Matias Mondragon arrived in Denver expecting his partner to leave prison and meet him.
But when a parole board refused to free Billy Newson, 28, Mondragon made a fatal decision: He decided to stay in Colorado.
Within two weeks, the 31- year-old was dead, stabbed in a parking lot in the early hours of Aug. 22 after an altercation at a Broomfield tavern.
Matt Joe Weber, 31, of Arvada, told police that Mondragon picked a fight with him and a friend, calling them “fags” as they drank at the Night Owl Lounge in Broomfield.
But Shaundra Fuqua, 39, who accompanied Mondragon to the bar, said it was Weber and his friend, Mathew Bufe, 25, who started the fight when they realized that Mondragon was gay.
Weber appeared in Broomfield County Court on Thursday and was charged with first-degree murder in the case.
“There wasn’t evidence for a hate-crime charge,” Adams County district attorney spokeswoman Krista Flannigan said.
Weber is scheduled to return to court for a preliminary hearing on Oct. 15.
Weber told police that he was with his girlfriend and Bufe when Mondragon called the two men “fags.” They traded words and a bouncer separated them.
Weber told police Mondragon continued to stare at him, and so he “flipped him off,” Weber told police, according to the affidavit for his arrest.
Weber said that when he and his friends walked outside, Mondragon followed them and hit Bufe on the head with a beer bottle. Weber first told police that Mondragon had a gun but changed his story, saying there was no gun.
According to the affidavit, Weber admitted stabbing Mondragon because he “struck Bufe in the head with a bottle and was advancing toward Weber.”
A bleeding Mondragon staggered across the street and collapsed at a gas station, where police found him. The Adams County coroner said he had been stabbed twice, once in the back and again between the sixth and seventh ribs, a wound that punctured his left lung and left ventricle. He bled to death.
Fuqua, at whose home Mondragon was staying, noticed that Mondragon and someone else at the bar were exchanging angry words. “I knew they were arguing with him, and he told me it was because he was gay. I walked over and handed (Weber) a beer and said ‘Please, dude, we don’t want any problem, just be cool.’ “
A while later, she gave Mondragon a cigarette, and he left the bar. He wasn’t carrying a bottle, she said.
When she came out, she said, she saw him scuffling with Bufe. She didn’t see the fatal blow, and when Mondragon began to walk away, she thought he was going back to her house.
A friend offered her a ride, and she took it, never realizing he had been stabbed, she said.
“He was a really nice person,” Fuqua said. “He didn’t really do anything but try to go out and have a good time.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
