No one disputed whether 16-year-old Chris Selectman was at the scene when McKinley Dixon, a young drug dealer, died from a gunshot wound. He was. And no one questioned where the bullets came from. They came from Selectman’s .25-caliber handgun.
But two other points loomed large: whether Selectman’s acts constituted self-defense or robbery and whether outside influences ultimately shaped his guilty verdict on a felony murder charge, sending him to prison for life without parole.
A detective sought to interrogate Selectman without his mother present, when he refused to be interviewed in front of her. Other youths at the scene changed their stories before testifying against him. And some jurors felt intimidated and harassed by Dixon’s family – one saying she voted to convict Selectman because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.
“I haven’t been able to forget him,” the juror said recently, speaking on condition of anonymity because she fears reprisal. “I feel very sad and helpless about what happened. I wonder about where he is, what he’s doing, whether he’s angry. This young man has nothing to look forward to now, and it’s because the system failed him.”
Today, Selectman hopes for a second chance, praying for clemency or a reversal of his verdict on appeal.
“I’ve been sorry from Day One,” Selectman said, explaining that he’s guilty only of trying to buy marijuana and had no other violent-crime convictions in his background. “I was a knucklehead for putting myself in that situation.”
The events that would shape the rest of Selectman’s life – and end Dixon’s – took place Feb. 25, 1994.
Divergent accounts
It was a Friday. School had let out.
Selectman joined up with two other boys he knew, Isiah Thomas and Sean Jude, for an evening of partying. The other boys already had spent most of the afternoon drinking and smoking marijuana.
By early evening, they were eager to buy more pot. Thomas called around and found a deal through the 17-year-old Dixon. He warned Selectman that Dixon could be dangerous. Selectman brought a handgun.
They met the 6-foot-5 Dixon, whom the kids called “the big dude,” at a grocery-store parking lot. Dixon drove up with a friend named Carlos, and all the kids decided to do the deal inside Dixon’s Oldsmobile.
Thomas and Selectman looked over the merchandise and judged it short of the amount they wanted to buy. They agreed to seek out friends of Selectman to weigh the marijuana at a nearby apartment complex. The five teens entered the building, failed to find Selectman’s friends and headed back to the parking lot.
Standing outside in the chill, they talked about what they should do. Selectman agreed to go ahead and buy the pot but suggested they do it inside the apartment foyer – out of the cold and out of public view.
And that’s where accounts diverged.
Selectman told police that he stepped into the foyer with Dixon, ahead of the other boys. Once inside, he immediately asked to see the sack of pot. Dixon pulled it out, and when Selectman reached for it, Dixon swung at him.
Startled, Selectman backed up, pulled out his gun and fired a shot into the air. Dixon then jumped him, he said, and as they wrestled for the gun, at least five shots were fired. The two rolled out the foyer door and onto the sidewalk.
Selectman stood up and, followed by his friend Thomas, scrambled home. He knew Dixon had been shot during the struggle but didn’t think it was serious. He saw no blood.
“I protected myself”
By the time police arrived, Dixon was dead on the sidewalk. The next day, rifle-wielding Aurora police swooped in on Selectman’s house and arrested him.
At the police station, with his mother present, Selectman initially denied knowing anything about the shooting. But later that day, he told Detective Geraldine Burggraff that he didn’t want to say anything with his mother in the room but that he would be willing to talk.
The detective told him that the law required his mother to be present. But after thinking it over, she drew up a waiver and asked Selectman and his mother to sign it.
They did.
Burggraff told Selectman that everything would be “all right,” he remembers, that she would help him.
“I was there,” Selectman told her.
Then he wrote an explanation of what happened on school notebook paper. He described how Dixon tried to attack him and how scared he was that the boy who was 6 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier would hurt him.
“I didn’t mean for anyone to get shot or killed, but if it wasn’t the big dude it would have been me, so I protected myself the best way I could,” he wrote.
Shortly afterward, the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office charged Selectman as an adult with felony murder, predicated on an attempted-robbery charge.
At trial, the prosecution would build its case on the testimony of Dixon’s friend Carlos, who said he saw Dixon holding his hands up. They would also rely heavily on Jude’s statement that Selectman told Dixon, “Break yourself” – which he said in street lingo means, “Give me what you’ve got.” Slang dictionaries offer different definitions, which can include “Give me all your money” or “Run away.”
But Jude, who never mentioned any robbery on the night of the shooting, was the only witness to claim to hear those words. On appeal, Selectman’s lawyers would argue that the phrase has another meaning in hip-hop jargon: “Watch what you’re saying.”
Also in the trial testimony, Burggraff gave a different version of Selectman’s written statement.
She shocked Selectman when she testified that he had “grabbed for” the marijuana bag instead of “reaching” for it when Dixon produced it, as he wrote in his statement.
In closing statements, the prosecutor seized on the characterization of Selectman grabbing the bag as well as other testimony as proof that Selectman should be convicted of murder.
“That’s not self-defense, ladies and gentlemen; that’s murder,” said Pamela Gordon, the assistant district attorney.
Intimidated jurors
Meanwhile, jurors had more to consider than testimony and evidence, according to affidavits obtained by The Post.
One juror told investigators for Selectman’s lawyers that he was being followed home from court. Another testified that after her car wouldn’t start one evening, a man with the victim’s family followed her and “started to swear at me.” Another said that members of the victim’s family entered an elevator with her and made “negative” comments about the case.
And several believed they were receiving intimidating stares from family members sitting behind the prosecutors’ table.
As the jurors shared their experiences before deliberations, some grew frightened, according to the juror who says she made a mistake.
She voted to convict Selectman of felony murder – even though she judged him guilty of only manslaughter – because she feared for her safety, she later told investigators with the public defender’s office.
But none of the jurors complained to the judge until after delivering their verdict.
The other jurors, she said, didn’t want to alert Judge John Leopold to the situation for fear he’d be angry, and they worried about wasting tax dollars, given that the trial had lasted almost two weeks.
“They just wanted to get on with their lives,” said the juror, adding that she was the last holdout on a guilty verdict after they had deadlocked earlier. Days later, she called the judge to tell him what had happened.
Ultimately, Leopold declined to grant Selectman a new trial based on the alleged jury tampering, citing a lack of evidence showing who was behind the intimidation and exactly what happened or what was said. The prosecution had submitted affidavits from some jurors saying they weren’t intimidated.
“It is necessary for this court to have specifics of what was said,” the judge said.
He also questioned why the defense didn’t include more information in the affidavits.
Said Sam Santisteven, one of Selectman’s trial lawyers: “My recollection is we were having a difficult time identifying who (was contacting jurors). There was no real way of isolating who it might have been. It was a difficult burden to shoulder.”
The judge characterized his decision as unusually difficult.
“I have grappled and wrestled with this for a long time, and I frankly worked on it when I wasn’t around here,” he said. “And it’s as hard a decision as I’ve seen since I’ve been here.”
“Words can be twisted”
In 2001, the state appeals court declined to reverse the guilty verdict.
The three-judge panel found no abuse by the trial judge in his handling of the tampering allegations and, in a 2-1 vote, found no harm in the detective’s interview of Selectman without his mother present.
The law, at that time, did not recognize a waiver of the parental right, but two of the three judges reviewing the case noted, “neither does it forbid it.” (In 1996, state lawmakers changed the law, allowing police to seek waivers.)
In a blistering dissent, Judge Raymond Jones wrote that such a ruling flies in the face of legislative intent and previous judicial rulings that take note of the “inherently coercive atmosphere” of police interviewing juveniles.
Chief appellate deputy Kathleen Lord, who waged Selectman’s appeal, said it is outrageous that the teen was penalized for “acting like a child” – the opposite of the law’s intent.
“He basically said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened, but I don’t want my mom to hear it,”‘ she said. “This is what a child does. The police exploited that.”
Melva Selectman, Chris’ mother, says there’s a lot to regret about what happened, from Chris’ actions to her own.
“I was trying to be as cooperative as I could be, but you don’t realize how words can be twisted,” she said. “Every tear I’ve shed for my son, I’ve shed for the victim and his mother. And I know my son feels remorse. Every time that anniversary rolls around, we always think about that family.”
Selectman has another appeal pending. He’s asking for a verdict reversal based partly on what he calls an inadequate investigation by his defense team of the jury-tampering allegations.
The juror who said she took part in a mistaken verdict says she would do anything to help him now. Selectman was guilty of manslaughter, not murder, she said.
Recently, she pulled out the notes she had taken during the trial. They moved her to tears.
“This was nothing premeditated, I felt,” she said. “This was just a spur-of-the-moment bad situation that happened. He deserved some punishment, but not that.”
About the series
Day one: Colorado prosecutors have used an unusual combination of laws to put 45 teens in prison for life with no hope of early release.
Day two: Teens are far more likely than adults to be prosecuted and put away for felony murder, a
crime that doesn’t require them to willfully participate in a homicide.
Day three: Among those now serving life without parole are teens who killed a parent. In some cases, jurors never heard their stories of abuse.
Day four: Over time, Colorado legislators have consistently moved the state toward a system
that punishes teen criminals and devotes fewer resources to rehabilitation.