Federal officials unveiled a slew of charges Tuesday against two Coloradans accused of ripping off a program that provides free rides to Medicaid patients, the first criminal charges filed in response to a sprawling fraud bonanza identified by state officials more than two years ago.
The indictments allege that Ashley Marie Stevens and Wesam Yassin separately participated in the transportation program and fraudulently collected seven-figure payouts — more than $3.3 million for Yassin alone, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado. The two drivers, who ran separate companies, allegedly fabricated rides for appointments that didn’t exist. Stevens is accused of billing for rides for her husband while he was incarcerated, and Yassin allegedly billed $165,000 for driving a patient who was dead.
Both Stevens, of Mesa County, and Yassin, of Douglas County, were charged with multiple counts of wire fraud, money laundering and health care fraud for their participation in the driving service.
The program pays drivers to ferry Medicaid patients to and from doctor’s appointments, but it became a haven for fraud in 2022 and 2023, after state officials increased the service’s reimbursement rates. State officials told The Denver Post last month that an estimated $25 million was lost in the broader fraud.
Yassin’s indictment was still sealed Tuesday evening. In a statement, federal officials alleged that Yassin billed Medicaid for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rides that never occurred between March 2022 and October 2023. She raked in $283,000 from rides for just one patient, most of which was paid to Yassin after the patient had already died.
Yassin allegedly used the proceeds to buy a home and furnishings, along with luxury vehicles, jewelry and cosmetic surgery. She was released on bond earlier this week, according to court records.
Stevens billed the state for more than $1 million between July 2022 and February 2023, according to the indictment. More than $400,000 came from rides she provided to herself or to her family members, for which there were “very few” actual medical appointments, federal authorities allege.
The trips included rides for her husband, who was incarcerated during some of the time when Stevens claimed she was driving him to the doctor. Another $150,000 was billed for rides that either never took place or were for trips that didn’t involve Medicaid services.
She was also paid more than $450,000 for rides that were at least 400 miles long, authorities allege. From east to west, Colorado is roughly 380 miles wide. Stevens allegedly used the proceeds from the scheme for travel and to buy a luxury car.
Stevens was already in Mesa County jail when she was indicted in December, according to court records. She remains in custody.
Yassin and Stevens are the first drivers to face any criminal repercussions for allegedly bilking the program. The fraud was in its heyday in 2023, state officials previously told The Post: A rash of new drivers entered the program then, shortly after the state increased the rate paid to transportation companies. Unscrupulous drivers, who were paid on a per member, per mile basis, allegedly packed their cars with patients and drove them across the state.
Some targeted homeless people in Pueblo and Colorado Springs, driving them to methadone clinics in metro Denver. Some patients were bribed with cash or drugs, state officials have said. Kim Bimestefer, the executive director of the state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, told lawmakers last month that the fraud scheme was “international.”
BOSTON — Massachusetts is among a minority of states where you can lose your driver’s license for unpaid parking tickets, tolls and other minor violations.
But advocates want to change that. A proposal on Beacon Hill would effectively end debt-based driving restrictions by prohibiting the state Registry of Motor Vehicles from suspending drivers’ licenses over unpaid fines for non-criminal infractions.
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Traffic deaths in Colorado increased in 2025, reversing a decline in recent years, with about one in three deaths related to impaired driving, according to state data released Thursday.
Colorado Department of Transportation officials said that, while the increase is small, they see troubling trends and plan to refocus safety efforts around impaired driving and deaths involving pedestrians and bicyclists.
A total of 701 people died on Colorado roads in 2025, an increase of 1.7% over the 689 fatalities reported in 2024, the data show. The number is still below the a record-setting 764 fatalities in 2022.
Impaired driving remains a leading factor in traffic deaths, CDOT officials said in a news release. CDOT recorded 234 deaths in crashes involving an impaired driver in 2025. Since 2022, impaired driving-related fatalities have decreased by 18%, state records show.
A breakdown of CDOT’s 2025 numbers shows the fatalities included 124 pedestrians, 18 bicyclists, and 146 motorcyclists. Car and truck crashes accounted for 392 fatalities.
CDOT and the Colorado State Patrol plan increased patrols aimed at “removing impaired drivers from our roads,” Col. Matthew Packard, chief of the patrol, said in a statement. “Even if you think you’re OK to drive, the consequences of impaired driving are never worth the risk. Use a ride-share service, public transportation, or call a sober friend. Your commitment to sober driving could save a life.”
An Aurora pedestrian died Saturday night after being hit by a car while crossing the street, police said.
The pedestrian, a 43-year-old man who has not been publicly identified, was walking west across Peoria Street at East Colfax Avenue outside of the crosswalk when he was hit, according to a news release from the Aurora Police Department. The crash happened just before 11 p.m. Saturday.
He was also crossing against the traffic signal, police said. The white Ford SUV that hit the man while driving south on Peoria Street had a green light.
Paramedics took the man to the hospital, where he later died, police said. He will be identified by the Adams County Coroner’s Office.
Speed and alcohol are not believed to be factors in the crash, according to the Aurora Police Department.
As of Sunday evening, no charges were expected to be filed in the crash “unless additional details are obtained through the investigation and/or reconstruction of the scene,” police said.
A conservative podcaster who’s trumpeted false election conspiracies and called for the execution of political rivals, including Gov. Jared Polis, has formally joined the Republican race to become Colorado’s next governor.
Joe Oltmann, who filed his candidacy paperwork Monday night, now seeks to participate in an electoral system that he has repeatedly tried to undermine.
He is the 22nd Republican actively seeking to earn the party’s nomination in June. It’s the largest gubernatorial primary field for a major party in Colorado this century, surpassing the GOP’s previous records set first in 2018, and then again in 2022 — and it comes as the party hopes to break Democrats’ electoral dominance in the state.
That field will almost certainly narrow in the coming months; four Republicans who’d filed have already dropped out. No more than four are likely to make it onto the ballot — either through the state assembly or by gathering signatures — for the summer primary, said Dick Wadhams, the Colorado GOP’s former chairman.
The size of the primary field doesn’t really matter, he said, because few candidates will actually end up in front of voters. Eighteen candidates filed ahead of the 2022 race, for instance, but just two were on the primary ballot.
On the Democratic side, a smaller field of seven active candidates is headlined by Attorney General Phil Weiser and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. Polis is term-limited from running again.
For 2026, Wadhams counted only a half-dozen or so Republican candidates whom he considered “credible,” a qualifier that Wadhams said he used “very, very loosely”: Oltmann, state Sens. Barbara Kirkmeyer and Mark Baisley, state Rep. Scott Bottoms, ministry leader Victor Marx, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell and former Congressman Greg Lopez.
Wadhams said that other than Kirkmeyer, all of those candidates had either supported election conspiracies or a pardon for Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk now serving a nine-year sentence for convictions related to providing unauthorized access to voting equipment.
Oltmann, of Castle Rock, has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that the 2020 presidential election was not won by Democrat Joe Biden, while calling for the hanging of political opponents. He previously said he wanted to dismember some opponents to send a message, according to the Washington Post, before adding that he was joking.
In his Dec. 26 announcement video, Oltmann baselessly claimed that Democrats, who have won control of the state amid demographic shifts and anti-Trump sentiment, were in power in Colorado only because of election fraud.
He said Polis and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, along with 9News anchor Kyle Clark, were part of a “synagogue of Satan.” Polis and Griswold are both Jewish.
In his announcement, Oltmann painted an apocalyptic picture of the state and said he hoped that three of its elected leaders — Polis, Griswold and Weiser — would all be imprisoned. He pledged to eliminate property taxes, to focus on the “have-nots” and to pardon Peters, whom President Donald Trump has also sought to release by issuing a federal pardon that legal experts say can’t clear Peters of state convictions.
Oltmann’s decision to join the field is an example of “extreme candidates” from either major party “who file to run but will go nowhere,” predicted Kristi Burton Brown, another former state GOP chair. She now sits on the Colorado State Board of Education.
She said the size of the Republican primary field was a consequence of Republicans’ difficulties winning statewide races in Colorado. Democrats have won all four constitutional elected offices for two straight election cycles.
Burton Brown said it “might be a good idea moving forward” to require candidates to do more than just submit paperwork to run for office. That might include a monetary requirement: She said she didn’t support charging candidates significant sums but thought that “requiring some skin in the game” could prevent “unreasonable primaries.”
The 2026 election comes as state and national Democrats search for a path forward after Trump’s reelection last year.
Approval polling for leading Colorado Democrats has sagged this year, and voters here hold unfavorable views of both the Democratic and Republican parties that are roughly equal, according to a November poll.
Wadhams said that the odds were “very difficult” for any Republican gubernatorial candidate next year. While approval for Polis and other Democrats has declined, support for the Republican standard-bearer — Trump — is far lower in the state. In last year’s election, Colorado was a largely blue island in a broader national red wave.
To have a real shot of winning in 2026, Wadhams argued, the GOP needed to nominate someone for governor who could sidestep anti-Trump sentiment and press on the issues driving voter discontent. Running more divisive candidates in a blue state, he warned, would risk harming Republicans’ chances in down-ballot races the statehouse or in races for Congress.
“There seems to be an opening for Republicans we haven’t seen for a while,” he said. “But that opening will only exist if we have candidates who won’t get pulled into this conspiracy stuff and this Tina Peters stuff. Because those are nonstarters. They’re sure losers.”
WESTWOOD — As 2025 comes to a close, AAA Northeast urges those who plan to take part in year-end holiday celebrations to designate a sober driver.
In December 2023, 1,038 people were killed in drunk-driving crashes nationwide — with more than a quarter of those fatalities occurring during the Christmas and New Year holiday periods according to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Nighttime driving is significantly more dangerous than daytime driving: 30% of drivers involved in fatal crashes between 6 p.m. and 5:59 a.m. were drunk.
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A recent Facebook post from a Mustang Mach-E owner in Canada triggered a wide-ranging conversation on social media and beyond, as EV enthusiasts and skeptics debated how modern electric crossovers manage grip and control in icy conditions.
The original post detailed an unsettling moment on a steep, ice-coated driveway where the owner, despite driving “super slowly” and on winter tires, nearly slid into her own home. She reported using the Mach-E’s most conservative traction settings, including Whisper driving mode and disabling one-pedal driving, yet traction loss still nearly led to a collision. This incident brings to the surface the fact that even advanced traction systems can be outmatched by extreme surface conditions.
At its core, a winter traction challenge like this is about the interaction of three critical elements: tire grip, vehicle dynamics control systems, and driver input strategies. Electric vehicles such as the Mustang Mach-E bring unique traits to this mix, especially compared with traditional internal combustion vehicles.
Electric Drivetrain and Weight Distribution Effects
Image Credit: Ashley Jensen/Facebook.
The Mach-E’s electric powertrain delivers smooth, instantaneous torque across both front and rear motors in AWD configurations. This setup can aid initial traction by allowing fine torque modulation between axles, a benefit over mechanical limited-slip differentials in ice and snow. At the same time, the Mach-E’s heavy battery pack means a low center of gravity and significant mass over the wheels. That mass improves traction compared with lighter vehicles, but it also raises stakes when physics overtakes traction control.
The Mach-E forum members point out that electric AWD systems often allow some rear wheel movement before intervening, a calibration that can feel playful or even Mustang-like in winter slides. In that forum thread, another Mach-E owner experienced a similar “slipping and sliding” behavior in not-so-deep snow. They wrote:
“We had a small amount of snow this evening. I had to go out while it was still snowing, about an inch had fallen. Seemed like my car (4X) was a bit skittish. I always drive in 1-pedal and unbridled mode. The car unexpectedly lost traction a few times and began sliding a bit, even though I was doing less than 40 MPH and not braking. Perhaps just letting up slightly on the accelerator (but not coming off it fully). In a way, it reminded me a bit of driving my old Miata in the snow!”
Some owners report that the traction control logic lets the rear end yaw up to roughly 20 degrees before stabilizing, and this behavior can come across as more “dynamic” than conservative under slippery conditions.
One commenter on the Mach-E forum stressed that while winter tires are “really advantageous because their rubber compound is much stickier,” people often mislabel them as snow tires, which they aren’t. He noted that their stickier compounds give them far better grip, “while all-season tires’ compound, which turns far harder below 40 degrees, lessen their grip the colder the temperature gets.”
The Role of Driving Modes and Regen Braking
Image Credit: Kevin Burnell/Shutterstock.
Modern EVs mediate throttle and brake inputs through software modes that alter power delivery and braking behavior. In the Mach-E, Whisper mode is designed to soften throttle responses and reduce abrupt torque delivery. While that sounds ideal for low-grip conditions, there is nuance beneath the surface.
Some owners argue that regen braking behavior under one-pedal driving or in certain modes can be counterproductive on ice. In one-pedal mode, the vehicle uses regenerative braking aggressively when the driver lifts off the accelerator.
On snow or ice, this can induce unexpected deceleration forces that unsettle traction, especially if antilock braking systems aren’t engaged in the same way they would be under conventional braking. Several Mach-E drivers recommend disabling one-pedal driving in winter and relying on the traditional brake pedal so that ABS can more effectively manage wheel slip when decelerating.
This interplay underscores how EV regen systems layer complexity on traditional traction control. Regenerative braking is highly efficient, but on icy surfaces it demands a different driver instinct than engine braking in a petrol or diesel vehicle.
Tires Still Matter Most
Despite sophisticated AWD and traction control, winter tire choice remains the dominant factor in real-world grip performance. Owners in Mach-E online communities repeatedly emphasize that all-season or performance tires perform poorly on ice and snow. Dedicated winter compounds with aggressive tread patterns can transform handling performance, reducing wheelspin and shortening stopping distances.
One community-reported example contrasts the Mach-E’s poor traction on stock all-seasons with its confident handling after fitting CrossClimate2 or other winter tires. Even a rear-wheel drive Mach-E with proper winter rubber has been reported to climb moderate slopes and maintain directional stability that stock tire setups could not provide.
The takeaway from this viral driveway incident is that physics still has the final word — not a dismissal of EV traction technology, but rather a reminder of its limitations. Traction control, torque vectoring, and regen braking all help optimize grip, yet they cannot create friction where the surface provides almost none. A steep icy driveway effectively becomes a vertical challenge rather than a traction problem when coefficients of friction approach zero.
As one owner in the comments on the original post put it, mastering winter driving now includes understanding the logic behind vehicle systems instead of simply trusting them. Knowing which drive mode and brake strategy suits which surface is part of being a safe driver in an era when software mediates so much of the car’s behavior.
Image Credit: Ashley Jensen/YouTube.
Finally, the Mach-E experience this week is a springboard into deeper questions about EV traction systems and how drivers interpret and interact with them. It is not just about the tech in the vehicle but how the human behind the wheel engages with it in the face of unforgiving winter physics. It’s equally important to stay calm and avoid sudden inputs when your tires skid or lose traction.
Ease off the accelerator immediately and do not slam the brakes, since that can worsen the slide. Look where you want the car to go, not at the obstacle, because your hands tend to follow your eyes. Gently steer in the direction of the skid until the vehicle straightens. If braking is needed, apply smooth, progressive pressure to let ABS work. Once traction returns, straighten the wheels gradually and slow down further to prevent another loss of control.
The gap between settler lives and those it colonised is the system working as it was designed to, writesYuki Lindley.
As news of the NTs refusal to let the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention see the conditions within their prisons makes the headlines and Kumanjayi Whites family continue to demand an investigation into why their disabled son was killed by police in a Coles supermarket, it is important to understand the context within which Indigenous lives are so frequently disregarded, incarcerated and ultimately eliminated in the settler colonial state we call Australia.
As Australian scholar and historian, Patrick Wolfe famously concluded, “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event”. Yet, colonisers always insist that colonisation is over now, that its in the past, much like the way they insist the only real Indigenous people are those staring out of historical black and white photos. Colonisers love to believe that the colonial violence is all over and done with, that it was an unfortunately bad way of starting off the colony, but that we can and should move on now, because well, its not like there are any real Indigenous people left anyway.
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But if we take the time to study settler colonialism, we learn that it progresses from the initial bloody phases of frontier violence, to a more settled, structural process of eliminating the native, by embedding the genocidal intent of colonisation into the various power structures of the emerging state. During this phase, we see laws emerge that continue the process of elimination by targeting Indigenous peoples through policies such as the Aboriginal Protections Acts of the 1960s, which removed children from their families and dominated every aspect of Indigenous people’s lives, from their employment, marriage, to where they could live.
Today, the state no longer directly targets Indigenous people according to race and skin tone, but through a system of laws that target poor, traumatised, homeless people with disabilities; the result is that Indigenous people are the ones incarcerated because of the systematic trauma and poverty that the state inflicted upon their families.
Mandatory sentencing laws, which exist in WA and NT, fill up the prisons with poor, traumatised Indigenous people, the majority of whom are locked up for small non-violent crimes of poverty, such as shoplifting or unpaid fines. All the evidence shows that incarceration only leads to increasing crime rates because of the re-traumatising effect of prison.
This system of laws doesnt make sense if you assume the state wants to decrease crime rates; however, within the context of settler colonialism, it works perfectly to remove the natives from disturbing the peace of settler society. It is about removing Indigenous poverty from our view, whether by enclosing them within reservations or prisons, the intent remains the same.
The police, as an institution, is the big stick that the state uses to control its people, and as such, it was the police force that was tasked with removing Indigenous bodies from society and keeping them tightly controlled. Today, the police have largely moved on from lynching Indigenous people who strayed into settler society, to a system of neglect, disregard and excessive force designed to ensure that once Indigenous people are detained, their chances of leaving alive significantly reduce. By insisting that the police are continue to investigate themselves, the state ensures that the colonial intent of elimination continues to function as it has been designed.
Then there is the fact that Indigenous women are far more likely to be incorrectly identified as the perpetrator when they call for help during domestic violence incidents, which is why Indigenous women often dont call for police help.
As Indigenous scholar and journalist, Amy McQuire highlights, this leaves Indigenous women extremely vulnerable; indeed, the record on missing Indigenous women in this country reveals the shocking lack of due diligence performed by the police when investigating missing Indigenous women. This is why perpetrators knowingly target Indigenous women, because the police are unlikely to collect evidence and investigate their disappearance.
Colonisation continues to break up Indigenous families, while the state no longer removes Indigenous children in order to breed out the natives, families continue to be broken apart by laws which criminalise poverty, though laws that lock up parents for unpaid fines for minor offences such as driving without a licence or drinking in public. The consequence of these laws are that Indigenous parents are taken away from their homes leaving their children trapped in a cycle of neglect and poverty, which the state itself began.
It was the state that ensured that Indigenous people were unable to accumulate wealth and property through policies that controlled and often stole their wages (which were low to begin with), and through policies that excluded them from purchasing property. Even once these legal frameworks were dismantled, the racism within the banking and real estate sector ensured they remained excluded in practice, only allowed to purchase property in the worst neighbourhoods if they were able to secure a mortgage at all. This state-inflicted intergenerational poverty is the reason Indigenous people are targeted by laws that criminalise poverty and homelessness, with those laws most prevalent in states such as WA and the NT, due to their larger Indigenous population.
Colonisers have long weaponised access to food, having stolen the best lands, they force Indigenous people into reservations and missions, often ensuring that the paucity of food and overcrowding create the conditions where the natives simply die off; in these crowded, unhealthy spaces, outbreaks of diseases do the work of the colonial state in reducing the Indigenous population. The destruction of Indigenous food systems ensured they became dependent on the state for food, and without regulation to ensure adequate, healthy food availability and affordable prices, Indigenous communities continue to experience high levels of chronic disease, malnutrition, and child development issues; these issues are often compounded by a lack of working stoves, running water and working fridges in their homes. Thus, the colonial state continues its intent of smoothing the pillow of a dying race, as it removes the conditions required for Indigenous health and life.
Then there is the colonial assertion of power over what constitutes knowledge, history and how we understand the world. Colonisers have long believed they know Indigenous people and their experiences better than Indigenous people themselves. White expert accounts of their time spent in Indigenous communities fly off the shelves, explaining the Indigenous subject to a largely white audience. Of course, these outsider opinions formed under the logic of white supremacy rarely capture the reality of Indigenous experiences, communities and worldviews. Colonial institutions of knowledge production often silence Indigenous perspectives, in order to maintain the power dynamics which allow Indigenous lives to remain tightly controlled by the very systems intent on their elimination.
Outside of the ivory towers of academia, the media continues to push their colonial narrative, which portrays Indigenous people as unable to direct and manage their own communities. The media floods the public with images of dysfunction, criminality and violence. While these are the impacts of colonisation, the media subtly suggests through its choice of language and stories to cover that there must be something innately criminal and dysfunctional about Indigenous people themselves, and the settler public unquestioningly accepts this soothing narrative.
50 years of truth-telling about Australias racist past
Marking half a century since its groundbreaking first edition, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination remains a powerful work of truth-telling on colonial race relations.
In every aspect of Australian life, the colonising power of the state negatively impacts Indigenous lives. While wealth, education, and social status can provide a pathway out for certain individuals, the fact that we live in a settler colonial state means that the underlying intent of the state remains the elimination of Indigenous sovereignty in order to gain access to their lands. As Patrick Wolfe has identified, the state requires the elimination of the native as a native, as part of a sovereign people. This leaves Indigenous people the impossible choice to cut off parts of who they are, their ancestry, their history and become assimilated into the settler state, albeit as second-class citizens, orto hold onto their sense of self within a structure intent on their elimination.
As a sociologist and historian, Orlando Patterson has shown, colonisation breaks kinship groups, languages, culture and connection to Country, through a process of stripping away the very things that give people a sense of self and belonging; in this way, a proud sovereign people can be turned into an object, a tool, a slave. This is the process that Indigenous people resist daily, in their insistence and assertion of their rights as sovereign people, and it is this assertion of their humanity as a sovereign people that is incommensurable with the settler colonial state we call Australia.
It is the incommensurability of Indigenous lives within the settler colonial state that lies at the heart of the gap between the lives of settlers and those they colonised. The gap is not a failure of the system, but rather the colonial system working as it was designed to. How can Indigenous lives be valued and allowed to thrive under a structure intent upon their elimination? This is the incommensurability that lies at the heart of all settler colonial states, and the reason why justice comes too slowly for Indigenous peoples if it comes at all.
Yuki Lindleyis a student of philosophy of race, colonisation and Indigenous sovereignty.
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In a windowless room at Denver police headquarters on a recent Thursday afternoon, Officer Chris Velarde activated a police drone to investigate a potential car break-in.
Officer Chris Velarde flies a drone and monitors live footage from its camera from Denver Police Department headquarters on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Several floors above, the drone launched from the roof and flew itself — essentially on autopilot — to the site of the call, reported as a man breaking into a car with a crowbar near the Santa Fe Arts District.
The drone whizzed along, 200 feet up, in a straight line across blocks, buildings and streets during the roughly mile-long flight from police headquarters at 1331 Cherokee St. Velarde didn’t pick up the Xbox video-game controller that manually pilots the drone until it reached the area of the call. Then he took control and trolled the block for the supposed break-in, watching live video footage transmitted from the drone on his computer monitor as he flew.
After a few moments, Velarde spotted two people jiggering the passenger-side window of a vehicle. He zoomed in on the pair, and on the car’s license plate. He ran the plate to see whether the vehicle was stolen; it was not. The people on the street didn’t look up. They didn’t seem to know a police drone was hovering above them, that they were being recorded and watched a mile away by officers and a reporter.
Two more people joined the pair at the vehicle’s window and Velarde made the call — this didn’t look like a vehicle break-in. More likely, someone had just locked their keys in their car. He cleared the call with 911 dispatchers and told them there was no need to send an officer to the scene. Then he sent the drone back to headquarters; it flew itself to the rooftop dock, landing autonomously on a platform stamped with bright blue-and-yellow QR codes.
The Denver Police Department began testing drones as first responders — that is, sending them out on 911 calls — in mid-October after signing up for two free pilot programs from rival drone companies Skydio and Flock Safety. The effort has raised concerns among privacy advocates, Denver politicians and the city’s police oversight group, particularly regarding the department’s contract with Flock, the company behind the city’s controversial network of automated license-plate readers.
Police see the drones as a way to speed up call-response times and provide more information to officers as they arrive on scene, improving, they say, both public safety and officer safety. If a drone arrives at a scene before officers, and the drone pilot can tell police on the ground that the man with the knife actually put down the weapon before the officers arrived, that helps everyone, police said.
“The more knowledge, information and intelligence that we can provide our officers on the ground, the better methods that they can use to respond to certain situations, which may cause them to not escalate unnecessarily,” said Cmdr. Clifford Barnes, who heads the department’s Cyber Bureau.
Critics say the eyes in the sky raise serious privacy concerns both with how the drones and the data they collect are used now, and with how they might be used in the future as the technology rapidly changes. They worry that the drones could create a citywide surveillance network with few legal guardrails, that the footage they collect will be used to train private companies’ AI algorithms or that police will misuse emerging AI capabilities, like facial recognition.
“When it comes to the decision of, are we going to use this thing that could potentially increase public safety, that will erode privacy rights — no one should get to decide the public is willing to give away our constitutional rights, except the people,” said Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. “And when law enforcement makes that decision for us, it becomes extremely problematic.”
Almost 300 drone flights in 55 days
So far, only Skydio drones have flown as first responders over Denver.
Denver police signed a zero-dollar contract with Flock — without public announcement — in August for a year-long pilot of drones as first responders, but the company has yet to set up its autonomous aircraft. Skydio, on the other hand, moved quickly to get drones in the air after Denver police in October signed a contract to test up to four of the company’s drones during a free six-month pilot.
Skydio’s drones can reach about a 2-mile radius around the Denver police headquarters. The company advertises a top speed of 45 mph with 40 minutes of flight time; Denver pilots have found the drones average around 28 mph and around 25 minutes of battery life per flight.
From the first flight on Oct. 15 through Tuesday, two Skydio drones flew 297 times, according to data provided by Denver police in response to an open records request. Most of those flights — 199 — were to answer calls for service; another 82 were training flights, according to the data.
Skydio drones also surveilled events — a function police call “event overwatch” — seven times, the police data shows. Overwatch might include flying over a protest to track where the demonstrators are headed and alert officers on the ground for traffic control, Barnes said. (The police data showed that all seven overwatch flights occurred on Oct. 18, the day of Denver’s “No Kings” rally.)
The drones flew to 29 calls about a person with a weapon, 21 disturbances, 20 assaults in progress, a dozen suspicious occurrences and 11 hold-up alarms, according to data from Denver’s 911 dispatch records. The drones also flew to 39 other types of calls, including reports of prowlers, fights, burglaries, domestic violence and suicidal people.
The most common outcome for a call was that the officers were unable to locate an incident or the suspect was gone by the time the drone or police officers arrived, the records show. Across about 200 calls for service that included drone responses, police made 22 arrests and issued one citation, the dispatch data shows.
When responding to calls for service, the drones reached the scene before patrol officers 88% of the time, the police data shows. A drone was the sole police response in 80 of 199 calls for service, or about 40% of the time.
Barnes said answering calls with solely a drone improves police efficiency.
“If an officer on the ground doesn’t need to respond, and the drone pilot is comfortable with cancelling the other officers coming, we can assign those officers to more important, more pressing matters, so call-response times come down,” he said.
That approach raises questions about what the drones (which are equipped with three different cameras and a thermal imager) can and can’t see, and how officers are making decisions about call responses without actually speaking to anyone at the scene, the ACLU’s Robinson said.
“Humans have bias,” he said. Drone pilots might be more inclined to send officers to a potential car break-in in a low-income neighborhood and more likely not to in a higher-income neighborhood, he said. Or they might miss something from above that they could have seen at street level.
Officer Chris Velarde flies a drone and monitors live footage from its camera from Denver Police Department headquarters on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
But minimizing in-person police interactions with residents, particularly in over-policed neighborhoods, can also be a positive, said Julia Richman, chair of Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board, which provides civilian oversight of the police department.
“Where my head goes is the other outcome, where they roll up on those people who are trying to get keys out of the car and then they shoot them,” she said. “Actually, (the drone-only response) seems like a really good outcome.”
The oversight group has talked with Denver police over the last two years about developing its drone program, she said. The department created a seven-page policy to guide their use; the policy aims to ensure “civil rights and reasonable expectations of privacy are a key component of any decision made to deploy” a drone.
But Richman said she was surprised by aspects of the police department’s pilot programs despite the ongoing conversations with department leadership.
“What was never discussed, not once, was the idea of a third party running those drones or those drones being autonomous,” she said, referring to the drone companies. “What has changed with this latest pilot is the key features and key aspects that would create public concern had never been discussed with us.”
Both Flock and Skydio advertise autonomous features powered by artificial intelligence. Skydio uses AI for its autonomous flight paths, obstacle avoidance and tracking people and cars.
Flock, which also offers autonomous flight, advertises its drones as integrating with its automated license-plate readers. The license-plate readers — there are more than 100 around Denver — automatically photograph every car that passes by them. If a license plate is stolen or involved in a crime, the license-plate readers alert police within seconds.
Police Chief Ron Thomas and Mayor Mike Johnston defended the surveillance network as an invaluable crime-solving tool this year against mounting public discontent around how much data the machines collected and how that data was used — particularly around sharing information with the federal government for the purposes of immigration enforcement.
That privacy debate around Flock’s license plate readers unfolded in communities across Colorado and nationwide this year. In Loveland, the police department for a time allowed U.S. Border Patrol agents to access its Flock cameras before blocking that access. In Longmont, councilmembers voted Wednesday to look for alternatives to replace the 20 Flock license plate readers in that city.
When Denver City Council members, some driven by privacy concerns, voted against continuing Flock’s license-plate readers in May, Johnston extended the surveillance anyway through a free five-month contract extension with Flock in October that did not require approval from the council. Against that backdrop, Denver police quietly signed on for Flock’s drone pilot in August.
Barnes said the police department will not use any license-plate reader capabilities available on Flock drones. Such a feature would constitute “random surveillance,” which is prohibited under the department’s drone policy. The drones never fly without an officer’s direct involvement, he added.
The blue 2-mile-radius line seen on a computer screen shows the range of Denver police Skydio drones flown from Denver Police headquarters. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
The policy also prohibits drones from filming anywhere a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy unless police have a warrant, and says officers should take “reasonable precautions … to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Denver police do receive search warrants to fly drones for particular operations outside of the drones-as-first-responder program. In October, a Denver police detective sought and received a warrant to fly a drone over a shooting suspect’s home in Cherry Hills Village to check whether a truck involved in the shooting was parked at the wooded property.
The warrant noted that when driving home from anywhere outside Cherry Hills Village, the suspect could not reach his house without passing by Flock license-plate readers, and that photos from those license-plate readers suggested the truck was at the property.
Denver Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Councilman Kevin Flynn both told The Post they were not aware of the police department’s Skydio drone pilot before hearing about it from the newspaper, even though they are both on the city’s Surveillance Technology Task Force. The new group began meeting in August largely to consider Flock license-plate readers, as well as other types of surveillance technology, Gonzales-Gutierrez said.
“We haven’t talked about it in the task force, and the charge of our work in the task force is to come up with those guardrails that need to be put in place for these types of technology being utilized by law enforcement,” she said. “I feel like they just keep moving on without us being able to complete our work.”
Police don’t need permission from the City Council to carry out the pilot programs, Gonzales-Gutierrez said, but she was disappointed by the lack of communication and collaboration from the department.
Flynn sees the potential of police drones, particularly in speeding up officer response times, which can sometimes be dismal in the far-flung areas of his southwestern district.
“If a drone can get there to a 911 call and it can help an officer at headquarters assess the scene before a staffed car could get there, I would love that,” he said.
But he wants to be sure they are used in a way that respects residents’ rights. He would not support using the drones for general patrolling or surveillance, he said.
“This pilot is an excellent opportunity to test all of those boundaries and see if there are ways to operate a system that can be very useful for public safety without crossing boundaries,” he said.”…And maybe we don’t keep using them. That is the point of a pilot.”
‘These are flying cops’
The Skydio drones film from the moment they are launched until they drop in to land.
When the drone is on its way to a call — flying at the 200-foot altitude limit set by the Federal Aviation Administration — its cameras remain pointed at the horizon. In Denver’s denser neighborhoods, the Skydio drones at that height flew among buildings, sometimes at eye-level with balconies, offices and apartment windows, according to video of four flights obtained by The Post through an open records request.
“What if someone is in their apartment unit in one of these giant buildings and they’re changing, and they have their window open because they’re way up high and they don’t think anyone is watching them?” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “That is crazy.”
The drones buzzed over rooftop decks, balconies and elevated apartment complex pools, the videos show. On one trip, a drone flew past the Colorado State Capitol Building, recording three people on a balcony on the tower under the building’s golden dome. Another time, the drone pilot zoomed in on a license plate so tightly that the car’s small, decorative “LOVE” decal was clearly visible.
Flynn noted that a 200-foot altitude would put the drones well above most of the homes in his less-dense district, and that people on their porches or balconies aren’t somewhere private.
“If someone is out on a balcony, sitting there reading a book… generally speaking, if you are out in public there’s no expectation of privacy,” he said.
The Skydio drones recorded about 54 hours of footage in the first eight weeks of their operation, according to data provided by the police department. Police leadership opted to have the drones’ cameras on and recording whenever the drone is in flight to boost transparency about how the drones are being used, Barnes said.
“It makes sense to keep the camera rolling,” Barnes said. “Then, if there’s an allegation, we just make sure that footage is recorded and treated like digital evidence, uploaded to the evidence management platform so it could be reviewed as necessary. We’re just trying to make sure we establish that balance, being as transparent as possible.”
Drone footage unrelated to criminal investigations is automatically deleted after 60 days, he said. While it’s retained, it’s stored in an evidence system that keeps a record of anyone who looks at it. The drone unit’s sergeant, Brent Kohls, also audits the flight reports monthly. (Footage used in criminal investigations will be on the same retention schedule as body-worn camera footage, police said.)
Kohls noted it would be unusual for the drone footage to be viewed only by the pilot. The feed is often displayed on the wall of the police department’s Real-Time Crime Center as it comes in.
ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the organization’s speech, privacy and technology project, would rather see police keep the recording off while flying a drone to a call, even if the camera is still livestreaming to police headquarters. In that scenario, a drone pilot might still see a woman tanning topless on her rooftop pool deck, he said, but the government wouldn’t then keep a recording of that privacy violation, amplifying it further.
“The thing we are really worried about is police start deploying drones as first responders for the majority of their calls for service and suddenly you have this crisscrossing network of surveillance all over the city,” Freed Wessler said. “You have the potential for a pervasive record of what everyone is doing all the time.”
Kohls said an officer flying a drone who spotted a different crime occurring while en route to another call would stop to report and respond to that secondary crime, just like an officer would on the ground.
“Absolutely, if an officer sees a crime happening, they’re going to get on the radio, alert dispatch to what they’re observing,” Kohls said. “Hopefully, if they have a few minutes of battery time left still, they can extend their time and circle or overwatch on that scene to provide hopefully life-saving radio traffic, whatever information they need to relay to dispatch to get other officers heading, or the fire department heading that way.”
State and federal laws have not yet caught up to how police are using drones, Freed Wessler said. The Fourth Amendment has what’s known as the plain-view exception, which allows police officers who are lawfully in a place to take action if they see evidence of a crime happening in plain sight.
“The problem here is we are not talking about police doing a thing we would normally expect them to do,” Freed Wessler said. “We are talking about police taking advantage of a new technology that gives them a totally new power to fly at virtually no expense over any part of the city at any time of day and see a whole bunch of stuff happening.”
A Denver police drone lands on its docking station on the roof of Denver Police headquarters in Denver, on Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Police have broad leeway to watch suspects without first getting a search warrant — like by peering through a fence or climbing the steps of a nearby building to look into a yard. But that’s different from using a subtle video camera to record a person 24/7 for months, the justices concluded.
So far, that’s the closest ruling in Colorado on the issue of drone surveillance, Freed Wessler said. Robinson, the policy director at the ACLU of Colorado, said lawmakers should act to regulate police drone use — either at the state or local level.
“These are flying cops,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy. “That is another one of those slippery slopes.”
Aside from the legality of surveillance, another question is how the drone footage and flight data is used by the drone companies, Lipton said.
“We live in a time where all these AI-fueled companies have a real drive to integrate AI into everything, and they’re really hungry for new data,” she said. “And we have law enforcement helping to feed these companies in a way they don’t really understand.”
Under its current agreement with Denver police, Skydio doesn’t use drone footage to train its algorithm or improve its product. Flock spells out in its contract that the company can “collect, analyze and anonymize” drone footage, then use that anonymized footage to train its “machine learning algorithms,” and enhance its services.
Lipton added that technology is moving fast — Axon, a company that powers many police departments’ body-worn cameras — this month started testing facial recognition on its cameras to automatically alert a police officer if a person they’re encountering has a warrant out for their arrest.
Prisons are experimenting with “movement analysis” to automatically flag a person’s movements as potentially aggressive before the person perpetrates violence, she said.
“We are technologically at a place where it would not be hard for a drone to fly over an area and basically serve as a license-plate reader for humans,” Lipton said. “… Some of this analysis is just not being done because it is not publicly palatable yet. But it is not like it is technologically difficult for some of these companies.”
To mark National Older Driver Safety Awareness Week from Dec. 1-5, AAA Northeast is spotlighting the rising number of fatal traffic crashes involving older drivers across the United States.
Between 2014 and 2023, the population of people 65 and older in the United States increased by 28%. During this same time, the number of older drivers involved in fatal crashes increased by 41%, while the number of older licensed drivers increased by 38%.
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Are you traveling by car on this Thanksgiving eve? One expert says the best time to hit the road this holiday travel season is before 10 a.m. or after 8 p.m.
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Travelers along I-95 in Northern Virginia share their Thanksgiving hopes, excitement
Are you traveling by car on this Thanksgiving eve?
A Google tech expert told WTOP they predict the best time to drive Wednesday in the D.C. area is before 10 a.m. or after 8 p.m.
The worst time to be on the road ahead of Thanksgiving is between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
WTOP’s Luke Lukert spoke with travelers along Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia.
Erskine Alexander, a psychotherapist from New York, said he was thankful for being able to get off work and have some family time.
“A lot of patience during this time, especially in New York City. So to be able to get on the highway and listen to some nice music in zero traffic is perfect,” he said.
Stay with WTOP for the latest this holiday travel season.
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A trek by state Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester, and local leaders over the bridge to Connecticut recently may make Bay State highways safer from wrong-way drivers.
Tarr’s visit to the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s Highway Operations Center in Newington to see a potential technological solution to the problem comes after a driver is accused of heading north on Route 128 south on the A. Piatt Andrew Bridge and colliding with a car carrying four young adult Gloucester residents.
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LITTLETON – For deer, the fall time change Sunday morning means trouble: a 16% spike in collisions with vehicles over the following week, despite years of safety campaigns and the construction of 75 special crossings along highways.
Drivers in Colorado collided with at least 54,189 wild animals over the past 15 years, according to newly compiled Colorado Department of Transportation records. That’s far fewer than in many other states, such as Michigan, where vehicle-life collisions often number more than 50,000 in one year.
The carnage — especially this time of year — increasingly occurs where animals face the most people along the heavily populated Front Range, beyond the mountainous western half of the state that holds much of the remaining prime habitat, state records show.
State leaders and wildlife advocates gathered on Thursday near one of the crossings along the high-speed C-470 beltway in southwest metro Denver to launch a safety campaign.
“We’ve made wildlife crossings a priority in our rural areas, and also increasingly in urban areas,” CDOT Director Shoshana Lew said. “We cannot put underpasses and overpasses everywhere. Particularly at this time of year, we urge everyone to be careful of wildlife.”
Lew credited the crossings with containing collision numbers that could be much higher in Colorado, given the traffic and the prevalence of deer and other wild animals. Most of the state’s highway construction projects, such as the work on Interstate 25 north of Colorado Springs that includes a large wildlife bridge, will factor in wildlife safety needs, Lew said.
The risk of collisions spikes this time of year due to deer and elk migrating to lower elevations, bringing more animals across highways. The end of daylight saving time also plays a role as more drivers navigate roads during the relatively low-visibility hours before and after sunset, when deer often move about.
In Colorado, the 54,189 vehicle-animal collisions that CDOT recorded from 2010 through 2024 caused the deaths of 48 vehicle occupants and more than 5,000 injuries. The animals breakdown: 82% deer, 11% elk, 2% bears.
Ten counties where vehicles hit the most animals during that period included five along the Front Range — Douglas, Jefferson, El Paso, Larimer, and Pueblo — with a combined total of 12,791 collisions, state records show. That compares with 11,068 in the other five counties in western Colorado — La Plata, Montezuma, Garfield, Moffat, and Chaffee.
Colorado lawmakers over the past two decades have directed funds for the installation of more and more wildlife crossings, typically overpasses and underpasses combined with fencing along highways. “These can be up to 90% effective in reducing collisions,” Environment America researcher Rachel Jaeger said.
Most recently, in 2022, lawmakers set up a wildlife safe passage fund with a $5.5 million investment for crossing construction. That money’s been spent. State transportation planners have identified locations where crossings are needed, such as the stretch of U.S. 40 between the intersection with I-70 and the town of Empire, where bighorn sheep live.
Wildlife-vehicle collisions have proved persistent enough that safety advocates have launched a social media campaign and are mulling new strategies, such as promoting ridership on CDOT’s intercity Bustang buses as an animal-friendly way to move.
Police chases increased tenfold in the six months after Chief Todd Chamberlain broadened the Aurora Police Department’s policy to allow officers to pursue stolen vehicles and suspected drunk drivers, a move that made Aurora one of the most permissive large police agencies along the Front Range.
Aurora officers carried out more chases in the six months after the policy change than in the last five years combined, according to data provided by the police department in response to open records requests from The Denver Post.
The city’s officers conducted 148 pursuits between March 6 — the day after the policy change — and Sept. 2, the data shows. That’s up from just 14 police chases in that same timeframe in 2024, and well above Aurora officers’ 126 chases across five years between 2020 and 2024.
The number of people injured in pursuits more than quintupled, with about one in five chases resulting in injury after the policy change, the data shows. That 20% injury rate is lower than the rate over the last five years, when the agency saw 25% of pursuits end with injury.
Chamberlain, who declined to speak with The Post for this story, has heralded the department’s new approach to pursuits as an important tool for curbing crime. Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman believes the change has already had a “dramatic impact” on crime in the city.
However, the effect of the increased pursuits on overall crime trends is difficult to gauge, with crime generally declining across the state, including in Denver, which has a more restrictive policy and many fewer police pursuits.
“You throw a big net out there, occasionally you do catch a few big fish,” said Justin Nix, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “But you also end up with the pursuit policy causing more accidents and injuries.”
Of those 87 arrestees, 67 had a criminal history, 25 were wanted on active warrants, 18 were on probation and seven were on parole, the monitor found.
“What we find is that people who steal cars, it’s not a joyriding thing, it’s not a one-off, they tend to be career criminals who use these vehicles to commit other crimes,” Coffman said. “There seems to be a pattern that when we do apprehend a car thief, they tend to have warrants out for their arrest, and we do see the pattern of stealing vehicles to commit other crimes. So we are really catching repeat offenders when we apprehend the driver and/or passengers.”
The soaring number of pursuits was largely driven by stolen vehicle chases, which accounted for 103 of the 148 pursuits since the policy change, the data shows.
Auto theft in Aurora dropped 42% year-over-year between January and September, continuing a downward trend that began in 2023. In Denver, where officers do not chase stolen vehicles, auto theft has declined 36% so far in 2025 compared to 2024.
Denver police officers conducted just nine pursuits between March 6 and Sept. 2, and just 16 so far in 2025, data from the department shows. Four suspects and one officer were injured across those 16 chases.
“I think there are broader societal factors at work,” Nix said of the decline in crime, which has been seen across the nation and follows a dramatic pandemic-era spike. “When something goes up, it is bound to come down pretty drastically.”
Aurora officers apprehended fleeing drivers in 53% of all pursuits, and in 51% of pursuits for stolen vehicles between March and September, the police data shows.
Coffman said that shows officers and their supervisors are judiciously calling off pursuits that become too dangerous. He also noted that every pursuit is carefully reviewed by the police chain of command and called the new policy a “work in progress.”
“I get that it is not without controversy,” Coffman said. “There wouldn’t be the collateral accidents if not for the policy. So it is a tradeoff. It is not an easy decision and it is going to always be in flux.”
Thirty-three people were injured in Aurora police chases between March 6 and Sept. 2, up from six injured in that time frame last year. Those hurt included 24 suspects, five officers and four drivers in other vehicles.
One bystander and one suspect were seriously injured, according to the police data.
The independent monitor noted in its October report that it was “generally pleased” with officers’ judgments during pursuits, supervisors’ actions and the post-pursuit administrative review process, with “two notable exceptions” that have been “elevated for additional review and potential disciplinary action.”
The monitor also flagged an increase in failed Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT, maneuvers during pursuits, which it attributed to officer inexperience. The group recommended more training on the maneuvers, which are designed to end pursuits, and renewed its call for the department to install dash cameras in its patrol cars, which the agency has not done.
“It sounds reasonable,” Coffman said of the dash camera recommendation. “They are not cheap and we need to budget for it.”
‘No magic number’
It’s up to city leadership to determine if the benefits of police chases outweigh the predictable harms, and there is no “magic number,” Nix said.
“When you chase that much, bad outcomes are going to happen,” he said. “People are going to get hurt, sometimes innocent third parties that have nothing to do with the chase. You know that is going to be a collateral consequence of doing that many chases. So knowing that, you should really be able to point to the community safety benefit that doing this many chases bring.”
The majority of large Front Range law enforcement agencies limit pursuits to situations in which the driver is suspected of a violent felony or poses an immediate risk of injury or death to others if not quickly apprehended.
Among 18 law enforcement agencies reviewed by The Post this spring, only Aurora and the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office explicitly allow pursuits of suspected drunk drivers. The sheriff’s office allows such pursuits only if the driver stays under the posted speed limit.
Aurora officers pursued suspected impaired drivers 13 times between March and September, the data shows, with five chases ending in injury.
Omar Montgomery, president of the Aurora NAACP, said he is a “cautious neutral” about the policy change, but would like Aurora police to meet with community members to explain the impact in more detail.
“People in the community do not want people on the streets who are causing harm to other individuals and who are committing crimes that makes our city unsafe,” he said. “We want them off the streets just as bad as anyone else. We also want to make sure that innocent people who are not part of the situation are not getting harmed.”
Topazz McBride, a community activist in Aurora, said she has been disappointed by what she sees as Chamberlain’s unwillingness to engage with community members who disagree with him.
“Do I trust them to use the process effectively and responsibly with all fairness and equity to everyone they pursue? No. I do not trust that,” she said. “And I don’t understand why he wouldn’t be willing to talk about it. Why not?”
Montgomery also wants police to track crashes that happen immediately after a police officer ends a pursuit, when an escaping suspect might still be speeding and driving recklessly.
“They are still going 80 or 90 mph and they end up hitting someone or running into a building,” he said. “And now you have this person who that has caused harm, believing that they are still being chased.”
The police department did not include the case of Rajon Belt-Stubblefield, who was shot and killed Aug. 30 by an officer after he sped away from an attempted traffic stop, among its pursuits this year. Video of the incident shows the officer followed Belt-Stubblefield’s vehicle with his lights and sirens on for just under a minute over about 7/10ths of a mile before Belt-Stubblefield crashed.
Police spokesman Matthew Longshore said the incident was not a pursuit.
“The officer was stationary, running radar when the vehicle sped past, and the officer was accelerating (with both lights and siren eventually) to catch up to the vehicle,” Longshore said. “The officer did not determine nor declare that he was in pursuit of the suspect’s vehicle before the suspect crashed into the two other vehicles.”
The officer, who has not been publicly identified, killed Belt-Stubblefield in an ensuing confrontation. Belt-Stubblefield, who was under the influence of alcohol, tossed a gun to the ground and was unarmed when he was shot.
Whether or not a pursuit preceded his death was one of several questions raised in the independent monitor’s Oct. 15 report, which characterized the shooting and the department’s response to the killing as a setback in otherwise improving community relations.
A man has been arrested in a four-vehicle crash that killed one person and injured two others, according to the Wheat Ridge Police Department. Police said the man was under the influence at the time of the crash.
Cesar Hernandez Sanchez, 32, was traveling westbound on Colorado 58 just after 7 p.m. on Oct. 17 when he crossed over the dirt median into eastbound traffic, striking three vehicles.
One person was pronounced dead at the scene, while two other victims were taken to the hospital with serious bodily injuries. Wheat Ridge police said both are expected to be okay at this time.
Sanchez was also hospitalized with serious injuries, but was discharged from the hospital on Thursday. Since then, he has been booked into the Jefferson County Jail.
Sanchez faces charges including two counts of vehicular homicide, four counts of vehicular assault, reckless driving and driving under the influence. He also faces seven traffic offenses, including failure to display lights with low visibility, failure to drive in single lane and driving the wrong way on a one-way roadway.
“Our focus continues to be supporting the victims in this crash and pursuing justice with our partners at the DA’s Office,” Wheat Ridge police said on social media.
PORTLAND, Ore. — The Portland Bureau of Transportation is reminding drivers to use extra caution over the next several days with the forecasted strong rain and winds.
PBOT says ponds can appear on the roads in spots in a hurry with strong fall storms. Especially when the storm is one of the first big ones of the season and there are a lot of leaves that still need to come off trees.
They say sometimes ponds can appear because of leaves blocking storm drains. Other times it’s due to construction or just the shape of the roads working together with gravity.
When in doubt, they say it’s best just to use caution, slow down and call the city if you notice any particularly bad spots.
Yaakov Kilberg, 19, was driving the Mazda carrying all four victims, according to the Asbury Park Press. Aharon Lebovits, Shlomo Cohen and Chaim Grossman, all 18, were passengers in the vehicle, the outlet reported.
Christopher Neff, a 41-year-old resident of Westminster, Colorado, was identified by police as the pickup driver, Philadelphia NBC affiliate WCAU reported. He suffered serious injuries in the wreck and was hospitalized, authorities said.
Police said around 12:40 a.m., Neff was traveling northbound in the southbound lanes about 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia, according to local CBS affiliate KYW. The teens were headed southbound when Neff collided with them head-on, then a tractor-trailer struck their vehicle from behind, police said.
“A simultaneous winching operation and extrication on the second vehicle determined, unfortunately, that four occupants had succumbed to their injuries,” the Carneys Point Fire Department wrote on Facebook.
Kilberg, Lebovits and Cohen were residents of Lakewood, N.J., while Grossman lived in Fallsburg, N.Y. They were reportedly Yeshiva students enjoying a weekend break.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A Portland man who posted videos of himself engaging in dangerous driving stunts on social media was found guilty of only three of 11 charges this week, prompting criticism from prosecutors.
Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Katharine von Ter Stegge on Monday convicted 33-year-old Oscar Lee Burrell Jr. of three misdemeanor charges: two counts of reckless driving and one count of recklessly endangering another person. The verdict followed a bench trial, in which the judge, not a jury, determines the outcome.
The charges stem from a series of incidents in March 2025, in which Burrell filmed himself performing illegal stunts while driving through public parks and on Interstate 5. Videos posted to social media showed Burrell steering with his knee, hanging out of his car window, and driving through pedestrian areas and playgrounds.
Despite the video evidence, Judge von Ter Stegge found Burrell not guilty on eight other charges, including multiple counts of recklessly endangering another person, criminal mischief, and disorderly conduct.
Social Media Videos Showed Risky Stunts
On March 25, Burrell was seen in a video veering into oncoming traffic on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard before entering Peninsula Park via a pedestrian path. He then performed doughnuts on the grass near park facilities while filming himself.
He was convicted of reckless driving for the March 25 incident, but acquitted on charges of recklessly endangering another person and criminal mischief.
Two days later, on March 27, another video showed Burrell driving through Farragut Park, laughing and making gestures while steering with his body halfway out the window. He was acquitted of reckless driving for this incident.
On March 28, Burrell was filmed driving along Interstate 5, passing vehicles while steering with his knees and hanging out of his car. He was convicted of reckless driving and recklessly endangering another person in connection with that event.
You can view the video that was played in court here.
Prosecutors Blast Verdict
Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez expressed strong disagreement with the outcome.
“The evidence in this case clearly showed that Mr. Burrell was engaged in wildly reckless behavior,” Vasquez said in a statement. “He was driving through city parks with children present and hanging out of his vehicle on the freeway. That he was not found guilty of more charges is bewildering.”
Deputy District Attorney Alex Garcia, who prosecuted the case, said Burrell’s actions pose an ongoing threat to public safety.
“Mr. Burrell’s conduct is 100% criminal, and he will continue to do it for the ‘likes’,” Garcia said, referring to Burrell’s apparent motivation to gain attention on social media.
No Jail Time in Sentencing
Despite the guilty verdicts, Burrell was sentenced to no jail time. His sentence includes:
18 months of bench probation
80 hours of community service
Attendance at a victim impact panel
A high-risk driver course
A 90-day license suspension
Mental health and substance abuse evaluations with treatment if needed
The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office thanked Portland Police Officer Zachary Nell for his work on the case.
The police chief for the Colorado Mental Health Hospital in Pueblo used road-rage-like tactics to confront speeding drivers while he was off-duty, outside of his jurisdiction and in an unmarked state vehicle, prompting drivers to call 911 at least three times last year, an internal investigation found.
Chief Richard McMorran was reinstated to his position Aug. 15 with a 5% pay cut after a 10-month investigation into his actions. He was on paid administrative leave during that investigation, which included a review by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and a referral to prosecutors for potential criminal charges.
In an email Thursday, 10th Judicial District Attorney Kala Beauvais said her office is still considering whether criminal charges are warranted.
“We are nearing a decision,” she said.
McMorran did not return a request for comment Thursday.
On at least six occasions between January and September 2024, McMorran confronted drivers on Interstate 25 who he believed were speeding, the investigation found. The chief tailgated, raced and pulled up beside drivers. He yelled, gestured, swerved into the other drivers’ lanes, refused to let them pass, and “paced” them to gauge their speed, investigators found.
He was in the unmarked vehicle, outside of hospital grounds, off-duty and sometimes wearing plain clothes during the confrontations, the investigation found. It was not immediately clear Thursday whether the unmarked vehicle was equipped with police lights and sirens.
Two of the incidents, in January 2024 and September 2024, ended in actual traffic stops, the internal investigation found.
“You had multiple interactions with members of the public that caused them to fear for their safety and call 911. These interactions were repeatedly inappropriate, unprofessional, demonstrated poor judgment and exhibited a lack of understanding about the impact you have on members of the public when behaving this way,” Chris Frenz, deputy director of operations and legal affairs at the Office of Civil and Forensic Mental Health, the agency that operates the state’s mental health hospitals, wrote in an Aug. 13 disciplinary letter.
Drivers called 911 during three of the confrontations. At least one of the drivers was concerned that the chief “had ulterior motives other than traffic enforcement,” Frenz wrote.
The investigation considered whether the chief was specifically targeting women in the confrontations, spokeswoman Stephanie Fredrickson confirmed. She said the targeted drivers were both men and women but declined to give an exact breakdown of their genders “to protect their privacy.”
Frenz concluded that the chief was not specifically stopping women.
“I do not believe you were targeting (name redacted) or anyone specifically, as you admitted that it was common practice for you to identify people speeding and use various techniques to get them to slow down,” he wrote. “However, your practices very clearly gave an initial appearance of some type of targeting or harassing behavior from the viewpoint of any specific person subject to this behavior.”
During the internal investigation, McMorran denied swerving or tailgating, but generally acknowledged the incidents and told internal investigators that he feels he has “an obligation to intervene when people are driving too fast.” He said he pulled alongside drivers to monitor their speeds because his vehicle is not equipped with radar, and that the “perceived yelling and gesturing” was his way of telling the drivers to slow down.
“You were shocked that anyone thought you were trying to run off the road. You’ve never done anything like that before,” Frenz wrote in the letter, summarizing the chief’s positions during the investigation. “…If you had known so many people had been calling in, you would have approached things differently.”
The chief noted during the internal investigation that he is allowed to make traffic stops. He is a POST-certified police officer, state records show. Frenz wrote in his letter that “current policy” gives the chief the authority to conduct traffic stops.
Frenz wrote that he was reducing the chief’s salary by $498 a month, not because he made traffic stops, but because of the way he did so.
“You should have known that pacing people in an unmarked vehicle, with no uniform, without pulling them over, would cause confusion and fear,” Frenz wrote. “Moreover, your repeated conduct on the freeway reflected poorly on the department.”
In addition to the pay cut, McMorran, for the next year, is prohibited from driving his state vehicle outside of the hospital’s sprawling 300-acre campus, is prohibited from conducting traffic stops unless there is an immediate health or safety concern, and cannot drive his state vehicle to his home or use it for personal reasons, according to the letter.
The state mental health hospital’s small police department handles criminal matters at the 516-bed campus in Pueblo. The department includes a handful of certified police officers, as well as a number of security guards.
McMorran was appointed chief in 2018 when his predecessor was abruptly removed from his position, placed on administrative leave and escorted from the premises. The reason for the previous chief’s departure was not clear, but he did not return from leave.
