Quantcast
Channel: In Depth – The Colorado Independent

Pioneering disability rights attorney Carrie Ann Lucas dies

0
0

Editor’s note: Carrie Ann Lucas, a nationally known disability rights attorney and mother of four, died today, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2019. She was 47. Lucas’s death was announced on her Facebook page by family and friends, who said she “died after an arbitrary denial from an insurance company caused a plethora of health problems, exacerbating her disabilities and eventually leading to her premature death.” This profile of Lucas was originally published in The Independent on Oct. 28, 2016. 

The most vocal critic of a proposed ballot measure that would let dying people take prescribed life-ending drugs is a 44-year-old lawyer and disability rights activist named Carrie Ann Lucas.

It is Lucas who joins – or leads – public protests, who talks to reporters, who takes on the issue at debate after debate. Inevitably someone will suggest her arguments are selfish or callous, or that she is a fear-monger. Her critics’ understanding of the measure is as flawed as the measure itself, she will say, not without empathy. She knows people behaving in the name of love and mercy can’t always hear beyond the cry of their own hearts.

“I don’t want anyone to die in pain, either, and have a miserable death,” Lucas says. “But I also want to make sure that we are legislating laws that protect the most vulnerable people. And this doesn’t do that.”

In her newspaper op-eds, she describes what those who have not seen her may not know: She has a degenerative neuromuscular disease. She uses a wheelchair. She breathes through a ventilator. She has a gastrostomy tube. Lucas presents the details of her disease in the same straightforward way that she says she lives in Windsor as a single mom with four children — all adopted, all with disabilities. Her manner suggests it would be wise to stifle any hint of pity. For that matter, do not veer into some version of “I could never do what you do,” because, really, you don’t know what you are talking about. Human beings have no idea what they are capable of.

Lucas testified against death-with-dignity bills in the last two state legislative sessions. The hearings were full of emotion and dramatic testimony on both sides, and the bills were defeated. So, supporters sidestepped the legislature and gathered more than enough signatures to put the question on this year’s ballot.

Voters now will decide whether Colorado will join five other states that allow mentally competent adults with less than six months to live to receive a prescription for life-ending drugs. Two doctors must agree on a terminal diagnosis and prognosis. The patient can take the drug when and where he or she wishes, as long as it is self-administered.

Prop. 106 is widely supported in Colorado, which has a strong independent streak. Supporters, largely affiliated with Compassion & Choices, a Denver-based national organization, had raised $5.6 million as of Oct. 20, nearly twice that raised by opponents, the most powerful of which is the Catholic Church.

Lucas attributes the lopsided support for the measure to misinformation, naivete, and the gauzy handiwork of euphemism. “It’s not ‘medical aid-in-dying,’” she says. “It’s assisted suicide.”

The issue resonates deeply with those who know the helplessness of watching someone they love slowly die in pain or terror. (And I am among this universe of people. My mom. Cancer.) Or of knowing someone terminally ill and so desperate to die, they take their own lives. It is personal. On that level, the support for Prop. 106 is easy to understand.  

It is also easy to understand those opposed for religious reasons. Their faith tells them that it is not for us to decide when we should leave this world any more than it was for us to decide when to enter it.

Lucas’ arguments are more complex. This is, in part, because she is given to saying such things as the proposed law discriminates against people who are not terminally ill. “If we really believe that people should have the right to have total control over every aspect of their lives, even to death, then why not let a depressed 19-year-old who broke up with his girlfriend and is in very real pain access these drugs?”

(Yes, this is hyperbolic. No, Lucas does not seem to care. She is in the habit of carrying an argument to its furthest logical extension.)

But, in large part, her position can be hard to understand because it is rooted in her life as a disabled person. It requires the able-bodied to enter a realm where each day can bring a reminder that you, disabled person, are an afterthought to some, the subject of idealized inspiration to others, and an object of pity or repulsion to others still. All of these reactions achieve the same result: to strip from people with disabilities their  humanity, to deny them mutual acknowledgement of the glorious and messy and sacred thing that it is to be alive.

This is a realm unknown to most able-bodied people. And Lucas has spent half of her life here.

***

lucas-headshot-1

She was a high school freshman when she began to lose muscle strength. She attributed this, at first, to laziness. Lucas was an athlete. Maybe she just wasn’t training as hard as she should be, she thought.

By 17, she was walking with braces and had begun a years-long odyssey from specialist to specialist, from crutches to a manual wheelchair to an electric wheelchair, from a part-time ventilator to a tracheotomy and a 24-7 ventilator. Lucas now occupies “the land of folks who have a neuromuscular disease for which we don’t have a definitive label.”

As her disease progressed, Lucas graduated from college, worked as a teacher, volunteered as a youth pastor, received her Master’s degree in divinity, and went to law school, graduating near the top of her class. She won a prestigious Equal Justice Works fellowship, launching what became the Disabled Parents Rights nonprofit she now runs.

Along the way, she adopted four elementary-school-aged children from foster care. All have disabilities of one sort or the other. Two need a wheelchair to get around. They range in age now from 15 to 26.

Over time, she came to view doctors as fallible and biased against the disabled, whose quality of life, she says, they deem poor.

She learned that bureaucracies – be they the insurance industry, the school or child welfare systems – were quick to second-guess the needs and abilities of disabled parents and of disabled children. She had to fight to adopt her first child, her niece, because the child is disabled and Lucas is disabled and the social service agency could not reconcile the two.

Lucas, who practices juvenile law, represents parents who have been accused of abusing or neglecting their children. About 80 percent of her clients are parents with disabilities, who are overrepresented in the child welfare system.

“We hear things all the time like, ‘How can you be a parent if you can’t throw a football for your son?’” she says. “As disabled people, we are always addressing the issue of how society devalues our lives and experiences. We are always confronting attitudes about our abilities to work, to be parents. We are confronted day in and day out with the way society views our capability and our quality of life.”

She underwent a slow, steady shifting of landscape, her worldview expanding from that of her able-bodied youth to that of someone facing yet another too-narrow doorway, too-cluttered aisle, or too-tiny restaurant because no one was thinking about how a wheelchair might fit.

The redirecting of perspective was so incremental that she did not experience it as an epiphany, but more like once she was on one side of a threshold and then she was on the other and she could not tell you how or when she crossed.

“It just was,” she says.

***

Prop. 106 defines terminally ill as “an incurable and irreversible illness that will, within reasonable medical judgment, result in death.” The proposed law also says the mentally competent terminally ill adult who wishes to access the drug – a sleeping medication known as secobarbital – must have a prognosis of death within six months.

By this definition, Lucas argues, she would qualify as terminally ill. Anyone who would die without medical intervention or treatment would qualify, including the insulin-dependent diabetic, she says.

Nonsense, counter supporters. The proposed law says the right to request life-ending drugs “does not exist because of age or disability.”

“Our doctors know the difference between someone who is disabled and someone who is terminally ill and has no option for life-saving medicine, no opportunity for medical intervention. They are in the active stages of dying,” says attorney Julie Selsberg.

If Lucas is the face of the opposition, Seslberg is that of the proponents. Her father suffered from ALS and wrote a letter to The Denver Post in February 2014 begging lawmakers to pass a death-with-dignity bill. In the absence of such a law, he said, he had chosen to starve himself to death.

“I have to give my testimony to you now, because by next week I hope to be dead,” he said. “You see, I made a terrible mistake. I chose to live when I should have chosen to die, at my own hands, many months ago. Because now I can’t swallow the foods that made my mouth water or the sweets that added a few pounds to my middle. I can’t talk to my friends and family who surround me; my voice is barely audible, and every whispered word takes monumental effort. I can’t walk; my muscles have atrophied. I can’t breath; I’m on a machine that inhales and exhales for me.”

It took Charles Selsberg 13 days to die.

“Doctors are not looking to interpret this is in broad manner,” says Selsberg, who has debated Lucas four times. “I was a prosecutor and I would not support something that I felt would prove a danger to a certain population. I have devoted my life to seeking justice for people and this is seeking justice for victims of terminal illness. I would not support it if I thought it would cause harm.”

Colorado isn’t pioneering anything here, Selsberg says, pointing out that Prop. 106 is modeled on Oregon’s law, which was passed in 1997. Since then, according to state statistics, 1,545 people have had prescriptions written under the Death With Dignity Act, and 991 patients have died from ingesting the medications.

But, Lucas argues, Prop. 106 does not explicitly say “active stages of dying.” From that lack of specificity flows the rest of her main argument. It follows the logic of a larger society that insists that with your wheelchair and ventilator and feeding tube, with your incontinence and inability to bathe yourself, you cannot possibly have an acceptable quality of life.

It does not escape her that some of the very same conditions that prompted Charles Selsberg’s plea to die with dignity are those with which she lives: a ventilator, a feeding tube, muscles that have atrophied.

“That’s my life,” she says. The profound insult of Prop. 106, she says, is the suggestion that she and others who are disabled lack dignity.

Lucas’ experience suggests to her that someone who is dependent on medical intervention to live, who is isolated and vulnerable and depressed, could easily find two doctors willing to sign off on a lethal prescription because, again, who would want to live this way?

That same experience suggests to her that a caretaker, weary of caretaking, could wage a campaign of persuasion – or coercion – against such a disabled person, sowing a seed of doubt that blossoms into certainty that life is no longer bearable and this prescription thing is the way to go. And, because no witnesses are required to be present, that caretaker could force feed the drugs and claim it was self-administered, Lucas argues.

That would be a felony under the law, said Selsberg, adding that safeguards are in place to protect against precisely such abuses as those Lucas describes.

Lucas calls the safeguards weak and unenforceable. “Look at what happened with medical marijuana,” she says. “The number of 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds with debilitating back pain working at ski resorts is remarkable.”

“It’s not the people who are supporting the measure, the proponents’ families, that I am worried about,” she says. “Those folks, clearly they have loving family members around them. It’s the people who don’t and I represent a lot of people who have no one … This a clear social justice issue. Once a person is dead, you can’t go back and say, ‘Oops, she was really abused. She was really depressed’ — and people at the end of life are depressed, to say they are not is a lie. It’s done. We can’t go back and fix that.”

***

Lucas fights because she does not know how not to fight. She has never been an “Oh, it will all work itself out in the end” kind of person. This is the girl who in high school ended up in the principal’s office because she argued that the band director should let her friend’s disabled sister march in band.

“It was just, ‘What do you mean she can’t go? Of course she can. You make that happen. You figure it out.’ That was my attitude. You fix things.”

The girl got to march.

This is the woman who decided to get her Master’s degree in divinity at Iliff school of Theology (she wanted to be a community organizer) and then went on a 33-day hunger strike with a handful of other Iliff students to protest what they saw as institutional racism. How could the library there not carry work by major African theologians, she demanded. She went on to sue the college because it did not have a handicap-accessible bathroom.

“I once said, when introducing Carrie for an award, that I know no one as able to bend reality to her will,” says Amy Robertson, a longtime friend of Lucas’. “She has a number of disabilities, her kids have disabilities, she fights for parents with disabilities. She can go into a situation and say, ‘This is how I see it,’ and get people to finally see it that way.”

Lucas has lost count of how many lawsuits she has filed as a plaintiff; many were part of her earlier work at the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition. Nearly all involved violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The most well-known was probably the Kmart case, a class action suit in which she was the lead plaintiff and Robertson her lawyer. Filed in 1999, it took seven years to resolve and resulted in Kmart making its stores accessible, as well as a landmark $13 million settlement of which Lucas received $10,000. (“I took my kids to Disney World.”)

She fights because she still can.

When I first called Lucas, she thought I wanted to talk to her about Jerika Bolen. Bolen was the 14-year-old Wisconsin girl who was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2, an incurable, progressive disease. She could move only her head and hands. She was in constant pain.

Jerika decided she wanted to stop treatment and enter hospice, choosing to die. She told the local paper she had thought about it a long time and that she knew her decision would hurt her family, but she was going to a better place. Her mother told reporters she had to respect her daughter’s decision, saying her daughter lived in constant pain and “no one in their right mind would let someone suffer like she was.”

Jerika asked for a special prom before she entered hospice. The story made national headlines. Hundreds of people attended. She died on Sept. 22.

“We just watched them starve a 14-year-old to death because she had a disability,” Lucas says. “She was 14. She was not dying. She was not anywhere close to death. We should be watching that girl go to high school and go to her actual prom and go to college and get a job because that’s what people with her neuromuscular disease do. People with her exact condition are therapists and doctors and lawyers and filmmakers and actresses and models. That is what she should have been doing.”

Lucas asked local child protective services in Wisconsin to intervene in Jerika’s case. For that, she says, her office received death threats.

“Everything from ‘I hope you die,’ ‘You are going to be the next to die.’ to ‘Butt out. This is none of your business.’”

Many comments came from people she assumes were “white liberals” because they came on the heels of a public radio interview. Those comments were more along the lines of: “’Well, of course she wants to die. Her life is horrible. She has this disability.’”

Which, to Lucas, is just another way of saying, “Better off dead than disabled.”

Lucas knows some people think she is misleading voters about the potential consequences of Prop. 106. She knows some think the scenarios she paints are far-fetched.

But Lucas also knows this: Just a few months ago people accepted a 14-year-girl’s decision to die rather than live with her disabilities. They not only allowed her to enter hospice and remove her ventilator. They also threw her a prom.

Large photo by Megan Verlee, Colorado Public Radio. Carrie Ann Lucas, right, a lawyer with significant disabilities, was among those testifying against the “Death With Dignity” bill on Feb. 7, 2015.

Small photo courtesy of Carrie Ann Lucas.


In presidential run, Colorado’s Hickenlooper pushes compromise in an uncompromising time Will the former governor's brand of 'canny centrism' prove strategically moderate or hopelessly naive in 2020?

0
0
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper kisses Roslyn Vaughan while making a presidential campaign stop at a house party in Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 27, 2019 (Photo by Evan Semón)

It is a late Friday afternoon in early February and passengers at Gate 12 of Washington’s Reagan National Airport are displeased.

“Fucking United,” a lawyer-lobbyist gripes when hearing that his flight home to Denver will be delayed.

“Noooo,” grumbles a young congressional staffer who’d skipped out of the office early for a weekend of Vail powder. “I’m going to miss my ride up to the mountains.”

One passenger, though as eager to board as the others, embraces the delay. The man in a candy stripe shirt and black overcoat spends the hour introducing himself to the frequent fliers, stressed-out text messagers and others weary from their week in the orbit of a federal government cranking up after a partial, month-long shutdown.

He shakes the hand of an engineer from Golden who’d been wondering aloud if he is the Colorado governor who was term-limited out of office a few weeks earlier. Then he shakes the hands of the engineer’s colleague and the colleague’s intern and even the woman whose charger the intern is borrowing.

Another passenger wants to know if it’s true what they say on TV, that he’s running for president because, what with the shutdown and that Russian mess, Washington seems kind of, well, broken.

Hearing this, a federal worker in a Broncos scarf looks up from her iPhone. “Wait, you’re, uh, you’re…” she says, fumbling for her “camera” button.

John Hickenlooper flashes his giddy-up smile.

“Yes,” he says and reaches out his hand. “Hi, I’m John.”

A long shot

Hickenlooper is a long shot. And that’s putting it mildly.

The 14th Democrat to launch a 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, he is polling at 1 percent, campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire in the shadows of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris. Just last week, the rising Dem star, Beto O’Rourke joined what is expected to be the largest Democratic field in memory. The national press seems to adore Hickenlooper when it’s not calling him naive.  

Hickenlooper was a mayor and then governor known for his careful consideration, his on-one-hand-but-on-the-other strategizing over potential outcomes, sometimes to the point of paralysis. This is a man who, while running the city in 2006, agonized over a possible bid for governor to such extent that he would go to bed thinking he was going to run and wake up thinking he wasn’t. When he finally made the announcement he would sit out that cycle, he did so with a sheet of paper on one side of which he’d typed a speech declaring he was in. On the other side he’d scribbled notes about how much he loved being the mayor of Denver. He’d wait four more years before jumping into the governor’s race.

In 2013, Hickenlooper told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that he didn’t want to be president. And maybe he meant it. But Trump has, as Hickenlooper puts it, “divided the country, angered our most loyal allies, attacked the free press and First Amendment and the very notion of what’s fake and what’s true.” And so he changed his mind about a presidential bid. Trump, Hickenlooper says, has to be beaten.

“The way to do so isn’t by out-talking him or kicking him in the balls. That would just strengthen his base and deepen the divisions,” says the longtime pledger of “clean” campaigns. “I think the only way to beat Trump is by demonstrating an ability to make government work (by getting) people in conflict to work through their disagreements and find compromise moving forward.”

Hickenlooper is running essentially as an anti-Trump, on a record of centrism, compromise, a willingness to listen. He defines himself as a can’t-we-all-just-get-along beacon of optimism in Trump’s American Carnage landscape. He, unlike Trump, isn’t a grudge holder, but rather a “dream-of-what’s-next-and-let’s-figure-out-how-to-do-it person,” says Dan Baer, an Obama-era ambassador and former Hickenlooper cabinet member. 

Hickenlooper is running because he thinks it’s his time — or, more to the point, that these extraordinary times need someone like him.

He knows he’s a long shot, a relative unknown leaping into the political fray. But he also knows a little something about being both and has proven he shouldn’t be underestimated.

As a young man, John Hickenlooper was a dyslexic and painfully shy kid with Coke-bottle glasses.(Photo courtesy of John HIckenlooper)
As a young man, John Hickenlooper was a dyslexic and painfully shy kid with Coke-bottle glasses. (Photo courtesy of John HIckenlooper)

Introductions

The political unknown was considered a dark horse 16 years ago when he glad-handed his way into the Denver mayor’s office.

Hickenlooper was used to introducing himself. He has a little-known condition called prosopagnosia that makes it difficult for him to recognize faces. He’s also an extrovert. He says the combination makes social situations “kind of an adventure,” and so he offers handshakes enthusiastically – sometimes introducing himself to people he already knows.

To reach voters whose hands he couldn’t shake personally, his 2003 mayoral campaign rented billboards bearing the image of the timeless “Hello, my name is” nametag, with “John” handwritten in the center. They were signature Hickenlooper: Earnest, folksy, and suggestive of a kinder, more civil approach to politics.

Ever the savvy marketer, the geologist-turned-brewer distinguished himself from the pack of seven mayoral contenders by touting his effort three years earlier to keep the Mile High Stadium name on the new Broncos stadium. It was ultimately dubbed Invesco Field at Mile High for a price of $120 million. But Hickenlooper had tried to block the naming-rights deal by filing a lawsuit arguing the Mile High brand shouldn’t be sold to the highest bidder because it had cultural and economic value for Denver.

His defeat in court didn’t keep him from earning props as a spirited champion of a growing city that had yet to brand itself, nor from forging his own brand as a populist underdog. He spoke often about the death of his father, a mechanical engineer after whom he was named, when he was 8. And he talked about having been a lanky, dyslexic and painfully shy kid with Coke-bottle glasses and an odd last name who learned early on to disarm bullies with self-effacing humor.

Hickenlooper was raised and educated at an elite prep school on Philadelphia’s Main Line and then at Wesleyan University in Connecticut where he earned an English degree and later a master’s in geology. After grad school in 1980, he went to work as a field geologist for the Denver-based Buckhorn Petroleum, which laid him off during the energy bust of 1986.

With a severance package and time on his hands, he researched the art and science of micro-brewing, drew up a business plan, and persuaded friends and investors to partner in opening Colorado’s first microbrewery, The Wynkoop Brewing Co., in Denver’s then-dilapidated Lower Downtown neighborhood.

The place was a success, and Hickenlooper parlayed what he calls “the hip new brewpub thing” into investments in more than 30 other hip new pubs and restaurants in Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, and elsewhere. He also invested in the redevelopment of several empty warehouses near the Wynkoop and helped rebrand the neighborhood as “LoDo” as an influx of galleries and boutiques prodded it, too, toward relative flyover-state hipness.

During that time, he gave tens of thousands of dollars to the Chinook Fund, a nonprofit he co-founded that gives startup grants to progressive community groups in Denver.

The mayoral candidate with the modern art collection and sprawling loft in LoDo’s Titanium Building managed to come off as a regular Joe who was so frugal, he often said, that he didn’t own a suit.

“Had one, but the zipper broke,” he told me during his 2003 mayoral run.

“You know, he even drives a Saturn,” added his spokeswoman.

The timing of his mayoral run wasn’t ideal for his family life. The longtime bachelor who once offered a $5,000 reward to prod a friend to find him a bride had a year earlier married Helen Thorpe, a journalist from Texas. The couple’s baby boy, Teddy, had whooping cough the month his parents moved into their new loft and his father launched his campaign. The new dad was fighting a cold and sleep deprivation as he rocked his wheezing son the morning of our first interview. Thorpe, drained from several nights up with Teddy and ambivalent about her husband’s political ambitions, mentioned something about him being more excited about filling potholes than furnishing their new home.

Politically, though, his timing was impeccable. So was his luck. The newcomer seemed fresh after 12 years of governance by Mayor Wellington Webb who is credited for opening Denver International Airport, redeveloping the Central Platte Valley and reducing the crime rate, but also known for cronyism and political patronage. Webb’s political machine was backing his former police chief Ari Zavaras, as his successor. But Zavaras lost his frontrunner status by misrepresenting that he had a college degree and then telling The Denver Post it was no big deal.

Hickenlooper, an avid reader, Malcolm Gladwell-citer, and Big Idea guy, harnessed the aspirations of educated, upwardly mobile newcomers hankering for a more sophisticated city – a place their friends and family visiting from the coasts would see as more than just a cowtown. An untapped well of fiscally moderate, socially liberal Denverites were drawn to his ideas about streamlining City Hall to run more like a business and changing the culture of city government into a more customer-friendly “service industry.”

John Hickenlooper
John Hickenlooper (Photo courtesy of Hickenlooper campaign)

His campaign played to those ideals with a TV ad in which, wearing a coin dispenser around his waist like a gun holster, he talked about “making change” in Denver while feeding coins into expired parking meters as a city parking monitor looked on, aghast. The message: That this hi-I’m-John guy was one of us. For some voters, weary after 12 years of Webb, this dorky micro-brewer with the motor scooter and self-deprecating humor had them at hello.

Hickenlooper whizzed into the mayoral run-off and beat his opponent, former state lawmaker turned city auditor Don Mares, with 65 percent of the vote.

It was during that run-off that the distinctions between the liberal Chinook Fund he’d helped found in the ‘80s and his pro-business agenda became clear. Labor unions and some of the groups Chinook bankrolled blasted him for having opposed a living wage in Denver, where he owned seven restaurants and employed 400 workers with the help of a $125,000 city loan and a $3 million subsidy from the Denver Urban Renewal Authority.

Shortly before his victory, he told me that sometimes the words “progressive”’ and “progress” were mutually exclusive.

Branding a “world-class city”

Denver’s new mayor lucked out by landing the job just as Denver’s economy was bouncing back after its tech bubble burst in the late 1990s. The 9/11 attacks slowed its recovery. Hickenlooper benefited from projects that Webb and former Mayor Federico Peña helped put into place: A new international airport, massive housing construction at the former Stapleton Airport and in the Central Platte Valley, three new sports stadiums, a public library expansion, and the expansion of the Colorado Convention Center.

He kept up the momentum by backing tax increases for arts and culture that bankrolled, among other efforts, expansions at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and Denver Botanic Gardens and an addition to the Denver Art Museum by Daniel Libeskind, the “it” architect of the moment. Whether projects like those turned Denver into the “world-class city” Hickenlooper had promised is debatable. But there’s no doubt they elevated the Mile High brand.

He also pushed for better transportation, including the passage of a $4.7 billion regional tax increase for a light rail system and commuter buses that eased movement not just within Denver, but throughout the metro area. That project involved brokering agreements with a long list of ideologically diverse suburban mayors, many of whom had distrusted Denver city government until that point.

Despite his fear of heights, he parachuted out of a plane (twice, because the first time he wasn’t looking into the camera) for a 2005 ad supporting ballot measures to stave off constitutional spending limits and raise state revenues for transportation, education and other programs throughout Colorado. Backing regional and statewide efforts helped boost his name recognition and build support beyond the city limits. It also helped fill his campaign coffers with contributions from construction companies, developers, lawyers, lobbyists and people working in the financial sector.

Hickenlooper picked former Anschutz Investment Co.’s managing director (and now U.S. Sen.) Michael Bennet as his first chief of staff. Roxane White, a well-respected former executive of several Denver-area nonprofits, took over that job after Bennet left to run Denver Public Schools. The team of neo-liberal and Republican policy wonks set out to professionalize the city. They put in place a customer-friendly 3-1-1 phone system, expedited permitting processes for developers, and lured new businesses – and jobs – to Denver. And they closed Denver’s worst budget gap ever without major staff or service cuts.

His promise to reward and retain high-performing city workers with free meals and other perks didn’t pan out. Neither was he able to put an end to police and sheriff misconduct nor stop officers from having disciplinary issues overturned on appeal to the city’s Career Service board, though he did create a safety oversight committee, appointed a special safety monitor, and adjusted the disciplinary system for errant officers. 

Perhaps most destabilizing was Hickenlooper’s failure to plan for the repercussions of the redevelopment that he and his predecessors championed. As housing prices went up, racial and economic diversity declined in wide swaths of Denver, stripping neighborhoods of their cultures and textures, and pricing many residents out of the city.

Meanwhile, citing his effectiveness and eccentricities, Time magazine named him as one of the nation’s top five big city mayors in 2005. A year later, he persuaded the Democratic National Committee to hold its 2008 national convention in the city. After scraping together tens of millions of dollars for that effort, he showed party elite a Denver that organizers portrayed as a hub of microbrewing, rockabilly-listening, bike-riding, downward-dogging, upwardly mobile, tech-savvy, health-and-recycling-obsessed, carbon-light sustainability, civic engagement and tolerance. Meanwhile, his police department spent much of the convention week sweeping up homeless people, silencing protestors and hauling innocent bystanders off to jail.

Whether or not the city vaunted in national headlines that summer reflected reality, Hickenlooper helped Denver achieve some modicum of hip, maybe for the first time since the Beatniks hung out on Colfax. Maybe for the first time ever.

John Hickenlooper at his 2017 State of the State address. (Photo by Allen Tian)
Gov. John Hickenlooper at his 2017 State of the State address. (Photo by Allen Tian for The Colorado Independent)

Hick takes the state

Denver’s brander-in-chief had stayed in his lane as mayor, rarely using his office to weigh in on national or international politics. But in 2009, when Ken Salazar resigned from the U.S. Senate to become Barack Obama’s Interior secretary, Hickenlooper threw in his name for Gov. Bill Ritter to consider him when picking a replacement. Bennet, who was running Denver Public Schools at the time, also sought the appointment. By several accounts, the superintendent wowed Ritter with his fluency in national and global affairs, and the mayor underwhelmed him. Bennet beat out his former boss for the Senate seat.

Hickenlooper set his sights on the governor’s office once it became clear that Ritter wasn’t seeking re-election and that Salazar wouldn’t run.

Unlike Denver, which is solidly Democratic, Colorado in 2010 was a purple state with an even blend of Dems, Republicans and independent voters. It was a tough year for Democrats as the Tea Party took aim at Obama and his supporters nationally. Again, luck was on Hickenlooper’s side as a plagiarism scandal took down his most formidable Republican opponent, former Congressman Scott McInnis. That left two weaker conservatives in the race: Anti-immigration crusader Tom Tancredo running in the right-wing American Constitution Party and Republican Dan Maes, who at the time was dogged by ethics scandals.

“Hick,” as the big-city mayor had become known statewide, no longer campaigned about the need for more cafés and public art. He called for economic growth in all parts of the state, a series of non-controversial, nonpartisan state reforms, and more political civility. He neutralized Tancredo’s and Maes’ mudslinging with a TV commercial in which he stood, fully clothed, under a shower because he said negative campaign ads made him feel dirty. The feel-good ad drew national attention, replayed in segments on the nightly news and Sunday morning talk shows.

Tancredo and Maes effectively split the conservative vote in that year’s general election. And Hick’s 51 percent victory in the three-way race – made possible by a strong showing in politically moderate Front Range suburbs – earned him a national rep as a rare Democrat whom independents and moderate Republicans would support.

But that reputation was challenged almost immediately when a troika of hot-button issues – “guns, gays, and grass,” as one of his aides called it – landed on his desk during his first term as governor.

In July 2012, a gunman opened fire during a midnight screening in an Aurora movie theater. He killed 12 people. The state legislature responded with three tough new gun control bills. Hickenlooper signed all three, much to the chagrin of gun rights advocates, including the statewide group of county sheriffs. Two of those laws – one requiring universal background checks before gun sales and the other limiting high-capacity ammunition magazines – led to the recalls later that year of two Democrats in the state Senate.

At a County Sheriffs of Colorado gathering months later, sheriffs confronted Hickenlooper about their displeasure with the magazine limit law and his failure to meet with them and hear their objections before signing it. He was caught on videotape stammering to apologize for the magazine law, saying he and his staff didn’t have all the facts about it. He also said that he was conflicted about supporting the bill, but felt compelled to do so because, he claimed, one of his staff members had gone rogue by “committing to us signing it.” The National Rifle Association described his remarks as “a desperate tap dance,” and sheriffs scorned him for gutlessness. Gun control advocates murmured similar criticisms, albeit more quietly.

Later in 2012, Colorado voters legalized recreational marijuana, the first in the nation to give it the green light. Hickenlooper opposed the ballot measure, saying it was “reckless” and “risky.” But he accepted the will of the voters and became the de-facto face of what, by most accounts, was its successful implementation. Conservatives and law-and-order moderates who didn’t know about his early opposition or overlooked it felt burned, saying he should have thrown his weight behind stopping the ballot measure or tried to stall its rollout once it passed. Hickenlooper now says he would oppose national legalization of marijuana, but also thinks the federal government should stop classifying it as a Schedule 1 drug, the same category as heroin.

Also in his first term, many right-of-center Coloradans felt alienated by his support for civil unions, gay marriage, and policies allowing driver’s licenses and in-state tuition rates to undocumented immigrants. Many also derided his backing of Medicaid expansion, which has dramatically cut the number of uninsured Coloradans. 

Hickenlooper, ever eager to find middle ground, took care to balance those Democratic stances with policies that appealed to moderates and conservatives. He signed an executive order against unfunded state mandates; set customer service goals for every state agency; consolidated more than 30 departments to cut duplication in state government; and launched a program called “Cut the Burden,” which eased public health and environmental regulatory requirements to make it easier for companies to do business in Colorado.

He also built public-private partnerships, including a much-lauded program that places high school students in apprenticeships within companies that commit to hiring them full time after graduation as an alternative to the college track. About 250 students and 70 companies are participating in Colorado’s CareerWise program, which over the next eight years aims to place one in 10 high school kids in apprenticeships.

Hickenlooper’s successes with economic development were undeniable, eclipsing all others in his eight years as governor. Colorado’s unemployment rate fell from 9 percent to 3 percent, and its ranking as the nation’s 40th most job-creating state skyrocketed to somewhere between 1st and 6th, depending on the list.

“There were natural forces at play there, sure. But John made a deliberate effort to sell Colorado as a place where it’s great to do business,” his lieutenant governor, Donna Lynne, said in December. “John is the jobs governor. He’s the economic recovery governor. Those are the achievements he’ll be remembered for.”

But as his term progressed, he became a target of the left for his stance on one of the most contentious issues in the state: oil and gas development. Hickenlooper sought, often unsuccessfully, to toe the line between Colorado’s public face as an oasis of wilderness and clean air and his own, pro-oil and gas agenda. Simultaneously, the former petroleum geologist put in place the first program in the nation aimed at limiting methane leaks from oil and gas sites while also quietly dismantling key aspects of Ritter’s clean energy goals.

A rare Democrat with heavy campaign funding from the oil and gas industry, Hickenlooper once publicly drank fracking fluid in an attempt to vouch for its safety. He spent years opposing local bans on drilling. Those efforts led to a 2014 showdown he waged with Jared Polis over the then-Boulder congressman’s backing of two statewide anti-fracking ballot measures, arguing they threatened Democrats in an election year. After months of wrangling, he persuaded Polis to end his financial support for the initiatives, effectively killing their chances of passing.

Hickenlooper now says, “I am unaware of any disagreement I’ve ever had” with Polis, who took office as his successor in January. Polis and Colorado’s newly Democrat-controlled legislature are poised to pass sweeping regulations on oil and gas development this session.

As Hickenlooper’s administration let oil and gas companies pock communities that opposed their presence, and allowed exurban sprawl to coil around existing oil and gas sites, a growing movement of “fractivists” protested the governor they started calling “Frackenlooper.” In 2017, their objections to his laissez-faire policies intensified when an abandoned Anadarko gas line sparked a fatal home explosion in Firestone.

But laissez faire is a relative term in Colorado, and less than an hour north and east of Firestone, rural communities fearing that Hick and his administration would grab their guns, steal their water and strip their liberties tried to secede from the state in 2013. Roxane White – the chief of staff who moved with Hickenlooper from City Hall to the statehouse – recalls meetings in northern Colorado communities where she says “they were just yelling and screaming at us.”

“That was so difficult, because it went against everything John believes in about governing, which is bringing people together rather than letting things splinter.”

Another lowpoint, White and others say, came with the 2013 murder of Hickenlooper’s first corrections director, Tom Clements. Having inherited a prison system that over-relied on solitary confinement, Clements was working to limit its use and end the practice of releasing inmates from long-term isolation directly onto the streets without offering step-down programs to ease them back into civil society. It was tragic enough that he was gunned down at his front door by a man newly paroled from the state prison system. But nearly unbearable to Hickenlooper and others in the administration was the irony that Clement’s killer, Evan Ebel – who happened to be the son of a lawyer friend of Hickenlooper’s – had spent years in solitary confinement, only to have the prison system ignore his requests to participate in a step-down program before he walked free.

“Do you have an obligation to the public to re-acclimate me, the dangerous inmate, to being around other human beings prior to being released and, if not, why?” Ebel asked in three formal grievances, each almost verbatim, filed in the months before he was paroled.

The Corrections Department didn’t answer his final complaint until two weeks after it had already released him. The letter said that because Ebel hadn’t adhered to the department’s line-spacing requirements for written grievances, his wouldn’t be considered. The parolee who long had complained about the prison system having crushed his humanity went on to murder Clements five weeks later.

During his first term, Hickenlooper also faced personal challenges. He and wife Helen Thorpe ended their 11-year marriage in 2012. Thorpe, who was on her way to becoming an award-winning and best-selling nonfiction author, since has openly discussed her discomfort as a politician’s wife. Hickenlooper married Robin Pringle, a vice president at Liberty Media, four years later.

Politically, the roughest patch of Hickenlooper’s governorship came during his 2014 re-election bid. It was a brutal year for Democrats. Popular Democratic Sen. Mark Udall lost his seat to Republican Congressman Cory Gardner, the first incumbent U.S. senator in Colorado to be toppled by a challenger in nearly four decades. Hickenlooper’s prowess at campaign fundraising – snagging unprecedented sums from health care, banking, oil and gas, construction, tech, telecomm, legal and lobbying interests – wasn’t helping him push ahead of his conservative Republican opponent, Bob Beauprez, in the polls. The former congressman was so far right that on talk radio he likened Americans to sheep who are living under a “one world order” and eagerly would line up to let the government implant microchips in their bodies.

For about 12 hours from election night until the following morning, it looked as though Beauprez had unseated the governor. But Hickenlooper managed to squeak ahead with a three-point victory. That slim margin, a close advisor says, “scared the living crap out of John in terms of his political future.” The advisor and others say the experience prodded Hickenlooper to shift to the right in his second term and to stay out, at least publicly, of state Democratic politics.

Notably, Hickenlooper didn’t commit to helping his then-lieutenant governor, Joe Garcia, run to replace him when term-limited out of office this year. Garcia went on to resign in 2015 and is now head of the state’s community college system. Three years later, Hickenlooper also didn’t publicly back the gubernatorial bid of Donna Lynne, the longtime health care executive he appointed as his second lieutenant governor, though she essentially ran the state while he travelled the country extolling centrism with Ohio Gov. John Kasich and planting the seeds for his presidential run. Lynne was knocked out in the Democratic primary and is now the chief operating officer of Columbia University’s medical center and CEO of its system of affiliated doctors.

Gov. John Hickenlooper addresses the media at the Westin Downtown Denver on Nov. 6, 2018. (Photograph by Evan Semón for The Colorado Independent)

Neither-here-nor-thereness

Hickenlooper left the governor’s office in January with a string of unfinished business. He agreed to discuss it – among other issues – a few weeks later when I ran into him at D.C.’s National Airport as he headed home after some presidential campaign prep-work. Once our flight finally boarded and took off, he switched his aisle seat in the 8th row for a middle seat next to me in row 33 for an interview.

We spoke first about the two state constitutional amendments – the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) and the Gallagher Amendment – that bind Colorado’s budget with strict revenue and spending limits, and a perception that he wouldn’t make the tough decisions needed to ease their stranglehold on state government.

“I’m not sure what tough decisions we haven’t made,” he told me, “we” being his preferred pronoun when talking about his record in office.

“A decision to ask voters to strike them from the Constitution,” I said.

He paused, repositioning his back, which he injured moving a piano at age 35, and acknowledged, “OK, fair enough.” He went on to say TABOR is “with all candor, the stupidest thing we have in Colorado,” but that undoing it and the Gallagher Amendment is an idea “whose time hasn’t come” in terms of “public awareness and readiness.”

Other challenges whose time he said has not yet come include how to raise funding for road and transportation improvements — the state has a multi-billion-dollar backlog of transportation needs, which have failed to keep up with population growth. Adequately funding education — the state ranks 42nd nationally – in part to close persistent racial and socio-economic gaps is another core issue with which Colorado had yet to grapple. Voters rejected tax increases for both during his governorship. He said it’ll be up to Polis’s administration to raise enough public awareness to bring about meaningful – and, likely costly–  reforms.

He also leaves to Polis the task of implementing Colorado’s first statewide water plan, whose creation he touts as one of his top achievements. The plan is meant to avert a statewide water shortfall that, due to climate change and population increases, is projected for 2050. Because water is such a divisive issue, his administration made a point of seeking input from rural and urban water users, West Slopers and Front Rangers, environmentalists, the outdoor recreation industry, the business community and others. The resulting plan is big on collaboration, but short on action. It fails to prioritize which projects among those competing interests should be funded and to say how, specifically, to pay for them.

Amy Beatie, former executive director of the Colorado Water Trust, has described the plan as “basically just a multi-page tome that’s more narrative than a plan. It’s just a giant thing that just sits on everybody’s desk.” She and other water policy experts say it’ll take “lots of tough decisions” before Colorado can put into action a defined strategy for living within its means.

In response to criticisms that he avoided those water policy decisions, Hickenlooper told The Independent last fall that “Any time you try to do something for the first time and you are … a pioneer, you’re going to get some challenges.”

The tough decision for which Hickenlooper is best known for not making relates to Colorado’s death penalty law.

He supported capital punishment during his run for governor. But as the execution date for convicted Chuck E. Cheese killer Nathan Dunlap drew near in 2013, he reversed his position and granted Dunlap a temporary reprieve. That he did not “commute,” or nix Dunlap’s death sentence, nor seek to address the racial inequities and other “flaws” he said concerned him about how Dunlap’s and other capital cases have been prosecuted, nor work to repeal the death penalty law altogether, troubled several of his closest aides. They expressed their frustration and disappointment to him as they never before had.

Facing criticism that he had punted on yet another controversy, Hickenlooper promised a “statewide conversation” about a death penalty system that has targeted defendants of color at rates exponentially higher than defendants who are white. He never started that discussion.

“I did not execute Nathan Dunlap and I’d grown up my whole life being an eye-for-an-eye supporter,” he said, defending his handling of the issue. “People say I didn’t make the hard decisions. But that was the hardest decision of all.”

As with TABOR reform and increasing transportation and education funding, he says abolishing the death penalty is an idea that “wasn’t ready” during his time in office. “I didn’t think I should eviscerate our legal system, all those witnesses, all the judges and jurors” in Dunlap’s case, he told me.

In the two months since he left office, Colorado’s new Democrat-controlled legislature is poised to pass a law abolishing capital punishment, and Polis has said he is willing to sign it.

This neither-here-nor-thereness, a consistent inclination to avoid conflict and confrontation in the name of compromise, or reason, or carefulness has, critics and supporters say, both helped and hindered Hickenlooper as a leader. He is the sometimes-moderate claiming to be the sometimes-progressive, the bridge-builder who avoids heights. Some attribute the tendency to his narrow 2014 re-election and to concern for how his stances may someday effect his election or appointment to a higher office. Others, more charitably, cite his intuitive ability to choose which battles to fight and which to walk away from.

“There’s something really unappealing about some politicians who say ‘People on this side believe this and people on that side believe that, and I’m somewhere in the middle’,” former Hickenlooper Cabinet member Baer says. “But I don’t see the governor in that role. I think he’s very in tune with constituencies and has an unusual Spidey sense about making sure that you only have fights that are worth having in order to get things done.” 

Baer notes that the “canny centrism” with which his former boss approached his job was necessary partly because Colorado is so politically divided, but also because, by statute, its governor’s office holds less power than those in other states.

“I think John’s natural instinct with Colorado has been to go slower because if you go fast and actually say what you’re thinking, you might have northern Colorado voting to secede or a bunch of legislators getting recalled, and you might have a hard time governing from then on,” he says. “Had he commuted Nathan Dunlap’s sentence… had he tried to do away with the death penalty, would he have lost a second term? I don’t know. But I do know know it was a hell of a fight holding on to the seat.”

John Hickenlooper launches his presidential campaign at Denver Civic Center on March 7, 2019. (Photo by Evan Semón)

The upside – and downside – of not making enemies

Hickenlooper asked for two ground rules during our interview on the flight back to Denver: That we not speak on the record about his now-16-year-old son, Teddy, and that he’d go off the record when he felt necessary.

“If you answer all reporters’ questions, things get divisive. If you aren’t careful, you’ll piss everyone off,” he told me.

Given his willingness to move back 25 rows, I acquiesced on the condition that, among other things, he discuss his unwillingness to upset people. You’ve served 16 years in political office, half the time leading a purple state, and you’re running for president in what may be the most politically divisive time in modern U.S. history, I said. Isn’t pissing people off inevitable?

“I hear that,” Hick said. “I’ve been hearing that a lot.”

The now-67-year-old hearkened back to the days in his 30s and 40s when he was trying to persuade a city that had grown up on Coors to try the Wynkoop’s array of microbrews. He said it wasn’t just beer he was selling. It was the experience – the free samples, the friendly touch, the personal connection. “I learned early on in the restaurant business that there’s no margin in making enemies,” he told me, just as he has told hundreds of people in neighborhoods throughout Denver, counties throughout Colorado, and now in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

“I’ve never persuaded anyone by telling them why they’re wrong and why I’m right. You need to listen to them. You need to repeat what they say back to them, let them know you hear what they’re saying,” he continued, pointing out that his approach is the opposite of Trump’s.

He cited as an example his record as mayor convincing suburban mayors with a wide array of political views to support FasTracks, the system of light rail and express bus services in metro Denver.

As examples go, that particular one is unlikely to win him the Oval Office. But, Hickenlooper is not running for president on big ideas.

Sixteen years after first schmoozing his way into office, he  has learned that his brand, his winning formula stems from his ability to listen, to make people feel heard enough to believe that compromise is the best way forward, however old-school that strategy may currently seem.

“It’s not just that we need to get rid of Trump. We need to get back a willingness to collaborate, which has atrophied. There’s a sense that if you collaborate with someone, if you compromise, somehow you’re not strong enough, not good enough,” he said.

Hickenlooper knows that his approach may, in the context of the 2020 race, be counter-intuitive, and lack a certain audacity. He acknowledges that in a race to unseat one of the most pugnacious presidents in history, trying too hard to find middle ground risks coming off as naive and unresolved, untethered from a party that feels its indignation more righteously and urgently than perhaps ever before.

And so the moderate Democrat who years ago told me that sometimes “progressive”’ and “progress” were mutually exclusive wants me to jot down in my notebook that somewhere deep inside him is the geology graduate student who in 1978 wrote a letter to the editor saying health care is a right, not a privilege. He wants folks to appreciate that despite his whiteness and maleness – “things I can’t do anything about” – he understands the dynamics of racism and sexism and oppression. What Democrats and, ultimately, America need to be confident of, he said, is that his heart’s in the right place.

People don’t think of me as a progressive because I compromised to get things done and am flexible on how we get there. But I’ve stayed pretty true to my core values over the course of my life. The outcome is a progressive outcome even if it’s a compromise,” he said.

It is here, as our flight from D.C. is somewhere over northern Missouri, that Hick starts bouncing all over the map. The longtime oil and gas booster under whose leadership critics say Colorado regressed on green energy issues is saying there’s no other state “to achieve more on progressive issues than (Colorado). We’ve got the greenest people on earth.” One minute he is spinning his progressive credentials while the next he is pointing out that moderates nationally won 37 out of 40 swing districts that Democrats grabbed in the 2018 midterm election, and that beating Trump will require winning swing states like Michigan and North Carolina, and that he’s the Democrat to do it.

As he speaks, I notice that he keeps pointing out my window toward Iowa, which isn’t far north in the darkness. He figures he has a strong shot in the Democratic caucus there next February because his grandfather’s first cousin, Bourke Hickenlooper, had served as governor of Iowa and one of its U.S. senators.

“If you’re over 60, you know the name Hickenlooper in Iowa,” he tells me.

He rattles off a list of talking points about Iowans’ affinity with Colorado, and how they’re three times more likely to vacation in Colorado than any other state, and how warmly they receive him every time he stops by. Other candidates may be better known, he acknowledges. They may be raising more money or drawing bigger crowds. But in the wilderness of today’s politics, Hickenlooper wants to be the voice of reason. He is the geek who came from nowhere, the geologist who became a brewer who became a mayor who became a governor who believed Colorado could be more than what it was. And Colorado, he notes, “is hip in Iowa.”  

“So, it’s all coming together now,” he says of the symmetry he sees between the political landscape, his record, and his hail-fellow-well-met approach.

“In a funny way, it’s as if it’s my destiny to be here now, at this point in history.”

Decision Dissected: What regents say they knew – and didn’t – about CU presidential pick Some say they chose Mark Kennedy with eyes wide open. Others say they were blindsided by his conservative congressional record.

0
0
Mark Kennedy, president of North Dakota University and finalist for the top job at the University of Colorado, on stage with CU Board of Regents Chair Sue Sharkey at a public forum on April 24, 2019. (Photo by Susan Greene)

It was early April and the University of Colorado’s Board of Regents hunkered down for a second day at Denver International Airport’s Westin Hotel interviewing prospects for the school’s next president.

The nine regents had been given thick packets about each of the six applicants who had made the short list. In them were their resumes, responses to a questionnaire, and background reports summarizing news accounts and controversies about them, if any, signaling potential red flags.

With help from a recruiting firm, the board’s lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke, had prepared the reports so regents would have the information they’d need to question each applicant and choose between them. It was his job, he says, to prevent any surprises.

The five Republicans and four Democrats would unanimously agree that afternoon on a lone finalist: University of North Dakota President Mark Kennedy, 62, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota.

But in the ensuing weeks, revelations about Kennedy’s recent performance at UND and his conservative voting record more than a decade ago in Congress have triggered an uproar from students, faculty, alumni and donors. Regents now disagree on what they knew about his background, what they should have been told, and whether it’s relevant. Some say they have been blindsided by revelations that O’Rourke’s report omitted, and others say they chose Kennedy with their eyes wide open. The partisan divide on the nine-member board has split even further, with a Republican regent castigating his Democratic counterparts for backpedaling and feigning ignorance.

Two academics in Virginia had tried to warn CU regents against their “secret selection” process. Now that their advice has gone unheeded, those professors – who study public university hiring practices – say regents “have lost the trust of the (CU) community and perhaps the community at large.” In the meantime, former Sen. Mark Udall is calling on regents to reopen the selection process, as are hundreds of alumni who are blasting them for their “mind-boggling” lack of transparency and threatening to withhold future donations.

As the board prepares to cast final votes on Kennedy Thursday, it appears, to the frustration of many, that Colorado’s flagship university, one that worked for decades boosting its reputation for research and scholarship, fell short on both while searching for a new president.

Narrowing the field

The elected board that governs the University of Colorado is made up of members from each of the seven congressional districts, plus two “at large” members representing the whole state. The GOP has controlled it since the 1970s.

Bruce Benson, the former oil man who will retire from CU’s presidency in July, was a Republican gubernatorial nominee and chairman of Colorado’s Republican Party. He succeeded former Republican U.S. Sen. Hank Brown when Brown retired in 2008.

The university hired a national recruiting firm, Wheless Partners, to help fill a position that’s expected to pay between $750,000 and $1 million a year. The company received 160 applications, including one from former Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who founded and directs the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University. It narrowed that list to 28 for CU’s presidential search advisory committee to review. That 17-person group whittled the names to 10 before sending regents its recommended short list of six in March.

One of them was a Colorado-based business person. Three were academics from out of state. And two, also from out of state, were former Republican politicians with recent experience running institutions of higher learning.

The board was intent on naming one finalist rather than two because, as CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue tells it, it’s tradition, at least with the last three presidents, for regents to unite around their pick. The university promised each applicant that their identity would be concealed unless he or she was chosen. That means that the regents, who so far have carried out search in closed-door executive sessions, are prohibited from discussing them, leaving the process shrouded in secrecy.

Each of the six applicants on the short list met with the regents for two hours in a conference room at the Westin. Four were interviewed on Wednesday, April 3, and two the morning of Thursday the 4th. Once the last interview, which was with Kennedy, ended, regents ate lunch together then took turns around the conference table saying what they liked and didn’t about all six.

Three people close to the process say the Republican majority clearly favored the two Republican politicos: Kennedy and a woman who held a high-ranking state office before moving on to higher education.

They say that applicant – whom The Independent won’t name without her permission – faced pointed questions about her political record, including her endorsement of a ban on same-sex marriage in her state. CU cites confidentiality in refusing to disclose the reports O’Rourke compiled on her and the other applicants, so it’s unclear whether his summary of her background mentioned her more moderate stances supporting abortion rights and funding for stem cell research, which CU conducts.

Kennedy, in comparison, has a far more conservative record from his three terms in Congress between 2001 and 2007. Twice, in 2004 and 2006, he sponsored bills seeking a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He also voted to:

  • Deny funding for stem cell research
  • Restrict abortion rights, funding for women’s reproductive health care, and family planning aid overseas
  • Require K-12 students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school and allow school prayer during the War on Terror
  • Allow electronic surveillance without a warrant
  • End net neutrality
  • Remove environmental protections for endangered species

O’Rourke says attorney-client privilege prevents him from disclosing which details about Kennedy’s background he shared with regents.

Regents say that Kennedy, in his interview, told them his views on same-sex marriage have “evolved” as times and public sentiment have changed, and as he came to know a gay couple personally.

But, by several accounts, his sponsorship of a constitutional gay marriage ban and other specifics about his voting record were not explicitly mentioned in his background report or during his interview. Nor was the fact that his controversial votes were a factor in the University of Central Florida’s decision last year not to hire him as its president.

For CU’s regents, Kennedy possesses the three qualities they’ve said they want in the person they hire to run the university and manage its $4.5 billion annual budget. He has political experience they hope will help secure favorable policies and funding from federal and state governments. He has led an institution of higher learning, albeit one a fraction of CU’s size without nearly the breadth of research programs or diversity. And he has experience in the business sector as an accountant who became director of finance for the former Pillsbury Company and a top executive at the corporation that now owns Macy’s.

Regents were also impressed by his polish, eloquence and eye contact.

“This guy could teach a Dale Carnegie course. He knows how to… work a room,” one of them says.

After two days cooped up in the Westin, the regents did not discuss the possibility of reconvening on a later date to give themselves time to consider the applicants they had just interviewed. Instead, they informally agreed to pick Kennedy as their sole finalist, then packed up to leave.

On their way to their cars, one of the Republican regents commented to one of the Democrats that the selection process had gone “faster than I expected.”

The backlash

News of Kennedy’s finalist status broke early the next week in North Dakota’s Grand Forks Herald, which pointed out that UND had said two months earlier, in February, that he had no interest in seeking another job.

Herald columnist Mike Jacobs had written after Kennedy’s failed bid for the University of Central Florida’s presidency last year that he earned a reputation as a “looker instead of a leader and a loyalist.” In that same column, Jacobs mocked Kennedy for suggesting when becoming UND president in 2016 that he should be referred to as “the honorable” because of his stint in Congress.

Word of Kennedy’s selection spread quickly in Colorado before CU’s legal and human resources staff had finished checking his references. The communications team scurried to push its announcement up by two days, to April 10. Once word was officially out, university rules required regents to allow at least 14 days of public comment before formally voting on his hiring.

The backlash was fast and furious.

CU scholars, researchers, adjunct professors, other faculty members and staffers, students and alumni immediately started voicing concerns about Kennedy on social media, on campus, in class, and on a portal the university created for public input. As of Monday morning, there were 2,812 submissions, summarized here.

“It’s difficult for me to believe that after months of searching Mark Kennedy was the best CU could come up with. He has shown himself to be hostile to shared governance and mediocre in almost every other respect. CU deserves much much better,” one commenter wrote.

“I am disappointed. How can an institute of higher education that demands excellence from students faculty and staff bring forward such a thoroughly and absolutely mediocre candidate?” wrote another.

Another post: “As one who has been trained in executive searches and questionnaire design I must say this instrument showed serious bias. Notice the fifth dot that discusses “expectations in most areas.” What if you have respondents who have been led to believe that the candidate fails in ALL areas? As an alum, a former dean, a long term donor and a long term faculty member serving three colleges on campus, this gentleman is fatally flawed in all categories you have listed. I urge the Regents to reopen the national search…”

“Absolutely the worst candidate for CU president. And I don’t blame him I just am shocked and utterly disappointed from the board of regents for whose salary I pay through my taxes. DO NOT APPOINT MARK KENNEDY as next CU president!!!!!!!!!!! Shame on you!” reads another comment.

Regents, for the record, are unpaid.

Some commenters supported Kennedy: “CU Regents don’t bend to the mob. Take this man as he has presented himself and don’t allow the CU system to paint a good man out to be a monster.”

But supporters appeared to be vastly outnumbered by critics. Overall, 129 commenters gave Kennedy an “Outstanding” ranking, while 1,035 said he would have “Difficulty in most areas.”

Regent Chance Hill, a Republican from the 5th Congressional District, has dismissed Kennedy’s detractors, whom he refers to as Far Leftists, and decried what he calls a “gauntlet of unreasonable attacks, inaccurate news headlines, and slanderous smears along with a fixation over a few votes (Kennedy) cast — out of more than 4,000 — during his six years in Congress.”

“With all of their purported progressive enlightenment and so-called open-mindedness, they cannot tolerate the notion of a Republican occasionally challenging their liberal college fiefdoms where people suffer real negative consequences if they dare challenge the Leftist orthodoxy that dominates campus culture,” Hill wrote on Monday.

With the help of the university’s public relations team, Kennedy penned an open letter to the CU community, saying he would be “happy to address” his past votes in Congress “as to how they would impact my actions and decisions as president. On some, the societal consensus has changed over the past decade-plus, as has my own thinking.”

He touted his work at UND “issuing an anti-discrimination and harassment policy covering sexual orientation and gender identity as strong as similar policies at CU,” and expanding recruitment of LGBTQ faculty and programs for LGBTQ students.

“Students, faculty, staff and members of our community will have my full support and respect no matter who they love or how they identify. I am committed to be a leader for all,” he wrote.

Some critics are skeptical.

“The idea that a mature person is going to shift his values that dramatically is very unlikely,” says Richard Jessor, who has taught behavioral psychology at CU for 68 years.

Gov. Jared Polis – who is gay and from Boulder – also chimed in, tweeting on April 18 that he would like to see a new candidate brought forward for the presidency who “unites the board.”

Kennedy, with his wife Debbie at his side, spent last week visiting with administrators, donors and faculty members, and holding public forums on each of the CU’s four campuses. At almost every stop, he spoke about his mother urging him each year on the first day of school to include the shy or new or funny looking kids on the playground and help make them feel comfortable. He talked about being the first boy in his family to go to college and about working his way up the corporate ladder. And, underscoring his appreciation for diversity and inclusion, he said repeatedly that “Life is a game of addition, not subtraction.”

In a meeting with CU’s Faculty Council on Monday, Council Chairwoman Joanne Addison questioned whether, as UND’s president, he signed the so-called “Pomona letter,” a 2016 manifesto that has united more than 700 college and university presidents in declaring it a “national necessity” and “moral imperative” to continue and expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Kennedy said he wasn’t familiar with the letter. “We at the University of North Dakota don’t have many, if any, DACA students,” he added, noting that “cultural sensibilities” in North Dakota are different than those in Colorado. Then he promised to strongly support DACA students if hired.

On Wednesday, audience members on CU’s Anschutz medical campus in Aurora asked about how stem cell research and teaching of abortion techniques in medical school might be affected under his presidency. One asked if their health care plan would no longer include the same reproductive choices. Kennedy, roaming the auditorium stage, assured them that nothing would change because he would “check my politics at the door.”

His tour culminated Friday with a forum at the Boulder campus’s Macky Auditorium, where he faced his angriest audience. Students and faculty booed and taunted him. Some yelled “Yeah, right” and “Bullshit” as he answered questions. Some held signs reading “Love trumps hate,” and “Go away.”

The Committee on Rights and Compensation, an independent graduate labor union at CU-Boulder, has opposed his selection. The Boulder Campus Staff Council wrote a scathing letter urging regents not to hire him. And a coalition of the CU’s distinguished professors – an elite group of its top scholars – signed a resolution expressing “grave concern about the quality and the qualifications of the Finalist for the position of President of the University of Colorado.”

Among CU’s nearly 50 distinguished professors is Jessor, the behavioral psychologist who joined the faculty in 1951 and since has worked to help boost its academic reputation.

“When I came here, CU was a sleepy university, and now it’s ranked very highly. To bring in a candidate who is just mediocre, who seems to have no depth, who hasn’t shared concerns for scholarship, for social justice, and hasn’t shown empathy for those who are marginalized and discriminated against, that undermines all that we’ve been striving to do all these decades,” he told The Independent. “It’s just not fair to have that kind of person in the leadership of the university.”

Another distinguished professor, historian Elizabeth Fenn, examined Kennedy’s curriculum vitae and compared his claims about progress he has made regarding Native American issues at UND to his record. She found that he:

  • Reduced tenure track positions at the American Indian Studies Department from three to one, at the same time making it a “subsidiary” of the History Department
  • Turned a building devoted to American Indian culture and services into a center for all minorities
  • Overstated his work building collaborations with tribal colleges

“Even more egregious – if I read his CV correctly — Kennedy appears to claim the accomplishments of others as his own,” Fenn wrote the regents last week.

On Sunday, CU’s Faculty Council released a report that cited Fenn’s findings as evidence that Kennedy “presented inaccurate information about his accomplishments on his CV.”  

That report alleges other misconduct, including the fact that Kennedy’s claims about increasing graduation rates among UND’s minority students exceed UND’s own statistics.

The report also challenges Kennedy’s assertion that, since devoting his career to academia, he has distanced himself from politics. It notes that he was treasurer of conservative Minnesota Republican Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential campaign while teaching at The Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University.

Kennedy responded Monday morning by arguing that his involvement with Pawlenty’s campaign started before he advanced from a teaching job to an administrative position. He wrote that the Faculty Council has identified no ethical misconduct, but rather misconstrued his record and his responses to questions at last week’s forums.

Distinguished Professor Lorrie Shepard, an expert in research and evaluation methodology and former dean of CU’s School of Education, has written regents that Kennedy’s insistence that he’ll “check (his) values at the door” is ethically troubling.

“Moreover, from the perspective of cognitive science research, this is literally impossible,” she wrote. “Personal values and biases remain at work even when we think we are being ‘objective’. That’s why ‘implicit bias’ and ‘stereotype threat’ have been shown to be real things.”

As an example of when Kennedy’s personal values likely affected his work, Shepard pointed to his decision not to mete out punishments after two 2016 incidents in which white students were photographed wearing blackface at UND. Students in one of those cases boasted that they “Locked the black b—- out” – referring to an African American student – of her dorm room, then shot the picture of themselves in blackface and posted it on her Snapchat account.

Kennedy had said the incidents “appalled” him. But, unlike presidents of other universities who have cracked down on students involved in similar incidents, he said he couldn’t punish UND students for exercising their free speech rights.

Who knew what, and when?

The unity McConnellogue said the board strove for in hiring a new president is cracking.

At-large Regent Lesley Smith, a Democrat, tweeted on the day of the announcement that “Some information about Mark has come to light that is concerning; my colleagues and I will be exploring this further.”

On Friday, Regent Irene Griego, a Democrat from the 7th Congressional District, announced that she’ll be voting against Kennedy in response to input from the public. The vast majority, she wrote in a statement, “have expressed sincere, heartfelt concerns that Mr. Kennedy’s selection will neither enhance our university’s progress nor foster our diversity efforts to protect the wellbeing of students of color, the LGBTQ community, or students with different ideas and backgrounds.”

Regent Linda Shoemaker, a Democrat from Boulder’s 2nd Congressional District – whose family foundation is among The Independent’s donors – also will vote no. She says she has been “shocked by the aspects of Mark Kennedy’s record that have surfaced” since she and fellow regents named him as the sole finalist, and struck by “how strongly people have spoken out in opposition.”

“Students feel intimidated and threatened and insulted by the regents’ choice of Mark Kennedy as the sole finalist,” she said after his forum Friday in Boulder. “I could hear the fear in their voices. The faculty questions were much more controlled, but they were equally distressed.”

As Shoemaker tells it, she did not research the applicants on her own before meeting them, and there was no time to review Kennedy’s congressional record between his late-morning interview on April 4 and the board’s selection that afternoon. She relied on the background report that O’Rourke prepared.

“We didn’t know about his amendment to ban gay marriage, or his votes or any of that. For two hours he sounded like a moderate Republican. Nobody told us he’s a far-right conservative,” she says. “I really trusted that we were getting the full picture from the search firm and internal legal. I assumed I was given all the relevant information I needed as a decision maker to make a decision.

“The only conclusion I can draw is the search firm thought they were working for the Republicans on the board.”

Wheless Partners – whose $99,000 contract for the presidential search includes vetting the applicants’ backgrounds – has not responded to inquiries for this story.

About Kennedy’s congressional voting record, CU’s McConnellogue was quoted by The Grand Forks Herald as saying, “Some of the issues just aren’t relevant to the job,”

O’Rourke, for his part, started a phone interview with The Independent last week by noting that he works for all nine of the elected regents, who often have disparate political views and agendas. He also noted that he and his staff are “only human.” Still, he accepts some of the blame for some regents feeling blindsided.

“I was responsible for providing the regents with background information on the candidates. If any of them believe that they did not receive adequate information about Mark Kennedy’s political history and voting record, I take responsibility for not having met that expectation,” he said.

Asked about possible disparities between the depth in which he summarized Kennedy’s background and that of the other Republican politico who was a frontrunner, O’Rourke said, “That may be somebody’s opinion. I disagree with it.”

“We did not approach this from the standpoint of trying to be more thorough with one candidate than another.”

Regent Jack Kroll is a Democrat from Denver’s 1st Congressional District and vice chair of the board. He works full-time as an assistant director of admissions at CU Boulder. He says he can’t remember what aspects of Kennedy’s congressional voting record were mentioned in his background packet or during his interview.

“You know, there’s a lot of information that has come forward and we, we discussed, you know as a group, some of these issues and stances. … But as it relates to a specific vote, I don’t remember if those specific votes was something that we discussed.”

Kroll says he researched the six applicants who’d made the short list prior to their April 3-4 interviews, including Kennedy. “I think I started on his Wiki page and you go from there.”

“This Google thing, we all have access to it,” added one of two other regents who say they also researched applicants on their own.

All three regents who acknowledged doing so say his voting record didn’t surprise them.

“To the extent that we knew that Mark Kennedy was a former Republican congressperson who served in the early 2000’s, that’s where his party was,” said Kroll. “I don’t think it would be surprising to have some of the information come forward that has come forward.”

“What is more important in this process,” he added, is what Kennedy has accomplished at UND and whether he has taken “any actions since leaving Congress” to push his political views in his roles at universities.

Board Chairwoman Sue Sharkey, a Republican from the 4th Congressional District, has echoed those remarks, saying in interviews that she cares about Kennedy’s current views on topics such as same-sex marriage, not about the views he held 15 years ago.

She and Kroll issued a joint statement saying, “Mark Kennedy spoke with us at length about his current support for same-gender marriages, how he worked productively with the LGBTQ community at UND and hired its first LGBTQ coordinator, and that he supports diversity, both on the campus and in whom he hires. He also spoke with us about his leadership style, strategic planning and collaborative relationships through the shared governance process.

“We did not rush and did not compromise in our efforts to find the strongest candidate…”

On Monday morning, Regent Hill posted a lengthy Facebook commentary slamming “some Democrat Regents (who) have been frantically looking for any possible way to backpedal at the first sign of opposition from their liberal base, finding ways to seek cover so that they can justify changing their initial Yes votes to No votes.” About those claiming to be surprised by Kennedy’s voting record, he wrote that they are “hoping that their liberal base is uninformed enough to believe that Regents never conducted their own independent research on each finalist.”

The “small, well-orchestrated Far Leftist mob” Hill says is behind opposition to Kennedy “in my opinion represents a mentality as dangerous to this nation’s future as any foreign threat we face.”

“I will not budge,” he wrote. “Come Hell or high water, I will proudly and unapologetically vote Yes this Thursday to appoint Mark Kennedy as our next CU President.”

Pulling out?

Thursday’s meeting has been set for 1:00 p.m. at Krugman Hall on the CU’s Anschutz Campus (12700 East 19th Avenue, Aurora, CO 80045).

Some faculty members and students are starting to discuss efforts to recall regents who vote yes. And CU’s public relations team – which reports to Benson – continues working to help Kennedy respond to criticism.

Some close to the process wonder whether those efforts coaching him are appropriate, given that this interim between the regents’ announcement April 10 and their final vote is supposed to be a vetting period.

“I attended a number of the meetings, both public and private, with Mark Kennedy as he toured the CU campuses last week. It is unclear to me, even now, if the week was designed to allow Mr. Kennedy time to prove himself to the public, or rather, to showcase him as the heir apparent,” Shoemaker says.

Benson has not returned inquiries for this story.

Former Sen. Udall called on CU Monday to reopen its presidential search, stating that “Too many questions remain unanswered, and a new president who doesn’t have a broad cross section of support from all of Colorado’s stakeholders will be hamstrung from the very beginning of his or her tenure.”

In a letter to regents Monday morning, 366 CU alumni – many of whom are donors – expressed “displeasure with both the process and the substantive choices” that led regents to choose Kennedy as their sole finalist. They called it “mindboggling how many of these issues were not publicly discussed prior to his nomination.”

“It is never too late to admit you made a mistake. Start the process over. Include more students, alumni, faculty, and the public in your selection process. Increase transparency and solicit more feedback,” they wrote. “Also, strongly consider not selecting a former politician with a lengthy voting record from either party. Find a consensus candidate that we can all be proud of.”

The group added that “it will be extremely difficult for us to continue our donations or our active engagement” with CU if Kennedy’s nomination is not withdrawn.

Some regents say they’ve heard from other donors – including major ones – also threatening to pull their support. Two donors who in the past year have contributed $80,000 and $150,000 told The Independent that their contributions will dry up with a yes vote.

From Virginia, two George Mason University scholars chimed in Monday with an especially sobering I-told-you-so.

Judith Wilde, a professor in George Mason’s policy and government program, and her colleague, Professor Emeritus James Finkelstein, authored the first-ever study of contracts between public universities and executive search firms for the hiring of presidents. They had read about CU’s search last fall and emailed regents Sharkey and Kroll offering advice. They warned against what they called “secret searches” – ones in which there’s a sole finalist and no public information about the other frontrunners. They also warned against relying on executive search firms to thoroughly investigate applicants’ backgrounds.

Wilde and Finkelstein emailed the two regents against this week to deride them for not heeding their warnings and to say it appears CU’s search “has become one of the most controversial in the nation both in terms of process and outcome.”

“While there is no way to predict the future should the Regents go forward and make this appointment as planned, we can say with reasonable certainty the next several years at the University of Colorado will not go smoothly,” they wrote.

Last week, after his forum at the Anschutz campus, The Independent asked Kennedy if the controversy around his hiring has led him to consider pulling his name from contention. He paused, and walked closer to McConnellogue before answering.

“The University of Colorado is one of the finest research institutions with some of the (best) minds in this country,” he said.

But that wasn’t an answer.

“Have you considered pulling out?”

Kennedy made the deep eye contact that had impressed regents at his interview.

“No,” he said, and swallowed hard. “No, not at all.”

“Beyond Reform”: What Michael Hancock has – and hasn’t – fixed in Denver’s troubled jails "...This was the first time we had a mayor not even bothering to say, ‘We’re sorry that your loved one is gone, is dead.’ "

0
0

Late last August, Mayor Michael Hancock and his top safety officials held a news conference to celebrate what they called “a major milestone” in Denver’s long troubled Sheriff Department.

They were releasing a report that listed nearly 400 organizational changes the agency had made after several years of violence, understaffing and mismanagement in two Denver jails it runs. Someone presumably aimed to convey progress by titling the report “Beyond Reform,” but failed to realize the term also can mean “hopeless” and “unfixable.”

The administration’s nearly $31 million in reform efforts since 2015 range from significant shifts such as a new use-of-force policy centered on de-escalation techniques to tweaks such as changing the style of male inmates’ underwear to reduce the smuggling of contraband.

“As a community, the Sheriff Department and the residents of this city embarked on significant reformation that has set this department on a transformational path, and I am proud of the progress we have made together,” Hancock said at the time.

But the mayor’s handling of the department has become a campaign issue as he seeks a third term in next week’s election, and his critics – especially the union that represents most of the city’s 700 sheriff’s deputies – see the progress as minimal in a department they say still faces much of the same dysfunction.

“This mayor has shown no real leadership,” says Deputy Mike Britton, vice president of the Denver Sheriff Fraternal Order of Police union local who has been a fierce and longstanding Hancock critic. “He can give all the lip service he wants about these so-called ‘reforms,’ but without a willingness to really make meaningful changes, we’re no better off than when we started.”

 

The Marvin Booker case

Understanding Hancock’s oversight of the Sheriff Department requires familiarity with a case he inherited when he took office in July 2011, a year after the city opened its $158 million Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center downtown.

Hailed as a national model for an improved justice system, the 1,500-bed jail was supposed to solve a litany of problems, including overcrowding and an inability to provide special housing to inmates with mental health issues. It was designed to serve the city’s needs at least until 2035.

Bill Lovingier, Denver’s corrections chief under former Mayor John Hickenlooper, had pushed the city to build the new jail. Upon its opening in April 2010, he told The Denver Post that “The creation of this facility was critical to the Denver Sheriff Department, as it will enable us to efficiently serve the people of Denver and operate the jails in a safe, humane and secure environment.”

Three months after the jail opened, a man named Marvin Booker was hauled in on an outstanding warrant for drug possession. The homeless street preacher took off his shoes in the crowded booking area while waiting for his name to be called. When it was, he walked sock-footed to the booking desk, then turned back to retrieve the shoes he’d left behind. A sheriff’s deputy ordered him to return to the booking desk, and when he failed to obey, she grabbed him. Booker – who was 56 and weighed 135 pounds – resisted, swinging his elbow toward her twice after she restrained his arm. Three other officers wrestled him to the ground, piled on, cuffed his hands behind his back, and put what’s called a sleeper hold on his neck. Booker died after Sgt. Carrie Rodriguez, the on-duty supervisor that morning, shocked him with a Taser.

The attack, which the coroner ruled a homicide, was captured on surveillance cameras.

Hickenlooper, the mayor at the time, phoned Booker‘s family expressing his condolences and promising a swift investigation and justice once the investigation was complete. Hancock, who was running to replace Hickenlooper, echoed those promises on the campaign trail.

But under Hancock’s watch, the officers involved in Booker’s killing, as well as the police detectives and internal affairs officials who investigated it, lied about the case, including while testifying in the federal civil rights lawsuit Booker’s family filed.

It came to light at trial, for example, that in the evidence room, a detective had swapped out the Taser used to kill Booker with a different Taser. Officials used that substitute Taser in their autopsy report, the internal investigation of Rodriguez and the four deputies involved in Booker’s death, the Denver District Attorney’s decision not to press charges against them, and the Hancock administration’s decision not to discipline or fire them. Hancock’s Safety Department made no effort to explain why the timestamp on the substitute Taser handed in as evidence showed it was deployed more than a half-hour after Booker was killed and for a far shorter time than witnesses say Rodriguez shocked him.

The federal jury found Rodriguez, the four deputies and city government culpable for Booker’s homicide, liable for excessive force, and to blame for, among other things, having overexaggerated the threat Booker posed. The jury also found they destroyed evidence, including officers’ text messages to each other right after he died. It ordered the administration to pay his family and their lawyers $6 million.

Hancock never reached out to the family to express regret about Booker’s killing. Nor, after such a big loss in federal court, did he ask his Safety Department to account for the disappearance of the homicide weapon and his officers’ role in it. His administration meted out no punishment to the officers. And Hancock repeatedly has declined to comment about the case.

“This case is an open wound nine years later because this mayor, who claims to be a champion of civil rights, showed no compassion for the victim,” says Booker’s brother, the Rev. Spencer Booker. “Denver deserves better than Michael Hancock.”

 

The Michael Marshall case

The $6 million jury award for Booker’s death was, at the time, the most the city had ever paid in an excessive force case. The community looked to the administration for reform.

Hancock’s safety manager then was Stephanie O’Malley, the daughter of former Mayor Wellington Webb, who had no experience in criminal justice when he appointed her. The duo hired a new sheriff, Patrick Firman, from a Chicago suburb, as what Hancock called a “change agent.”

But change didn’t come nearly fast enough.

A month after Firman’s hiring, sheriff’s deputies killed another homeless African American man, Michael Marshall, in the jail in much the same way as their colleagues had killed Booker.

Marshall was a 50-year-old, 112-pound paranoid schizophrenic who had been arrested on a trespassing charge at a Colfax Avenue motel where he sometimes stayed. He was being held on a $100 bond.

Videos of his killing – which The Colorado Independent sued to make public – show Marshall in the jail’s 4th floor sally port, shirtless and pacing nervously back and forth in what experts agreed was an acute psychotic episode. Two deputies stood for a while watching him, and when Marshall tried to walk between one of them and a wall, the deputies surrounded him. The deputy nearest him reached out, pinned Marshall to the cement block, then swung him back toward a bench. Two more deputies approached and yanked Marshall to the floor, where the three officers seemed to easily restrain him for about four minutes.

Another deputy brought a “spit hood” that was placed over Marshall’s mouth to prevent him from spitting or biting. He choked on his vomit, and his body went limp. A crew of deputies did nothing for about 20 minutes, then called a medic, who found no pulse, and Marshall was taken, lifeless, to Denver Health Medical Center.

The administration didn’t notify his family until a few days later that he was in a coma. They were given no details about the incident and had to post his bond before they were allowed to visit him. They ended life support several days later when doctors told them Marshall was brain dead.

As in the Booker case, nobody in the Sheriff Department was criminally charged or fired for Marshall’s killing.

Nick Mitchell, the city’s independent safety monitor tasked with holding Hancock’s Safety Department accountable, noted in a 2018 report that the department had let one of the deputies involved, Thanarat Phuvapaisalkij, transfer to the Denver Police Department while he was still under investigation for Marshall’s homocide. Mitchell questioned whether the administration had learned anything from the tragedy. He also questioned the sensitivity of a sheriff’s sergeant who nominated Deputy Bret Garegnani for a department lifesaving award for having initiated CPR on Marshall, despite the fact that Garegnani was the first deputy to pin Marshall to the floor, resulting in injuries that led to Marshall’s death nine days later. That sergeant’s nomination letter read, in part: “Deputy Garegnani is ultimately responsible for prolonging the life of Michael Marshall which allowed for those valuable moments that the Marshall family ultimately had with Michael and will be forever grateful.”

Hancock’s administration paid Marshall’s family and lawyers $6 million – the same as it paid in Booker’s case – to keep their civil rights suit from going to trial.

The family says the mayor didn’t reach out to them personally until their lawsuit was settled two years after Marshall’s killing. Even then, niece Natalia Marshall says, the main thing the mayor told them was that his sister had been killed, “so he knows what it feels like to lose” a loved one.

“But he never expressed his condolences,” she added.

Hancock’s handling of the Booker and Marshall cases has, at least in part, caused several high-profile leaders in Denver’s African American clergy and civil rights communities to endorse his opponent, political newcomer Jamie Giellis, in next week’s mayoral election.

“These were not the first times we’ve had people harmed in these jails. But this was the first time we had a mayor not even bothering to say, ‘We’re sorry that your loved one is gone, is dead.’ The mayor has been loathe to do that. I don’t know what his reason is, but he will not own the fact that his Sheriff Department was wrong,” says the Rev. Terrence Hughes, a pastor at Denver’s New Covenant Christian Church Alpha Omega Ministries and former president of the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance.

Like Hughes, Superintendent Patrick L. Demmer, pastor of the Graham Memorial Community Church of God in Christ, stood by the Booker and Marshall families through years of what he calls “fighting the city for justice.” He said he is “no cheerleader for the mayor,” but is supporting Hancock because he feels he’s more qualified than Giellis.

I suppose that I give him a mulligan on the Booker and Marshall situations in the same way that evangelicals gave Donald Trump a mulligan on disrespect for family and women,” Demmer said. “But every time he uses the terminology ‘protecting civil rights’ as part of his campaign, I have to scratch my head. It is no secret that he stood in the way of civil rights when it came to those men’s killings.”

The mayor repeatedly has declined to answer questions about those cases and declined to comment on perceptions that, in his administration’s handling of them, he betrayed the civil rights community from which he often says he sprung.

 

“Falling through the cracks”

In addition to the $6 million payout to the Marshalls, Hancock’s administration agreed to the family’s demands for new policies to protect inmates with mental illness. Among those were requirements that two mental health providers be available round-the-clock in both of Denver’s jails and that protocols be put in place to ensure better communication among jail personnel regarding inmates with mental illness.

As several deputies tell it, Hancock’s administration has been skirting those commitments.

The police union’s Britton calls the quality of the “quote-unquote psych nurses” hired by the city “questionable.” “Nobody seems to have checked their credentials or capability to actually deal with mental health issues,” he said. Rather than relying on those nurses to help inmates in crisis, he said he and other deputies have learned that it’s most effective to “respond to the mentals by bribing them with food.”

“We divert their attention away from what is disrupting them. This is how we make deals on a continual basis.”

As part of its reform efforts, the department has been experimenting with several new ways to classify inmates when they’re booked into its jails. Britton says that due to confusion and miscommunication about those categories it has become difficult for deputies, their supervisors and the mental health professional on duty to discern the needs of mentally ill inmates – especially those in crisis.

He says a jail that was built to accommodate inmates with mental health problems is not serving that purpose. As an example, he cites Pod 2B where he says the department is currently housing 61 female inmates – mixing those with chronic mental health conditions, addictions and suicidal tendencies with the general female inmate population. On certain shifts, he says the pod is monitored by a single deputy, far exceeding the 1:45 ratio the union says should be the maximum.

The result, he says, is that inmates are “stuffed in there like sardines,” causing “regular pandemonium” – assaults between inmates, inmates assaulting staff, and inmates going through withdrawal and experiencing psychological breakdowns and even delusions without the monitoring and support they need.

“It’s a tinderbox,” Britton said. “They’re definitely violating the terms of the Marshall agreement by masking the fact that these inmates have psychological issues so it looks like we’re abiding by the settlement when we’re not. And these women, well, they’re falling through the cracks.”

Britton points out there’s an empty pod that could alleviate crowding, but he says the administration won’t open it for that purpose to avoid having to pay overtime to staff it.

The Sheriff Department’s spokeswoman, Daria Serna, says the department “utilizes overtime where appropriate.

She says Pod 2B is a short-term pod and that inmates can be transferred to other units or to the county jail on Smith Road if necessary.

For its part, Denver Health, which provides the psychiatric nurses on contract to the jails, says all are specially certified to treat mental illness.

“Denver Health’s psychiatric nurses who work in Denver jails are hardworking professionals who provide high quality, compassionate care to Denver’s inmate population,” said the hospital’s spokesman, Simon Crittle.

 

Mission Accomplished?

Things seem to have calmed since the height of chaos in the department in 2014 and 2015 when, almost monthly, a new story would break about one SNAFU or another.

One story exposed a deputy grabbing an inmate and slamming him into a wall for what his bosses deemed to be “no legitimate reason.” They also found that he lied in his account of the incident. Hancock’s administration was criticized for waiting a year to discipline Deputy Brady Lovingier, son of the former corrections chief Bill Lovingier. The department then assigned Brady Lovingier to train his colleagues on how to handle volatile situations and how to write official reports about use-of-force incidents.

Another story exposed a deputy booking a man into Denver’s downtown detention center, walking over to him, belting him in the face and then apparently kicking him, after which the deputy’s colleague wrote an inaccurate report about the incident.

There were revelations in court that a deputy planned and encouraged a violent attack on an inmate in an incident about which the department released an internal affairs report that a federal judge called a “sham.” Then it came to light that the chief of the jail was put on a leave of absence for giving preferential treatment to a sheriff’s captain (who happened to be the ex-wife of then-Sheriff Gary Wilson) after she was booked in the jail on a domestic violence charge. There were also revelations that security was so lax at the jail that two inmates sauntered out without being noticed.

The department has been relatively embarrassment-free for a few years now. And, more importantly, deputies have not killed anyone in their custody.

Hancock acknowledged during his news conference last summer that “the work is not over” in remaking the Sheriff Department, and that his appointees will need to be vigilant overseeing what he called  “continuous improvement efforts.”

The administration said it had put in place what the Sheriff Department claimed was 99% of nearly 400 recommendations by consultants, Mitchell’s office and others. “Beyond Reform,” as the report’s authors intended, signaled that the administration felt it had achieved its goal of turning around the wayward department. Mission Accomplished.

But critics, especially sheriff’s union members, some of whom are working to unseat Hancock next Tuesday, read the title differently – as in “things are so bad… under this administration that they’re beyond reform,” Britton says.

In listing its reform efforts, Hancock’s office points out that the Safety Department has hired 103 new deputies since 2016. Serna, the spokeswoman, says the department “actively recruits to fill vacancies year around.” But those assertions don’t jibe with the fact that the department is currently 98 deputies under full-staffing levels or with the fact that attrition is at its highest in memory. A report released since the mayor’s news conference last summer shows that 29% of new employees left the Sheriff Department in 2018, compared to 10% and 15% in the fire and police departments, respectively.

Data obtained by The Colorado Independent in 2017 sheds light on possible reasons why.

An internal report based on a survey conducted by the University of Colorado-Denver showed staffers overwhelmingly said they felt the Sheriff Department lacked leadership, trained them inadequately, and kept its jails dangerously overcrowded. Half of them said they were either thinking about or actively looking for jobs outside the department.

Another 2017 report showed that assaults among inmates in Denver’s jails had increased 784% since 2011, when Hancock took office, and spiked dramatically two years after Firman was appointed in 2015. The data also showed that inmate-on-staff assaults had jumped 620% since 2011 – again, with significant increases since 2015.

There is no updated data – at least that’s publicly available – about morale in the department. If it were, Britton said, “it would show that things are even worse now and that there’s no trust in the front line, in the majors, in the sheriff.”

He and six deputies interviewed for this story say Firman is so disengaged that he rarely “walks the floor” – meaning the halls of Denver’s jails.

To that allegation, the administration responded in an email Tuesday, “The suggestion that Sheriff Firman does not regularly engage with his employees is patently false and being propagated by those who oppose his reform efforts.”

Union brass admit their members are miffed by some of the reforms, including one requiring Safety Department managers to put more stock in inmates’ grievances about deputies and to investigate them more thoroughly. Britton says that 63% of deputies are the subjects of internal affairs investigations and that, of those, 85% are the subjects of two or more cases. He grumbles that many of his members feel they’re under siege.

Deputies have snickered at the creation of what the administration is calling its Public Integrity Division and its hiring of David Walcher, a charismatic Republican who was voted out of office as the Arapahoe County sheriff in November. Walcher is seen as a likely replacement for Firman should Hancock win a third term and decide that he needs a new “change agent.” He will lead a team that will investigate claims of misconduct and ethics violations in the department.

When it comes to ethics, Walcher got off to a bumpy start in his new position. Within a week of his hiring in April, CBS4 Denver reported that on his way out of office in Arapahoe County, he charged the county more than $3,000 for four customized, engraved rifles – one for himself and three for his commanders – as retirement gifts.

GEO-run Aurora ICE Detention Center is isolating immigrants – some mentally ill – in prolonged solitary confinement ICE data shows that detainees have been locked up alone, 23 hours a day, for as long as nine months

0
0
Idrissa Camara, an aide at a Pueblo home for disabled people, volunteered for solitary confinement at the Aurora detention center. The experience, he says, brought him close to ending his life. Photo by Bryan Kelsen

The former ICE detainee agreed to talk under one condition: That he be called “Elvis.”

The Salvadoran with a pompadour and an “I’d rather be in Memphis” T-shirt was pacing and singing to nobody in particular at the Commerce City park where we arranged to meet. He was still singing when the interview began.

He sang in low, mournful tones about his mother’s death when he was 9, and about the stepfather who abandoned him at 13. He sang about hitching rides to Mexico at 15 and at 16 spending all the money his mother left him so he could hide in an auto parts truck to cross the border into Texas. He sang about singing her favorite songs in his church choir and at his job as a gutter installer, and about moonlighting as an Elvis Presley impersonator when he can get the work.

His song stopped when our interview turned to the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came to question him about an unresolved DUI, and how those questions landed him in the Aurora ICE Processing Center because he is undocumented. It wasn’t, he admits, entirely unexpected. 

But what he didn’t expect, he says, was that while in detention, he would be placed into isolation 23 hours a day for reasons that, years later, still make the baritone weep.

“I sing when I have stress,” he struggled to say through his tears. “And the guards, well, they didn’t want me singing.”

Isolation 

ICE has a long, yet little-known record of holding detainees in solitary confinement – a term the agency forcefully rejects, preferring “segregation” in “Restricted Housing Units” (RMUs) or “Special Management Units” (SMUs), instead. Whatever the nomenclature, ICE is isolating some detainees 22 to 23 hours a day in cells less than half the size of a standard parking space, with little more human contact than the hand that slides a food tray through a door slot and the hand that comes to retrieve it.

Although most state governments don’t entrust private corrections companies to impose solitary confinement, the federal government allows the GEO Group, Inc. – one of the nation’s largest such companies – to do so at its processing center in Aurora. 

Site of the Aurora Detention Center, where the GEO Group Inc. is putting some detainees in longterm solitary confinement. Courtesy of Google Maps
Site of the Aurora ICE Processing Center, where the GEO Group Inc. is putting some detainees in long-term solitary confinement. (Image via Google Maps)

The 33-year-old center, located in an industrial area a few blocks from the northeastern Denver border, holds detainees, including asylum-seekers, who have been rounded up by ICE agents or flown in from the borders. Of its 1,532 beds, 48 are in cells designed for solitary confinement. They are 84 square feet and windowless, each with a toilet, sink and bed.

The agency points to its 475-page standards and operations manual to explain why such cells are needed: “This detention standard protects detainees, staff, contractors, volunteers and the community from harm by segregating certain detainees from the general population.” 

The manual distinguishes between two forms of isolation. 

“Disciplinary Segregation” is punitive, meted out for infractions ranging from showing insubordination toward a corrections officer to killing someone. Placement requires a disciplinary hearing by GEO staffers, which detainees’ lawyers often aren’t allowed to attend, even if their clients have been deemed mentally incompetent. Detainees’ privileges are limited and they are allowed out of their cells for only an hour a day to shower, exercise or sit in a day room and watch TV.

“Administrative Segregation” allows GEO officials to isolate detainees for administrative reasons, which can be vague and subjective. Detainees in “Ad Seg,” as it’s called, are afforded more privileges than those in disciplinary segregation, with two hours out of their cells each day. 

Records obtained from ICE through a Freedom of Information Act request by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and narrowed specifically to Colorado by Arizona Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy – who has been reporting on ICE in that state – give a rare glimpse at how GEO carries out isolation in Aurora. 

The spreadsheet breaks down solitary confinement placements by gender, country of origin, reason for placement, dates of placement and release, and, among other data, whether a detainee has legal representation and mental illness.

From March 2013 through February 2017, the corporation reported 123 placements in its Aurora facility’s segregation cells, all for male detainees. ICE redacted the detainees’ names, so it is unclear from the data how many of those placements represent unique individuals and how many were men repeatedly being segregated. Elvis, for example, says he was sent to “the hole” three times. 

Of those 123 placements: 36% were put into segregated cells for “protective custody,” 26% for “disciplinary reasons,” 21% to isolate detainees who were the subjects of pending investigations, 9% for those on hunger strike, and 8% for unspecified reasons. 

Immigration lawyers who work with clients at Aurora say some gay men and trans women have opted to be placed in solitary cells because they feel unsafe in the facility’s general population. The lawyers also say GEO uses the cells when there is overflow from other parts of the facility and nowhere else to house detainees.

According to ICE’s standards manual, the agency strives to segregate detainees for no more than 30 days, unless a case involves “extraordinary circumstances.” A Colorado Independent analysis of ICE’s data finds that GEO isolated detainees in solitary confinement for an average of 45 days. Of the 123 placements listed, the shortest stint was two days and the longest nine months.

Though the records came from ICE, its Colorado spokeswoman, Alethea Smock, wrote in response to questions from The Independent that the agency “has no information on these cases at this time in our restrictive housing units and we cannot verify statistics gathered from outside our organization.”

Neither ICE nor GEO will say how many detainees are currently in segregation in Aurora, nor how many have been isolated there in the past two years.

“We don’t have this information available at this time,” Smock wrote.

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, D-Aurora, led Colorado’s three other Democratic Congress members on a tour of the Aurora facility in July. One of the members asked if GEO imposes solitary confinement. The members told The Independent that company officials told them no. U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, a former public defender and former litigator on prison issues, says she asked, “Well, if you don’t have solitary confinement, what do you do for discipline to remove an inmate from general population?” She says GEO officials used an administrative term nobody understood, and didn’t have numbers when asked how many detainees were held there. Later on the tour, DeGette recalls, somebody asked again: Does GEO use solitary confinement? 

“They said, ‘Well, if we have inmates who feel anxious in the population, we have a place where they can go and be by themselves’,” DeGette says. 

“I feel like there was an over-adherence to terminology,” she went on to say. “Did they lie to me? No. But if I didn’t use the right words, they weren’t going to help me out.”

Pablo E. Paez is GEO’s executive vice president for corporate relations. He says the Aurora facility adheres to performance-based national standards set by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, including those governing the use of special management units. 

“As a service provider to a federal agency, our company is contractually required to meet DHS policies and standards and plays no role in creating them,” he wrote in an email. “We can’t solve the immigration crisis from our facility. But for more than 30 years, our leadership and employees have been committed to protecting those entering the facility and ensuring they are provided high-quality, culturally responsive services in safe, secure, and humane environments, and are treated with compassion, dignity and respect.”

Heading to the hole

Most migrants who come to the U.S. illegally say desperation forced them to flee their countries. Most faced difficulty and danger crossing one or more borders to get here. Most arrive with no resources, little command of English, and no community, but many manage to overcome those challenges and rebuild their lives. The decision to leave their home countries was a risky and uncomfortable calculation, 11 former detainees tell The Independent, but one they or their parents made because discomfort trumps despair. 

They say the knowledge that ICE might one day catch up to them didn’t ease the shock when that day came.

“You are never prepared for it,” says a 43-year-old Guatemalan brick layer from Thornton who, like Elvis, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It is in this context, under considerable stress, that former detainees say it becomes all too easy to lash out at the guy snoring, complaining or bullying you in the next bunk, or at a corrections officer shouting orders, or at the world, or fate or a god by whom they felt betrayed.

“I should be punished for trying to survive?” – former detainee from Mexico

“You may do a thing, you may say a thing that brings you regret or shame,” says a North African migrant who says he spent two weeks in solitary confinement for fighting with a detainee he says was “using my stuff.” “Maybe everybody in there is having, how do you say, crisis.”

“For me, I was frustrated,” adds a man from Mexico who says he spent about a month in solitary for shoving an officer after more than two weeks of sleeplessness caused by wheezing from asthma he says GEO would not treat. 

“I should be punished for trying to survive?” he says.

His and the North African’s time in isolation did not fall within the four-year period reflected in ICE’s data. One of Elvis’s three placements did, but doesn’t show up in the records, either, because his nationality and the dates of his confinements don’t match up.

He says he was thrown in the hole three times for showing “insolence” toward corrections officers. The now-fluent English speaker doesn’t know what insolence means, but is pretty sure it relates to him defying guards’ orders to stop singing during their shifts. He admits to having occasionally forgotten their warnings, and says songs would “just leak” out of him. 

A close friend from his church, sitting in on part of our interview, looks at me and points to her head. 

“Maniaco depresivo,” she says.

Lack of treatment

ICE’s standards require that “Detainees must be evaluated by a medical professional prior to placement” in segregation. They also say: “Health care personnel shall conduct face-to-face medical assessments at least once daily for detainees in an SMU. Where reason for concern exists, assessments shall be followed up with a complete evaluation by a qualified medical or mental health professional, and indicated treatment.” 

The agency, ICE’s Smock wrote in an email, is “committed to ensuring that those in our custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments and under appropriate conditions of confinement.”

Elvis says the mental health part of his check-ins amounted to “Good morning, Mr. (name omitted), are you hallucinating or suicidal today?” He has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress-, obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorders since bonding out of detention. Elvis’s attorney, also interviewed for this story, succeed in having a stay placed on his deportation. 

“I’d die if they sent me back in there.” – Elvis

If GEO had asked why he sang so often around corrections officers and other detainees, he would have said it was his way of comforting himself in a facility that reminded him of an orphanage where he says he lived briefly in San Salvador and was assaulted by other boys.

If staffers had asked how he was holding up in isolation, he says he would have told them that his tight cell stirred memories of the armoire in which his stepfather forced him to sleep when his mother was dying and other women would spend the night. He would have said the experience was flashing him back to the day he stood in the center of a wood pallet surrounded by boxes of auto parts in an airless semi-truck wondering if he would still be alive once it crossed the border. 

But GEO staffers didn’t ask, he says, nor did they offer psychological treatment during his nine months in Aurora. He hums, rocking back and forth, recalling the constant teeter between living in isolation and living among hundreds of anxious strangers. He cracks his knuckles explaining what it was like not knowing what day or time it was in a fluorescent-lit cell without windows or a light switch. And he clutches his throat describing the terror that can come with having no voice.

“I communicate (by) singing,” he says. And he tried hard to muzzle himself to work his way out of the hole.

“It broke him,” his church friend says of his time in isolation. 

“I would die. I’d die if they sent me back in there,” he adds.

Elvis – whose story The Independent confirmed with his lawyer – fears ICE or GEO staff will retaliate against him for speaking out. That fear is what prompts him and most other former detainees to demand reporters use pseudonyms in news stories, if they agree to interviews at all. It’s what leads them to insist on meeting in parks rather than at their homes or the homes of people who help them.

The ICE detention facility in Aurora is the subject of a scathing government review. Photo by Alex Burness
The GEO-group owned and operated ICE detention facility in Aurora. (Photo by Alex Burness)

The condition of anonymity puts ICE at a disadvantage, unable to respond about specific cases. Smock wrote that her agency cannot research or provide information on allegations of medical mistreatment “without the specific details, including the names and signed privacy-waiver forms of the current or former detainees who have made these allegations.”

“For the people you interviewed,” she added, “if they’re not being detained, we’re not sure what they would be fearful of.”

Checking the “no” box

Details in ICE’s own data echo what former detainees have told The Independent. 

They show that in late 2015 GEO officials in Aurora isolated a man from El Salvador for what staffers described as displaying “abnormal behavior (masturbating/taking off clothes) in his cell that housed three other detainees.” They reviewed his placement in segregation after a month and then after two months, when they wrote, “Subject continues to exhibit bizarre behavior and will remain in Seg at this time.” After three months, they wrote that “GEO Medical is considering sending him to an outside mental health hospital for evaluation.” But he was still in isolation at four months, continuing to “exhibit bizarre behavior that would be disruptive in general population.” And he was still there at five months when GEO referred him “to tele-psychiatry” – a cheaper option than meeting in person with a doctor for a mental health evaluation. His placement in solitary lasted nearly seven months until the corporation released him from custody on bond. 

GEO officials checked “no” in a box asking if he had mental illness.

In 2016, GEO officials in Aurora isolated a man from Ghana because “he appears to be unstable,” the records show. It was “not his first time in Seg.” The corporation kept him isolated after he flooded his cell (typically accomplished by clogging the toilet and repeatedly flushing) several times as a way to force staffers to let him out. It kept him isolated after the warden ordered GEO’s emergency response team to extricate him from his cell and move him to another because he had shredded his mattress and pillow. And it kept him in solitary after he, on more than one occasion, threw feces and urine at staff members through his cell door. The records include no mention of providing mental health treatment or moving the man to a place where he could get psychiatric care. Instead, they show GEO’s staff recommended “continue Seg placement until he stabilizes enough to be placed back in general population.” 

They marked him, too, as a “no” under mental illness.

Several psychological, psychiatric and human rights organizations have deemed solitary confinement to be psychologically harmful to prisoners, and Juan Mendez, the United Nations special Rapporteur on torture, has said any stint in solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days amounts to torture.

“From my experience, I think it’s pretty clear that seclusion is torture to some individuals, some more than others. It can make mental illness worse and can also cause mental illness among people who previously weren’t mentally ill,” says David Drake, a psychiatrist and director of AXIS Health System over a five-county area in Southwest Colorado who has worked extensively with prisoners. Flooding a cell and throwing excrement, he adds, are signs “of someone who has become acutely disturbed” and needs help.

GEO classified all but one of the detainees in the data set as not having mental illness. The lone exception was a Jordanian man who in 2014 had made comments about sexual abuse and threatened staff.

In December 2015, the data shows that GEO placed 11 Bangladeshi detainees in solitary confinement because they were hunger striking. Those men had no lawyers – nor did the men in 97% of the placements listed in ICE’s records. Immigration attorneys say that less than 10% of the facility’s detainees currently have legal representation.

At the time, the Bangladeshis contacted The Colorado Independent through an intermediary to report a lack of medical care and legal counsel in the Aurora facility. The intermediary called around the clock, using words like “Save our ship” and “SOS” to convey their urgency. 

The ICE data shows the Bangladeshis started eating and were released from solitary after about six days.

Under scrutiny

ICE tells The Independent that it “ensures detention facilities comply with ICE detention standards through an aggressive inspections program.” Detention centers that aren’t in compliance with its standards, it noted, are shut down under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Appropriations law. 

“ICE does not tolerate any mistreatment or abuse of people in our custody.” – John Fabbricatore, acting field office director, ICE enforcement and removal operations 

An email from the agency pointed out the creation in 2009 of the Office of Detention Oversight (ODO), an independent body that conducts inspections intended to put extra scrutiny on detention center compliance with standards. 

“ICE does not tolerate any mistreatment or abuse of people in our custody,” John Fabbricatore, acting field office director for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations in Denver, wrote in a statement for this story.

“Our deportation officers work hard within the bounds of the law and ensure the guidelines set forth in the Performance-Based National Detention Standards, 2011, are followed at the detention facility. Unsubstantiated allegations published by the media without thorough investigation diminishes the exceptional work the men and women of ICE do every day to keep our communities safe from criminal aliens.”

"Outdoor recreation" at the Aurora Detention Facility takes place in a cell with partially open ceiling. Courtesy of ICE
“Outdoor recreation” at the Aurora ICE Processing Facility takes place in a cell with partially open ceiling. (Photo courtesy of ICE)

But watchdogs argue that ICE is going too easy on GEO’s operation in Aurora.

In June 2018 and again in June of this year, the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association – which represents attorneys who work on detainees’ behalf – wrote ICE and the Department of Homeland Security about what they called GEO’s “Failure to provide adequate medical and mental health care” at Aurora. Lack of care not only violates detainees’ human rights, they wrote, but also interferes with detainees’ ability to assist their lawyers – when they have them – with their cases.

The groups pointed to ICE’s own Office of Detention Oversight review of the Aurora facility in 2016, which found it compliant with only seven of ICE’s 16 national standards, and found 24 deficiencies in the remaining nine standards.

Their letters cited leaked DHS documents containing an internal memo with the subject line, “Urgent Matter,” saying that nationally there have been deaths of detainees in ICE custody that were preventable. The letters also cited a 2018 memo in which an ICE supervisor wrote the agency’s deputy director to say ICE’s Health Service Corps “is severely dysfunctional and unfortunately preventable harm and death to detainees has occurred.”

In the last decade, two men have died at the Aurora facility – Evalin-Ali Mandza of Gabon in 2012 and Kamyar Samimi of Iran in 2017. In Mandza’s case, the Department of Homeland Security found GEO staff unprepared to deal with heart failure and at fault for waiting an hour after he complained of severe chest pains before calling an ambulance.

As of last week, members of Congress who toured the Aurora center say, the facility’s two top medical positions were vacant, and GEO had one psychiatrist on staff when it is supposed to have two. ICE doesn’t dispute that account.

The watchdog groups cited a report issued this spring by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) documenting “egregious” conditions at ICE facilities, including the Aurora facility, in 2018. They detailed accounts of Aurora detainees being denied essential medical or mental health care even though GEO staff was on notice about their specific needs. 

One is a 39-year-old man with PTSD from South Sudan who grew up in the midst of the civil war and says he was orphaned when North Sudanese soldiers burned down his village. He hallucinates about people who had died or who had threatened him. According to one of the group’s letters, “GEO placed him solitary confinement in early 2018 for more than a month after an altercation with a corrections officer he said was violent towards him after he asked for a form to file a grievance against her.” In a legal declaration, the man reported that solitary confinement exacerbated his hallucinations:

“Being alone makes the voices worse. When I sleep, they come and disturb me. They say the same thing over and over again. They say they are going to kill me and my parents. I get confused about what to do and why they are talking to me. I don’t know how to get rid of them so that I cannot listen to them anymore. I feel very sad when I hear those voices. I am tired all the time and feel depressed… I was placed in segregation on February 9, 2018, and was there for over a month. This was a very hard time for me. I was alone, and the voices were bothering me all day and night. I was very scared.”

The American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association also cited the case of Patrick who – after being diagnosed with and treated for a traumatic brain injury, depression, anxiety and seizure-, bi-polar- and post-traumatic stress disorders – was held at the Aurora facility from August 2018 until June 2019. Patrick, also from Sudan, had attempted suicide at least twice before, both times while being held in solitary confinement in prisons. From the Aurora detention center, he reported regularly receiving the wrong dosages of his medications to control his depression, anxiety and seizures. He also reported having no access to therapy. “As a result, his coping mechanisms to deal with stress deteriorated,” the groups wrote.

They report that GEO put Patrick under suicide watch for about a week when his lawyer says he tried to strangle himself using his clothes, then began ramming his head into a wall. After he was taken out of suicide watch, a mental health provider told him “that he would be sent to punitive segregation immediately following his time on suicide watch.” His immigration lawyer scrambled to find disability lawyers to pressure GEO to keep him out of solitary confinement and put him back in general population where he could be monitored more closely. 

U.S. Rep. Crow has watchdogged the facility closely since taking office in January. Contacted about The Independent’s findings, he said in a statement Friday, “These reports are deeply disturbing and appear to be part of a larger pattern of behavior by ICE that continues today.

“We’ve repeatedly seen the facility fail to properly address the health and medical needs of detainees and just this month learned that there is only one psychologist on hand for over 1,200 individuals. ICE has operated in the shadows for too long and it is clear that more oversight is needed to protect the dignity and decency of all people.”

DeGette says reports about GEO “raise the broader issue of should we be having private companies running any kind of detention facilities at all?” 

Drake, the psychiatrist in Durango, agrees. 

“I have a concern about private jails in general because they have an incentive to fill their beds and maximize their resources to make a buck,” he says. He also has concerns about the use of “solitary confinement in any prison… that is not administered in a discrete, time limited fashion.”

The ship

Some former Aurora detainees say they chose to be placed in isolation to escape the chaos of the facility’s general population or avoid problems that could arise. 

Idrissa Camara is one of them.

Idrissa Camara of Pueblo is one of few former ICE detainees willing to speak out about the trauma of solitary confinement. Photo By Bryan Kelsen
Idrissa Camara of Pueblo is one of few former ICE detainees willing to speak out about the trauma of solitary confinement. (Photo by Bryan Kelsen for The Colorado Independent)

The 30-year-old from Guinea came to the U.S. at age 12 with his father, who was married to a U.S. citizen and became a permanent resident. His father died, and his stepmother hadn’t formally adopted him, so he had overstayed his visa from 2000 when, in 2007, he was charged for a $90 cocaine deal in Aurora. That charge landed him in the GEO facility for a year from 2011 to 2012 for deportation proceedings, but he could not be deported because of administrative issues on Guinea’s part, so he was released with an outstanding deportation order. He was detained again for nine months between July 2018 and May of this year so ICE could carry out the order from 2012.

His lawyer managed to win a hold on his deportation, and Camara – who works as an aide in a home for the disabled in Pueblo – is awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge. 

He says he was diagnosed at age 16 with bipolar disorder. In 2012, during his first detention at the Aurora facility, he opted into solitary confinement because he had to stop taking Latuda, a medication that GEO told him was too expensive. 

“They gave me the option of whether or not I wanted to be in general population or go to ad seg to (avoid) any issues that might come up in case I deteriorated emotionally. I was worried that if I didn’t do that, something could have happened and they would have blamed me,” he says.

As he tells it, his week and a half in isolation seemed like months. He never knew what time it was and couldn’t see himself in the stainless steel plate that GEO hung on the wall as an unbreakable substitute for a mirror. Some days,  he says, he wouldn’t get the hour outside of his cell that ICE standards require. 

“Things would come up that they decided (were) more important. Like a fight in another part of the facility, or paperwork,” he says. 

He tried to sleep as much as possible to avoid marinating in what he calls “a lot of emotional doubt, anger, frustration and rejection because of not being a U.S. citizen.” When he was awake, he says, the sound of the vents reminded him of a boat engine, and he would hallucinate that he was on a ship – “put there because I was from a different part of the galaxy.”

“I felt like I wasn’t my own entity or person, that someone else had control of me and could do with me what they wanted. I was obsessed about the opening and closing of the doors, hoping someone was coming to talk to me about anything, just some human contact. But they just slid the food in the door and shut it back up. And I remember at times I was hysterical, I was shouting that I wasn’t an animal. I wasn’t certain what the distinguishing line between an animal and human being was.”

Camara recalls hearing “bangs on the doors, screaming, hysteria, people talking. 

“I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but I could hear their screaming and the echoes of their screams, the painful cry of their souls. It was dark, really dark,” he says. 

“It was actually bringing up thoughts of, like, ending things. I’m talking about suicide. I’ve faced challenges and struggles in my life before, but nothing like that. Nothing.”

The Colorado Independent’s coverage of immigration issues is underwritten in part by a grant from ACLU Colorado. This article is also supported by a grant from the Solitary Confinement Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Vital Projects Fund.” In accordance with The Independent’s editorial independence policy, underwriters have no control over story selection or content.

 

Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a rural town’s silence (Part I) A Rangely cop knew Daniel Pierce had paranoid schizophrenia, but says he had no choice but to kill him. Town leaders want the story to go away.

0
0
Still shot from the dashboard camera on former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney's patrol car as he chased Daniel Pierce through the desert. The December 10, 2018 pursuit ended when Kinney fatally shot Pierce.

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part collaboration between The Colorado Independent and The Rio Blanco Herald Times. We will post the second part tomorrow, Nov. 8. 

RANGELY – No one seems to know why Daniel Pierce settled in this northwestern Colorado town last year after his wife in Missouri and mother in California kicked him out of their houses. But in the four months he lived here, he came to think of it as heaven.

Not just because he relished the hours he’d spend bumming cigarettes in front of the Kum & Go and watching pickups haul ATVs west toward the Utah desert. But because Pierce, who had paranoid schizophrenia, became convinced he was God and Rangely the place where people long dead or lost from his life would reappear at his whim. 

That’s what he told the police officer who checked in on him twice last December after he scared some kids outside a school and alarmed workers at the local bank.

Lt. Roy Kinney had been keeping his eye on Pierce, just as he did the rest of this 2,300-person community with its boom-and-bust economy, don’t-tread-on-me politics and town motto declaring itself “Way outside of ordinary!” 

“Do you know who I am? I’m the Creator, Roy,” Pierce, 58, told him. “I’m God. I am Jesus fucking Christ.” 

He tried to prove his point by inviting the lieutenant to “shoot me, I’ll come back to life, shoot me.” If his estranged wife did not return to him that evening, he threatened, “Everybody in this town will disappear.”

Daniel Pierce arrived in Rangely in August, 2018 after struggling for years with untreated paranoid schizophrenia. His wife and mother both kicked them out of their houses, fearing their safety as the voices in his head grew louder. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)
Daniel Pierce arrived in Rangely in August 2018 after struggling for years with untreated paranoid schizophrenia. His wife and mother both kicked them out of their houses, fearing their safety as the voices in his head grew louder. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)

Kinney was rattled by those threats, but decided Pierce was not a danger to himself or others.

That conclusion would prove fatal two days later when Pierce drew all three of Rangely’s officers – the town’s whole police force – and a sheriff’s deputy into a lengthy car chase. In the adrenaline blur of its final 20 seconds, Kinney shot Pierce in the head.

Pierce’s Dec. 10, 2018 killing marked Rangely’s first officer-involved homicide in nearly four decades. Everybody in town heard about it. Yet, in the aftermath, there has been silence. 

In that silence, town officials refused to turn over key documents to internal affairs investigators. In that silence, a longstanding rivalry between the police department and the larger sheriff’s office and a soured relationship between two friends raised questions about how the case and the investigation were handled. And in that silence, the police chief and Kinney were forced from their jobs. 

Town officials released no information about the shooting, and later urged The Rio Blanco Herald Times not to report the story. The newspaper partnered with The Colorado Independent to investigate what happened. Our outlets combed through hundreds of pages of public documents, reviewed hours of video and audio recordings, and interviewed more than 50 people, including Pierce’s family members, Kinney and other law enforcement officers, mental health providers, legal experts, and state, county and local government officials. 

The death of Daniel Pierce was, in many people’s minds, further evidence of recklessness in a police force town residents had come to distrust. We found his killing may have been legally justified, but it was not unavoidable. It underscored the extent to which many in law enforcement are ill-equipped to handle mental health crises and the degree to which the kind of intervention Pierce needed is lacking in rural Colorado. 

There was a shooting and there was its aftermath. This is the story of both. 

The stranger

Daniel Pierce did not have an easy childhood. His mother, Rose Nuttbrock, was 16 when she had him. His father, never around, died of a heroin overdose. His younger brother, David, was murdered by a schoolmate when he was 14 and Pierce 18.

Daniel Pierce's mother, Rose Nuttbrock, holds a photo of her two sons – both lost to homicides. Daniel younger brother David was 14 when accidentally shot by a schoolmate, who then intentionally killed him so he wouldn't tell. Daniel, then 18, didn't attend David's funeral because he felt guilty for not taking his little brother off-roading, as David asked, the weekend before his death. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
Daniel Pierce’s mother, Rose Nuttbrock, holds a photo of her two sons – both lost to homicides. Daniel’s younger brother David was 14 when accidentally shot by a schoolmate, who then intentionally killed him so he wouldn’t tell. Daniel, then 18, didn’t attend David’s funeral because he felt guilty for not taking his little brother off-roading, as David asked, the weekend before his death. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

Pierce’s family says he went through Army basic training in the 1980s but did not go on to serve because he married and had kids. Their account of his short-lived military record contradicts what he told people in Rangely, where he flashed the “Combat Engineer” tattoo on his arm and talked about serving in the special forces during Operation Desert Storm. He actually had been working at a farm store in Northern California at that time. 

He and his first wife had two girls, the eldest of whom, Heather, died from sepsis at age five. In 1990, he severely injured his back in a car accident. Pain kept him from working after an unsuccessful surgery. His first marriage ended, as did his contact with his younger, surviving daughter – yet another in his long string of losses.

Pierce started dating a former coworker whom he eventually married. Debra Pierce says he had reconstructive surgery on his lower back in the late 1990s and relied on a port to infuse him with a steady cocktail of drugs to ease his constant pain. He stayed home, living on Social Security disability, and spent his time fixing things around the house and helping raise her daughter, Kayla.

“Red pushed her a little hard, but he was a good dad, a good guy,” Debra says of the husband she nicknamed for his hair color. “There was a time when I loved him.”

***

Daniel Pierce is pictured here with his wife, Debra and her daughter, Kayla, whom he helped raise, between them. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)
Daniel Pierce is pictured here with his wife, Debra and her daughter, Kayla, whom he helped raise, between them. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)

Pierce’s back pain worsened, leading a doctor in 2012 to prescribe a painkiller called Prialt. The drug comes with an FDA warning: “Severe psychiatric symptoms and neurological impairment may occur during treatment.” 

He started hearing voices after about six weeks on the medication. There were people living under their house, he told Debra. He was sure they had installed cameras in their shower. 

“He pretty much destroyed the house drilling holes in the walls trying to find them,” she says.

The doctor did not pull him off the painkiller until a few months later, she recalls, and he warned her then that her husband’s delusions might not go away. “This is who he is now,” she remembers the doctor saying.

The voices grew louder and Pierce’s paranoia more fierce until he agreed later that year to be hospitalized near their home in Missouri. He spent three weeks in the psychiatric ward, where doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. The pills they had given him helped quiet the voices. When he would not take them, doctors injected the medication. But Pierce eventually stopped showing up for the monthly shots until delusions, along with constant threats lurking in all corners, became his new normal in his early 50s. 

“There was a time when I loved him.” – Debra Pierce, widow of Dan Pierce

Debra realized over time he had been lying to her about his military experience. She started wondering what else he was lying about and which of his tales stemmed from mental illness and which from deception. She would move out during his bad spells and Pierce would threaten her as he sensed her slipping away. She came home one day to find that he had shot and killed two of her cats. If it would have been legal to hunt humans, he told her, that would be his sport. 

Pierce would say things like, “You’re still my wife, and if I can’t have you, nobody will,” and Debra came to suspect that if she ever left him, “nobody would find my body.” Police would show up for welfare checks because he had reported she had been taken hostage. Their 21-year relationship came down to two terrifying options: “He would either kill me or he would kill somebody else and then (everybody) would look at me and ask, why didn’t you get him help?”

Debra Pierce discusses her late husband, Daniel Pierce, before heading to work in Sedalia, Mo., on November 4, 2019. (Photo by Julie Denesha)
Debra Pierce discusses her late husband, Daniel Pierce, before heading to work in Sedalia, Mo., on November 4, 2019. (Photo by Julie Denesha)

And so she cut off all contact in 2016 and hid from the man to whom she remained legally married. Without treatment, she says, the voices in his head drowned out her own, and no amount of her patience or love could silence them. 

***

Pierce hid his diagnosis from his mother, who did not learn of it until he moved back to California to live with her in 2017. Nuttbrock was alarmed by how he had changed. 

“He would talk like he was talking to someone, but there was nobody there.”

Once, Pierce called police in California to say he had killed Debra in Missouri and needed them to check on her. A SWAT team surrounded her home 1,600 miles away. When they confirmed she was safe, Nuttbrock asked police to put her son on an involuntary mental health hold. He persuaded doctors to release him after one night.

Wherever there was a crack in his mental health care, he found a way to slip through it.

“The sik meds only make me sick I don’t need them. An they change me for the worst,” he wrote Debra from California in a letter blaming their problems on former neighbors whom he believed had connected military radio equipment to his brain, emitting frequencies he could hear 24/7.

“I’m so upset about all this stuff. I’m ready to kill them all. The pain of worrying about you an missing you is getting more than I can handle! And I don’t care anymore about going to jail for killing them,” his letter reads. “I wise thing could be different but someday sone I’ll bring you there bodys to prove it to you.”

Nuttbrock agreed to let him stay under one condition: “I didn’t want to hear any more about those voices.” But they kept speaking to him and he to them until Pierce scared his teenage nephew. When Nuttbrock gave Pierce one last warning, he, at six feet tall, lunged at her. She told him then he needed to move out.

Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, CA, was alarmed by the changes in her son, Daniel Pierce. Eventually, she grew scared of him and kicked him out of her house out of self-protection. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, Calif., was alarmed by the changes in her son, Daniel Pierce. Eventually, she grew scared of him and kicked him out of her house out of self-protection. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

“He wasn’t my son” by that point, she says, crying into the phone. “He was a stranger. I didn’t even know him. And I was afraid.”

***

Pierce headed east in the blue Chevy van his mother bought him, stopping in New Mexico and then back in Missouri to find Debra. She recalls the Memorial Day weekend in 2018 when he showed up at the home supply store where she works.

“I said ‘There’s nothing left,’ and he said, ‘You’re still my wife,’ (and) I said, ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’

“He had tears in his eyes and drove off,” she says, teary, too. “That was the last time I seen him.”

Untreated paranoid schizophrenia often breeds alienation for those with the condition. Their delusions, their paranoia can subsume their former selves so that people who were close to them tend to push them away out of self-protection. So it was that nobody in Pierce’s family spoke with him during the six months that followed. 

“The sik meds only make me sick I don’t need them.” -Daniel Pierce in a letter to his wife

Nuttbrock was tracking her son’s whereabouts from the bank statements and blood pressure prescription mailed to her home. She could see that he headed from Missouri to Wyoming, then down to Colorado in August 2018. He had no ties in Rangely that she or her daughter-in-law knew of. 

Pierce wrote her in October 2018 that he had been led here by his “extended family” of Native American relatives – a distant branch of her family tree she doubts he could have tracked down. Maybe out of loneliness, she figures, he was searching for some lost tribe.

Tim Webber, who heads the Western Rio Blanco Metropolitan Recreation and Park District in Rangely, first encountered Pierce at the district-run RV park in town where Pierce was living out of his van. When Pierce told him he was a veteran, Webber loaned him a tent and sleeping bag, stopped charging him rent for his RV park space, and hired him to mow the greens at the local golf course. “He was always on time and he did a good job,” he says. “He was a different fellow, but a nice guy.”

As temperatures dropped last fall, Pierce used the money he earned at the golf course and a job working maintenance at the community college to rent a duplex on South Grand Street. His landlord, Chris Wills, describes him as neatly dressed, well spoken and chatty about what he said was his career in the Army’s elite special forces.

Something about Rangely resonated with Pierce.

Pierce wrote two letters to his mother from Rangely. In this, the first, he mentioned reuniting with dead people and others who had been lost from his life. Among those was his daughter Heather who died decades ago at age 5. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
Pierce wrote two letters to his mother from Rangely. In this, the first, he mentioned reuniting with dead people and others who had been lost from his life. Among those was his daughter Heather who died decades ago at age 5. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

“I love this part of the country it’s where I belong,” he wrote Nuttbrock last October. “I even found my Heather here Mom. She is a butieful girl,” he went on about his young daughter who died decades earlier. “I know this a sounds so crazy, but please beliveae me. So much has happen in my life.”

Pierce’s last letter to her, dated Nov. 15, described the park near his townhome, the friends he was making here, and the way Rangely takes such good care of its children.

“It’s a special life here,” the letter reads. “My health is great here. No more pain or headaches. Thank God.”

Rangely America

Petroglyphs and paint pictographs have graced the sandstone canyons south of Rangely for about 13 centuries. But a town that now has one church for every 230 residents is also known for an often-photographed bluff on its eastern outskirts spray painted with the misspelled message “Jesus is Comming.”

This patch of high desert 25 miles east of the Colorado-Utah border has always been a place through which people pass, whether the native guides who led Spanish missionaries through the area in 1776 or oil and gas workers who migrate with shifts in their industry.

Rangely, with a population of about 2,300, had a three-person police force at the time of Daniel Pierce's killing in December 2018. Two of them, including the chief and lieutenant, lost their jobs over the shooting. (Map by Mark Castillo)
Rangely, with a population of about 2,300, had a three-person police force at the time of Daniel Pierce’s killing in December 2018. Two of them, including the chief and lieutenant, lost their jobs over the shooting. (Map by Mark Castillo)

Rangely hit the map in 1931, when the California Company – now Chevron – spudded an oil well. It incorporated as a town 15 years later. The Chamber of Commerce touts that Rangely has “the largest field in the Rocky Mountain region.” In 1956, the field yielded 49% of Colorado’s total oil production. That percentage since has dropped to single digits.

During boom cycles, the industry afforded Rangely the ability to build schools, a hospital and a tricked-out recreation center. When energy prices drop, reduced tax revenue strains agencies like the fire department and police force, even as the population has stayed relatively static.

The town has worked hard to diversify its economy. It founded Colorado Northwestern Community College more than 50 years ago. It sponsors annual motor sports events like rock-crawling and rally races. And it promotes its Tank Center for Sonic Arts, an abandoned water tank reconfigured as a music venue whose eerie acoustics have drawn international attention. 

Despite those efforts, there is a sense among locals that Rangely is under siege — be it by new state oil and gas regulations, by federal Obamacare guidelines blamed for the hospital’s financial woes, and even by its own county government, which some say favors the town of Meeker on the east side of this two-town county. 

***

Kinney, a 53-year-old Marlboro-smoking, Mountain Dew-drinking former police lieutenant, grew up partly in Rangely, where his granddad worked the oil fields for Chevron. Being a cop, he says, is “all I ever wanted to do.” He enlisted in the Air Force as a law enforcement specialist and worked for the Rio Blanco Sheriff’s Office for 15 years before he went to work as Rangely Police Department’s No. 2 in 2010.

Locals saw him as a throwback – one of those small-town cops who knew your parents and probably your grandparents, and who would take the time to show up in person rather than phone. Smart, some describe him. A bit tightly wound, others say. A guy who’ll talk with you and hear what you’re saying.

Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney was forced out of his job after fatally shooting Daniel Pierce on Dec. 10, 2018. He may have been the person in town Pierce most trusted.
Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney was forced out of his job after fatally shooting Daniel Pierce on Dec. 10, 2018. He may have been the person in town Pierce most trusted.

“Like that sheriff on TV. You know, Opie’s dad,” one of his neighbors says. 

“Yeah,” agrees her husband, “but with balls.”

Kinney reported to longtime Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek, known as Vinny, who refused multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. 

Wilczek has a reputation as rough around the edges – short-tempered, long-winded, and sometimes gruff. He had a stroke in 2016. Kinney ran the department in his long absence.

To the extent that a 73-year-old town like Rangely has old, established families, Wilczek’s is one of them. The police department and the town administration are linked through blood and marriage. Wilczek’s cousin, Lisa Piering, became town manager the day after Pierce’s death after years serving as town clerk. And his wife, Karen, serves not only as Rangely’s county court clerk, but also the primary judge in its municipal court, where cases stemming from police citations are heard.

Former Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek before he was forced into retirement last spring after Daniel Pierce's killing. The chief was years overdue updating the town's 18-year-old police policies, and admitted he wasn't familiar with his department's rules on use of force.
Former Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek before he was forced into retirement last spring after Daniel Pierce’s killing. The chief was years overdue updating the town’s 18-year-old police policies, and admitted he wasn’t familiar with his department’s rules on use of force.

“I think that’s a conflict of interest,” says Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola.

Karen Wilczek was reappointed as municipal judge by the town council after assuring members she recuses herself “when any potential or perceived conflicts of interest arise.” Town Attorney Dan Wilson backed her up. 

***

The Rio Blanco Sheriff’s Office and the Rangely Police Department cooperate with one another, but the relationship can be strained. The small police force long has grumbled that the larger Sheriff’s Office lures away Rangely’s officers with its slightly higher salaries. 

It hasn’t helped that the police chief had a history of butting heads with the sheriff whose election bid he opposed in 2014. When Mazzola won the seat, he reached out to Wilczek and deputized him and all Rangely police officers in what he calls a gesture of trust and reconciliation.

Their truce was short-lived. 

At first, Wilczek and Mazzola bickered over minor jurisdictional issues – what Kinney called “pissing matches.” Those turned into all-out war in 2016 when Kinney, unable to pursue a robbery suspect on foot because of an injury, yelled at him to stop and fired two warning shots into the air with people and a sheriff’s deputy nearby.  

Mazzola calls Kinney’s warning gunfire “boneheaded” and “reckless,” especially for a veteran officer. He was furious when Wilczek refused to seek an outside investigation, as is required for officer-involved shootings. Wilczek said it was not an officer-involved shooting because nobody was hit and his department’s policies did not prohibit officers from firing warning shots. 

The Ninth Judicial District Attorney’s office and agents from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation sided with the police. But Mazzola had lost trust in Rangely’s police force and its ability to work safely with his deputies. He told the town manager “your town is out of control” and declared all of Rangely’s officers undeputized because, he says, he did not want the legal liability for their missteps. 

“I touted Roy as the best cop in the county. (But) when he went to work for Rangely PD, something changed,” Mazzola says of Kinney.

Kinney took Mazzola’s condemnation as a personal attack from a man he had considered a close friend since Dec. 10, 2004.

Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola has been the most outspoken critic of the Rangely Police Department, calling the former regime reckless two years before Daniel Pierce was killed. (Courtesy of Rio Blanco County Sheriff's Office)
Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola has been the most outspoken critic of the Rangely Police Department, calling the former regime reckless two years before Daniel Pierce was killed. (Courtesy of Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Office)

It was on that date – 14 years to the day before Kinney would kill Pierce – that Mazzola killed a suspect in a reported domestic dispute after a car chase. Kinney, who also responded to that call, remembers Mazzola asking him immediately after, “Did I fuck up? Did I fuck it up?”

“I told him no, because in my eyes he hadn’t, even though in other people’s eyes he may have,” he says.

For many years, the two men would meet for dinner each Dec. 10 to, as Kinney puts it, “celebrate our survival.” But in recent years, they stopped getting together. “I guess our relationship changed,” he says. 

Mazzola agrees that the 2004 shooting “bonded us,” and says, “I’m not sure how things fell apart.”

The demise of their friendship would later cause Kinney to wonder if Mazzola tried to influence the investigation into Pierce’s death to make him look bad. 

***

Criticism of the Rangely PD intensified in 2017 when prominent residents were being pulled over in what they complained were overly aggressive traffic stops. Officers would snare drivers on pretexts such as turning on their blinkers too soon or having muddy license plates or objects dangling from their rear-view mirrors. Locals were angry to learn officers had a running contest to see who could make the most drunk driving arrests.

“We didn’t encourage competition, I’ll tell you that,” says Kinney, who also does not deny such a contest took place. “It’s human nature to be competitive. It has been going on among officers here for a long, long time.”

In January 2018, the town council held a three-hour public hearing about the police department, which Kinney refers to as “the Evisceration.”

The Rangely Police Department has been operating under 19-year-old policies that, despite the town manager's assertions to the contrary, hadn't been updated before Pierce's killing. They still haven't been updated 11 months later, and town council members are scheduled to consider changes later this month.
The Rangely Police Department has been operating under 19-year-old policies that, despite the town manager’s assertions to the contrary, hadn’t been updated before Pierce’s killing. They still haven’t been updated 11 months later, and town council members are scheduled to consider changes later this month.

Residents complained they felt picked on by over-amped cops abusing their power. Jeff Rector, a Rio Blanco County commissioner who had been pulled over twice, said their “heavy-handedness” was out of touch with “Rangely America.” “Everybody’s not a bad guy,” added Paul Fortunato, a former sheriff’s deputy. 

Sheriff Mazzola, in the meantime, became increasingly outspoken against the police force. “We’re public servants,” he says of law enforcement. “We’re not at war with the public.”

The five-person department lost two of its officers in 2018. One of them, Max Becker, left for the sheriff’s office because he felt his views about law enforcement didn’t line up with the police force. He later filed a complaint against the Rangely department alleging it was misrepresenting the length of time recorded for its traffic stops to justify the use of a drug-sniffing dog. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the DA’s office found discrepancies, but did not pursue the issue. 

A confidential informant, meanwhile, lodged a complaint through the sheriff’s office, claiming Kinney and Wilczek were throwing drug-tainted tennis balls into people’s cars to trigger canine drug searches. Both denied the allegation, and no action arose from that complaint, either.

“We’re public servants. We’re not at war with the public.” -Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola

Distrust stung the police department hardest late last year when it started having trouble getting its cases prosecuted. Jessica King, the deputy DA at the time, says she was “constantly frustrated” by its chronic inability to provide her office with evidence and documentation from its arrests. 

She felt she was “stonewalled right and left,” mainly on drug cases, which she stopped prosecuting. But Mazzola says it was more than drug cases and that “She was totally bucking everything from Rangely.”

By the time Pierce was killed in December, Kinney says King’s refusal to prosecute cases had rendered his department essentially powerless.

Jesus talk

Still on the beat despite public scorn and interdepartmental drama, Kinney first met Pierce at an ATV race in September 2018. He would over the next months see the newcomer walking around town. “He always wanted a cigarette, saying his military check hadn’t come yet. I’d give him one and we’d stand on the street and talk.” Over many Marlboros, Pierce told him stories about his exploits in the special forces. “It was just extraordinary stuff that made me think, ‘No way, this guy’s full of crap,’” says Kinney, an Air Force veteran.

Their exchanges were friendly until Dec. 4 when the school district reported a man who fit Pierce’s description had been lingering around the high school trying to lure students into his blue van. Kinney and Wilczek went to question him outside the Main Street Café, where Pierce told them one of the students was his nephew, Sebastian. 

Pierce seemed lucid during that conversation. But he had never mentioned to Kinney he had family in town. And there was no student named Sebastian involved in the school encounter. The lieutenant tracked down Pierce’s mother by phone in California that day. Nuttbrock told him about her son’s paranoid schizophrenia and her decision to kick him out of her house.

“She opened her heart to me and I really thought we made a connection,” he says. “I told her that everything seemed to be fine with him, that he seemed to be fitting in, other than that weird school thing.” 

***

Four days later, on Dec. 8, employees of the Bank of the San Juans on Main Street reported a man fitting Pierce’s description had come by looking for a red-headed teller he thought might be in danger. They told him no redhead worked there. Still, he said he would return for her Monday and would be “coming with God.”

Kinney headed to Pierce’s place, where body camera video shows Pierce waiting for him on his front porch.

Screenshot from a police body camera video taken as Lt. Roy Kinney approached Roy Pierce's townhome on Dec. 8, 2018.
Screenshot from a police body camera video taken as Lt. Roy Kinney approached Daniel Pierce’s townhome on Dec. 8, 2018.

“Had a call from the bank. You spooked ‘em,” Kinney told him.

“You can put me where you want. Tonight everybody will be gone,” Pierce said. 

He invited the lieutenant into his living room where he kept only a rug, the back seat of a car he used as a sofa, and a radio blaring country music. After some conversation, he proclaimed himself “the Creator.”

“You think you’re the Creator?” Kinney asked. “Is the Creator harmful to people?” 

“No. Hell no. I’m not harmful to anybody, Roy.”

Pierce pointed in the direction of the bank, saying the redhead he was looking for that morning was his wife Debra.

“Your Debra doesn’t live here in Rangely,” Kinney told him.

Pierce, still wearing his wedding ring, said she had visited him the day before and that they were trying to get back together. Kinney asked where she went. 

“I… She… Roy, you can come and go. This is heaven. You can come and go from this place.”

When Kinney told him to stop scaring people, Pierce got in his face. “You want to shoot me? Shoot me, I’ll come back to life, shoot me.”

Kinney radioed for back-up. 

“You don’t need back-up. You want to put me in jail? Put me in jail,” Pierce challenged him. “You’re not going to put me in a hospital, either. You’re not going to fucking sedate me because medicine doesn’t work on me. You’ve got one choice. … Tonight the world ends if I don’t get my wife back.” 

“And if she doesn’t come back, what’s going to happen?” Kinney asked. 

“Like I said, the world will disappear tonight. Everybody in this town will disappear. That’s the way it goes.”

Kinney left after about 20 minutes. As he walked out Pierce’s door, the Rio Blanco County sheriff’s deputy who had responded as back-up commented:

“He is off his rocker. Is that an M-1 hold or what?”

***

Police officers have authority under Colorado law to take people into custody for an involuntary, 72-hour treatment evaluation if they are mentally ill and an imminent danger to themselves or others. The decision to put someone on an “M-1 hold” hinges on factors such as whether their thought process is illogical, they are hearing voices or seeing things that are not there, and they are showing signs of anger and aggression.

Kinney says Pierce was the second person in his life to “scare the hell out of me” — the first being an older cousin named Tommy Carl. 

“Looked a lot and talked a lot” like Pierce, he says.

He describes his cousin while reviewing the body camera video of what he calls Pierce’s “Jesus talk” in his home office. “Tommy Carl was a vicious, violent bastard. I don’t say that about Dan. But that’s what I see in his eyes when he gets angry here.”

“Everybody in this town will disappear. That’s the way it goes.” -Daniel Pierce 

His cousin died about 10 years ago: “Killed himself in Oklahoma, confronted by cops and they wouldn’t shoot him, so he shot himself.”

Kinney says the fact that Pierce rattled him that morning was not reason enough to “take away his freedom.” He had encountered several people during his three decades of policing who asked him to shoot them. “It’s not an uncommon thing,” he says. “And, Jesus, this is the second Jesus I’ve dealt with in my career.” 

He decided Pierce’s threats were not credible because he did not have the power to literally destroy the town.

Kinney called the hotline at Mind Springs Health – the contractor paid to provide mental health services in Rio Blanco County – and described his conversation with Pierce. He laid out his reasoning for why “he wasn’t M-1-able.” He says the counselor agreed.

Mind Springs President and CEO Sharon Raggio confirms the call was made and says it lasted 58 seconds. She says because her organization has no record of Pierce in its system, it was likely a “curbside consult.”

Still, she says, the call was out of the ordinary. 

“Usually when law enforcement calls, it’s for some kind of help. It’s not just ‘Does this person need an M-1 or not?’ but ‘Is this person safe and how can we engage them and get them into treatment?’”

As Raggio tells it, typical protocol would be for Mind Springs to reach out to the subject of the call and “ensure that a safety plan would be made.”

But no such outreach or safety plan was made on Pierce’s behalf. Kinney says he did not discuss those options during his phone call with Mind Springs and that the counselor did not offer them.

“He is off his rocker.” -Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Nye

The police incident report about Pierce’s visit to the bank and subsequent “Jesus talk” with Kinney was written in July 2019 – seven months after Pierce’s death – by Officer Ti Hamblin, who had been named Rangely’s interim police chief after Kinney’s and Wilczek’s forced retirements. Kinney hadn’t gotten around to writing it before he was put on leave after the shooting.

The report does not mention the lieutenant’s call to Mind Springs or any efforts to seek help for Pierce.

The pursuit

Two days after Kinney had visited Pierce, the lieutenant stopped in the parking lot of Rangely’s Kum & Go and was speaking with Butch McAlister, a former sheriff’s deputy. It was Monday evening, Dec. 10. McAlister had spotted a car broken down outside the convenience store and worried because the methamphetamine user inside was relying on a propane heater to keep warm.

Daniel Pierce enjoyed smoking outside Rangely's Kum & Go convenience store. He had his own van, but stole a truck from the store's parking lot the night of his death. (Photo by Paige Jones)
Daniel Pierce enjoyed smoking outside Rangely’s Kum & Go convenience store. He had his own van, but stole a truck from the store’s parking lot the night of his death. (Photo by Paige Jones)

Pierce showed up, walked between Kinney and McAlister, and said the man who had been causing trouble outside the high school had a woman tied up in the basement. Then, he went to smoke with the cashier.

“I told Butch that if there’s somebody dangerous, it’s that guy,” Kinney says.

The lieutenant headed to his office to fill out paperwork. Shortly after, he heard from dispatch that a white pickup truck had been stolen from the Kum & Go. He assumed the thief was the meth user with the broken-down car until he heard the description of the suspect.

“I was just like, ‘Oh, God, it’s him.’” 

He was alarmed to hear from dispatch that the truck Pierce had stolen had a rifle on the front seat. 

***

Sheriff’s Deputy Max Becker, the former Rangely police officer, spotted the stolen truck on state Hwy. 139 southeast of town. Pierce was driving about 40 miles an hour, well below the speed limit, when Becker radioed that he would follow him and wait for backup from Kinney, who was the only other law enforcement officer on duty and nearby. Becker also asked dispatch to alert law enforcement in neighboring Mesa County, about 50 miles in the direction Pierce was heading. He says he planned to follow Pierce all the way to Mesa County if necessary because he did not want to escalate the situation.

Pierce stopped in the middle of the road and got out of the truck. Becker initiated a “high risk traffic stop,” drawing his gun and telling him to show his hands. “He clearly (saw) who and what I am,” Becker says. Yet, “he seemed surprised.” 

Ignoring Becker’s commands, Pierce got back into the stolen truck and continued driving southbound.

Rio Blanco County Sheriff's Deputy Max Becker had resigned from his job as a Rangely Police officer a few months before the car chase that ended with Daniel Pierce's death. Becker didn't agree with how aggressively his former bosses were pursuing him. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)
Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Deputy Max Becker had resigned from his job as a Rangely Police officer a few months before the car chase that ended with Daniel Pierce’s death. Becker didn’t agree with how aggressively his former bosses were pursuing him. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)

Kinney chimed in about Pierce over the radio: “That party, I know who it is. 10-96 on him” – “10-96” being police code for “mental suspect.” “He was very confrontational the other day,” Kinney warned. “The guy is nuts.”

The lieutenant caught up to Becker and asked if he could safely pass him and Pierce, “get some distance,” and lay out spike strips to disable the truck. Becker did not object, advising that there was a straightaway coming up where Kinney could set the strips safely.

Kinney made the pass, but Pierce then turned the stolen truck around and headed back north on State Highway 139. Kinney caught up immediately behind Pierce, telling him several times by name over a loudspeaker to pull over. 

By this point, Pierce’s driving had become erratic, leading Kinney to speculate over the radio that Pierce could be “messing with that rifle.” Meanwhile, Wilczek had joined the pursuit and deployed spike strips further north. Hamblin, too, had responded. Rangely’s entire police force, plus Becker, was now involved.

Kinney decided to pass Pierce after he failed to respond to the loudspeaker. As he did so, Pierce suddenly crossed the centerline, veering toward Kinney’s patrol car and causing the lieutenant to nearly run off the road to avoid being hit. There would be disagreement later as to whether he was trying to ram Kinney’s car, or just driving erratically. Kinney would say Pierce was trying to kill him.

As Becker tells it, Wilczek escalated the situation by driving “right on [Pierce’s] bumper.” “It was an indicator to me that things were getting a little bit ramped up,” he says.

The pursuit took place in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction until Pierce approached the intersection of state highways 139 and 64, within Rangely’s town limits. The spike strips the officers set up deflated the front tires of the stolen truck, limiting Pierce’s ability to control it. Kinney was concerned that if Pierce turned left at the intersection, no officers would be there to protect the town. He directed Becker to “push him off the road” and guard against any oncoming traffic.

Because ramming a vehicle amounts to use of deadly force, Becker refused. Later, opinions would differ on whether that decision affected the outcome.

Officer Hamblin followed Kinney’s order, using the bumper of his patrol car to push the truck as Pierce accelerated, making it spin off the side of the road near the intersection. The truck accelerated forward again, striking Kinney’s patrol car with enough force to significantly damage the car and injure Kinney’s neck in a way that would eventually require surgery and limit his range of motion. Pierce reversed after the first impact, pushing Hamblin’s car sideways. He pulled forward again, bounced off the front of Becker’s patrol car to hit Kinney’s again. The revving of the truck’s engine drowns out almost all other sound in the video. The squad cars had Pierce cornered. 

Wilczek, by this point, was out of his car standing alongside the stolen truck. Pierce reversed again. The chief shouted to his colleagues that he would fire at its back tires to disable them, then did so with two shots. 

Kinney, still in his patrol car, didn’t hear Wilczek, but he heard the shots and thought Pierce had fired at the chief. He says he could not see whether Pierce was holding a gun, but did see a big smile on his face. He interpreted that grin to mean “I was next.”

It was fast and loud, that moment in the December darkness when Kinney shot through the truck’s front windshield, hitting Pierce twice in the head.

Then time stopped.

“Everything, everything in me seemed to freeze,” Kinney says.

He, Becker and Hamblin secured the car, finding that the rifle in it had been left untouched. Pierce, wearing his Army cap, was slumped in the driver’s seat. “He’s dead,” Kinney said, though Pierce was still breathing. Paramedics arrived to transport Pierce to nearby Rangely District Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after. 

One of those paramedics was Shanna Kinney, the head of Rangely’s emergency services and the lieutenant’s wife. She had been on standby at the hospital, listening to the radio traffic on the police scanner. When she heard Becker defy her husband’s order to push the truck off the road, she says her “heart sank.”

“In my entire career I had never heard or seen that happen before,” she says. “I knew that [Becker] falling to the rear [of the pursuit] was going to leave our three officers to deal with this and I had a feeling that this was going bad.”

Part 2: Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a rural town’s silence 

 

Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a rural town’s silence (Part 2) The crisis responder Rangely police called about Daniel Pierce didn't offer help, and town leaders shrouded information about his killing.

0
0
Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney at his kitchen table, breaking months of silence about the man he killed and job he lost in a December 2018 shooting. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part collaboration between The Colorado Independent and The Rio Blanco Herald Times. We posted the first part, linked here, on Thursday, Nov. 7 and advise reading it before part 2. We will post the story in its entirety on Saturday, Nov. 9.

“Over Forever!”

Most everyone in Rangely heard within a day or two there had been a police chase and some guy had been killed.

Chris Wills knew more details than most because an investigator had come to question her about her tenant Daniel Pierce and because Pierce’s van had been towed to Wild Willie’s Storage, Wills’ business. 

She went to the townhome Pierce rented from her and found on the kitchen counter a calendar with two notes jotted in marker. “The Ends” reads the note on Dec. 5. The one on Dec. 9 reads “Over Forever!”

Pierce died on the 10th.

“My husband and I were sitting there like ‘Oh my God, this was suicide by cop.’ We figured then that it was orchestrated,” she says.

This calendar found in Daniel Pierce's home suggests he planned to end his life the week of his killing and lured Rangely police into a suicide-by-cop. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
This calendar found in Daniel Pierce’s home suggests he planned to end his life the week of his killing and lured Rangely police into a suicide-by-cop. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

***

Pierce’s killing was Rangely’s first police-related homicide since 1981, when one of its officers killed a sniper at the town’s post office. Yet town officials stayed mum, not even mentioning it during a town council meeting the next day. They put Lt. Roy Kinney and Chief Vincent Wilczek – two-thirds of the police force at that time – on extended administrative leave pending criminal and internal affairs investigations.

District Attorney Jeff Cheney, in a report about his criminal probe in March, wrote he considered “potential violations of police policies and best practices as a factor,” but ultimately cleared  Kinney and Wilczek of criminal wrongdoing. Given that Pierce had used the stolen truck as a weapon, the DA found, they could not be faulted for defending themselves and each other.

Rangely’s new town manager, Lisa Piering, and Mayor Andy Shaffer made no public statements about the shooting, both citing confidentiality around personnel matters. Piering refused to release Kinney’s personnel file to the officers in the Craig Police Department who were conducting the internal affairs inquiry. According to the report, she told investigators that Town Attorney Dan Wilson “did not feel comfortable” turning over the file. 

Piering ignored the Herald Times’ questions, even months later, about what had happened with Wilczek and Kinney and who was running the police department.

She told The Independent in August she did not know and had not asked if police had sought mental health intervention for Pierce. She said Rangely officers “have training, obviously, on all sorts of human behavioral issues.” But that was an overstatement. In a career spanning nearly 30 years, Kinney’s mental health training amounted to a one-day workshop four years earlier.

Piering said Rangely’s town council had no policy discussions after Pierce’s killing because nobody had called for one and there was “no need.” She defended the officers, saying they had followed a set of police policies the town had newly adopted.

Former Rangely town clerk Lisa Piering was the acting town manager the night of Daniel Pierce's killing, and formally accepted the town manager's job the next day. She has made several misrepresentations, withheld key documents, and refused to answer – or seek answers – about the shooting and its aftermath. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)
Former Rangely Town Clerk Lisa Piering was the acting town manager the night of Daniel Pierce’s killing, and formally accepted the town manager’s job the next day. She made several misrepresentations, withheld key documents, and refused to answer – or seek answers – about the shooting and its aftermath. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)

But she was wrong. Chief Wilczek had been working on revising Rangely’s police policies since at least 2010. Former Town Manager Peter Brixius says in his last year in that job — he left in August 2018 — there was an “extensive push” to get new policies in place. Wilczek didn’t get it done. On the night Pierce was killed, officers were still operating under a set of policies and procedures adopted 18 years earlier, copied from those of the Grand Junction Police Department. 

New policies still have not been adopted 11 months later and are scheduled to be considered later this month by the town council.

Piering, by the time of that August interview, had received the internal affairs report, which clearly showed officers broke several police department policies when they chased and killed Pierce. 

She and Wilson refused to release that report, which predated by four months a new state law requiring police internal affairs records be open to the public. The old statute governing those records required government agencies to do a balancing test weighing public transparency interests against law enforcement officers’ desire for privacy. 

“Allowing the public unfettered access to the report you request would seriously impair the privacy interests of those involved…,” concludes a letter they had signed by Ti Hamblin, the new police chief who has refused to discuss anything related to Pierce’s killing.

The Independent’s First Amendment lawyer Steve Zansberg pointed out in a letter to town officials that Hamblin had a conflict of interest in determining privacy interests because he was directly involved in the Pierce pursuit. 

Piering eventually agreed to release the internal affairs report, but with all the conclusions redacted. Those are the important parts – the ones the public needs to determine whether police went rogue the night they killed Pierce.

Rangely Town Manager Lisa Piering at first refused to release the internal affairs report about Daniel Pierce's killing. Then she released it with the conclusions redacted, leaving the public unable to assess if officers violated police policies. (Photo by Niki Turner)
Rangely Town Manager Lisa Piering at first refused to release the internal affairs report about Daniel Pierce’s killing. Then she released it with the conclusions redacted, leaving the public unable to assess if officers violated police policies. (Photo by Niki Turner)

Releasing the unredacted report, Piering wrote in an affidavit, “would have a hugely chilling effect on my ability to supervise my employees and to fairly exercise my discretion in making employment related decisions and consider future changes to policy.” She, the council and town employees “would be inundated with criticism, opinions, and adamant recommendations of what I should do, and what the Council should do, relative to each of the decisions I and my staff have made since the incident occurred,” she continued.

The end result, Piering wrote, would be “that our governance of the Town of Rangely would be severely negatively impacted.”

“It’s going to rekindle this whole thing that has went on.” – Rangely Mayor Andy Shaffer

Experts on government transparency point out that Colorado has an open records law precisely so the public can evaluate officials and hold them accountable. 

“Law enforcement officers, in particular, require scrutiny because they wield so much power,” says Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. “Secrecy fosters mistrust, but transparency helps to build trust between a police department and a community.”

Under the new state law, Roberts notes, only limited redactions would have been allowed.

Rangely Mayor Andy Shaffer – who is also the town's fire chief – has defended the lack of transparency around Daniel Pierce's killing, saying nothing good can come of reporting about the incident. (Photo courtesy of the Rangely town web page)
Rangely Mayor Andy Shaffer – who is also the town’s fire chief – has defended the lack of transparency around Daniel Pierce’s killing, saying nothing good can come of reporting about the incident. (Photo courtesy of the Rangely town webpage)

When Piering agreed to an interview with the Herald Times in September, she invited Mayor Shaffer to the meeting. Publishing this article, they said, would re-traumatize the officers involved, “dredge things up” and “stir up a can of worms for this community.”  

“It’s going to rekindle this whole thing that has went on… It’s not a favorable position for anybody,” Shaffer warned the newspaper. “From me to you in small town America, that’s what’s going to happen. That’s where it’s going and it’s not going to be nice for anybody.”

The story, they said, is over.

***

An unredacted copy of the internal affairs report obtained in our reporting concluded that Wilczek should have cleared with Kinney his decision to fire at the truck’s tires. The chief admitted several times his lack of familiarity with his own department’s policies on pursuits, use of force, and deadly force. 

The report found that Kinney broke department policy by taking tactical control of the pursuit outside of the town limits without formal approval from Max Becker, the sheriff’s deputy who first spotted Pierce driving the stolen truck. Ramming the truck and shooting Pierce without confirming he was holding a weapon, investigators determined, were unjustified uses of deadly force. 

Investigators did not find Hamblin at fault for ramming the truck because he was following Kinney’s directions. They seem to have ignored that the officer now in charge of Rangely’s police department admitted he would have asked to ram the truck if the lieutenant had not made the order. 

The report cited Kinney’s 2016 warning shots incident at least three times – saying at one point it was symptomatic of a lack of leadership in the Rangely PD. It said the lieutenant broke department policy by taking unreasonable risks in pursuing Pierce so aggressively. 

Kinney, in response, says he “started calling the shots because Becker wasn’t doing it” – a point Becker does not dispute. Kinney points to a part of the video in which he asked Becker if he could pass Pierce on the highway, and “Max gave me an affirmative.” “I was backing Max up, and I believe I was helping him to bring this to an end safely. Helping does not mean showing up and being a blind and deaf dunce.”

He most objects to the report downplaying the threat he says Pierce posed. He asserts that Pierce tried to sideswipe his patrol car during the pursuit rather than merely “swerved,” as the report phrases it. It is unclear from the dashboard video which account is more accurate. 

Kinney did not help his case by arguing semantics, insisting the truck was “pushed” rather than “rammed” off the road. He was defensive and snarky at points. Asked why he did not follow Becker’s lead in letting Pierce continue driving toward Mesa County, he told his reviewer, “Why? Because we didn’t.” 

“I honestly believe that they were trying to get us torn down so the sheriff could take over.”  – former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney

The investigation found that Kinney had taken half of a 300 mg Hydrocodone pill early the morning of the incident, more than 14 hours before he killed Pierce. 

He had been on the prescription for chronic back pain since the 1990s and had disclosed it on his job application and to Wilczek and the town manager. He also had a signed medical waiver to keep taking it. Still, the inquiry deemed his use of the drug to have violated Rangely’s code of conduct.

“It did not affect me while on duty,” he says. “But if I violated their code, OK, they got me, … especially if they’re looking for excuses.”

Kinney believes Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola stirred criticism about the police department and intentionally influenced the inquiry against him and Wilczek by telling internal affairs investigators about the September 2016 warning shots incident.

“I honestly believe that they were trying to get us torn down so the sheriff could take over.”

He acknowledges that theory “may sound paranoid,” but says, “Having been hit with back to back to back to back complaints … we have every reason to be.”

More personally, Kinney feels burned by the former friend whose own officer-involved shooting he defended 14 years earlier. The brotherhood he had with Mazzola, he says, has been betrayed.

Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola blasts former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney – not for killing Daniel Pierce, but for disrespecting jurisdictional boundaries during the December 2018 pursuit. Kinney supported Mazzola when he shot and killed a suspect exactly 14 years prior. (Photo by Caitlin Walker)
Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola blasts former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney – not for killing Daniel Pierce, but for disrespecting jurisdictional boundaries during the December 2018 pursuit. Kinney supported Mazzola when he shot and killed a suspect exactly 14 years prior. (Photo by Caitlin Walker)

“That’s a sad damn thing.”

Mazzola says he spoke with internal affairs investigators because they reached out to him with questions. Both he and Becker acknowledge that Kinney “is a better tactician” than Becker. “Roy has a very strong personality. He’s a leader and he’ll take charge,” Mazzola says.

But he draws a line, saying, “There are jurisdictions for a reason.” Kinney taking control of the pursuit from Becker, he says, amounted to Rangely police “not respecting our jurisdiction.”

Michael Benza, senior instructor of law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, says a pattern of policy violations and police overzealousness could have created serious legal liability for Rangely. Piering’s refusal to release Kinney’s personnel file to the internal affairs investigators was, in his opinion, a “red flag.”

All of those actions, he says, “add zeros” to a potential lawsuit against the town. 

Neither the DA’s nor internal affairs reports addressed the judgment calls Kinney and his department made in response to Pierce’s mental illness or whether different decisions or protocols may have prevented the fatal outcome. And no one in town leadership asked how or why a man police knew was sick ended up with two of its bullets in his head.

Pierce’s life and death were reduced to a closed police matter. Nobody said it was a shame, a tragedy what happened, or that maybe there are cracks in the system.

Judgment calls

Rose Nuttbrock wants to believe her son wanted to live.

If he was suicidal, she asks, why were his last letters to her so upbeat and “why would he have just refilled his high blood pressure prescription in November?”

Daniel Pierce's mother, Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, CA, has considered taking legal action about his killing by Rangely police. "This never should have happened," she says.
Daniel Pierce’s mother, Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, Calif., has considered taking legal action about his killing by Rangely police. “This never should have happened,” she says.

She tells herself he didn’t mean to steal the white pickup truck and must have thought it was his because he used to own one in Missouri that looked like it. She reckons he stopped on the highway and got out of the truck, confused, because he didn’t know why the police were chasing him. About the “Over Forever!” Pierce noted on his calendar, she thinks maybe he was referring to his time in Rangely, where he had hoped to escape from his problems – and not, she says, referring to his life.

“Does Colorado care? Do they even care if an officer, you know, shoots someone, if they kill a man with mental illness?” – Rose Nuttbrock, Daniel Pierce’s mother

But reason weighs on her. Her own experience reminds her of those voices, that sickness in his head. And she realizes her Danny was sick of being sick.

She understands his behavior was causing problems for the police. What she cannot abide is that Kinney knew about his paranoid schizophrenia, yet killed him anyway.

“Why couldn’t they have used tear gas or something? Why did they have to shoot him? If he was holding a gun, (wouldn’t they) have seen it? … That just isn’t right,” she says. “If this had happened in California, newspapers would have been knocking down my door. I mean, why wasn’t I hearing from anybody? Does Colorado care? Do they even care if an officer, you know, shoots someone, if they kill a man with mental illness?”

***

Rio Blanco County is a dangerous place to have a mental health crisis.

Rangely, with a population of about 2,300, had a three-person police force at the time of Daniel Pierce's killing in December 2018. (Map by Mark Castillo)
Rangely, with a population of about 2,300, had a three-person police force at the time of Daniel Pierce’s killing in December 2018. (Map by Mark Castillo)

Residents here are nearly twice as likely as the average Coloradan to be uninsured. With about 6,300 residents, the county has far less than half the mental health providers per capita than the state average. Countywide, according to Mental Health Colorado, it has two licensed professional counselors, two clinical social workers and one registered psychotherapist. It has no psychologists and no nurses specializing in mental health.

The county health department long has ranked mental health – and substance abuse issues – as its top concern, but its latest progress report in 2018 found it had made “little traction” on prevention and treatment efforts. 

Some 57% of residents here cited “mental health stigma” as the reason they have been unable to obtain mental health services, and 61% reported being uncomfortable discussing personal problems, according to data compiled by Mental Health Colorado. Those percentages eclipse the statewide averages of 22% and 31%, respectively. 

Sharma Vaughn, who worked until August as the chief nursing officer at Rangely District Hospital, says this community too often perceives mental health problems as a character flaw rather than an illness. Those attitudes are largely cultural – “the rugged individualistic West,” she says. But she sees them also as reflections of an under-funded rural health care system.

“If we have an emergency and we don’t have the resources, it can be between an hour or two hours before someone gets to us with that specific skill set,” she says. About the Pierce case in particular, “My worry is that I’m not sure what resources we had for him and I’m not sure what resources we have for law enforcement professionals to make sure we have someone in crisis getting the help they need.”

The national model for preparing first responders is a 40-hour crisis intervention training (CIT) that originated in Memphis and teaches officers to recognize acute mental disorders so they can help people access care and treatment. It is designed to promote the safety of both the public and law enforcement.

Several police forces in Colorado require officers to have such training. Rangely is not one of them. Officials from small and rural law enforcement agencies say they do not have the money or person-power to spare officers for a whole workweek. Why Rangely does not is unclear because Piering refuses to answer questions about the training, saying she was not the police chief or town manager at the times in question and feels uncomfortable “continuing to guess or speculate.” She attached to an email the still-unadopted new department policy manual.

It has been almost a year since Daniel Pierce's shooting and Rangely's Police Department has yet put its officers through a mental health training. (Photo by Paige Jones)
It has been almost a year since Daniel Pierce’s shooting and Rangely’s Police Department has yet to put its officers through a mental health training. (Photo by Paige Jones)

For Rangely police, mental health training has consisted of an eight-hour class called Mental Health First Aid that has been offered only a handful of times every few years in the community. The course covers the basics such as identifying signs of depression and anxiety in others and in yourself. It does not discuss conditions such as paranoid schizophrenia, and is not specifically for law enforcement. The classes typically are open to the public, attended by everyone from librarians to business owners.

Sarah Valentino of Steamboat Springs taught the course as part of her work with the Northwest Colorado Community Health Partnership. “Whenever I went down there, the classes filled up right away,” she says of Rio Blanco County.

She offered a day-long class in Rangely in March 2018 that was attended by Deputy Becker from the sheriff’s office and Hamblin and Wilczek from Rangely police. Kinney was not there. He had taken the course in 2014 for which he received a Mental Health First Aid certification that expired in 2017. 

Kinney says that day-long workshop was the only mental health training he remembers having in his 28 years as a law enforcer in Rio Blanco County. “Come to think of it, yeah, that’s not a lot.”

After the March 2018 training in Rangely, the Partnership planned to offer a follow up course specifically for law enforcement in northwest Colorado. The sponsoring group, Mental Health First Aid Colorado, had funding from Colorado’s Attorney General’s office to pay for it, and rural agencies such as Rangely police were meant to be prioritized. But the training never happened because the money was not fully allocated or spent. Barb Becker, who runs the statewide program – and is not related to Deputy Becker – says, “We got a delayed start in terms of getting the contract signed.”

Next month will mark the year anniversary of Pierce’s killing. Since then, Rangely Police Chief Hamblin has not put his police force through mental health and crisis response training. “I did not have the manpower to ‘need to’ hold any mental health training until now,” he wrote in an email. Now that he has hired three new officers, is advertising for a lieutenant and just requested funding for a sixth officer, he said he is trying to schedule a class “for early next year.” 

The class he was referring to was the basic Mental Health First Aid eight-hour workshop.

***

It is easy, experts warn, to assume that better mental health training for law enforcement could change the outcomes of cases like Pierce’s. 

“But I don’t know that’s necessarily true,” Valentino says. 

“When you have law enforcement responding to unmet mental health needs, bad things happen,” adds Vincent Atchity, the new president of Mental Health Colorado, the state’s premier advocacy group, who has spent much of his career trying to disentangle people with mental illness from the criminal justice system.

Daniel Pierce arrived in Rangely in August, 2018 after struggling for years with untreated paranoid schizophrenia. Police knew he was in crisis, but didn't seek help. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)
Daniel Pierce arrived in Rangely in August 2018 after struggling for years with untreated paranoid schizophrenia. Police knew he was in crisis, but didn’t seek help. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)

Until recently, Colorado was one of six states that still used jails to house people on involuntary mental health holds known as M-1s. But big city law enforcement agencies were complaining about jail overcrowding and rural departments struggled to meet the 72-hour limit for M-1 holds because of the time it could take to transfer people to and from clinics for mental health evaluations. The legislature in 2016 passed a bill to extend the 72-hour limit, but then-Gov. John Hickenlooper vetoed it on grounds that evaluation and treatment for people in crisis should not be delayed. In 2017, lawmakers passed – and Hickenlooper signed – a law requiring that people on involuntary holds be housed in clinical settings such as psychiatric wards rather than in jails. 

There is no such ward at Rangely District Hospital. Rio Blanco County has a contract with West Springs Hospital, which is run by Mind Springs Health, the organization Kinney called about Pierce. The hospital is 92 miles south in Grand Junction.

West Springs is the only psychiatric hospital between Denver and Salt Lake City. It had 32 beds on the day Kinney called, and had been at capacity for years, with a list of patients waiting for inpatient care. “The truth is they were always full, every day, and every day we had a wait list,” says Mind Springs’ President and CEO Sharon Raggio. 

Her organization addressed the problem by adding 32 more beds, doubling West Springs’ capacity. Those beds became available on Dec. 11, 2018 – the day after Pierce was killed.

***

Pierce fell through other cracks in mental health care services that also involved Mind Springs.

“What I do know is that Mind Springs encourages officers to not do M-1s. Mind Springs encourages officers to defer to Mind Springs,” Valentino says. “As the professionals, as the people who have the most training around this, they didn’t want people in law enforcement to be making those decisions about M-1s inappropriately.”

Mind Springs’ Raggio frames her organization’s stance a bit differently, saying law enforcement officers often feel “uncomfortable” seeking M-1 holds because they are not mental health professionals and “because it’s a big deal to take away someone’s constitutional right to be free.” “Generally speaking, we encourage law enforcement to use what we call an M-0.5, instead,” she says. 

M-0.5 holds, made possible by a state law that went into effect six months before Pierce’s death, are an option for first responders, medical and mental health professionals to take someone who does not meet the “imminent danger” criterion of an M-1 hold to an outpatient clinic for walk-in services such as evaluation and treatment. Those initiating them are supposed to coordinate with a so-called “mobile crisis service” – which is required in each county by state law and must arrive within two hours in rural areas – to create a safety plan for the person in crisis. The mini-M-1 hold is a half-measure to address mental health breakdowns as health crises rather than criminal ones and to make sure that people with urgent needs like Pierce get the intervention they need.

Some, mostly well-resourced and urban communities in Colorado have formed co-responder teams that bring together law enforcement, paramedics and mental health clinicians to respond to calls like the ones about Pierce from the school and bank in Rangely. Rio Blanco County’s public health department says its communities can not afford such a team. As with many of its mental health needs, the county relies on Mind Springs to act as its mobile crisis service under a subcontract with the state.

“Let’s all work together to close the cracks and make sure this never happens again.” – Sharon Raggio, president, Mind Springs

Whenever someone asked Mind Springs for mobile response to a home, business, hospital or jail, Raggio says, “We responded.”

“We would have been happy to correspond with Lt. Kinney,” she adds. “He could have put Mr. Pierce on an M-0.5 and taken him over to our office. That was a legal option.”

Kinney says he did not know about the mobile crisis service or an M-0.5 hold until asked about them in an interview for this story. 

“I have never heard of either.”

Alice Harvey, a former emergency room nurse who took the job as public health director in Rio Blanco County in summer 2019, says she has noticed confusion about the mobile crisis service and how it’s supposed to work with law enforcement.

“It’s a bit of a mess, honestly, because there’s such need and we’re all scrambling to provide resources.”

Raggio says the Pierce case will prompt her to make sure that Mind Springs’ hotline counselors offer support to first responders who call in seeking M-1 holds but do not ask for other help.

“I think we need to go back and better train people on those types of calls,” she says. “I agree this was a tragedy. It’s just terrible when anything like this happens. Let’s all work together to close the cracks and make sure this never happens again. That’s really what it’s got to be about.”

Ken Davis, a mental health care provider in Moffat County and longtime advocate of better crisis intervention services in northwest Colorado, says he feels sick knowing “We’ve created a kind of perfect storm in which somebody with a persistent severe mental health problem is not getting the treatment, not getting the support, with people in the position of authority not recognizing the problem, and we’re having these kinds of unfortunate outcomes.”

“This is a man’s life. It makes you wonder if the price of a life in a rural area is lower than the price of a life somewhere else. I hate to tell you that the answer is yes.”

Pierce’s death, adds Vaughn, the nurse in Rangely, “Might be a really good example of a time when the community needs to come together to discuss mental illness.”

***

There has been no such coming together, no public conversation about what Pierce was enduring, and no discussion about whether Rangely police are equipped to prevent deaths like his now and in the future. Residents have been left to surmise what ailed Pierce, what might have saved him, and how their police force responded to his crisis.

Wills, Pierce’s landlord, kicks herself for not offering her tenant spiritual help. “I feel kinda bad because if I had known what was going on with him, maybe I would have called a pastor to check in on him.”

Jillien Wade is a lifelong Rangely resident who works as a postal carrier in town. She never met Pierce, but heard about his killing.

“There were rumors … like that he had Huntington’s disease,” she says. 

In the absence of more information about the shooting, she “assume(s) the police department made the best decision in that moment.”

“I want to believe that was the situation.”

Not talking

Mazzola, after killing the suspect who tried to ambush him in 2004, saw a counselor who urged him to “tell the story to anyone who will listen” and to keep telling it until he didn’t feel the need to anymore. 

Talking about that shooting, the sheriff says, was therapy for him, a path to move forward.

Kinney has not had that option. 

“You want people to know so they’re not sitting there thinking, whatever, like we’re just a bunch of yahoos because, frankly, I’m destroyed by that.” – former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney

The town made him sign a confidentiality agreement when Piering, Mayor Shaffer, Town Attorney Wilson, and the agency that insures Rangely police forced his retirement in May. He – along with Chief Wilczek – had to agree under the threat of a civil suit and damages not to “disparage” the town, Piering, or other town officials, especially as it relates to decisions made after Pierce’s death.

“So, basically, I’m under contract not to say anything.”

Not saying anything led Kinney to hole up most of the past year in his home office reviewing body camera and dashboard camera videos. He has memorized the twists and turns of the pursuit and the back and forth of the police radio chatter. He watches the Jesus talk video thinking “I know what’s coming, what if we could turn back and M-1 him,” and he sobs.

Former Police Lt. Roy Kinney cries in his home office as he talks about what he would say to Daniel Pierce's wife and mother. (Photo by Susan Greene)
Former Police Lt. Roy Kinney cries in his home office as he talks about what he would say to Daniel Pierce’s wife and mother. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Saying nothing prodded Kinney to pour over Rangely police policies, transcripts of internal affairs interviews, Colorado’s M-1 law, and studies about paranoid schizophrenia. 

The silence spurred a depression that has, if nothing else, made him realize how clueless he had been about depression.

“It consumes me, this shooting. It’s all I think about,” he says.

Kinney describes his town as a “rumor basin” – a place where if people do not know something about you, they’ll make it up. The longer the silence goes on, he says, the worse it gets.

“You want clarity. You want people to know so they’re not sitting there thinking, whatever, like we’re just a bunch of yahoos because, frankly, I’m destroyed by that,” he says. 

He points to the body camera video playing on his screen and adds, “They don’t know Dan Pierce. They don’t know Jesus.”

The silence became unbearable for Kinney by September, the weekend his daughter was getting married and word had spread through Piering that journalists from the Herald Times and The Colorado Independent were onto the Pierce story and might crash the wedding. Through channels, he says, Piering let him know that the angle of this story would be that he got away with murder. 

He decided to end his silence, regardless of the risks. He wants to tell the people of his town, “I did everything I could, knowing what I knew then, to protect myself, fellow officers, the community and him.”

“I heard the shots and believed Dan shot at Vince and that’s why I killed him,” he says. “There is nothing to cover up. I know in my heart that his goal was to die that night and I’m just really sad that I was any part of it. All I need is to let people know that I didn’t violate the trust they had in us. We were out of options.”

***

Kinney replays in his memory his conversation with Pierce’s mom. It haunts him that he had reassured Nuttbrock after she “spilled her guts to me,” then killed her son less than a week later. It makes it harder knowing that he may have been the person in town Pierce most trusted. 

“I thought if anybody could talk him down it would be me.”

Kinney’s confidentiality agreement has kept him from reaching out to Nuttbrock since the shooting. It also has kept him from contacting Pierce’s wife, Debra, whose absence in Pierce’s life has, in some ways, become an absence in his.

If the two had spoken, Debra would have questioned what went down that night on that road into Rangely.

“Did he need to use brute force? Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know,” she says of Kinney.

Daniel Pierce's widow Debra tried for years to prod her husband back into treatment. He refused. The voices in his head, she says, drowned out her own. Debra Pierce (Photo by Julie Denesha)
Daniel Pierce’s widow Debra tried for years to prod her husband back into treatment. He refused. The voices in his head, she says, drowned out her own. (Photo by Julie Denesha)

She also would have told him about things that may have made the past 11 months easier. Like Pierce’s plan, if his pain got too bad, to “run out in front of a truck and end it all.” And his infatuation with O.J. Simpson’s 1994 Bronco chase from police, which struck such a chord with him that he would talk about it years later. And her suspicion that some part of her late husband “knew what he was doing and that he was tired of the voices and wanted to end this.”

Had it not been for the silence, Debra would have told Kinney she knows the corners Pierce could put you in: You were damned if you tried to help him, damned if you hurt him, and damned if he hurt somebody else and you were blamed for not having intervened.

She would have told the lieutenant she knew what he saw in Pierce’s eyes that day in his townhouse and two nights later, cornered in the stolen truck. And she would have said what is perhaps hardest to say: That as much as we may feel for people with acute mental illness, there can be something terrorizing that grows from their madness that needs to be stopped, sometimes at any cost.

Had Kinney been able to reach out, Debra would have said “I’m glad Red’s not hearing the voices, wherever he is.” 

She also would have told him, “I don’t hold anything against you.”

Read Part 1 here.

Through the Cracks: A stranger, a police shooting, and a small town’s silence A rural Colorado cop knew Daniel Pierce was in a mental health crisis, but didn’t seek care before killing him. Town leaders tried to kill the story.

0
0
Still shot from the dashboard camera on former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney's patrol car as he chased Daniel Pierce through the desert. The December 10, 2018 pursuit ended when Kinney fatally shot Pierce.

RANGELY – No one seems to know why Daniel Pierce settled in this northwestern Colorado town last year after his wife in Missouri and mother in California kicked him out of their houses. But in the four months he lived here, he came to think of it as heaven.

Not just because he relished the hours he’d spend bumming cigarettes in front of the Kum & Go and watching pickups haul ATVs west toward the Utah desert. But because Pierce, who had paranoid schizophrenia, became convinced he was God and Rangely the place where people long dead or lost from his life would reappear at his whim. 

That’s what he told the police officer who checked in on him twice last December after he scared some kids outside a school and alarmed workers at the local bank.

Lt. Roy Kinney had been keeping his eye on Pierce, just as he did the rest of this 2,300-person community with its boom-and-bust economy, don’t-tread-on-me politics and town motto declaring itself “Way outside of ordinary!” 

“Do you know who I am? I’m the Creator, Roy,” Pierce, 58, told him. “I’m God. I am Jesus fucking Christ.” 

He tried to prove his point by inviting the lieutenant to “shoot me, I’ll come back to life, shoot me.” If his estranged wife did not return to him that evening, he threatened, “Everybody in this town will disappear.”

Daniel Pierce arrived in Rangely in August, 2018 after struggling for years with untreated paranoid schizophrenia. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)
Daniel Pierce arrived in Rangely in August, 2018 after struggling for years with untreated paranoid schizophrenia. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)

Kinney was rattled by those threats, but decided Pierce was not a danger to himself or others.

That conclusion would prove fatal two days later when Pierce drew all three of Rangely’s officers – the town’s whole police force – and a sheriff’s deputy into a lengthy car chase. In the adrenaline blur of its final 20 seconds, Kinney shot Pierce in the head.

Pierce’s Dec. 10, 2018 killing marked Rangely’s first officer-involved homicide in nearly four decades. Everybody in town heard about it. Yet, in the aftermath, there has been silence. 

In that silence, town officials refused to turn over key documents to internal affairs investigators. In that silence, a longstanding rivalry between the police department and the larger sheriff’s office and a soured relationship between two friends raised questions about how the case and the investigation were handled. And in that silence, the police chief and Kinney were forced from their jobs. 

Town officials released no information about the shooting, and later urged The Rio Blanco Herald Times not to report the story. The newspaper partnered with The Colorado Independent to investigate what happened. Our outlets combed through hundreds of pages of public documents, reviewed hours of video and audio recordings, and interviewed more than 50 people, including Pierce’s family members, Kinney and other law enforcement officers, mental health providers, legal experts, and state, county and local government officials. 

The death of Daniel Pierce was, in many people’s minds, further evidence of recklessness in a small town police force town residents had come to distrust. We found his killing may have been legally justified, but it was not unavoidable. It underscored the extent to which many in law enforcement are ill-equipped to handle mental health crises and the degree to which the kind of intervention Pierce needed is lacking in rural Colorado. 

There was a shooting and there was its aftermath. This is the story of both. 

The stranger

Daniel Pierce did not have an easy childhood. His mother, Rose Nuttbrock, was 16 when she had him. His father, never around, died of a heroin overdose. His younger brother, David, was murdered by a schoolmate when he was 14 and Pierce 18.

Daniel Pierce's mother, Rose Nuttbrock, holds a photo of her two sons – both lost to homicides. Daniel younger brother David was 14 when accidentally shot by a schoolmate, who then intentionally killed him so he wouldn't tell. Daniel, then 18, didn't attend David's funeral because he felt guilty for not taking his little brother off-roading, as David asked, the weekend before his death. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
Daniel Pierce’s mother, Rose Nuttbrock, holds a photo of her two sons – both lost to homicides. Daniel’s younger brother David was 14 when accidentally shot by a schoolmate, who then intentionally killed him so he wouldn’t tell. Daniel, then 18, didn’t attend David’s funeral because he felt guilty for not taking his little brother off-roading, as David asked, the weekend before his death. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

Pierce’s family says he went through Army basic training in the 1980s but did not go on to serve because he married and had kids. Their account of his short-lived military record contradicts what he told people in Rangely, where he flashed the “Combat Engineer” tattoo on his arm and talked about serving in the special forces during Operation Desert Storm. He actually had been working at a farm store in Northern California at that time. 

He and his first wife had two girls, the eldest of whom, Heather, died from sepsis at age five. In 1990, he severely injured his back in a car accident. Pain kept him from working after an unsuccessful surgery. His first marriage ended, as did his contact with his younger, surviving daughter – yet another in his long string of losses.

Pierce started dating a former coworker whom he eventually married. Debra Pierce says he had reconstructive surgery on his lower back in the late 1990s and relied on a port to infuse him with a steady cocktail of drugs to ease his constant pain. He stayed home, living on Social Security disability, and spent his time fixing things around the house and helping raise her daughter, Kayla.

“Red pushed her a little hard, but he was a good dad, a good guy,” Debra says of the husband she nicknamed for his hair color. “There was a time when I loved him.”

***

Daniel Pierce is pictured here with his wife, Debra and her daughter, Kayla, whom he helped raise, between them. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)
Daniel Pierce is pictured here with his wife, Debra and her daughter, Kayla, whom he helped raise, between them. (Photo courtesy of Debra Pierce)

Pierce’s back pain worsened, leading a doctor in 2012 to prescribe a painkiller called Prialt. The drug comes with an FDA warning: “Severe psychiatric symptoms and neurological impairment may occur during treatment.” 

He started hearing voices after about six weeks on the medication. There were people living under their house, he told Debra. He was sure they had installed cameras in their shower. 

“He pretty much destroyed the house drilling holes in the walls trying to find them,” she says.

The doctor did not pull him off the painkiller until a few months later, she recalls, and he warned her then that her husband’s delusions might not go away. “This is who he is now,” she remembers the doctor saying.

The voices grew louder and Pierce’s paranoia more fierce until he agreed later that year to be hospitalized near their home in Missouri. He spent three weeks in the psychiatric ward, where doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. The pills they had given him helped quiet the voices. When he would not take them, doctors injected the medication. But Pierce eventually stopped showing up for the monthly shots until delusions, along with constant threats lurking in all corners, became his new normal in his early 50s. 

“There was a time when I loved him.” – Debra Pierce, widow of Daniel Pierce

Debra realized over time he had been lying to her about his military experience. She started wondering what else he was lying about and which of his tales stemmed from mental illness and which from deception. She would move out during his bad spells and Pierce would threaten her as he sensed her slipping away. She came home one day to find that he had shot and killed two of her cats. If it would have been legal to hunt humans, he told her, that would be his sport. 

Pierce would say things like, “You’re still my wife, and if I can’t have you, nobody will,” and Debra came to suspect that if she ever left him, “nobody would find my body.” Police would show up for welfare checks because he had reported she had been taken hostage. Their 21-year relationship came down to two terrifying options: “He would either kill me or he would kill somebody else and then (everybody) would look at me and ask, why didn’t you get him help?”

Debra Pierce discusses her late husband, Daniel Pierce, before heading to work in Sedalia, Mo., on November 4, 2019. (Photo by Julie Denesha)
Debra Pierce discusses her late husband, Daniel Pierce, before heading to work in Sedalia, Mo., on November 4, 2019. (Photo by Julie Denesha)

And so she cut off all contact in 2016 and hid from the man to whom she remained legally married. Without treatment, she says, the voices in his head drowned out her own, and no amount of her patience or love could silence them. 

***

Pierce hid his diagnosis from his mother, who did not learn of it until he moved back to California to live with her in 2017. Nuttbrock was alarmed by how he had changed. 

“He would talk like he was talking to someone, but there was nobody there.”

Once, Pierce called police in California to say someone – one of the voices in his head – killed Debra in Missouri. He needed them to check on her. A SWAT team surrounded her home 1,600 miles away. When they confirmed she was safe, Nuttbrock asked police to put her son on an involuntary mental health hold. He persuaded doctors to release him after one night.

Wherever there was a crack in his mental health care, he found a way to slip through it.

“The sik meds only make me sick I don’t need them. An they change me for the worst,” he wrote Debra from California in a letter blaming their problems on former neighbors whom he believed had connected military radio equipment to his brain, emitting frequencies he could hear 24/7.

“I’m so upset about all this stuff. I’m ready to kill them all. The pain of worrying about you an missing you is getting more than I can handle! And I don’t care anymore about going to jail for killing them,” his letter reads. “I wise thing could be different but someday sone I’ll bring you there bodys to prove it to you.”

Nuttbrock agreed to let him stay under one condition: “I didn’t want to hear any more about those voices.” But they kept speaking to him and he to them until Pierce scared his teenage nephew. When Nuttbrock gave Pierce one last warning, he, at six feet tall, lunged at her. She told him then he needed to move out.

Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, CA, was alarmed by the changes in her son, Daniel Pierce. Eventually, she grew scared of him and kicked him out of her house out of self-protection. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, Calif., was alarmed by the changes in her son, Daniel Pierce. Eventually, she grew scared of him and kicked him out of her house out of self-protection. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

“He wasn’t my son” by that point, she says, crying into the phone. “He was a stranger. I didn’t even know him. And I was afraid.”

***

Pierce headed east in the blue Chevy van his mother bought him, stopping in New Mexico and then back in Missouri to find Debra. She recalls the Memorial Day weekend in 2018 when he showed up at the home supply store where she works.

“I said ‘There’s nothing left,’ and he said, ‘You’re still my wife,’ (and) I said, ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’

“He had tears in his eyes and drove off,” she says, teary, too. “That was the last time I seen him.”

Untreated paranoid schizophrenia often breeds alienation for those with the condition. Their delusions, their paranoia can subsume their former selves so that people who were close to them tend to push them away out of self-protection. So it was that nobody in Pierce’s family spoke with him during the six months that followed. 

“The sik meds only make me sick I don’t need them.” – Daniel Pierce in a letter to his wife

Nuttbrock was tracking her son’s whereabouts from the bank statements and blood pressure prescription mailed to her home. She could see that he headed from Missouri to Wyoming, then down to Colorado in August 2018. He had no ties in Rangely that she or her daughter-in-law knew of. 

Pierce wrote her in October 2018 that he had been led here by his “extended family” of Native American relatives – a distant branch of her family tree she doubts he could have tracked down. Maybe out of loneliness, she figures, he was searching for some lost tribe.

Tim Webber, who heads the Western Rio Blanco Metropolitan Recreation and Park District in Rangely, first encountered Pierce at the district-run RV park in town where Pierce was living out of his van. When Pierce told him he was a veteran, Webber loaned him a tent and sleeping bag, stopped charging him rent for his RV park space, and hired him to mow the greens at the local golf course. “He was always on time and he did a good job,” he says. “He was a different fellow, but a nice guy.”

As temperatures dropped last fall, Pierce used the money he earned at the golf course and a job working maintenance at the community college to rent a duplex on South Grand Street. His landlord, Chris Wills, describes him as neatly dressed, well spoken and chatty about what he said was his career in the Army’s elite special forces.

Something about Rangely resonated with Pierce.

Pierce wrote two letters to his mother from Rangely. In this, the first, he mentioned reuniting with dead people and others who had been lost from his life. Among those was his daughter Heather who died decades ago at age 5. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
Pierce wrote two letters to his mother from Rangely. In this, the first, he mentioned reuniting with dead people and others who had been lost from his life. Among those was his daughter Heather who died decades ago at age 5. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

“I love this part of the country it’s where I belong,” he wrote Nuttbrock last October. “I even found my Heather here Mom. She is a butieful girl,” he went on about his young daughter who died decades earlier. “I know this a sounds so crazy, but please beliveae me. So much has happen in my life.”

Pierce’s last letter to her, dated Nov. 15, described the park near his townhome, the friends he was making here, and the way Rangely takes such good care of its children.

“It’s a special life here,” the letter reads. “My health is great here. No more pain or headaches. Thank God.”

Rangely America

Petroglyphs and paint pictographs have graced the sandstone canyons south of Rangely for about 13 centuries. But a town that now has one church for every 230 residents is also known for an often-photographed bluff on its eastern outskirts spray painted with the misspelled message “Jesus is Comming.”

This patch of high desert 25 miles east of the Colorado-Utah border has always been a place through which people pass, whether the native guides who led Spanish missionaries through the area in 1776 or oil and gas workers who migrate with shifts in their industry.

Rangely, with a population of about 2,300, had a three-person police force at the time of Daniel Pierce's killing in December 2018. Two of them, including the chief and lieutenant, lost their jobs over the shooting. (Map by Mark Castillo)
Rangely, with a population of about 2,300, had a three-person police force at the time of Daniel Pierce’s killing in December 2018. Two of them, including the chief and lieutenant, lost their jobs over the shooting. (Map by Mark Castillo)

Rangely hit the map in 1931, when the California Company – now Chevron – spudded an oil well. It incorporated as a town 15 years later. The Chamber of Commerce touts that Rangely has “the largest field in the Rocky Mountain region.” In 1956, the field yielded 49% of Colorado’s total oil production. That percentage since has dropped to single digits.

During boom cycles, the industry afforded Rangely the ability to build schools, a hospital and a tricked-out recreation center. When energy prices drop, reduced tax revenue strains agencies like the fire department and police force, even as the population has stayed relatively static.

The town has worked hard to diversify its economy. It founded Colorado Northwestern Community College more than 50 years ago. It sponsors annual motor sports events like rock-crawling and rally races. And it promotes its Tank Center for Sonic Arts, an abandoned water tank reconfigured as a music venue whose eerie acoustics have drawn international attention. 

Despite those efforts, there is a sense among locals that Rangely is under siege — be it by new state oil and gas regulations, by federal Obamacare guidelines blamed for the hospital’s financial woes, and even by its own county government, which some say favors the town of Meeker on the east side of this two-town county. 

***

Kinney, a 53-year-old Marlboro-smoking, Mountain Dew-drinking former police lieutenant, grew up partly in Rangely, where his granddad worked the oil fields for Chevron. Being a cop, he says, is “all I ever wanted to do.” He enlisted in the Air Force as a law enforcement specialist and worked for the Rio Blanco Sheriff’s Office for 15 years before he went to work as Rangely Police Department’s No. 2 in 2010.

Locals saw him as a throwback – one of those small-town cops who knew your parents and probably your grandparents, and who would take the time to show up in person rather than phone. Smart, some describe him. A bit tightly wound, others say. A guy who’ll talk with you and hear what you’re saying.

Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney was forced out of his job after fatally shooting Daniel Pierce on Dec. 10, 2018. He may have been the person in town Pierce most trusted.
Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney was forced out of his job after fatally shooting Daniel Pierce on Dec. 10, 2018. He may have been the person in town Pierce most trusted.

“Like that sheriff on TV. You know, Opie’s dad,” one of his neighbors says. 

“Yeah,” agrees her husband, “but with balls.”

Kinney reported to longtime Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek, known as Vinny, who refused multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. 

Wilczek has a reputation as rough around the edges – short-tempered, long-winded, and sometimes gruff. He had a stroke in 2016. Kinney ran the department in his long absence.

To the extent that a 73-year-old town like Rangely has old, established families, Wilczek’s is one of them. The police department and the town administration are linked through blood and marriage. Wilczek’s cousin, Lisa Piering, became town manager the day after Pierce’s death after years serving as town clerk. And his wife, Karen, serves not only as Rangely’s county court clerk, but also the primary judge in its municipal court, where cases stemming from police citations are heard.

Former Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek before he was forced into retirement last spring after Daniel Pierce's killing. The chief was years overdue updating the town's nearly two-decades-old police policies, and admitted he wasn't familiar with his department's rules on car chases and use of force.
Former Rangely Police Chief Vincent Wilczek before he was forced into retirement last spring after Daniel Pierce’s killing. The chief was years overdue updating the town’s nearly two-decades-old police policies, and admitted he wasn’t familiar with his department’s rules on car chases and use of force.

“I think that’s a conflict of interest,” says Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola.

Karen Wilczek was reappointed as municipal judge by the town council after assuring members she recuses herself “when any potential or perceived conflicts of interest arise.” Town Attorney Dan Wilson backed her up. 

***

The Rio Blanco Sheriff’s Office and the Rangely Police Department cooperate with one another, but the relationship can be strained. The small police force long has grumbled that the larger Sheriff’s Office lures away Rangely’s officers with its slightly higher salaries. 

It hasn’t helped that the police chief had a history of butting heads with the sheriff whose election bid he opposed in 2014. When Mazzola won the seat, he reached out to Wilczek and deputized him and all Rangely police officers in what he calls a gesture of trust and reconciliation.

Their truce was short-lived. 

At first, Wilczek and Mazzola bickered over minor jurisdictional issues – what Kinney called “pissing matches.” Those turned into all-out war in 2016 when Kinney, unable to pursue a robbery suspect on foot because of an injury, yelled at him to stop and fired two warning shots into the air with people and a sheriff’s deputy nearby.  

Mazzola calls Kinney’s warning gunfire “boneheaded” and “reckless,” especially for a veteran officer. He was furious when Wilczek refused to seek an outside investigation, as is required for officer-involved shootings. Wilczek said it was not an officer-involved shooting because nobody was hit and his department’s policies did not prohibit officers from firing warning shots. 

The Ninth Judicial District Attorney’s office and agents from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation sided with the police. But Mazzola had lost trust in Rangely’s police force and its ability to work safely with his deputies. He told the town manager “your town is out of control” and declared all of Rangely’s officers undeputized because, he says, he did not want the legal liability for their missteps. 

“I touted Roy as the best cop in the county. (But) when he went to work for Rangely PD, something changed,” Mazzola says of Kinney.

Kinney took Mazzola’s condemnation as a personal attack from a man he had considered a close friend since Dec. 10, 2004.

Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola has been the most outspoken critic of the Rangely Police Department, calling the former regime reckless two years before Daniel Pierce was killed. (Courtesy of Rio Blanco County Sheriff's Office)
Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola has been the most outspoken critic of the Rangely Police Department, calling the former regime reckless two years before Daniel Pierce was killed. (Courtesy of Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Office)

It was on that date – 14 years to the day before Kinney would kill Pierce – that Mazzola killed a suspect in a reported domestic dispute after a car chase. Kinney, who also responded to that call, remembers Mazzola asking him immediately after, “Did I fuck up? Did I fuck it up?”

“I told him no, because in my eyes he hadn’t, even though in other people’s eyes he may have,” he says.

For many years, the two men would meet for dinner each Dec. 10 to, as Kinney puts it, “celebrate our survival.” But in recent years, they stopped getting together. “I guess our relationship changed,” he says. 

Mazzola agrees that the 2004 shooting “bonded us,” and says, “I’m not sure how things fell apart.”

The demise of their friendship would later cause Kinney to wonder if Mazzola tried to influence the investigation into Pierce’s death to make him look bad. 

***

Criticism of the Rangely PD intensified in 2017 when prominent residents were being pulled over in what they complained were overly aggressive traffic stops. Officers would snare drivers on pretexts such as turning on their blinkers too soon or having muddy license plates or objects dangling from their rear-view mirrors. Locals were angry to learn officers had a running contest to see who could make the most drunk driving arrests.

“We didn’t encourage competition, I’ll tell you that,” says Kinney, who also does not deny such a contest took place. “It’s human nature to be competitive. It has been going on among officers here for a long, long time.”

In January 2018, the town council held a three-hour public hearing about the police department, which Kinney refers to as “the Evisceration.”

The Rangely Police Department has been operating under 19-year-old policies that, despite the town manager's assertions to the contrary, hadn't been updated before Pierce's killing. They still haven't been updated 11 months later, and town council members are scheduled to consider changes later this month.
The Rangely Police Department has been operating under 19-year-old policies that, despite the town manager’s assertions to the contrary, hadn’t been updated before Pierce’s killing. They still haven’t been updated 11 months later, and town council members are scheduled to consider changes later this month.

Residents complained they felt picked on by over-amped cops abusing their power. Jeff Rector, a Rio Blanco County commissioner who had been pulled over twice, said their “heavy-handedness” was out of touch with “Rangely America.” “Everybody’s not a bad guy,” added Paul Fortunato, a former sheriff’s deputy. 

Sheriff Mazzola, in the meantime, became increasingly outspoken against the police force. “We’re public servants,” he says of law enforcement. “We’re not at war with the public.”

The five-person department lost two of its officers in 2018. One of them, Max Becker, left for the sheriff’s office because he felt his views about law enforcement didn’t line up with the police force. He later filed a complaint against the Rangely department alleging it was misrepresenting the length of time recorded for its traffic stops to justify the use of a drug-sniffing dog. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the DA’s office found discrepancies, but did not pursue the issue. 

A confidential informant, meanwhile, lodged a complaint through the sheriff’s office, claiming Kinney and Wilczek were throwing drug-tainted tennis balls into people’s cars to trigger canine drug searches. Both denied the allegation, and no action arose from that complaint, either.

“We’re public servants. We’re not at war with the public.”  – Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola

Distrust stung the police department hardest late last year when it started having trouble getting its cases prosecuted. Jessica King, the deputy DA at the time, says she was “constantly frustrated” by its chronic inability to provide her office with evidence and documentation from its arrests. 

She felt she was “stonewalled right and left,” mainly on drug cases, which she stopped prosecuting. But Mazzola says it was more than drug cases and that “She was totally bucking everything from Rangely.”

By the time Pierce was killed in December, Kinney says King’s refusal to prosecute cases had rendered his department essentially powerless.

Jesus talk

Still on the beat despite public scorn and interdepartmental drama, Kinney first met Pierce at an ATV race in September 2018. He would over the next months see the newcomer walking around town. “He always wanted a cigarette, saying his military check hadn’t come yet. I’d give him one and we’d stand on the street and talk.” Over many Marlboros, Pierce told him stories about his exploits in the special forces. “It was just extraordinary stuff that made me think, ‘No way, this guy’s full of crap,’” says Kinney, an Air Force veteran.

Their exchanges were friendly until Dec. 4 when the school district reported a man who fit Pierce’s description had been lingering around the high school trying to lure students into his blue van. Kinney and Wilczek went to question him outside the Main Street Café, where Pierce told them one of the students was his nephew, Sebastian. 

Pierce seemed lucid during that conversation. But he had never mentioned to Kinney he had family in town. And there was no student named Sebastian involved in the school encounter. The lieutenant tracked down Pierce’s mother by phone in California that day. Nuttbrock told him about her son’s paranoid schizophrenia and her decision to kick him out of her house.

“She opened her heart to me and I really thought we made a connection,” he says. “I told her that everything seemed to be fine with him, that he seemed to be fitting in, other than that weird school thing.” 

***

Four days later, on Dec. 8, employees of the Bank of the San Juans on Main Street reported a man fitting Pierce’s description had come by looking for a red-headed teller he thought might be in danger. They told him no redhead worked there. Still, he said he would return for her Monday and would be “coming with God.”

Kinney headed to Pierce’s place, where body camera video shows Pierce waiting for him on his front porch.

Screenshot from a police body camera video taken as Lt. Roy Kinney approached Roy Pierce's townhome on Dec. 8, 2018.
Screenshot from a police body camera video taken as Lt. Roy Kinney approached Daniel Pierce’s townhome on Dec. 8, 2018.

“Had a call from the bank. You spooked ‘em,” Kinney told him.

“You can put me where you want. Tonight everybody will be gone,” Pierce said. 

He invited the lieutenant into his living room where he kept only a rug, the back seat of a car he used as a sofa, and a radio blaring country music. After some conversation, he proclaimed himself “the Creator.”

“You think you’re the Creator?” Kinney asked. “Is the Creator harmful to people?” 

“No. Hell no. I’m not harmful to anybody, Roy.”

Pierce pointed in the direction of the bank, saying the redhead he was looking for that morning was his wife Debra.

“Your Debra doesn’t live here in Rangely,” Kinney told him.

Pierce, still wearing his wedding ring, said she had visited him the day before and that they were trying to get back together. Kinney asked where she went. 

“I… She… Roy, you can come and go. This is heaven. You can come and go from this place.”

When Kinney told him to stop scaring people, Pierce got in his face. “You want to shoot me? Shoot me, I’ll come back to life, shoot me.”

Kinney radioed for back-up. 

“You don’t need back-up. You want to put me in jail? Put me in jail,” Pierce challenged him. “You’re not going to put me in a hospital, either. You’re not going to fucking sedate me because medicine doesn’t work on me. You’ve got one choice. … Tonight the world ends if I don’t get my wife back.” 

“And if she doesn’t come back, what’s going to happen?” Kinney asked. 

“Like I said, the world will disappear tonight. Everybody in this town will disappear. That’s the way it goes.”

Kinney left after about 20 minutes. As he walked out Pierce’s door, the Rio Blanco County sheriff’s deputy who had responded as back-up commented:

“He is off his rocker. Is that an M-1 hold or what?”

***

Police officers have authority under Colorado law to take people into custody for an involuntary, 72-hour treatment evaluation if they are mentally ill and an imminent danger to themselves or others. The decision to put someone on an “M-1 hold” hinges on factors such as whether their thought process is illogical, they are hearing voices or seeing things that are not there, and they are showing signs of anger and aggression.

Kinney says Pierce was the second person in his life to “scare the hell out of me” — the first being an older cousin named Tommy Carl. 

“Looked a lot and talked a lot” like Pierce, he says.

He describes his cousin while reviewing the body camera video of what he calls Pierce’s “Jesus talk” in his home office. “Tommy Carl was a vicious, violent bastard. I don’t say that about Dan. But that’s what I see in his eyes when he gets angry here.”

“Everybody in this town will disappear. That’s the way it goes.” – Daniel Pierce 

His cousin died about 10 years ago: “Killed himself in Oklahoma, confronted by cops and they wouldn’t shoot him, so he shot himself.”

Kinney says the fact that Pierce rattled him that morning was not reason enough to “take away his freedom.” He had encountered several people during his three decades of policing who asked him to shoot them. “It’s not an uncommon thing,” he says. “And, Jesus, this is the second Jesus I’ve dealt with in my career.” 

He decided Pierce’s threats were not credible because he did not have the power to literally destroy the town.

Kinney called the hotline at Mind Springs Health – the contractor paid to provide mental health services in Rio Blanco County – and described his conversation with Pierce. He laid out his reasoning for why “he wasn’t M-1-able.” He says the counselor agreed.

Mind Springs President and CEO Sharon Raggio confirms the call was made and says it lasted 58 seconds. She says because her organization has no record of Pierce in its system, it was likely a “curbside consult.”

Still, she says, the call was out of the ordinary. 

“Usually when law enforcement calls, it’s for some kind of help. It’s not just ‘Does this person need an M-1 or not?’ but ‘Is this person safe and how can we engage them and get them into treatment?’”

As Raggio tells it, typical protocol would be for Mind Springs to reach out to the subject of the call and “ensure that a safety plan would be made.”

But no such outreach or safety plan was made on Pierce’s behalf. Kinney says he did not discuss those options during his phone call with Mind Springs and that the counselor did not offer them.

“He is off his rocker.” – Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Nye

The police incident report about Pierce’s visit to the bank and subsequent “Jesus talk” with Kinney was written in July 2019 – seven months after Pierce’s death – by Officer Ti Hamblin, who had been named Rangely’s interim police chief after Kinney’s and Wilczek’s forced retirements. Kinney hadn’t gotten around to writing it before he was put on leave after the shooting.

The report does not mention the lieutenant’s call to Mind Springs or any efforts to seek help for Pierce.

The pursuit

Two days after Kinney had visited Pierce, the lieutenant stopped in the parking lot of Rangely’s Kum & Go and was speaking with Butch McAlister, a former sheriff’s deputy. It was Monday evening, Dec. 10. McAlister had spotted a car broken down outside the convenience store and worried because the methamphetamine user inside was relying on a propane heater to keep warm.

Daniel Pierce enjoyed smoking outside Rangely's Kum & Go convenience store. He had his own van, but stole a truck from the store's parking lot the night of his death. (Photo by Paige Jones)
Daniel Pierce enjoyed smoking outside Rangely’s Kum & Go convenience store. He had his own van, but stole a truck from the store’s parking lot the night of his death. (Photo by Paige Jones)

Pierce showed up, walked between Kinney and McAlister, and said the man who had been causing trouble outside the high school had a woman tied up in the basement. Then, he went to smoke with the cashier.

“I told Butch that if there’s somebody dangerous, it’s that guy,” Kinney says.

The lieutenant headed to his office to fill out paperwork. Shortly after, he heard from dispatch that a white pickup truck had been stolen from the Kum & Go. He assumed the thief was the meth user with the broken-down car until he heard the description of the suspect.

“I was just like, ‘Oh, God, it’s him.’” 

He was alarmed to hear from dispatch that the truck Pierce had stolen had a rifle on the front seat. 

***

Sheriff’s Deputy Max Becker, the former Rangely police officer, spotted the stolen truck on state Hwy. 139 southeast of town. Pierce was driving about 40 miles an hour, well below the speed limit, when Becker radioed that he would follow him and wait for backup from Kinney, who was the only other law enforcement officer on duty and nearby. Becker also asked dispatch to alert law enforcement in neighboring Mesa County, about 50 miles in the direction Pierce was heading. He says he planned to follow Pierce all the way to Mesa County if necessary because he did not want to escalate the situation.

Pierce stopped in the middle of the road and got out of the truck. Becker initiated a “high risk traffic stop,” drawing his gun and telling him to show his hands. “He clearly (saw) who and what I am,” Becker says. Yet, “he seemed surprised.” 

Ignoring Becker’s commands, Pierce got back into the stolen truck and continued driving southbound.

Rio Blanco County Sheriff's Deputy Max Becker had resigned from his job as a Rangely Police officer a few months before the car chase that ended with Daniel Pierce's death. Becker didn't agree with how aggressively his former bosses were pursuing him. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)
Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Deputy Max Becker had resigned from his job as a Rangely Police officer a few months before the car chase that ended with Daniel Pierce’s death. Becker didn’t agree with how aggressively his former bosses were pursuing him. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)

Kinney chimed in about Pierce over the radio: “That party, I know who it is. 10-96 on him” – “10-96” being police code for “mental suspect.” “He was very confrontational the other day,” Kinney warned. “The guy is nuts.”

The lieutenant caught up to Becker and asked if he could safely pass him and Pierce, “get some distance,” and lay out spike strips to disable the truck. Becker did not object, advising that there was a straightaway coming up where Kinney could set the strips safely.

Kinney made the pass, but Pierce then turned the stolen truck around and headed back north on State Highway 139. Kinney caught up immediately behind Pierce, telling him several times by name over a loudspeaker to pull over. 

By this point, Pierce’s driving had become erratic, leading Kinney to speculate over the radio that Pierce could be “messing with that rifle.” Meanwhile, Wilczek had joined the pursuit and deployed spike strips further north. Hamblin, too, had responded. Rangely’s entire police force, plus Becker, was now involved.

Kinney decided to pass Pierce after he failed to respond to the loudspeaker. As he did so, Pierce suddenly crossed the centerline, veering toward Kinney’s patrol car and causing the lieutenant to nearly run off the road to avoid being hit. There would be disagreement later as to whether he was trying to ram Kinney’s car, or just driving erratically. Kinney would say Pierce was trying to kill him.

As Becker tells it, Wilczek escalated the situation by driving “right on [Pierce’s] bumper.” “It was an indicator to me that things were getting a little bit ramped up,” he says.

The pursuit took place in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction until Pierce approached the intersection of state highways 139 and 64, within Rangely’s town limits. The spike strips the officers set up deflated the front tires of the stolen truck, limiting Pierce’s ability to control it. Kinney was concerned that if Pierce turned left at the intersection, no officers would be there to protect the town. He directed Becker to “push him off the road” and guard against any oncoming traffic.

Because ramming a vehicle amounts to use of deadly force, Becker refused. Later, opinions would differ on whether that decision affected the outcome.

Officer Hamblin followed Kinney’s order, using the bumper of his patrol car to push the truck as Pierce accelerated, making it spin off the side of the road near the intersection. The truck accelerated forward again, striking Kinney’s patrol car with enough force to significantly damage the car and injure Kinney’s neck in a way that would eventually require surgery and limit his range of motion. Pierce reversed after the first impact, pushing Hamblin’s car sideways. He pulled forward again, bounced off the front of Becker’s patrol car to hit Kinney’s again. The revving of the truck’s engine drowns out almost all other sound in the video. The squad cars had Pierce cornered. 

Wilczek, by this point, was out of his car standing alongside the stolen truck. Pierce reversed again. The chief shouted to his colleagues that he would fire at its back tires to disable them, then did so with two shots. 

Kinney, still in his patrol car, didn’t hear Wilczek, but he heard the shots and thought Pierce had fired at the chief. He says he could not see whether Pierce was holding a gun, but did see a big smile on his face. He interpreted that grin to mean “I was next.”

It was fast and loud, that moment in the December darkness when Kinney shot through the truck’s front windshield, hitting Pierce twice in the head.

Then time stopped.

“Everything, everything in me seemed to freeze,” Kinney says.

He, Becker and Hamblin secured the car, finding that the rifle in it had been left untouched. Pierce, wearing his Army cap, was slumped in the driver’s seat. “He’s dead,” Kinney said, though Pierce was still breathing. Paramedics arrived to transport Pierce to nearby Rangely District Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after. 

One of those paramedics was Shanna Kinney, the head of Rangely’s emergency services and the lieutenant’s wife. She had been on standby at the hospital, listening to the radio traffic on the police scanner. When she heard Becker defy her husband’s order to push the truck off the road, she says her “heart sank.”

“In my entire career I had never heard or seen that happen before,” she says. “I knew that [Becker] falling to the rear [of the pursuit] was going to leave our three officers to deal with this and I had a feeling that this was going bad.”

“Over Forever!”

Most everyone in Rangely heard within a day or two there had been a police chase and some guy had been killed.

Chris Wills knew more details than most because an investigator had come to question her about her tenant and because Pierce’s van had been towed to Wild Willie’s Storage, Wills’ business. 

She went to the townhome he rented from her and found on the kitchen counter a calendar with two notes jotted in marker. “The Ends” reads the note on Dec. 5. The one on Dec. 9 reads “Over Forever!”

Pierce died on the 10th.

“My husband and I were sitting there like ‘Oh my God, this was suicide by cop.’ We figured then that it was orchestrated,” she says.

This calendar found in Daniel Pierce's home suggests he planned to end his life the week of his killing and lured Rangely police into a suicide-by-cop. (Photo by Kurt Miller)
This calendar found in Daniel Pierce’s home suggests he planned to end his life the week of his killing and lured Rangely police into a suicide-by-cop. (Photo by Kurt Miller)

***

Pierce’s killing was Rangely’s first police-related homicide since 1981, when one of its officers killed a sniper at the town’s post office. Yet town officials stayed mum, not even mentioning it during a town council meeting the next day. They put Kinney and Wilczek – two-thirds of the police force at that time – on extended administrative leave pending criminal and internal affairs investigations.

DA Cheney, in a report about his criminal probe in March, wrote he considered “potential violations of police policies and best practices as a factor,” but ultimately cleared Kinney and Wilczek of criminal wrongdoing. Given that Pierce had used the stolen truck as a weapon, the DA found, they could not be faulted for defending themselves and each other.

Rangely’s new town manager, Lisa Piering, and Mayor Andy Shaffer made no public statements about the shooting, both citing confidentiality around personnel matters. Piering refused to release Kinney’s personnel file to the officers in the Craig Police Department who were conducting the internal affairs inquiry. According to the report, she told investigators that Town Attorney Dan Wilson “did not feel comfortable” turning over the file. 

Piering ignored the Herald Times’ questions, even months later, about what had happened with Wilczek and Kinney and who was running the police department.

She told The Independent in August she did not know and had not asked if police had sought mental health intervention for Pierce. She said Rangely officers “have training, obviously, on all sorts of human behavioral issues.” But that was an overstatement. In a career spanning nearly 30 years, Kinney’s mental health training amounted to a one-day workshop four years earlier.

Piering said Rangely’s town council had no policy discussions after Pierce’s killing because nobody had called for one and there was “no need.” She defended the officers, saying they had followed a set of police policies the town had newly adopted.

Former Rangely Town Clerk Lisa Piering was the acting town manager the night of Daniel Pierce's killing, and formally accepted the town manager's job the next day. She has made several misrepresentations, withheld key documents, and refused to answer – or seek answers – about the shooting and its aftermath. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)
Former Rangely Town Clerk Lisa Piering was the acting town manager the night of Daniel Pierce’s killing, and formally accepted the town manager’s job the next day. She has made several misrepresentations, withheld key documents, and refused to answer – or seek answers – about the shooting and its aftermath. (Photo by Roxie Fromang)

But she was wrong. Chief Wilczek had been working on revising Rangely’s police policies since at least 2010. Former Town Manager Peter Brixius says in his last year in that job — he left in August 2018 — there was an “extensive push” to get new policies in place. Wilczek didn’t get it done. On the night Pierce was killed, officers were still operating under a set of policies and procedures adopted 18 years earlier, copied from those of the Grand Junction Police Department. 

New policies still have not been adopted 11 months later and are scheduled to be considered later this month by the town council.

Piering, by the time of that August interview, had received the internal affairs report, which clearly showed officers broke several police department policies when they chased and killed Pierce. 

She and Wilson refused to release that report, which predated by four months a new state law requiring police internal affairs records be open to the public. The old statute governing those records required government agencies to do a balancing test weighing public transparency interests against law enforcement officers’ desire for privacy. 

“Allowing the public unfettered access to the report you request would seriously impair the privacy interests of those involved…,” concludes a letter they had signed by Ti Hamblin, the new police chief who has refused to discuss anything related to Pierce’s killing.

The Independent’s First Amendment lawyer Steve Zansberg pointed out in a letter to town officials that Hamblin had a conflict of interest in determining privacy interests because he was directly involved in the Pierce pursuit. 

Piering eventually agreed to release the internal affairs report, but with all the conclusions redacted. Those are the important parts – the ones the public needs to determine whether police went rogue the night they killed Pierce.

Rangely Town Manager Lisa Piering at first refused to release the internal affairs report about Daniel Pierce's killing. Then she released it with the conclusions redacted, leaving the public unable to assess if officers violated police policies. (Photo by Niki Turner)
Rangely Town Manager Lisa Piering at first refused to release the internal affairs report about Daniel Pierce’s killing. Then she released it with the conclusions redacted, leaving the public unable to assess if officers violated police policies. (Photo by Niki Turner)

Releasing the unredacted report, Piering wrote in an affidavit, “would have a hugely chilling effect on my ability to supervise my employees and to fairly exercise my discretion in making employment related decisions and consider future changes to policy.” She, the council and town employees “would be inundated with criticism, opinions, and adamant recommendations of what I should do, and what the Council should do, relative to each of the decisions I and my staff have made since the incident occurred,” she continued.

The end result, Piering wrote, would be “that our governance of the Town of Rangely would be severely negatively impacted.”

“It’s going to rekindle this whole thing that has went on.” – Rangely Mayor Andy Shaffer

Experts on government transparency point out that Colorado has an open records law precisely so the public can evaluate officials and hold them accountable. 

“Law enforcement officers, in particular, require scrutiny because they wield so much power,” says Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. “Secrecy fosters mistrust, but transparency helps to build trust between a police department and a community.”

Under the new state law, Roberts notes, only limited redactions would have been allowed.

Rangely Mayor Andy Shaffer – who is also the town's fire chief – has defended the lack of transparency around Daniel Pierce's killing, saying nothing good can come of reporting about the incident. (Photo courtesy of the Rangely town web page)
Rangely Mayor Andy Shaffer – who is also the town’s fire chief – has defended the lack of transparency around Daniel Pierce’s killing, saying nothing good can come of reporting about the incident. (Photo courtesy of the Rangely town webpage)

When Piering agreed to an interview with the Herald Times in September, she invited Mayor Shaffer to the meeting. Publishing this article, they said, would re-traumatize the officers involved, “dredge things up” and “stir up a can of worms for this community.”  

“It’s going to rekindle this whole thing that has went on… It’s not a favorable position for anybody,” Shaffer warned the newspaper. “From me to you in small town America, that’s what’s going to happen. That’s where it’s going and it’s not going to be nice for anybody.”

The story, they said, is over.

***

An unredacted copy of the internal affairs report obtained in our reporting concluded that Wilczek should have cleared with Kinney his decision to fire at the truck’s tires. The chief admitted several times his lack of familiarity with his own department’s policies on pursuits, use of force, and deadly force. 

The report found that Kinney broke department policy by taking tactical control of the pursuit outside of the town limits without formal approval from Max Becker, the sheriff’s deputy who first spotted Pierce driving the stolen truck. Ramming the truck and shooting Pierce without confirming he was holding a weapon, investigators determined, were unjustified uses of deadly force. 

Investigators did not find Hamblin at fault for ramming the truck because he was following Kinney’s directions. They seem to have ignored that the officer now in charge of Rangely’s police department admitted he would have asked to ram the truck if the lieutenant had not made the order. 

The report cited Kinney’s 2016 warning shots incident at least three times – saying at one point it was symptomatic of a lack of leadership in the Rangely PD. It said the lieutenant broke department policy by taking unreasonable risks in pursuing Pierce so aggressively.

Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney at his kitchen table, breaking months of silence about the man he killed and job he lost in a December 2018 shooting. (Photo by Susan Greene)
Former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney at his kitchen table, breaking months of silence about the man he killed and job he lost in a December 2018 shooting. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Kinney, in response, says he “started calling the shots because Becker wasn’t doing it” – a point Becker does not dispute. Kinney points to a part of the video in which he asked Becker if he could pass Pierce on the highway, and “Max gave me an affirmative.” “I was backing Max up, and I believe I was helping him to bring this to an end safely. Helping does not mean showing up and being a blind and deaf dunce.”

He most objects to the report downplaying the threat he says Pierce posed. He asserts that Pierce tried to sideswipe his patrol car during the pursuit rather than merely “swerved,” as the report phrases it. It is unclear from the dashboard video which account is more accurate. 

Kinney did not help his case by arguing semantics, insisting the truck was “pushed” rather than “rammed” off the road. He was defensive and snarky at points. Asked why he did not follow Becker’s lead in letting Pierce continue driving toward Mesa County, he told his reviewer, “Why? Because we didn’t.” 

“I honestly believe that they were trying to get us torn down so the sheriff could take over.”  – former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney

The investigation found that Kinney had taken half of a 300 mg Hydrocodone pill early the morning of the incident, more than 14 hours before he killed Pierce. 

He had been on the prescription for chronic back pain since the 1990s and had disclosed it on his job application and to Wilczek and the town manager. He also had a signed medical waiver to keep taking it. Still, the inquiry deemed his use of the drug to have violated Rangely’s code of conduct.

“It did not affect me while on duty,” he says. “But if I violated their code, OK, they got me, … especially if they’re looking for excuses.”

Kinney believes Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola stirred criticism about the police department and intentionally influenced the inquiry against him and Wilczek by telling internal affairs investigators about the September 2016 warning shots incident.

“I honestly believe that they were trying to get us torn down so the sheriff could take over.”

He acknowledges that theory “may sound paranoid,” but says, “Having been hit with back to back to back to back complaints … we have every reason to be.”

More personally, Kinney feels burned by the former friend whose own officer-involved shooting he defended 14 years earlier. The brotherhood he had with Mazzola, he says, has been betrayed.

Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola blasts former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney – not for killing Daniel Pierce, but for disrespecting jurisdictional boundaries during the December 2018 pursuit. Kinney supported Mazzola when he shot and killed a suspect exactly 14 years prior. (Photo by Caitlin Walker)
Rio Blanco County Sheriff Anthony Mazzola blasts former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney – not for killing Daniel Pierce, but for disrespecting jurisdictional boundaries during the December 2018 pursuit. Kinney supported Mazzola when he shot and killed a suspect exactly 14 years prior. (Photo by Caitlin Walker)

“That’s a sad damn thing.”

Mazzola says he spoke with internal affairs investigators because they reached out to him with questions. Both he and Becker acknowledge that Kinney “is a better tactician” than Becker. “Roy has a very strong personality. He’s a leader and he’ll take charge,” Mazzola says.

But he draws a line, saying, “There are jurisdictions for a reason.” Kinney taking control of the pursuit from Becker, he says, amounted to Rangely police “not respecting our jurisdiction.”

Michael Benza, senior instructor of law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, says a pattern of policy violations and police overzealousness could have created serious legal liability for Rangely. Piering’s refusal to release Kinney’s personnel file to the internal affairs investigators was, in his opinion, a “red flag.”

All of those actions, he says, “add zeros” to a potential lawsuit against the town. 

Neither the DA’s nor internal affairs reports addressed the judgment calls Kinney and his department made in response to Pierce’s mental illness or whether different decisions or protocols may have prevented the fatal outcome. And no one in town leadership asked how or why a man police knew was sick ended up with two of its bullets in his head.

Pierce’s life and death were reduced to a closed police matter. Nobody said it was a shame, a tragedy what happened, or that maybe there are cracks in the system.

Judgment calls

Rose Nuttbrock wants to believe her son wanted to live.

If he was suicidal, she asks, why were his last letters to her so upbeat and “why would he have just refilled his high blood pressure prescription in November?”

Daniel Pierce's mother, Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, CA, has considered taking legal action about his killing by Rangely police. "This never should have happened," she says.
Daniel Pierce’s mother, Rose Nuttbrock of Riverside, Calif., has considered taking legal action about his killing by Rangely police. “This never should have happened,” she says.

She tells herself he didn’t mean to steal the white pickup truck and must have thought it was his because he used to own one in Missouri that looked like it. She reckons he stopped on the highway and got out of the truck, confused, because he didn’t know why the police were chasing him. About the “Over Forever!” Pierce noted on his calendar, she thinks maybe he was referring to his time in Rangely, where he had hoped to escape from his problems – and not, she says, referring to his life.

“Does Colorado care? Do they even care if an officer, you know, shoots someone, if they kill a man with mental illness?” – Rose Nuttbrock, Daniel Pierce’s mother

But reason weighs on her. Her own experience reminds her of those voices, that sickness in his head. And she realizes her Danny was sick of being sick.

She understands his behavior was causing problems for the police. What she cannot abide is that Kinney knew about his paranoid schizophrenia, yet killed him anyway.

“Why couldn’t they have used tear gas or something? Why did they have to shoot him? If he was holding a gun, (wouldn’t they) have seen it? … That just isn’t right,” she says. “If this had happened in California, newspapers would have been knocking down my door. I mean, why wasn’t I hearing from anybody? Does Colorado care? Do they even care if an officer, you know, shoots someone, if they kill a man with mental illness?”

***

Rio Blanco County is a dangerous place to have a mental health crisis.

Residents here are nearly twice as likely as the average Coloradan to be uninsured. With about 6,300 residents, the county has far less than half the mental health providers per capita than the state average. Countywide, according to Mental Health Colorado, it has two licensed professional counselors, two clinical social workers and one registered psychotherapist. It has no psychologists and no nurses specializing in mental health.

The county health department long has ranked mental health – and substance abuse issues – as its top concern, but its latest progress report in 2018 found it had made “little traction” on prevention and treatment efforts. 

Some 57% of residents here cited “mental health stigma” as the reason they have been unable to obtain mental health services, and 61% reported being uncomfortable discussing personal problems, according to data compiled by Mental Health Colorado. Those percentages eclipse the statewide averages of 22% and 31%, respectively. 

Sharma Vaughn, who worked until August as the chief nursing officer at Rangely District Hospital, says this community too often perceives mental health problems as a character flaw rather than an illness. Those attitudes are largely cultural – “the rugged individualistic West,” she says. But she sees them also as reflections of an under-funded rural health care system.

“If we have an emergency and we don’t have the resources, it can be between an hour or two hours before someone gets to us with that specific skill set,” she says. About the Pierce case in particular, “My worry is that I’m not sure what resources we had for him and I’m not sure what resources we have for law enforcement professionals to make sure we have someone in crisis getting the help they need.”

The national model for preparing first responders is a 40-hour crisis intervention training (CIT) that originated in Memphis and teaches officers to recognize acute mental disorders so they can help people access care and treatment. It is designed to promote the safety of both the public and law enforcement.

Several police forces in Colorado require officers to have such training. Rangely is not one of them. Officials from small and rural law enforcement agencies say they do not have the money or person-power to spare officers for a whole workweek. Why Rangely does not is unclear because Piering refuses to answer questions about the training, saying she was not the police chief or town manager at the times in question and feels uncomfortable “continuing to guess or speculate.” She attached to an email the still-unadopted new department policy manual.

It has been almost a year since Daniel Pierce's shooting and Rangely's Police Department has yet put its officers through a mental health training. (Photo by Paige Jones)
It has been almost a year since Daniel Pierce’s shooting and Rangely’s Police Department has yet to put its officers through a mental health training. (Photo by Paige Jones)

For Rangely police, mental health training has consisted of an eight-hour class called Mental Health First Aid that has been offered only a handful of times every few years in the community. The course covers the basics such as identifying signs of depression and anxiety in others and in yourself. It does not discuss conditions such as paranoid schizophrenia, and is not specifically for law enforcement. The classes typically are open to the public, attended by everyone from librarians to business owners.

Sarah Valentino of Steamboat Springs taught the course as part of her work with the Northwest Colorado Community Health Partnership. “Whenever I went down there, the classes filled up right away,” she says of Rio Blanco County.

She offered a day-long class in Rangely in March 2018 that was attended by Deputy Becker from the sheriff’s office and Hamblin and Wilczek from Rangely police. Kinney was not there. He had taken the course in 2014 for which he received a Mental Health First Aid certification that expired in 2017. 

Kinney says that day-long workshop was the only mental health training he remembers having in his 28 years as a law enforcer in Rio Blanco County. “Come to think of it, yeah, that’s not a lot.”

After the March 2018 training in Rangely, the Partnership planned to offer a follow up course specifically for law enforcement in northwest Colorado. The sponsoring group, Mental Health First Aid Colorado, had funding from Colorado’s Attorney General’s office to pay for it, and rural agencies such as Rangely police were meant to be prioritized. But the training never happened because the money was not fully allocated or spent. Barb Becker, who runs the statewide program – and is not related to Deputy Becker – says, “We got a delayed start in terms of getting the contract signed.”

Next month will mark the year anniversary of Pierce’s killing. Since then, Rangely Police Chief Hamblin has not put his police force through mental health and crisis response training. “I did not have the manpower to ‘need to’ hold any mental health training until now,” he wrote in an email. Now that he has hired three new officers, is advertising for a lieutenant and just requested funding for a sixth officer, he said he is trying to schedule a class “for early next year.” 

The class he was referring to was the basic Mental Health First Aid eight-hour workshop.

***

It is easy, experts warn, to assume that better mental health training for law enforcement could change the outcomes of cases like Pierce’s. 

“But I don’t know that’s necessarily true,” Valentino says. 

“When you have law enforcement responding to unmet mental health needs, bad things happen,” adds Vincent Atchity, the new president of Mental Health Colorado, the state’s premier advocacy group, who has spent much of his career trying to disentangle people with mental illness from the criminal justice system.

Until recently, Colorado was one of six states that still used jails to house people on involuntary mental health holds known as M-1s. But big city law enforcement agencies were complaining about jail overcrowding and rural departments struggled to meet the 72-hour limit for M-1 holds because of the time it could take to transfer people to and from clinics for mental health evaluations. The legislature in 2016 passed a bill to extend the 72-hour limit, but then-Gov. John Hickenlooper vetoed it on grounds that evaluation and treatment for people in crisis should not be delayed. In 2017, lawmakers passed – and Hickenlooper signed – a law requiring that people on involuntary holds be housed in clinical settings such as psychiatric wards rather than in jails. 

There is no such ward at Rangely District Hospital. Rio Blanco County has a contract with West Springs Hospital, which is run by Mind Springs Health, the organization Kinney called about Pierce. The hospital is 92 miles south in Grand Junction.

West Springs is the only psychiatric hospital between Denver and Salt Lake City. It had 32 beds on the day Kinney called, and had been at capacity for years, with a list of patients waiting for inpatient care. “The truth is they were always full, every day, and every day we had a wait list,” says Mind Springs’ President and CEO Sharon Raggio.

Daniel Pierce slipped through cracks in police protection and mental health care in California and Missouri before doing so in Colorado. (Photo courtesy of the Pierce family)
Daniel Pierce slipped through cracks in police protection and mental health care in California and Missouri before doing so in Colorado. (Photo courtesy of the Pierce family)

Her organization addressed the problem by adding 32 more beds, doubling West Springs’ capacity. Those beds became available on Dec. 11, 2018 – the day after Pierce was killed.

***

Pierce fell through other cracks in mental health care services that also involved Mind Springs.

“What I do know is that Mind Springs encourages officers to not do M-1s. Mind Springs encourages officers to defer to Mind Springs,” Valentino says. “As the professionals, as the people who have the most training around this, they didn’t want people in law enforcement to be making those decisions about M-1s inappropriately.”

Mind Springs’ Raggio frames her organization’s stance a bit differently, saying law enforcement officers often feel “uncomfortable” seeking M-1 holds because they are not mental health professionals and “because it’s a big deal to take away someone’s constitutional right to be free.” “Generally speaking, we encourage law enforcement to use what we call an M-0.5, instead,” she says. 

M-0.5 holds, made possible by a state law that went into effect six months before Pierce’s death, are an option for first responders, medical and mental health professionals to take someone who does not meet the “imminent danger” criterion of an M-1 hold to an outpatient clinic for walk-in services such as evaluation and treatment. Those initiating them are supposed to coordinate with a so-called “mobile crisis service” – which is required in each county by state law and must arrive within two hours in rural areas – to create a safety plan for the person in crisis. The mini-M-1 hold is a half-measure to address mental health breakdowns as health crises rather than criminal ones and to make sure that people with urgent needs like Pierce get the intervention they need.

Some, mostly well-resourced and urban communities in Colorado have formed co-responder teams that bring together law enforcement, paramedics and mental health clinicians to respond to calls like the ones about Pierce from the school and bank in Rangely. Rio Blanco County’s public health department says its communities can not afford such a team. As with many of its mental health needs, the county relies on Mind Springs to act as its mobile crisis service under a subcontract with the state.

“It makes you wonder if the price of a life in a rural area is lower than the price of a life somewhere else.” – Ken Davis, advocate for mental health care in Rural Colorado 

Whenever someone asked Mind Springs for mobile response to a home, business, hospital or jail, Raggio says, “We responded.”

“We would have been happy to correspond with Lt. Kinney,” she adds. “He could have put Mr. Pierce on an M-0.5 and taken him over to our office. That was a legal option.”

Kinney says he did not know about the mobile crisis service or an M-0.5 hold until asked about them in an interview for this story. 

“I have never heard of either.”

Alice Harvey, a former emergency room nurse who took the job as public health director in Rio Blanco County in summer 2019, says she has noticed confusion about the mobile crisis service and how it’s supposed to work with law enforcement.

“It’s a bit of a mess, honestly, because there’s such need and we’re all scrambling to provide resources.”

Raggio says the Pierce case will prompt her to make sure that Mind Springs’ hotline counselors offer support to first responders who call in seeking M-1 holds but do not ask for other help.

“I think we need to go back and better train people on those types of calls,” she says. “I agree this was a tragedy. It’s just terrible when anything like this happens. Let’s all work together to close the cracks and make sure this never happens again. That’s really what it’s got to be about.”

Ken Davis, a mental health care provider in Moffat County and longtime advocate of better crisis intervention services in northwest Colorado, says he feels sick knowing “We’ve created a kind of perfect storm in which somebody with a persistent severe mental health problem is not getting the treatment, not getting the support, with people in the position of authority not recognizing the problem, and we’re having these kinds of unfortunate outcomes.”

“This is a man’s life. It makes you wonder if the price of a life in a rural area is lower than the price of a life somewhere else. I hate to tell you that the answer is yes.”

Pierce’s death, adds Vaughn, the nurse in Rangely, “Might be a really good example of a time when the community needs to come together to discuss mental illness.”

***

There has been no such coming together, no public conversation about what Pierce was enduring, and no discussion about whether Rangely police are equipped to prevent deaths like his now and in the future. Residents have been left to surmise what ailed Pierce, what might have saved him, and how their police force responded to his crisis.

Wills, Pierce’s landlord, kicks herself for not offering her tenant spiritual help. “I feel kinda bad because if I had known what was going on with him, maybe I would have called a pastor to check in on him.”

Jillien Wade is a lifelong Rangely resident who works as a postal carrier in town. She never met Pierce, but heard about his killing.

“There were rumors … like that he had Huntington’s disease,” she says. 

In the absence of more information about the shooting, she “assume(s) the police department made the best decision in that moment.”

“I want to believe that was the situation.”

Not talking

Mazzola, after killing the suspect who tried to ambush him in 2004, saw a counselor who urged him to “tell the story to anyone who will listen” and to keep telling it until he didn’t feel the need to anymore. 

Talking about that shooting, the sheriff says, was therapy for him, a path to move forward.

Kinney has not had that option. 

“You want people to know so they’re not sitting there thinking, whatever, like we’re just a bunch of yahoos because, frankly, I’m destroyed by that.” – former Rangely Police Lt. Roy Kinney

The town made him sign a confidentiality agreement when Piering, Mayor Shaffer, Town Attorney Wilson, and the agency that insures Rangely police forced his retirement in May. He – along with Chief Wilczek – had to agree under the threat of a civil suit and damages not to “disparage” the town, Piering, or other town officials, especially as it relates to decisions made after Pierce’s death.

“So, basically, I’m under contract not to say anything.”

Not saying anything led Kinney to hole up most of the past year in his home office reviewing body camera and dashboard camera videos. He has memorized the twists and turns of the pursuit and the back and forth of the police radio chatter. He watches the Jesus talk video thinking “I know what’s coming, what if we could turn back and M-1 him,” and he sobs.

Former Police Lt. Roy Kinney cries in his home office as he talks about what he would say to Daniel Pierce's wife and mother. (Photo by Susan Greene)
Former Police Lt. Roy Kinney cries in his home office as he talks about what he would say to Daniel Pierce’s wife and mother. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Saying nothing prodded Kinney to pour over Rangely police policies, transcripts of internal affairs interviews, Colorado’s M-1 law, and studies about paranoid schizophrenia. 

The silence spurred a depression that has, if nothing else, made him realize how clueless he had been about depression.

“It consumes me, this shooting. It’s all I think about,” he says.

Kinney describes his town as a “rumor basin” – a place where if people do not know something about you, they’ll make it up. The longer the silence goes on, he says, the worse it gets.

“You want clarity. You want people to know so they’re not sitting there thinking, whatever, like we’re just a bunch of yahoos because, frankly, I’m destroyed by that,” he says. 

He points to the body camera video playing on his screen and adds, “They don’t know Dan Pierce. They don’t know Jesus.”

The silence became unbearable for Kinney by September, the weekend his daughter was getting married and word had spread through Piering that journalists from the Herald Times and The Colorado Independent were onto the Pierce story and might crash the wedding. Through channels, he says, Piering let him know that the angle of this story would be that he got away with murder. 

He decided to end his silence, regardless of the risks. He wants to tell the people of his town, “I did everything I could, knowing what I knew then, to protect myself, fellow officers, the community and him.”

“I heard the shots and believed Dan shot at Vince and that’s why I killed him,” he says. “There is nothing to cover up. I know in my heart that his goal was to die that night and I’m just really sad that I was any part of it. All I need is to let people know that I didn’t violate the trust they had in us. We were out of options.”

***

Kinney replays in his memory his conversation with Pierce’s mom. It haunts him that he had reassured Nuttbrock after she “spilled her guts to me,” then killed her son less than a week later. It makes it harder knowing that he may have been the person in town Pierce most trusted. 

“I thought if anybody could talk him down it would be me.”

Kinney’s confidentiality agreement has kept him from reaching out to Nuttbrock since the shooting. It also has kept him from contacting Pierce’s wife, Debra, whose absence in Pierce’s life has, in some ways, become an absence in his.

If the two had spoken, Debra would have questioned what went down that night on that road into Rangely.

“Did he need to use brute force? Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know,” she says of Kinney.

Daniel Pierce's widow Debra tried for years to prod her husband back into treatment. He refused. She empathizes with the police lieutenant who took his life. (Photo by Julie Denesha)
Daniel Pierce’s widow Debra tried for years to prod her husband back into treatment. He refused. She empathizes with the police lieutenant who took his life. (Photo by Julie Denesha)

She also would have told him about things that may have made the past 11 months easier. Like Pierce’s plan, if his pain got too bad, to “run out in front of a truck and end it all.” And his infatuation with O.J. Simpson’s 1994 Bronco chase from police, which struck such a chord with him that he would talk about it years later. And her suspicion that some part of her late husband “knew what he was doing and that he was tired of the voices and wanted to end this.”

Had it not been for the silence, Debra would have told Kinney she knows the corners Pierce could put you in: You were damned if you tried to help him, damned if you hurt him, and damned if he hurt somebody else and you were blamed for not having intervened.

She would have told the lieutenant she knew what he saw in Pierce’s eyes that day in his townhouse and two nights later, cornered in the stolen truck. And she would have said what is perhaps hardest to say: That as much as we may feel for people with acute mental illness, there can be something terrorizing that grows from their madness that needs to be stopped, sometimes at any cost.

Had Kinney been able to reach out, Debra would have said “I’m glad Red’s not hearing the voices, wherever he is.” 

She also would have told him, “I don’t hold anything against you.”


CU regents passed over more experienced and prominent applicants when picking Kennedy as president A list leaked to the The Independent also shows mainly Republicans made the cut

0
0
Former GOP Congressman Mark Kennedy speaks at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus on May 2, 2019, the day the board of regents named him as the system's new president. The announcement that Kennedy was the sole finalist for the $850,000-a-year job was met with unprecedented protest and concern that politics, not merit drove the process. (Photo by Susan Greene)

The University of Colorado’s elected board of regents passed over applicants with more experience running universities and more distinguished careers when it hired conservative former Congressman Mark Kennedy as the system’s president last spring.

A list of 30 names leaked anonymously to The Colorado Independent and authenticated by the board’s lawyer shows Kennedy, then president of the University of North Dakota (UND), edged out the heads of far bigger schools such as Penn State, Rutgers and Texas A&M, as well as several prominent Coloradans, including former Gov. Bill Ritter and former Lt. Gov. Donna Lynne.

Kennedy’s unremarkable performance at UND — which has a student body one-fifth that of CU’s and a budget that’s one-eighth the size — and his far-right voting record in Congress made him a controversial lone finalist whose values, thousands of CU students, faculty members and alumni argued, were inconsistent with the university’s. The secrecy around his hiring by a Republican-controlled board that promised applicants confidentiality led to concern among critics that partisan politics, not just merit, determined the outcome. 

The Colorado Independent’s reporting, including interviews with a dozen applicants and others close to the hiring process, shows some of the concern was warranted. The Independent found that a selection committee dominated by Republican community members and advised by a consultant with strong Republican ties narrowed a field of about 160 people to short lists consisting mostly of Republicans. Robert Engel, the retired president of the Denver-based CoBank, was one of regents’ favorites for the job. But sources say several regents wanted a former Republican office holder and whittled the selection committee’s six top choices down to Kennedy, who had represented a Minnesota district in Congress, and Kerry Healey, former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts who went on to run Babson College, a small private school in that state.

Speaking for the board, its chairman, Grand Junction Republican Glen Gallegos said party affiliation and politics did not factor into the hiring process of a university whose anti-discrimination policy prohibits even the asking of the question. Gallegos declined comment on how Kennedy stacked up against other applicants and defended the promise of confidentiality, calling the leak of the list of names “regrettable.” 

Though regents have confirmed the accuracy of the list, none publicly have explained the decision to hire Kennedy for the $850,000-a-year job over others with stellar resumes. Instead, four Republican regents are seeking an investigation to identify the source of the leak.

The agreement

The list of 30 applicants was emailed in late February to the board of regents by its secretary and lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke, as CU was searching to replace its longtime President Bruce Benson, who was retiring in July. In October — six months after the board chose Kennedy in a controversial, party-line vote — the list was mailed to The Independent’s newsroom in an envelope with no return name or address and accompanied by a handwritten note reading, “I trust you will handle this information ethically.”

On regents’ behalf, O’Rourke asked The Independent to help regents honor a pledge they made to applicants that their identities would remain confidential. That pledge, regents said, ensured the highest qualified pool. 

The Independent refused, citing Colorado’s open records law and a suit The Boulder Daily Camera filed against regents weeks earlier. The suit asserts the list of applicants and materials about them should be open to public scrutiny as a way for Coloradans to assess how the elected regents are doing their jobs.

CU Board or of Regents (Courtesy of CU)
2019 CU Board or of Regents (Courtesy of CU)

Regents, concerned about lawsuits for breaching confidentiality, agreed through O’Rourke to authenticate the list in exchange for The Independent’s agreement to conceal the names of three of the applicants. They are the presidents of a large southern university and a mid-size West Coast university and the CEO of a health care corporation, each of whom informed the board that being outed for having sought the job could jeopardize their current positions. The Independent agreed to conceal their identities based on a standard in journalistic ethics to minimize harm.

The applicants

The identities of all 160 applicants still remain under wraps, but the short list of 30 includes several prominent Coloradans. 

Among them, as The Independent reported in April, was former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who led the state from 2007 to 2011, and decided not to seek re-election. The CU Law graduate and former Denver district attorney focused his governorship largely on pushing the state toward green energy. Ritter founded and has been running the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University.

Also vying for the job was Donna Lynne, a Democrat who served as former Gov. John Hickenlooper’s lieutenant governor and the state government’s first chief operating officer from 2016 through earlier this year. She worked for more than 20 years as a top executive in New York City government under Mayors Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani and later ran Kaiser Permanente in Colorado and several other western states. Lynne taught public health at Columbia University for 15 years, including on weekends while living in Colorado, and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018. She since has been working as Columbia University Medical Center’s chief operating officer and lead executive of its faculty medical practice.

Engel, the retired CoBank CEO whom several regents favored, is a Republican who has touted his experience as Donald Trump’s banker in the 1990s. He angled unsuccessfully in 2017 for an appointment as Trump’s agriculture secretary.

Other Coloradans on the list of 30 include: 

  • Former U.S. Rep. Bob Beauprez, a CU graduate and Republican banker and developer who served two terms representing Colorado’s 7th Congressional District and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006 and 2014
  • Kent Thiry, who stepped down earlier this year as CEO of the Denver-based DaVita Inc., one of the country’s largest providers of kidney dialysis services. Thiry eyed a GOP bid for governor last year and has bankrolled ballot measures to revamp Colorado’s redistricting process and to open party primary elections to unaffiliated voters.
  • Joseph Swedish, former CEO of Anthem who earlier in his career ran Centura Health, the largest hospital system in Colorado. He keeps a home in Silverthorne.
  • Air Force Brigadier General Andrew Armacost, who was dean of faculty at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs at the time of his application. He was named as Mark Kennedy’s replacement for president of UND earlier this month.
  • Walter Copan, undersecretary of Commerce for standards and technology and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder. The Republican businessman from El Paso County was appointed to that position by President Donald Trump in 2017.
  • Western Colorado University President Greg Salsbury

Among notable out-of-state applicants were the following current or former academic leaders: 

  • Eric Barron, president of Pennsylvania State University, whose student population is about 50 percent bigger than CU’s. He previously ran Florida State University and, early in his career, worked as a research fellow and scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder. 
  • Michael Young, president of Texas A&M University, clerked for the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, served as the ambassador for trade and environmental affairs during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and is an expert on trade and religious freedom.
  • Debasish “Deba” Dutta, then the chancellor of Rutgers University and now the chancellor of the University of Michigan-Flint
  • Darrell Kirch, president emeritus and former longtime president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). He worked previously as the acting scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health, dean of the Medical College of Georgia and Penn State’s College of Medicine, and CEO of Penn State’s medical center.
  • Linda Bell, provost and dean of faculty at Barnard College
  • John Montford, former chancellor at the Texas Tech University system

Perhaps the most multi-faceted applicant was then-Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson. The Rhodes scholar and Air Force Academy graduate who served as an Air Force officer stationed at NATO in Belgium went on to spend several years on the National Security Council’s staff, found a business incubator in New Mexico, serve as that state’s secretary for children, youth and families, serve five-and-a-half terms as a moderate Republican congresswoman from New Mexico, and run the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She withdrew from contention to take a job at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Other defense officials who sought the job, in addition to the Air Force Academy’s Armacost, are Air Force Major General Mark Brown and Jay Gibson, a civilian who was forced out last year as the Pentagon’s first chief management officer due to underperformance.

Prominent business leaders, aside from Swedish, include Justin Gmelich, a former partner at Goldman Sachs. 

Healey was chair of the Massachusetts’ Republican Party before being elected Mitt Romney’s lieutenant governor in 2002. On a platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage, she won that state’s Republican nomination for governor in 2006, but lost to Democrat Deval Patrick. At the time of her application, she was running Babson College, a private school focused mainly on business and entrepreneurship. Its 3,000-person student body is 4% the size of CU’s.

After being passed over for the CU job, she became the first president of the Center for Advancing the American Dream, promoting “economic freedom and access to capital” as part of the D.C.-based Milken Institute.

Kennedy, for his part, started his career as an accountant and became finance director for the former Pillsbury Company and a top executive at the corporation that now owns Macy’s. The conservative Republican went on to serve three terms representing a Minnesota district in Congress between 2001 and 2007. Twice, he sponsored bills seeking a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He also voted to:

  • Deny funding for stem cell research
  • Restrict abortion rights, funding for women’s reproductive health care, and family planning aid overseas
  • Require K-12 students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school and allow school prayer during the War on Terror
  • Allow electronic surveillance without a warrant
  • End net neutrality
  • Remove environmental protections for endangered species

He went on to teach briefly at the Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University before becoming a university administrator. As UND’s president for less than two and a half years, he had strained relationships with some faculty members and donors. A report by CU’s faculty council, which opposed his hiring, found that Kennedy “presented inaccurate information about his accomplishments” on his resume, took credit for increasing graduation rates among minority students that exceeded UND’s own statistics, and claimed to have distanced himself from politics since leaving academia, although he served as treasurer of conservative Minnesota Republican Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential campaign during that period.

Kennedy has said criticism of him and his record was unfair because his views have evolved over the years. His conservative record nevertheless was a factor in the University of Central Florida’s decision not to hire him in 2018 as its president — a job he sought less than two years into his tenure in North Dakota.

Faculty and students, in unprecedented protests last spring at CU’s four campuses (Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs and the Anschutz medical complex), slammed Kennedy as out of sync with a university that has worked for decades to boost its reputation for research, scholarship, tolerance and inclusion. They also slammed the Democratic regents for having voted with Republicans to name him as their sole finalist in April. 

It appealed to regents from both parties that Kennedy had experience in Congress, business and academia. So did his promise to accomplish what CU officials say Benson never did: A university-wide strategic plan. Regents also were impressed by Kennedy’s charisma and interpersonal skills, and by his commitment to help them — a board that long has been deeply, and at times bitterly, divided — work together more effectively.

“Those were things we wanted to hear,” Regent Linda Shoemaker told The Independent in April. (Her family’s foundation is among our nonprofit newsroom’s supporters.) 

As protests against Kennedy’s hiring escalated last spring, Shoemaker and fellow Democratic regents turned against him, some claiming that O’Rourke had not told them about Kennedy’s conservative congressional record before they unanimously supported naming him the sole finalist. All four Democrats ended up voting to oppose his hiring in May, but were outnumbered by five “yes” votes cast by Republican regents.

In a statement to The Independent, Kennedy said: “There were many great candidates considered for the CU presidency, so I feel fortunate that the Board of Regents selected me for the job. Having learned more about the university since I was hired and meeting the many great people inside and outside CU who care deeply about the institution, I am even more determined to do all I can to further CU’s success.”

The search firm

The Independent tried reaching out — with varying degrees of success — to each of the 30 people on the list. Twelve agreed to be interviewed for this story. Eleven of them spoke “on background,” meaning they did not want their names attached to the information and impressions they shared with us. Some feared coming off as bitter about being passed over. Some were still looking for jobs and did not want their failed applications at CU more visible on the web than necessary. Some recently started new jobs and prefer to avoid the publicity. And two said they did not want to criticize the regents’ selection process because they’d like to apply for CU’s presidency when the job opens up again.

The only applicant willing to speak on the record was Kirch, who earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from CU, and did his medical residency at its hospital. He endows a scholarship for CU medical students who are the first in their families to go to college,

He emphasized that there were people better qualified than he for CU’s presidency.

Dr. Darrell Kirch, president emeritus of the Association of American Medical Colleges, made the list of the 11 final applicants and says the selection committee focused largely on politics. "We are better than this," he says. (Photo courtesy of AAMC)
Dr. Darrell Kirch, president emeritus of the Association of American Medical Colleges, made the list of the 11 final applicants and says the selection committee focused largely on politics. “We are better than this,” he says. (Photo courtesy of AAMC)

“It’s not sour grapes that’s leading me to talk,” he said. Rather, he added, he is at a point in his career where he is “freer than most of the applicants” to speak his mind and said his conscience tells him to “make sure people know how problematic the selection process appeared to be.” 

Kirch and six other applicants are especially critical of the company the regents hired to lead the search.

Out of nine firms that bid for the contract, the board chose the Alabama-based Wheless Partners at a $99,000 flat-fee, plus $25,000 in additional expenses. That’s significantly less than the $200,000 to $250,000 experts on university searches say is the going rate for a client of CU’s size, complexity and caliber. It is also less than the $189,000 CU paid for the search that hired Benson in 2008. 

The board of regents touted Wheless Partners in a press release as “one of the nation’s leading executive search consultant and human capital advisory firms.” But several applicants with decades of experience hiring top university administrators say the company’s profile in that sector and its price both struck them as unusually low. 

“I have worked with all of the major search firms in academia over the years and I had never heard of Wheless,” Kirch said. “Nor had anybody I know heard of a search firm that presented itself as doing a comprehensive search for such an extraordinarily low bid. It was concerning to me personally because the appearance was to have a third-rate search firm just going through the motions for as little money as possible.”

Wheless Partners’ website went offline over the past few months and some of the firm’s principals have left to work with the Texas-based Wheless Search & Consulting — which, as former Wheless Partners’ partner Michael Ballew tells it, is an “entirely different company.” Those who worked directly on CU’s search did not return inquiries for this story.

Ballew wrote in an email that Wheless Partners’ price for the CU search was “fair and reasonable.” “We simply quote what we feel are competitive rates.”

Four applicants, unprompted by The Independent, mentioned as another red flag the involvement of Robert Witt on Wheless Partners’ search team. The former chancellor and president of the University of Alabama is a Republican who, according to al.com, helped establish and manage a dark-money nonprofit focused on higher education that funneled $1.4 million of that school’s funding to political PACs benefitting GOP politicians.

“The words ‘Bob Witt’ and ‘non-partisan’ don’t fit in the same sentence,” said a university leader who sees Witt’s participation in any higher education search as a sign that the school wants to hire a conservative.

Board of Regents Chairman Glen Gallegos, a Grand Junction Republican, says he is "not sure that I remember much about" the list of applicants for CU's presidency. (Courtesy of CU)
Board of Regents Chairman Glen Gallegos, a Grand Junction Republican, says he is “not sure that I remember much about” the list of applicants for CU’s presidency. (Courtesy of CU)

Board Chairman Gallegos said he was unaware of Witt’s politics or involvement in spending UA money for partisan purposes: “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Ballew said Witt, who did not respond to inquiries for this story, was consulted strictly about the “knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for a university president.”

“I can assure you that political affiliation matters not to the firm,” he wrote in an email. “To those who question Dr. Witt’s involvement, I would say that they are simply making incorrect and unfair assumptions without fact. … Perhaps they are trying to incorrectly amplify Dr. Witt’s role in order to support their personal agendas and/or biases about the search process.”

Two applicants noted that Scott Watson, a Wheless Partners co-founder who also worked on CU’s search, spent much of his phone conversations with them chatting about race car driving, his hobby. 

“That, uh, surprised me,” said Kirch, a trained psychiatrist and neuroscientist.

The other, a leading researcher in his field, said he expected to speak with Watson “about equity issues, digital learning, (and issues) related to how a premier research university innovates and stays competitive nationally and internationally.” “And here we were, no joke, talking about racing cars, or him talking about racing cars and me listening, rather,” he said. “I told my wife about it. We had a good laugh.”

Ballew defended Watson, praising his professionalism and skill as a “conversationalist” with the “gift of gab.”

The search committee

Aside from recruiting applicants, Wheless Partners’ contract also entailed working with a board-appointed selection committee co-chaired by Republican Regent Heidi Ganahl and Democratic Regent Irene Griego. It consisted of four representatives from each CU campus, one dean representative, one staff representative, and two student representatives, plus the following “community representatives”:

  • Martha Bathgate, representing the University of Colorado Foundation board of directors
  • Pam Shockley-Zalabak, former chancellor at CU Colorado Springs 
  • Ben Ochoa, a partner at the Denver-based law firm Lewis Roca Rothgerber
  • C.Y. Harvey, president and COO of the Anschutz Corp. and the Anschutz Investment Company 
  • Jake Zambrano, former director of operations for former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens who now works at EIS Solutions, a political and public relations firm run by influential Republican operatives
  • Brian Davidson, who ran unsuccessfully for regent 
  • Frank McNulty, the former speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives

Of the seven community representatives, all but Shockley-Zalabak and Ochoa are Republicans. 

The committee narrowed the 160 applicants to 30, and then narrowed the 30 to 11 for in-person interviews. The 11 were Kennedy, Healey and Engel, NIST’s Copan, Rutgers’ Dutta, Texas A&M’s Young, Swedish formerly of Anthem, Barbara Damron, a Republican former head of New Mexico’s higher education department whose husband won the GOP nomination for governor in that state in 2006, and Kirch. The president of a large Southern university who asked not to be named also made the list, as did the Air Force’s Wilson, who pulled out of contention before her interview. 

Penn State’s Barron, as well as Ritter and Lynne, were not invited for interviews. 

Then the committee winnowed the list even further to the six applicants who met with the regents. They were Kennedy, Healey, Engel, Young, Dutta, and the university president who asked for anonymity. 

Mark Kennedy, president of North Dakota University and finalist for the top job at the University of Colorado, on stage with CU Board of Regents Chair Sue Sharkey at a public forum on April 24, 2019. (Photo by Susan Greene)
Mark Kennedy, president of North Dakota University and finalist for the top job at the University of Colorado, on stage with CU Board of Regents Chair Sue Sharkey at a public forum on April 24, 2019. (Photo by Susan Greene)

As the selection was beginning, then-Chairwoman Sue Sharkey, a Republican, declared that the board was “committed to this being a bi-partisan process.” University officials said no applicants were asked about their party affiliation and no one moved up or down in the selection process based on partisan factors. Again, even asking the question would have been a violation of CU’s non-discrimination policy. 

Nevertheless, from a field of 160 and then 30 applicants, the selection committee boiled down the list to 11, at least eight of whom are Republicans or used to be before becoming university presidents and ending their party affiliation. Five of the six applicants forwarded to regents for interviews are Republicans or were so before they started leading universities. Dutta is the only of the six whom public records show has not declared a party affiliation.

CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue said in response to questions about that breakdown: “I don’t know that (the list) was dominated by Republicans. Obviously two of them [Kennedy and Healey] have held elected office, so it’s hard to dispute that. I don’t know about the others.”

Kirch said Republican community appointees controlled his interview with the selection committee while members representing the university stayed mostly quiet. 

As he and three others interviewed by the committee told it, McNulty — who did not return inquiries for this story — and other politically active Republicans among the community appointees grilled them on how, if hired as president, they would handle ideological differences that could arise with or between regents. Kirch took “ideological differences” to mean “political differences,” and said he hesitated to answer. He said McNulty and others pressed him, and Republican and Democratic committee members debated in front of him about whether those differences matter in choosing a president. 

“It was very strange to be in that room,” Kirch said. “I made the statement and observation that it was clear there was not a shared understanding of (regents’) role as a governing board, and if they were to ask me to become president and if I was to agree to take that position, I felt one of the most valuable things we could do early on is to bring in a governance expert to make the transition from making decisions based on partisanship to making them based on evidence, ethics.”

Board Chairman Gallegos said because he wasn’t on the selection committee, “I don’t know who dominated and who didn’t.” And, although he was emailed the same list of 30 applicants that was leaked to The Independent, he said he is “not sure that I remember much about” it.

“I really don’t know that I have a comment as to who was more qualified and who wasn’t.”

Kirch figures the committee must not have appreciated that he turned their questions into a lecture about nonpartisanship. He said the committee, CU’s staff and Wheless’s team did not bother contacting him after his interview to say he hadn’t made the list of six who would be called back to meet with the full board of regents. 

“Not even the courtesy of a phone call,” he said. “I learned I didn’t get the job like everybody else: In the news.”

Some applicants mock CU for what they describe as feigning a serious presidential search. Some speak bitterly about the university having wasted their time. Some express dismay about Kennedy’s hiring, saying the depth of his experience does not match CU’s caliber and complexity.

That an applicant with a few years’ experience running “a lower-tier, non-research university… was selected to lead a system that’s poised to be in the upper tier of American universities is a sad statement,” Kirch said.

“We are better than this.”

The post-mortem

Colorado is one of four states — in addition to Michigan, Nebraska and Nevada — in which voters elect university regents. Its board has been controlled by Republicans since the 1980s. The balance of power could shift, as it has with Colorado’s congressional delegation. Three of the nine seats are up for grabs in November’s election and congressional districts will be redrawn after the 2020 Census.

Higher education systems in most other states are run by boards of trustees appointed by governors. Experts say the advantage of appointing rather than electing people to govern universities is that a governor could, conceivably, pick members possessing a gamut of skills and expertise to thoughtfully round out the board. The disadvantage, experts warn, is that trustees often are beholden to the governors who appointed them and make decisions at their behest.

“There’s certainly something more democratic about electing regents, and the hope is that they’ll be more independent because of it,” said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. 

CU’s board may have independence that appointed boards do not, but it operates in lockstep when it comes to how it communicates with the public, including taxpayers who help support the university. Its policy is to speak with one voice.

“Our board chair will be talking on behalf of all of us,” Regent Griego, a Democrat, said of Gallegos, a Republican, when asked about the hiring of a president she opposed. 

As the board’s “one voice,” Gallegos repeats, verbatim at points, the words of McConnellogue, the university’s spokesman.

“You’re going to hear me say that the process we ran was a good process,” Gallegos said. “I think it was an excellent process that produced the results that we wanted. For people to come back and say this wasn’t right and this didn’t work, it sounds like Monday morning quarterbacking to me.”

McConnellogue, on the same topic: “This was a process that everyone involved took seriously and produced the results we wanted. … It’s easy to armchair quarterback the result.”

Gallegos described the selection process as “completely transparent,” then a few minutes later in the same interview, said, “I think it had to be a very secretive process in terms of letting out who the people were that applied.” 

McConnellogue: “We’re not concealing things. ‘Concealing’ makes it sound so nefarious. We’re trying to ensure the confidentiality that is allowed us under the law.”

Nationally, anonymous searches for public university presidents are becoming increasingly common, Poliakoff said. “More and more, we’re seeing searches done much more like corporations — anonymously.”

The Daily Camera, in its lawsuit against regents, argues that CU — and other public education systems such as school districts — are not corporations, but rather public institutions funded, at least in part, by tax dollars. As such, the suit says CU broke Colorado’s open records law by concealing the identities of applicants regents interviewed and background materials about them, preventing the public from assessing how regents made one of their most important decisions.

“Colorado residents have the right to vet the actions of their elected officials, including CU regents,” said Julie Vossler-Henderson, the Camera’s central news editor. Her paper and its readers want to know if Kennedy was the strongest among the applicants, she noted, and the only way to discern that is to have access to information that enables a comparison. 

Regents have expressed little interest in helping the public scrutinize their hiring decision. Before The Independent had finished reporting this story, Regents Sharkey, Ganahl, John Carson and Chance Hill, all Republicans, were calling for tracking down whoever leaked the applicant list and, if it came from a board member, potentially seeking that regent’s ouster. The four want the university to commission a private investigation — involving handwriting analysis, if need be — to find the source of the leak, whom university sources said they presume to be a Democrat.

“I read about this, this dragnet, or whatever you want to call it, and thought this is classic CU,” said a member of the selection committee who asked not to be named. “If regents cared even half as much about scholarly and scientific research as (they do) about opposition research, just think what a great university we would be.”

Triggered: How one of Colorado’s smallest protests became its most violent

0
0
James Marshall protesting in Alamosa, Colorado on June 4, 2020 minutes before he shot driver Danny Pruitt. (Photo by Megan Colwell/Valley Courier)

ALAMOSA — The protesters, about a dozen in all, gathered on June 4 in the intersection of State Avenue and Main Street. Like protesters across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police, they were demanding police accountability and racial justice. 

The group occupied the crosswalk during red lights, then stepped to the curb on green. Letting traffic pass, they figured, would keep things peaceful.

Some drivers raised their fists and honked in solidarity. Others, cranky that skinny-jeaned millennials were chanting “Whose streets? Our streets” in their city’s main intersection, flipped them the bird.

In the days before the protest, warnings of outside agitators coming in to make trouble prompted a posse of armed businessmen to stand post. People were on edge.

Just before 6 p.m., a man driving a Dodge Ram pickup pulled up to the red light, then accelerated into the crosswalk.  

A video of the scene shows protesters lurch out of the way. It also shows one protester, a white man dressed in black, pull a gun from his waistband and shoot the driver in the head. 

Their June 4 run-in lasted five seconds, less than an average yawn. That’s all it took for one of Colorado’s sleepy protests to become its most violent.

Marshall Law

James Edward Marshall IV, the 27-year-old shooter, is facing a slew of charges, including attempted murder. He knows a thing or two about what he’s up against because he is a defense lawyer.

Marshall grew up in Cincinnati’s suburbs and studied political science at Ohio State University where, as he still touts years later, he was the president of the rifle and “cigar culture” clubs. He graduated in 2018 from the University of Colorado Law School. A former classmate in the student law clinic there says he would bemoan police and prosecutors’ treatment of his clients more loudly and bitterly than others. 

He went to work at the public defender’s office in Durango, a job he kept for only 10 months. In June 2019, he married CU grad Mariah Loraine and moved to Alamosa. She took a job as a child welfare caseworker for the county’s Department of Human Services and he opened a law office at the corner where he would shoot Pruitt a year later.

Photo of James Marshall from his law practice's web site.
Photo of James Marshall from his law practice’s web site.

He called his practice “Marshall Law.”

His goal, he told people here, was to represent clients at fees they wouldn’t need to sell their homes to afford. 

“He thought there was a niche in this area that he could fulfill. He seemed to have the mindset of being of service and wanting to really establish himself,” said Christine Canaly, director of the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council whose office is next to the one Marshall rented.

Canaly has seen tenants come and go in her two decades working in the building. He was the first to tidy up the joint restroom. He even brought a “little wicker basket to make it homey,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is great!’”

She found him friendly when he would pop in to say hi, but also says he seemed “stressed out” and has a “nervous temperament.”

Marshall played a lot of trivia at Square Peg, a downtown brewery. He also frequented Milagros Café, the popular coffee spot below his office. He sometimes met clients there, though usually grabbed a cup to go while on his cell phone. Customers say he is a loud talker. Some also say his tailored suits and matching dress shoes and belts stood out in a town more accustomed to jeans and work boots.

Over the past year, he struck up several conversations with Aaron Miltenberger, executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs of the San Luis Valley. They would chat while waiting for their coffee orders. 

“We’d run into each other and talk about news, politics, whatever. The conversation would often be around the current political state. He’d say ‘I f—ing hate Trump,’ or something like that,” he said. 

“James is pretty tightly wound. There’s an intensity you don’t always see around here.” 

Your typical Texan

Danny Pruitt, the 49-year-old gunshot victim, spent most of the past three weeks in a coma, the bullet still lodged in his brain. 

Named after his dad, he grew up in Maypearl, a town of 1,000 in Texas’s cow country. He served as an electronics tech in the Army after Operation Desert Storm and fell 15 feet on the job, hurting his shoulder and back, before being discharged for disability. He has not worked since, says Tom Metier, his lawyer.

Pruitt’s friends and family say he is fiercely private, unwilling to talk much about his life.

“I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell,” said Brent Thompson, the neighbor he was with in the hours before the shooting.

Records show Pruitt made a long string of moves within Texas before heading to Colorado in 2018. He stayed for a while in a small home near a cemetery in Cañon City, then moved to an RV Park in Blanca with a view of the snow-capped Fourteener of the same name. The mountain, he told people, reminded him there is a God. 

About a year ago, he bought seven acres of cheap land at the far eastern edge of the San Luis Valley. The off-grid community called Sangre de Cristo Ranches has drawn many Texans and Oklahomans, off-roaders and gun people, and at least two residents who recently were using Confederate flags as window coverings.

Pruitt spent much of the past year preparing to build a small cabin on the property where he could live with his 5-year-old daughter, Melody. He also was battling for custody with her mother in Texas until being granted primary custody in the winter.

Danny Pruitt and his daughter, Melody, who is now five. She was with her mother in Texas the day of his shooting. (Photo courtesy of Pruitt family)
Danny Pruitt and his daughter, Melody, who is now five. She was with her mother in Texas the day of his shooting. (Photo courtesy of Pruitt family)

“All he wanted was to get away and build a better life for that girl,” his sister, Candace said. 

Thompson, a preacher who lives down the hill from Pruitt, counseled his new friend through the rough patch. Both are veterans who share a similar “appreciation of this land, of this country,” he said.

He describes Pruitt as “your typical Texan — a cowboy-hat-wearing, pickup truck-driving, downhome, morally sound kind of person” committed, above all else, to his daughter. “The very first thing he built up there is a room for her to be in, a safe place for her while he’s working.”

All I know is he and the mom of his daughter got into some bad stuff and he seems to have some hard times in the past down (in) Texas. He’s like a lot of people who’ve had bad marriages, bad lives, done things they’re not necessarily proud of.” 

Pruitt posted a selfie on Facebook in mid-May. In it, he wore the white cowboy hat Thompson says he saves for trips into town. He was standing next to his pickup on what looks like his property, layers of foothills and the valley behind him. He looked proud. And he was smiling.

“Been here with god (a) while now. Ain’t no way I’m leaving,” he wrote. “I’ll raise my daughter and build things back in my life. Home this is home!”

Stoking fear

The May 25th killing of George Floyd, who was Black, by a white Minneapolis police officer set off a national soul-searching, and public officials across Colorado responded. Leaders of dozens of cities, both big and small, recognized widespread frustrations about police brutality and institutional racism. They acknowledged people’s pain. They promised to look at their own communities’ policies and practices, and make changes, if needed.

City brass in Alamosa said nothing.

“We do not have the big city issues with law enforcement officers. Our law enforcement officers care and I care about them. We know how to get along with each other here,” Mayor Ty Coleman said as an explanation for his silence.

Coleman is Black, a demographic that makes up less than 1% of a city population that is about 41% white and 51% Latino. His election as mayor and the fact that city police have avoided significant civil rights controversies speak to a local comfort with racial diversity, at least to a certain extent. 

Zahra Dilley, 37, is a Black call center worker who moved with her six children from Chicago five years ago. She feels her family is safer here, but not free from racism. She says locals sometimes stare at her with an expression she interprets to mean, “Of all the places you could have went, why here?”

“I don’t think they, including the mayor, want to admit we have the same problems that go on like everywhere else,” she said. 

Alamosa may be more comfortable with its ideological differences. Some 40% of voters here are Democrat, 37% unaffiliated and 21% Republican. Adams State University professors, local business owners, federal employees, Russian pot growers, good-old-boy ranchers and the immigrants who tend their stock, big city transplants and sixth-generation oldtimers have learned to coexist here. In years of Fourth of July and Pride parades, climate action and anti-abortion marches, there has been little turmoil.

But this spring was different. Alamosans, like all Americans, followed how protests in Minneapolis triggered others in Atlanta, Washington, DC and Los Angeles. They tracked the protests in Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo. They saw the grief and fury on marchers’ faces and watched footage of fires and looting. 

Alamosa Economic Development Director Kathy Rogers Woods, in an email she marked as “IMPORTANT and TIME SENSITIVE information — PLEASE READ,” wrote “There have been reports that a group is planning to gather on Main Street at 11 PM TONIGHT – Monday, June 1, for what is thought to be similar activity we’ve been seeing in cities across the nation, of late.” That group turned out to be a gaggle of high-schoolers whose plans to go downtown to spray paint buildings police easily thwarted. 

But three minutes after Woods sent her email, Cathy Garcia, U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner’s southern regional office director, replied all with a message reading: “Group will be in Pueblo at 6 pm tonight. Heard from Trinidad that a group will be there sometime soon and that buses would be coming from Colorado Springs.”

A sign near the Alamosa intersection where James Marshall shot Danny Pruitt on June 4.
A sign near the Alamosa intersection where James Marshall shot Danny Pruitt on June 4. (Photo by Susan Greene)

Some in the email chain read Garcia’s message to mean buses of protesters could be heading to Alamosa. And so, within a few hours, phones here were buzzing with anxious text messages about a purported caravan of radical agitators headed to bust up the town. Managers at the Alamosa Walmart closed early that evening, barricading the doors and windows. 

That night, a posse of civic leaders and other volunteers showed up downtown carrying sidearms and semi-automatic rifles to protect businesses from the would-be band of looters. A contingent of city police officers joined them.

“Several of my friends and I, we open carry and we heard that supposably that they were sending antifa down here to paint our town and terrorize our streets and we weren’t going to let that happen,” said Larry Jack, one of the locals who stood guard.

“We had quite a big turnout, at least 80 of us downtown. … There was really a buzz going on,” added Eric Gile, owner of a roofing company in town.

Buzz was all there was. That night and the other three first nights of protest here went peacefully, with little more friction than a Black man calling a gaggle of armed posse members some names and a white man mooning protesters with “All Lives Matter” written on his butt.

Wanting something better

Marshall and his wife, Mariah Loraine showed up for one of those first protests. They seemed to have come directly from work – he wearing a business suit and she in office attire. She was openly carrying a pistol.

“That seemed really odd,” said protester Jesse Marchildron. “I was like why are you carrying a gun at a peaceful protest?”

He and others say the couple protested with an intensity, even rage that stood out in the crowd of about 30. Husband and wife would lead chants, including one in Spanish. They would shake their signs and scream profanities whenever police would drive by. And they would urge fellow marchers to protect themselves against “the pigs.”

One fellow protester, Elizabeth Oxer, says Marshall was the loudest in the crowd: “But, like, not in a good way.”

Miltenberger had run into Marshall at the café in the weeks and days prior. They talked longer than usual, at first about COVID, then about Floyd’s killing, Black Lives Matter and police violence. He says Marshall vented about a criminal justice system he saw as broken, violent and corrupt. 

I remember feeling like whoa, James is really on edge.”

Screenshots of Marshall’s private Facebook page provided to the Valley Courier show him advising his Facebook friends on May 29 “How not to die while protesting.” “ 1. Be white. 2. Carry a freedom stick,” – slang for firearm – he wrote. He posted an article the next day about the National Guard and Minneapolis police forcing residents into their homes at curfew. “This isn’t policing anymore. It is a hostile occupation,” he wrote.

He elaborated on his views June 1.

“Since being anti-fascist is about to be labeled as terrorism, I’m going to make a record: 75 years ago, our nation finished a brutal World War against fascism. 400,000 American Patriots died to protect the free world from fascism. Millions of Europeans were murdered by fascists. Millions more gave their lives to protect others from fascism’s insidious ideas. Being anti-fascist is the default stance in a democracy.”

“I am not an anarchist. I am not a liberal. I am not a conservative. I am not a Democrat. I am not a Republican,” he wrote. “I am a human being and I want something better than this.”

The morning of the shooting, he posted a section of the U.S. Code about war crimes, implying National Guard members broke the law when tear-gassing and otherwise hurting protesters on U.S. soil. That afternoon, he posted a response to the argument that “Not all cops are bad.” “Well, not all Germans were Nazis, but enough were,” he wrote. 

Four and a half hours before the shooting, he posted: “It’s really hard to go to school for over 20 years, pay $200,000, pass the bar exam and swear an oath to defend the Constitution to then watch high school bullies with badges and guns trample on civil liberties in the name of ‘law and order.’”

“If you can’t dodge it, ram it”

Pruitt spent most of June 4 helping Thompson clear trees in Forbes Park, an area near their properties.

Thompson offered him $150 for his time, but he wouldn’t take it. “He said, ‘No, that’s just what people do for people.’ He’s done that for me more than once, helped me out and never asked for anything.”

He says Pruitt asked if he would drive to Alamosa with him that evening for a hamburger. Thompson couldn’t go because he had a 6 p.m. meeting.

“I don’t think he would have gone to town if he knew people were protesting. He doesn’t want nothing to do with it,” Thompson said, adding that Pruitt doesn’t have a TV or follow current events. “He don’t care. He don’t care who the president is. He wouldn’t even listen if you talked about it.”

But Pruitt’s Facebook page shows he was following the news closely.

On May 28, he posted an article about a soldier credited with saving lives in Kansas by ramming a shooting suspect with his pickup truck. He previously had posted a picture of his own Dodge Ram 4×4, writing, “How does it go if you can’t Dodge it ram it if you can’t see it well hit it.”

On June 1, he shared five Facebook posts related to the protests. 

One was a meme picturing Black looters that read, “I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t look like they’re grieving to me.” One defended police officers, à la “not all cops are bad.” One sought prayers for President Donald Trump: “He’s fighting an evil we can’t even imagine.” One showed a T-shirt printed with an American flag and the words “You don’t have to love it, but you don’t have to live here either.” And one was a photo of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry with his gun drawn, and a reference to the line, “Go ahead, make my day.”

Those posts since have been scrubbed from his Facebook page.

Protesters marching in downtown Alamosa on June 4, 2020 moments before the shooting. Shooter James Marshall is pictured at far left. (Photo by Megan Colwell/Valley Courier)
Protesters marching in downtown Alamosa on June 4, 2020 moments before the shooting. Shooter James Marshall is pictured at far left. (Photo by Megan Colwell/Valley Courier)

Flashpoint

Several protesters showed up to the intersection after work. One carried a cardboard sign she had Sharpied on her lunch break. Another brought a sandwich for the intervals between red lights. They were mostly women, mostly young, and mostly white, though led by a Latina organizer

They knew full well that their neighbors and coworkers weren’t clamoring for national police reform and racial reconciliation. But they hoped that waving a sign in the middle of Main Street would make people think. They also felt like standing for something at a time when they felt powerless. 

Marshall came with his wife. He wore a black T-shirt, a black glove on his shooting hand, his signature aviator glasses and a military cap that covered his blond hair. His black face mask concealed the beard he had grown during lockdown. 

He carried a sign reading “Murder is murder no matter BLUE did it.” And, as he had several nights prior, he was yelling louder than the others. 

Fellow protesters say he was interrupting the organizer and other young women as they led chants, recited names of Black victims of police brutality, and at one point kneeled silently on the pavement. In the video, captured by a nearby bookstore surveillance camera, you can see him marching with an exaggerated, almost militaristic gait in and out of the crosswalk.

The video shows a dark gray pickup approach the protesters, slow down to a near stop, then accelerate toward them. Loraine, among others, jumps out of the way.

Oxer — a 23-year-old Americorps volunteer from Iowa who identifies by the pronoun “they” — remembers thinking someone had been hit. They yelled “What the f—?” and flipped off the driver. 

“Then there was the gunshot. Which was not great,” they said. “At first I thought it was the guy in the truck that had done it. That was my first time ever being near a gunshot. I think I was maybe 10 feet away.”

Chris Canaly heard the gunfire from up in her office. She looked down and saw women running. She said she could hear them “screaming ‘Oh my god, oh my god,’ at the top of their lungs.”

Pruitt had been hit in the back of his head by the 9mm bullet Marshall had shot through his back window. He managed to stop his truck in the middle of the intersection. Oxer says a protester tried persuading him to get out and sit down. He said something, but they can’t remember what. “And then he drove off.”

Thompson was just about to start his meeting when he heard his phone ring. It rang again two more times. It was Pruitt, just shot, calling for help, he says. With each call, Thompson kept pressing the button to say he’d call back. 

Pruitt drove 12 blocks toward the Adams State campus before passing out.

Marshall, in the meantime, ran from the scene with his Glock 43, phoned Randy Canney, a prominent defense lawyer in Salida, drove home to East Alamosa separately from his wife, changed his clothes and shaved off his beard, according to his arrest report. Police arrived two hours and 40 minutes after the shooting. 

He told Detective John Vasquez he acted instantaneously and admitted shooting Pruitt after “he observed the truck come into contact with” his wife and feared for her safety, the report shows. The detective wrote, “As the conversation continued I told James the video footage does not show his wife as he explained and he responded the video would be wrong.”

James Marshall's booking shot at the Alamosa County Jail. (Photo courtesy of Alamosa Police Department)
James Marshall’s booking shot at the Alamosa County Jail. (Photo courtesy of Alamosa Police Department)

Marshall’s booking shot shows him clean-shaven in a lawyerly dress shirt, head cocked back and grinning. He was facing charges of attempted 2nd-degree murder, 1st-degree assault, reckless endangerment, felony menacing, criminal mischief, illegal discharge of a firearm and prohibited use of a weapon. 

Loraine bailed him out on a $60,000 bond the next day, when she either quit or was fired from the county. Canney says the couple left town almost immediately:

“They don’t feel safe there.”

Aftermath

Pruitt came out of his coma over the past week and was released Wednesday from UCHealth Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs. He is recovering at his sister’s home in Alamosa, the bullet still lodged in his head.

He has spoken with District Attorney Robert Willett and with Alamosa police, who are still investigating the case. 

They took over the intersection last week to reenact the shooting. A source advising the probe says detectives have been looking into whether the traffic light was red or green when Pruitt accelerated toward the protesters, and whether any were hit. None of those we interviewed said they were.

Tom Metier, Pruitt’s personal injury lawyer, says his client remembers coming to a stop at the intersection and getting shot. “He has other memories, but not that I can share right now,” he said.

The city’s response to the shooting has been to launch what City Manager Heather Brooks calls a “public education campaign” to keep protesters out of Alamosa’s crosswalks.

In the meantime, about 3,500 people have over the past three weeks donated about $150,000 for Pruitt’s and his daughter’s care. “Please pray for Danny and his family, help him to keep fighting. So his little girl might, one day, have her daddy back,” wrote the niece who organized the Gofundme page.

Conservative, alt-right and fake news outlets have been playing up the story, some going so far as to report that Pruitt died of his gunshot wound. Pundits cite the shooting as proof of a national antifa uprising. Local law-and-order types speak of Pruitt as a heroic patriot with an inalienable right to drive unobstructed on his way to grab a burger.

“He has a right to get there without interference … and defend himself in the process,” said Eric Gile, who was among the locals who stood downtown earlier that week locked and loaded.

“When people are hindering (people) from getting where they need to go and blocking traffic, basically that’s a small riot. … It’s destructive and, yes, a line needs to be drawn,” added Larry Jack, another resident who joined the armed posse.

Whether the traffic light was red or green, Jack says he would have felt threatened by protesters standing in the crosswalk, even if only a dozen. He figures that he, too, would have tried to drive through them. 

“It could have been me. It could have been any of us. I probably would have done the same thing,” he said. “I think the country in general is sick of this, the violence, the hatred, the racism from all sides.”

It is language like Jack’s, implications that white folks are victimized by racism — and by protests against it — that galvanized many protesters here in the first place. That frustration is perhaps best captured by the sign Marshall’s wife was carrying at the protest: “If you are more bothered by how people react to injustice than you are by the injustice you are invested in oppression.” But that point, say several others marching that day, was lost the moment her husband pulled the trigger. 

Oxer’s diary the night of the shooting reads: “This whole thing just reinforces what detractors believe: That we all secretly just wanna set shit on fire and shit.” 

They noted that Pruitt made the first provocation by driving into the protesters, and that “while he was the victim, he was also the instigator.

Alamosa residents left tokens of the concern for Danny Pruitt following his shooting, uncertain if he would survive. (Photo by Susan Greene)
Alamosa residents left tokens of the concern for Danny Pruitt following his shooting, uncertain if he would survive. (Photo by Susan Greene)

“But it’s hard to say (that) about someone on life support.”

Marshall, Oxer says, betrayed their movement, at least in Alamosa where some locals believe protesters ambushed Pruitt’s truck and many more now associate them with violence. 

“It sucks that someone on our side would make things a thousand times worse for us,” they said.

Oxer said they hope Marshall gets the “maximum punishment,” and notes that the Alamosa police who questioned them did a good job. They are fully aware of that irony.

Mayor Coleman said he understands that “protesters didn’t mean for this to happen.” 

But sometimes the reality and the perception are different in people’s mind,” he said. “And sometimes people forget what the original purposes of the marches were all about.”

This story was written in partnership with the Valley Courier in Alamosa. Our collaboration is powered by COLab, the Colorado News Collaborative — a nonprofit formed to strengthen local public-service journalism in Colorado. More than 40 news organizations share in-depth local reporting to better serve Coloradans.





Latest Images