Steffan Tubbs is out at KOA’s Colorado Morning News following his July 30 arrest on suspicion of domestic violence, disturbance by phone. Late last night, after word of the split broke, Tubbs went on Facebook to share the thoughts of his fourteen-year-old son, who told him, “It’s just too much.”
Ignacio Luque-Verdugo received the maximum sentence in a 2014 triple shooting at Aurora’s Bronco Bar that the judge in the case described as an execution. Prosecutors said a man killed in the incident was shot six times, with five of the bullets fired into his back after he was already down.
Studio420, an Englewood marijuana club, has been ordered to shut down following an administrative hearing. The business is planning to appeal the latest negative ruling in a years-long fight with the city that dates back to a time when it was called iBake Englewood and fronted by an entrepreneur who called himself Thurlow Weed.
The death of James Cummings, a 27-year-old from Denver, who drowned after leaping from a cliff-jumping spot at Green Mountain Reservoir in Summit County, was at least the fifteenth fatality at a Colorado water attraction in 2017. Now, federal and local authorities have jointly decided to temporarily restrict access to the site, in part because of its spreading reputation online among adventurers in Colorado and beyond.
Charges against Cynthia Dawn Russell and Elizabeth Moseley in relation to an ADAPT protest of Senator Cory Gardner in January have been dismissed. This decision, which came down on the same day that cases against five Democratic Socialists of America members who demonstrated against the senator at a July sit-in were also tossed, helps explain why Gardner recently relocated his offices from the Chase Bank building, a commercial enterprise, to a federal building.
Our recent post about the most expensive neighborhoods for rent in Denver this summer included ten areas in which the average cost for a one-bedroom apartment ranged from just under $1,500 per month to almost $2,000. In contrast, the ten least expensive Denver neighborhoods in terms of rent prices all boast an average rent price of less than $1,000.
Shortly after the publication of our August 8 post identifying the fourteeners in the Elk Mountains near Aspen as Colorado’s most dangerous, authorities announced the death of 57-year-old Rei Hwa Lee on North Maroon Peak, one of the aforementioned sites. Lee is the third person to die on an Elk Mountains fourteener in 22 days, and the second fatality in the Maroon Bells area since late May.
Jury selection for the Taylor Swift-DJ David Mueller trial is continuing in Denver at this writing, with national and international media operations closely monitoring developments in a story that involves dueling accounts about alleged bottom-touching prior to a June 2013 Pepsi Center concert. But this activity seems positively sluggish in comparison to the explosion of activity on Twitter, where Swift supporters are rallying under the hashtag #StayStrongTaylor.
Less than a month after William Scott Planer was arrested in Colorado Springs for putting an anti-Semitic sticker on the door of Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Center, a second synagogue in the city has been the target of hateful vandalism via Nazi graffiti at Temple Beit Torah. And while there’s no evidence of direct linkage between the crimes, Jeremy Shaver, associate regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, says such incidents appear to be escalating in the Springs and beyond.
On Sunday, August 6, a thus-far-unidentified 35-year-old Front Range man died while climbing the Knife’s Edge portion of Capitol Peak, in the Elk Mountains near Aspen. He’s the second person to perish scaling Capitol Peak in less than a month, following Parker’s Jake Lord, who suffered a fatal fall there on July 15. And according to Lloyd Athearn, executive director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, data compiled by the organization shows that Capitol Peak and several other Elk Mountains fourteeners are among the riskiest in Colorado.
It may not be good for his business, but Joshua Hunt, the co-founder and CEO of the local real estate brokerage TRELORA, says that for a significant number of people in Denver, including many of those who’ve just moved to the Mile High City, renting makes more sense than buying.
Today, jury selection begins in the court battle between former Denver DJ David Mueller and pop star Taylor Swift; he claims she got him fired by falsely accusing him of groping her prior to a June 2013 concert at the Pepsi Center, while she maintains that Muller “reached up under my skirt and grabbed my ass right when I was having to pose for a photo” that was subsequently made public against the wishes of all parties involved. The controversy has resulted in the biggest celebrity trial in Denver since 1994, when King of Pop Michael Jackson was hauled into court after being accused of plagiarism by Crystal Cartier, a local singer-songwriter.
Gun violence is a common occurrence in Colorado. In July, at least 67 incidents involving guns took place across the state. Not all of them resulted in injury or death, but each could have. See where they happened here.
Skeletal remains found near South Boulder Creek east of Gross Reservoir have been formally identified as Ryder Johnson, who vanished on January 17, 2016 after a day of work at Eldora ski resort. Johnson’s family, which offered a six-figure reward in connection with his disappearance, have released a statement expressing a mixture of grief and relief over confirmation of a fate members had long feared.
The Denver Police Department has expanded its body-worn-camera program to include members of the SWAT team. However, the policy’s fine print reveals that the cameras won’t be routinely used during tactical operations, when SWAT officers may be put in the position of using force. The man in charge of the DPD’s body-worn camera program justifies this exception by saying that criminals could use such footage to their advantage.
Among those at the center of an unprecedented lawsuit filed against Attorney General Jeff Sessions over federal scheduling of marijuana is Alexis Bortell, eleven, who had to move with her family from Texas to the Colorado community of Larkspur in order to legally use medical cannabis, which has eliminated the epileptic seizures she regularly suffered. As such, she represents a group of patients that her lawyer, Michael Hiller, describes as “medical marijuana refugees.”
A thus-far-unidentified 27-year-old man is suspected of having drowned after leaping from a cliff-jumping site at Green Mountain Reservoir in Summit County. The fatality is at least the fifteenth at a Colorado water attraction this year, and like Haley Clarke’s jumping-the-falls death in 2016, it spotlights the risks of extreme diving.
What’s it like to be summoned to the White House? For Rick Enstrom, a longtime figure in Colorado Republican politics, an invitation to attend an August 1 forum about small businesses like Enstrom Candies, the longtime Colorado enterprise he helps run, was an opportunity to get another angle on the administration of President Donald Trump — one that doesn’t have anything to do with investigations into possible collusion with Russia or the other assorted controversies that have dominated coverage by most major media outlets other than Fox News, which caught Enstrom on camera at the event.
This weekend, skeletal remains were found near South Boulder Creek east of Gross Reservoir. The area is not far from where Ryder Johnson vanished on January 17, 2016, after leaving his job at Eldora ski area.
There’s good news and bad news in Zumper’s report about rent prices in Denver during the summer of 2017. The good news is that the average cost of renting a one-bedroom apartment in the most expensive Denver neighborhood circa spring of this year has actually fallen by nearly $100 in three months, and there have been similar declines in three other top-ten areas. The bad news is that prices are up in six of the ten priciest neighborhoods, a couple of them by almost $200 over that same period.
John Bowlen, son of Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, has been named in a Colorado arrest warrant following his weekend arrest in California for driving under the influence; see our previous coverage below. In the document, also accessible here, Arapahoe Count Judge Darren Louis Vahle counts five ways in which the younger Bowlen violated his probation for a domestic violence incident involving booze and whippets back in 2015.
Keith Hammock has been found guilty of second-degree murder and more for killing one teenager and wounding another last October after they’d jumped a fence into his backyard, where he was growing marijuana. The verdict demonstrates the limitations of Colorado’s famous Make My Day law, especially when it comes to pot grows deemed illegal.
