News that two thirteen-year-olds who allegedly compiled a “kill list” related to their middle school have been arrested in Colorado Springs hardly qualifies as shocking at this point. In the more than eighteen years since the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School, folks in the state have seen far too many instances of young students being arrested for alleged school threats and violent plots, as documented below.

The State of Colorado, acting for the Department of Corrections, has agreed to pay a fairly modest $171,000 to settle a lawsuit in the torturous, slow-motion, completely preventable jail death of Dennis Choquette in November 2016. But Choquette’s estate has also reached confidential agreements with a slew of other defendants, including a giant private-prison company that owns the facility where most of the horrors took place. And given the disturbing facts of the case, which we first outlined this past February, after the complaint was filed, the sum of the settlements is almost certainly much, much larger.

Critics have long complained about the relatively light sentences given to some prominent white, privileged college students found guilty of sex crimes, and this week brings another example of the phenomenon. Jack Warmolts, a onetime Air Force Cadet who pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and unlawful sexual contact in October 2016, is now back on the streets after serving only eight months of a one-year term. However, ex-CU Denver student John D. Kennedy was sentenced to a minimum of nine years for sexual assault and more in part because his victim wrote an impassioned letter asking the judge in the case not to “allow another predator to go free.”

As seen in the photo above, Keith Hammock was once the driver for the Rasta Bus, a service that won a Best of Denver award in 2006. But if this recognition was a high point for him, yesterday marked an all-time low. On October 4, Hammock was sentenced to eighty years in prison for a 2016 shooting of two teens who invaded his home marijuana grow. One of the teens died in the incident.

Tanner Flores, nineteen, has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Ashley Doolittle, his girlfriend, in June 2016. Later today, October 5, he’s expected to be sentenced in the case. He faces a possible life term plus 32 years for kidnapping. As we noted in our previous post, on view below, Flores killed Doolittle near Berthoud, then transported her body across the state in his truck before being arrested in the Collbran area.

Christian Willis is the third person to be sentenced for playing a role in a robbery-gone-wrong that led to the fatal September 2015 shooting of Darren Bloomquist, a 49-year-old Air Force veteran who was moonlighting as a cab driver to support his disabled wife. According to the Denver District Attorney’s Office, the police report in the case remains sealed. However, we know that Willis and Nicholas McKinney, who were both juveniles when the crime took place, will spend decades in stir even though their older pal Dasean Perry actually fired the fatal shot.

At this writing, at least fifty people are reportedly dead and hundreds more were wounded after a mass shooting attack by Stephen Paddock during a Jason Aldean appearance outside the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas on Sunday night, October 1. These numbers make it the deadliest event of its kind in U.S. history, but hardly an isolated one. In the five years-plus since July 20, 2012, when twelve people were killed and seventy were injured during James Holmes’s attack at the Century 16 theater in Aurora, 1,864 incidents like it have taken place, according to online estimates.