GOLDEN — Katharine Decker set a bagged rock about the size of a cantaloupe in front of the jury with a heavy thump Monday.

This rock, Jefferson County’s chief deputy district attorney told the jurors, is the rock that killed 20-year-old Alexa Bartell. The defendant, Joseph Koenig, threw it through her windshield two years ago and he is guilty of murder, Decker said during opening statements in Koenig’s trial.

“This rock blew through her head like a cannon,” she said, noting the fatal attack was one of several in an ongoing spree that night.

Koenig is guilty, his attorneys conceded in their own opening statements — but not of first-degree murder. The then-18-year-old didn’t intend to hurt anyone that night, defense attorney Thomas Ward said. He and two other teenagers didn’t think at all about the potential danger of hurling rocks at other drivers. They thought only about hitting cars, not people.

“All three of the boys in that truck are guilty of causing Alexa Bartell’s death,” Ward told jurors. “We are not running from that. But the evidence will show Alexa Bartell’s death, as tragic as it was, was not first-degree murder.”

Koenig’s jury trial started Monday in Jefferson County District Court, where the 20-year-old is charged with first-degree murder, nine counts of attempted murder, three counts of assault, six counts of attempted assault. He faces life in prison if he is convicted of first-degree murder.

Ward suggested jurors should find Koenig guilty only of the lesser offense of manslaughter. He said Koenig’s mental state that night didn’t match what is legally required for a first-degree murder conviction.

Koenig is accused of carrying out a series of attacks in which he and two other teenagers threw rocks and objects at passing cars, including one attack on April 19, 2023, that killed Bartell. Koenig and other teenagers threw at least 10 objects at cars on at least three different nights between February and April 2023, prosecutors allege.

“The defendant’s attacks were frequent, the defendant’s targets were focused, the defendant’s weapons were fatal,” Decker said.

She showed photos of cars damaged in the spree. Some had rock-sized holes in their windshield, or smashed bumpers or crushed side mirrors.

Prosecutors say Koenig threw the rock through Bartell’s windshield as the two vehicles passed each other around 10:45 p.m. on Indiana Street near the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Koenig’s defense team alleges it was another teenager in the car who threw the fatal rock.

Legally, all three teenagers can be held convicted of causing Bartell’s death regardless of who threw the rock, both prosecutors and defense attorneys told jurors.

Koenig’s is the only case to go to trial. The other two teenagers in the car that night have pleaded guilty and are expected to testify during Koenig’s trial.

Nicholas “Mitch” Karol-Chik, 20, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder in 2024 and faces up to 72 years in prison. Zachary Kwak, 20, pleaded guilty days later to assault and attempted assault and faces between 20 and 32 years in prison.

Neither Karol-Chick nor Kwak have been sentenced; their sentencings are set for early May. Their plea deals are contingent on their cooperation with Koenig’s prosecution.

All three teenagers were arrested after cellphone data tied them to the crime scene. All were 18 at the time. The trio treated the attacks like a game, court records show. They turned around to take a photo of Bartell’s smashed car as a memento, prosecutors said.

“As the defendant literally blows her brains out, he whoops,” Decker said. “He says ‘Holy (expletive)’ as this rock deposits part of her brain tissue on the side of the road.”

Ward told jurors the teenagers threw rocks at cars after a night of ongoing pranks that escalated from shoplifting and throwing rocks at parked cars to throwing rocks at moving cars as the teenagers tried to one-up each other.

“It was stupid and immature, but not one of these three boys thought that they would use the rocks to hurt people,” Ward said. He called the first-degree murder charge “inflated.”

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“You going to prison isn’t going to make you a decent person, you going to prison isn’t going to bring back our son,” said Sally Glass, Christian’s mother, addressing the table where former Clear Creek County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Buen sat. “…But you’ve done so much damage, and you must not be able to get away with it.”

Sally Glass choked on her words throughout her speech to the judge during the Monday morning sentencing hearing, fighting back tears. At times, she completely stopped speaking to breathe deeply and compose herself, allowing silence to fill the courtroom.

Buen was convicted in February of criminally negligent homicide in the 2022 killing of Christian Glass after his first trial ended with the jury deadlocked on a murder charge. He was also convicted of reckless endangerment in that initial jury trial.

During the Monday morning hearing, Clear Creek County District Court Judge Catherine Cheroutes gave Buen the maximum possible sentence: three years in the Colorado Department of Corrections for the homicide charge and 120 days in jail for the reckless endangerment charge. The sentences will be served concurrently.

“Mr. Buen killed Christian Glass, and that deserves punishment,” Cheroutes said. “There’s no question in my mind that that is appropriate. … This was about power. This wasn’t a mistake.”

Cheroutes said the sentence needed to address “the needs of the victims and the community” while also serving as an example and promoting respect for the law.

Still, the maximum sentence doesn’t feel like enough and pales in comparison to the years Buen stole from his son, Christian’s father, Simon Glass, said.

“What a waste, what a terrible waste,” Simon Glass said.

He said the family is still struggling to come to terms with his son’s death and that talking about his son in the past tense feels “completely alien, like someone else is speaking.”

Simon Glass also struggled to complete his testimony before Cheroutes during the hearing. He said all of his once-happy memories of his son had been infused with pain — not just from the shooting, but from the drawn-out legal process and multiple trials.

“This entire trial has been incredibly difficult for all of us,” said Katie Glass, Christian’s sister. “I am not the same person I was before. I have anxiety attacks, I have depression, I can’t live my life like I used to be able to. And I just miss him.”

Buen shot and killed Christian Glass on June 10, 2022, after the 22-year-old called 911 for help when his car got stuck on a rock in Clear Creek County. Glass, who had marijuana and amphetamine in his system, was experiencing a mental health crisis and told dispatchers he was afraid of “skinwalkers” and people chasing him.

“He died terrified, in pain and all alone,” Katie Glass said. “That’s what hurts me the most.”

Seven law enforcement officers responded to Glass’s 911 call and spent more than an hour trying to coax him out of the car while he was experiencing delusions and paranoia. Eventually, Buen decided to break Glass’s window and pull him from the vehicle.

When officers broke the window, Glass grabbed a knife and officers fired a Taser at him and shot him with beanbags in an attempt to force him to drop it. Instead, Glass twisted in the driver’s seat and thrust the knife toward an officer standing next to the shattered window behind him, prompting Buen to shoot Glass five times. Glass then stabbed himself several times.

A separate grand jury investigation into the incident in 2022 found Glass had committed no crime, had acted in panic and self-defense before he was killed and had never actually come close to stabbing the officers. The involved law enforcement agencies agreed to a $19 million settlement with Glass’s parents in May.

Buen was fired after he was indicted.

“Christian deserved better, you all deserved better,” Buen said during the sentencing hearing, standing before the court in his orange prison jumpsuit. “This is something I have to live with.”

He said there were a million things he could have done better that night and he wishes that he had done differently.

Simon Glass called out the grief displayed by Buen, his attorney and his supporters as performative. He said the former deputy has continually shown “a complete lack of remorse throughout the trial.” Buen and his attorney insisted the regret was genuine.

The former deputy said that every time he speaks with his family, they talk about their favorite memories and time together.

“I can’t imagine sharing those moments and having the person that they’re about be gone,” Buen said.

Buen’s sister, Jennifer, said she’s had to deal with the “unbearable pain of watching your brother slip away.”

She and her daughter, Abigail, told the judge that Andrew Buen changed after the 2022 shooting. They said he was “beyond broken and hurt” and became distanced.

Buen’s mother and close friends also testified on behalf of the ex-deputy, asking the court for “mercy.”

Judge Cheroutes said she truly believed the group’s statements about Buen, that he is a kind, gentle and loyal person, but she said that all changed once he was in uniform and armed.

She said law enforcement officers must remember that they are public servants and their duty is not to violate their oath to serve and protect.

“And that is exactly what happened in this case,” she said.

Andrew Buen’s supervisor, former Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Sgt. Kyle Gould, was not there during the incident but permitted Buen to break into Glass’s car. Gould pleaded guilty to failing to intervene in the excessive force of another officer in 2023 and was sentenced to two years of probation.

An additional four law enforcement officers face charges of failing to intervene in the excessive force of another officer; their criminal cases are pending.

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Colorado prison officials will not allow a man convicted of killing a Denver police officer 20 years ago to enter a program that could make him eligible to seek an early release, a prison spokeswoman confirmed Thursday.

Raul Gomez-Garcia, 39, drew outrage last month when he applied to participate in a three-year prison program for people convicted of crimes as juveniles and young adults. If he were accepted to and completed the program, which focuses on building life skills, he would have been eligible to apply for early parole.

Gomez-Garcia was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of Denver police Detective Donald Young on May 8, 2005. Gomez-Garcia was 19 at the time.

His request to join the program was denied on April 4, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Alondra Gonzalez said, because it did not meet “the statutory and policy-based eligibility requirements.”

“Mr. Gomez-Garcia is not under consideration for the program and is not eligible to reapply for a period of three years,” she said in a statement.

Over the last seven years, roughly 59% of prisoners who applied for the program were denied, prison records show. Between the 2021 and 2023 fiscal years, 17 prisoners were granted parole after finishing the program.

In a statement to The Denver Post about the controversy around his application to the program, Gomez-Garcia said he hoped the program would help him learn “even more tools that I can use to continue to improve and become a better man today than I was yesterday.”

He also apologized for his actions and said he is no longer the same person he was as a teenager.

Gomez-Garcia shot Young and his partner, Detective Jack Bishop, who survived, while the pair of officers were working an off-duty security job on May 8, 2005. Gomez-Garcia, who was living in the U.S. illegally, fled to Mexico after the killing and was extradited to Denver.

The possibility that he could have become eligible for an early release outraged Young’s family, the Denver police union, and Denver police Chief Ron Thomas, who called it “preposterous.”

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Jackson Maes, 27, died by suicide alone in his cell and no deputy checked on him for more than eight hours, his mother alleged in the federal lawsuit. He’d made suicidal statements before his death, but deputies failed to get him mental health help and did not take away items he could have used for self-harm.

The Denver jury on Wednesday found the sheriff’s office liable for inadequate training and found a jail commander liable for deliberate indifference, said Sean Dormer, an attorney for Maes’ mother, Sarah Lieberenz. The jurors began deliberations at about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday and reached a verdict around 1 p.m. Wednesday.

“I think the most important thing to Sarah, and to all of the friends and family of Jackson who watched (the trial), is that it is a statement that his life didn’t need to end that day, in that place, and that his condition was a medical condition and he deserved care just like anyone else,” Dormer said. “It is an important verdict for the idea that suicidal thoughts are not supposed to be a death sentence. That life goes on and there is hope.”

Saguache County Sheriff Dan Warwick did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.

Maes was jailed on Nov. 16, 2019, after a worker at a Crestone bar called 911 because she was worried about how drunk he was. The deputy who responded found Maes had a warrant for failing to appear in court for a traffic ticket and arrested him.

The deputy put Maes in a holding cell at the Saguache County Sheriff’s Office, where the 27-year-old banged his head on a wall and made suicidal comments to the deputies.

The deputies placed a call to mental health professionals, but nobody answered. Deputies didn’t leave a voicemail and didn’t try to contact anybody else for help, the lawsuit alleged. They also did not place Maes on suicide watch.

At about 10:15 p.m., Maes began to create a way to hang himself in his cell — about seven minutes after a deputy left his cell for what would be the last time that night.

Maes hanged himself at 10:21 p.m., video shows. At that time, and in the minutes before, deputies socialized in the dispatch room, the lawsuit states. Nobody physically checked on Maes or looked at the video feed of his cell. His body was not discovered until 7 a.m. the next day.

A deputy later claimed in a report that he’d checked the cells at 11 p.m. and midnight, but surveillance video showed he did not. A second deputy who took over at midnight also failed to check the cells.

Dormer argued during the trial that deputies should have checked on Maes regularly that night.

“It would have taken…10 seconds to check on Jackson in his cell before leaving for the night,” Dormer said.

He noted that the amount of the final payment will be higher than the jury’s $4 million verdict, because attorneys’ fees and costs will be added to that. He expects the final payment to be close to $7 million.

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The police department’s crime laboratory started a process to review the reports from at least 422 sexual assault evidence kits that Denver police submitted to CBI for DNA testing over the last 12 years, spokesman Doug Schepman said in a statement Friday.

From that initial review, the lab will determine how many kits should be re-tested, he said. If re-testing reveals new DNA evidence, police will investigate the sex assault cases further, Schepman said.

The move to review the cases comes after CBI discovered Woods mishandled DNA testing in more than a thousand cases during her nearly 30-year tenure as a DNA analyst at the statewide law enforcement agency. Woods retired in lieu of termination in late 2023 after an internal investigation found she deleted, omitted or manipulated DNA data in at least 1,003 criminal cases.

She was charged with 102 felonies in January; the criminal case against her is ongoing.

The review by the Denver Crime Laboratory is separate from — and redundant to — CBI’s internal review of Woods’ cases. CBI reviewed more than 10,000 cases that Woods handled — including the 422 Denver cases — and found problems in 1,003 cases.

The agency did identify problems in a subset of the 422 Denver cases, CBI spokesman Rob Low said. He and Schepman both declined to give a specific number.

“We welcome the opportunity to work with the Denver crime lab in its assessment to determine if any Denver PD cases warrant retesting,” Low said in a statement.

During CBI’s internal investigation, Woods admitted to taking shortcuts when she was testing Denver sex assault cases, an internal affairs report shows. She said she did so after Colorado legislators passed a law in 2013 that required authorities to test nearly all sexual assault evidence kits, regardless of whether the case was likely to result in an arrest or prosecution.

Woods told internal affairs investigators that she believed the Denver crime lab sent CBI the sex assault cases it did not expect to solve, so she took shortcuts in the DNA testing process — she deleted data about low quantities of male DNA so that she wouldn’t have to complete additional testing that was unlikely to produce conclusive results, according to the internal affairs report.

“Denver PD gave us all the cases that they knew they weren’t going to prosecute and they told us that,” Woods said in a November 2023 interview with investigators. She then cited the 2013 law change and said CBI was overwhelmed at the time.

The agency reported in 2016 that the law more than tripled the number of sex assault evidence kits submitted to CBI.

During the internal affairs interview, Woods agreed with an investigator’s suggestion that her flawed work on the Denver sex assault testing might have been “a method of triage.”

“Possibly,” she said, according to an excerpt in the internal affairs report. “Again, no excuse for it.”

The 2013 law was aimed at clearing Colorado’s backlog of untested sexual assault evidence kits, which are sometimes called rape kits. In 2016, CBI announced it had worked through the backlog and tested more than 3,000 old cases.

But it didn’t last. The agency now has a backlog of more than 1,400 untested rape kits. It currently takes about 558 days for kits to be tested after they are submitted to the state, according to CBI. The agency’s goal is to turn around testing in 90 days.

The current backlog was exacerbated by Woods’ misconduct because the agency pulled scientists from casework to handle the review of Woods’ cases, officials have said.

Schepman said police would work with CBI as the city’s review goes forward.

“We intend to collaborate with the CBI on our results of the review, in the interest of working together to serve victims in the best way possible,” Schepman said.

Denver Post reporter Nick Coltrain contributed to this report. 

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Michael Correa, 45, will become the first non-U.S.-citizen to stand trial in an American federal court for torture committed abroad when his 10-day jury trial starts Monday in U.S. District Court in Denver.

Correa is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit torture and six counts of inflicting torture on specific victims. He faces up to 20 years in prison on each charge.

He is accused of torturing at least six people over several months in 2006 while he served in a special Gambian armed unit known as the “Junglers” that took orders directly from then-President Yahya Jammeh. The prosecution is being closely followed by international human rights organizations and by people across The Gambia.

“This case is definitely something that folks are watching, because it is so historic for the United States to bring a case like this, and because there has been so little accountability for the crimes under the Jammeh regime,” said Carmen Cheung Ka-Man, an attorney with The Center for Justice & Accountability, which is representing three of the six alleged victims.

Correa is accused of torturing people suspected of plotting a coup against Jammeh, according to a grand jury indictment in the case. U.S. prosecutors allege Correa beat people, electrocuted them, dripped molten plastic and acid on their bodies, put plastic bags over their heads and threatened them with guns, hot metal rods and other devices.

Correa came to the U.S. in 2016 to escort The Gambia’s vice president on a trip in New York and never left, overstaying his visa and resettling in Denver, where prosecutors said he worked as a day laborer. He was arrested without incident in 2019 and charged with the federal torture crimes in 2020.

He has pleaded not guilty and remained in federal custody.

Correa’s federal public defenders declined to comment through a pre-recorded blanket phone message which said the office does not discuss cases. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado did not return a request for comment.

When Correa was indicted, Department of Justice officials said the prosecution showed the U.S. would not be a “safe haven” for perpetrators of torture and that such perpetrators would face justice in this country.

The federal prosecution moves the U.S. into a new era, Cheung Ka-Man said.

“That’s a really important thing for our courts to do,” she said. “It means we are upholding the rule of law here, and that our courts are spaces where human rights violators can be held accountable.”

She added that the Gambian government is in the process of setting up its own war crime tribunal, and that several people involved in that effort plan to attend the Denver trial to learn how the process can work.

Sirra Ndow, a representative with the Alliance of Victim-Led Organisations, a nonprofit in The Gambia that aims to champion victims’ rights, said the U.S. prosecution, while challenging because it is taking place so far away, is broadly supported by Gambians.

Culturally, Gambians tend to avoid the justice process, she said, so that wide support is particularly notable.

“We kind of tend to shy away from going to the formal justice system, so seeing that the majority of Gambians are demanding justice is a big signal that… we never want something like this to happen again in this country,” she said.

She said the prosecution brings a measure of “satisfaction” to all torture survivors, not just the six victims identified in the U.S. case.

“Justice for one victim is justice for all,” she said.

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A Colorado man imprisoned for 15 years says he was wrongly convicted of a triple shooting inside an Adams County bar because of faulty eyewitness identification.

James Garner, 51, is challenging his conviction with help from the Korey Wise Innocence Project. He claims that three witnesses misidentified him as the shooter in a crowded bar and that new science around the unreliability of eyewitness identification should invalidate his 2012 conviction.

None of the three witnesses could pick Garner out of a photo array shortly after the shooting. They did not identify him as the shooter until three years later, during Garner’s jury trial, when the three victims, all brothers, pointed to him at the defense table and said for the first time that he was the shooter.

“That’s an enormous red flag,” said Brandon Garrett, a professor of law at Duke University. “People’s memory does not get better over time.”

Garner is due in Adams County District Court on Monday for the beginning of a two-day hearing on his petition for post-conviction relief. He is arguing both that his attorneys failed to adequately represent him during his jury trial and that the science around eyewitness identifications has changed enough that it critically undermines the original evidence against him.

Garner doesn’t dispute that he was at the bar at West 52nd Avenue and Pecos Street on Nov. 22, 2009. He was there celebrating a birthday with several friends. Around 1:30 a.m., a dispute broke out between Garner’s group of friends and a separate group at the bar, according to court records.

Someone fired at least five shots, and three brothers in the other group were wounded, the records show. All three survived.

After the shooting, almost everyone in the bar ran away, including Garner. He dropped a pair of glasses in the chaos and his girlfriend dropped her phone — police later used those items to identify Garner.

The three wounded brothers and the bar’s staff stayed until police arrived, court records show. Witnesses initially gave varying descriptions of the shooter. One said the shooter was a white bald man; another said the shooter was a Hispanic man with short black hair, another witness described the shooter as thin with a mustache.

Police never found the gun used in the shooting and did not make any arrests for several months, until they eventually identified Garner as having been present in the bar. Officers showed the witnesses a lineup of photos of five random people and Garner, to see if they could identify Garner as the shooter.

None were able to. One witness said Garner was “possibly there,” and then identified one of the random people as the shooter. Another witness also picked out a random person as the shooter.

Not until Garner’s jury trial did the three brothers say they were certain the man at the defense table was the shooter that night. Garner was convicted of assault and related charges and sentenced to 32 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 2029.

But since his conviction, new science has shown that witnesses should not be shown a suspect’s face more than once, said Jeanne Segil, an attorney for Garner with the Korey Wise Innocence Project, an organization within the University of Colorado Boulder that provides free legal services to people who claim to be wrongfully convicted.

“A first test really can be quite reliable,” she said. “And the finding that the brothers did not identify Mr. Garner, that is actually probative of innocence. That non-identification is looked at differently today.”

In court filings, prosecutors with the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office have argued the changes in eyewitness identification research do not constitute new evidence in Garner’s case.

“Since this evidence does not concern a debunked forensic process, and was widely available at the time of trial, it does not qualify as newly discovered evidence,” the prosecution wrote in a July 2023 motion.

A spokesman for the DA’s office did not return a request for comment on Garner’s petition for post-conviction relief.

Garner’s case went to the Colorado Supreme Court in 2019, which upheld the validity of the witnesses’ in-court identifications in a 4-3 decision, finding that the identifications of Garner were not “impermissibly suggestive.” The three dissenting justices found that first-time, in-court witness identifications should be handled with more legal guardrails to ensure a fair process.

Mistaken eyewitness identifications have played a role in roughly two-thirds of the hundreds of cases in which DNA later exonerated the person convicted of the crime, said Garrett, the Duke professor.

“The overall pattern in these DNA exonerations is you have very confident eyewitnesses at trial — and we now know they were wrong,” he said.

Jurors tend to trust confident in-court witness identifications even though a broad body of research shows they are unreliable, Garrett added.

“It’s counterintuitive when you are on a jury, because you think, ‘This is a crime, someone was focusing, someone is trying to pay attention,'”  he said. “And in a courtroom sometimes the witnesses are really confident, because they’ve been prepared by the attorneys. What happens in the courtroom may be compelling, but it is courtroom theater, not memory.”

Garner is innocent, Segil said. He hopes the hearing Monday and Tuesday will start the process of erasing his conviction, she said.

“He’s been really deeply frustrated, as anybody in his position would be,” she said. “He’s looking forward to getting back into court and having a chance to make his case. He’s been waiting for this for a really long time.”

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Jared Hedges, 48, was arrested March 21 at Taos Ski Valley and charged with two felonies after the boy told authorities Hedges had sexually assaulted him. Hedges was a coach for Team Summit Colorado, a youth ski club at Copper Mountain that focuses on developing young athletes.

He did not return a request for comment Wednesday.

Hedges served as head coach for the team’s alpine racing program for skiers under 14. He is no longer a coach for the club, executive director CB Bechtel said in a statement posted on the club’s website Thursday.

“The nature of this allegation is both shocking and horrifying, and I want to assure you Team Summit is responding with the utmost seriousness and urgency,” Bechtel said in the statement. “We are cooperating fully with the investigation authorities have underway.”

The club, which is “gold certified” by U.S. Ski and Snowboard, is a feeder for elite athletes, said Jason Jordan, an attorney for the boy’s family. The national ski and snowboard association uses the gold certification to denote the top 10% of clubs that have longstanding records of success.

The boy, whom The Denver Post is not identifying, said Hedges groped and assaulted him after the boy laid down to sleep at one of two cabins the team was staying in during the trip to Taos in northern New Mexico. The boy, crying, woke up another child and called his mother immediately after the assault, according to a statement of probable cause.

Other children told deputies with the Taos County Sheriff’s Office that Hedges had been staying in a lower area of the cabin with three children at the time of the incident. When the boy called his mother, Hedges began to pack up his own belongings, according to the statement of probable cause.

When deputies arrived, Hedges was walking away from the cabin toward a road, according to the probable cause statement.

Jordan said Monday that the family believes Hedges “groomed” the boy for some time before the assault, and said there were prior instances of inappropriate behavior that the boy didn’t fully understand before the assault, which was an escalation.

“The young boy knew something was seriously wrong, he was incredibly upset,” Jordan said.

Jordan believes there could be additional victims who have yet to come forward.

“We are obviously concerned more than anything that there are a lot more victims out there,” he said. “These types of things, in our experience, are not isolated.”

He urged any such people to contact local law enforcement.

The club reported the coach’s arrest to the U.S. Center for SafeSport and has made a professional therapist available to the club’s athletes, families and staff, Bechtel said in the Thursday statement. Coaches go through background checks before they are hired and every two years, and they complete mandatory SafeSport trainings, Bechtel said.

The Center for SafeSport issued a temporary suspension against Hedges on Thursday, its website shows.

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The end of Colorado retiree Michael Burch’s life can be measured in seconds, minutes, hours and days.

Deputies gave him 16 seconds of warning before shocking him with a Taser and tackling him inside a jail cell at the Huerfano County Detention Center in Walsenburg, breaking his ribs on a bench. Paramedics spent six minutes checking him out before leaving without providing any care. Burch banged on a cell door and screamed for help for an hour after he was injured.

And he lived for eight days before dying on the floor of that southern Colorado jail.

Officers in the Huerfano County Detention Center broke Burch’s ribs then let him go without needed medical treatment for a week as he slowly died, despite his repeated pleas for help, his family alleged in a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Huerfano County Sheriff’s Office, the county and several individual deputies and medical providers.

The 69-year-old retired correctional officer died from complications of blunt force trauma to his chest, the coroner ruled, finding Burch suffered six badly broken ribs, a collapsed lung, internal bleeding and bruised intestines after a jail detention officer tackled him on March 28, 2023.

Burch’s rib injuries went untreated even when Burch asked to go to the hospital, told paramedics and deputies that his ribs were crushed and repeatedly pleaded for help, his family alleges. Burch was in the middle of a mental health crisis. He told deputies the devil was talking to him and sometimes ranted incoherently.

“Collectively, everybody in their jail assumed this guy was, in their own words, ‘batshit,’ ” said Omeed Azmoudeh, an attorney for Burch’s family. “That he was malingering, he was making up his injuries, the only reason he is complaining is because he wants a free day from jail by going to the hospital.”

Azmoudeh pointed to a particular moment, after Burch was tackled and handcuffed on the floor, when one captain in the jail turned to a medical provider and made a circular motion with her finger by her head and said, “Batshit.” Surveillance footage captured the exchange.

Attorney Qusair Mohamedbhai said Burch’s death was one of the most horrific he’s seen in decades.

“It’s the slow, painful death of a man in a cage that I simply have never seen before in Colorado,” he said.

Huerfano County Sheriff Bruce Newman did not return a request for comment on Burch’s death. The officers’ use of force was investigated by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and 3rd Judicial District Attorney Henry Solano declined to bring criminal charges against the deputies in January 2024.

Burch moved to Colorado in 2007 after he retired from a 23-year career as a correctional officer in California. The ordeal that led to his death began in mid-March 2023, when his neighbors and others began to notice that he was acting strangely.

In one instance, Burch went into a bank and spoke incoherently about fake $100 bills, in another he went to a hospital and complained about his rights as a veteran in an erratic manner. Then, on March 25, 2023, he pulled into the driveway of two men he’d never met, ranted about various topics and then swung a rubber mallet at them, according to the CBI’s investigative report.

He was arrested and charged with felony menacing. After he was booked into the detention center, someone there gave him a small pencil and notepad, and he wrote notes on it to calm himself. On his third day in custody, a newly hired detention officer said he saw Burch pull the small pencil across his wrist in a “cutting” motion, according to the CBI report.

Detention officer Stuart Pino and Capt. Lea Vigil went to Burch’s single-person cell, where Pino shouted, “You going to try to stab somebody?” body-worn camera footage shows. Burch did not answer.

Pino and Vigil opened the cell door and Pino shouted at Burch to drop the pencil.

“Drop it, or we’ll drop you,” he shouted.

Burch stood at the back of his cell with his hands at his sides and did not move or speak, the body-worn camera footage shows. Sixteen seconds after the first shout, Vigil fired her Taser at Burch as he stood with his hands at his sides. Burch then lunged forward.

Pino grabbed Burch and tackled him, throwing the man into a bench. Burch let go of the pencil and was handcuffed. The officers later said that Burch tried to stab them with the pencil.

When paramedics arrived a few minutes later, Burch complained that his right side hurt.

“My ribs are crushed… all of the ribs are in my body,” he said. When asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, he said, “Oh yeah man, I want to go.”

But Capt. Billy LaPorte intervened, telling paramedics that since it wasn’t an emergency, the jail’s medical staff would evaluate Burch internally and decide whether he needed to go to a hospital, the body-worn camera footage shows.

Over the next seven days, Burch’s condition worsened. In the hours immediately after the incident, he scooted across the floor of his cell, sat by the door and banged on it, shouting for “Help,” on and off for an hour, surveillance video shows. He also apologized and asked for water. Jail staff had covered the main window of his cell with black plastic after Burch stripped naked. He sat by a second window inches above the ground, hitting it with the back of his elbow, surveillance footage shows.

He was slowly suffocating, Azmoudeh said.

“His breaths got shorter and shorter and shorter until he was no longer breathing,” he said.

By March 31, a big, black bruise was visible on Burch’s torso, surveillance video shows. On April 1, Burch told Vigil that he’d nearly died the night before.

“I almost didn’t make it last night, sweetheart,” he said, repeating that his ribs were crushed and asking for a medical appointment.

Two hours later — five days after the incident — he had a telehealth visit with a nurse practitioner who was out of state. The nurse practitioner did not identify Burch’s rib injuries and the visit instead focused solely on his mental health. Burch still received no care for his injury, his attorneys say.

The lawsuit names the paramedics and that nurse practitioner as defendants. Azmoudeh said it was the responsibility of the medical providers to identify and treat Burch’s injuries.

“People who are experiencing a mental crisis require more advocacy by medical staff and the people responsible for providing medical care rather than less,” Azmoudeh said. “If someone is in crisis they will have, for obvious reasons, a more difficult time communicating their injuries and ailments.”

Two days after the telehealth visit, Burch collapsed in his cell at 10:38 p.m. on April 3, according to the lawsuit. An officer looked in the cell at midnight and took no action. Not until 4:40 a.m. did an officer actually enter the cell to check on Burch. By that time, his body was cold.

The officer made a call over the radio.

“Oh, this guy’s frozen, bro.”

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Michael Clark, 49, was convicted in a 2012 jury trial of first-degree murder in the 1994 cold-case killing of Boulder city employee Marty Grisham, 48, who was shot to death at his home on the evening of Nov. 1, 1994.

Clark has consistently maintained his innocence in the murder — despite DNA testing done by Woods that she said connected him to the crime scene. New testing by an independent lab now shows that Woods’ testing was flawed, Clark’s attorney, Adam Frank, said Monday.

The new testing took place after the CBI discovered that Woods, a top scientist at the agency for decades, mishandled DNA testing in more than 1,000 cases, sometimes cutting corners or skipping protocols meant to ensure accurate results. She was charged in January with 102 felonies; the criminal case is still pending.

Her misconduct shook Colorado’s justice system and is expected to cost millions of dollars to rectify. Clark was the first to claim he was wrongfully convicted due in part to her unethical work.

“Michael Clark was convicted because of Missy Woods’ false testimony that DNA evidence put him at the scene of the crime,” Frank said. “Based on (the) retesting, we now know that is not true.”

Woods tested DNA in a small tub of lip balm that was found under the stairs near Grisham’s apartment. The city employee answered a knock at his door at 9:34 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1994, and was shot multiple times by someone who never entered the apartment.

Woods concluded that the DNA in the lip balm tub excluded 99.4% of the world’s male population but could include Clark.

The new testing found that it is 2.8 times more likely that random people contributed the DNA in the lip balm than Clark, according to a copy of the DNA results filed in court. That means there is “limited support” to exclude Clark’s DNA from the lip balm, the report states.

Moderate support would be a ratio between 100 and 10,000, while strong support would be a ratio higher than 10,000, the report says.

The re-testing shows Clark’s DNA is not in the lip balm container, Frank said in a Monday court filing.

“…The reason Mr. Clark was arrested, prosecuted and convicted was that Missy Woods falsified a DNA match,” Frank wrote. “DNA retesting has proven that Mr. Clark has been telling the truth all along: Mr. Clark’s DNA is not in the Carmex container.”

A spokeswoman for the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, Shannon Carbone, said in a statement Monday that prosecutors are “committed to reaching the right result in this case” and that the DNA testing of the lip balm and additional items “has been helpful.”

“We owe it to everyone involved — the murder victim and his family, the community and Mr. Clark — to carefully evaluate the evidence and reach the right result here,” she said in an email. “We are absolutely committed to that process and goal. So we will be meeting with the private lab and other analysts from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, consulting with DNA experts and evaluating the other evidence presented at the original trial.”

That process will take a couple of weeks, she said.

In 1994, investigators considered Clark a suspect in Grisham’s killing because he had access to a 9mm gun — the same caliber used in the killing — and because they alleged he stole blank checks from Grisham and wrote $4,500 in false checks from Grisham’s account.

Later, they alleged Clark, then 19, dreamed of joining the Marine Corps and believed he could not do so if he was caught committing check fraud, so he killed Grisham in an attempt to cover it up. A jailhouse informant also later claimed Clark had admitted to the killing while jailed in the check fraud case.

But Clark had been in Denver at 9 p.m. that night, then at his home in Boulder making phone calls to friends by 9:45 or 10 p.m., Frank said. Investigators initially believed it was possible Clark shot Grisham at 9:34 p.m. that night, but “the timeline was very tight,” Frank wrote in a motion for post-conviction relief.

The case went cold, and no one was arrested in Grisham’s killing for nearly two decades.

The investigation was reopened in 2009, and Woods tested the lip balm tub for DNA in 2011. Clark was arrested after police said the testing results tied him to the crime scene.

He is serving a life sentence and is due in court Tuesday for a discussion of the new DNA results.

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