Crime & Police

The Denver Police Department provided Westword with the final total of arrests and/or citations for the 2017 version of the Denver 4/20 Rally. The numbers are considerably higher than what was initially reported — twenty citations and five arrests — but fewer than in previous years when the festival was held on a weekend and sometimes covered multiple days.

Denver Police Department statistics reveal the ten Denver neighborhoods with the most crimes per square mile during the early months of 2017. But while the numbers are higher than residents would wish, they’ve actually declined over the past two years in many, if not all, of the areas.

All too often these days, we hear about police violence against suspects, as in the 2015 fatal officer-involved shooting of seventeen-year-old Jessie Hernandez, which recently led to a City of Denver settlement of just under $1 million. But there are plenty of times when cops are the victims of violence from individuals they encounter, as is made clear by some startling statistics assembled by the Colorado Springs Police Department. According to FBI data detailed in a series of graphics on view below, more than 1,000 Colorado police officers have been assaulted annually in recent years, with most of those attacks taking place late at night or early in the morning.

Richard Kirk has been sentenced to thirty years in prison for murdering his wife, Kristine Kirk, nearly three years ago, shortly after he’d consumed a marijuana edible. During the hearing at which this punishment was formalized, Kirk implied that the pot candy had spurred the killing, saying, “I had no idea how it would affect me…. I’m so sorry that I became the monster that I was supposed to protect them from.” But a major cannabis business organization maintains that legal marijuana actually reduces crime instead of increasing it.

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.

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.

An opioid epidemic is sweeping across the country and ravaging Denver’s drug addicts. It’s motivation enough for the Harm Reduction Action Center to push for a safe injection site in Denver, and has staff at the Denver Library, whose Central branch has seen six overdoses this year, training on how…

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.

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.

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.

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.

On Sunday, March 5, relatives of Holly Lynn Moore will join friends and supporters in a procession, on foot and motorcyles, around the perimeter of the Outlets at Castle Rock shopping mall, marking the second anniversary of the nineteen-year-old’s death. It sounds like a strange way to commemorate what local…

John Orlando Sanchez, who goes by his middle name, has been sentenced to life in prison plus an incredible 108 years for the 2015 murder of 41-year-old Eric Schnaare. And a newly unsealed arrest affidavit shared below paints a brutal portrait of the slaying. Afterward, Andrew Gutierrez, who was sentenced to life plus sixteen years over the incident, is quoted as saying, “Wasn’t that awesome? That almost made me cum in my pants.”

In a jailhouse interview, Joshua Cummings, who has been charged with the slaying of RTD security officer Scott Van Lanken in late January, calls himself a “soldier of the Islamic state” and maintains that his actions were done for the “pleasure of Allah.”