Security cameras monitor an extensive list of products stocked on those protected shelves, including batteries, lightbulbs, laundry detergent, pregnancy tests, deodorant, candles, medicine and baby food. Patrons pay at one of two dedicated check-out counters before being handed receipts and continuing their shopping trips.

The anti-theft measures at the store, 757 E. 20th Ave., don’t surprise some shoppers: “They call it ‘Un-Safeway’ for a reason,” Alex Haskins told The Denver Post in the parking lot, repeating a common nickname for that location.

Major supermarket chains are ramping up their efforts to prevent stealing by restricting access to certain aisles, installing merchandise lock boxes, hiring security guards and more. Corporate spokespeople point to retail crime as a major problem for the grocery and convenience store industries, though several declined to discuss measures at specific stores in Denver.

“Different products experience different theft rates, depending on store location and other factors,” said Amy Thibault, a spokesperson for CVS Pharmacy. “Locking a product is a measure of last resort.”

Often, such actions come as an inconvenience to customers, with the new security protocols recognized as nationwide annoyances. The union representing Colorado grocery store workers says they’re Band-Aid solutions to larger problems: shortages of employees and security.

“Locking up merchandise can be an effective theft deterrent, but it underscores the need for more staff and more security in our stores,” said Kim Cordova, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7. “With limited staff, customers face delays in accessing products, leading to frustration that often falls on our essential grocery store workers.”

The grocery industry, which is making less money now compared to recent years, predicts it will shell out more cash to hire and keep employees through benefits, training and other measures, according to the industry publication Grocery Dive.

Last year, the industry’s profit margin — 1.6% — was about as low as percentages before the COVID-19 pandemic years, which sent margins up to as high as 3% in 2020, when Americans spent months under lockdowns.

“It’s a marginal business. We work at the margins,” said Pete Marczyk, the co-founder of Marczyk Fine Foods. He runs a locally owned grocer with two locations in the Uptown and Hale neighborhoods.

His small business isn’t spared from theft — and he feels the financial hits personally.

“To us, it’s rent money,” Marczyk said. “That’s the money I need for tuition for my kid.”

Denver neighborhoods with highest theft rates

In Denver, several stores that have implemented some of the most extensive anti-theft measures aren’t located in neighborhoods with the highest reports of shoplifting offenses at supermarkets.

From Aug. 1, 2023, to Aug. 1, 2024, the Central Park neighborhood had the most larceny reports at local stores, with 98, according to the Denver Police Department. Union Station followed with 45, then Montclair with 37, Baker with 31 and Hampden with 14.

Five Points — home to the Safeway store with cordoned-off aisles — didn’t make the top 15 neighborhoods, ranking 17th.

But perhaps owing to the store’s past experience with crime, a security patrol car was parked by the entrance on a late August afternoon while an officer talked to a customer by a car in the parking lot. And on a recent weekend, just inside the entrance, a security guard and an employee confronted a man they suspected of theft.

Creating a store within a store for certain products is a less-common approach, but Safeway has implemented the setup at some other locations — and customers who commented on a recent Denver-specific thread about the practice on Reddit had no shortage of opinions.

Albertsons, the parent company of Safeway, didn’t respond to requests for comment about its strategies to prevent stealing.

Several miles away, the protocols at a King Soopers location in the Central Park neighborhood — No. 1 on the police’s list for grocery thefts — felt relatively normal this week.

A sign at the front of the store, 10406 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., informed patrons that receipts were required when exiting the building. It banned the indoor use of suitcases, duffel bags and roller bags. In small print at the bottom, the sign said: “These enhanced safety measures will help combat crime.”

The store itself offered an upscale shopping experience, with sushi and cheese counters. Security cameras watched overhead, but infant care items, medicine, vitamins, toys and wine sat openly on display. Only cosmetics and detergent were stored under lock and key.

A security guard stood at the exit, but he didn’t make a move to check receipts.

Jessica Trowbridge, a spokesperson for King Soopers and City Market, declined to provide details on their anti-theft practices “to preserve the integrity of our security measures.” But she said stores work with law enforcement to fight crime.

“We are disappointed by the increased level of crime across retail establishments,” Trowbridge wrote in a statement. “We have recently deployed additional solutions to help prevent and deter illegal activity, and although early in implementation, we have received positive feedback from associates and customers.”

Other well-known brands keep their theft-prevention tactics concealed from the public.

“Some products are subject to additional security,” said Kelsey Bohl, a spokesperson for Walmart. “Those determinations are made on a store-by-store basis.”

Companies offering business security to the grocery industry are more direct about potential strategies. InVue, a North Carolina-based technology company, highlights several methods to prevent shoplifting, including employee training, inventory checks, security tags, smart locks and more.

At a Walgreens location at 120 N. Broadway on the edge of the Baker neighborhood, the security measures were pronounced.

Lock boxes were common along many of the aisles, making facial products, perfume, deodorant, games and dietary supplements inaccessible unless a patron pressed a customer service button to flag down an employee.

The impact of crime was also apparent: Shoppers entering and leaving the pharmacy on Tuesday were greeted by a busted window covered with plywood.

“Retail crime is one of the top challenges facing our industry today,” said Megan Boyd, a spokesperson for Walgreens. “These additional security measures allow us to improve on-shelf availability of products to customers.”

“It really is almost fruitless”

At some big-name stores, it’s largely business as usual.

The Berkeley neighborhood’s Safeway location, 3800 W. 44th Ave., sits in a quiet shopping center near a State Farm Insurance office and an Anytime Fitness health club. Vitamins and detergent are within arm’s reach. The only items locked away are premium wines, including bottles of Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon.

The neighborhood recorded just four larceny offenses at grocery stores over the last year, DPD’s data shows.

For now, smaller retailers operating in the Denver area are keeping their items unlocked, too.

At the 7305 N. Pecos St. location of the Hispanic grocery chain Lowe’s Mercado, toiletries, laundry detergent, wine and beer are readily available to patrons, with only jewelry and medicines like NyQuil shielded in display cases.

Marczyk Fine Foods’ stores use security cameras, barcode tracking and employee training to mitigate stealing, which Pete Marczyk estimates happens about once a day.

Since the pandemic, he said, he’s noticed a lack of police presence in the city, and his business can’t afford its own high-level security guard. Customers shouldn’t expect lock boxes throughout his stores, he said, in part because expensive products, such as ribeye steaks, are already behind glass.

“We don’t have the financial wherewithal at our size,” Marczyk said, “to really take steps beyond making sure, as much as we can, that our employees are safe and that customers feel safe when they come in our stores.”

The silver lining is that with only two locations, they’re often not targets of organized theft. And Marczyk Fine Foods more often handles nuisance issues.

But Marczyk knows that he’s not alone in his challenges. He recalled watching a woman run out of King Soopers with a cart of groceries while a security guard looked on.

“It really is almost fruitless,” Marczyk said. “If somebody’s going to walk in and steal from you, they’re going to walk in and steal from you.”

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The Denver Auditor’s Office found Advantage Workforce Services LLC failed to pay Denver’s minimum wage and overtime to hundreds of workers and routinely denied paid sick leave.

The auditor’s office found Advantage Workforce Services to be the same company as Instawork, a firm city inspectors found in January to have committed a litany of similar labor violations.

That investigation found that Instawork committed 1,200 minimum wage violations, more than 700 overtime violations and more than 12,500 paid sick leave violations.

The city ordered the company to pay more than $1 million in restitution and fines.

During the latest investigation, which began in May, investigators found Instawork withheld “an extraordinary amount of payroll data”, consisting of documentation of more than 14,000 shifts for 1,450 employees.

Instawork claimed these employees worked for Advantage Workforce Services, regulators found, when in reality the two companies are the same.

“Instawork has had numerous opportunities to do the right thing,” Denver Auditor Timothy M. O’Brien said in a news release. “Instead they withheld information we requested and stopped thousands of employees from receiving their rightful pay and sick leave according to the law.”

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Matthew Nicholas, 41, also was convicted of attempted first-degree assault and three-degree motor vehicle theft after a five-day jury trial, according to a news release from the 17th Judicial District. Nicholas is set for sentencing Oct. 28.

Commerce City police said they arrested Nicholas after he became upset with his mother on Dec. 12 while they were running errands and she was driving. Nicholas demanded she play a game of “truth or dare,” according to the news release, and threatened to shave her head if she didn’t tell the truth.

The woman said Nicholas was angry because she had sold her restaurant and was going to sell her house, leaving Nicholas without a job or place to stay, an initial probable-cause affidavit stated. She also alleged Nicholas was upset because he felt she had cheated him out of the inheritance money he was supposed to receive.

Nicholas dumped a cup of gasoline on his mother, according to the release, and pulled out a lighter. His mother then pulled the car over in a nearby construction area, jumped out and called for help. One construction worker used a concealed handgun to subdue Nicholas and his mother and keep them apart until law enforcement arrived, according to an affidavit.

District Attorney Brian Mason called the crime “egregious and unthinkable” in a statement announcing the conviction.

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On Tuesday, 31-year-old Andre Jones was convicted of attempted second-degree murder, multiple counts of first-degree assault, aggravated motor vehicle theft and resisting arrest, according to court records.

In April 2022, a Wheat Ridge police officer was responding to reports of a stolen U-Haul rental truck that had crashed into a fence when he was attacked by Jones.

Jones stabbed the officer multiple times in the neck, chest and back.

After a six-day trial, the jury deliberated for just under four hours before reaching their verdicts, a spokesperson for the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office said in a statement Tuesday.

Jones will next appear in court for a sentencing hearing on Oct. 10, 2024.

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Major Morgan III, 28, was arrested Aug. 7 in Murfreesboro, where he has lived since May, and booked into a county jail. He is being held without bond before an Aug. 21 hearing.

Four hours before Morgan was detained at his home, the arresting officer received a call from a detective in Boulder, Sharon Ramos, who said that Morgan was wanted for felony theft of $100,000 to $1 million, along with being a fugitive from justice, police records show.

Morgan was charged Aug. 9 with one felony count of theft, which could result in a sentence of four to 12 years in prison, along with fines and restitution costs, if he is convicted.

As BusinessDen first reported this month, Morgan took deposits from dozens of Colorado homeowners and business owners but didn’t finish their projects before moving to Tennessee and filing for bankruptcy. That has drawn the attention of Front Range police.

“There are at least four county prosecutors and one state looking into how he handled his business affairs,” Tom Connolly, the trustee who is overseeing Morgan’s bankruptcy case, said during a meeting between Morgan and 35 of his alleged victims on July 17.

Allison Weber, a marketer in Highlands Ranch who is owed $68,000 by Morgan, according to his bankruptcy filings, had mixed emotions when she heard of his arrest last week.

“I don’t want him to do this to other people and I think he needs to be caught, so I am happy to hear that he is in custody,” she said. “However, I know he has a small child.”

Weber and her husband paid Morgan and his company, M3 Designs, $68,000 for a pool installation. She says that M3 worked on the project for a few weeks without permits, county regulators put a stop to that, and Morgan kept their money. The Webers were left with a hole in the ground, mounds of dirt and more than $30,000 in damage to their yard.

“Everything he was doing was done incorrectly,” she said of Morgan. “I do believe that he didn’t know what he was doing. And the money we sent him was way more than what he did.”

Kate Casanova, of Denver, is an artist and art professor married to a professional musician. She and her husband say they paid Morgan $131,000 to build a studio in their backyard.

“We really liked Major,” Casanova said. “We thought he was young, hungry, professional.”

They bought gifts for Morgan’s newborn child and paid him money they’d saved over 14 years. But the studio project didn’t get past the permitting stage before Morgan went bankrupt and the couple doesn’t have the cash to start again. They’re working out of a cramped garage.

“I was hugely relieved to hear that he had been arrested because it seems pretty obvious that this is how he operates and we didn’t want him to potentially be scamming anybody else,” Casanova said. “It also means that we are closer to getting justice in our own situation.”

The Boulder Police Department declined to turn over its police reports on Morgan, claiming that its investigations are still open, and noted it has three ongoing cases involving him. The Boulder County District Attorney’s Office declined to discuss its case against Morgan.

Morgan’s bankruptcy lawyers, Rob Cohen and Gary Brown with Cohen & Cohen in Denver, did not return requests for comment. Morgan does not have a defense attorney.

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The original sculpture of the baseball icon resting a bat on his shoulder was cut off at its ankles in January, leaving only Robinson’s cleats behind at McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas.

An identical statue will return to the park, where about 600 children play in the urban youth baseball league called League 42, which was founded in 2013 and named after Robinson’s uniform number with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Playing for the Dodgers, Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s racial barrier in 1947.

The community is expected to be joined Monday by representatives of Major League Baseball and former players, including All-Stars CC Sabathia and Dellin Betances, according to League 42 posts on social media.

The nonprofit was met with an outpouring of support and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations after news of the stolen statue shocked the community and spread across the country. Bob Lutz, League 42 executive director, said this year that the donations helped fund the replacement statue, as well as improvements to the plaza where it stands, the nonprofit’s facilities and its programming.

The statue was created at Art Castings of Colorado, a bronze foundry in Loveland.

The rebuilt statue is identical to the original because the mold was still viable. Dedicated in 2021, it was created by artist John Parsons, a friend of Lutz, before he died in 2022.

Firefighters found burned remnants of the original statue five days after it disappeared. One man pleaded guilty and will spend about 15 years in prison, although most of that time is related to a burglary that happened a few days after the statue heist.

Ricky Alderete was sentenced Friday to 18 months and ordered to pay $41,500 restitution for stealing the statue, an act he said stemmed from his addiction to fentanyl.

The lonely cleats of the original found a new home at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, this year.

Robinson played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers, paving the way for generations of Black American ballplayers. He is not only a sports legend, but also a civil rights icon. Robinson died in 1972.

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They’ve struck a dozen times in the last 10 days, RTD assistant general manager for rail operations Dave Jensen said in an interview.

This is the latest surge in a pattern the FBI has observed for more than a decade in which global economic demand for copper creates opportunities for criminals. The thefts have complicated an already difficult summer for RTD officials who, for months, have been scrambling to handle track maintenance problems and ensure safety for riders on buses and trains.

“If they grab the wires associated with our power, it will shut us down,” Jensen said.

On Tuesday, a theft targeted RTD’s A Line that carries riders from the downtown Union Station to Denver International Airport, impairing signal systems, officials said. On Monday, a similar theft along the A Line led to malfunctions that forced RTD officials to ferry DIA-bound rail riders onto buses between Union Station and Central Park Station.

Multiple thefts targeted copper wires along the G Line west of Denver and the R Line that links Aurora and south metro Denver.

Pull the wrong wires from RTD systems, Jensen warned, and thieves could be electrocuted. Trains also could hit them along the tracks where thefts have occurred, he said.

“It’s a crime of opportunity,” Jensen said. “They know there is demand for copper. Typically it is not organized. It is people looking for a quick dollar and an easy way to get it.”

Thieves have escaped with up to 100 feet of wire — far less than would be available on spools in RTD’s maintenance yards.

Aurora and Denver police have been notified.

The overall damage has cost nearly $10,000, officials estimated. The agency repair work is expected to cost another $10,000.

Each theft caused problems including train delays and crossing gates staying down along roads. Some of the wires power low-voltage systems that control signals where rails cross roads. Other wires control sensor systems that show the locations of RTD trains. Most of the thefts happened at night across RTD’s 120-mile network of tracks.

RTD officials this week appealed to the public for help catching thieves. Blue signs along tracks give phone numbers people can call. Tips can be provided anonymously using RTD’s Transit Watch app, officials said, and by calling the agency’s transit police dispatchers at 303-299-2911 or texting 303-434-9100.

Public transit systems nationwide have been hit with thefts of copper wires. Two years ago, the RTD faced a similar surge. Stepped-up surveillance led to arrests and identified a license plate on a suspect vehicle, which proved to be stolen.

At a recent industry conference in Toronto, rail transit operators discussed possible responses. RTD officials in Denver have been covering more of their wiring with wood and this week were placing tracking sensors on wires.

An FBI intelligence assessment in 2008 anticipated thefts in response to rising demand for copper in China, India and other booming economies “driving the demand for raw materials such as copper and creating a robust international trade.”

Thieves sell the wires to recyclers who then can sell the copper to scrap dealers for use in mills, boundaries and various industries, the FBI report said. The tighter the supply of copper becomes globally, analysts found, the bigger the demand for illicit copper.

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The teenager was also wanted on a warrant at the time of the killing that would have kept him temporarily jailed without bond had he been arrested, records show.

The teen, whom The Post is not naming because he is a juvenile, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of 49-year-old William “Todd” Kidd on July 10 outside the Federales Denver bar at 29th and Larimer streets in Denver’s River North Arts District.

Kidd, who worked at the bar, was intervening in a disturbance when he was shot, police have said. He died two days later on July 12.

The teenager’s journey through Colorado’s juvenile courts highlights how the system is designed to keep children out of custody through a focus on pretrial release and a statutory cap on the number of kids who can be incarcerated in the state — an approach supporters hail as the best way to help vulnerable youths, but critics decry as soft on crime.

“The vast majority of kids going through the system are not safety risks to anybody,” said Emma Mclean-Riggs, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “Sometimes these cases are used as leverage to produce more incarceration of children when there is not sufficient context.”

George Brauchler, a former district attorney and current Republican candidate for district attorney in the 23rd Judicial District, said while he understands the juvenile justice system’s aim to keep kids out of detention, the approach can be detrimental to both youths and broader community safety.

“We have gone so far off the deep end of the criminal justice reform spectrum that we are rolling the dice for a lot of communities because it makes us feel good about how we are treating kids,” he said.

Charged with stealing cars

The 14-year-old boy was arrested on charges of stealing cars in Douglas County in December and again in Adams County in January, court records show.

In Douglas County, he was charged in juvenile court with motor vehicle theft, conspiracy to commit motor vehicle theft, criminal mischief and false reporting, said Eric Ross, a spokesman for the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. He declined to comment further.

In Adams County, the 14-year-old was charged in juvenile court with motor vehicle theft, resisting arrest, vehicular eluding and obstructing a police officer. Chris Hopper, spokesman for the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, declined to comment on the case.

In the Adams County case, the boy on multiple occasions violated the conditions of his personal recognizance bond, records obtained by The Post show. He sometimes missed required meetings, violated his GPS monitoring and struggled to keep his GPS unit charged.

Personal recognizance bonds allow defendants to be released from custody on the promise they will return to court, rather than requiring defendants to pay money as collateral before their release. In 2021, state lawmakers required that all bonds set in juvenile cases be personal recognizance bonds.

“There was kind of a universal understanding that holding kids because their families are poor doesn’t make any sense,” Mclean-Riggs said of the 2021 change.

In late April, Adams County prosecutors filed a motion to revoke the boy’s bond after a fifth bond violation report was filed in the case, the records show.

The teen was arrested, and during a court hearing on May 1, his attorneys asked that he be released on bond into his mother’s custody. Prosecutors objected, citing “community safety concerns” because of his GPS violations, the records show.

Magistrate Michal Lord-Blegen granted a personal recognizance bond with several conditions, including that the teenager remain on GPS monitoring, attend school and therapy, and stay away from weapons, drugs and alcohol.

Just over two weeks later, another bond violation report — the seventh overall — was filed in the case, records show. Prosecutors once again sought to revoke the boy’s bond, and the boy was arrested again.

On May 17, Lord-Blegen again allowed the teenager to be released from custody, again over the objection of prosecutors who sought for the boy to be held with no bond.

On May 28, the 14-year-old ran away from home on his way to court, according to the records. Two days later, Lord-Blegen issued a warrant for his arrest and ordered the boy be detained on a no-bond hold when he was taken into custody.

But the teenager was not arrested again until July 16 — days after Denver police allege he shot and killed Kidd. Officers found the boy in Casper, Wyoming, police have said.

The records obtained by the Post do not specifically indicate why the magistrate issued the personal recognizance bonds, but do note that the teenager had been attending therapy, was referred to a mentor and, until the homicide, was not arrested on new charges, only on bond violations. Lord-Blegen could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The 14-year-old boy appeared in juvenile court Tuesday for a hearing in the Denver homicide case, but a judge closed the courtroom to the public after learning that members of the media were in attendance.

A focus on rehabilitation

Juvenile court operates differently than adult court and is designed to focus on rehabilitation and the child’s best interests, rather than punitive measures, attorneys told The Post. All of the attorneys who spoke with The Post were not familiar with the teenager’s case and spoke generally about juvenile justice.

Judges can hold a child in detention without a bond if they find the child poses a substantial risk of harm to others and community-based alternatives to incarceration will not work, state law says.

But the presumption in juvenile court is that the young defendants should be released from custody whenever possible, because childhood incarceration has been proven so harmful to youths, Mclean-Riggs said.

In cases involving property crime — like motor vehicle theft — and not violent crime, youths typically will be released on bond while their cases are pending, said Tally Zuckerman, a Denver criminal defense attorney.

“I would honestly be shocked if a kid was held on a no-bond hold for a motor vehicle theft,” she said.

Children are also given extra leeway for bond violations, she added, particularly for violations like missing school or returning a positive drug test that don’t involve violence or new crimes.

Technical violations of bond often are not a good indicator of a person’s level of threat to a community, said Tristan Gorman, policy director for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.

“That happens a lot with people who are poor, people who don’t have transportation, people with mental health issues or any number of things,” she said. “But it also happens a lot with teenagers who don’t have a fully developed frontal lobe. So… if it is mostly about GPS and check-ins, that is not really indicative of, is this kid safe in the community?”

Brauchler said the leeway given to youths in juvenile court has in some cases swung too far toward rehabilitation and away from accountability.

“I want us to be rehabilitation-focused where appropriate, and that applies to 98, 99% of juvenile cases,” he said. “But the rest of them, we have to have the tools in the toolbox to treat them more seriously.”

Juvenile bed cap

Colorado lawmakers have passed a series of laws over the last two decades aimed at limiting the number of juveniles held in the state’s juvenile detention centers, citing the long-term harm of childhood incarceration.

Legislators first set a cap on the number of youths who could be detained statewide in 2003, limiting the number of available beds for juvenile detention to 479. That cap has been steadily lowered — most recently in 2021 to 215 beds. Lawmakers also allowed for an additional 22 temporary emergency beds that become available if the state hits its juvenile detention limit.

The bed cap has drawn ire in recent years as the state has neared the limit, with some prosecutors, law enforcement officers and politicians saying the ceiling pushes children who should be detained back into the community.

“From a pure logical standpoint, it makes no sense,” Brauchler said. “It takes a fixed number — not a percentage of juveniles in the state, not a percentage of juveniles in the system, not a percentage of crime, not a percentage of anything — it’s a fixed number of beds statewide, regardless of the amount of criminal activity that takes place by juveniles or the risk they pose to the community.”

Some children would be better off in detention than in their home environment, where they might face the same pressures that led to the first crime and be more likely to re-offend, said Aurora City Councilman Dustin Zvonek, who last year championed a city resolution asking the state to abolish the juvenile detention bed cap.

“They’re still little kids,” he said. “And to be running around neighborhoods with a weapon, running from SWAT officers, it’s hard to wrap your mind around — but it is a reality we face, and so we have to have a system in place that protects the Aurora community.”

Mclean-Riggs said children who end up in the juvenile justice system have typically first been failed by myriad other systems — from education to welfare to health care — and that a holistic approach is needed, rather than a reactionary turn to incarceration.

“The place to intervene effectively for these children is years before they touch the criminal legal system,” she said “…The view that says the answer here is pretrial detention is myopic and is not accounting for all of the other systems that were supposed to hold and intervene for this child and his family.”

It’s not clear whether the bed cap played a role in the 14-year-old’s releases in Adams County.

On the morning of May 1, when he was released on bond after it was revoked, the state had 213 juveniles in detention, said Heidi Bauer, spokeswoman for the Division of Youth Services, just under the 215 limit.

On May 17, the second time he was released after a revocation, 204 juveniles were in detention at the start of the day.

Bauer noted the number of filled beds frequently fluctuates. Over the last six months, the state’s average daily juvenile detention population has hovered between 185 and 206 youths.

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The grand jury investigation began after a CBS Colorado report found Gordanier, who was also mayor of the small Jefferson County town, signed off on purchasing police vehicles from other jurisdictions and selling them to his daughter, Town Clerk Brenda Hamilton, for a fraction of their market value.

Hamilton would then resell the vehicles for a considerable profit, according to CBS Colorado’s reporting and confirmed by a news release from the district attorney’s office Thursday.

The town first purchased a black Dodge Charger at a law enforcement auction in March 2018 and sold it to Hamilton in July 2021 for $500 when the fair market value was $8,588, according to the district attorney’s office. Hamilton later resold the vehicle.

Town officials then purchased a Ford Fusion at a discounted price from the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in September 2021 and sold it to Hamilton for $1,000 three months later, who then sold it to a third party for $12,000.

And town officials purchased a Chevy Tahoe from the Glenwood Springs Police Department in 2017, which was then sold to Hamilton for $300 in September 2022. She then resold it for approximately $7,000.

The vehicles were sold to Hamilton with Gordanier’s approval, according to the district attorney’s office.

Hamilton is also accused of impersonating a police officer in July 2023 when she was in a police vehicle and turned on the lights to try to detain a suspicious person. She also used a town credit card to pay for her Costco membership and buy nearly $500 in items from the store that were not for the town’s use, according to the district attorney’s office.

Lakeside is a town of 16 people and largely consists of Lake Rhoda and the Lakeside Amusement Park.

Both Gordanier and Hamilton turned themselves into the Jefferson County Jail and were released on bail. Hamilton is set to appear in court Aug. 2 and Gordanier is set to appear in court Aug. 6.

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Kevin Sypher, 57, pleaded guilty to one count of theft and one count of official misconduct in a Monday disposition hearing, according to court records. The plea deal dropped one count of charitable fraud and a second count of official misconduct from his case.

In Wednesday’s hearing, 4th Judicial District Court Judge Jill Brady sentenced Sypher to four years of probation — two years for each charge — and ordered him to pay nearly $1,700 in victim compensation funds, court charges and probation fees.

Brady sentenced Sypher to a deferred sentence of two years for theft — a form of probation that allows a defendant to avoid a conviction on their record by postponing sentencing until the end of a supervised period — according to court records.

In exchange for the deferral, the defendant usually pleads guilty to the charges, pays fines and costs and agrees to supervision terms set by the court. If all the terms are met, the case is dismissed and the conviction is not added to their record.

Brady also sentenced Sypher to two years of traditional probation and 48 hours of community service for official misconduct.

The sheriff’s office began investigating Sypher in March 2023 after a doctor filed a complaint with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office Internal Affairs Unit, claiming that Sypher had asked for help with a fake crisis negotiation training scenario earlier that month.

During the scenario, the doctor called a “role player” and read a script provided by Sypher. The script stated that Sypher had several tumors and had recently stopped taking a chemotherapy drug used to treat cancer, officials said.

The “role player” was later discovered to be Sypher’s second wife, according to the arrest affidavit.

During the investigation, officials learned that at least seven people gave Sypher large sums of money totaling more than $20,000 after he claimed he had cancer and couldn’t afford to pay for treatment.

Sypher also married another woman while still married to his first wife and solicited money by claiming he was divorcing his first wife and his bank accounts were frozen, officials said.

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