Bruco “Bo” Strong Eagle Eastwood has a history of ending conflict with weapons, according to Colorado court records.
He had pulled knives. Pointed guns. Thrown punches.
But on Tuesday, Bo Eastwood pulled the trigger, apparently for the first time, wounding two eighth-graders with a rifle believed taken from his father’s gun cabinet.
His father, Bruco War Eagle Eastwood, said Tuesday was the flash point in a pattern of escalating mental illness and frustration for his 32-year-old son.
“He talked a lot with imaginary people. He’d get mad at them and scream and curse,” War Eagle Eastwood said Wednesday. “About a month ago, he got a lot worse.
“He wrote journals all the time. He didn’t show them to me much. What I saw was just different.”
The journals were seized Tuesday night, when investigators executed a search warrant at War Eagle Eastwood’s farm outside Hudson, where Bo Eastwood has been living in a basement bedroom for the past five years while earning some money helping with his father’s horse-rental and riding-lessons business.
Eastwood said he “went weak in the knees” when police showed up at his home at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
“I’m devastated,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear their son or daughter caused someone to be hurt.”
Sought mental-health help
War Eagle Eastwood said his son had been studying at Aims Community College in Fort Lupton for his GED the past two years but was unable to pass the test.
He said Bo had begun to visit libraries in Brighton, in Fort Lupton and at Aims to use the computers, where he corresponded online with junior and senior high school students.
A number of those students had been e-mailing photographs of themselves, individually or in groups. War Eagle Eastwood said the photos were taken by police during their Tuesday night search.
“Some of the photos were taken at parties, with the kids drinking or posing,” War Eagle Eastwood said.
According to police reports, Bo Eastwood repeatedly flashed a volatile temper, battled mental-health problems and was arrested multiple times for drinking violations.
Eastwood was ordered to undergo mental treatment and take anger-management and domestic-violence classes after threatening or beating people. But family members say when hebegan hearing voices and sought mental-health treatment recently, he was turned away.
“He said he’d been trying to find help but no one could help him because he couldn’t pay,” War Eagle Eastwood said.
Bo Eastwood’s first arrest as an adult, less than two months after he turned 18, came March 4, 1996, at the Westminster Mall when he got into a dispute with two strangers.
In the middle of J.C. Penney, Eastwood drew a knife on Michelle Gonzales and Jack Wright, according to Jefferson County District Court records.
He was charged with menacing but pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. He got 10 days in jail.
A month later, Bo Eastwood turned a common conflict between older and younger members of a household into a police matter.
On April 18, 1996, he entered the room of a 16-year-old boy living with Eastwood’s family.
He pushed the younger boy on his bed, put a black gun to his right temple, and said, “If you ever take anything from me again or piss me off, I’ll kill you.”
Later that night, police found Eastwood standing next to a Chevy Blazer. The officer arrested him for felony menacing.
The officer found a juvenile girl, who had run away from home, hiding in the back seat of the SUV. The officer also found in the vehicle the gun that had been used to threaten the boy. The gun was loaded with nine bullets in the magazine and one bullet in the chamber.
According to Adams County District Court records, the felony charge was dismissed in a plea agreement and Bo Eastwood pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. He was sentenced to probation and required to receive mental-health treatment and take anger-management classes.
Mourning son’s lost freedom
Eastwood got in trouble again when he was 19 and an episode of “play fighting” with his 17-year-old live-in girlfriend got out of hand.
When Federal Heights police arrived at the couple’s mobile home just after midnight on a Saturday in 1997, Bo Eastwood’s girlfriend told police the two had been goofing around,pretend fighting. But when she wanted to stop, Bo Eastwood punched her in the arm. Eventually, she told police, he pushed her to the floor and she hit her head.
The girlfriend’s 12-year-old sister, who had been sleeping in a nearby room, told police she woke to see “Mr. Eastwood punching (the girlfriend) in the face and head several times,” according to the police report. “She went to help her sister and got into a fight with Mr. Eastwood.”
He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges including harassment.
As a condition of his probation, he was required to surrender his handgun, according to police records.
On Jan. 22, 1999, Eastwood allegedly gave tequila to a 16-year-old boy.
Federal Heights police arrested him again on July 22, 2003, after he crashed his car into another vehicle and walked away from his car. He was cited for drunken driving and sentenced to 90 days in jail.
The elder Eastwood said he hasn’t talked with his son since his arrest Tuesday.
“I feel he’d get angry if I tried to interfere now. He needs to be where he is now. If I had the money, I don’t think I’d bail him out,” he said. “Freedom was always so important to him. And now he’s lost it forever.”
Staff writer Howard Pankratz contributed to this report.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206
