Brian Rimar, a scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency, thought his assignment seemed simple enough: Monitor a herd of sheep through the southern Colorado grazing season, then dissect and analyze their livers for possible copper poisoning. What Rimar didn’t know was that the project would take his own career to…
Peter Fonda told him to call back at 4 p.m., January 16. “I’ll be here,” he promised Nile Southern, who has been waiting for years to hear those words, that hint of promise. “We’ll talk then.” It’s now 3:58 p.m. on January 16, and Southern paces around the basement office…
Several pieces of proposed legislation making their way through the Colorado General Assembly raise the question: If Secretary of State Vikki Buckley had nothing left to do, could she do it well? Early last week, three bills designed to take away a huge chunk of her responsibilities were awaiting action…
Stupor bowl: Not so very long ago–three weeks, in fact, right before the Broncos were to face off against the New York Jets in the playoffs–Mayor Wellington Webb again refused to make any wacky wagers on the outcome of the game. While other politicians were betting Rocky Mountain oysters against…
As Erin Ault rode RTD’s route 15 bus on the evening of November 29, 1998, he heard what sounded like a muffled popgun. Seconds later, other passengers on the bus began to scream at RTD driver Daniel Boyer, pleading with him not to stop. Ahead, close to a bus stop…
Now that the Super Bowl’s out of the way, local television newscasts can focus on the Really Big Game: Sweeps, that all-or-nothing effort to lure members of the elusive Nielsen family into watching their stations so they can up their ratings. The February sweeps period doesn’t officially begin until Thursday,…
Todd Manns thinks he’s found a way to prove once and for all whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin. Using his company’s firearms-training simulator, Manns is working on a virtual re-creation of the view from Oswald’s sixth-floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository, from which he shot…
Want to stage the Olympic Games in your town? There’s nothing to it, really, but there are a couple of things you need to know. First of all, you’ll have to appoint some committees. No potential site worth its five interlocking rings can hope to land the Olympics without 150…
Momy Drearest Regarding Eric Dexheimer’s “Honor Thy Mother,” in the January 28 issue: What is a putz? Ciaran Redmond. If it weren’t for the humor of his stupidity, his story would be as pathetic as most losers’ stories are. John Rael via the Internet And Justice for Some I am…
After his girlfriend left and he had a nervous breakdown, quit his teaching job and stopped taking his medication, John the Depressed Guy lived in “the hatchback hotel.” For six months he slept in the back of his 1985 Honda Accord, making a home in RV lots, city parks, roadsides,…
On Tuesday, City Hall still bore the scars of Monday’s Super Bowl rally. Outside, street sweepers blew away leftover parade litter; on the doors, notes from Mayor Wellington Webb promised a victory celebration for city workers; inside, miscreants wearing blue and orange swapped high fives as they waited to pay…
It’s a cool, sharp spring morning, early April, 11:45, a time when most people are swallowing the last gulp of their second cup of coffee or feeling the pangs of lunch hunger. Ciaran Redmond has just finished robbing his third bank of the day, and he isn’t finished yet–can’t be,…
Editor’s note: These excerpts from Senator Wayne Allard’s impeachment diary were considered “too controversial” for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which is publishing the senator’s musings on the historic proceeding. The material was provided to us by a well-known smut peddler, who vouched for its authenticity on a stack of…
In the last few years, the Denver Housing Authority has been home to controversies involving its executive director, Sal Carpio, including his well-publicized drinking problem and a sexual-harassment suit. Now another sexual-harassment complaint has the agency scrambling to cover its tracks. In September 1996, seeking to confirm reports from employees…
Kathy Caddell’s mother spent the last ten months of her life at a high-end nursing home that charged more than $4,000 a month. That sum helped pay for wall-to-wall carpeting, plush sofas and art in the common areas–but Caddell says it didn’t buy her mother basic human dignity. “They treated…
I confess! What a bunch of blabbers this town keeps turning out. Senator and animal doc Wayne Allard has been telling all–and we mean all, right down to his wife’s lame movie choices (At First Sight, according to Sunday’s installment)–to the Denver Rocky Mountain News’s Mike Romano (although some lost…
For a good ol’ red-dirt Georgia boy, that Dan Reeves sure has got one pow’ful sense of theater. First he ups and coaxes a 44-year-old back-up quarterback out of retirement because they go back to the leather-helmet days together, and then, when things get rough for his fragile starter, Dan…
In 1957, Bill Thom, then a high-school student in Hartford, Connecticut, played Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom in the senior production of Of Thee I Sing. Remember Of Thee I Sing? No? Well, with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin and a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie…
Love It or Leave Regarding Tony Perez-Giese’s “Waiting to Exile,” in the January 21 issue: Loi Nguyen’s problems as a resident alien who finished his time in prison and now is in limbo awaiting deportation is truly underwhelming in its tragedy. It is unfortunate that he sits in limbo at…
In December, when the U.S. launched air strikes against Iraq, Loi Nguyen heard a rumor spreading through the Wackenhut center for Immigration and Naturalization Service detainees in Aurora. The rumor was that if the conflict escalated into a full-fledged world war, the U.S. government was going to come in and…
Malpractice cases, Moss explained to his client, settle late or never and can cost a fortune. You’ll be personally, perhaps viciously, attacked. You’ll contend with tough, even brutal adversaries, special rules that treat medical negligence far more leniently than any other kind, and blind biases in favor of the defendant…..
The cops were wrong, and Ali Seyed Kazemi was right: Despite the three-year police investigation that concluded otherwise, it wasn’t he who tried to pass a fake prescription for a painkiller (“Prescription Grudge,” December 10). “There’s not a doubt in the world that there was probable cause to bring charges,”…
