We don’t know a lot about Matthew Goldberg and Robert Guerrero.
We know they’re young, just 23 and 25.
We know they’re provocative, angry, and apparently unrepentant.
And we know they will likely never make a sacrifice on behalf of this community even remotely equal to those freely given by the men and women whom the pair dishonored Saturday by allegedly dumping red paint over a monument dedicated to Denver’s fallen police.
They’ll never chase a meth-baked white supremacist toting a semi-automatic rifle into a housing complex in southeast Denver and then be ambushed by the maniac in a hail of gunfire. But that’s what Officer Bruce L. VanderJagt did in November 1997 before he perished.
His name is etched on that monument.
They’ll never rush into a melee at a City Park jazz concert in order to keep the peace and take a bullet in the way Officer Celena Hollis did in 2012.
Her name is on that monument.
They’ll never be shot in the face at point-blank range while arresting two men who’d hijacked and robbed a shuttle at Stapleton Airport, spend more than a month in a coma, and then suffer the next 20-plus years with paralysis and brain trauma before dying in 2011, as Officer David Roberts did.
A friend of mine tells me he had lunch with Roberts a couple of times some years ago and that he “had great difficulty speaking, walking, and doing anything else that required motor skills.” But even so, “he was a truly funny and happy man, with no bitterness whatsoever.”
Roberts’ name is on that monument.
Our two self-righteous protesters against police will never know how it feels to pursue a car thief down an alley and have him turn and start shooting at you, and then finish you off casually, after you’re flat on the ground, with a couple of shots to your head.
“How does this feel? How do you like it?” the murderer said to Officer Shawn Leinen as he executed the cop at close range in 1995.
Leinen is remembered on that memorial, too.
“This case is about the purchasing of 13 minutes of freedom with the life of Denver police officer Shawn Leinen,” then District Attorney Rill Ritter would tell the killer’s jury. Thirteen minutes is how long he remained free after Leinen’s death.
Our paint-splattering duo will never race from a restaurant after seeing two armed robbers burst out of a nearby business, only to be ambushed by one who’d gone through an open gate. That’s how Officer Patrick Joseph Pollock died in 1986.
Officer James Wier was killed by a shotgun blast in 1987 while responding to a domestic violence call.
Officer Kathleen Garcia was ambushed in her patrol car in 1981 by someone who was never caught.
Detective Donald Lee DeBruno was shot in the chest in 1975 while arresting a man wanted in a shooting in Toronto, and who had killed officers elsewhere.
The list goes on. online lists 68 line-of-duty deaths in Denver going back more than a century. Fifty of the officers were killed by hostile gunfire.
If Goldberg and Guerrero think that some cops sometimes use too much force, or are too quick to shoot, fine. I wouldn’t argue. But they have no interest in such distinctions. They prefer a wholesale smear of police, including those whose lives truly exemplified public service.
No, we don’t know much about Goldberg and Guerrero, except that their idea of heroics is evidently an act of theatrical vandalism. Come to think of it, that’s probably enough.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @vcarrollDP
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