Crime And City Living

A thirty-four year old man was killed yesterday a couple of blocks from my daughter's home in a recently designated historic neighborhood that is walking distance from Denver's downtown Auraria campus. 

This is the second murder within a stone's throw of her home since she moved in. Like the last one, it was swiftly solved, but a quick arrest doesn't bring the dead back, or erase the unease the murders leave behind.

This burglar and murderer who was already wanted on outstanding warrants was caught with the latest technology - a traffic camera feed and iPhone tracking, as well as more old school gumshoe work, and the weapon used, a metal bar, was also old school. He was caught to the victim's house keys in hand.

The previous murder in the neighborhood involved two girls, probably with gang connections, who were fighting downtown and reconvened to the park. A bystander who tried to intervene was shot and killed by one of the girl's boyfriends.

Crime, serious and petty, is a reality of daily life in a major city.

There have been three shootings near East High School, which is almost exactly half a mile from my office.

A couple of years ago, a man went on a murder spree that started about four blocks from my office, killed a passing acquaintance of my wife on South Broadway in the middle, shortly before its end resulted in the death of a clerk at a hotel where I'd met a friend from out of town a few months earlier.

A few months before that, some drunks drove their car into a light pole in the alley behind my office and took out power to the entire block for a day. They were arrested on the spot barely conscious in the car.

I was having breakfast at a fairly nice restaurant a couple blocks from my office, maybe a year ago, when a schizophrenic homeless man barged in and started trying to wreck havoc, knocking things to the floor, before a couple employees and a patron in an elegantly executed maneuver managed to remove him from the premises and send him on his way.

It barely even counts as crime, but I routine drive by one to three homeless encampments going to or from work, or on errands elsewhere around town.

The most serious incident my family has personally experienced was a few years ago when I was robbed by two men at gunpoint in front of my home who then fled in a beat up late model car. I stayed cool and cooperated with them, and it honestly wasn't even a lasting PSTD class trauma.  I called the police ands they came, but no one was caught and there wasn't much of an investigation.

They took my laptop, my cell phone, and my wallet. In the end, it was inconvenient, but not life altering. Almost all of the files on my laptop were backed up in the cloud and a quick call from my wife's phone to my assistant made it possible for him to adopt new passwords that made it impossible for any of the data to be accessed even if someone could breach the password to the laptop itself. He also quickly alerted my credit card companies to the theft and no unauthorized charges were made. It took a couple of weeks to replace my ID and credit cards which was particularly inconvenient because I had to be on a trip for which I needed not just an ID for airport security, for which I could use my passport at home, but a driver's license to rent a car. I'd also had about $100 in cash and an unfilled pharmacy prescription in my wallet. The cash was a total loss, but I managed to find the prescription, wrapped around a couple of discarded meth prescriptions in a public trash can a couple of blocks away, the next day. The monetary loss was sufficiently marginal that I didn't make an insurance claim. While they weren't caught for this mid-level felony, I'm sure that within a few years that the perpetrators ended up in prison for something, OD'd, or killed.

Other incidents of crime were far more mild. A locked bicycle was stolen off of our front porch. A stroller we were no longer using was stolen from our garage when the garage door was left open once. My car parked on the street has been broken into several times with a handful of items of trivial value like spare change, a pocket knife, a disposable lighter, and a bottle of ibuprofen were stolen although my musical tastes were sufficiently unfashionable that they didn't steal my CDs.

I've had a couple of instances of authorized credit card charges. One was a set of recurring false charges probably at a gas station I used to frequent when I worked in Wheat Ridge that I didn't even notice until I started working in the Denver Tech Center on the other side of town but kept seeing charges from a gas station I no longer used. The other was a string of expensive appliances purchased from big box home supply stores in Houston, Texas while I was several states away and knew no one there. Both were reversed without much trouble when I called attention to them and the problem didn't recur.

Beyond that it's been nothing more serious than littering and dogs pooping on my lawn without the owner picking it up, and near misses with cars violating traffic laws from cutting me off on the highway or a roundabout when they were supposed to yield, to nearly being hit by someone running a red light, to honking my horn at someone driving the wrong way on a one way street towards me.

My partner in my law firm, who also lived just a few blocks away from me, experienced a couple of home burglaries.

Still, it's survivable.

In the practice of law itself, it isn't usually quite so personal. 

Mostly, I routinely dealt with cases of major fraud and embezzlement. Economically, these cases, often involving hundreds of thousands to many millions of dollars of losses, have been the most serious. But white collar crime simply isn't as traumatic of violent and physical blue collar crime.

I have, however, worked on a couple of wrongful death cases involving homicides (which honestly are easier on the stomach than negligence based personal injury cases because you don't have to delve into the gory medical details of the horrific injuries). There have also been several cases involving the multiple legal facets that can flow from sexual assaults involving people who know each other, domestic violence, and child abuse, from restraining orders to custody to claims for money damages.

There have also been a number of cases of more mundane thefts from probate estates, the most notable of which involved a widow whose late husband had rented heavy construction equipment that his employees misappropriated a dozen of after his death. 

Finally, there have been a few cases of on the job potential threats of violence from people connected to cases we are involved in, the most notable of which happened in Grand Junction, Colorado, where I had to deal with a stalker ex-husband who had followed his wife and our of our attorneys back to our offices after a hearing, while the client, the attorney, and rest of the employees of the office fled out the back door to hide until the police arrived. The attorney involved, a former domestic relations magistrate, took the risk very seriously because she and her law clerk had been shot outside the Mesa County Courthouse by a disgruntled husband in a divorce case after a hearing.