Controversial columnist and media figure Ann Coulter is scheduled to give a free talk at the University of Colorado Boulder campus on Wednesday, March 21, and campus officials will no doubt spend the time between now and then preparing for potential trouble.
On Friday, March 2, news broke that Nick Dawkins had resigned as principal of Manual High School, and the initial letter describing the reasons behind his decision was exceedingly polite, albeit with an edge of sadness. But the following day, in an essay entitled “Why I Left Denver Public Schools,” Dawkins was much more blunt, revealing that a controversy over reports of a confederate flag at a Manual-Weld Central High School football game last September was among the factors that led to his departure. “For weeks as this situation played out I was targeted by those that called me a nigger and vowed to bring harm to me,” Dawkins wrote.
The fallout continues following Mayor Michael Hancock’s apology for inappropriate texts sent to Denver police officer Leslie Branch-Wise. The scandal has led to veiled lawsuit threats from an attorney representing Wayne McDonald, a former Hancock pal who won $200,000 in a previous suit over over his 2012 firing from a position with the mayor; he’d supposedly made similarly problematic comments to Branch-Wise. And it’s also emboldened critics such as the Colorado Latino Forum’s Lisa Calderón, organizer of a March 7 march to call for his resignation. Nick Rogers, president of the Denver Police Protective Association, doesn’t go quite as far as Calderón. But he sees the Branch-Wise matter as another example of Hancock’s flawed leadership.
Earlier this month, Richard Darling was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for allegedly killing, dismembering and “filleting” the body of Rey Pesina in an Aurora homeless encampment on Halloween of 2015. The sentence would seem to offer some solace to Candace Chamberlain, who was romantically involved with both men before getting caught in the middle of their fatal conflict. But more than two years later, she’s still struggling to deal with her memories from that awful day.
In 2016, as we’ve reported, at least eleven women accused nurse Tom Moore of improperly touching them while he was supposed to be providing medical care. Now, he’s been given a twelve-year sentence for unlawful sexual contact in the 17th Judicial District, to run concurrently with a dozen year jolt previously doled out in Weld County. But according to one of Moore’s multiple arrest affidavits, the amount of time he’s been ordered to serve is only a little longer that the decade during which he allegedly used his profession as a means to violate one female victim after another.
The owners of Bandit say that the dog is a boxer mix. But as we’ve reported, officials in Aurora believe he’s a type of pit bull, a breed banned in the community for a decade-plus, and they’ve spent more than a year trying to put him to death over a January 2017 biting incident. Today, March 2, they’ll succeed. He’s scheduled to be euthanized at the Aurora animal shelter this morning.
The fallout has been considerable in the wake of Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s apology for inappropriate texts sent to Denver police officer Leslie Branch-Wise. The latest example comes from an attorney representing Wayne McDonald, a former Hancock friend and onetime City of Denver employee who won a $200,000 settlement four years after filing a lawsuit over his 2012 firing, which had reportedly been prompted by “inappropriate comments” he’d made to Branch-Wise, then a part of the mayor’s security team. According to the lawyer, Milwaukee-based William Sulton, corresponding via email, Hancock told untruths about McDonald after sacking him, and in alluding to him during his video apology to Branch-Wise, “Mayor Hancock caused the same false statements to be published about Mr. McDonald.”
In March 2017, as we’ve reported, former Longmont medical marijuana dispensary owner Rocky Pedersen was arrested for an AR-15-toting pot-shop robbery spree. He’s now been sentenced to fourteen years behind bars for a series of crimes that he blames on his switch from cannabis to heroin.
An attendee at a town hall in Erie held following the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida says pro-gun state representative Lori Saine supported her argument that teachers should be armed by claiming Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had supported gun control and lobbied the state legislature to make schools gun-free zones to prevent return fire during the lethal April 20, 1999 attack that took the lives of twelve students and a teacher. Moreover, the account is backed by two others who were also at the town hall.
The fallout from Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s apology for inappropriate texts sent to Denver police detective Leslie Branch-Wise when she was on his security detail in 2011 and 2012 has been fast, furious and, at times, contradictory. Hancock has been lambasted by two different police organizations and chided by powerful politicos, with one former city council member calling on him to resign. Meanwhile, the City of Denver has announced that it is developing new sexual harassment training for city employees even though Hancock continues to insist that he didn’t sexually harass Branch-Wise, and the head of a notorious Denver prostitution ring says the mayor was a client.
Joshua Sands is “the most vulnerable person in Brighton” according to attorney David Lane, and that makes what happened to him even more shocking. Sands, who has autism, was assaulted and tased by six members of the Brighton Police Department after being mistaken for a murder suspect who was already behind bars at the time.
On the evening of February 27, around the same time that Denver Mayor Michael Hancock issued a video apology for inappropriate text messages sent to a Denver police officer, representatives for KC Becker, the Colorado House of Representative’s majority leader, publicly issued documents about alleged impropriety by Representative Steve Lebsock, a Thornton Democrat accused of sexually harassing at least eleven women, including fellow rep Faith Winter and lobbyist Holly Tarry. One passage maintains that Lebsock said to one complainant, “Don’t you need a fuck buddy? I need a fuck buddy.”
Last night, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock issued an extraordinary video apology for what his office has termed “inappropriate behavior” toward Denver Police Detective Leslie Branch-Wise when she was part of his security detail approximately six years ago. The clip, on view below, was prompted by Branch-Wise’s participation in a Denver7 report in which she shared text messages from Hancock, one of which asked if she’d ever taken a pole-dancing course before warning her, “Be careful! I’m curious;)!”
Last year, then-eleven-year-old Colorado resident and medical marijuana patient Alexis Bortell joined other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against pot-hating Attorney General Jeff Sessions over federal scheduling of cannabis. Yesterday, February 26, a judge with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the suit, but Bortell, now twelve, wasn’t distressed. Shortly after the news went public, a post appeared on her Facebook page reading, “We were ready. Smile. We know #SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] is where we are probably going.”
As we’ve noted, reporters and anchors covering the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have frequently mentioned the disturbing similarity between images from the latest tragic event, during which seventeen people died, and those from the April 20, 1999, attack on Columbine High School in Littleton. But there’s another tie between these tragedies beyond bloodshed and heartache. Politicians and stakeholders desperate to deflect calls for tougher gun laws are once again suggesting that violence in popular culture is more responsible for what happened in Parkland than are easily procured automatic weapons. And as was the case after Columbine, one of the main whipping boys is actor Keanu Reeves.
The man killed in a fatal accident at Keystone on Sunday, February 25, has been identified as 32-year-old North Carolina resident Leon Harding Christopher III. He’s the third person to die at a Colorado ski area during the 2017-2018 season and the second to lose his life at Keystone, following an accident that took the life of Nathan Enright in December.
In the first few days after the start of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, we shared a post headlined “Colorado’s Won More 2018 Winter Olympic Medals Than 81 Countries” to celebrate the achievements of the state’s first two medalists, snowboarders Red Gerard and Arielle Gold. In the days that followed, plenty of other athletes from these parts competed in various disciplines, and while critics expressed disappointment with the performance of the U.S. Olympic team overall, Coloradans still managed to collect ten medals, more than 78 of the nations that took part.
After Denver Environmental Health prohibited sales of kratom for human consumption in the wake of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration alert late last year, advocates for the plant-based pain reliever spoke out, with many saying the product had helped them kick addictions to powerful opioids, including heroin. These testimonials are echoed by Roxanne Gullikson, facility director for Portland, Maine’s Greener Pastures Holisticare, a residential treatment center opening next month that will use kratom in combination with marijuana as part of a formal and comprehensive addiction treatment regimen. To her, Denver’s ban is both unjustified and potentially damaging.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 25, a skier died at Keystone, a short time before 47-year-old Gabriel Wright was killed while snowboarding in the backcountry not far from his home in Telluride. The Keystone death is the second this season at the resort, following the fatal accident that took the life of Nathan Enright in December. And the ski area has also been at the center of two other major stories recently shared in this space, involving a controversial negligence ruling and an organ-and-tissue-donation failure after the passing of Jason Taylor, who was killed at Keystone two years ago.
At 10:30 a.m. today, February 23, members of several Indivisible groups along the urban corridor will be both outside and inside Senator Cory Gardner’s Denver office, at 721 19th Street, to protest what they see as his tone-deafness when it comes to the need for gun legislation of the sort students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida began calling for in the wake of the February 14 shooting there.
The February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida has sparked numerous threats in Colorado, where student arrests and increased security at various facilities have occurred statewide during recent days, as well as plenty of conversation about whether new gun-control laws are needed. Against this backdrop, Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario has stirred controversy aplenty by way of a Facebook video on view here in which he suggests that blaming weapons for such incidents is flat-out nonsensical.
A Freedom of Information Act request conducted by Montana’s KULR-TV has revealed that Jeff Murphy, who died from a 500 foot fall in Yellowstone National Park last June, had been searching for a $2 million treasure said to have been hidden by New Mexico author Forrest Fenn. As we’ve reported, three Coloradans previously died in this quest during the past two years, making Murphy the fourth person confirmed to have lost his life during a Fenn treasure hunt. But the ex-wife of one victim from the state believes that two additional people have perished to date for what she’s dubbed a hoax, bringing the total to six.
