The last person known to authorities to have seen a missing 19-year-old woman was seen scrubbing a large Igloo cooler the day after she vanished.
A cooler was one of several items police have seized from Deby’s Bakery and Cafe, where Travis Forbes, 31, worked, while investigating the disappearance of Kenia Monge of Aurora, according to court documents.
Police also served a search warrant to go through his white 2000 Ford van seeking trace material including clothing, fiber, hair, body fluids, fingerprints.
No arrests have been made in the case, and police, who have questioned Forbes, have not described him as a suspect.
Monge was last seen by two friends at about 1 a.m. on April 1 at 24K nightclub in LoDo. She handed her purse, keys and cell phone to friends to hold while she went to the rest room, said Tony Lee, Monge’s stepfather. But she never returned to her friends who had driven her to the nightclub, he said.
Forbes told The Post last week that he and friend Edward Fajardo, 31, of Denver, met Monge, who was talking to a homeless man at 2:30 a.m. a short distance from the nightclub.
Forbes says he offered her a ride home because she lived close to Deby’s Bakery, 2369 Trenton Way. She was sobbing because of a breakup with her boyfriend and asking him to take her to his home. He said he couldn’t and dropped his friend off before driving her home.
But on the way, he said, they stopped at about 3 a.m. at a Denver Conoco, 505 E. Speer Blvd., to get her a cigarette. The gas station was closed but she saw a nicely dressed, “baby faced” stranger with a lip piercing named “Dan.” He last saw her walking away with the man, he said.
“She walked off with no coercion, under her free will,” he said.
Lee said her daughter’s friends then brought his stepdaughter’s purse, keys and cell phone to him later that afternoon.
He then found a 6:46 p.m., April 1, text message that said: “Hey, this is Travis, the guy who gave you a ride last night,(smiley face, in the)- white creepy van. (D)id you get home?”
At about 7 p.m., as Lee was wondering where his stepdaughter might be and contemplating a call to police, a business owner near Deby’s Bakery saw Forbes drive to the back of the business, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Denver detectives interviewed the owner of Deby’s, who leases a work area to Forbes. She told them that when she went into the business on the morning of April 2, she found that her surveillance camera was turned off. She played it back and found that the last image captured on the videotape was of Forbes as he entered her office and turned the machine off at 7:22 p.m. on April 1. He was wearing latex cleaning gloves that went to his elbows. She said he wasn’t scheduled to work that day, court records say.
When police reviewed the tape they saw Forbes at 7:10 p.m. wheeling a cart to the back door of Deby’s with a large white cooler on top. The cooler appeared to be bound with black duct tape. He rolled the cooler inside Deby’s just 24 minutes after Forbes had texted Monge’s phone asking about her well-being, court documents say.
A man who works nearby told police he was leaving his store around 8:30 p.m. that night when he saw two or three men behind Deby’s burning something in a 55-gallon metal drum. He saw a white cargo van nearby, according to the court documents.
The next day, Saturday April 2, between 2 and 3 p.m., the owner of a neighboring business again saw Forbes parked behind the bakery. Forbes was cleaning the inside and outside of a large white cooler in the back of his van.
Later that day, Lee met Forbes and Fajardo at the Conoco station. Just before the meeting ended, Forbes told Lee: “I wish I knew more about what happened to your daughter but I told you everything I know.” He had tears in his eyes, his voice was unsteady and his whole body was shaking.
In an interview with The Post, he said he hadn’t realized how serious the incident was until he sensed Lee’s anxiety.
“I wish we could have taken that girl to detox,” he said. “I should not have left her. I could have tagged along.”
Fajardo later told police that on the night he and Forbes picked Monge up, Forbes had a black rubber mat covering the floor of the cargo area of the van. But when a Denver detective looked inside the van days later, there was a rug that looked and smelled new covering the back, which was very clean, a court report says.
On April 5, a Tuesday, Deby’s owner called police and reported that she was missing a white Igloo cooler she estimated was 30 inches long. Four days later, police went to Deby’s and seized an Igloo cooler that was 38 inches long, it says.
Denver police Lt. Matt Murray said the case is still being investigated as a missing person case and no one is considered a suspect.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
