Crime
Weld County deputy arrested on child abuse, assault charges
WELD COUNTY, Colo. – A Weld County sheriff’s deputy was arrested Tuesday on felony assault and misdemeanor child abuse charges and has been placed on unpaid leave.
The deputy, 32-year-old Derek Kinch, most recently worked in the courts division of the sheriff’s office, and has been a deputy in Weld County since 2008.
The sheriff’s office first found out about the possible child abuse involving its own deputy early on July 21, it said. The alleged abuse happened at a home in the 11000 block of Montgomery Circle—near Longmont in unincorporated Weld County.
Since Kinch’s arrest affidavit wasn’t available Tuesday, there are few details surrounding the case currently available. The sheriff’s office says that Kinch was allegedly involved in “ongoing child abuse.”
Kinch was arrested Tuesday around 7 p.m. on second-degree assault and child abuse charges.
He also faces an internal investigation by the sheriff’s office, and has been placed on unpaid administrative leave pending an outcome in his criminal case.
The sheriff’s office says the investigation remains ongoing and asks anyone with information on the case to call 970-356-4015.
La Plata County officials, Dylan’s mother give Redwine case update after arrest, court appearance
LA PLATA COUNTY, Colo. — Authorities in La Plata County and the mother of Dylan Redwine both held news conferences Tuesday to talk about the arrest of Mark Redwine in the five-year-old case surrounding the death of his 13-year-old son, Dylan Redwine.
On Tuesday, authorities in Washington state released police body camera footage of Redwine’s arrest, which happened in Bellingham, Washington late Friday, just before midnight.
A day earlier, a judge in Washington ordered Redwine be held on a $1 million bail pending an Aug. 17 extradition hearing. He will fight extradition back to Colorado. Continue reading
Mark Redwine will remain held on $1M bail, will fight extradition back to Colorado
BELLINGHAM, Wash. – Mark Redwine will remain held on a $1 million bond in northeastern Washington while he awaits extradition back to Colorado on murder and child abuse charges related to the 2012 death of his 13-year-old son, Dylan.
But Denver7 has learned that Redwine will fight extradition back to Colorado. The judge at Monday’s hearing set his extradition hearing for Aug. 17. Continue reading
Suspect in deadly Texas immigrant truck incident has criminal history in Colorado
DENVER – The truck driver charged with having nearly 100 undocumented immigrants—10 of whom died—inside a sweltering truck inside a Texas parking lot, also has a criminal past in Colorado.
James Bradley, 60, faces federal charges for transporting people he knew were in the country illegally, and could face an unending prison term or death if convicted.
But Denver7 Investigates has learned that Bradley had a spotted history of criminal behavior in Colorado as well. Continue reading
Brauchler says he’ll bring Aurora shooter James Holmes back to Colorado if elected governor
DENVER – George Brauchler says he’ll bring Aurora theater shooter James Holmes back to Colorado to serve his sentence if Colorado elects him as its next governor in 2018.
“As governor, I will return Aurora Theater Shooting mass murderer back to CO to serve his sentence here, where he committed his evil crime,” Brauchler tweeted early Friday. Continue reading
Taylor Swift defense team will get to probe ex-Denver radio DJ’s claims about lost audio tape
DENVER – The defense team for singer Taylor Swift will get to cross-examine the man accused of grabbing her buttocks before a Denver concert in 2013 over how a tape of the man speaking with his radio station bosses about the incident disappeared while he was pursuing legal options in the case.
The trial involving Swift and the man, former KYGO radio host David Mueller, is set to begin Aug. 7 in the U.S. District Court of Colorado in Denver.
Judge William J. Martinez on Wednesday decided that the famed singer’s defense attorneys will get to cross-examine Mueller over how the full tape disappeared so the jury can decide if he acted maliciously and destroyed evidence of the full tape himself, or whether a series of accidents and misplacements ended in the full tape disappearing.
Mueller was fired from his job in early June 2013—days after a member of Swift’s security team claimed that Mueller had grabbed her buttocks underneath her skirt while taking a photo together ahead of a concert at the Pepsi Center.
He sued Swift and some members of her team in September 2015, claiming they slandered him and forced his firing without cause, though the radio station said it did its own internal investigation before firing Mueller.
And Swift filed a counterclaim months later calling Mueller’s claims that it was a different KYGO employee who actually touched Swift’s buttocks “specious” and called for a jury trial to settle the back-and-forth allegations.
Swift’s attorneys filed documents in late June and early July claiming that Mueller destroyed the secret tape he had made of the conversations involving his superiors.
Judge Martinez’s decision on those motions came Wednesday, but he stopped short of declaring Mueller had committed an “adverse interference” in the case when the tapes went missing.
Mueller secretly recorded the meeting, which is legal under one-party consent rules in Colorado, with his superiors on June 3, then edited the full two-hour tape into clips, which he sent to his attorney.
Mueller kept the full audio file on his computer and on an external hard drive, he testified. But at some point after making the edited clips, he spilled coffee on his computer, then went and got a new one without saving its hard drive. The judge’s ruling says he got the new computer sometime in 2015.
And Mueller also claimed when he was deposed that his external hard drive “stopped working” and that he threw it away “because it was junk.”
Thus, the full audio of the meeting has never been heard by anyone except for Mueller, and the meeting between him and his superiors plays a central part in the case.
Judge Martinez found that the full tape would have helped Swift’s team in discovery and possibly in the upcoming trial, but could not say, based on the evidence, that Mueller lost or destroyed the full tape by doing so “in bad faith”—a requirement for proving an adverse interference.
Instead, the judge decided he had lost or destroyed the tape out of “mere negligence”—which is still a “sanctionable spoliation of evidence,” he wrote.
“Although the Court declines to make a finding that Plaintiff acted in ‘bad faith’ in the sense that he intended to destroy evidence, it also cannot characterize the loss or destruction of evidence in this case as innocent, or as ‘mere negligence,’” Judge Martinez wrote.
Judge Martinez said that Mueller should have known that legal movement in the case was “imminent” and thus should have known he would be require to preserve evidence relevant to the case.
“[I]t is quite likely that the reason Plaintiff secretively recorded his conversation with Call and Haskell (his former employers at KYGO) was because he knew that some form of adversarial legal action was likely to follow,” Martinez wrote. “Moreover, Plaintiff later edited the audio file in order to send ‘clips’ to his own attorney…because Plaintiff himself was actively considering [litigation].”
Because of this, Judge Martinez wrote, Swift’s team was “prejudiced by the loss of evidence,” because not having access to the recording limited their “ability to explore whether Plaintiff has or has not ‘changed his story.’”
The judge wrote that Mueller “failed to take any number of rather obvious steps to assure that this evidence was not lost.”
“While the spill of liquid on his laptop may have been Plaintiff’s fault, it was an entirely foreseeable risk,” Judge Martinez wrote. “Indeed, the same thing had happened to Plaintiff’s previous laptop not long before…Plaintiff could and should have made sure that some means of backing up the files relevant to litigation was in place, but this was not done.”
Judge Martinez also chided Mueller for being “unjustifiably careless” in handling the audio file after seeking claims of $3 million against Swift for defamation.
“Given these claims, it is very hard to understand how he spent so little time and effort to preserve the very evidence which—one might think—could have helped him to prove his claims, and why he evidently responded with nonchalance when that evidence was lost,” Judge Martinez wrote.
As such, he said that giving Swift’s defense the chance to cross-examine Mueller would give the jury the best opportunity to determine whether Mueller got rid of the tape on purpose, as both of his KYGO superiors are already expected to testify at the trial.
The judge wrote that he didn’t want to “put too heavy of a thumb on the scale” against Mueller’s claims, and that giving Swift’s attorneys the chance to cross-examine him would give her team “the benefit of allowing the jury to make its own assessment” of Mueller’s actions.
“The Court has little doubt that if the jury concludes Plaintiff acted with bad faith or an intention to destroy or conceal evidence, they will draw their own adverse inferences,” Martinez wrote.
A final pre-trial preparation conference in the case is set for July 21. The trial is set to begin Aug. 7 at 8:30 a.m. and is scheduled for nine days.
Swift will be in court during the case, and has said in the past that if the jury finds in her favor that she’d donate any money to charities whose missions are to protect women from sexual assault.
Lawsuit: By restricting life-saving Hepatitis treatments, Colorado prisons putting taxpayers on hook
DENVER – Eighteen inmates in Colorado prisons died over a three-year period because of the state’s “cruel and arbitrary” system for treating Hepatitis C infections, which is leaving thousands of inmates without access to treatments, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed Wednesday by the ACLU of Colorado against the state Department of Corrections.
As of last December, there were 2,280 prisoners in Colorado who had been diagnosed with some degree of the virus, which amounts to about one-ninth of the state’s total prison population. Hepatitis C is the most-prevalent blood-borne infectious virus in the U.S. Continue reading
Denver Sheriff Department disputes ICE claim it didn’t notify of inmate’s release
DENVER – The Denver Sheriff Department is disputing allegations it never notified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents it was releasing an inmate with an immigration detainer from custody.
Late on Tuesday, ICE said it had picked up Ricardo Daniel Lopez-Vera, 19, and was holding him pending a hearing in front of a federal immigration judge.
ICE said it had placed an immigration detainer on Lopez-Vera on July 11—a day after he was involved in a fight that left another inmate dead. Continue reading
Former Morrison Police Department lieutenant indicted, accused of stealing $132K via police fund
GOLDEN, Colo. – A Jefferson County grand jury on Tuesday indicted a former Morrison Police Department lieutenant on 29 counts, accusing him of stealing more than $132,000 from the town over 5 years.
Anthony Paul Joiner, 38, faces charges of theft, attempting to influence a public servant, embezzlement and forgery.
It’s unclear when the department severed ties with Lt. Joiner, but he was the second in command at the town’s police department throughout the time he is accused of stealing the town’s money: from December 2010 to February 2016.
The grand jury indictment alleges that Joiner used a private fund, the 5280 Police Motors Memorial Fund, used to send officers to Washington D.C. for National Police Week, to funnel town money to his own expenses via the fund.
Some of the money Joiner is accused of funneling into the fund, then using for his own expenses, were extra duty shift wages that were owed to Morrison. The indictment alleges that Joiner billed both the town and the nearby Bandimere Speedway extra, then used some of the money for himself.
Joiner was arrested Tuesday and booked into the Jefferson County jail on a $50,000 bond. He’s first expected in court Wednesday morning.
ICE picks up man involved in Denver jail inmate’s death, says sheriff didn’t notify of release
DENVER – The Denver jail inmate whose fight with another inmate ended in the other inmate’s death is now being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending an immigration hearing.
Ricardo Daniel Lopez-Vera, 19, had an immigration detainer placed on him by ICE on July 11—a day after he was involved in a fight that left another inmate, 42-year-old William Anderson, dead.
Denver7 had not previously named Lopez-Vera as the man involved in the fight because he was not charged in Anderson’s death.
ICE says Lopez-Vera was released from the Denver jail without the Denver Sheriff Department, which runs the jail, notifying ICE he had been released.
ICE says Lopez-Vera had previous convictions for driving while ability impaired and another misdemeanor, but said it had not previously contacted him before the July 11 detainer.
He will remain in ICE custody pending his immigration hearing. ICE hasn’t said when Lopez-Vera entered the country illegally.