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BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — The case before the Colorado Supreme Court on Thursday was about elephants but the justices had a few questions about dogs. If five elderly elephants at a zoo in Colorado Springs win the right to challenge their captivity in court, what could happen to the pets kept by many people the packed courtroom? If elephants can seek their freedom, Justice Melissa Hart wondered, what might happen with her dog? "How do I know when it stops?" Hart asked during the hearing on whether five elephants from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo should...
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — A mentally ill man who killed 10 people at a Colorado supermarket was convicted Monday of murder by a jury that rejected his attempt to avoid prison time by pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. Victims' relatives recounted in pained testimony the lives gunman Ahmad Alissa destroyed in the 2021 attack in the college town of Boulder. Nikolena Stanisic, whose only sibling, Neven, was killed, recalled going out to ice cream with her brother the night before he was shot and how he would sometimes help her with her b...
DENVER (AP) — Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, was found guilty by a jury on most charges Monday in a breach of her county's election computer system. Peters was accused of using someone else's security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system. Prosecutors said she was seeking fame and became "fixated" on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results. The c...
DENVER (AP) — The shooter who killed five people and injured 19 others at an LGBTQ+ club that was a refuge in the conservative city of Colorado Springs pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes and was sentenced to 55 life terms in prison on Tuesday, but once again declined to apologize or say anything to the victims' families. Prosecutors nevertheless highlighted the importance of Anderson Lee Aldrich being forced to take responsibility for the hatred toward LGBTQ+ people that they say motivated the mass shooting. As part of a plea agreement, Aldr...
DENVER (AP) — A Colorado man pleaded guilty to murder charges on Friday for starting a 2020 house fire that killed five members of a Senegalese family out of misplaced revenge for a stolen iPhone that he mistakenly tracked to the house. Kevin Bui, now 20, was a teenager at the time of the fire but prosecuted as an adult. He has been portrayed by prosecutors as the ringleader of three friends who started the Aug. 5, 2020, fire in the middle of the night in a Denver neighborhood. Bui wrongly believed people who had recently robbed him lived in t...
DENVER (AP) — Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run. Twenty-five years later, and with Mendo now a mother herself, the trauma from that horrific day remains close on her heels. It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city she had visited a lot while working in the casino industry. Then again in 2022, when 19 stu...
DENVER (AP) — A couple who owned a Colorado funeral home where authorities last year discovered 190 decaying bodies were indicted on federal charges that they misspent nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds on vacations, cosmetic surgery, jewelry and other personal expenses, according to court documents unsealed Monday. The indictment reaffirms accusations from state prosecutors that Jon and Carie Hallford gave families dry concrete instead of cremated ashes and alleges the couple buried the wrong body on two occasions. The couple also c...
DENVER (AP) — Colorado authorities issued an arrest warrant Friday for a former funeral home owner they say kept a deceased woman's body in a hearse for two years at a home where police also found up to 30 cremated remains. The grisly discovery occurred Feb. 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a Denver house rented by 33-year-old Miles Harford, who owned Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services in the Denver suburb of Littleton, Denver police said. It had been closed since September 2022. The discovery is the latest in a string of horrific cases...
DENVER (AP) — Two Colorado funeral home owners accused of abandoning nearly 200 bodies took payments from families that were meant for cremations and burials and instead bought vehicles, cryptocurrency, a $1,500 dinner in Las Vegas and other personal items, prosecutors and an FBI agent said Thursday. In a courtroom packed with families of the deceased, FBI Agent Andrew Cohen detailed that Jon and Carie Hallford used payments from the families to buy two vehicles — a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti — for more than $120,000, enough to cover crema...
DENVER (AP) — The four Black girls lay facedown in a parking lot, crying "no" and "mommy" as a police officer who had pointed her gun at them then bent down to handcuff two of their wrists. The youngest wore a pink tiara as she held onto her teenage cousin's hand. The 6-year-old Lovely watched as her mother, Brittney Gilliam, was led to a patrol car in handcuffs after she shouted in frustration at the police, who mistakenly believed the car she was driving was stolen. Over three years later, the Denver suburb of Aurora has agreed to a $1.9 m...
DENVER (AP) — The shooter who killed five people and endangered the lives of over 40 others at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs plans to plead guilty to new federal charges for hate crimes and firearm violations under an agreement that would allow the defendant to avoid the death penalty, according to court documents made public Tuesday. Anderson Aldrich, 23, made a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to 50 hate crime charges and 24 firearm violations, the documents show. Aldrich would get multiple life sentences in addition to a 1...
DENVER (AP) — Investigators who entered a Colorado funeral home where nearly 200 abandoned bodies were found encountered stacks of partially covered human remains, bodily fluids several inches deep on the floor, and flies and maggots throughout the building, an FBI agent testified Thursday. Prosecutors also revealed text messages sent between the funeral home's owners showing they were under growing financial pressures and had fears that they would be caught for mishandling the bodies. As the bodies accumulated, one of the co-owners even s...
DENVER (AP) — A Colorado police officer convicted of killing Elijah McClain, a young Black man walking home from a store, is expected to learn Friday whether a judge will sentence him to prison or he will receive probation. McClain's mother also may speak at the sentencing hearing. Among the three officers charged in McClain's 2019 death, Randy Roedema was the only one found guilty and was the most senior officer who initially responded to the scene. A jury convicted the former Aurora officer in October of criminally negligent homicide, w...
DENVER (AP) — An owner of a Colorado funeral home accused of abandoning nearly 200 bodies in a building for years was worried as far back as 2020 about getting caught, a prosecutor said Thursday at a hearing where the prosecution objected to lowering his bond. "My one and only focus is keeping us out of jail," said one text message allegedly written by Jon Hallford that a prosecutor read in court. Arguing for maintaining a high bond for Jon Hallford, Senior Deputy District Attorney Rachael Powell said Hallford wrote that text in May of 2020. S...
DENVER (AP) — A man leaving the scene of a car wreck Tuesday shot his way into the Colorado Supreme Court building and inflicted "extensive damage" to the building before being arrested by police, authorities said, adding the incident seems unrelated to the court's recent ruling banning former President Donald Trump from the ballot. Colorado's justices have received threats ever since they ruled 4-3 last month that a rarely used constitutional provision barring from office those who "engaged in insurrection" applies to Trump. Authorities, h...
BRIGHTON, Colo. (AP) — Two Denver-area paramedics were convicted Friday for giving a fatal overdose of the sedative ketamine to Elijah McClain in 2019 — a jury verdict that experts said could have a chilling effect on first responders around the country. The case involving the 23-year-old Black man's death was the first among several recent criminal prosecutions against medical first responders to reach trial, potentially setting the bar for prosecutors for future cases. It also was the last of three trials against police and paramedics cha...
BRIGHTON, Colo. (AP) — A jury has acquitted a Denver-area police officer of manslaughter, following trial testimony that he put Elijah McClain in a neck hold before the Black man was injected with the powerful sedative ketamine by paramedics and died. The acquittal came Monday in the second of three trials against first responders indicted by state prosecutors in the 23-year-old massage therapist's death in August 2021. The local district attorney initially declined to bring charges but the case was revived after the 2020 murder of George F...
BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — A judge on Tuesday granted a defense request to hold a hearing with experts to determine if a mentally ill man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket in 2021 is mentally competent to be prosecuted for the mass shooting. Prosecutors revealed last week that experts at the state mental hospital determined that Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is now mentally competent to proceed in the case. However, his lawyer, Kathryn Herold, exercising the defense's right to challenge the finding, requested a hearing with t...
DENVER (AP) — When officers responded to a domestic violence call Aug. 5, Brandon Cole reached into a vehicle, took an "aggressive stance" and then rushed toward one of them, police said. Thinking he was holding a knife, the officer fired twice, killing him. But the object Cole dropped as he fell to the ground turned out to be a black marker. "This is a tremendous tragedy," Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas said during a news conference Monday as police released graphic body-camera video of the shooting, which is still being investigated. A n...
DENVER (AP) — A Colorado police officer accused of putting a handcuffed woman in a parked police car that was hit by a freight train did not know the car was parked on the tracks, the officer's lawyer said in court Monday. While evidence will show Officer Jordan Steinke standing on the railroad tracks during a night traffic stop on Sept. 16, 2022, she did not know that an officer she was assisting had parked his patrol car on the tracks, defense lawyer Mallory Revel said in opening statements in state court in Greeley. The tracks were c...
Dozens of insurance companies are suing Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy to recoup money paid out to homes and businesses lost in Colorado's most destructive wildfire in 2021. The lawsuit was filed Thursday, a few weeks after investigators announced that a sparking power line owned by Xcel was one of the causes of a fire that, fanned by high winds, destroyed nearly 1,000 homes and left two people dead. Embers from a smoldering scrap wood fire set days before on a nearby property used by a Christian religious communal group was also found to have...
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The person who killed five people at a Colorado Springs nightclub in 2022 was sentenced to life in prison on Monday, after victims called the shooter a "monster" and "coward" who hunted down revelers in a calculated attack on a sanctuary for the LGBTQ+ community. During an emotional courtroom hearing packed with victims and family members, Anderson Lee Aldrich pleaded guilty to five counts of murder and 46 counts of attempted murder – one for each person at Club Q on the night of the shooting. Aldrich also ple...
DENVER (AP) — A shooting in downtown Denver amid fans celebrating the Nuggets' first NBA championship win was likely sparked by a drug deal gone wrong, police said Tuesday. The violence left 10 people wounded, including one of two people arrested in connection with the shooting. All of the injured — nine men, one woman — are expected to survive, including five or six people that police believe were bystanders not involved in the drug deal, Chief Ron Thomas said at a news conference. He said 20 rounds were fired at the scene, roughly a mile...
DENVER (AP) — A trio of health care bills enshrining access in Colorado to abortion and gender-affirming procedures and medications became law Friday as the Democrat-led state tries to make itself a safe haven for its neighbors, whose Republican leaders are restricting care. The main goal of the legislation signed by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis is to ensure people in surrounding states and beyond can go to Colorado to have an abortion, begin puberty blockers or receive gender-affirming surgery without fear of prosecution. Bordering states of W...
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The 22-year-old accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in November posted to a neo-Nazi website and used gay and racial slurs while gaming online, a police detective testified Wednesday. Among the things Anderson Lee Aldrich posted was an image of a rifle scope trained on a gay pride parade and a shooting training video. Aldrich, who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they and them, also used a bigoted slur when referring to someone who was gay, D...
