Disbarred attorney David John Moskal, who became embroiled in legal controversies in Colorado while on supervised release from federal prison for stealing millions from clients in Minnesota, died August 3 in Summit County. No cause of death has been released. An obituary notice on a mortuary website asks that memorial…
A mere four years ago, at the height of the mid-Bush economic frenzy (post-9/11 recession, pre-mortgage meltdown), a certain Niwot-based manufacturer of plastic boat shoes could do no wrong. Crazily colored, beloved by gardeners and ER personnel and children of all ages, Crocs were conquering the world. The company was…
Three years ago, in a feature titled “Over and Over Again,” I looked at one of the primary reasons for the staggering failure rate of parolees in Colorado. That would be the fact that more and more prisoners are paroling homeless, with no job prospects and little preparation for what…
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar was back in Colorado today, August 4, touring a Longmont solar panel company as a way of pushing the Obama administration’s vision of a clean energy economy. But that vision, which involves collecting abundant solar power from a procession of solar farms set up…
In this week’s cover story, “The Bridge to Somewhere,” I look at the rising animal-vehicle collision rate across Colorado and the effort to build a wildlife bridge over Vail Pass. Our relentless interstates have fragmented habitat, disrupted migration patterns — and led to a lot of nasty roadkill, along the…
Colorado reported 35,302 collisions between animals and vehicles from 1986 through 2004. The actual number may be much higher, since the available records are sketchy — in 60 percent of the collisions, the species involved isn’t even identified — and many minor accidents involving wildlife aren’t recorded. The highest incidence…
No one knows exactly when the first elk wandered into the median around milepost 142, but after a few days they were hard to ignore. By that point, there were 25 or 30 of them spread over three miles, trapped, cars and trucks streaking by them on the interstate that…
The scene: A vacant field at 76th and Stuart in Westminster, now home to the rig of the Imperial Flyers, quite possibly the oldest continuously operating amateur trapeze group in the world. The cast: Daring young men, some not so young, and daring young women, too, all floating through the…
Back in March, I wrote about the remarkable tributes at a memorial service for Whitney deMoraes Hendrickson, an 18-year-old college freshman who died in a freak accident in Colorado Springs when another driver smashed into a gas pump and started a fire (“On a dark day, celebrating a good life”)…
The proverbial wheels of justice turn slowly but not always surely. So it’s always interesting when the gears spit out a real acknowledgment of wrongdoing, even if the folks involved are all pointing fingers at each other. Recent documents filed in Mike Zinna’s long-running court battles with Jefferson County government…
As I reported last week, things got pretty testy near the end of the three-day disciplinary hearing for attorney Mark Brennan. A physical confrontation between Brennan and his chief accuser, Kim Ikeler of the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, erupted when Ikeler approached the podium as Brennan was delivering his…
It began with Presiding Disciplinary Judge William Lucero slapping attorney Mark Brennan with two contempt citations. It ended with Brennan leaning into opposing counsel Kim Ikeler, moving him bodily away from the podium and calling him “a little piece of shit.” In a little-used courtroom in the Denver City and…
No law is truly written in stone. Not even those tablets Charlton Heston brought down from the top of Mount Hollywood in The Ten Commandments, which looked suspiciously like slabs of heavy cardboard. But some laws, as they age ungracefully, begin to resemble big cement blocks. Take, for example, the…
Julie Stene has waited nine years for her day in court, and Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos Samour Jr. figures that’s long enough. Denying a reluctant district attorney’s effort to further delay filing charges in a 2000 rape investigation that the DA’s office repeatedly refused to pursue, Judge Samour instructed…
The way Jim Benish tells it, if local law enforcement agencies don’t manage to solve two and possibly three notorious, decades-old child murder cases, it won’t be because they don’t have enough evidence. “They have all the information that I have,” says Benish, a former Thornton police officer and author…
It’s rare for a judge to order a reluctant district attorney to purse a rape case, finding that the DA’s decision not to file was arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable. But that’s what happened last year in a decade-old sex assault case in Arapahoe County that we reported on in “CU…
On a quiet Sunday morning last February, Jaime Brown arrived at that dark and unthinkable place every young mother dreads. She walked into the room of her three-year-old daughter, Abigail Holland Brown, and found her face-down on her bed. Her skin was cold and blue. There was no breath, no…
There’s not much respect and affection to be found between former colleagues David Shaklee and Jim Hibbard. The controversial Adams County coroner whose strained dealings with other agencies and his own staff is the subject of this week’s cover story, “The Body Shop,” Hibbard used to work for the county…
As we reported several moons ago in a Westword feature entitled “The Zen of Ken,” one of Ken Salazar’s first official acts as Secretary of the Interior was to visit the Lakewood office of the Minerals Management Service and vow to clean up the place. The obscure but vital agency,…
We get so many letters from prisoners proclaiming their innocence of any and all misdeeds that it’s curiously refreshing when one admits that he did something wrong. Wrong and dumb. So this recent, neatly typed apology from Charles W. Wimberly, resident of a federal prison in Tucson, caught our attention:…
A Jefferson County judge threw out objections Friday afternoon to a suicide’s controversial will, ruling that the man’s estate must go to a prominent Denver charity — even though his family contends that the charity had prior notice of his suicide plans and failed to take action. Laradon Hall, which…
As noted in a previous blog, “Doing the Math on Christo’s Arkansas River Wrap,” Colorado art mavens and opinion leaders are just crrraaaazy about Over the River, the proposal by husband-and-wife artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to suspend six miles of silvery fabric over the river between Canon City and Salida…
