News

Dr. Karl Shipman’s stumble off a ladder in September 1997 set off a perilous chain of events that led to — but did not end with — his sudden death at age 64. The hardy, athletic internist and former chief of medicine at Presbyterian Hospital had simply broken his wrist…

The Beat goes on:Over the past several years, the estate of writer Jack Kerouac, whose experiences — both real and, uh, imaginary — in Denver during the late Forties are documented in landmark Beat works such as On the Road, has been the subject of a peevish lawsuit, with Kerouac…

Russell Enloe’s father, the electrician, was baffled by the fluorescent-light decision. “He came in and saw us ripping them down,” Russell remembers, “and he said, ‘Don’t do it! They’re so cheap to run!'” A few hours later, the landlord came by to point out that the storefront at 46 Broadway…

Denverites love their oldies. According to the most recent Arbitron ratings (representing, in the jargon of the industry, “Summer, Phase 2”), four purveyors of flashbacks — KOOL 105, Jammin’ Oldies 92.5 and a pair of classic rockers, the Fox and the Hawk — are in the top ten music-driven stations…

At the end of August, a twenty-year-old University of Colorado student was kidnapped by six Asian gang members as she walked home in the gray pre-dawn light. They pulled her off the street and into their van with such unexpected force that her feet left her shoes, then drove her…

Kate Lacroix is a strong and outspoken young woman, a performer by training. Yet the assault she suffered almost a year ago shook her to the core. It was the kind of attack some people have difficulty even classifying as rape: She was taken in her sleep by a roommate…

Amy Pollman’s life changed one night in January 1995, when a psychiatric patient at Porter Hospital who was known to be suicidal smothered herself with a plastic bag that had escaped the notice of hospital employees. Pollman was at home when the call came. It was the first suicide at…

Many Colorado nurses fear that if they speak out about improving working conditions, they will be retaliated against by their employers. They feel powerless to change a health-care system they see as flawed. To eliminate their fear so that they can confidently be involved in staffings and other issues in…

Juana Barrera was the first one to arrive. She pedaled up to the fountain pond in Civic Center Park last Friday, propped her mountain bike against the stairs and sat down to read and wait for the others — if there were any others. Finally, about twenty minutes later, Shawn…

On snowy days, it takes a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get to Bob Allen’s log house off the steep and winding Spruce Canyon Drive. But the same powder that’s such a pain in the winter is welcome come spring when the snowmelt seeps through the soil and enters fractures in the…

Let them eat tulips: The Central Platte Valley has suddenly become the destination for Denver’s society crowd. The dusty railyards that used to provide a swell home to hobos, drunks and river rats are becoming just a memory, and civic boosters can’t stop yammering about it. The city’s patrons and…

The houses are still there, sitting in the middle of the Auraria campus as though nothing had ever happened. They stand side by side, one short block of them, red brick and green trim, Victorian and cottage, reminders of a time — and a community — long gone. Josie Acosta…

It’s four o’clock on a late September afternoon, and Sam Hammer, the flying traffic cowboy for Country 104.3 and 950 AM/The Fan, would already be in the air if it weren’t for one little problem: He can’t find his plane. So he picks up the handset of the mobile radio…

Saturday, July 17, 1999. Grace Aragon drives 170 miles from her home in Denver to the Kit Carson Correctional Center, a private prison on the outskirts of Burlington, just ten minutes shy of the Kansas border. She comes to visit her son Kenny, who at age 22 has already served…

The young man in the tailored gray suit stands behind the defense table and waggles his finger at Judge R. Brooke Jackson. He’s pretty full of himself, and he occasionally looks back at the gallery to see if his audience is equally impressed with his courtroom presence and vocabulary. Except…

Jimmy Myers was eighteen the night he rolled the car with the body of Geoffrey Hobin inside. Eighteen months later, in March 1999, he stood before Judge R. Brooke Jackson to be sentenced — not for murder, but for burglary. Now that a jury had acquitted Myers’s friend and co-defendant,…

When Coors Brewing Company worker Homer James was summoned to a meeting with his supervisors in April 1996, he thought it was because he’d been called “nigger” by a co-worker. Instead, to his surprise, the topic was sexual harassment. Coors had been sued over the issue in 1994 and –…

At the heart of Denver’s most contentious school-board race is a weed-studded field on 37th Avenue and Zuni Street. It will be the site of northwest Denver’s newest elementary school. But the fenced-in lot has also come to symbolize years of struggle between parents in northwest Denver and the Denver…

The Santa clauseWhen former governor Roy Romer lost his seat as chairman of the Democratic National Committee last week, Colorado lost some of its national prominence — and local detective R. W. “Pete” Peterson lost one of his favorite targets. Back in early 1998, when the Washington, D.C., magazine Insight…

Mystery writer Dolores Johnson may have made a fatal mistake the first time she decided to invent a gruesome death rather than rely on inspiration from a real dry cleaner. “The idea,” she remembers, “was a body found on a conveyor belt in the morning when the dry-cleaning shop opens…

The wild, wide-open medium known as Internet radio is booming in these parts, which is good news for Sam Stock. After all, his colorful departure from the Peak earlier this year demonstrates that he’s better off in a job without too many rules. Stock’s dismissal, previously recounted in these pages…