Sitting in a seven-by-ten-foot cell all day, every day, for four years, Casey Holden learned how to do a whole lot of nothing. Now the world expects him to be a go-getter, a self-starter, a juggler of appointments and budgets and mounting financial obligations. And he has only a very…
Casey Holden was sixteen years old when he got locked up on juvenile drug and theft charges. A series of problems while serving his time, including two assaults and cutting off his ankle bracelet when he was almost done, has kept him behind bars most of the last decade. For…
After Eric Harris shot him and left him for dead on the lawn of Columbine High School, all sixteen-year-old Mark Taylor could think about was seeing his family one more time before the life ebbed out of him. Fighting to stay conscious, he prayed, he babbled — and, with the…
Cradling a sawed-off shotgun in his lap, Eric Harris glares into the video camera. He takes a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and winces. Then he talks smack about the pathetic losers involved in school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky. “Do not think we’re trying to copy anyone,”…
It took five years, a state grand jury and key evidence from a reluctant witness, but families who lost children in the attack on Columbine High School finally had their worst suspicions confirmed: Top Jefferson County leaders knew something awful about prior police investigations of killers Eric Harris and Dylan…
In a belated effort to clear the air, the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office offered up its souvenirs of a massacre last Thursday. It was quite a show — but not quite enough to dispel the stink that has clung to the biggest criminal investigation in Colorado history. For a few…
The sign on the door at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office read: “News Conference: Go up stairs and turn right.” Reporters who followed the instructions found themselves in a parking lot. It wasn’t the first time that Jeffco’s finest have sent the press in the wrong direction since the 1999…
Four Aprils ago, as investigators strung yellow crime-scene tape and boarded up bullet-riddled windows around Columbine High School, snow began to fall — a wet, heavy spring storm that masked the carnage in merciful white. But the snow couldn’t quite obscure the spontaneous memorials that were already surfacing on and…
Memo To: Jefferson County Sheriff John P. Stone Re: Columbine I know that you’re a busy man. You’ve got a lot on your mind and only a few weeks to go before you clean out your desk. So I’ll try to keep this short. I realize, too, that you’re tired…
In the digital age, it’s a simple matter for a police agency to record incoming calls for help. Every 911 call, from the most trivial to the most urgent — say, a call from a frantic cafeteria worker at a local high school reporting gunfire and three victims down –…
When a public official takes on duties that appear to be at cross purposes, it’s said that the job requires him to wear “many hats.” If that’s the case, then Dave Thomas sports more headgear than a marching band. As three-term district attorney of Jefferson County, Thomas is the lead…
Jefferson County just doesn’t get the message. When confronted with bad news, Jeffco inevitably decides to kill the messenger rather than contemplate the message. Which, almost as inevitably, is this: Someone screwed up. Again. The most recent screwup involves more leaked documents coming out of the Columbine investigation (the grand-champion…
The people have a right to know — but public officials have a slippery grasp on that basic tenet of democracy. On Monday, Attorney General Ken Salazar and Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas convened the first meeting of a task force designed to clear the air around Columbine –…
Four years ago, the race for Jefferson County sheriff attracted about as much attention as a quilting bee in Punkin Center. The campaign, which pitted a powerful Republican county commissioner against a little-known Arvada police commander running as an independent, produced few fireworks and had a predictable outcome. This time…
“Shame on you.” Like monkeys and reporters, state lawmakers can be a shameless bunch. But that didn’t stop Randy Brown from heaping shame on members of the House Civil Justice and Judiciary Committee last week. After four hours of emotion-charged testimony, including pleas by Brown and other parents to seek…
On a Monday in early January, Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Taylor was finally brought to account for the strange and disturbing story he’d been telling about the Columbine massacre for nearly three years. Summoned that morning to a meeting with internal affairs, Taylor admitted that the story was, in…
The families of the Columbine victims leave no stone unturned as they search for the truth. They keep looking under rocks, making dark discoveries — and then the worms start turning. The worms have been wiggling every which way since U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock threw out most of the…
A year before the shootings at Columbine High School, Eric David Harris already had the plan worked out in his head. He knew what time to attack the school in order to kill and maim the most students. He knew where he and fellow gunman Dylan Klebold, alias “V” or…
Last week’s dismissal of most of the lawsuits against police and school officials stemming from the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School left frustrated victims’ families contemplating a wide range of responses, from legal appeals and legislation to renewed calls for a grand jury to investigate possible police misconduct. If…
The Fire Last Time They dreamed of fire. It would be a cleansing fire, fueled by propane, gasoline, gunpowder, homemade napalm — and their own savage hatred. Explosion after explosion, building to a conflagration that would settle all arguments and consume hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives. At first, when the…
For the past eighteen months, ever since Columbine families filed nine lawsuits against him and his agency, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone has refused to talk to reporters about the school massacre. When other county officials deign to comment on the police response to the attack, they invariably parrot the…
Two weeks ago, when Kmart officials announced that their stores would stop selling handgun ammunition, they described the decision as a shift in “merchandising strategy” that had been in the works for some time. It was just a coincidence, they suggested, that Kmart executives had met with filmmaker Michael Moore…
