ESPN is reporting that longtime Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, whom the Denver Broncos have been rumored to covet for months, has decided to retire from football after thirteen years in the NFL in order to pursue a broadcasting career.
Proponents of a new bill designed to combat juvenile sexting, including a University of Colorado Denver professor who literally wrote the book on the subject, believe the measure lays out proportional penalties for those who deserve them without punishing victims. In addition, the legislation allows individuals who unwittingly receive a photo that could technically constitute child pornography a way to avoid sanction, but only if they get rid of it in a finite amount of time rather than hanging on to the image.
Jessie Oliver, 34, has been convicted of a September 2015 double shooting that killed Bobby Brown, also 34, and critically wounded a teenage girl. An arrest affidavit in the case reveals that he was arrested in near-record time because a Denver police officer just happened to be close enough the gunfire to see the scene of the crime and hear what went down.
HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, which has become the go-to spot for what is essentially investigative comedy, devoted the lion’s share of its latest episode to a shredding of current federal marijuana laws. And among the stories Oliver used to illustrate his points were several from Colorado that Westword has covered for years.
This past Saturday, April 1, Cole Barker, a 35-year-old from Georgetown, was laid to rest in Mount Vernon, Texas, after suffering a fatal ski accident at the Loveland Ski Area. Barker died on March 24, one day before the passing of Michael Black, a 56-year-old Floridian and part-time Pagosa Springs resident, who succumbed to injuries suffered on March 21 at Wolf Creek Ski Area. They are the eleventh and twelfth people to die at a Colorado ski resort during the 2016-2017 season, which was already deadlier than 2015-2016.
As many as eight possibly gang-related shootings have taken place near the booming RiNo area over the past two weeks or so according to Mark Ungar, president of the Whittier Neighborhood Association, including a thus-far-unsolved broad daylight gun-down near 31st and Gilpin earlier this month that resulted in serious injuries for two men.
Reports that incentive money to attract film and television productions to Colorado could be a victim of budget cuts arrived in close proximity to news that this very fund had convinced producers of Bravo’s Top Chef to film the show’s upcoming fifteenth season in Colorado, specifically Denver, Boulder and Telluride. Colorado Film Commissioner Donald Zuckerman, who shared his arguments for why the incentives should be increased from their current level of $3 million (far less than in states such as New Mexico, Utah and Georgia) for a Westword post published last October, says the Top Chef deal would never have happened without this monetary lure and fears significant harm to the burgeoning local film-and-TV industry if the budget blade chops off the resource.
The latest economic indicators for the Denver metro area show that the local economy remains red-hot. But while that’s generally a positive, the pace of growth is creating shortages of affordable housing either to buy or rent.
In Colorado, we tend to hear about avalanches when they have fatal consequences, as was the case with a Garfield County slide caused by snow bikers in February that overtook two people, killing one of them. But at this time of year, when winter is transitioning into spring, avalanches that don’t get media attention are happening all the time, and many, if not most, of them could have deadly consequences if folks are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ken Salazar, a former Colorado Senator and Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama, has revealed that he will not run for governor in 2018. This announcement would seem to be good news for Mike Johnston, a former state senator who is currently the best known Democrat to have announced his gubernatorial candidacy. But Johnston’s response to the development is more about saluting Salazar than celebrating this turn of events.
The American Health Care Act, the measure intended to replace Obamacare, has been the target of criticism aplenty since its introduction in part because of predictions that it would disproportionately hurt the poor and elderly in Denver and beyond. This reception, not to mention President Donald Trump’s threat to unseat any Republican who votes against the bill, has put GOP members of Congress in a difficult position, and those from Colorado have reacted with varying degrees of support and obfuscation.
The Denver Police Department gives out far fewer tickets to drivers for running red lights in-person than through the use of photo radar. But there are definitely places in the metro area where citations involving actual traffic stops are issued far more frequently than others.
Fort Collins is appealing a temporary restraining order issued last month against the enforcement of a public-indecency ordinance that includes the words “the breast or breasts of a female,” despite a statement from the ruling judge that he would likely rule against the community on constitutional grounds.
For evidence that the 2017 Libertarian Party of Colorado State Convention, which takes place March 24-26 in Westminster, is very different from the annual gatherings sponsored by Democrats and Republicans, look no further than the prominent speaking role reserved for Sarah “Daggers” Stewart, a prominent advocate for the decriminalization of prostitution.
Jessica Rabbit, the provocatively titled new offering by Sleigh Bells, is both an aural blast and a declaration of independence for musical partners Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller, who headline at the Gothic Theater on March 24.
The Denver-area housing market remains so hot that bidding wars and above-list sales have become commonplace not just here but in other parts of the state, too. These factors and others help explain why a recent survey deemed Colorado to be among the worst places in the country for first-time home buyers.
Adam Ruiz, 23, has been found guilty of strangling his half-sister, Samantha Welch, and her girlfriend, Celia Reyes, and setting fire to their apartment in a cover-up attempt. The crime took place in Chicago circa October 2014, and Ruiz confessed to the crime in Denver the following July.
A prominent Denver civil-rights law firm has announced that it is preparing a lawsuit on behalf of Greg Heard, a homeless man who says he was trying to surrender to a Denver police officer when he was tased in an episode caught on a body-camera video . A former SWAT team leader believes Heard’s tasing represented “a textbook use of force,” but Michael Berry, a retired police officer who currently trains law enforcers, strongly disagrees. He breaks down the clip, on view below, and notes that the officer’s use of unprovoked profanity before pulling his taser’s trigger helps explain how incidents like this one can result in excessive force against a suspect and injury or worse to police.
Forbes has just released its list of the world’s billionaires, and of the 2,043 individuals who’ve achieved this benchmark, ten of them live in Colorado.
Rachel Dewey, a 48-year-old middle-school teacher, part-time professor and mother of three teenage boys, was killed skiing on Pikes Peak’s Little Italy couloir on Sunday, March 19. However, her death will not add to the number of skiing casualties in Colorado during the 2016-2017 season, which has already surpassed last year’s total.
CBS has formally asked a court to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of Burke Ramsey over a 2016 docuseries in which a team of analysts concluded that he’d murdered his sister, JonBenét Ramsey, in their Boulder home on Christmas Day 1996. In response, Ramsey family attorney Lin Wood summarily rejects the arguments made by CBS and Dr. Werner Spitz, a participant in the docuseries being sued separately for comments he made last September during a WWJ-AM/CBS Detroit interview publicizing the program.
This week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that 24 million people would lose their insurance by 2026 under a new House health-care plan intended to replace Obamacare. That number will likely include many poor people and seniors in Denver, whose tax credits will be significantly smaller according to figures collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
