GREELEY, Colo. – The woman accused of abusing her son in a Facebook video that went viral in May pleaded guilty Tuesday to misdemeanor child abuse charges.

Katrina Kennedy-Flores, 27, of Lochbuie, faces up to two years in jail after she pleaded guilty to child abuse knowingly or recklessly causing bodily injury charges in a Weld County District courtroom.

Police arrested Kennedy-Flores in late May after another woman posted a 16-minute video to Facebook May 9 showing Kennedy-Flores hurling insults and death threats at her son, then slamming the boy’s booster chair down near or on top of him.

After walking away, the video show Kennedy-Flores returning to the boy’s playpen and hitting him. Police photographs showed the boy suffered bruising to his arms, legs and forehead.

A court allows her to see the boy in limited and supervised settings after she was initially barred from seeing him.

Kennedy-Flores is a single mother on permanent disability. Her attorney says she suffers from scoliosis and cerebral palsy.

She is due back in court for sentencing Jan. 3.

BOULDER, Colo. – Police arrested a former Boulder County sheriff’s deputy who worked at the county jail Tuesday morning on charges he conspired to smuggle marijuana edibles and chewing tobacco into the jail in late September.

Boulder police say Tyler P. Mason, 33, was struggling with money when he agreed to bring the contraband into the jail for an inmate who was a childhood friend.

Another inmate told jail staffers about the plan on Sept. 23, and on Sept. 28, undercover detectives watched Mason allegedly take $160 from a woman in Longmont, which was to be used to buy the edibles and tobacco. Police say the woman was in on the plan.

Though the planned transaction never happened and there is no evidence Mason had smuggled contraband before, he was placed on administrative leave, then fired from the sheriff’s office on Oct. 12.

Mason had been working at the jail since December 2014.

He will be charged with one felony count of first-degree conspiracy to introduce contraband, a felony second-degree count of conspiracy to introduce contraband, and misdemeanor first-degree official misconduct.

Mason was booked into and released from the Boulder County jail Tuesday and is next scheduled to appear in court Dec. 1 to be formally charged.

DENVER – Police are holding a man for investigation on murder charges after he allegedly shot a man to death early Sunday morning in what was initially believed to have been a home burglary.

Michael E. Lewis, 46, is being held for investigation on first-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a previous offender charges.

Denver police were originally called out to a home in the 4700 block of Ireland Court, near Green Valley Ranch Boulevard, just before 6 a.m. Sunday after a person originally described as a suspected burglar was shot multiple times.

The victim of the shooting later died at a Denver hospital. The Denver Office of the Medical Examiner identified the victim Monday afternoon as Thomas Johnson Jr., 53.

A probable cause statement for Lewis’ arrest says Lewis called 911 after the shooting and told dispatchers he had to shoot a man after the man broke into his house. He said he had shot the man in the leg and that the man was also bleeding from his head, but Lewis would not say where the gun was located.

Investigators brought Lewis, who was convicted in 2010 of felony forgery and sentenced to five years in prison, to the police station for an interview, at which time Lewis declined to speak to officers without a lawyer present.

An officer who rode with the victim of the shooting to the hospital told investigators the victim was shot twice in each leg and had a gunshot wound to the back of his head.

A different officer said there was no sign of forced entry at the home either.

Court records show Lewis has an extensive rap sheet that includes arrests on vehicle theft, assault, menacing, and domestic violence charges, among others.

DPD says the investigation into the shooting remains ongoing.

ADAMS COUNTY, Colo. – The Thornton man accused of buying a 15-year-old girl from her father and having sex multiple times a day for several months, will face trial for human trafficking and sexual assault.

Adams County Judge Michael Cox bound over 43-year-old Erik Castillo’s case to District Court, following a Preliminary Hearing on Thursday.

Castillo has been formally charged with Trafficking of a Minor for Sexual Servitude, Sexual Assault on a Child by one in a position of trust, Sexual Assault on a Child by one in a position of trust with a pattern of abuse, and Sexual Assault with a 10-year Age Difference. The first three charges are felonies, but the latter is a misdemeanor.

Prosecutors called just one witness during the Preliminary Hearing.

Trooper Penny Gallegos, a 23-year veteran of the Colorado State Patrol, told the court that she was assigned to the Innocence Lost Task Force, which investigates human trafficking.

Gallegos said they received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that the young teenager may have been sold to Castillo by her own father and that she was living with Castillo.

Investigators tracked Castillo to a mobile home on the 1600 block of E. 78^th Avenue in Thornton.  They later learned that the suspect was receiving services for a child.

Gallegos said she went to Castillo’s home to ask him about his car, telling him that it had been involved in a traffic infraction in Aurora.

When the suspect went into his house to retrieve his driver’s license, Gallegos got a glimpse of the girl sitting on the sofa.

She asked to speak to the girl, who was then escorted out to the trooper’s vehicle.

Castillo gave the trooper the girl’s birth certificate and a medical form from Denver Health.  It indicated that the girl was pregnant.  He also gave her a note from the girl’s father indicating that she had permission to be with Castillo in the U.S.

The girl told investigators she met Castillo on Facebook.

She said they exchanged photos, but the photos Castillo sent were not of him, Gallegos said. They were someone else’s pictures that he downloaded from the internet.

Gallegos said the girl told investigators that Castillo paid her father $100 a month.  He also apparently paid her bus fare to Colorado.

Court documents state that Castillo is not a blood relative, but that her father told her she “should call him ‘uncle.’”

“We had no idea that human slavery was going on,” said neighbors Rob Curtis and Donna Benet. “He seemed like an okay guy.”

Benet told Denver7 that she thought Castillo was living by himself.

“I guess he kept her pretty tucked out of the way.”

Curtis snapped several photographs as police made the arrest.

“He had just moved in,” Curtis said.  “A few months later, all these cops are rolling up and FBI Agents.  We thought ‘something big is going on here.’”

The tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children apparently came from the girl’s brother.

Trooper Gallegos testified that the girl was 7 weeks pregnant when they first talked to her.

“She said she never left the house, except to go with Castillo to the grocery store,” Gallegos said.

Under cross examination, Gallegos said the girl admitted that she wasn’t being held against her will.

“But she said, she ‘had nowhere else to go,'” the trooper added.  “She said she wasn’t going to school and had no plans to.”

Castillo will remain held on bond pending his next court appearance, November 16.

DENVER – The man accused of shooting two teens meddling with his backyard marijuana grow was formally charged Thursday, and the charges also implicate him in a similar shooting that happened in September 2015.

The Denver District Attorney’s Office on Thursday charged Keith Hammock, 48, with two counts of first-degree murder, four counts of attempted murder, one count of manufacturing marijuana and one count of marijuana cultivation.

Hammock allegedly shot and killed a 15-year-old and wounded – possibly paralyzing – a 14-year-old in the latest shooting, which happened around 2 a.m. Oct. 9 at a home in the 2800 block of High Street.

In that case, he allegedly shot the two teens through a window after finding them in his illegal backyard marijuana grow in the middle of the night.

The District Attorney’s Office said Hammock has also been implicated in the September 2015 shooting of a 17-year-old that happened “under similar circumstances.”

Hammock is being held without bond at the Denver Detention Center. His next court date as yet to be set.

BOULDER, Colo. – Boulder’s police chief says the two officers who shot and killed a machete-wielding ex-Marine on Oct. 5 were trapped in a stairwell with the man when they shot him.

Boulder Police Department Chief Greg Testa told Boulder’s city council that Brandon Simmons, 28, ignored the two officers’ commands to drop his weapon and darted toward them when the officers decided to shoot, according to a report from Denver7’s news partners at the Boulder Daily Camera.

Simmons died in the shooting. The two officers are from different departments – one is from the University of Colorado Police Department and the other is a Boulder Police Department officer. A total of 14 CUPD officers and nine BPD officers responded to the scene that day.

“He cussed or made statements to them that would indicate he wasn’t going to comply, and he started advancing towards them,” Chief Testa told the council, according to the Daily Camera. “Both the officers were trying to back down the stairs as they’re yelling with him, and the distances got so close that they ended up shooting their weapons.”

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office’s Critical Incident Team continues to review the shooting. The two officers were placed on standard administrative leave after the shooting.

EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. – How does a city ranked in the top-five places to live in the country end up with one of the nation’s worst suicide rates?

That’s exactly what Newsweek tried to answer in a new report released Wednesday on the growing amount of suicides – specifically among teens – in Colorado Springs, which U.S. News & World Report earlier this year said was the No. 5 place to live in the country.

The magazine reports 13 teenagers have committed suicide in El Paso County so far this year, which is one less than the total number of teen suicides in the county last year.

Even more alarming, Newsweek reports five students out of 1,180 from the Discovery Canyon Campus killed themselves between late 2015 and summer 2016.

“It’s become almost commonplace…because it doesn’t happen once every four years,” high school junior Gracie Packard told Newsweek. “It happens four times a month, sometimes.”

Suicide rates nationally are at a near-30-year high, and the 1,058 people who committed suicide in Colorado last year put the state seventh in the country – up by 2.9 suicides per 100,000 people from 2007.

In 2014, the suicide rate in Colorado Springs was 26.1 per 100,000 people.

The Newsweek report digs through a possible “copycat contagion” in which some teens feel empowered to commit suicide when other friends of classmates do. It noted that three students at Discovery Canyon killed themselves within a two-week period. Two of them knew each other.

It also looks into mental health concerns – children with family members in the military have higher suicide rates, and Colorado Springs is a military hotbed.

And it details how some teens reach out to others, including friends and family, to talk about their suicidal tendencies or attempts. One teen sent text messages and Snapchat messages to friends before she walked into the woods behind her father’s house and shot herself.

Students are joining city and school officials to try and combat the problem through support groups and a screening system meant to identify at-risk teens.

Read the full story in Newsweek. The magazine story comes out Oct. 28.

DENVER – An FBI task force recovered nine children and arrested several alleged sex traffickers in Colorado and Wyoming in a sting that took place late last week.

The sweep was part of a nationwide operation that happens each year to bust sex trafficking rings known as Operation Cross Country.

The FBI Rocky Mountain Innocence Lost Task Force, which includes many Colorado law enforcement agencies, announced Tuesday morning it arrested 11 alleged pimps and 32 customers in addition to the rescue of the nine children.

Agents spent Oct. 13-15 working hotels, truck stops, street corners and social media apps to round up the alleged traffickers.

The task force said it noticed an increase in the use of online and app-based dating and hook-up sites to facilitate the alleged prostitution.

“We have to do a better job of getting out in front of this,” said Denver Police Department Sgt. Dan Steele, who worked on the task force and noted parents need to better-monitor their children’s social media and app usage.

The task force said the youngest trafficking victim it recovered was 14 years old. It said the Colorado and Wyoming operation ranked second in the country in terms of the number of children recovered this year – 11 children were recovered in a sting in Milwaukee.

Last year, the Rock Mountain task force recovered 20 children out of 149 nationwide in the annual sweep.

The FBI estimates up to 2,000 underage children are sexually exploited every year. Thirty-eight law enforcement agencies and district attorney’s offices from across Colorado and Wyoming participated in the task force.