News

On the day that fifteen people died at Columbine High School, Rebecca Oakes tried to block out the barrage of news reports, the sirens and the shocked expressions on the faces of her colleagues. She closed her office door, shuffled papers on her desk and attempted to concentrate. She couldn’t…

1. Thou shalt be careful in the big city. Early Saturday morning, the mall shuttle fills quickly as it passes through LoDo and heads toward Broadway. There are grandmotherly women who’ve bused down from Boulder, bleary-eyed hipsters clutching their Starbucks cups and anti-gun leaflets, families with babies in backpacks. “Let’s…

This December will mark seventy years since the Royal Gorge Bridge was strung 1,053 feet above the Arkansas River where it cuts through a sheer canyon a dozen miles outside of Canon City. The project was the brainchild of Lon Piper, a San Antonio toll-bridge promoter who conceived the undertaking…

Northwest of downtown Denver, a neighborhood peers out over the city’s skyscrapers and railyards. In the late 1800s, Highlands was a pristine city whose residents were proud of their elevated metropolis, separated from Denver by a valley through which a highway now runs. The Highlanders pitied the poor souls below…

Parents in northwest Denver say the Denver Public School District is neglecting its Hispanic students. But some people are looking out for them. Four years ago, members of the congregation at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on West 36th Avenue started discussing how they could address some of their community’s…

Gardeners tend to be an unobtrusive breed, most often found grubbing in soil and mumbling in Latin while presenting their rumps to a peaceful blue sky. But threaten a garden and you find in its creator an opponent as implacable, as blindly persistent, as any plant pushing its roots through…

For fifteen years, Dana Line has served Denver as a sheriff’s deputy at the county jail. Dealing with inmates can be risky, but Line always assumed that if he were hurt on the job, he would be taken care of. Today he no longer believes that. In 1992 Line was…

Calling All (Inexpensive) Social Workers Parents, teachers and authorities are struggling to understand how two kids at Columbine High School could have murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher without anyone paying attention to the warning signs. At the same time, social workers, nurses and psychologists in the Denver…

Since Westword went to press last Tuesday just as news of the shootings at Columbine High School was beginning to leak out, it wouldn’t be fair to criticize how the rest of the media handled the coverage. But then, as last week’s tragedy so amply illustrated, life isn’t fair. The…

After more than 25 years of showing full nudity at their downtown strip joint, Rusty and Ted Bullard want to give their customers a little bit more. But the city keeps playing fresh with them, so they’ll have to take what they can get. The Bullards own Kimberly’s, once known…

Some Stern Talk I’m not sure what affiliation, if any, Westword has with KXPK-FM (the Peak), but in searching the Internet, I found Celebrity Death Slalom, a contest depicting Howard Stern, Leo DiCaprio and Calista Flockhart. I would ask you to join in my disgust that Howard Stern is afforded…

A week after the massacre at Columbine High School, everybody has an agenda. Some are noble, some are not. Some seek the truth, others spin it. But everybody has one. Within minutes of the tragedy, travelers searching the Web for information on the Trenchcoat Mafia were stunned to find their…

The only things certain in life are death and taxes. At the Hospice of Metro Denver’s Aurora Care Center, the days leading up to April 15 went by peacefully and, for the most part, quietly, but death was still in the neighborhood, and some twenty patients, men and women, all…

Josh Shifferly hacks with a shovel at the icy hole in the snow where an avalanche had trapped him the month before. An evergreen just up the slope stands tall, part of the scraggly tree line some 500 feet below the broad, bald ridge leading to the 12,020-foot Cumberland Pass…

With less than an hour left, the plan had gone wrong. The three of them were supposed to steal five cars and place them at five police substations around Denver. Each car would contain a homemade bomb, and each bomb would explode as police chiefs from around the world sipped…

The skies may be friendly, but the airline that beckons customers to fly them is just greedy, Denver officials say. A recent city audit of United Airlines showed that the company owes Denver more than $629,000, but United disagrees and has refused to pay. The dispute is over a formula…

The beds they made: At least one person in Denver thinks it’s ironic that 300 black mayors, members of President Clinton’s cabinet and other dignitaries–in Denver this week for the annual convention of the National Conference of Black Mayors–are staying at a hotel that has been repeatedly accused of racism…

What’s a guy gotta do to fire up some barbecue in this town? For the Reverend William Harris, who runs the Gethsemane Pentecostal Temple at the corner of 26th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, the answer isn’t easy. For years the reverend has been cooking up ribs in five large pits–in…

John Peters figured out long ago that the refugee relief business has more than its share of oddballs. It was 25 years ago, in fact–after the physician had joined in a series of medical relief missions that involved parachute jumps into Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras and Bangladesh in the wake of…

A Matter of Conviction I wanted to thank Westword for Juliet Wittman’s story of Lisl Auman, “Zero to Life,” in the April 15 issue. I believe I now have a clearer idea of the actual events, and it seems obvious that life in prison is in no way warranted for…