A man was shot and killed by a La Plata County sheriff’s deputy on Tuesday afternoon after coming at the deputy with an ax handle and baseball bat during a traffic stop for what appeared to be domestic violence, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Multiple people called 911 at around 2:40 p.m. Tuesday about a man and woman who were fighting inside a moving vehicle driving north on U.S. 550 leaving Durango, CBI officials said in a news release Wednesday.
A La Plata County deputy and Durango police officer spotted the vehicle in the 28000 block of U.S. 550, about six miles north of Durango, and pulled the driver over.
A woman got out of the vehicle and ran toward the officers for help and the driver, armed with an ax handle and baseball bat, started moving toward the woman and the deputy, according to the CBI.
The deputy shot the man and, despite medical aid, he died at the scene.
No one else was injured during the encounter, state officials said.
The sheriff’s deputy was put on administrative leave as part of the standard protocol for police shootings, and the CBI is investigating the case along with the Southwest Regional Shoot Team.
Pushback and criticism against the federal government continued across Colorado this week after immigration officials arrested a father and two children in Durango, sparking local protests that were met with pepper spray, rubber bullets and physical confrontation by federal agents.
Colorado Bureau of Investigation officials on Thursday announced the agency will investigate a federal agent throwing a protester’s phone and pushing her to the ground outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Durango.
The encounter was caught on video as demonstrators gathered outside the ICE office on Monday to try to prevent a Colombian man and his two children from being separated and moved to different facilities.
Fernando Jaramillo Solano and his 12- and 15-year-old children were arrested Monday morning while heading to school despite the family’s active asylum case, advocates with Compañeros Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center said.
Durango Police Chief Brice Current asked the CBI to investigate in the wake of a widely circulated video which “appears to show a federal agent use force on a woman during the demonstration,” the state agency said Thursday.
Investigators will look into whether any state criminal laws were broken during the incident and send the investigation to the 6th Judicial District; the district attorney’s office will decide whether to file charges.
Gov. Jared Polis on Wednesday said Colorado officials were not informed of the operation or given any information about whether Jaramillo Solano and his children were suspected of any crimes.
“The federal government’s lack of transparency about its immigration actions in Durango and in the free state of Colorado remains extremely maddening,” Polis said on social media.
“The federal government should prioritize apprehending and prosecuting dangerous criminals, no matter where they come from, and keep our communities safe instead of snatching up children and breaking up families,” he continued.
ICE officials did not respond to an email seeking comment about the investigation and arrests.
Dozens of Durango and La Plata County residents packed City Council chambers and overflowed into the hallway during a tense, emotional community meeting Thursday evening.
City officials at times seemed at a loss for how to address the arrests and protests, including ICE officials refusing to let Durango police perform a welfare check on the children.
“People really put their lives on the line for the children and this community, and it was an incredible display of people’s position on this issue. It makes me very proud and sad at the same time,” Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales said.
Community members who attended the protest spoke about being assaulted and seeing others assaulted by ICE agents while state and local police watched and did nothing to intervene.
Sixteen-year-old McKenna Bard described calling 911 five times to beg for medical assistance, but no one came, leaving high school students and residents to try to treat their own injuries for more than two hours.
Bard was one of several speakers who criticized the Durango Police Department for failing to help community members during the protest, even to provide medical aid.
“The people of Durango feel betrayed, lied to and disgusted,” Bard said.
The Rev. Jamie Boyce, a minister with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango, said she saw ICE agents stomp on protesters who sat with linked arms, pepper-spray protesters directly in the face and use sound cannons and rubber bullets. One agent put a protester in a chokehold, she said.
“City Council, I want you to hear the haunting cries of people asking, ‘Why won’t you protect us?’ Because that is the question that calls for your moral clarity,” she said. “I beg you, claim your moral ground and strength of character to help heal our hurting city.”
The arrests and protests in Durango are among a wave of violent federal immigration action across the United States, with similar clashes between demonstrators and federal agents happening in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.
Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, last week said any state or local officials who impede federal law enforcement are engaging in illegal activity.
“To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anyone who lays a hand on you or tried to stop you is committing a felony,” Miller said on Fox News.
LA PLATA COUNTY, Colo. — Authorities issued an immediate evacuation order for parts of La Plata County on Saturday after levee breaches caused flooding near Vallecito Creek north of Bayfield.
Breeches occurred on the west side of the creek, forcing an immediate evacuation of homes on West Vallecito Creek Drive, according to the Upper Pine River Fire Protection District.
Nearly 350 homes were evacuated, though no injuries have been reported.
Evacuees are asked to check in at Bayfield High School, located at 800 County Road 501, where a shelter has also been established.
A map of the evacuation area has been posted here.
Crews are asking for volunteers to fill sandbags at Upper Pine Fire Station 1 on Clover Drive.
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The breeches occurred after stream gauges hit 1,040 cubic feet per second, signaling high spring runoff.
Heavy rain is expected around 11 p.m., raising flood concerns in North Vallecito, the fire district said.
The district said it has activated equipment, prepared emergency contacts, and is urging residents to avoid creek banks, which may be unstable and prone to erosion.
Officials are urging motorists to drive slowly and carefully as they may encounter debris and mud on the roads throughout the county.
Officials cite the October 2006 flood, when debris and rising waters damaged flood control structures and forced evacuations of at least 18 homes.
Rising water levels are also being reported in parts of San Juan County, where officials are warning that some minor flooding may occur.
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For the first time, Coloradans have a clear picture of where they can go for sometimes-controversial health services such as abortion, gender-affirming care or medical aid-in-dying.
In much of the state, though, the answer is “nowhere close.”
Hospitals are required to disclose data about restrictions on 66 services related to reproductive, gender-affirming and end-of-life care to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment under a law passed in 2023. Starting this month, they also must provide copies of their disclosure forms to patients ahead of their appointments.
Only three Colorado counties — Denver, Douglas and Weld — have unrestricted access in at least one hospital to three services from the list that The Denver Post sampled.
Access to gender-affirming surgery was especially limited; only 13 of Colorado’s 64 counties have a hospital without non-medical restrictions on a double mastectomy, also known as “top surgery,” for gender affirmation. (Eighteen counties have no hospital within their borders, and the rest either don’t offer mastectomies to anyone or restricted who could receive one.)
Nor was access to the other sampled services much broader.
Thirteen Colorado counties have a hospital that would assist with a request for medical aid-in-dying without religious or other non-medical limitations, and 15 have one that would provide comprehensive treatment for a miscarriage, which can include drugs and procedures used in induced abortions.
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Facilities that restrict the services they offer aren’t likely to make changes because of the law — particularly since many of the restrictions stem from religious beliefs — but at least patients will know what to expect when they go for care, said Dr. Patricia Gabow, a former CEO of Denver Health who has written about the intersection of religion and health care.
Of course, transparency only does so much for people who live in a county where the only hospitals are Catholic-owned, Gabow said. Catholic hospitals, which include those owned by CommonSpirit Health and some belonging to Intermountain Health, generally don’t offer contraception, sterilization, gender-affirming care, medical aid-in-dying or abortion.
“People who live in Durango, I don’t know what they’re supposed to do,” she said.
Mercy Hospital in that city follows Catholic ethical and religious directives for health care, and the closest hospital that offers comprehensive reproductive services or assistance with medical aid-in-dying is in Del Norte, about two and a half hours away.
Catholic doctrine requires health care providers to “respect all stages of life,” and not participate in procedures such as medical aid-in-dying or sterilization without a medical reason, said Lindsay Radford, spokeswoman for CommonSpirit Health, which owns Mercy.
The system’s hospitals work with patients and their families to provide appropriate pain and symptom relief as they near death, she said.
“We respect and honor the physician-patient relationship, and medical decisions are made by a patient and their doctor. Patients who seek care at a CommonSpirit Health hospital or clinic are fully informed of all treatment options, including those we do not perform,” she said in a statement.
Geographic and political differences
Generally, access to potentially controversial services was greater in more areas with larger populations, though with significant exceptions.
Both of Jefferson County’s hospitals, St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood and Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge, won’t allow measures to end a pregnancy if a fetus still has a heartbeat.
The state’s form conflates “threatened” and “completed” miscarriages, said Sara Quale, spokeswoman for Intermountain Health, which owns Lutheran Hospital. The hospital doesn’t restrict care once a fetus has died, but if it still has a heartbeat, doctors attempt to treat whatever is causing the miscarriage, she said. The most common cause of miscarriages is a problem with a fetus’s chromosomes, which doesn’t allow it to survive and has no treatment.
In contrast, people in rural Prowers County on the Eastern Plains can get comprehensive miscarriage treatment without driving elsewhere. So can residents of Rio Grande County.
Local politics also don’t necessarily match up with access.
The three counties that had at least one hospital offering unrestricted access to the three sampled services were deep-blue Denver and thoroughly red Weld and Douglas.
While their residents might differ on many issues, Weld and Douglas counties shared one common characteristic with Denver: They’re home to at least one hospital owned by a secular system, such as UCHealth, Denver Health or HCA HealthOne.
At least 22 hospitals in Colorado have religious restrictions on care options: 17 owned or formerly owned by Catholic organizations, and five affiliated with the Adventist faith. In some cases, when a hospital changes hands, provisions of the deal require the new owner to honor the seller’s religious and ethical rules, even if the buyer is secular.
Some secular organizations also listed certain services as restricted.
UCHealth generally doesn’t serve patients under 15, while Denver Health doesn’t provide abortions under certain circumstances because of concerns about losing federal funding, spokesman Dane Roper said.
The seven HealthOne hospitals also had non-religious restrictions, but didn’t specify their nature. Banner Health didn’t respond to inquiries about service limitations at its five Colorado hospitals.
Informed decision-making
So far, Colorado is the only state that requires hospitals to directly tell patients when they don’t offer services for religious or other non-medical reasons, said Alison Gill, vice president of legal and policy with American Atheists, which supported the law as it went through the legislature.
That provision will be important not only for Coloradans seeking care, but for people traveling to the state because of its welcoming policies around reproductive and gender-affirming care, she said.
“We are encouraging other states to enact similar provisions because it is essential to provide patients with information about service availability so that they can make informed decisions about their health care,” she said.
The law has some limitations, said Gabow, formerly of Denver Health. For example, an outpatient gynecology office owned by a religious health system doesn’t have to give patients the disclosure form, and insurers don’t have to include hospitals offering care without limitations in their networks, she said.
Colorado’s law won’t inherently increase access to health care, but it may prevent surprises for patients who don’t know to look up the closest hospital’s religious affiliation or don’t realize it could affect them, said Dr. Sam Doernberg, a physician researcher at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Doernberg wrote a study that found 132 counties nationwide had “religious monopolies” in their hospital markets as of 2020. The vast majority involved Catholic hospitals, and 11 involved Adventist hospitals. The study didn’t include counties that don’t have a hospital and are adjacent to a monopoly county, so the actual number where people don’t have the full range of choices may be higher, he said.
While no states have tried them yet, researchers do have a few ideas to more directly increase access to care while still respecting the religious rights of organizations that own hospitals, Doernberg said.
For example, they could directly fund public health departments so they can provide more reproductive services in areas where the dominant health system limits options, or they could require that insurance companies don’t charge patients an out-of-network rate if none of the in-network hospitals offer gender-affirming care, for example, he said.
“There are other possible solutions that are not currently being pursued,” he said.
One person is dead and another in critical condition after a boat hit three tubers at Navajo State Park on Saturday, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, a boat hit a tube that was being towed behind another boat near Windsurf Beach at Navajo State Park. People on the two boats called 911 and rangers, as well as Southern Ute police officers, arrived shortly after the incident. Three people were riding on the tube, according to a Saturday news release from CPW.
One person died at the scene and another was airlifted to a hospital in critical condition. The third tuber was not injured, park officials said. The identity of the person who died has not yet been publicly released.
Windsurf Beach was temporarily closed for the investigation, according to the release.
Audrina Bartley is described as 5 feet, 5 inches tall; 125 pounds; with brown hair and brown eyes. She has braces and normally wears glasses, according to the agency.
Audrina was last seen wearing a white hoodie with “faith over fear” on the front, black skinny jeans, a pink Nicki Minaj shirt, black basketball shoes and a white Puma backpack. She was not wearing glasses when she left.
Audrina has several medical conditions that may require medication.
Anyone who sees Audrina should call 911 or the Southern Ute Police Department at 970-563-4401.
