Boulder – FBI agents are examining a bomb threat at a Boulder grocery store to determine whether it is part of a broader scheme to extort money from businesses across the country.
The threat was phoned in to the King Soopers store at 30th Street and Arapahoe Avenue on Tuesday. The caller said store employees should wire money to a certain account or the caller would remotely set off a bomb that had been placed in the store, FBI spokeswoman Rene Vonder Haar said.
Employees called police, who closed down the store while they swept for explosives.
Neither the initial search nor a second search with a bomb-sniffing dog turned up any explosives, said Boulder police spokeswoman Julie Brooks.
But Vonder Haar said FBI agents have taken an interest because the case is similar to threats called in to stores in at least 11 other states in the past week.
“It’s the same MO that we’ve seen nationwide,” she said.
Law enforcement officials say the caller claims to have a bomb and orders the store to send money to an account through an in-store money-transfer service such as Western Union. He often claims to be able to see inside the store, but officials believe he is making it up. In at least one case, investigators have traced the call to a cellphone somewhere in Portugal.
No one has been arrested, no bombs have been found, and no one has been hurt, though the calls have triggered store evacuations and prompted lengthy sweeps by police and bomb squads.
ARAPAHOE COUNTY
Text message spurs elementary lockdown
Arapahoe County authorities locked down an elementary school and searched it Thursday after one student received a text message featuring a cartoon character holding a pipe bomb.
The message also implied that the pipe bomb was intended for a teacher at Peakview Elementary School in Centennial, according to a news release from the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office.
Nothing suspicious was found during the search. Investigators identified an 11-year-old student at the elementary school as the message’s sender.
The girl admitted sending the message after being disciplined by the teacher, the Sheriff’s Office said.
The incident began about 8:30 a.m., when a father noticed the text message received on his daughter’s cellphone at home. The father went to the school to ask his daughter about it. His daughter said she didn’t know about the message, and soon sheriff’s deputies were called to the school to investigate.
The 11-year-old sender was taken to the Arapahoe County Juvenile Assessment Center. She will face charges of interference with staff, faculty or students of educational institutions, the Sheriff’s Office said.
BOULDER
Suspect in CU attack put in state hospital
A man suspected of slitting the throat of a college freshman in Boulder was transferred from Boulder Community Hospital to the Colorado State Mental Health Institute in Pueblo.
Kenton Astin, 39, is accused of slashing University of Colorado student Michael George Knorps, 17, on Monday morning at the University Memorial Center.
Astin has a criminal history that includes a 2001 knife attack. He has previously been treated at the state mental hospital in Pueblo and was released under the supervision of Boulder County’s mental-health center.
Knorps, of Illinois, has been released from the hospital and is recuperating.
GOLDEN
Lakewood man gets five years in break-ins
Robert Kent Peterson, 46, of Lakewood was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison for breaking in to two Littleton homes.
Peterson pleaded guilty in June to two charges of criminal trespass. He also will be on supervised parole for two years after he serves his sentence.
He was arrested in February 2006 for breaking in to the two homes. In one home, a 16-year- old girl found Peterson in the upstairs bathroom. In the other, a mother had come home and gone upstairs, where she found Peterson hiding in a daughter’s closet.
Peterson was convicted in a similar case in 1999, and while on probation on that charge, documents show, he told his probation officer that he had entered more than 40 homes.
DENVER
CSU, CU see rise in research grants
Three University of Colorado campuses in Boulder, Denver and Colorado Springs attracted $637 million in research funding in the most recent fiscal year, a dip from the previous year’s $640 million, university officials reported Thursday.
Grants to Colorado State University in Fort Collins increased nearly $30 million this fiscal year, provost Tony Frank said.
Research funding at the University of Colorado at Boulder increased $10 million to $266 million this year – a school record.
But research grants earned at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center – the state’s top research institution in grants – dropped $10 million to $363 million.
At the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, research awards dropped more than $2 million to $7.9 million.
CSU brought in $267.4 million last fiscal year and close to $300 million for the 2006-07 year, Frank said.
Funds for all universities came primarily from federal sources, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the military, as well as from the state, industry and hospitals.
DENVER
Records electronic at Children’s Hospital
Missing test results, illegible doctors’ notes and information that can become scrambled in paper files no longer plague the medical staff of The Children’s Hospital network in Colorado.
The pediatric hospital has become the first all-children’s hospital in the nation to have a completely integrated electronic- records system, according to a study by Utah-based Klas Enterprises, an independent research company.
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia ranked second in its use of paperless records, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Children’s Hospital Seattle tied for third in the Klas study of stand-alone children’s hospitals.
Doctors using the system receive alerts about their patients’ drug allergies or whether a drug could cause a reaction with other medication the child is taking.
“It means a lot to the patient, especially … those with very complicated medical problems. It means they go from specialist to specialist or into the emergency room. It means the provider has the complete medical record,” said David Kaplan, the chief medical-information officer at Children’s in Denver.
The hospital’s 12 statewide care centers and 400 outreach clinics have access to the $30 million system. The records system has been put into use over the past five years, and the final piece came online several months ago, Kaplan said.
