Southbound Federal Boulevard was closed at 14th Avenue for the crash investigation, the agency said on social media at 12:35 p.m.

Denver Fire Department crews extricated one person who was pinned in the crash, officials said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

Troopers and Denver police officers raided the property at about 6 p.m., finding three-quarters of the roughly 600 pounds of drugs that were taken earlier this month, according to a CSP news release.

No suspects were present at the property, and no arrests were made, though law enforcement also found a stolen pickup truck that was not connected to the theft.

Colorado State Patrol Trooper Sherri Mendez declined to say where the property was located, citing the need to protect the agency’s ongoing investigation.

Denver police have also recovered a Chevy Silverado truck that troopers previously said was involved in the crime, according to the release.

The theft was discovered April 4, when an evidence technician walking through a CSP storage lot in Arapahoe County noticed a damaged gate.

Investigators then discovered that a trailer on the lot had been broken into and its contents — several hundred pounds of trafficked marijuana, scheduled for destruction — were gone.

The thieves are believed to have used power tools to remove locks from the gate and trailer April 1.

Troopers said in the news release that the recovered marijuana has since been placed in “a secure interior location” managed by CSP.

Anyone with information about the theft is encouraged to contact the agency at 303-239-4501.

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

The crash at East 10th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard occurred Thursday afternoon, according to police. The crash closed southbound lanes of Colorado Boulevard.

The cyclist died at the scene, according to police, who did not identify the deceased.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

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.”

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Denver District Court, comes as hundreds of foreign students across the country — some who have been linked to pro-Palestine activism — are facing deportation and visa revocation by the Trump administration.

The complaint names as defendants Chief Jason Mollendor and six other members of the Auraria Campus Police Department involved in last year’s arrests on the campus, home to the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and Community College of Denver.

“The truth is that the arrests on April 26, 2024, were never about enforcing campus policies, they were about punishing protesters for their views,” the lawsuit, brought by the Rathod Mohamedbhai law firm, states.

Devra Ashby, director of communications and marketing for Auraria Higher Education Center, said campus officials had not yet been served with the lawsuit Wednesday.

“We are committed to following the appropriate legal processes and will respond through the proper legal channels should we receive notice,” Ashby said.

The plaintiffs — an MSU Denver professor, two CU Denver faculty members, two CU Denver students and three Colorado residents — all either had their charges dismissed by the Denver City Attorney’s Office or entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the City Attorney’s Office that led to the dismissal of their charges.

“I was taught by this university that we are supposed to raise our voices when injustices are happening,” said plaintiff Sarah Napier, 25, a CU Boulder graduate who joined the protest to advocate for the CU system to divest from Israel.

“I took many classes on civil disobedience at CU and felt called by my personal beliefs that I should be there protesting the university’s complicity in genocide,” she said. “They’re not upholding what they’re teaching. They can’t be educating students and then silencing the truth.”

Encampment met with arrests

On April 25, several hundred pro-Palestine demonstrators established an encampment on the grassy lawn of Auraria’s Tivoli Quad. The Denver protest, which included tents and demonstrators peacefully assembling, was born out of a wave of student activism and college encampments across the country protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.

Demonstrators pledged to stay until University of Colorado officials divested from activities and funding related to Israel.

“Rather than respecting the constitutional rights of those gathered, law enforcement, including officers from the Denver Police Department and the Auraria Campus Police Department, abrogated well-established First Amendment rights through intimidation and mass arrests,” the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, police justified the arrests of students, faculty and other demonstrators as necessary to enforce Auraria’s camping ban that prohibits tents — a policy the plaintiffs’ attorneys said was enacted in 2004 following a protest against the Iraq War in which students set up tents on campus.

The timing of the policy indicated it was created “not as a neutral regulation, but as a tool to restrict expressive conduct and limit speech on campus,” the lawsuit states.

On April 26, Skip Spear, general counsel and chief administrative officer for Auraria Higher Education Center, told several protesters their tents violated campus policy and they needed to leave, the lawsuit alleges.

“It was a peaceful protest,” Napier said. “We were just there with signs and tents. Students were still able to go to classes. It wasn’t disrupting the normal flow of the university.”

The lawsuit alleges Spear did not tell all of the gathered protesters that they needed to leave, nor did he say that they could continue to demonstrate if they removed the tents. Spear then contacted Chief Mollendor, who declared the protest “unlawful” and deployed law enforcement, according to the lawsuit.

The eight plaintiffs, in their lawsuit, contend the Auraria demonstrators did not violate laws or campus policy, other than a few unidentified protesters who set up tents.

“By refusing to allow protesters to move away from the tents and continue their protest, Chief Mollendor made clear that he was there to shut down the protest rather than simply ensure the removal of tents,” the lawsuit states.

Mollendor issued a dispersal warning that failure to leave could result in arrest, the lawsuit said. That order was unlawful, the plaintiffs’ attorneys argue, because “it failed to instruct demonstrators to remove the tents, instead broadly prohibiting all speech on Auraria Campus.”

The lawsuit said officers began dismantling tents and arresting seated protesters who had linked arms. Seven out of the eight plaintiffs were charged with trespass and failure to obey a lawful order, while one protester, CU Denver lecturer Joie Ha, was charged with interference and failure to obey a lawful order.

Denver and Auraria police arrested around 40 people for trespassing and resisting arrest on April 26.

Despite the tents being removed at that time — the only alleged policy violation — the lawsuit said police continued arresting people.

“Once the tents were removed, the protest was entirely lawful and protected under the First Amendment,” the lawsuit states. “The decision to proceed with arrests after the fact demonstrates that the objective was to suppress the protest and retaliate against the protesters.”

The lawsuit noted that a week after the arrests, Denver police Chief Ron Thomas said during a Citizen Oversight Board meeting that he refused to aid in clearing the encampment because there was “no legal way” to do it unless the protest “truly does something that creates an unlawful assembly” and that they weren’t “going to go in and sweep out this peaceful protest just because they’re occupying a space on campus that you’d like to use for something else right now.”

The demonstrators re-occupied the Tivoli Quad after the arrests and stayed 23 days until the campus ordered the dispersal of the encampment.

“This is democracy in action”

Plaintiff Alex Boodrookas, an MSU Denver professor who teaches Middle Eastern history, said he joined the protesters after walking past the encampment on his way back from a faculty meeting and seeing riot police.

“The police presence was stunning,” Boodrookas said. “There were police cars everywhere, fully armored, and armed police and this was a peaceful protest. The dangerous thing that day was the presence of the police. Other than that, the protesters were holding talks and craft circles.”

Attorney Azra Taslimi, who is representing the plaintiffs, said it’s an important time to bring this lawsuit forward amid the federal government’s targeting of student activists. 

“It’s a dangerous message to send out to the public at large that there is some speech that is going to be protected and some that when it challenges government, what our country’s policies are, that is going to be met with police oppression,” Taslimi said. “We are seeing a dangerous unraveling of the rule of law across the country.”

Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. State Department already had revoked 300 or more visas from international students across the country as the Trump administration largely targets foreign-born students who have objected to Israel’s war in Gaza.

In Colorado, the Trump administration has revoked at least 22 international students’ visas, including 10 students at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and 12 students across the University of Colorado’s four campuses. It’s unclear why these students — whose identities and countries of origin have not been released — were targeted.

“Student protests are not a disruption of education, they are a reflection of it,” Taslimi said. “This is what civic engagement looks like. This is democracy in action.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.

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. 

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

The eight-month pilot program resulted in law enforcement recovering about 170 cars and arresting nearly 300 people. It helped solve homicides, robberies and hit-and-runs, according to the Denver Police Department.

But as the City Council prepares to decide whether to extend the program for another two years, the surveillance gear is raising privacy concerns and questions about whether federal agents could obtain the data for activities like deportations.

Here’s how the cameras work: When a car passes through an intersection with a camera, it takes a photo of the license plate and what the vehicle looks like. The system then cross-references the license plate with national and local law enforcement databases. If a plate matches one listed in the system as stolen or involved with a crime, the Denver Police Department is notified — with a pinpoint of where the photo was taken — within about 15 seconds.

“It’s just a concern that we’re creating some serious potential for unintended consequences by using the tech,” Councilwoman Sarah Parady said during a Safety, Housing, Education and Homelessness Committee meeting last week.

The Denver Police Department says the company, Flock, only stores the photos for 30 days unless they are flagged as part of an investigation. Flock also doesn’t have contracts to work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“For anyone to access our DPD data… they have to sign and attest that they won’t give the information to ICE or use it for civil violations related to that,” Denver police Cmdr. Jacob Herrera said.

The two-year extension of the 111 cameras deployed throughout Denver would add $666,000 to the contract, bringing the total program cost to about $1 million.

Car thefts have gone down in Denver since the pilot program began. In 2023, more than 12,000 cars were stolen in the city. In 2024, there were about 8,500 car thefts, according to Denver police data. Herrera attributes that decrease to multiple initiatives, including the cameras.

During the committee meeting, Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez raised questions about whether DPD tracks when the system makes mistakes. Detroit recently paid $35,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging a woman and her child were wrongly detained as a result of the Detroit Police Department’s use of license-plate readers.

Herrera said Denver police don’t have a formal system for tracking false positives, but that the department makes sure officers know the technology isn’t foolproof.

“We communicate very strongly to the officers… You still need to be an observer, an investigator, before you pull this car over or take action. This is just a probability, it’s not a certainty,” he said.

The system takes photos of about 2 million cars every month on average, Herrera said. The photos are limited to the vehicles themselves and don’t include drivers or passengers.

Councilman Kevin Flynn asked during the meeting whether the system could be challenged as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures.

“This system doesn’t have any of those features that have caused either the United States or the Colorado Supreme Court to say there have been constitutional violations,” said Matthew Kirsch with the Denver District Attorney’s Office.

The Safety, Housing, Education and Homelessness Committee forwarded the proposal to the full council, which is scheduled to vote on the measure April 14.

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

Ashlye Handy, 36, was convicted of second-degree murder on Jan. 14 in Denver District Court in the shooting death of Abrehem Yohhanes in a Denver apartment building in the 1400 block of Yosemite Street in September 2021, according to a news release from the Denver district attorney’s office.

Yohhanes was discovered bleeding from his head inside an apartment by a friend about 4 a.m. Sept. 16, 2021, according to Handy’s arrest affidavit. The friend went to check on Yohhanes after receiving a screenshot of a concerning text sent by Handy’s brother in a Facebook thread. The text read, “I love you thug rest up.”

Handy, then 32, who is described in the affidavit as Yohhanes’ girlfriend, had already fled the apartment when the friend arrived, according to the affidavit.

Police believe Yohhanes was shot about 11:08 p.m. Sept. 15, 2021, when ShotSpotter reported a shot in the area of 1425 Yosemite St., which is directly next to the apartment building where Yohannes was found, according to the affidavit.

Police also acquired surveillance video of Handy leaving the apartment building about 11:12 p.m. that night, about four minutes after ShotSpotter detected a gunshot in the area, according to the affidavit. She was seen carrying a black and silver handgun, and leaving in a silver Chevy Impala she and Yohhanes had previously arrived in about 10:52 p.m. She was arrested in the shooting on Oct. 19, 2021.

Handy was sentenced to 25 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections on Thursday.

“Abrehem Yohhanes’ murder was a terrible, senseless tragedy: A young man, just 16 years old, killed with nearly his entire life in front of him,” Denver District Attorney John Walsh said in the release. “Ms. Handy will pay a heavy price for her awful actions – a sentence that we hope will bring a measure of comfort and a sense of justice to all those who knew and loved Abrehem.”

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

Chief Ron Thomas said shortly after the March 20 shooting in an alley near 35th Avenue and Humboldt Street in Denver’s Cole neighborhood that the man, who was homeless, was armed with a handgun.

He has since been identified as Jose Medina, 57, by the Denver Office of the Medical Examiner.

An image of the item — which Major Crimes Bureau Commander Matt Clark said bore Smith & Wesson markings and was damaged by one of the 16 bullets fired by four officers — was shown on a television screen during the briefing.

Police also released body-worn-camera video of the shooting Thursday that shows officers confronting Medina, who had reportedly been camping behind Annunciation Catholic School.

In the videos, officers repeatedly tell Medina to drop the weapon, which they identify as a firearm. When Medina instead lifts his right arm, which held the replica gun, officers open fire, striking Medina multiple times.

Officers then move in and handcuff Medina, as one officer presses his handgun into the back of Medina’s head, which Thomas told reporters was “not protocol” but was intended as a “de-escalation technique.”

Clark said officers provided emergency medical care to Medina, applying a chest seal and tourniquet, before he was taken to a hospital, where he died later that day.

Thomas said officers had made contact with Medina periodically since 2005, and he was believed to have been homeless on and off since then.

“No officer wants to take a life,” Thomas said. “They only responded with, ultimately, deadly force because he moved that weapon in their direction and put them in fear of their life.”

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.

At about 11:30 a.m. Thursday, the Denver County Jail inmate was found non-responsive in her housing unit, the sheriff’s department said in a news release.

A medical team responded to the unit and started life-saving measures, but the woman was declared dead shortly after, sheriff’s officials said. Her cause of death remains unknown.

The Denver Police Department is investigating the death, per the city’s policy for any deaths in custody, according to the news release.

Sheriff’s officials said the woman would be identified at a later date by the Denver Office of the Medical Examiner.

Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.