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On a bright winter afternoon in northeast Park Hill, elementary-school students stream out of the Margaret Smith Renaissance Academy. While some mothers wait impatiently for their children to climb into the backseats of idling cars, most of the kids are walking to the trim brick homes and well-kept yards for…

The law that created the Toxics Release Inventory is one of the more novel pieces of legislation enacted in the past decade. It doesn’t mandate any reductions in toxic releases or outlaw particular chemicals. It simply lets the public know what goes on behind factory gates. That information–and the media…

At Roll-O-Rama, roller-skating is confined to precise, two-hour sessions. If you arrive early, clutching your brushed aluminum roller-skate case–the one that contains actual four-cornered skates, as opposed to in-lines–you will just have to cool your heels. In the foyer, the ticket window has a plywood panel shoved across its opening,…

It was a medical problem for the ’90s: A rich benefactor offers a giant, cost-conscious health-care corporation $1 million to pay for a brand-new building–if the company agrees to use it to house a program that has lost money for the past twenty years. What to do? Several former employees…

Sometime just before midnight on December 19, 1984, the Wilberg Mine in Huntington, Utah, caught fire. Even now, investigators can’t agree on what sparked it–the best guess is either an overheated air compressor or an electrical arc on a piece of mining equipment. But the results were depressingly clear: Twenty-seven…

When civil rights activist Judith Lee Berg had an opportunity to work in Atlanta three years ago, she didn’t think twice about renting out her Denver home and making a temporary move to Georgia. She didn’t think twice, either, about hiring A&R Transfer, a moving company a friend had recommended…

Get the rope: Forget the unfortunate lynching routine with black rodeo clown Leon Coffee at the National Western Stock Show. And ignore–if you can–the inexcusable “Jew down” joke repeated by longtime rodeo announcer Hadley Barrett, even though stock show president Pat Grant had promised in a letter to the Anti-Defamation…

When most people drive by the north Denver neighborhoods strung out along Interstate 70–including Globeville, Elyria and Swansea–they assume the area is entirely industrial and don’t notice the hundreds of homes tucked in between the factories and junkyards. If told that the neighbors are angry because trucks roar down their…

Read and Buried Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Where the Bodies Are Buried in Boulder,” in the January 23 issue: In a word? Bravo. If you are quiet, you can hear the thud reality makes when it smacks against the heads of those who wish to hide from the truth. Well, unless…

The natives–and even the ex-Californians–were getting restless. Four weeks after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the case was still the talk of the town, the state, the country–but there were so few new developments to talk about. Reporters kept rehashing the same old stories, chewing over the same old facts…

Members of the legal community were surprised and angry three months ago, when Gilpin County District Judge Kenneth Barnhill and prosecutor Jim Stanley had the temerity to try a juror for criminal contempt of court after she declined to convict a defendant in a drug case. The action, considered by…

Manual High School students talk about commitment to their school with a religious fervor. Many of them paint a rosy picture. Everyone gets along. Race has been overcome. The basketball team’s integrated. Some teachers can’t even remember the last fight they saw, much less broke up. And the school performs…

For years, car crashes in Colorado have been big business for a handful of doctors hired to perform medical exams on people claiming to have been injured in the wrecks. Members of this small group of “independent medical examiners” were frequently retained by insurance companies hoping to prove the victims…

James Darnell is in a rut. Just days before the 63-year-old Colorado Springs man was slated to go on trial for trying to hire a hitman to kill a woman and her young child, he was arrested for allegedly taking out a murder-for-hire contract on four other people, including a…

Taking stock: Yee-haw! Yep, the National Western Stock Show is in town, inspiring unusually pungent odors in Denver’s air and equally stinky reporting jobs by writers who don’t know bull about their beat. Which accounts for this correction in a recent newspaper: “A cutline in Tuesday’s Denver Post identified an…

Ken Fleck’s former career as an oil wildcatter in Kansas was a series of risky maneuvers–where do you drill and how deep? His present career as a calendar publisher may seem much more tame, but not the way Fleck does it. He’s taken the plunge into slick, specialty products like…

The body was found at the bottom of a six-foot-deep pit at a construction site near a Boulder public-housing project. The hole was covered with particle board, marked with cones and blocked by construction equipment. Two weeks later, on December 19, Boulder County Coroner John Meyer ruled the death of…

What a Beaut Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s January 16 column, “Global Warning”: Patricia Calhoun is very defensive. She typically tries to steer the reader away from the real issue. The real issue is reality. Yes, little JonBenet was murdered. Yes, the police are handling the case in a much different manner…

Emily Herrera listened carefully to the first few notes of the aria emanating from the audition hall. The “Caro Nome” aria, she thought. From Rigoletto. The singer’s voice pierced the quiet like a dagger. She’s good, Emily thought. But she’s a coloratura soprano. Emily, a lyric soprano, relaxed. She listened…

Sam Zakhem casts a hungry eye on the milling bodies in the halls of the State Capitol. The press conference room is filling up nicely, but the crowd is mostly made up of well-wishers and business associates. Where are the cameras? “Are any of the TV stations coming?” Zakhem asks…