Eight people from metro Denver were indicted on federal charges related to drug trafficking, weapons and money laundering, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said Thursday.
The suspects — all current or former residents of Denver, Aurora, Commerce City and Wheat Ridge — are facing charges of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute meth, fentanyl and cocaine, federal officials said in a news release.
Law enforcement officers arrested Dario Perez Quintero, 34; Guadalupe Mendoza Martinez, 46; Pedro Mendoza Martinez, 54; Abimael Felix Luque, 32; David Uvaldo Mora Sanchez, 32; Hector Joel Quijada Portillo, 30; Oscar Noel Ruelas Molina, 44; and Jose Alexis Guzman Felix, 30, this week, according to court records.
The indictment, filed Tuesday, includes additional charges related to drug possession and distribution, illegal firearm possession and money laundering, but it does not detail how investigators determined the eight suspects were identified as being involved in the scheme.
They face up to life in prison if convicted on the first count of conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute, federal officials said.
The case was investigated by multiple federal agencies through the Homeland Security Task Force, including Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Applejack Wine & Spirits, a staple of the Denver area since the 1960s, has been sold to ABC Fine Wine & Spirits in Orlando, Florida.
ABC, one of the country’s largest family-owned and operated alcohol beverage retailers, announced the purchase Friday. The company said in a statement that the sale marks its first out-of-state acquisition in 90 years and is the start of plans to expand nationwide.
“This is a milestone in ABC’s history and a major step toward our overall expansion plans,” said Charles Bailes III, ABC chairman and CEO. “Applejack has an exceptional reputation in the industry and is an iconic beverage retailer in Colorado.”
Applejack was founded in 1961 in Wheat Ridge. It also has stores in Thornton and Colorado Springs.
Former Applejack CEO and owner Jim Shpall said he has known Bailes for about 30 years and called ABC “great, great operators.”
Shpall said Herb Becker was Applejack’s original owner. The store opened in the Applewood shopping center in Wheat Ridge. At that time, Interstate 70 didn’t reach past Wadsworth Boulevard or Kipling Street, Sphall said.
Alan Freis, Shpall’s father-in-law, bought the business in 1980.
“I had been practicing law. An opportunity arose to go into the business and I started at Applejack in 1994,” Shpall said. “Effectively, until just now, in 65 years of history, it has been run by just three people.”
The first Applejack store is in the same shopping center where it started, but has grown in size through the years. The site at 3320 Youngfield St. is approximately 40,000 square feet.
And the well-known Applejack sign in front of the store has been in place since around 1962, Shpall said.
The three Colorado stores will operate as Applejack by ABC.
Shpall said the companies haven’t disclosed the sales price.
ABC Fine Wine & Spirits started from a single downtown Orlando storefront in 1936. The retailer, privately owned and run, has grown to more than 125 locations across Florida.
ABC said it plans to remodel the Applejack stores and add walk-in humidors in the first six months.
Shaida Ghaemi was last seen Sept. 9, 2007, in Wheat Ridge. (Photo courtesy Colorado Bureau of Investigation)
Arash Ghaemi has wondered for 18 years what happened to his mother after she disappeared from a Wheat Ridge motel.
So Ghaemi, an artificial intelligence developer and entrepreneur, turned his profession into his passion.
“What if I can get the case files and run it through AI?” he said of the police investigation into his mother’s disappearance. “Maybe it will show me something and make the connections. If I could build it to solve my mom’s case, I could likely build it to solve other cases.”
Ghaemi launched CrimeOwl, an AI program that searches cold-case files to generate new leads for investigators, last year.
So far, the AI platform is in the hands of a few private investigators who are using it to chase leads on behalf of families searching for missing loved ones. Ghaemi hopes one day the program will have its big break in solving a case, and maybe — just maybe — it will help figure out what happened to his mother, Shaida Ghaemi, when she disappeared in 2007.
Ghaemi, who goes by “Ash,” on Tuesday met with investigators, information-technology staff and commanders at the Wheat Ridge Police Department to show off his AI tool and to ask for an update on his mother’s case.
For now, Wheat Ridge police say CrimeOwl is too unproven to use in the department’s investigations, including Shaida Ghaemi’s disappearance.
And they are tight-lipped about her case.
“We were really happy to meet with Ash. It’s part of our philosophy of relationship policing,” said Alex Rose, a Wheat Ridge police spokesman. “It was a twofold meeting to explain what we could about the case and to give some professional insight on the AI tool so it can become more widespread and of use to agencies across the country.”
‘Still trying to make sense of it’
When Arash Ghaemi was growing up, his mother was almost too good a mother, he said, describing her as “almost overbearing” in taking care of him and his older sister.
But when Arash was 17, his parents divorced, and everything changed.
Shaida Ghaemi became distant from her children. She left home a lot.
“It was weird,” he said. “She went from always needing to be in contact with me and my sister to she could take it or leave it.”
Shaida Ghaemi did not have a permanent home and did not have a job, her son, now 40, said. She traveled between Colorado and Maryland, where her parents lived.
In 2007 — five years after the divorce — she moved into the American Motel in Wheat Ridge with her boyfriend, Jude Peters.
“I am still trying to make sense of it,” he said of the changes in his mother’s behavior.
Arash Ghaemi was a 22-year-old server at a Red Robin restaurant in Highlands Ranch when his grandfather called from Maryland on a September night and told him they were unable to reach his mother. He asked his grandson to call the police.
Shaida Ghaemi, then 44, was last seen on Sept. 9, 2007, by Peters. Drops of her blood were found in their motel room. At the time, Peters told 9News it was menstrual blood and that Ghaemi often left for months at a time.
Wheat Ridge police still consider her disappearance a missing-person case, and there is no “clear indication of foul play,” Rose said. “Jude is not considered a person of interest in this investigation at this time,” Rose said of Peters.
“They still don’t know where she’s at and they don’t have any trace of her,” Ghaemi said.
‘True value’ of AI
Artificial intelligence is gaining ground as a law enforcement tool. Multiple police departments across Colorado are using the technology, most commonly for converting body-worn camera footage into written crime reports. It’s also being used to track license plates and to scan people’s faces.
The Wheat Ridge Police Department uses Axon’s Draft One to help write police reports, based on their body-worn camera footage.
“Our officers know they’re accountable for every single word,” Rose said. “It gives them a who, what, when and where and can save them time, but it’s not a substitution for good police work.”
Ghaemi launched CrimeOwl about six months ago. He is also developing AI programs for the dental industry and a new sports statistics program that could eventually be used by the NBA.
He programmed CrimeOwl to sort through all of the documents in a case file and build a map of the people connected to the missing person, such as partners, family, close friends and neighbors. The AI also creates a timeline of events leading to the disappearance or death and then maps all of the geographic locations connected to the crime, he said.
The platform has a chat function so investigators can ask the AI to sift through files to find answers to their questions.
While CrimeOwl was designed to help with missing-persons cases, Ghaemi said he hopes it can be used to solve other crimes.
No police departments have bought the product so far.
Ghaemi, who lives in Miami, said he tested CrimeOwl on a solved cold case in Florida and, after uploading the police case file into his program, the AI created a list of credible suspects within 30 minutes, he said. Police confirmed it had identified the actual perpetrator, he said.
“It took me 30 minutes to do what it could have taken them weeks or months to do,” Ghaemi said. “That’s the true value here.”
Not ready for police use
CrimeOwl, however, is not ready for active law enforcement investigations, Rose said.
The CrimeOwl platform would need to be secure so no one could tamper with the evidence once it is uploaded, Rose said. It would need to receive various certifications before any law enforcement agency used it, he said.
It would also need to be vetted by lawyers so any leads it generated would hold up at trial, he said.
“There are a lot of details and a lot of hypotheticals that would need to be heavily vetted for AI technology in a real-world police setting,” Rose said.
Still, Wheat Ridge police are intrigued by Ghaemi’s AI tool and were more than willing to offer advice and expertise, he said.
“We’re always going to applaud somebody who is trying to use technology to find ways to help,” Rose said.
Ghaemi said the Wheat Ridge investigators declined to hand over his mother’s case file because of the security concerns. He had wanted to upload those documents into CrimeOwl to see if it could generate new leads.
Police officials also told him that if they used CrimeOwl to identify a suspect, that person’s defense attorney would likely argue bias since the AI platform was built by the missing woman’s son, Ghaemi said.
“My stance is it has been 18 years. You guys have passed it on to other investigators. It’s not solving the case,” he said. “I’m willing to take that risk.”
Ghaemi hopes to overcome the legal barriers and law enforcement skepticism before his new company folds under financial pressure. He said CrimeOwl has a revenue stream, but it loses money every month.
“I built this thing with a mission in mind at first,” he said. “I didn’t really know how it would work or if it would work or if I would go broke. Even if it’s not me and CrimeOwl went broke tomorrow and we had to shutter the doors, I just want investigators to use AI to solve these cold cases.”
WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. — A drive-thru coffee shop in Wheat Ridge said construction along Wadsworth Boulevard is preventing customers from stopping by.
Like most moms, Cassie Grutz’s day starts before the sun comes up. Every morning, she loads up her two kids, Carson and Ceecee, and heads to two different schools.
But after the drop-offs, she doesn’t get to sit down and have a cup of coffee. She drives nearly an hour in traffic to make coffee for her customers.
Mike Castellucci
Grutz owns the Sugar Cube Coffee Shop at 44th and Wadsworth in Wheatridge. Originally a dental hygienist, she bought the shack during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“No one wanted to see me during that time, that’s for sure,” she said.
That’s when she decided to work at something where people wanted to see her, and who would smile because they felt it.
The coffee shop started out decades ago as a Fotomat, then the check-in hut for a putt-putt course. Grutz has employees, but they usually take separate shifts since the shop is only a few feet wide.
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Grutz knows Wadsworth is filled to the brim with coffee shops, but if people stop, they’ll come back. She roasts her own beans, and she feels her coffee is the best.
“If they miss our entrance, which they’ve changed since construction started, they immediately see Dutch Brothers coffee, and then there’s no reason for them to turn around,” Grutz said.
In an update, the City of Wheat Ridge said the Wadsworth Improvement Project, which began in November 2021, remains on schedule and should be completed in spring 2026.
City of Wheat Ridge
It can be overwhelming owning a business, roasting your own beans, and serving customers, but Grutz feels joy from it all. It’s just that she has to close at 11:30 a.m. because she’s a mom, and she has Carson and CeeCee to pick up from school.
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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.
A police officer made a venomous discovery during a car search, Colorado officials said.
Screengrab from @Wheatridgepolice on X.
Drug paraphernalia in “plain sight” led a police officer to a venomous discovery while conducting a car search, Colorado officials said.
While checking the car on May 26, the officer found a plastic bin, body camera footage from the Wheat Ridge Police Department posted on X, formerly Twitter, shows.
That’s when he found a live rattlesnake.
“Does he have any other thing that might bite me?” the officer can be heard saying in the video.
“Does he have any other thing that might bite me?”
While checking park trailheads Sunday at 11:30 p.m., one of our officers saw a car with drug paraphernalia in plain sight. Around the same time, the car’s owner was dropped off to the location by an Uber. pic.twitter.com/6mduqCF1J5
The car’s owner had lent the vehicle to a friend and was taking an Uber back to the location, officials said.
Officials said on X there will be no charges against the vehicle owner, but they’re trying to contact the friend because they “have a lot of questions.”
Wheat Ridge is about a 6-mile drive northwest of Denver.
Paloma Chavez is a reporter covering real-time news on the West Coast. She has a degree in journalism from the University of Southern California.
