Crime
Colorado Attorney General sues Boulder County over oil and gas moratorium
BOULDER, Colo. – The Colorado Attorney General’s Office sued Boulder County and its board of commissioners Tuesday after weeks of threatening to do so if the county did not repeal a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in unincorporated parts of the county.
Attorney General Cynthia Coffman and the state of Colorado are plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which Coffman had threatened since last month if the county didn’t repeal its moratorium by Feb. 10.
Boulder County put the moratorium in place in 2012 and has extended it eight times, most recently in December, when county commissioners voted to extend it to May 1.
But the suit filed Tuesday points to a 2015 Colorado Supreme Court case that went against Fort Collins’ moratorium on fracking and a Longmont moratorium, and said that local governments cannot regulate the oil and gas industry.
The 2015 case’s ruling said that the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Act gives the state sole power to regulate oil and gas development and operations within the state.
In both rulings, the court said that even temporary moratoriums, which Boulder has argued its is, “deleteriously affects what is intended to be a state-wide program of regulation.”
In Tuesday’s filing, Coffman and the state ask for the court to declare that Boulder County’s moratorium is pre-empted by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Act, and also for it to put in place a permanent injunction that would keep the county and board from enforcing the moratorium. Coffman and the state also ask for court costs and other relief justifiable by the court.
Boulder County and state officials responded swiftly Tuesday afternoon.
“The Colorado Attorney General sent a special valentine to the oil and gas industry today against Boulder County for our working to safeguard our community from the industrial impacts of oil and gas development,” a news release from the county said.
But it maintains, as it did when Coffman first threatened to sue, that its moratorium is “of a materially shorter duration and is consistent with Colorado law.”
The county said its board of commissioners will meet as planned on March 14 and March 23 to review the county’s new oil and gas regulations for unincorporated parts of the county.
“It’s our right and our responsibility to protect our residents and to protect our world-class environment from the impact of oil and gas development, which is very industrial…” said Commissioner Elise Jones.
Five Democrats who represent areas of Boulder County in the state House lambasted Coffman’s suit, saying she was suing on the behalf of a private industry.
“The Attorney General has decided to wield the power of her office for the benefit of private companies at the expense of local communities,” said Majority Leader KC Becker, D-Boulder.
But Colorado Oil and Gas Association President and CEO Dan Haley told Denver7 that Boulder’s five-year old moratorium is illegal.
“We support the Attorney General’s decision,” he said. “For us, it’s very clear. It’s about the law. It’s not about fracking, It’s not about drilling. It’s not about pipelines. It’s about whether, or not, we have a rule of law in Colorado.”
Rep. Jared Polis, the Democrat who represents the 2nd Congressional District and is the Vice Chair of the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, slammed Coffman’s lawsuit Tuesday.
“We should all be outraged that the Colorado attorney general has chosen to use public tax dollars to bully Boulder County on behalf of the oil and gas industry,” Polis said in a statement. “The oil and gas industry is more than equipped to bring their own lawsuits, and I suspect they have opted not to sue Boulder County because they know Colorado law allows for a short term fracking moratorium. What the attorney general has done today is a purely political waste of money, and it is not legally sound.”
State Sen. Matt Jones, D-Louisville, also criticized Coffman’s perceived ties with the oil and gas industry in a statement.
“This is disgraceful. After seeing the Attorney General’s and Oil and Gas industry’s press releases about the lawsuit sent out almost at the same time, I think it’s safe to assume the Attorney General is using the powers of her office and using tax dollars to intimidate and sue taxpayers at the behest of special interest industries,” he said. “The question I have for the Attorney General is this: how many oil and gas corporations did she consult with before sending out her threat letter to Boulder County on January 26?”
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Security officer at Colorado Springs juvenile facility arrested for alleged assault of inmate
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – A security officer at the Spring Creek Youth Services Center has been arrested for allegedly assaulting one of the youth inmates at the facility in September.
The guard, Dean Hawkinson, 58, turned himself in to authorities Thursday after an arrest warrant was filed on second-degree assault and child abuse charges.
The alleged assault happened Sept. 12 of last year. The Colorado Department of Human Services says Hawkinson allegedly grabbed the juvenile by their arm and squeezed their neck.
Colorado Springs police say they were made aware of the incident Sept. 29 and that the department’s Crimes Against Children Unit started an investigation.
CDHS says the juvenile was medically cleared and has since been released from the facility.
Hawkinson was placed on administrative leave following his arrest, CDHS says.
“The Division of Youth Corrections condemns the alleged actions in the strongest possible terms,” said Anders Jacobson, director of the Division of Youth Corrections. “The Division of Youth Corrections not only encourages employees to report incidents of abuse and neglect – we require it.”
CDHS says the Spring Creek facility was reorganized last October, after the alleged abuse, so that the only inmates were juveniles awaiting trial. The department says the changes improved staff-to-inmate ratios at the facility from 10-to-1 to 5-to-1.
Hawkinson was named as being one of several guard assaulted by juveniles at the facility in 2014 in a Colorado Springs Gazette story.
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2 Californians arrested with 14 pounds of suspected heroin in western Colorado
MESA COUNTY, Colo. – Two California residents were on Tuesday arrested with nearly 14 pounds of suspected heroin, according to law enforcement authorities.
A Mesa County sheriff’s deputy pulled a car over about 30 miles east of the Utah-Colorado border on I-70 because the car didn’t have a license plate and had a dark tint on the driver’s-side window, the sheriff’s office says.
The sheriff’s office says the deputy got permission to search the vehicle after allegedly smelling marijuana, and found six packages hidden behind a panel in the car that contained nearly 14 pounds of a white powder that tested positive for heroin.
The Western Colorado Drug Task Force arrested Ricky Medina, 24, and April Gomez, 23, on felony drug charges. Both are being held on $50,000 cash-only bonds at the Mesa County Detention Facility.
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Unsolved: Questions abound 4 years after pregnant Denver woman disappeared in Pueblo
February 18 is typically a day for celebration for Laura Saxton. It’s her daughter’s birthday. But every year, two weeks earlier, she now marks another anniversary: the day that same daughter disappeared.
Kelsie Schelling was 21 years old and eight weeks pregnant when she vanished on Feb. 4, 2013. She had her first doctor’s visit and had seen a sonogram of her baby earlier that day. Continue reading
Brooke Higgins, who plotted Mountain Vista HS shooting, sentenced to 3 years in juvenile facility
HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. – The teen girl who pleaded guilty in December to conspiring to commit first-degree murder for plotting a 2015 attack to shoot students and teachers at Mountain Vista High School was sentenced Wednesday.
Brooke Higgins, 17, had also pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit murder in December.
She was on Wednesday sentenced to three years in the Division of Youth Corrections for the solicitation charge, but will get credit for 409 days served since her initial arrest. That juvenile sentence was stipulated under her plea agreement.
Higgins will also have to serve four years of supervised probation and mental health treatment after she is released from juvenile detention as part of a deferred sentence for the conspiracy charge. Should she successfully complete the probation, her adult conviction can be sealed, according to the district attorney’s office.
“This agreement provided us the greatest opportunity to get the most public safety and justice for the community. What this defendant did was not just idle chatter,” said District Attorney George Brauchler in a news release. “At the same time, the agreement offers the best chance for rehabilitation for this defendant, who has accepted responsibility and has earned that chance.”
Higgins admitted in December she had plotted the attack with fellow student Sienna Johnson, whose case is still in court.
Court documents showed she had told friends she wanted to commit a mass shooting and that she idolized Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. She had also texted multiple people in an attempt to get a gun.
But after Wednesday’s sentencing hearing, Higgins’ attorney, Iris Eytan, blamed 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler for depression he says Higgins has suffered since she was charged.
Brauchler initially filed adult charges against Higgins and ordered her be held on a $1 million bond. Eytan added that depression from an instance in which Higgins was allegedly raped contributed to her mental state before she planned the shooting.
“Her emotional state was not about to kill anyone else, but to kill herself,” he said.
Eytan also blamed Colorado media for the hoopla that surrounded the case.
Higgins herself apologized to “the teachers, the students and the parents” at Mountain Vista High School, saying she was “sorry for the things that [she] joked about and talked about.”
“I never meant for things to get so out of hand and I never meant to hurt anyone,” she said.
Johnson’s case is still pending in courts after a Jan. 6 hearing was rescheduled. She is charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder after deliberation.
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Colorado bills aim to change abortion rules; one would make performing abortion a class 1 felony
DENVER – A handful of bills introduced in Colorado’s House of Representatives aim to affect abortion laws in the state, but they will first have to clear a House committee chaired by a doctor who specializes in reproduction.
ABORTION-RELATED BILLS FILED
One bill, House Bill 1108, would make it a class 1 felony for practitioners to perform an abortion unless it is intended to save the mother’s life or unless the unborn child dies as a result of medical treatment, such as chemotherapy.
That would put practitioners who perform abortions in the same category as first-degree murderers, child abusers who cause a child’s death and people charged with treason.
The bill is sponsored by Reps. Stephen Humphrey and Kim Ransom, as well as Sen. Tim Neville.
Another bill, House Bill 1086, would require practitioners to tell a woman about a process that can be used to reverse “abortion pills” 24 hours before giving a woman the pill, and would require the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to post information on its website about the process.
Though the process is not widely-used at this time, researchers at the University of California-San Diego published a paper on it in 2012. The bill says that as of May 2016, the process had been successfully utilized in 175 pregnancies.
But others have warned of dangers linked to the process.
The process works by using a hormone-based drug that utilizes progesterone, which is a necessary hormone in women’s bodies, to reverse the effects of the main compound in “abortion pills,” mifepristone.
The bill, sponsored by Reps. Justin Everett and Dan Nordberg and Sen. Vicki Marble, says it aims to “reduce ‘the risk that a woman may elect an abortion, only to discover later, with devastating psychological consequences, that her decision was not fully informed.’”
A third bill (House Bill 1085), titled the “Women’s Health Protection Act” and sponsored by Rep. Patrick Neville, a Douglas County Republican, would require any clinics that provide abortions to register with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, which would have to inspect each registered clinic at least once a year to be sure it is using sanitary equipment and is adhering to special rules also outlined in the bill for abortions performed after 20 weeks of gestation.
But currently, first and second-trimester abortions (up to 26 weeks’ gestation) are allowed in Colorado, as are “late-term” abortions that are most often performed because a fetus as developed complications.
The bill would require clinics to report the number of abortions it performed and the trimester it was performed in, among many other things, in its registration with the attorney general.
CLEARING COMMITTEE AND HOUSE COULD PROVE DIFFICULT
The three bills face a difficult course in Colorado’s Legislature.
They are all scheduled for their first committee hearing Feb. 9 in the House Health, Insurance and Environment Committee, in which Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-5.
The committee is chaired by Rep. Joann Ginal, Ph.D., a Democrat from Fort Collins who is also a reproductive endocrinologist by trade. Its vice chair is Rep. Daneya Esgar, a Pueblo Democrat who is also the majority caucus chair.
Esgar told Denver7 in an interview this week that the three bills would get “a fair hearing,” but that she and her fellow Democrats would “stand up for all women’s rights.”
But she expressed concern over some of the aforementioned bills the committee is set to hear Feb. 9.
“We just passed the 44th anniversary of Roe v Wade, and I share the same frustrations that the millions of women exhibited on Saturday across the country [in the Women’s March events nationwide] – instead of being able to focus on how to make health care for everyone more affordable and more accessible, we are still fighting for basic reproductive rights,” she told Denver7.
Ginal told the Coloradoan that the bills wouldn’t pass the House, which is also controlled by Democrats, should they make it out of committee.
She said House Bill 1085 contained “impossible regulations,” according to the Coloradoan.
Esgar expressed concern over House Bill 1108, saying it was “a very dangerous idea to target doctors and health providers” by making them class 1 felons.
“They are providing a medical service and should never be singled out. Abortion is not a crime, it’s a safe and legal procedure,” she told Denver7. “History has shown that banning abortion, or stopping access to safe abortions, is dangerous for women’s lives.”
But she stopped short of saying such bills further divide the Legislature, in which Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate.
“There are definitely issues, like this one, that we do not agree on and that can cause tension at times. However, we do have more in common than divides us, and here in Colorado we actually work really well together,” Esgar said. “Our work is to come together and find out how to bring the state forward even with divergent ideas.”
Still, abortion remains among the most hot-button issues in Colorado politics, as Colorado Republicans have fought to restrict abortion access for years on both the state and federal levels and Democrats fight to keep women’s reproductive rights already on the law books in place.
Many of the state’s counties do not have abortion clinics, but the state does require only licensed physicians perform abortions, parental consent for women under age 18 to obtain an abortion, and that taxpayer funding for abortions is only provided to preserve a woman’s life or in the case of rape or incest.
The peer-reviewed research group Guttmacher Institute, which researches sexual and reproductive health and rights, found the number of abortions declined by 14 percent between 2011 and 2014, but that there was also a 14 percent decline over that time period in the number of Colorado facilities that provided abortions.
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Apparent hate crime in Peyton draws attention from national Muslim council, feds
PEYTON, Colo. – A possible hate crime in a small town northeast of Colorado Springs has drawn the attention of the FBI and the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization.
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Denver7 Tuesday that the homeowners in Peyton woke up Sunday to find the outside of their home vandalized with eggs, dog feces, bath tissue and papers scrawled with messages regarding the homeowners’ racial background.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Tuesday condemned the incident.
“Our nation’s leaders – at the highest levels – need to address the growing bigotry we are witnessing around the country in the post-election period,” CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said in a statement.
The FBI’s Denver branch confirmed it was investigating but gave no further details.
“The FBI does not comment on active, ongoing investigations of the FBI’s or other investigative agencies,” Denver branch spokeswoman Amy Sanders told Denver7.
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Former Canon City coach, student teacher charged over sexual relationship with teen student
FREMONT COUNTY, Colo. – A former part-time athletics coach and student teacher in the Canon City School District faces charges over an alleged sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student.
Austin Randall Trahern, 24, faces one count of sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust.
The Fremont County Sheriff’s Office says someone reported the alleged relationship between Trahern and the 15-year-old girl, and that Trahern turned himself in to deputies on Monday.
The sheriff’s office says he was still employed by the district while the relationship was taking place.
The Canon City Daily Record reports the incident happened last June but that charges weren’t filed until Feb. 3.
Citing the arrest affidavit, the Daily Record reports Trahern coached PE at Canon City Middle School and worked with the Canon City High School track and field team. The Daily Record reports that the incident wasn’t reported until nearly two months after it happened.
Trahern was released on a $1,000 personal recognizance bond Monday after his first court appearance.
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CU Boulder: Tumpkin abuse case victim ‘should have received immediate response from the university’
DENVER – The Chancellor of the University of Colorado responded Friday evening to a Sports Illustrated article which claimed the school may have known about allegations former assistant football coach Joe Tumpkin had abused his ex-girlfriend a month before any actions were taken.
In the statement, Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano apologizes to the victim in the case and to her son, writing, “She should have received an immediate response from the university pertaining to the actions we might take as well as expressing concern for her safety and any support she needed to deal with repercussions of the trauma she suffered.”
DiStefano said school staff provided Sports Illustrated with a full timeline of what happened, but alleges the sports magazine chose not to publish “key elements” of the events.
The reporter who wrote the story, Michael McKnight, claims to have talked to the woman, who is given the name “Jane” in the report to protect her identity.
It says head coach Mike MacIntyre and his wife both had received messages from the woman in early December. The report says she first reached out to MacIntyre’s wife, Trisha, and wrote that she had “an important issue regarding Joe that is sensitive and confidential” and that she needed to talk to Coach MacIntyre.
DiStefano refutes the claim, saying Tumpkin’s ex-girlfriend notified MacIntyre of the alleged assault in mid-December. After being notified, MacIntyre immediately told athletic director Rick George about the allegations.
The woman had also, according to the report, emailed Coach MacIntyre two days earlier, saying she had a “very confidential concern” about Tumpkin.
The report says that phone records back up claims that MacIntyre called the woman right after his wife had received her message, and told him that Tumpkin had “repeatedly and violently abused her” during the last two years of their three-year relationship.
The report says the call lasted for 34 minutes and said the most-recent abuse had happened in mid-November, when the Buffs played Washington State at home. The report says she ended her relationship with Tumpkin afterward.
The SI report says that MacIntyre told her she was “very courageous” to call and expressed concern over the alleged abuse.
The woman said MacIntyre told her he had talked to athletic director Rick George briefly about the allegations and that they would decide what to do. But she told SI she never heard from the athletic department again.
“At that time, we believed that it was premature to take personnel action because there was no restraining order, criminal charges, civil action or other documentation of the allegation,” DiStefano said in the statement.
He adds, “we regret that as soon as each of us knew of the allegations of domestic violence, written evidence or not, we did not report them to our office of Institutional Equity and Compliance.”
Tumpkin, usually a safeties coach on the team, coached the defense during the Buffs’ bowl game on Dec. 29 after the team’s defensive coordinator left.
On Jan. 6, the Boulder Daily Camera broke the story that the woman had been granted a restraining order against Tumpkin in December. Four days later, he was suspended indefinitely after police officially opened an investigation into the alleged abuse.
On Jan. 25, a Boulder County judge granted a permanent protection order against Tumpkin, prohibiting him from ever contacting his ex-girlfriend.
Tumpkin submitted his resignation, which was requested by the university, on Jan. 27. It became effective Jan. 31. He is set to receive just under $80,000 as a final payout, which includes a bonus for the team’s bowl game.
DiStefano also refutes the claim that Tumpkin received a promotion to interim defensive coordinator ahead of the Alamo Bowl.
“Tumpkin was not promoted nor did he receive any adjustment in salary or title.”
On the day his resignation became effective, Tumpkin was charged with five counts of felony second-degree assault and three counts of misdemeanor third-degree assault.
Denver7 has reached out to CU officials for comment, but those requests have yet to be returned. A spokesman told SI, however, that the university – including MacIntyre and George — was not aware of any allegations until the Daily Camera informed them of the restraining order.
Tumpkin posted $10,000 bond on Thursday in Bromfield County Court, according to records.
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Man accused in shooting death of RTD security officer charged with first-degree murder
DENVER – The suspect in the shooting death of a Denver transit security guard Tuesday night near Union Station was charged with first-degree murder Friday morning in Denver District Court.
Joshua Cummings, 37, his face still swollen from what Denver District Attorney Beth McCann called an infection, uttered only two words during the hearing when he told the judge, “Yes sir,” when asked if he understood his rights. Continue reading