legalized limited recreational cannabis sales in the state. Given the report’s origins, attorney and activist Brian Vicente, who co-authored Amendment 64, says haters of progressive marijuana laws such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions will find it more difficult than ever to suggest that these statistics are flawed.
After your Denver Broncos defeated the New York Jets 23-0 yesterday, December 10, messages from Twitter-using fans relieved that the team had finally broken its eight-game losing skid were countered by tweets ripping the squad for winning a meaningless contest and hurting the prospects for the best-possible draft picks next year.
Entrepreneur Scott Pack is the target of an amended lawsuit that builds on a complaint about what the attorney who filed the first one called the largest marijuana fraud case in Colorado history. Pack was also the subject of a surprising attack on the website of his old company, Harmony & Green, in which what were described as former employees juxtaposed apologies for his actions with photos that portrayed him as living it up after being indicted by an Arapahoe County grand jury for allegedly ripping off investors for as much as $10 million.
Nathan Enright, a 21-year-old who’d recently moved to Larimer County from Libertyville, Illinois to attend college, is the second person to have died at a Colorado ski resort during the 2017-2018 season. Enright’s injury took place while snowboarding at Keystone on December 2, the same day U.S. Armed Services member Collin Zak perished at Monarch, but his death wasn’t reported for nearly a week.
The mystery behind the death of Colorado mountain-biking pioneer Mike Rust has finally been solved. Yesterday, December 7, a jury in Saguache County, found Charles Moises Gonzales guilty of killing Rust, whose remains weren’t found until nearly seven years after he vanished in 2009 under mysterious circumstances.
As we’ve reported, Frontier, which promotes itself as Denver’s hometown airline, has had one public embarrassment after another of late, including bottom-scraping quality ratings in the wake of its disastrous response to a snowstorm this time last year and comments by its main investor in which he compared customers who complained to teenage spoiled brats. As such, a downtown Denver protest yesterday, December 7, by Frontier pilots who eagerly declared themselves to be “100 Percent Ready to Strike” qualifies as the latest horror story for the carrier, which has had no shortage of such tales in the past.
On December 17, 2016, during a psychotic episode, Ryan Partridge, an inmate at Boulder County Jail, tore his own eyeballs from his head. Partridge survived this horrifying example of self-harm, and he’s now suing Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle and more than twenty other named defendants. David Lane, the attorney who filed the lawsuit, accessible below in its entirety, stresses that this shocking incident isn’t isolated.
In a new interview, Vail’s Lindsey Vonn, among the most famous and accomplished skiers ever from the State of Colorado, says that if she makes the United States team for the next Winter Olympics games, to be held during February 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, she will be representing America but not President Donald Trump. Vonn adds that should she be invited to the White House with the squad or after earning a medal, she will not attend.
As we’ve reported, Colorado Representative Lori Saine was arrested at Denver International Airport on December 5 on suspicion of introducing a firearm into a transportation facility. Since the publication of our previous item, the Denver Police Department has released a probable cause statement that reveals the make and style of Saine’s weapon: a Kahr Arms 9mm semi-automatic handgun that’s the subject of consistently positive online reviews and a YouTube video that’s been viewed more than 67,000 times at this writing.
As we’ve reported, Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood will learn during a December 15 hearing if he’ll be allowed to venture unsupervised off the grounds of Pueblo’s Colorado Mental Health Institute, where he’s resided since being found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 2010 shooting at Deer Creek Middle School. First Judicial District DA Pete Weir is among those objecting to this plan, and he offers as one reason for caution the awful story of David Lynn Cooper, who brutally killed his ten-year-old daughter mere months after being released from the state mental hospital because he’d supposedly regained his sanity.
As we’ve reported, rent prices have finally started to moderate in Denver. But these shifts follow a long period in which rental costs have continued to go up and up and up in the Mile High City’s red-hot housing market. Even with recent improvements, rents for one-bedroom apartments during the course of 2017 have increased by well over 15 percent, a rate that’s the third highest out of one-hundred large and mid-size cities across the country.
The ugliness that marked the dueling lawsuits between Denver DJ David Mueller and pop star Taylor Swift over an alleged butt-grabbing incident at a 2013 Pepsi Center concert has provided a predictably nasty coda. As we’ve reported, Swift told Time magazine that Mueller had never paid her the $1 judgement she won during an August trial, adding that she considered his failure to do so “an act of defiance” that was “symbolic in itself.” But Mueller quickly fired back, insisting that he had sent her the $1 in the form of a Sacagawea coin that served as a symbol for him.
In an interview for Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which pays tribute to women, dubbed “silence breakers,” who spoke out about sexual harassment and assault in 2017, pop star Taylor Swift says Denver DJ David Mueller, who sued her in June 2015 for getting him fired from his job at KYGO after claiming (falsely, he insisted) that he’d grabbed her ass during a 2013 show at the Pepsi Center, still hasn’t paid her the $1 she won from him at a high-profile trial earlier this year.
According to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Colorado doubled during the first nine months of 2017 as compared to the same period last year. And while an ADL representative doesn’t directly blame President Donald Trump for mainstreaming such behavior, he makes it clear the Commander in Chief isn’t helping the situation.
In some ways, the Tuesday, December 5 arrest of Representative Lori Saine, a Weld County Republican from Dacono, for bringing a gun to Denver International Airport is no surprise. After all, she’s among the state legislature’s most prominent advocates for allowing guns in public places, including schools.
Next week, on Friday, December 15, a judge will determine if Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood will be allowed to venture unsupervised off the grounds of the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, where he’s resided since being found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting and wounding two students at Deer Creek Middle School seven years ago. Among those who strongly oppose this idea are Pete Weir, current DA in the First Judicial District, where Eastwood was prosecuted, and the family of Matt Thieu, who survived after Eastwood shot him in the torso.
At a meeting on Monday, December 4, the Douglas County School Board killed the district’s controversial voucher program, ending years of conflict. The fight has waged for years in the court system, but in the end, victory was achieved at the ballot box thanks to the electoral success of anti-voucher candidates last month.
This morning, Monday, December 5, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, with the nine jurists charged with considering whether Denver-based Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips discriminated against a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, by refusing to make them a wedding cake because their union contradicts his fundamentalist Christian views. Given the current ideological makeup of the court and the ultra-conservative proclivities of the newest justice, Colorado native Neil Gorsuch, many observers expect the court to side with Phillips in a ruling that critics say would preference one group of Christians over all others. But an expert thinks there’s still a chance the Supremes will reject the Masterpiece claim and suggests arguments that may sway the court’s potential swing justices.
Steffan Tubbs will not be rehired by KOA radio, which fired the longtime Colorado Morning News host in August after he was arrested and accused of domestic violence by telephone. This decision was made even though the charge against Tubbs was subsequently dismissed and his accuser was herself busted on November 17 for allegedly stalking him and violating a protection order that forbade her from making contact.
Once upon a time, the average person thought of $1 million as an enormous sum on which members of a family could live in luxury for the rest of their lives if only such an amount was within their reach, which it wasn’t. But times have changed. A new study suggests that $1 million is now a reasonable total to set aside for retirement, and even those who manage to do so may eventually run out of cash. That includes people who settle in Denver, which is ranked in the lower half of major cities when it comes to stretching these seven figures.
