Two things.
So often, we don’t know why someone did something, only that they did it. It is so unsatisfying.
So I called Steve Davis, spokesman for the Lakewood police, a good guy who is always expansive when crazy stuff happens.
He apologized to me profusely. He swore he did not know why James Cha vez put a loaded gun in his 4-year-old daughter’s school backpack.
It is the craziest of stories. The girl’s Molholm Elementary School pre-kindergarten teacher was gathering up the kids’ belongings Wednesday when she got to the backpack.
It was heavy. She looked inside. The cops were called.
James Chavez was summoned. He brought his mother. According to Davis, the man almost immediately pointed to his mother. Classy.
It didn’t take long for Chavez to admit he put it there. He said it was supposed to be for a minute but that he forgot all about it.
Chavez told police he was shot in the back in 2003 and that the shooter was never caught. He keeps the gun as protection, he said.
“Nothing in our files backs that up,” Davis said.
Chavez was booked on charges of suspicion of child abuse, reckless endangerment and carrying a weapon on school grounds.
“I am at a loss to tell you why anyone would put a loaded gun in a 4-year-old’s backpack. This is a pretty sad story, a tragedy just waiting to happen. Fortunately, it did not. It would have been a story no one would have wanted to write,” Davis said.
Art Hernandez got his fish back.
I wrote about him earlier this summer after he was ticketed at Antero Reservoir near Fairplay for being two fish over the legal limit.
The problem was that he had not consumed the two fish he’d caught the previous afternoon. He swore he had never heard of the rule for which he was given a $49.50, five-point ticket for violating. He just wanted enough fish, he said, to serve at the 78th birthday party for his mother, Viola.
The call arrived Monday. It was the state Division of Wildlife game warden who had ticketed him.
“I have something for you,” he said, asking him to come to the DOW’s Denver headquarters.
“I thought that was strange,” Hernandez, 47, said.
The warden was there with a supervisor. They were giving him back his $49.50 and the five points against his fishing license. And they handed him the ticket. “VOID” was written across the front.
The warden then walked in with a black plastic bag, a white tag marked “Evidence” attached. It was Hernandez’s two fish.
“It was strange because the last time I saw the guy, he was walking away with my fish,” he said. “Now, he was bringing them back.”
The warden then apologized, Hernandez said.
“The supervisor explained that I was a nice guy,” Hernandez said. “I had never met the man before, but it was nice what he was doing.
“That day on the lake, I felt like a criminal. Today, I am satisfied. I got a little of my dignity back.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
