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Delmar Parkway was easy to forget.
The neighborhood in Aurora, on the border with Denver between Colfax Avenue and 6th Avenue, has the same problems as many neglected urban areas: trash piles, reckless drivers, poor lighting, vandalism, syringes, fireworks and bullet casings.
Oldtimers and newcomers differ on what they think the neighborhood’s future should be. But most people Denverite has spoken to agree: Neither cops, politicians, nor journalists have seemed to pay much attention.
That changed in late August. A camera captured armed men entering an apartment in a half-century-old apartment complex, The Edge at Lowry, at 12th Avenue and Dallas Street.
Minutes after the men entered the apartment, where many Venezuelan immigrants live, gunfire erupted outside the complex, and 25-year-old Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo was shot dead.
“We had been used to gunshots, obviously,” says Madeleine Schaffner, who lives a few blocks away. “But for a lot of us, I think that felt like the breaking point. That’s too close. We can’t be having shootouts in the street.”
The incident didn’t just shake the neighborhood. The video of the armed men spread internationally and put this area at the center of the United States’ debate over immigration.
As the story blanketed national media, TV crews pointed their cameras toward the renters. Reporters from New York rushed to the building. They aimed microphones at neighbors and scribbled down anonymous quotes.
Then, the Colorado Republican Party and former President Donald Trump pointed to the video as proof that the “sanctuary city” of Denver had dumped the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua in the “quiet suburb” of Aurora. Overnight, Delmar Parkway became a symbol of election-year fears about a supposed foreign takeover, not just of an apartment building but, falsely, of an entire city.
Armed vigilantes have threatened to confront the apartment residents; a white supremacist spewed hate speech at a city council meeting; and a billboard at the state border has mocked the situation.
Meanwhile, Trump himself has promised to come to town.
“You may never see me again, but that’s OK,” Trump said at a political rally in New York on Sept. 18. “Got to do what I got to do.”
And yet many of the people living in this national spotlight feel totally ignored.
Around the neighborhood, new immigrants worry the media is misrepresenting the story and that racist rhetoric is putting them at risk — just as they’re trying to build new lives.
Other residents from across the political spectrum are banding together, looking for a way forward.
“We want to be safe here,” Schaffner says. “We don’t really care who’s doing it. We just don’t want people to shoot guns here.”
She and other neighbors are trying to sort truth from fiction. They’re trying to be seen.
“No one’s ever come and talked to us,” says another resident, electrician David Bottoms. “Really. No one.”
The story of a neighborhood
Wearing a National Rifle Association t-shirt, Bottoms cools down from a hot day of pulling bindweed. His dogs dart around the yard. Far away, police sirens whine.
Not one bullet zips through the air — not on this Saturday night in September. Bottoms treasures quiet evenings like this one. He says they’ve been all too rare.
Like countless people nationwide, Bottoms has watched the stories about his neighborhood on TV, from the home he shares with his father. It’s been in their family for decades. And the family has been in Aurora since the late 1800s, when the town was still called Fletcher.
Bottoms remembers his childhood spent playing soccer at Del Mar Park and swimming in the Highline Canal.
“We had a rope swing,” he says. “We’d go up there and catch crawdads. We’d build stupid little rafts and stuff like that.”
His grandparents farmed dryland wheat. They were there before Fitzsimons Army Hospital and Lowry Air Force Base brought the city new life — and also after the military left, gutting Aurora’s economy.
His family was there when nearby Colfax Avenue thrived, and they saw what happened after I-70 took traffic elsewhere and Aurora sprawled onto the plains, taking Old Aurora’s economic energy and the middle class with it.
In the 1970s, Colfax began to turn from a thriving business corridor to an open civic wound, with crime and desperation bleeding into the Delmar Parkway neighborhood.
In the ‘80s, a new chapter began with the arrival of Mexican immigrants.
Over the years, those immigrants started businesses. Spanish became the neighborhood’s second language. The bakery Panaderia el Paisa Bakery, the candy shop Dulcería El Pachangon, the ice cream shop Nevería La Mexicana and the church Iglesia Liberación y Poder de Dios opened blocks away.
And now, new Venezuelan immigrants are redefining the community again.
Hundreds of new immigrants have arrived
In recent years, millions of immigrants have left Venezuela for countries around the world. They’re fleeing gangs, crime, corrupt police and an economic crisis.
Over the past two years, more than 42,000 new immigrants, most from Venezuela, have arrived from the border to Denver, many bused here by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Some of those immigrants were looking for cheaper housing. With help from the City of Denver and nonprofits, some moved into Delmar Parkway — many at the Edge apartments. ( Denver does not have information on where individual immigrants were placed by nonprofits and cannot say how many new immigrants moved into the Edge specifically.)
The arrival of hundreds of new people, many of whom have nothing, has meant changes for the neighborhood. There are new faces, new music and new people contributing to the culture of the community.
There’s also been a steady ramp up in reports of crime and complaints from residents. And the new arrivals have often been left to live in squalor, with the city accusing landlord CBZ Management of running the Edge and other apartments as a “slumlord.”
Since 2021, 54 complaints have been filed with the City of Aurora, including about broken heating, flooding, black mold, exposed wiring and other problems at the Edge. Repeatedly, the complaints noted, the landlord would not respond.
Local elected officials, especially Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky and Mayor Mike Coffman, described the situation in increasingly alarming terms, with both saying that the Edge and two other CBZ apartments had “fallen” to or been “taken over” by Tren de Aragua. Police have repeatedly pushed back on that claim, though they say that men connected with the gang have carried out a string of violent crimes around the buildings.
In a joint statement, Coffman and Jurinsky clarified a gang had not taken over Aurora and that police were responding to the situation in the apartments. Coffman now says Tren de Aragua is not in charge of the apartments at all.
But it was too late. The video of the armed men lit a combustible situation, bringing national attention.
Residents are trying to make sense of claims about crime.
Michael Davis listens to the blues and watches a kid zip her scooter over chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Originally from Denver’s East Side, Davis has lived in his Delmar Parkway house for 12 years.
By the time he moved in, the neighborhood had been struggling, in ways, for decades. Government offices and facilities had moved elsewhere. And there was little investment in Old Aurora.
So, Davis found a deal on a house much cheaper than anything he could find in Denver. He bought his home for around $75,000. Now, it would cost around $400,000.
Sure, there are gunshots, he says, but it’s not as bad as the East Side was in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Back then, the Bloods and Crips warred across Colorado Boulevard.
“My auntie got murdered on the East Side,” Davis says. “It was much rougher back then.”
And crime in Delmar Parkway, he says, is nothing new.
After the video of armed men went viral, friends and family started checking in on Davis.
Like many residents, he felt the reality on his block didn’t match the overblown national claims.
“Nobody’s taking over,” he says. “I walk my dog every day by [the apartments]. And, I mean, it is a rough apartment complex over there. It’s been rough.”
Others say it has been far from normal.
Every time a shot goes off, Denise Taylor’s 10-year-old grandson dives to the floor.
“Grandma,” he asks. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“Baby, I don’t know,” she replies. “It’s just out of control.”
Taylor grew up in Gary, Indiana. She left after violence swept her community and looked for a fresh start in Colorado. She’s lived a block from the Edge for the past 12 years, with her three grandchildren.
Over the past year, she says she’s heard more gunfire than ever before, sometimes daily.
“You’ll never know when the shots are going to blast out,” Taylor says. “The bullets don’t have no names.”
Crime data supports the idea that the area has seen changes in crime recently, compared to the rest of Aurora.
Data Source: Aurora Police Department
Citywide, felony and misdemeanor crimes dropped after peaking in the pandemic, according to Aurora police records of crimes reported between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 for each year since 2019. But for the blocks around the Edge and other CBZ-owned apartments, crime either stayed at high levels or rose slightly.
The data also show crime isn’t new in these areas. The neighborhoods around CBZ’s buildings — and around Colfax Avenue — generally saw more felonies than the rest of the city since 2019.
Data Source: Aurora Police Department
David Pyrooz, a University of Colorado Boulder sociology professor who studies crime statistics, and Catherine Durso, a University of Denver computer science and statistics professor, reviewed Denverite’s data analysis. Both say these trends suggest something has changed in the areas surrounding these apartment complexes.
But this data does not address what changed, they stressed.
Police also have made a series of arrests of men alleged to have committed violent crimes at the Edge and other CBZ-managed properties; they accused the men of connections to Tren de Aragua.
Separately, officers arrested one man and are seeking several others who they say appeared in the viral August video, and also recovered a rifle from a nearby apartment. Police haven’t confirmed any connections to the gang among those people.
Data Source: Aurora Police Department
And yet even as the violence near the apartments has frightened people like Taylor, her family also has formed connections with the Venezuelan immigrants who live there.
Taylor’s grandson has Venezuelan friends. She lets them play together at the Edge, trusting his new friends’ parents, but she checks in with him frequently.
By dark, he must return home.
The view from the Edge
After the August shooting, city officials threatened to close the Edge, in part because of longstanding habitability issues.
Denverite reporters saw rodents, mold, broken appliances and clogged drains at the apartments. The three CBZ apartments have totaled 30 fire code violations since 2020. The city is suing the company over the alleged unlivable state of some of its apartments, while the landlord has blamed the city for failing to respond to the alleged gang activity. The city is pressuring CBZ to sell one of its other buildings.
CBZ has declined to respond to Denverite’s requests for comment.
Around the apartments, many new immigrants feel they’ve been caught in the middle — abandoned by the city and landlord, scapegoated by the media and politicians.
“I don’t know what happened, whether it’s true, whether it’s a lie,” says Cris Guzmán, raising the possibility that the video of the armed men was fabricated.
We meet Guzmán relaxing with friends on the sidewalk across from the Edge, long into the night. Some neighbors, like David Bottoms, think the men are an intimidating sight — but to Guzmán, it’s more like an outdoor living room. Even near midnight, he is quick to offer a white plastic chair or a cooler for strangers to sit.
“It’s a perfect night,” he says.
He’s trying to learn English, but that takes time. He’s finding work, but not enough of it. He misses his wife and child he took from Venezuela to Mexico City. He left them to journey across the border, into the United States, looking for better jobs.
And he’s exhausted by how his home has been invaded by reporters who are spinning stories he doesn’t trust.
“I’ve never seen anyone with a gun here,” he says.
As he tells it, the news stations and social media users have been pushing lies. It’s not residents committing most of the crimes, he says, but people from outside taking advantage of them. He doesn’t trust that journalists are getting the story right. They don’t spend enough time in the community to understand it.
That’s a common feeling around the apartments. As the uproar grew, renters at the building held a rally for the press in August. They wanted to put the focus on the condition of the apartments and the landlord’s failure to help. No gang runs the Edge, they insisted.
“They’re trying to say that here there are delinquents, that here there are criminals. Here there are moms, there are families, there are fathers. To me … the only criminal here is the owner of the building,” resident Moises Didenot told reporters at the time.
Taylor and her grandson stopped by the apartments to see what was happening during the press conference. The 10-year-old joined the rally, demanding justice for his friends who lived there. Taylor, on the other hand, had doubts about the idea that there was no gang presence in the building.
An alleged Tren de Aragua member is facing domestic violence charges after being accused of threatening a woman with a gun at the Edge, according to an affidavit. In a separate incident, police say the man broke into an apartment where two people were sleeping and threatened them with a gun. Five more men, according to police documents, entered the same apartment, saying “they run this place.”
Other crimes have been tied to the gang across the metro area, though police leaders maintain the presence of the gang is small and that the department is working to keep it that way.
“I ain’t gonna say they got a gang over there,” Taylor says. “But it just feels like there’s no peace.”
Venezuelan immigrants live throughout the neighborhood — and they’re scared.
Jhon Harrinson, who came to Aurora two years ago, stands in front of his house a few blocks from the Edge. He lives here with his family, including his newborn daughter, who is a U.S. citizen.
He says he’s embarrassed when Venezuelans commit crimes. And he fears the blowback.
When he first came to the neighborhood, things were quiet. And he liked it that way. There weren’t so many car thefts and nightly gunshots.
“The safety issues started to be heard more since the Venezuelans started renting in the buildings,” he says. “We’ve been living here for two years now, in this same house, and it was only then that this started.”
Mayor Mike Coffman says it’s a mistake to collectively blame the residents of the apartments for crime.
“There’s a criminal element that preys upon the Venezuelan migrant community,” Coffman told Denverite. “And when you have a concentration, like at those apartment buildings, I think that criminal element will superimpose themselves on top of that community and exploit them.”
Still, Harrinson worries about how people from the United States interpret the news. He hopes they don’t assume all Venezuelans, or all Spanish speakers, are the problem.
“It affects us because the majority of people in the neighborhood are Hispanic,” he says. “Others look at us distrustfully, thinking that we are doing something wrong. And that is not the case.”
Some new immigrants are working to keep the community safe.
Nanci Angulo wears a bulletproof vest that reads “SECURITY.”
Her military garb looks out of place at El Paisa Panaderia on Colfax Avenue, a few blocks from the Edge. Smells of cinnamon and yeast waft from the shelves. Working men fill round metal trays with stacks of sweet pastries.
Angulo has lived in Denver for a year and has worked at the panaderia for most of that time. She misses the police work she did back in Venezuela, and she’s happy to be keeping the shop safe.
“I thank God for being here, having the job I have and being part of a better economy here in this country,” she says.
Before she started working security, people living outside on Colfax would steal bread and soda from the store, and money from customers. That mostly stopped after she started.
But beyond the store’s doors, she sees society’s ills on Colfax Avenue. People are homeless and desperate, she says. They have smashed the store’s windows. They’ve robbed workers walking to their cars at night. These kinds of crimes have been going on for years. In some cases, impoverished new immigrants have been absorbed into the poverty that has racked the area for decades.
She’s not alone in seeing it. A store manager told Coffman about a 12-year-old girl who was caught stealing food to sell on Colfax to support her family.
“It’s sad that it’s part of a desperation,” Coffman said. “What, food? Stealing food? …The craziness of all this is [many new immigrants] cannot apply for a work permit until they’re here for 150 days.”
Tired of the shootings, and the national narrative, neighbors have organized.
When she was in her late 20s, a year and a half ago, Madeleine Schaffner moved from a rental in Denver’s upscale Highlands neighborhood to a home built in 1911 in Delmar Parkway, where she could afford to buy. She fell in love with the community, with its helpful neighbors and nearby cultural amenities.
“I feel like when I first moved here, it was actually pretty chill,” Schaffner says. “It wasn’t too crazy. I didn’t really hear gunshots for the first few months of living here, which was nice.”
But gunfire started blasting almost nightly a few months after she moved in. Bullets nearly grazed her home, she says. And drivebys and gun fights between people on foot ramped up.
On Aug. 18, when rapid fire erupted at the Edge, she assumed she had heard a mass shooting.
“Obviously it’s very justified to feel scared right now,” she says.
Schaffner started looking for community organizations to join. Nothing focused on safety seemed to exist, outside of the social media site Nextdoor. So, she and her friends on her block called a community meeting.
They knocked on doors, posted on Nextdoor and eventually brought together a small group from the neighborhood to Denver’s Schlessman Library on a Saturday morning.
The group talked about the need for traffic-calming infrastructure to slow down the cars zipping around the community. Others complained about the lack of lighting, sluggish police response and an absentee city government.
They decided they could help each other out.
“If there’s a shooting, we can let each other know,” she said. “We can see if anyone has videos, kind of collect evidence, and then hopefully also have that power in numbers to contact our representatives.”
Though the neighbors all want greater safety, there’s a lot they don’t agree on.
Bottoms, the NRA member, blames people, not guns for the shootings. He wants the feds to close the southern border to the United States and Denver to stop funding handouts to new immigrants.
If that happened, he believes maybe the gunshots would stop. Maybe his dad’s truck wouldn’t have been stolen. Perhaps the fights in front of his home would cease, and he wouldn’t find so many diapers in his trash bin.
Meanwhile, Schaffner wants to avoid talking about crime in the context of immigration. Doing so, she fears, puts innocent people in the crosshairs.
“There’s people coming and targeting innocent people at that apartment and threatening them and saying, ‘We’re going to take back our neighborhood,’” Schaffner says. “It’s just inviting more violence into the area, which nobody wants.”
The whole political conversation in the United States is odd to Baiyu Hua, who attended the recent neighborhood meeting.
Growing up in China, he never heard gunshots. In Aurora, he often hears them nightly.
“I understand the unique history of this country and the choices of the people,” he says. “And that’s why people have chosen the right to bear arms. And I respect that very much.”
But the cost of that choice is high, he explains.
“It’s a really bloody price, in my point of view,” Hua says. “I think we all know as Americans, we’re paying the price every single day.”
And it’s not just the shootings. Other crime in the neighborhood goes unaddressed. When Baiyu and his wife Miranda Hua walk Colfax Avenue at night, they see drug deals, sex trade, graffiti and broken windows.
“For one reason or another, certain parts of the city were ignored,” Baiyu says. “It was allowed to decay to a certain point of where you can no longer ignore it.”
Around the world, people view the United States as a “shining city on the hill,” Baiyu says. Then they arrive and experience urban decay, something far worse than they saw back home.
“It should be a rude awakening to any authorities in the U.S., from the city to the federal level,” Baiyu says.
When the community group recently met, they mostly avoided fighting over immigration, neighborhood divisions and gun control. Unlike national politicians, they came together, rather than pushing each other away.
“I was proud of our group for staying very respectful,” Schaffner says.
“Politics need to stay out of it,” Bottoms says. “It has to stay out of it for any part of this to work.”
Denverite reporters Kevin Beaty and Rebecca Tauber and CPR reporter Molly Cruse contributed to this story.
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