“Remember me.”
Those words, etched onto a plaque for a dead man, have been posted for nearly a quarter-century on top of an abandoned mine.
It’s a headstone of sorts, a memorial to Wayne Tease — a 23-year-old house painter who was exploring Teller County in 1986 when he fell into a shaft. The story is the kind folk songs used to be written about: a terrible accident, a family’s grief and its fight against a corporate giant.
Prospectors in 1891 discovered gold and silver in a hill south of Cripple Creek. The mine was named The Mary McKinney after the wife of one of its bosses. It made $6 million by 1932.
Its abandoned shaft is one of hundreds pocking the area.
“The land around here is Swiss cheese,” says Jane Mannon of Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company.
Tease — a Pennsylvanian who’d moved to Colorado Springs — loved roaming the high country and dreamed of striking it rich. An old mine no doubt fascinated the flatlander, his mom tells me.
Janet Kunz got the phone call at work in April 1986. Her son had been exploring with a buddy when he fell into a shaft that a news report said was unmarked and unprotected.
Officials searched for days, but the 1,000-foot hole was too deep and precarious to recover his remains.
Kunz made calls and sent letters. She prodded authorities to send special infrared cameras. Images showed her son’s body, his white painter’s pants and undershirt, and a dark spot indicating blood.
The family held a memorial service in the valley at the top of the mine shaft. They planted a dogwood tree and posted the handmade copper plaque. Sen. Gary Hart’s office planted a sapling that since has grown to tower over the site.
Without a cemetery to visit, let alone remains, relatives come regularly to sit, grieve and remember Tease on the land owned by CCV.
Its former parent company, Texas Gulf, confidentially settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Tease’s fiancee. It later sold to AngloGold Ashanti Corp., which says Tease was trespassing and should have been more responsible.
Kunz, meantime, has battled for regulators to enforce laws to cap mines nationwide. She fought 14 years to get a death certificate. It was her husband’s wish before dying last year that his remains some day be mixed with hers and sprinkled in the spot they call their son’s “gravesite.”
Ashanti questions that term. The company is planning to turn the site into a leaching pond. The process would entail lining the land, heaping on crushed ore and dissolving it with sodium cyanide.
“A gravesite? I’m not sure that’s what I’d call it. It depends on your definition,” Mannon tells me, saying the surface mine wouldn’t affect Tease’s remains.
The company didn’t notify the family, which now is objecting to plans for a leach pond. CCV has offered to move the plaque and tree 1,000 feet away, and maybe throw in a bench for them to sit on.
The family is writing to the White House, the Labor and Interior departments and members of Congress to block the project. The land may be private, but the remains are theirs, they say. Mining it would desecrate the gravesite. They point to a law against treating human remains in a way “that would outrage normal family sensibilities.”
“Their greed supersedes any empathy,” Brian Tease, Wayne’s identical twin, says in what seems to be a normal family sensibility. “I’m most certainly willing to pitch a tent on that little piece of land and say absolutely not here, not my brother, no way.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
