“Every day” is the answer when I asked the obvious question: How often do you think of Danny Goetsch and his family?
“Every day. Every day,” Linda Mitchell repeated, “I think of them.”
Former Gov. Bill Ritter last week commuted the life-without-parole prison sentence Mitchell’s nephew, Dietrick Mitchell, received nearly 20 years ago in the August 1991 hit-and-run death of Danny Goetsch.
The rightness or wrongness of Ritter’s decision may well be long debated, but not in the mind of Linda Mitchell.
“I knew deep in my heart this day would come,” she said. “I just didn’t know when.”
Dietrick Mitchell was 16 and drunk when he killed Goetsch, 17, who was walking along the gutter on East 13th Avenue.
Today it would be seen as yet another tragic hit-and-run. But this one occurred during the overhyped, so-called Summer of Violence in Denver.
Prosecutors made Dietrick Mitchell out to be yet another hardened gang member, terrorizing the city. By any measure, he was not. Still, it led a jury to convict him of murder with extreme indifference, sending the boy away for life.
Which brings us back to Linda Mitchell. She was pretty much raising her nephew when it happened. She is the one he immediately ran to. She walked him into the police station.
And she is the one who finally got the attention of the governor.
“Nineteen years and five months ago, I promised him I was not going to let this die,” she said. “What happened to my nephew was so unjust, I could do nothing else.”
She cannot remember how many lawyers she hired, none of whom ever really helped Diet rick, she said. She spent thousands on trial transcripts, spent hours camped out in the governor’s office, attended every town-hall meeting she could find to tell anyone her nephew’s story.
With the help of the Pendulum Foundation, a juvenile-justice advocacy group, and Diet rick’s former trial lawyers, she compiled clemency petitions seemingly every year.
The last one to Bill Ritter was turned down in 2009. Linda Mitchell, 59, who until last August worked only jobs she could do at home to have free time working for Dietrick, kept searching for a way.
Last Friday afternoon, she left her job, looked at her phone and saw more than two dozen messages waiting for her.
“What is it now?” she wondered.
“When I heard, I started screaming and crying so, I had to pull off the road,” she recalled. She had no knowledge of the governor even considering Dietrick’s case.
“All those years I was trying desperately to find a door open that might lead to the governor’s office,” she said. “Finally, one opened.”
Sleep did not come that night. Early Saturday she made the 2½-hour drive to the prison near Ordway to see her nephew.
“I’m getting out?” he repeated after they hugged.
“You don’t know?” she asked. “No one told you?
“He just sat there,” Linda Mitchell said, “and he cried.”
He will be 36 next month. He told her that he was scared now. He grew up in prison. He really knows no other way.
“We will figure it out,” she soothed him.
I am sorry. It is what she says she would tell Danny Goetsch’s mother, were she allowed to speak with her.
“I have two wishes now,” Linda Mitchell said. “I wish I could talk with her and give her a hug. I wish she could forgive us.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
