Jerrelle Aireine Smith, 44, was convicted of first-degree murder in August for the death of Ryan Dillard, a new supervisor at the facility. He was also sentenced to 96 years for racketeering.

Smith was accused of being the mastermind behind a scheme by to steal from the distribution center, 1861 Tower Road, by creating “ghost employees” to trick the payroll system. He and his friends stole thousands of dollars, according to the district attorney’s office.

Dillard learned of the theft after he was hired on Oct. 4, 2021. Smith hired Michael Poydras, a former employee of Capstone Logistics, which operated the center, to kill Dillard. Poydras no longer worked for the company, but was still on the payroll system and benefitted from the scheme, according to the district attorney’s office.

On Oct. 21, 2021, Poydras opened fire on Dillard’s vehicle as the latter left the facility to pick up breakfast for his employees. Dillard was killed in the shooting. Poydras was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in July 2023.

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BOULDER, Colo. (AP) — Elan Shakti was tired and had trouble walking but decided to go to the supermarket anyway to buy plants for a family mourning.

But as she was buying them, Shakti, now 79, heard gunfire ring out and then someone yell for people to run. Shakti, who had recently been diagnosed with a heart condition, knew she couldn’t do that but left behind the cart she had been using for support and tried to make her way out of the King Soopers store as fast as she could.

That is when she fell and couldn’t move, having suffered a broken vertebrae, she testified Friday during a trial for a man accused of killing 10 people at the store in the college town of Boulder, Colorado.

“I said ’God, I hope you’re ready for me because I think this is it,′” Shakti said.

After she heard people rushing past her, Shakti said she also prayed not to be trampled as she was lying there on her chest. Later, she didn’t sense anyone around but still heard shots and thought the shooter was coming toward her. Instead, a man helped lift her up and take her outside to safety.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, multiple counts of attempted murder and other offenses, including having six high-capacity ammunition magazine devices banned in Colorado after previous mass shootings.

Alissa has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. No one, including Alissa’s lawyers, disputes he was the shooter.

Despite Shakti’s fear, prosecutors say Alissa targeted people who were moving and trying to get away from him, saying that gave him a sense of power and a rush of adrenaline. In one case, they say he saw but then passed by an elderly man who continued to shop, not realizing there was a shooting underway.

Sarah Moonshadow also testified Friday about how she and her son had been in a rush to buy strawberries and tea at a self-checkout stand when the shooting started. Her son, now 25, wanted to run immediately. But she told him to wait, listening for a pause from the gunman from having to reload before fleeing. She ducked down with her son at the kiosk, hearing gunfire and bodies dropping.

She said Alissa looked at her and was trying to raise the end of his rifle up but seemed to bump into a platform at a register. She said she told her son to go and they ran, not moving in a straight line to avoid being hit.

“I think I was just moving and not thinking about anything else,” Moonshadow said.

Moonshadow and her son are among 14 civilians Alissa is accused of attempting to kill by firing at or near them. He is also accused of attempting to kill 11 law enforcement officers.

Prosecutors on Thursday showed jurors image after image of the mass shooting inside a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, as they delivered opening statements in the long-delayed jury trial for Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 25, who is charged with killing 10 people in the March 22, 2021, attack.

Alissa’s attorneys do not dispute he carried out the mass shooting. But Alissa has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he should not be held legally responsible for the murders because he was either so mentally ill at the time of the killings that he could not tell right from wrong or so mentally ill he could not form the criminal intent to carry out the massacre.

Alissa has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and began experiencing symptoms in his late teenage years, including hearing voices, experiencing visual hallucinations and feelings of paranoia, defense attorney Samuel Dunn said. Alissa frequently heard voices screaming and yelling in his head and believed he was being followed by the FBI, Dunn told jurors.

“Prior to the offense, and on the day of the shooting, Mr. Alissa was in the throes of a psychotic episode,” Dunn said.

“He targeted Boulder”

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty told jurors Alissa was sane during the mass shooting, and pointed to Alissa’s months of planning and preparation, the lethality of the attack and Alissa’s surrender to law enforcement as evidence of his sanity.

Alissa, who lived in Arvada, started to research mass shootings in January 2021, Dougherty said. He looked at more than 6,000 images of guns, ammunition and equipment on his phone between January and March, including 400 photos of bomb-making materials.

On Jan. 20, 2021, he visited a webpage with a URL that read, in part, “what-is-the-most-deadly-type-of-round-bullet.” Alissa then purchased the type of bullet highlighted on that page, Dougherty said, and used it in the killings.

In the same timeframe, Alissa also researched other mass shootings and began to zero in on Boulder, Dougherty said.

“We know he targeted Boulder,” he said.

Alissa is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of King Soopers shoppers, employees and a responding Boulder police officer. He faces dozens of other charges connected to the attack.

Those killed in the shooting: Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Teri Leiker, 51; Boulder police Officer Eric Talley, 51; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65.

In court Thursday, Alissa sat with his defense attorneys, frequently fidgeting in his chair and looking around the courtroom. Dunn argued to jurors that Alissa could not tell right from wrong when he carried out the attack because of his untreated schizophrenia.

“He thought people were following him, thought people were surveilling him,” he said. “He became delusional.”

Dunn recounted a story in which Alissa’s father found him sitting on a couch at the family’s Arvada home in the middle of the night. Alissa believed there was a man in the bathroom, Dunn said, but Alissa’s father could not find anyone there.

“Ahmad Alissa was insane,” Dunn said. “…The motivation was his own insanity. …He could not cognitively distinguish right from wrong.”

“I heard someone die”

Several witnesses described the mass shooting when testimony began Thursday afternoon, including Alison Sheets, a now-retired emergency room doctor. She’d stopped at the store to pick up supplies after skiing, and wore a bright yellow jacket. When the shooting started, she hid on a bottom shelf among bags of potato chips, lying on her stomach.

“Fortunately many of the potato chips are colored yellow,” she said. “I did just look up, seconds after I hid, and saw the gunman walk past that aisle I was in. I looked away pretty quickly after that. I didn’t want to be seen in any way.”

Within a minute of hiding, Sheets heard a person shot in the aisle next to her, she said.

“I heard someone die — just a little breath of exhalation of someone collapsing and dying, and I smelled blood after that,” she testified.

Alissa shot and killed eight people in 68 seconds, Dougherty said.

“The victims are completely random, but the murders were absolutely planned, deliberate and intentional,” Dougherty told jurors, citing Alissa’s lethality as evidence of his intent: nine of the 10 victims were shot multiple times. No one who was shot survived.

“If he hit the person, he then moved in and executed them by shooting them again and again,” Dougherty said. “Anybody that got hit, he finished them off.”

Dougherty also argued that Alissa’s surrender when police surrounded the building shows his sanity: He put his weapons and ammunition down, stripped down to his underwear and put his hands up, the prosecutor said. Alissa later told mental health evaluators that he’d expected to go to jail and hoped he might die instead of being incarcerated.

The trial comes after years of delays because Alissa was too mentally ill to participate in his own defense — a different question than his mental state during the shooting. The trial will focus on Alissa’s mental condition at the time of the attack, rather than whether or not he carried out the shooting.

Testimony is expected to last several weeks. The trial is being streamed live: Visit this link and select Boulder Courtroom G.

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Police have identified 10 people linked to the Tren de Aragua gang who are operating in Aurora, and six of those people have been arrested and are in custody, Aurora police spokesman Joe Moylan told The Denver Post.

Details on the identities of the 10 people and the nature of the charges against all of the six arrestees were not immediately available, though some are in custody in connection with a previously reported shooting on Nome Street in July.

Moylan said officers have not arrested any gang members on charges related to collecting rent from residents at three Aurora properties owned by CBZ Property Management.

The properties took center stage in the conversation about the Venezuelan gang in Aurora when CBZ Property Management claimed unlivable conditions at its properties were due to criminal activity by Tren de Aragua gang members.

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman and other city officials repeated the company’s claim, suggesting the apartment complexes “fallen to” the gang. The claim was then amplified by local and national media and fueled by a viral video showing men with guns knocking on a door in the apartment complex.

Other Aurora officials — and the properties’ residents — have said the unlivable conditions at the company’s properties were longstanding and the result of the company’s mismanagement, rather than an overwhelming gang presence. Aurora’s interim police chief on Friday said gangs had not “taken over” one of the complexes.

Aurora has a population of about 400,000, and a study of its gangs last year identified 36 separate gangs with 1,355 members, about .34% of the city’s total population.

The 10 identified people linked to Tren de Aragua represent less than 1% of Aurora’s identified gang members, though Moylan said officers expect the number of documented Tren de Aragua members to grow as investigations into the gang continue.

“Every day we learn more about TdA, how it operates and how we can identify suspected members,” he said. “…It’s still too soon to try to quantify TdA’s presence in Aurora one way or the other.”

Aurora police have “investigated numerous claims and allegations” about gang members collecting rent from residents at the properties, but “have not yet established probable cause or made any arrests,” Moylan said.

Moylan declined to comment on how many criminal acts connected to Tren de Aragua members are currently under investigation, citing the ongoing investigative work. He said the police department has been investigating the gang for a year and that the residents making complaints about the gang’s activity have largely been migrants who live in the buildings.

Aurora police have publicly tied just one crime this summer to the Tren de Aragua gang: a July 28 shooting in which two men were shot and a third broke his ankle at the apartment building at 1568 Nome St.

One of the suspects in that shooting, Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, 22, is a known Tren de Aragua member, police said in a statement last month. He was arrested after the shooting and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

On Wednesday, Aurora police confirmed they also arrested Pacheco-Chirinos’ brother, 24-year-old Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos, on attempted-murder charges on July 29. Both are documented gang members and remain in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

Aurora police also arrested two other possible Tren de Aragua gang members on charges of tampering with evidence in connection with the July 28 shooting. “These two have gang ties and are suspected to be members of TdA,” police said.

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Joseph Mario Castorena was found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree attempted murder by an Arapahoe County jury in May for breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house in the early hours of Oct. 30, 2022, and killing her family when they arrived home.

Castorena was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences plus 24 years in prison for the deaths of Jesus Serrano, 51; Maria Anita Serrano, 22; Kenneth Eugene Green Luque, 20; and Rudolfo Salgado Perez, 49.

Maria Serrano was the woman’s sister, according to previous reporting. Jesus Serrano was Maria’s father and Kenneth Luque was Maria’s husband. Salgado Perez was renting an RV on the property and was killed when he came outside during the shooting.

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Right-wing social media influencers and citizen journalists seized on video shared by Denver’s Fox31 television station showing armed men at an Aurora apartment complex, often adding their own captions and commentary, as it made the rounds on TikTok, X and Facebook.

Even former President Donald Trump weighed in during a podcast interview, repeating unverified claims that gangs were taking over big buildings with “big rifles” in the city.

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman appeared on national TV and posted about the Venezuelan gang on his Facebook page, contradicting his police chief about the severity of the situation, and saying the city was preparing to go to court to get a judge’s order to clear out the apartment complexes where the Tren de Aragua gang operates. However, city staff on Tuesday said that is not the immediate plan.

Aurora and Denver police have publicly acknowledged there are Tren de Aragua gang members in their cities, but they say the gang’s numbers are not large and they operate in isolated areas. Others say the Tren de Aragua presence in Aurora, a city of nearly 400,000 people, has been overhyped.

“Those stories are really overblown. If you didn’t live here, you would swear we were being taken over by a gang and Aurora was under siege,” Aurora City Councilwoman Stephanie Hancock said Tuesday. “That’s simply not true.”

Aurora officials over the Labor Day weekend contradicted each other on the scope of the problem and the city’s responses to it.

Coffman claimed on Facebook that five apartment buildings along Dallas Street are “associated with gang activity,” and told Fox News that “several buildings” under the same ownership “have fallen to these Venezuelan gangs,” repeating claims made by property management company CBZ Management that the apartments fell into disarray because of gang activity.

Coffman did not return a request for comment Tuesday.

Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky, who has been most outspoken about the gang’s presence in the city, also did not return a call from The Denver Post seeking comment Tuesday.

The mayor’s claim of a gang takeover is disputed by other city officials, who say the longstanding disarray and poor conditions at the apartment buildings were the fault of poor oversight by CBZ Management — not because of criminal acts by Tren de Aragua members.

“There’s this hysteria that we apparently have a gang problem, but what we have is a slumlord problem in the city of Aurora,” City Councilwoman Alison Coombs said.

Aurora interim police Chief Heather Morris said in a video Friday that residents are not paying rent to gang members.

“I’m not saying there’s not gang members that live in this community,” she said in the video, taken at the Edge at Lowry apartments at Dallas Street and 12th Avenue, where officers were talking with residents.

“We’ve really made an effort these last few days to ask the specific questions and direct questions in terms of the gang activity and… making sure that people aren’t paying rent to gang leaders, gang members. That’s not happening. And we’ve discovered here today and yesterday, talking with so many residents, that that is not the case.” she said. “…We’re standing out here, and I can tell you that gang members have not taken over this apartment complex.”

“We don’t feel threatened by gangs”

Dozens of residents who gathered in the courtyard at the Edge at Lowry apartments Tuesday afternoon said they have not been threatened by — or even interacted with — gang members.

“They say there are gangs and criminals, but the only criminal here is the owner,” resident Moises Didenot told a crowd of reporters.

The residents demanded city leaders hold the “slumlord” building owners accountable for untenable living conditions, including rodents and bedbugs. Didenot held up adhesive mouse traps with three dead mice stuck to them.

Aurora officials have disputed the property manager’s claims that issues at the apartment buildings are due to gangs, instead citing poor upkeep that has resulted in repeated code violations.

Tenants on Tuesday said they were more afraid of the hatred sparked by news coverage.

“We don’t feel threatened by gangs,” said resident Gladis Tovar.

Multiple people interviewed by The Post, including the two City Council members, specifically referenced the Fox31 report about gangs at the Edge at Lowry complex — featuring the video of armed men in the building — as elevating the national attention on the story.

On Aug. 28, Fox31 reporter Vicente Arenas, who had been reporting on problems at the complex, posted to social media a video that shows six men, one of whom was holding a rifle and four of whom were carrying pistols, knock on a door and go inside an apartment.

Since the footage was first posted on the news station’s website and X accounts, Fox31 says its network partners have confirmed with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that the men were affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang. Efforts to reach the Fox31 news director Sean McNamara were unsuccessful Tuesday.

On Friday, Coffman wrote in a Facebook post that the city was preparing to seek an emergency court order declaring additional buildings a criminal nuisance — a tactic the city used before evicting 85 families from a building at 1568 Nome St. earlier this year. But city officials denied that Tuesday.

Aurora representatives are planning to meet with the property managers and owners before taking any official action in court, and an emergency court order is “one of several considerations at this time,” city spokesman Michael Brannen said.

“The state law is clear when it comes to a property owner’s responsibility when it comes to addressing health hazards and code violations at the apartment buildings they own,” he said in a statement. “We will continue to aggressively pursue a resolution in order to address the poor conditions impacting residents.”

A decrease in crime in Aurora this year

Venezuelan migrants have been arriving in metro Denver as they flee political upheaval, a poor economy and a humanitarian crisis. So far, an estimated 42,700 migrants have come through Denver since January 2023, according to a tracker on the city’s website, although many have moved to other parts of the country to be closer to family and friends.

While some claim the Venezuelan gang is bringing danger to the city, crime in Aurora has declined in 2024 compared to 2023, statistics published by the city show. Overall reported crime dropped 20% in the first eight months of the year when compared to the first eight months of 2023, the statistics show. The city saw declines in homicides, robberies and aggravated assaults.

Aurora police did not answer questions Tuesday about whether they have identified any instances of Tren de Aragua members collecting rent from Aurora residents, how many people have been identified as Tren de Aragua members in the city, or how many criminal acts have been connected to the gang.

Aurora city officials have publicly tied just one crime this summer to the Tren de Aragua gang: a July 28 shooting in which two men were shot and a third broke his ankle at the apartment building at 1568 Nome St.

One of the suspects in that shooting, Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, 22, is a known Tren de Aragua member, police said in a statement Thursday. Pacheco-Chirinos, who uses the alias “Galleta,”  was charged with assault with a deadly weapon in connection to that attack.

Pacheco-Chirinos was also charged with aggravated assault after an incident at the apartment complex in November, Aurora police said.

Across the metro area, Tren de Aragua gang members have been arrested in two other incidents this summer: a jewelry store robbery in Denver and an enforcement action by the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office on Aug. 21 arrested six people during a routine policing effort near South Quebec Street and High Line Smith Way — a slice of county land sandwiched between Aurora and Denver, spokesman John Bartmann said. Four of those arrestees were later found to be Tren de Aragua members, he said.

“We weren’t looking for them,” Bartmann said, adding that deputies found some drugs and recovered a stolen vehicle during the “proactive” policing effort. He was not able to identify the four arrestees or say Tuesday what charges they faced.

Denver police spokesman Doug Schepman said many people on social media were conflating Denver and Aurora in a “misleading” way. He said officers have no evidence that Tren de Aragua members are targeting Denver apartment complexes for “takeovers.”

Jon Ewing, a spokesman for Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, said the national attention was “fanning ugly rhetoric” during an election year. The mayor’s office is concerned that immigrants who moved to Colorado to start a better life will be harmed. But the city is also working to stop the spread of Tren de Aragua.

“We can walk and chew gum at the same time and be concerned about both of those things,” Ewing said.

Hancock, the Ward 4 Aurora City Council member, said the city is working to build trust among new arrivals so they will report crime to police.

“Our immigrant population is being targeted by gangsters from their own communities,” she said. “They often don’t report for fear of retaliation.”

“The hardest thing is getting people to tell us these things are happening. We need to develop trust with our agencies and we need APD to develop a relationship with people who came here to seek a better life.”

Aurora leaders also are worried about how the national reports reflect upon the city’s reputation.

“It definitely makes it seem like our city is not safe, that it’s not a good place to live, not a good place to do business,” City Council member Coombs said. “It also makes it seem like our city staff and our police department are not trying to serve the public.”

Denver Post reporter Katie Langford contributed to this report. 

This story was updated at 10 a.m., Wednesday, Sept. 4 to correct the Aurora ward represented by Stephanie Hancock.

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The Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA scientist made her way around the state laboratory in a walk-run, a signature forward-leaning gait. She handled two and three times as many cases as other analysts, worked the maximum 40 hours of overtime a month. Spent nights, weekends on the clock.

And for nearly 30 years, she reaped rewards: accolades and awards, high scores on performance evaluations, assignments to the state’s most high-profile criminal cases. She was the matriarch of CBI’s DNA lab, the go-to expert, an intimidating, entrenched force of a scientist who was frustrated with slower-paced colleagues, with people who insisted on following every little rule.

Former CBI Director John Camper called her an “all-star.”  One supervisor dubbed her a “workhorse.” She was one of the highest producers across the entire law enforcement agency.

And when her colleagues at the Arvada CBI lab raised red flags about the quality of her work, about how working fast had become working rushed, they were largely brushed off, considered complainers and pot stirrers.

“They say it is quality over quantity, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way,” CBI DNA analyst Katrina Gomez told internal affairs investigators in December. “I don’t know if that was the fuel to her fire, right? ‘I keep getting accolades, I keep getting recognized because I keep pumping out cases.’ But then at what point does the system take a step back and say, ‘How is she doing so many?’ Or do they just turn a blind eye because they enjoy the fact she is doing so many cases?”

The Denver Post obtained more than 800 pages of CBI investigative documents and 10 hours of internal employee interviews that lay bare how Woods took advantage of the state lab’s focus on results and productivity — and professional trust between colleagues — to hide her widespread manipulation of DNA data.

She leveraged her high regard at work and intense personality to bypass protocols, cover up her alleged misconduct and dodge questions when colleagues raised concerns about her work in 2014 and again in 2018, the investigative materials show.

“I often wondered how she could be so efficient, and I had always asked her to help be a part of teaching the new scientists that we were hiring to be that efficient,” Jan Girten, now-retired deputy director of CBI Forensic Services, told internal affairs investigators. Woods always refused to help with training, she added.

“At the time I thought she just didn’t want to help, you know, not being a team player with management, even though she got frustrated at the slow ones, but now… I’m like, maybe she was jacking with us all along,” Girten told investigators. “And it’s just really sad. It’s really sad. It will blemish us.”

CBI leaders began to discover the full scope of Woods’ misconduct in late 2023. The agency found Woods cut corners in much of her DNA testing, then covered up her shortcuts by altering, deleting or omitting data from lab work. The agency has so far identified problems in 809 of Woods’ cases between 1994 and 2023, and state lawmakers set aside $7.5 million to remedy the wrongdoing.

Colorado’s criminal justice system is bracing for a slew of people challenging their criminal convictions based on Woods’ flawed work. Already, one man says he was wrongfully convicted of murder based on Woods’ faulty DNA testing, and prosecutors in Boulder said a triple murderer received a plea deal with a lighter sentence in part because of her misconduct. Woods’ flawed testing will seed doubt deep into Colorado’s criminal justice system for years to come.

Woods’ attorney, Ryan Brackley, did not comment for this story but in the past has maintained that Woods never created false DNA results or offered false testimony in court. CBI spokesman Rob Low declined to comment and, with the exception of Camper, everyone else named in this story either declined to comment or could not be reached for comment.

CBI officials last year quickly recognized the potentially massive ramifications of Woods’ misconduct and worked to protect their lab’s professional certification and the agency’s reputation, the material shows.

“God forbid we have someone in prison that shouldn’t be…” Assistant Director of Investigations Kellon Hassenstab told Woods in November. “We’re all crossing our fingers and toes that we don’t… because I don’t know how we would come back from that as an organization.”

A Friday afternoon confrontation

Late on a Friday afternoon in July 2018, CBI forensic scientist Kiffin Champlin reviewed Woods’ DNA work on a cold-case triple homicide.

Woods sat a few desks away, waiting for Champlin to finish so she could call the investigators before the weekend and tell them the 1984 “Hammer Killer” mystery was finally solved.

But Champlin found a problem: evidence of contamination in the sample, which should have required more testing — and more time — to address. And then she saw Woods had deleted data to make it appear as though the sample wasn’t contaminated, to eliminate the need for those additional steps.

“I was pissed,” Champlin told internal affairs investigators in November. “I was super angry… I’m like, that’s not an accident.”

She turned to her colleague, forensic scientist Jennifer Dahlberg, for a second opinion, and Dahlberg reacted with alarm.

“She’s done this before,” Dahlberg remembered saying. “And this needs to escalate now.”

Dahlberg had four years earlier, in 2014, reported a similar problem with Woods’ work to the lab’s DNA technical leader, Sarah Miller — the manager responsible for supervising the science side of the Arvada lab. At the time, Miller simply required Woods to fix the problem in that case, then moved on without further scrutiny.

That didn’t sit well with Dahlberg, who tried to distance herself from Woods in the following years. In January 2016, she met with two lab supervisors to go over a list of problems she perceived in the lab’s DNA testing and quality control.

The first line of her list reads: “Problem — Poor quality of work.”

Then, in bullet points: “Everything is rushed. People don’t take pride in their work.” “Everything is ‘good enough,’ not best practice.” ” ‘Hippie lab’ — everyone does what they want, too much analyst discretion.”

The list continues with seven specific examples of DNA analysts’ recent mistakes — including one by Woods — and ways the processes and training could be improved.

The managers blew her off, Dahlberg told investigators, and she was instructed to better her communication with Miller. Weeks later, Dahlberg voluntarily took a demotion and a pay cut to stop handling DNA for CBI, instead focusing her work on blood testing.

She hoped the problem she saw in Woods’ work in 2014 was a one-time issue. But when Champlin turned to her on that Friday afternoon in 2018, that hope was dashed.

“I truly hoped that if it was on purpose she would have stopped, but then at that moment I knew she hadn’t,” Dahlberg said during a December interview with internal affairs investigators.

When Champlin confronted Woods about the deletion in the triple-homicide case, the senior DNA analyst looked back at her “like a deer in the headlights,” Champlin told investigators. Woods didn’t say much. Silence and obfuscation were her go-to responses to confrontations about the quality of her work over the years, the internal materials show.

Champlin cried on the drive home out of frustration and anger, and spent that weekend screwing up the courage to report the incident to the lab’s higher-ups, vowing not to let Woods “commandeer her” before she could do so.

On Monday morning, Champlin went straight to Miller and Aaron Koning, CBI’s assistant director of quality for Forensic Services, and detailed the issue. She suggested a procedural change to ensure Woods couldn’t make similar deletions going forward.

She told another supervisor that Woods “should never touch evidence again,” but she didn’t want to see Woods fired.

This time, the lab’s supervisors did take action. They interviewed Woods about the deleted data. She said she wasn’t sure how it had happened, and that she was overwhelmed at work, handling too much and feeling burned out.

They removed Woods from casework and reviewed everything she’d done so far that year, about six months of DNA testing. Several people in the lab felt at the time that the data deletion couldn’t be an accident, but Miller — the sole person responsible for reviewing Woods’ prior work — was not convinced.

“Because I knew Missy for so long, I didn’t think that she intentionally did anything,” Miller told internal affairs investigators. “…I trusted what she was saying, in that it was a mistake and that’s how it was. She didn’t have a history of lying to us by any means. I wouldn’t have expected that. And it was such a weird thing that I’d never seen before. In talking with other managers it was like, ‘What is this? It must have been a fluke situation.’ ”

Miller found no other deletions in her review of Woods’ work, which she estimated took a few days. The lab’s supervisors sent Woods to counseling and stopped her from working overtime. After about three months, Woods returned to casework in November 2018. She started working overtime again in December 2018.

The way the inquiry was resolved suggested to others in Forensic Services that supervisors suspected Woods deleted the data on purpose, Lance Allen, deputy director of Forensic Services in Grand Junction, told internal affairs investigators in February.

“I mean if it wasn’t intentional, why didn’t we just fix the process and not send her to counseling?” he said. “It felt like they knew it was likely intentional. She wouldn’t say it, but they felt it likely was. But it was a one-time thing. It was caught, it was not characteristic, (so) we’re gonna address it this way.”

Miller later said she didn’t make the procedural change that Champlin put forward because it seemed like an “overreaction.”

“Keeping that data, it seemed like something that we’d never needed to do before, never thought about doing, because we trust each other’s work,” she said. “And we follow the (standard operating procedures), and the SOPs say take that data and put it into here to work off of. It was like, ‘Oh, is this an overreaction to do a lot more work when it just didn’t seem necessary.’ ”

Champlin, who’d gone on maternity leave shortly after reporting the 2018 deletion, returned to find Woods back at work just as before.

“I just felt that no one believed me before, and I felt almost targeted a little bit as a pain in the butt, someone who is stirring the pot,” she told investigators. “I was pissed, super pissed.”

Right back on casework

Woods took the return to work as a stamp of approval.

“I figured CBI Forensic Services had investigated me, and then they put me right back on casework,” she told Hassenstab during her internal affairs interview in November. “So I’m thinking, ‘Oh, OK, well, I must not have done anything.’ ”

“I would just flip that,” Hassenstab responded. “I would say, ‘I just got away with this.’ ”

“Yeah,” Woods said.

Content warning: This audio clip includes an expletive

When the two-and-a-half-hour interview ended, Woods awkwardly joked with the investigators that she’d worn orange that day in case she had “to go to the penitentiary,” so she’d know how she looked in that color. A criminal investigation is ongoing but she has not been charged.

The 2018 review was the closest CBI came to discovering Woods’ misconduct before the 2023 revelations, but it wasn’t the sole incident that caused concern among her colleagues in the lab.

Woods regularly avoided the formal workflow for making corrections to her work, the internal affairs investigation found. CBI’s DNA analysts can make changes to their cases up to a certain point, and after that must ask an employee with higher-level clearance to make changes through a formal process.

At least once or twice a week, Woods went to one particular person with that higher-level clearance, forensic scientist Marko Kokotovic, and asked him to make changes for her without doing that formal documentation. He had “complete trust” in her and regularly agreed to do so, he told investigators in December.

“Honestly she was always very resistant to (the formal process),” Kokotovic said. “I would ask her to do it. She was always giving me a hard time of, ‘It’s so stupid, it’s just a little deletion, why waste all this time doing a correction when it just takes two seconds to delete this.’ It was pretty much always a time thing… She was a little bit more on the intimidating side. And she was always getting so much done that I didn’t want to hinder her progress, in a sense. So I was like, ‘You’re right, I’ll just do it for ya’ and it’s this tidy thing, moving on.”

Woods and other DNA analysts also manipulated the technical review process — what is supposed to be a random process in which analysts review each other’s work for accuracy — to ensure that their allies at work got their reviews, the internal affairs investigators found.

Champlin told investigators she purposely avoided reviewing Woods’ work after the 2018 incident. And some of the top performers in the lab would pass their work back and forth among each other for technical reviews, Miller said.

“You have your friends, and your friends don’t question or argue,” Miller said. “The technical review process can be very argumentative between analysts, where one person thinks it is this kind of sample and the other person thinks it’s this. There can be a lot of arguing. When you are doing it with your buddy, who kind of has the same thinking as you do, you don’t have as many problems, as much fighting over the data.”

Woods’ reputation in the lab and her personality might have helped push her work through the technical review process with less scrutiny, she added.

“She had a very strong personality and a lot of experience, and we all really looked up to her,” Miller said. “And she’s not an easy person to challenge. Some things could have gone away because, honestly, cognitive bias could have been involved — thinking you trust what she is doing, she knows what she is doing, she’s been doing this for 20 years — and, ‘It’s OK, what I am reviewing, I am signing off on it.’ ”

Miller defended her 2018 review as aimed at catching Woods’ mistakes — not carefully hidden misconduct and data manipulation.

Purposeful misconduct like that is much harder to identify, Allen said.

“A quality system does a great job of catching unintentional errors and mistakes,” he said. “A quality system will never be able to always catch the intentional, malicious, deceitful acts of someone trying to hide things.”

Anger and accreditation

An intern at CBI stumbled onto the problems with Woods’ work in September 2023 while going through large amounts of data for a Loveland nurse’s proposed research project on whether the law enforcement agency should regularly start testing additional material in sexual assault cases.

It was routine data entry — until data was missing in one of Woods’ cases.

The intern alerted a supervisor, who alerted her supervisor, who investigated. The team quickly found additional examples of missing data and discovered the deletions were limited to Woods’ cases, not other analysts, the material shows. An initial review showed a wider pattern of deleted data across at least 30 of Woods’ cases.

CBI officials put Woods on leave nine days after the intern flagged the first case.

The agency’s leaders immediately recognized the severity of the problem, internal affairs records show.

“You can literally be the person whose work brings down CBI Forensic Services, and I’m not even exaggerating that,” Hassenstab told Woods in November.

“This is devastating for the agency,” Girten, the retired deputy director of Forensic Services, told investigators. “All these cases are going to come back to us, and they’ll get thrown out. … It’s going to wreak havoc on the criminal justice community in Colorado.”

CBI alerted its forensic services accreditation agency, the ANSI National Accreditation Board, to the situation on Nov. 3, saying Woods’ conduct called into question her integrity. The letter included more detail than CBI provided to the public three days later when it announced the investigation in a press release.

The agency has since provided monthly reports on the ongoing effort to fix the problems to the accreditation board, the materials show. A spokeswoman for the accreditation board did not return a request for comment on CBI’s standing.

Camper, who served as CBI’s director from 2018 to February 2023, told The Post in an interview last week — and internal affairs investigators in February — that he would have opened an investigation had anyone raised concerns about Woods’ work that went beyond an employee struggling with “personal issues” who needed to take time off.

“We certainly weren’t shy about opening up investigations for misconduct, and we opened up investigations for a hell of a lot less than that,” he told The Post. “If serious issues like that had been brought to our attention, by all means we would have investigated it thoroughly.”

He called Woods’ actions “extremely disappointing, extremely discouraging,” and said there was clearly a breakdown within CBI in how her case was handled.

“I think any employer wants personnel issues and performance issues to be handled at the lowest possible level — but that said, if there was that sense of frustration that things weren’t being addressed or taken seriously, then that is obviously something that CBI is going to have to ensure doesn’t take place in the future,” he said.

By the end of June, CBI had spent $59,000 of the $3 million it received in state funding to retest DNA samples that Woods handled, said Low, the spokesman. The agency is also administering $4.4 million to reimburse district attorney’s offices for work on wrongful conviction claims due to Woods’ work. So far only $1,900 of that money has been claimed, Low said, by the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

During the internal affairs investigation, Woods’ colleagues reacted to her conduct with anger, betrayal and bewilderment, their interviews show.

All recognized the long-reaching impact of her misconduct in Colorado criminal justice.

“Before… I would have said she was a good analyst, maybe not the most thorough,” Gomez said. “I would have said she cares about the case and the people associated with the case. But after learning the extent to which she altered her data, I have no words. …We sign a code of ethics, a code of conduct every year. These are people’s lives — you’re a public servant, you’re supposed to be doing your best to help these people. So I don’t understand how she thought it was OK to do what she did.”

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Survivors fled out of the back of the store to escape the bullets. For more than an hour, others hid in shelves, checkout stands and offices.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, then 21, surrendered after being shot in the leg by a police officer in the store, emerging wearing only his underwear and repeatedly asking officers to call his mother. His attorneys don’t dispute he was the shooter.

But why he carried out the mass shooting remains unknown as his trial is set to begin this week.

The closest thing to a possible motive revealed so far was when a mental health evaluator testified during a competency hearing last year that Alissa said he bought firearms to carry out a mass shooting and suggested that he wanted police to kill him.

Robert Olds, whose 25-year-old niece Rikki Olds was the manager Alissa fatally shot at close range near the entrance, plans to sit in his usual spot in the front row throughout the trial. He has sometimes wished Alissa had just died in the attack. But he has held out hope that he would one day learn why his niece, known for her sense of humor and outgoing personality, and the others were killed. He has become less hopeful of that but is certain Alissa knew what he was doing.

“I hope he goes to prison for the rest of his life, and then he’ll serve the real penalty when he has to meet God and answer for killing 10 people,” he said.

The trial is expected to focus largely on Alissa’s mental state at the time of the shooting. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers argue he should be acquitted because his mental illness prevented him from being able to tell right from wrong.

The defense argued in a court filing that his relatives said he irrationally believed that the FBI was following him and that he would talk to himself as if he were talking to someone who was not there. However, prosecutors point out Alissa was never previously treated for mental illness and was able to work up to 60 hours a week leading up to the shooting, something they say would not have been possible for someone severely mentally ill.

Alissa is charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, 15 counts of attempted murder and other offenses, including having six high-capacity ammunition magazine devices banned in Colorado after previous mass shootings.

Alissa’s trial has been delayed because experts repeatedly found he was not able to understand legal proceedings and help his defense. But after Alissa improved after being forcibly medicated, Judge Ingrid Bakke ruled in October that he was mentally competent, allowing proceedings to resume.

Prosecutors will have the burden of proving he was sane, attempting to show Alissa that knew what he was doing and intended to kill people in the store.

Authorities have not explained why Alissa bypassed a King Soopers near his home in the Denver suburb of Arvada and drove about 15 miles to the chain’s store in Boulder, a city he had never visited before the shooting, according to the defense.

Prosecutors have presented evidence that, in the months before the shooting, Alissa had researched things like how to move and shoot with an assault rifle and what kinds of bullets are the most deadly. One court document noted without elaboration that he searched for information about the “Christ Church attacks,” an apparent reference to the livestreamed shooting attacks by a white nationalist on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people in 2019.

Alissa immigrated from Syria with his family as a toddler. He lived with his family in Arvada, where they owned a restaurant.

The only known problem Alissa had before the shooting was an incident in high school in 2018 when he was convicted of assaulting a fellow student, according to police documents. A former classmate also told The Associated Press that Alissa was kicked off the wrestling team after yelling he would kill everyone following a loss in a practice match.

A sister-in-law who lived in Alissa’s home told police that he had been playing with what she thought was a “machine gun” two days before the shooting before two relatives took it away, according to court documents.

Several of Alissa’s relatives are listed as potential witnesses for the defense during the trial. Potential jurors will be questioned starting Tuesday, with opening statements expected before the end of the week.

Both sides will rely on experts to testify about his sanity, possibly including videos of their interviews with Alissa, said defense lawyer Karen Steinhauser, a former prosecutor and University of Denver law professor.

If jurors don’t believe Alissa was legally insane, they could also consider whether his mental illness prevented him from being able to act with deliberation and intent and find him guilty of second-degree murder instead, she said.

A sanity evaluation done by experts at the state mental hospital found Alissa was legally sane at the time of the attack, according to details provided by the defense in a court hearing this spring. According to the defense, the evaluators found the attack would not have happened but for Alissa’s untreated mental illness, which attorney Sam Dunn said was schizophrenia that included “auditory hallucinations.”

Olds said he is bracing himself to learn more horrific details about the shooting, including surveillance video not previously shown in public.

But he said having the trial behind him will help him and many of the families finally grieve what they’ve lost, he said.

“There’s no such thing as moving on. It’s finding other ways to live without your loved one,” he said.

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Denver District Judge Martin Egelhoff on Tuesday dismissed three of Douglas County’s four claims, saying he lacked “subject matter jurisdiction” on the first two, and that the county came up short on its third claim, in which it alleged the state board had violated Colorado’s open meetings law.

But a fourth claim remains alive. That claim seeks judicial review, or an appeal, of the state board’s December decision overturning Douglas County’s approval of a valuation decrease for property owners.

“The court dismissed three of the county’s four claims,” county attorney Jeff Garcia said in a statement Friday. “The county is evaluating possible grounds for appeal on the three dismissed claims. However, regardless of any appeal, the county is proceeding to litigate its remaining claim.”

The affluent suburban county filed its lawsuit against the State Board of Equalization in January, characterizing its unanimous decision to deny Douglas County’s proposed $4 billion reduction in residential home values as “arbitrary and capricious.” With reduced valuations, homeowners would have seen lower tax bills as various taxing entities’ mill levies, or tax rates, were applied.

The suit alleged that the state board singled out Douglas County for denial even as it approved other counties’ requests for even larger valuation reductions. The county also noted that its assessment adjustment had already received the blessing of state tax officials and a third-party auditor, only to be shot down by the equalization board.

Egelhoff’s ruling comes the same week the Colorado legislature held a special session to address ballooning property tax bills in the state. On Thursday, the legislature passed a property tax deal aimed at stopping a pair of initiatives on November’s ballot.

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For 25 years, 10 city and county governments near the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site northwest of Denver have monitored for contaminants and other hazards through their participation in the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council. But now the council, which has met regularly to discuss conditions on the troubled property-turned-wildlife refuge is disbanding.

Broomfield pulled out earlier this week, joining Golden, Superior, Thornton, Northglenn and Boulder County in abandoning the council — a sufficient number of member defections to trigger the organization’s demise. The body will hold a final meeting this fall, clear the books and dissolve by early next year.

Deven Shaff, a Broomfield city councilman who has sat on the stewardship council for the past five years and serves as its vice chair, said its death doesn’t mean concerns about Rocky Flats will go away.

“You have an end to the stewardship council, but there is a story ahead for Rocky Flats,” Shaff said. “There’s a sense that there’s a new chapter for Rocky Flats.”

That new chapter could begin as soon as next week, when construction is set to start on two regional trail access points at the edge of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Looming over the project is a potential ruling from a federal judge that could halt plans to build the planned underpass and bridge, which will bring the Rocky Mountain Greenway trail onto the refuge.

The stewardship council’s demise and the continuing controversy are the latest developments in the long and tortured history of Rocky Flats.

The weapons manufacturing facility opened in 1952 and made plutonium triggers — or fission cores — for the nation’s nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. On a windswept piece of Jefferson County prairie between Arvada and Superior, the ugly result of all that industrial activity was the creation of tons of hazardous chemicals and barrels of noxious waste, some of which leaked or burned over the years.

Rocky Flats, which employed about 40,000 workers over its nearly 40-year active phase, was closed down after the FBI raided the plant in 1989. It sent 70 armed agents in a convoy of vehicles to the U.S. Department of Energy property to ferret out suspected environmental crimes.

“No way” everything was cleaned

Despite a 10-year, $7 billion cleanup that ended in 2005, many remain leery of what Jon Lipsky, one of the lead FBI agents during that raid — and an outspoken critic of Rocky Flats for years — calls an “unlicensed nuclear dump.”

“There’s all sorts of infrastructure that exists underground, and nobody knows what’s there,” Lipsky told The Denver Post. “There’s no way the Department of Energy cleaned everything.”

The Rocky Flats Stewardship Council is compromised because the Department of Energy funds it and “runs interference” for it, Lipsky said. That’s a sentiment shared by the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Chris Allred, who works on nuclear issues for the center, said there needs to be an organization that can look out for public health “without being subject to regulatory capture by the DOE.”

The peace and justice center is not convinced that the 6,500-acre site, which opened as a national wildlife refuge six years ago, is safe for human recreation. It’s one of several environmental groups that sued the federal government in January in an effort to stop the trail connections from being built on Colorado 128 and Indiana Street.

About 1,300 acres in the middle of the refuge remains a Superfund site, off-limits to the public, where the plutonium triggers were manufactured inside what amounted to a small standalone city.

“Rocky Flats is not stable in the environment,” Allred said. “This will only be made worse if construction projects are allowed to continue spreading contaminated dust.”

Dave Abelson, the longtime executive director of the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, flatly rejects the claim that he is bought and sold by federal interests, saying his accusers “have not shown a single example of where the funding source affected the actions or comments of the board or of the contract staff.”

“Not a single instance,” he said.

Abelson agrees that it’s time for the organization to sunset — not because it’s untrustworthy, he says, but because the science says so.

Water samples from the site have been relatively stable and within a safe range for years, while hundreds of soil samples — with the exception of one that generated headlines five years ago for its elevated plutonium reading — have also been deemed safe.

“Do you need the same type of intense focus that the governments have put on this?” Abelson said. “The answer appears to be no. You don’t need the same level of focus because it’s a stable site and has been for many years.”

Concern about lack of collaboration

The stewardship council grew out of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, which was launched in 1999. The council, created in 2006, was a more formal version of its predecessor and was created under a mandate in federal law to provide local communities a voice in the management and monitoring of contaminated sites nationwide.

The council has proven vital in looking for and identifying post-cleanup problems at Rocky Flats, Abelson said.

One year, city and county officials on the council challenged a plan by DOE officials to breach ponds on the site. They also expressed concern with the condition of Rocky Flats’ notorious landfills.

“The governments were alarmed when it became clear that portions of the original landfill that lie above Woman Creek were not stable,” Abelson said. “DOE eventually remedied the problem.”

In more recent years, things have been quieter, said Thornton Mayor Jan Kulmann, who chairs the stewardship council. She’s served on the body for a decade.

Thornton’s main concern is water quality, she said, with Standley Lake — just east of Rocky Flats — serving as a major source of drinking water for the city of 145,000.

“The data that we’ve been receiving from DOE … have not changed in 10 years,” Kulmann said. “We’re cautiously optimistic that it has reached a more stable condition.”

Broomfield’s concerns are different than Thornton’s, given its closer proximity to the refuge.

The city and county has been aggressive in separating itself from all things Rocky Flats in recent years. It started in February 2020, when the city’s elected leaders unanimously voted to pull out of the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority following the discovery in 2019 of an elevated reading of plutonium along Indiana Street and in the path of the proposed highway.

Not long after that decision, Broomfield withdrew from the Rocky Mountain Greenway project, resulting in the trail being rerouted through Westminster. But Broomfield Councilwoman Heidi Henkel isn’t so sure the city should have withdrawn from the stewardship council without having an “exit plan.”

“The only way to make government accountable is (that) you make everything public,” said Henkel, who served on the stewardship council for two years. “It’s disappointing to me that with a Superfund site there, we’ve decided to stop this group without any commitment to further the public discussion.”

While the Department of Energy will send quarterly water quality reports to the cities and counties that made up the stewardship council’s membership, Henkel worries about the lack of collaboration and shared knowledge that comes from everyone sitting down at a table together.

50,000 visitors to Rocky Flats

Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of Energy Communities Alliance, said the cities and counties around Rocky Flats are in a unique position because their advocacy organization — the stewardship council — is one of the first in the country to disband.

His Washington, D.C.-based group works with communities that are located near former nuclear weapons plants and nuclear energy facilities.

“Remedies fail and you have to keep on top of these issues,” Kirshenberg said. “The remedies need to be protective of human health and the environment. Hopefully, all we see is the use of the site — but if something happens in the future, they may have to put it back together.”

A Department of Energy spokesman told The Post that the agency would continue doing what it has been doing while the stewardship council has been active.

“The cleanup of the Rocky Flats site has proven to be protective of human health and the environment for nearly 20 years,” spokesman Jeremy Paul Ortiz wrote in a statement. “As we move into the third decade since cleanup, DOE will continue reporting on-site monitoring and maintenance activities and post this material on our public website.”

The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge saw 50,000 visitors in the most recent fiscal year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

One of those visitors is Jeanette Hillery, a member of the League of Women Voters of Boulder County. She’s also been a member of the stewardship council since its inception 18 years ago.

She said she’s struck by how the contamination horror stories of decades ago still seem to guide people’s thinking about Rocky Flats today. The site isn’t pristine, she said, but the testing and data she has seen over the last two decades indicate the risk posed by Rocky Flats’ legacy is more than manageable.

“There are a lot of people who want to go back to the 1970s and 1980s — and think that what was going on then is still going on today,” Hillery said. “The testing indicates it’s safe.”

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