People have been stopping by for months now, dropping off items they believe Dietrick might need.
Linda Mitchell has collected it all and given each person heartfelt thanks. They wanted to make sure that Dietrick, the nephew she raised as a son, would want for nothing when he finally arrived home from prison.
Dietrick Mitchell was a 16-year-old boy when he entered adult prison in August 1992, convicted of first-degree murder in the hit-and-run death of 17-year-old Danny Goetsch.
He was drunk when he ran over Goetsch, who was walking in the gutter along East 13th Avenue. Prosecutors in those frightful Summer of Violence days portrayed Dietrick as a rampaging gang member, which he was not.
Dietrick Mitchell got life. No parole.
His aunt fought tirelessly from that day to get Dietrick’s sentence reduced, pleading with multiple governors that her nephew’s sentence was unjust.
And then in January, her prayer was answered. Then-Gov. Bill Ritter commuted Dietrick’s sentence to 32 years.
With her nephew having already served nearly 20 years, Linda Mitchell that night held hope that, with good-time credits and a sympathetic parole board, Dietrick would finally be released.
She drove through the night to the prison after learning of the governor’s decision. He would be getting out, she told Dietrick, her face covered with tears.
She arrived at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway early April 14. She did not want to risk missing that day’s parole hearing for Dietrick.
She was met by Carrie Thompson of the state Public Defenders Office, who had represented Dietrick two decades earlier.
Thompson had prepared a three-page letter that, among other things, outlined what had gone into Ritter’s decision.
Linda Mitchell told the board she was fully prepared to house and financially support Dietrick, and that jobs working with teen support groups had been arranged.
At the very least, she implored the board, release him to a community corrections facility in Denver to ease his transition back into society.
She learned of the board’s decision the next morning. Dietrick had been denied parole.
“I thought they would parole him, I really did,” Linda Mitchell said in an interview. “To me, because the governor got involved and said to give this kid a second chance, I thought it might happen.”
The governor, she said, had seen the unfairness of Dietrick’s sentencing, that he had not used a gun, that no one in even the worst hit-and-run fatality had ever been sentenced to life in prison.
“Nobody wants to say enough is enough,” she said.
Katherine Sanguinetti, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said the governor’s decision simply moved up Dietrick’s parole eligibility date by several years.
It did not mean, she said, that the parole board was obliged to release him.
A new parole hearing, she said, will be scheduled for one to five years from now.
Dietrick, now 36, never believed the board would set him free, Linda Mitchell said. He grew up in prison, she explained. He knows that time is not his to control.
So she has bagged, boxed and put away the items that have arrived since January — coats, underwear, slacks and shirts. It breaks her heart to look at them now, she said.
“I’m disappointed, but I haven’t given up hope,” she said. “There has got to be more options. The Lord will help me find them.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
