This story originally ran in The Denver Post on Nov. 21, 1997.
An apparent burglary — a possible ruse to ambush and kill a Denver police officer — set off a massive manhunt and a subsequent carjacking attempt Thursday, escalating tensions between police and skinheads.
As children tried to get to school, west Denver and nearby Lakewood were filled with police — clad in black uniforms, wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, and armed with rifles and shotguns — going door to door, searching for a man who had fired on a patrol officer.
Helicopters circled above, including a military Huey, and bloodhounds and German shepherds tried to pick up the gunman’s track. Eventually, the dogs were tracking two additional suspects wanted in connection with the carjacking and suspected of assisting the man who had fired at the police officer.
The officer was not injured. All three suspects remained on the loose Thursday night.
“I’m p- off,” Mayor Wellington Webb told listeners of Mike Rosen’s KOA radio show Thursday morning.
The current outbreak of violence — which began with last week’s fatal shooting of a Denver police officer — represents “hideous, cowardly, scum-faced” acts that need to be addressed immediately, Webb said.
“We are not going to tolerate this kind of behavior in Denver, Colorado,” he said.
Gov. Roy Romer was equally distressed.
“We as a community have to come together and absolutely reject any kind of activity that leads to hate crimes,” he said.
The high-stakes drama played out about 32 hours after Oumar Dia, a 38-year-old refugee from West Africa, was murdered and Good Samaritan Jeannie VanVelkinburg was paralyzed in a shooting at a Downtown Denver bus stop. Arrested as a suspect in the murder was Nathan Thill, 19.
A second suspect turned himself in to Denver police Thursday night. Jeremiah Barnum, 23, was being held for investigation of first-degree murder, said Sgt. Jon Priest of the Denver police homicide unit. He said Barnum called police headquarters about 9 p.m. and told officers he wanted to surrender and where to find him.
“We went and picked him up,” the sergeant said.
Priest said investigators aren’t seeking anyone else in Dia’s death.
Thursday’s events started shortly before 7 a.m. when police received a 911 call of a prowler in the 1000 block of Ames Street. Officer Gregory Vacca arrived at the apartment complex, saw a door ajar and heard rustling in a nearby bush, police said.
“As he gets to the other side of the bush, two shots are fired,” said Sgt. Dennis Cribari.
When the gunman first opened fire, he was within 2 feet of the officer, police said.
Vacca took cover, and the gunman ran. When the officer pursued him, shots were exchanged between the two.
Police described the gunman as a white man in his early 20s with “very short” blond hair. Vacca was not hit, and the suspect escaped on foot, setting off an avalanche of police pouring into the area.
The city already was on edge because of the shooting death of police officer Bruce Vander Jagt last week; Tuesday night’s double shooting of Dia, who died, and VanVelkinburg, who came to his aid and is paralyzed; and the dumping of a pig inscribed with Vander Jagt’s name at his former station early Wednesday.
Thursday’s apparent ambush escalated tensions.
“This act is so repugnant, so repugnant … delivering a dead pig with officer Vander Jagt’s name on it,” Romer said. “That’s a sick mind that does that, absolutely sick. We need to make sure we don’t allow these people to terrorize us.”
About 200 officers — representing about 12 percent of the combined Denver and Lakewood police forces — searched in and around the Lakewood Dry Gulch Trail — a mix of open land, auto salvage yards and horse pastures — west of Sheridan Boulevard between West 10th and West 13th avenues.
“He (the suspect) ran through my backyard from the side of my house,” said Victor Murrow, who lives off West 10th Avenue and Chase Street.
As helicopters, dogs and officers in cars and on foot searched for the suspect, nearby schools were locked down and streets sealed off.
Two National Guard helicopters were called to the area. One equipped with an infrared device scanned rusting car shells in the junkyards below in an effort to detect the suspect’s body heat radiating from a hiding spot.
The copters used the baseball field at nearby Mountair Park as a staging area.
As the search progressed, it headed northwest.
Just before noon, two armed men attempted to hijack a pickup truck in the 1500 block of Depew Street. Randy Hargrave, 43, was making a U-turn when he was confronted.
“The (initial) suspect approached asking for a ride,” said Lakewood police Sgt. Kevin Paletta.
When Hargrave told the man he wouldn’t give him a ride, the man pulled back his jacket, revealing a gun, Paletta said.
“I mashed on the gas, stepped on the gas to get out of there,” Hargrave said.
As he peeled out, Hargrave hit a second suspect, who also had a weapon.
One of the two would-be carjackers matched the description of the man who fired at Vacca, police said.
Hargrave said the other looked like Steven Duprey, 29, an at-large suspect from the Buffalo Creek burglary last week. Officer Vander Jagt, 47, was gunned down by 25-year-old Matthaus Jaehnig in a southeast Denver apartment complex that burglary.
A woman was with the two men who tried to hijack the pickup Thursday, Hargrave said.
From Depew Street, the search continued northwest. Dozens of officers in patrol cars and on foot, armed with rifles and led by a bloodhound, searched an apartment complex, Plaza Del Lago, near West 20th Avenue and Lamar Street. Residents watched out windows and from balconies. The dog circled the complex and wound up back at its starting point. Television and radio news helicopters circled above.
Police stopped and questioned several men who fit the description of Thursday’s triggerman, but none of them turned out to be the gunman.
The manhunt did not turn up the suspects in the carjacking attempt, either.
It wasn’t for lack of effort.
Early in the afternoon, police cruisers rushed down West 10th Avenue about 2 miles east of Sheridan Boulevard when a helicopter spotted a man walking in a ravine. False alarm.
About 2:20 p.m., Lakewood police with guns drawn surrounded a house in the 1400 block of Harlan Street. That lead didn’t pan out.
The recent string of violent, high-profile events has police in a heightened state of awareness.
“Naturally, they are a little uneasy right now,” said Denver police spokesman John Wyckoff.
Webb consoled Vander Jagt’s widow, Anna Marie, at Denver Health Medical Center last week. He was there again Wednesday night, to support VanVelkinburg, 36, the woman who was shot when she tried to help murder victim Dia at the Downtown bus stop.
Thursday morning, the mayor walked to the edge of the ravine where police were searching for the suspect who fired at Vacca.
Webb said he isn’t yet convinced that Denver is up against a skinhead epidemic.
“We don’t know at present if this is a few knuckleheads or an organized presence,” Webb said.
Still, Denverites should band together during this difficult period, he said.
“Everybody should be concerned. This is a values issue for our community. Good people have to stand up,” Webb said. “We are not going to tolerate lawlessness.”
Meanwhile, three young “skinheads” staked out KWGN Channel 2, Thursday night until Greenwood Village police ran them off. A news crew spotted the three sitting in a car in a parking lot next to the television station just before the 9 o’clock news broadcast.
Police were called and responded “very quickly,” a station employee said. No threats were made, and no damage was caused, but the trio did have “knives and bats and stuff like that.”
Denver Post staff writer Jim Kirksey contributed to this report.
