The announcement that Kim Christiansen will take over the main anchor slot at 9News following the departure at month’s end of Adele Arakawa, who revealed her plans to retire last year in a bizarre blast at fake news, suggests that the station’s signature programs will continue their drift toward softer coverage intended to appeal to the aging demographic that still tunes in to television newscasts.
In an extraordinary attempt to save the job of CU Boulder head football coach Mike MacIntyre, who is credited with turning around a gridiron program that’s struggled since a recruiting scandal in the early 2000s, the university has suspended chancellor Phil DiStefano for ten days and mandated that MacIntyre and athletic director Rick George make $100,000 donations to a domestic-violence fund over the mishandling of abuse charges against ex-assistant coach Joe Tumpkin.
Rick Lewis, a star on both The Fox and KOA, has been officially named by the latter to the broadcasting crew for Denver Broncos games, joining his afternoon partner Dave Logan in the booth, with former Bronco Tyler Polumbus contributing as a sideline reporter. Lewis will replace former Broncos wide receiver Ed McCaffrey, who left the gig in April after contract negotiations collapsed, just as he did in Jacksonville last December for what turned out to be a successful dry run.
Mike McCarron is facing a methamphetamine charge even though he’s never knowingly possessed or used the substance. Prosecutors in El Paso County are pressing the accusation because they say a small amount of marijuana found in his truck tested positive for meth, even though a follicle analysis shows no trace of it in his system.
Representative Jared Polis’s announcement via Reddit that he’s running for governor of Colorado in 2018 turns the race into what is likely to become the craziest in state history, replete with big names, huge war chests and a major focus on marijuana.
The Colorado doctor behind a proposed ballot initiative to ban the sale of smartphones to children in the state under age thirteen views the devices as harmful to young people in a wide variety of ways, even suggesting a possible link to suicide. And while he concedes that enforcing the edict would be difficult, he sees the measure as a way to start a conversation here and throughout the nation as a whole about the wisdom of putting such a powerful tool in the hands of preteens.
One year ago today, on June 9, 2016, Ryan Wood Moss, a 23-year-old University of Colorado-Colorado Springs student, fell to his death at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. His body was found five days later, and an autopsy showed elevated levels of both alcohol and THC in his bloodstream. However, his mother insists that he was neither drunk nor high at the time of his fatal accident. Rather, she believes that hot temperatures at the park prior to the discovery of his remains produced a false positive for alcohol intoxication, and a nationally recognized medical examiner says she could be right.
Sienna Johnson has pleaded guilty to two charges, one juvenile and one adult, in relation to an alleged Columbine-style plot against Mountain Vista High School circa December 2015. Her sentence is similar to, but slightly longer than, the one meted out against Brooke Higgins, her accused co-conspirator, this past February.
The Denver Post, which announced in May that the paper’s newsroom will be moving out of its iconic Denver address, at 101 West Colfax Avenue, to the newspaper’s printing facility in Adams County, at the intersection of 58th Avenue and Washington Street, has agreed to sublease the space to the City of Denver for use as employee offices. By year’s end, in all likelihood, an area once devoted to keeping the government accountable will be occupied by workers from the government itself.
A court victory by two Colorado landowners who complained that the smell from a nearby marijuana grow made horse riding on their property less pleasant advances a strategy, based on federal racketeering laws, that anti-marijuana forces hope will help them to destroy the marijuana industry here and throughout the country.
New Colorado theft data reveals that three of the five most stolen vehicles in the state are trucks. This marks the most top-five appearances by pickups in at least three years.
It’s been more than nine months since the Denver Broncos were officially granted naming rights to Mile High Stadium following the bankruptcy of Sports Authority, the company that previously held them. Thus far, no business has stepped in to fill the void, and while a marketing expert believes a rights agreement will likely be reached prior to the start of the 2017-2018 regular season, he thinks smaller, less stable firms should stay away lest they suffer the same fate as Sports Authority, whose doom, he says, was hastened by the deal.
Elyssa McCreight, 32, has been identified as the victim of a fatal June 5 rafting accident on an Eagle County portion of the upper Colorado River known as Boneyard Rapids. She’s the second person to die rafting in Colorado this season, following a death on April 30, and one of two people killed on a state waterway over a two-day period. Bryan Reim was swept away at the Potholes, a popular western Colorado recreation site, on June 3.
Kevin Lyons has been sentenced for the April 2016 killing of Dr. Kenneth Atkinson and the wounding of two women, including his wife. Atkinson’s widow asked the judge in the case to impose the heaviest punishment possible, and he came as close as he could without imposing the death penalty, which prosecutors reluctantly chose not to seek.
This year’s Western Conservative Summit traditionally draws many of the biggest names in Republican politics, including Donald Trump, who was among the headliners last year when he was the GOP presidential nominee. But thus far, neither Trump nor any key members of his team have confirmed that they’ll attend the 2017 version, scheduled to take place July 21-23 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, prompting organizers to launch a Twitter campaign intended to use the power of the President’s favorite social media tool to get him and his closest helpers to commit.
Bryan Reim, 35, reportedly drowned on Saturday, June 3, a day after sharing a post about high water on Facebook. He’s one of two people to die in a two-day period on a Colorado waterway. The other death involved a tragic rafting accident, as did the season’s first drowning back on April 30.
A spectacular truck crash in Bailey that ended with the rig landing in the Platte River took place moments ago in an area near the scene of an accident involving another semi that destroyed a popular winery last year.
Monica Abeyta, thirty, was arrested on Saturday, June 3, in Colorado Springs after her three-year-old son shot his two-year-old brother. At last report, the injured child was in stable condition following the latest incident of children from Colorado being hurt or killed after finding an unsecured gun. Here are five additional examples as seen in excerpts from our previous coverage, as well as additional details about the Abeyta matter.
Former Denver Broncos star Peyton Manning, one of the most popular athletes in Colorado and across the country, is receiving unexpected backlash after reports that he joined President Donald Trump for a golf game, with many online commentators making reference to claims that the retired quarterback had pressed his naked buttocks into a trainer’s face during his days at the University of Tennessee.
This afternoon, organizers of the Denver 420 Rally will formally file an appeal to a decision by the City of Denver to prohibit them from applying for any event permit during the next three years and rescind the priority status that’s let them to regularly stage the annual gathering at Civic Center Park on or around April 20. According to rally attorney Rob Corry, the officials who ordered the ban, which followed complaints about trash at the park the morning after the get-together, have trumped up trivial matters in an arbitrary, unconstitutional way that suggests a bad reaction to the smoke plume that rose over the park at 4:20 p.m. on the day of this year’s event.
Denver rent prices, which seemed to be stabilizing earlier this year after a long stretch of increases, have now risen for the fourth consecutive month, according to a new report from ApartmentList.com. Prices are up on a year-to-year basis in ten out of ten metro-Denver areas surveyed by the site.
Longtime Denver Post sportswriter Terry Frei, who was fired following a tweet in which he wrote that he was “very uncomfortable with a Japanese driver winning the Indianapolis 500 during Memorial Day weekend,” apologizes for the message and expresses his hope that his supervisors at the paper might someday be open to his return. He also expresses frustration over being branded as a racist for his observation, which was inspired by his emotional connection to World War II veterans such as his late father, whose grave he visited shortly after pressing “send.”
