Rocky Pedersen, who has been charged with 35 criminal counts, including attempted first-degree murder, for a series of robberies at marijuana businesses over the past five months, once owned a medical marijuana dispensary that was itself the target of a high-profile robbery back in 2013.
Seven Denver deputies face possible discipline in the November 2015 jail death of Michael Lee Marshall, a mentally ill inmate whose slow, agonizing death was captured on video.
For at least the past couple of years, home buyers in the Denver area have often had to offer more than list price if they really wanted a property. And this scenario isn’t fading from the scene. A recent survey of U.S. cities with the most homes sold over list includes two from Colorado, Denver and Aurora, among the top fifteen.
A lawsuit filed against companies that own five of Denver’s most prominent strip clubs, as well as similar venues in seven states beyond Colorado, claims that exotic dancers are being ripped off by an illegal system that charges them to perform and forces them to help cover other employees’ earnings out of tips they receive, whether they made enough to do so or not.
Julian Archuleta resigned as a Denver police officer after pleading guilty to stealing money from the scene of a car crash, a crime documented by his own body camera. But his punishment is a relative wrist-slap.
Figuring out the Denver streets where drivers are most likely to get speeding tickets right now turned out to be more complicated than expected.
The Colorado Springs Police Department has released data revealing the number of local homicides linked by a so-called “marijuana nexus” during the past three years, with the 2016 numbers showing that weed was a factor in more than a third of the killings. However, a spokesperson for the CSPD insists that the release of these figures doesn’t represent a departmental position on the issue and says the numbers were issued following a barrage of requests from news organizations apparently looking for bombshell evidence that marijuana has played a big role in boosting the Springs murder rate.
Senator Michael Bennet is set to take part in his first town hall in more than two years, and rather than scheduling it in a majority Democratic area, he’s venturing into the Republican stronghold of Colorado Springs.
Last night, March 13, the Cherry Creek School District voted unanimously to move start times later for middle- and high-school students and earlier for children in elementary schools. The change has broad but not universal support from older students and their folks. However, a group of elementary-school parents were unhappy enough with them to have started a change.org petition that rejected alterations for their kids with extreme prejudice.
Zachary Mueller has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Greeley’s Pedro Adrian Dominguez, whose body was stuffed inside a barrel found floating in a creek at a remote location in Nebraska.
Heroin deaths in Denver are up 933 percent over fourteen years, and the heroin fatality numbers for Colorado as a whole are nearly as shocking, with a 756 percent rise since 2001 and a recent rate of increase that outpaces the one in the Mile High City. But considerably more people in Denver and Colorado are dying each year from other opioids, including methadone and prescription drugs such as Oxycontin and Fentanyl, than perish because of heroin use. And while the upticks in fatalities aren’t as sharp as the ones related to heroin, they’re still substantial. In Colorado, deaths from opioids other than heroin are up 128 percent from fifteen years ago, while Denver’s fatality total has risen by 372 percent.
The Denver Zoo is laughing off a Saturday Night Live skit about the facility, even though the focus of the routine was a fictional “animal pornographer” whose seemingly benign responses to a reporter played by host Scarlett Johansson were graphically depicted as describing acts of bestiality.
Today, basketball fans across the country are gearing up for the start of the annual NCAA basketball tournament popularly known as March Madness. But according to a new survey, Mile High hoops fans are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to experiencing and enjoying this annual sports ritual. According to the WalletHub report, Denver is the fourth worst large city for March Madness and ranks at 276 out of 291 total communities analyzed, barely ahead of Kennesaw, Georgia, Poughkeepsie, New York and Colorado Springs, which finished at 280.
Rich Wyatt, the star of American Guns, a once-popular Discovery Channel program that showcased him, his telegenic family, including wife Renee and kids Paige and Kurt, and his business, Wheat Ridge’s Gunsmoke Guns, has been found guilty of conspiring to deal firearms without a license and multiple tax charges.
California-born Andrew Garcia, a member of the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, is the tenth person to die following an accident at a Colorado ski area during the 2016-2017 season. He passed away several days after a crash while snowboarding at Buttermilk, an Aspen Skiing Company resort.
Of the nine deaths related to accidents at Colorado ski resorts during the current season, four are tied to Breckenridge. This represents an unfortunate trend: Four skiers also died at Breckenridge last season, out of nine across the entire state, with all of the incidents at Breck taking place during last March or afterward. That adds up to eight Breckenridge-related deaths in approximately one year and nearly half the current official total of eighteen fatalities during the past two seasons combined. No other Colorado resort, and there are over two-dozen of them, appears to have suffered more than one casualty. Yet after multiple contacts from Westword in recent weeks about the rising number of recent tragedies, Breckenridge’s only response has been a statement that essentially blames the victims for their own deaths.
A not-safe-for-work Tumblr page featuring images such as a Pokémon named Squirtle having sex with a naked woman mistakenly wound up linked on the website for Colorado state senator Kevin Priola, a conservative Republican who prides himself on his family values platform.
Tess Smith, a fifteen-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, broke her leg while skiing at Breckenridge on March 3. Afterward, she became unresponsive and died on March 6. An autopsy performed yesterday was intended to explain her inexplicable decline, but Lawrence Smith, Tess’s father, corresponding via e-mail, notes that the mystery has not yet been solved.
After an absence of more than eight years, former Channel 2 anchor Ernie Bjorkman is returning to the station, where he’ll take over as co-host of the morning program Daybreak from Tom Green, who announced that he was stepping away from the gig earlier this year. And the path Bjorkman has taken to get back to the CW affiliate is flat-out bizarre, encompassing gigs as a veterinary technician, a member of the Peace Corps who served in Ethiopia and a male model, among other things.
Last night, Senator Cory Gardner was scheduled to take part in his second telephone town hall over the span of eight days, a tactic apparently intended to undermine criticism about his failure to conduct in-person town halls, despite multiple demands that he do so and even a late February forum in Denver that went on in his absence. I wasn’t planning to take part, but a Gardner robo-call urged me to do so, albeit when the event should have been almost over.
The Denver Police Department has compiled data on the ten metro-area intersections with the most accidents during the first two months-plus of 2017. The statistics reveal that the most dangerous spots for Denver drivers right now aren’t on surface streets, no matter how busy. Each entry in the top ten pertains to locations at or near exits on one of the two major interstates that slice through the area, I-25 and I-70.
Boulder’s Adam Densmore has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the death of Ashley Mead. The details of the homicide are particularly shocking; the largest part of Mead’s body recovered to date is her torso, from which the organs had been removed according to Densmore’s arrest affidavit, on view below. However, Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett has decided against seeking the death penalty in the case, and in general, he believes the circumstances of a killing shouldn’t be the sole factor for determining whether or not capital punishment is appropriate.
