Crime & Police

As we’ve reported, Colorado Representative Lori Saine was arrested at Denver International Airport on December 5 on suspicion of introducing a firearm into a transportation facility. Since the publication of our previous item, the Denver Police Department has released a probable cause statement that reveals the make and style of Saine’s weapon: a Kahr Arms 9mm semi-automatic handgun that’s the subject of consistently positive online reviews and a YouTube video that’s been viewed more than 67,000 times at this writing.

As we’ve reported, Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood will learn during a December 15 hearing if he’ll be allowed to venture unsupervised off the grounds of Pueblo’s Colorado Mental Health Institute, where he’s resided since being found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 2010 shooting at Deer Creek Middle School. First Judicial District DA Pete Weir is among those objecting to this plan, and he offers as one reason for caution the awful story of David Lynn Cooper, who brutally killed his ten-year-old daughter mere months after being released from the state mental hospital because he’d supposedly regained his sanity.

According to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Colorado doubled during the first nine months of 2017 as compared to the same period last year. And while an ADL representative doesn’t directly blame President Donald Trump for mainstreaming such behavior, he makes it clear the Commander in Chief isn’t helping the situation.

In some ways, the Tuesday, December 5 arrest of Representative Lori Saine, a Weld County Republican from Dacono, for bringing a gun to Denver International Airport is no surprise. After all, she’s among the state legislature’s most prominent advocates for allowing guns in public places, including schools.

Next week, on Friday, December 15, a judge will determine if Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood will be allowed to venture unsupervised off the grounds of the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, where he’s resided since being found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting and wounding two students at Deer Creek Middle School seven years ago. Among those who strongly oppose this idea are Pete Weir, current DA in the First Judicial District, where Eastwood was prosecuted, and the family of Matt Thieu, who survived after Eastwood shot him in the torso.

Steffan Tubbs will not be rehired by KOA radio, which fired the longtime Colorado Morning News host  in August after he was arrested and accused of domestic violence by telephone. This decision was made even though the charge against Tubbs was subsequently dismissed and his accuser was herself busted on November 17 for allegedly stalking him and violating a protection order that forbade her from making contact.

Barely two weeks after Pueblo’s Donthe Lucas was arrested on robbery charges, the former Northeastern Junior College basketball star was served with an arrest warrant in the February 2013 disappearance of Kelsie Schelling, a Denver resident who vanished after heading south to tell her boyfriend, Lucas, that she was pregnant. The bust took place on the same day his mom, Sara Lucas, was taken into custody in regard to the aforementioned robbery, suggesting that authorities are trying to ratchet up the pressure on mother and son to reveal the whereabouts of Schelling’s body, which has not been found as of this writing.

On November 25, Denver TV stations prominently identified Javeon Brown when the Denver Police Department sent out an alert about the thirteen-year-old in relation to a Thanksgiving Day triple shooting near Manual High School. The outlets stopped doing so the following day after Brown’s arrest because he has not been charged as an adult for the crime. However, their reports continue to link to his name, and at this writing, a CBS4 item that scrubbed his moniker from its text sports a video that includes it.

Colorado’s Brock Franklin has been ordered to serve 472 years in prison for heading a violent child sex ring. The punishment is believed to be the longest-ever sentence for a sex trafficker in U.S. history.

On November 20, Kenneth Banks pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the death of Fallon Graham, a mother of two shot down outside Aurora’s Montview Bar & Grill two years to the day earlier. He did the same late last month in regard to two Denver murders, including the slaying of D’Andre Mayfield in a drive-by shooting. All three crimes took place during the same three-day period in 2015, and each is said to have been gang-related. Indeed, the prosecutor who effectively handed Banks the third of three life sentences without the possibility of parole says he opened fire on Graham because her companion had chosen to wear the wrong color shoes.

Family members of Alfredo Chavez, 17, fatally shot outside an Adams County grow house last year, are far from satisfied with the official investigation into this death.

Jose Ocampo, the first of two men convicted of murder in the death of aspiring rapper Michael House, has been sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 36 years for his actions. Danielle House, Michael’s sister, is pleased by this punishment, but it hasn’t lessened her sense of loss over the slaying.

Millions upon millions of people have bought and sold items on Craigslist without a problem. But that doesn’t mean horror stories involving the service are unknown, as Anthony Mott understands very well. Last year, the Jefferson County homeowner was tied up, threatened with a knife and robbed by two men who responded to a Craigslist ad, one of whom Mott managed to kill after freeing himself. Now, David Mascarenas, the surviving partner in crime, has pleaded guilty and faces decades behind bars for his role in this nightmare scenario.

Last week, authorities in Pueblo conducted a new series of searches in the case of Kelsie Schelling, a onetime resident of Denver (she lived in the Larimer Square area) who vanished more than four years ago after heading south to tell her boyfriend, Donthe Lucas, that she was pregnant. The searches focused on locations associated with Lucas, a person of interest in Schelling’s disappearance, and while they turned up no new evidence linking him to the disappearance, he was arrested days later at Denver International Airport for an unrelated robbery case — although one commenter on the Help Find Kelsie Facebook page saw a connection anyhow.

Freshly assembled data provides a new angle on Colorado places with the most arrests for intoxicated driving even as it offers fodder in the debate about whether stoned drivers are as big a threat as drunk ones. Areas with the largest number of marijuana businesses tend to have among the lowest rates of filings for driving under the influence or driving while ability impaired in the state. Additionally, less populous regions are apt to have more per capita DUIs and DWAIs than counties with big cities and crowded highways.

While opioid addiction is widely understood to constitute a national crisis, there’s disagreement about how best to tackle the problem, with some advocates arguing in favor of a health-care focus and others backing get-tough law enforcement tactics. But the latter approach fell short in the high-profile case of Sam Brunelus, who was busted on suspicion of manslaughter in the deaths of two men to whom he allegedly provided heroin laced with carfentanil, an extremely powerful synthetic opioid best known as an elephant tranquilizer.

The latest figures in regard to the most stolen vehicles in Colorado reveal a definite correlation between the rides most likely to be swiped in Denver and the state as a whole. And while the two most frequently targeted cars have remained the same for years, trucks have made major moves up the list.

Last night, November 9, the Elbert County Sheriff’s Office revealed the discovery of two men who’d been shot to death west of Simla, Colorado at what’s characterized as an illegal marijuana grow. The incident feeds into the law-enforcement narrative that cannabis sales have led to increased violence in the state days after the fifth anniversary of Amendment 64, the 2012 measure that sanctioned the practice in regard to recreational pot.

According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, 375 drivers in the state were arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence throughout Halloween weekend. That’s a huge increase from the same weekend last year. And the numbers are also way up for for busts over what CDOT refers to as its “Fall Festivals DUI Enforcement Period,” with law enforcement agencies averaging a staggering 47 driving-under-the-influence arrests per day during that span.

Since early 2015, authorities in Aspen have sought to make Landin Smith pay for two separate incidents in which he kicked members of the local police department. But in the end, Smith received no jail time for giving officers the boot, even though he’s committed similar acts so often that he was nicknamed the Aspen Cop Kicker. Moreover, Smith has spent plenty of time behind bars for his previous actions.

Jennifer Reali, popularly known as the “Fatal Attraction” killer, has reportedly been granted parole following a bumpy ride through the criminal justice system. In 2011, her sentence for murder was commuted by then-Governor Bill Ritter, but the state parole board subsequently rejected three appeals centered largely on the depth of her Christian faith.

The day after former Colorado resident Devin Kelley murdered 26 people at a Sutherland Springs, Texas church on November 5, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that this tragedy has pushed the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, the subject of his 2002 Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, from the list of America’s ten worst mass shootings.