News

Anne Sulton’s ride looks like a gangsta Rolls-Royce: gleaming silver with flared fenders, spoked wheels and a long, snout-like hood. The car is a “Phantom,” a radically modified Pontiac Firebird, and Sulton, the controversial civil-rights attorney who defended cop killer Gil Webb II last summer, doesn’t look like she should…

If you’ve rigged the wires on your cable box so you can get HBO for free or bought a “descrambled” black box so you won’t have to pay for cable at all, a new law says you could be fined $4,000. The legislation, signed last month by Governor Roy Romer,…

Blues gaveler: Denver juvenile court judge David E. Ramirez didn’t go quietly when he announced his retirement last week. In fact, Ramirez, long controversial for his alleged coddling of hardcore juvenile offenders, sent out a press release trumpeting the earthshaking fact that he would be stepping down on September 1…

Jose Luis Olivas and Fernando Torres Hernandez were hanging out in the alley off 27th and Larimer at about noon on April 10, sharing a quart of beer, when a white pickup truck pulled up to them. The man inside the truck gestured at them with his hands, but his…

Jim and Amy’s most ambitious number may never be seen. Three years of practice, and it keeps getting tangled in twists of fate. Last year, just before the State Artistic Skate Meet in Greeley, Jim and Amy were rear-ended; the accident landed them in therapy for months. The year before…

It’s the Bomb! Patricia Calhoun’s “Civics Lessons,” in the April 30 issue, made me nostalgic and sad. Twenty years ago people in Boulder cared about something other than themselves and wearing the right clothes and driving the right cars. Twenty years ago we worried about the world and the global…

The ballroom of the Westin Tabor Center was filled with hundreds of couples one Saturday night this past March. Supporters of the Colorado Easter Seal Society had gathered to fete the winners of the society’s most prestigious honor, the Edgar F. “Daddy” Allen Award, given annually to the group’s biggest…

Lobbyist William A. “Art” Roberts and his wife, Roselee, also a lobbyist, own a rather special blue-and-white nineteenth-century Chinese porcelain bowl, once the property of Jacqueline Onassis. They bid $4,000 for it two years ago at the Sotheby’s auction of Jackie O’s personal possessions, where Art took Roselee to celebrate…

Kelly Zielbauer says she wasn’t concerned about the health dangers she faced while working in the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Standards lab, despite the fact that she handled lethal chemicals daily. But when clumps of her hair fell out and she started getting headaches, she asked to be reassigned to…

The 140 firefighters of the Castlewood Fire Department protect some of metro Denver’s ritziest homes, including those of several Denver Broncos celebrities. Now the firefighters are getting in a few hits of their own, using a controversial pay-incentive program as a rallying cry to try to oust the existing fire-district…

This week’s announcement that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the U.S. Department of Defense have settled their legal fight over the cleanup of the former Lowry Bombing Range allowed both sides to save face. But sources say the split-the-difference compromise was the result of lucky timing–a…

Submitted for your approval: A train stuck in an underground tunnel. An air of creeping claustrophobia. Panicked passengers find it difficult to breathe. A woman screams. A man offers his left arm for a fresh pair of Depends. And the hypnotic, pre-recorded voice of Reynelda Muse repeats an eerie message:…

The Boulder County courtroom was standing room only last Wednesday, as Professor Alex Hunter presented his Civics 101 lecture on the origins of modern jurisprudence. While reporters from around the world yawned, Boulder’s district attorney took the grand jury concept slowly–very slowly–from the Magna Carta through the American Revolution to…

This was his first big tag. So he lied and told his parents he was sleeping at a buddy’s, when instead he drove to a field off Speer Boulevard. There he and three friends unloaded a few dozen spray cans and some forty-ounce bottles of beer. Then they went to…

Conduct Unbecoming Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “Zero for Conduct,” in the April 23 issue: It was good to see Mr. C’de Baca get some ink. I’m a former Denver Public Schools teacher (I left voluntarily, by the way), and I have seen what he’s talking about firsthand. He does, however, ascribe…

Joseph C’de Baca can see where this is going. He was supposed to be the third speaker on the agenda for the Denver Public Schools monthly public forum, but school board president Sue Edwards keeps calling other names instead. Magnet schools, anti-smoking campaigns, fair pay for janitors–the speakers come and…

The TV news show 48 Hours portrayed former Denver cop Michael Newell as a hero two weeks ago for his efforts to protect women from the obsessed and often dangerous men who stalk them. Specifically, the CBS crew concentrated on the story of Newell’s “rescue” of an Aurora woman named…

Is it just me, or is it snot in here? Now it can be said that if brains were dynamite, the Rocky Mountain News really would have enough to blow its nose. A News employee was fired recently for blowing his nose while on duty–and doing it all over the…

A controversial plan to hire a private company to nag Colorado motorists without car insurance took an unexpected turn earlier this year: It landed in court when the Utah firm that lobbied for the measure at the legislature didn’t get the job. And the lawsuit by Insure-Rite, Inc., over a…