I feel the commercialization of Christmas is currently way more out of hand than when Linus van Pelt first dropped Biblical verses on the American public, and you, Walmart, are making things worse. As exhibit A, I offer my visit this past weekend to one of your branches in Northglenn, where I discovered that a huge portion of the store is already devoted to Christmas.
As we’ve reported, Montrose County, on Colorado’s Western Slope, pulled its sex-offender list offline following a recent court ruling in which U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch found that such registries constituted cruel and unusual punishment in the case of three plaintiffs. The ruling is specific to the complainants in question, rather than everyone on the roster, and Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has announced her intention to appeal. So why make the move now? According to a representative from the sheriff’s office in Montrose, a fear of lawsuits.
The day before the announcement that he’d been hired by 9News, Tom Green, who left a decade-and-a-half stint on Daybreak, the KWGN morning show, in May and has been off the air ever since, posted the photo above on his Facebook page along with a caption that reads, “I tied a tie today…wasn’t sure I’d remember how. I’m kinda proud of myself.”
On Saturday, October 14, in an extraordinarily blatant attempt to bury a controversial decision, the Denver District Attorney’s Office announced that it would not file criminal charges over videos of East High School cheerleaders crying out in agony while being forced into the splits position. But the prospects of the case winding up in court haven’t disappeared. Two families are working with one of Denver’s most dogged and successful civil-rights attorneys, who’s issued a statement that hints strongly at the prospect of future litigation.
Last week, after listening to pundit after pundit say your Denver Broncos had virtually no chance of losing to the injury riddled, 0-5 New York Giants on October 15’s Sunday Night Football, this longtime Men of Orange fan sensed disaster. For decades, after all, the Broncos have regularly sucked it up against inferior opponents they were supposed to pummel, especially in prime-time contests, for reasons of overconfidence, a lack of intensity, the assumption that phoning it in would be good enough under the circumstances, or a combination thereof. And damned if they didn’t do just that, falling 23-10 to the pathetic G-men in a game whose outcome unleashed one of the angriest Twitter storms in recent memory, as demonstrated by the collection of tweets below.
Around the country, Boulder has a reputation as a youthful, wealthy, lily-white, politically progressive utopia. But the truth turns out to be considerably more complicated. According to “Boulder County Trends,” a fascinating new report from the Community Foundation Boulder County that’s accessible below, the population in the area is growing older and more diverse in ways that are complicating the interactions of the well-off and their less financially secure neighbors. Moreover, the county’s ideology doesn’t always translate into fairness or charity in quite the ways most locals likely imagine.
Once upon a time, ratings were pretty much the only way of judging commercial success for local television news. But that’s no longer the case. Witness a new report by TV Spy, a broadcasting-industry website, which grades Denver TV outlets and personalities by social media engagement. Using that measure, 9News is the clear number one, while Kyle Clark, anchor of Next With Kyle Clark, tops the talent chart in part because of the ways he’s used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram beyond simply establishing and extending his brand, as he explains to us in the following Q&A.
A federal jury has awarded Vietnam veteran Mark Smith a $760,000 judgment to be paid by the Town of Kremmling and two members of the community’s four-person police department, including the chief, over a brutality episode with a long and bizarre backstory. Smith’s attorney says the beating Smith took was motivated by what he calls “small-town politics on steroids.”
Twenty years ago today, on October 12, 1997, John Denver died when an experimental aircraft he was flying crashed into Monterey Bay off the coast of California. But even before this benchmark anniversary, the makings of a full-scale JD revival was underway, as exemplified by the prominent role his song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” plays in two major films currently unspooling at a multiplex near you. And speaking as a longtime resident of the city for which the man born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. renamed himself, I find that irritating as fuck.
Last year, we told you about the tragic death of Jack Splitt, the fifteen-year-old namesake of Jack’s Law, a landmark bill that allowed young medical marijuana patients in Colorado, like him, to take their cannabis-based medication at school. More than a year later, Mark Pedersen, who made MMJ suppositories that helped alleviate the pain suffered by Splitt as a result of a condition associated with his cerebral palsy, faces five felony pot possession and manufacturing charges in Jefferson County that flowed from the investigation into Jack’s passing despite the fact that there’s no evidence the medication harmed him in any way.
John Ramsey, father of JonBenét Ramsey, who was murdered in her Boulder home on Christmas Day 1996, has filed a $350 million lawsuit against CBS and assorted individuals associated with The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, a 2016 docuseries in which a panel of experts concluded Burke Ramsey, JonBenét’s brother, killed his sister with a blow to the head. In an interview on view below, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood, who also represents Burke in a similar complaint filed late last year, maintains that the suit isn’t specifically intended to prevent news organizations from making such claims in the future, but he’s fine if it has that effect.
Just over two years ago, we told you the shocking story of Desmond Smith, a fourteen year old allegedly murdered over a Cricket cellphone. More than two years later, three men have been sentenced in the case, which began with a particularly senseless act of violence and escalated into family drama in which a son agreed to testify against the father whose crime involved covering up for him and his uncle.
The Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federally funded law-enforcement group with an admitted anti-marijuana bias, has published the fifth volume in a series of reports about the impact of cannabis legalization on Colorado. Predictably, the new analysis, accessible below, is crammed with shocking statistics, and while many of the claims, including ones pertaining to an alleged spike in youth marijuana use in the state, aren’t supported by other, more reliable studies, expect them to be touted by the roll-back-the-pot-legalization-clock crowd anyway.
An Aurora family has spent most of 2017 trying to prevent city representatives from killing Bandit, a two-year-old dog deemed a hazard after what Animal Law Center attorney Jennifer Edwards describes as a minor bite suffered by a Federal Express deliveryman. But while a lawsuit filed by the owners and accessible below has put their pet’s euthanization on hold, the matter remains in limbo, and Edwards says the effect on Bandit has been devastating.
Shuei Kato, also known as Shuei Pako, has been found safe three days after he was due to return from an effort to summit Mt. Missouri in Chaffee County, and early reports suggest that a fire was key to his survival.
News that two thirteen-year-olds who allegedly compiled a “kill list” related to their middle school have been arrested in Colorado Springs hardly qualifies as shocking at this point. In the more than eighteen years since the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School, folks in the state have seen far too many instances of young students being arrested for alleged school threats and violent plots, as documented below.
Last month, as we’ve reported, rent prices in Denver finally started heading down after years of increases that contributed to the difficult many had making a living in Denver despite the strong economy. As a result, there are finally some good rent deals in the metro area, as exemplified by the available spaces below.
Thanks to a scheduled bye, your Denver Broncos didn’t play a game this weekend, and based on a telling conversation I overheard while eavesdropping yesterday morning, October 8, as reporters are wont to do, the Mile High City was nicer as a result.
Dan Hohs, a well-known triathlete from Steamboat Springs who wrote movingly about how endurance sports saved his life, died after a rattlesnake bite in Golden on Saturday, October 7. His death saddened many his friends and loved ones, who poured out their grief on social media, and speaks to the dangers associated with an uncommonly late rattlesnake season.
The National Weather Service forecast for metro Denver in the early hours of October 9 called for heavy snow that might not stick to the roadways became of warm pavement temperatures but could potentially snap limbs from trees. What we’ve gotten instead in most city locations is cold rain and a little bit of sleet. In other words, a classic blown forecast of the sort former Denver weatherman Chris Dunn defended to us when he said the biggest misconception about people of his profession is “the idea that, ‘Oh, you guys are always wrong’ and ‘If I had a job where I was always wrong and still got to keep my job, it’d be the greatest job in the world.'” Which makes it only appropriate that he recently became Internet-famous for apparently blowing a fart on the air.
The State of Colorado, acting for the Department of Corrections, has agreed to pay a fairly modest $171,000 to settle a lawsuit in the torturous, slow-motion, completely preventable jail death of Dennis Choquette in November 2016. But Choquette’s estate has also reached confidential agreements with a slew of other defendants, including a giant private-prison company that owns the facility where most of the horrors took place. And given the disturbing facts of the case, which we first outlined this past February, after the complaint was filed, the sum of the settlements is almost certainly much, much larger.
Critics have long complained about the relatively light sentences given to some prominent white, privileged college students found guilty of sex crimes, and this week brings another example of the phenomenon. Jack Warmolts, a onetime Air Force Cadet who pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and unlawful sexual contact in October 2016, is now back on the streets after serving only eight months of a one-year term. However, ex-CU Denver student John D. Kennedy was sentenced to a minimum of nine years for sexual assault and more in part because his victim wrote an impassioned letter asking the judge in the case not to “allow another predator to go free.”
