Pueblo – The courtroom of Municipal Judge William Alexander is packed with teens in trouble. Many of the boys swagger up the aisle toward Alexander in low-slung baggy hip-hop gear, tattoos peeking from under T-shirts.
A 13-year-old girl stands before the judge on this Wednesday afternoon.
“What happened?” says the judge, who asks many questions of kids and their parents.
“I went to a party,” she says, launching into a long tale about drinking shots, a fight breaking out, cops busting the party.
“That doesn’t sound like a very safe lifestyle,” he says, staring at her intently.
He then offers her the same deal he gives all teens who appear for the first time with a drinking ticket: a deferred sentence if she pays a $175 fine and attends alcohol-education classes.
Like every other kid in Alexander’s court, she takes the deal.
Lots of teens are swept into this program because in get- tough Pueblo, the underage drinking laws are strictly enforced. In some jurisdictions, for instance, police officers will break up parties, pour out the liquor, but not hand out minors possession citations. But in Pueblo, everyone gets a ticket at parties, even the kids who are not drinking.
And the City Council passed a municipal ordinance that penalizes parents for providing alcohol to minors.
It’s nearly identical to the state law, but with one big exception: It doesn’t make the offense a felony. Many police officers have been reluctant to enforce the state law because they don’t want to give parents a criminal record. The municipal law does slap parents with a $300 fine.
“The municipal court is taking a pretty aggressive stance,” says Alexander. “It’s much more in touch with our city than the state courts … and it’s faster and easier for the police to write tickets for municipal court.”
On the court bench, asking all those detailed questions, Alexander gets a macrocosmic view of hidden Pueblo, behind the closed doors, and he doesn’t much like what he sees.
“The hardest part of all is that so many parents don’t know how to be good parents,” he says. “They’re so unwilling to put their foot down.”
Frequently, he asks parents whether they’ve searched a child’s backpack.
“They say, ‘I’d never invade my child’s privacy.’ I want to say, ‘What are you smoking? It’s your responsibility to be aware of what your kids are doing. Kids lie all the time.”‘
Sheriff Dan Corsentino has ordered his officers to roust parents out of bed if a child is ticketed at a party.
“We haul them down to the site if it’s in the canyon or the hills,” he says. “It’s 1:30 or 2 in the morning. … Not everyone is happy. At first they’re angry at us, and then at their child. But if they’d taken more responsibility, their child probably wouldn’t be in that jam.”
Pueblo has long been plagued by underage drinking, but the brutality of a July 2004 car crash finally forced the community into action.
On that early morning, a Pontiac coupe raced through a residential zone at nearly 100 mph, past the stop sign and over the road bump, soaring into the air and smacking down, spinning clockwise, slamming into a tree, and then splitting in half.
All four people were ejected from the car, and the wreckage scattered over the neighborhood.
Charlene “Charlie” Parker, 18, was ejected from the driver’s seat, according to police reports. She had been partying that Saturday night with friends.
Nathan Trujillo, 20, and Vanessa Maestas, 18, died. Nicole Rousseau, 17, survived.
“Everyone said it was time to draw the line,” says Judge Alexander.
“The girl who was driving drunk had a couple minor-in-possession tickets pending. She’d appeared in court on Tuesday and wanted another week so she could find a lawyer, and (the accident) happened” at 2:30 a.m. Sunday.
Citizens were outraged.
“It was a powerful moment,” says Yvonne Gallegos, vice president of Crossroads Turning Points, the leading provider of addiction treatment in southern Colorado.
Six months later, she had leveraged that anger and started a community coalition. Its goal is nothing less than changing the social norm – from laws to values – in a town where the subculture of drinking dates back decades, when most fathers worked hard in the steel mills and felt entitled to drink at night.
Limited funding was no obstacle. Civic leaders wrote grants, passed laws and pushed everyone from cops to teachers – even liquor retailers – to join The Pueblo Coalition to Prevent Underage Drinking, with task forces made up of law enforcement officials, educators, parents and youths.
So far, it has worked, and the program is being replicated in nine high-risk counties in southern Colorado.
“That appears to be a high-risk area of the state, where the value system in previous years allowed young people to begin drinking at an early age,” says Karen Abrahamson, prevention field manager of the Colorado Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division.
“It’s a groundbreaking program that’s showing exceptionally positive outcome. Of 200 kids who have gone through it, only four were repeat offenders. That’s a 2 percent recidivism rate, which is awesome.”
Renee Cortez, a member of the parent task force, tried hard to protect her children against underage drinking. A Christian, she and her husband never drank or had alcohol in their home. They raised their son and daughter in church, including missionary trips.
Still, both children started drinking at young ages. Her son, Don, took his first drink in the eighth grade at a birthday party.
“It was at our cousin’s house, and I even asked the mom if there was going to be drinking. She said no. Because she was related, and because I knew her well and our kids hung out together, I said OK. Come to find out, years later, they had two kegs for the kids. I was floored.
“You just think, ‘Oh, my gosh how stupid can I be?’ But a lot of parents are doing that. They think it’s OK for their kid to sit home, have a bunch of their friends come over, and they drink there and stay there. But what happens when they get older, and they go out driving, and they wreck?”
After her son had his first beer in the eighth grade, he started a life of drinking that – despite consequences, threats and rehab clinics – he could not kick. He died in a car wreck in 2003 after he and a friend were drinking at a bar in Pueblo West.
Now Cortez tells teens in Saturday alcohol-education classes exactly how her son died.
“Find some alternative to going to these parties and getting drunk. Change your life around, because this could easily happen to you.”
Janet Kihn, the grandmother of two Pueblo teens, also has joined the coalition.
She’s the supervisor of a La Veta convenience store where an employee was caught in a sting selling beer to a minor.
Kihn had a choice: Her store would be banned from selling beer for five days, or she could spent 40 hours participating on the coalition.
She took the deal.
After attending just one Saturday meeting, observing the teens, she has become passionate about community involvement.
“I was so disturbed when I left those kids,” she says. “I just couldn’t even sleep that night. I don’t think people realize just how bad the situation is.”
Celia Molina also is required to attend a Saturday alcohol-education class, because her 15-year-old got caught drinking at a party.
When she was growing up in Pueblo, kids went down to the river, lit with bonfires, to party at keggers.
Sometimes a fight would break out, “but nobody had guns, and nobody was territorial about east side, south side, west side, and all that,” she says.
Her daughter’s world is different.
“I tell her, ‘Use your better judgment. Don’t be getting into trouble. Bad things always happen after people have been drinking.”‘
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com.
