The white clapboard house fronts the south side of Lakewood Gulch Park in west Denver.
No one answered the door when I knocked, so I headed back through a yard still crusted with snow and stopped at an iron fence by the sidewalk. About 30 weather-beaten stuffed animals were piled along it, plus a half-dozen votive candles, some yellow plastic roses and a pair of photographs. A makeshift memorial.
A kid pulled up on a bicycle. He looked about 13.
“Do you know the family that lives here?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “But I know about them. It happened last New Year’s Eve.”
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why they’re not home,” he said.
Smart kid.
New Year’s Eve is upon us, and amid all its fine traditions — champagne and “Auld Lang Syne” at midnight — is one whose stupidity beggars belief. Namely, stepping outside your home and firing a gun into the air.
If history and idiocy are repeated, it will happen dozens of times tonight in the Denver metro area alone.
The thing is, those bullets don’t just go spinning off into the ether. They have to come down someplace.
Exactly a year ago tonight one ripped through the wall of that house near West 11th Avenue and Wolff Street. The shot killed Rebecca “Becky” Yanez, 47, and her 11-year-old niece, Angelica Martinez.
That was a lone .44-caliber round, said to have been fired for sport at a streetlight. The shell apparently traveled 280 yards before finding the woman and the girl.
Violence doesn’t get much more random.
“Unfortunately, we see this in multiple cities across the country,” said Denver Police Department spokesman Sonny Jackson. “And it’s such an indifferent act. It’s the reckless disregard for human life that we’re concerned about.”
As people across Denver prepare to go out to parties or watch on TV as the ball drops in New York’s Times Square, Pedro Cortez awaits trial in the deaths of Yanez and Angelica.
It’s set to begin March 2 in Denver District Court, according to Lynn Kimbrough of the district attorney’s office. Cortez, 26, faces a string of charges: two counts of first-degree murder, one count of child abuse resulting in death, one count of possession of a weapon by a previous offender and a count of illegally discharging a firearm.
I grew up in rural North Carolina, where I heard old-timers talk about firing guns on New Year’s Eve. I worked with a guy named Red who lost most of his hand while “shooting anvils,” a Southern-fried tradition where gunpowder is loaded into a hole in an anvil, another anvil is placed atop it, and the resulting blast literally rings in the New Year.
But that tradition has gone by the wayside in the Tar Heel State. And it’s high time it vanished here in Colorado.
Unless you’re a law enforcement officer in the line of duty, discharging a weapon in Denver’s city limits is at minimum a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $999 fine. Fire into an occupied dwelling or car, there’s a state statute making the crime a Class 5 felony.
Seems sensible to me.
“You can’t predict where a bullet will come down,” Jackson said. “It’s so irresponsible. There are so many other ways to celebrate.”
Guns and knuckleheads never did mix.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com.
