Jorge Trujillo, 20, pleaded guilty to killing 18-year-old Jose Angel Hernandez, who police found shot to death in the driver’s seat of an SUV stopped in the middle of the road in Greenwood Village in the early hours of April 27, 2024.

Greenwood Village Police Department investigators said the men had been arguing while driving with two other people in the SUV when Hernandez pulled over and everyone but Hernandez got out of the vehicle to cool down. Trujillo then started shooting Hernandez without warning and ran from the scene, witnesses told police.

Trujillo was sentenced to 22 years in prison with credit for 503 days served on Jan. 12, court records show. He was represented by the , which does not comment on criminal cases.

A Boulder County jury found Andres Eloy Martinez Perez, 33, guilty of first-degree murder on Thursday afternoon, according to online court records. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Martinez Perez was arrested in December 2024 after his girlfriend’s remains were found near Lyons that September. Gaudy Garcia Pina, 37, had been reported missing from Denver thatJuly.

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said the jury’s verdict and the life sentence are justice and that Pina “was very much loved by her family and friends.”

“They will have to live with this terrible loss for the rest of their lives,” Dougherty said.

“I hope today’s verdict and life sentence brings some answers and peace for the victim’s many loved ones,” he added.

Pina’s body was discovered in a field northwest of Lyons in September 2024, but investigators struggled to identify her. Sheriff’s officials originally said they couldn’t determine the body’s gender because it had been decomposed.

It����ap unclear how long the woman’s body was in the field before she was found.

The coroner’s office was able to estimate the woman’s age and physical characteristics during an autopsy, which investigators used to find a Denver Police Department missing person report that matched the case. Investigators contacted the family to get a DNA sample and used rapid DNA analysis to identify Pina, according to Boulder officials.

Pina was originally from Venezuela and had been living in Denver with Martinez Perez, who sheriff’s officials said is a Denver resident. She was reported missing on July 15, 2024.

Kiarra Jones, a former paraprofessional for the school district, was eligible for a probation-only sentence, . Prosecutors argued for time in the Colorado Department of Corrections, and Arapahoe County District Court Judge Laqunya Baker-McKay agreed, according to the office.

Jones pleaded guilty in January to 10 counts of third-degree assault of an at-risk child, a felony, and two counts of misdemeanor child abuse, court records show. The plea deal, which dropped a felony count of child abuse from her case, was called “bittersweet” by the victims’ disappointed parents.

The three children hurt by Jones were students at the Joshua School in Englewood, which serves students on the autism spectrum. The Littleton Public Schools transportation department is contracted to bus students to the private school.

Jones was fired on March 19, 2024, after school district officials reviewed the recording of the previous day’s bus ride. That video showed Jones punching and elbowing a nonverbal boy with severe autism, who had been sitting calmly before the unprovoked assault.

Other videos slowly surfaced, but were not made public, of Jones assaulting other children on the bus, attorney Ciara Anderson of Rathod Mohamedbhai LLC previously told The Denver Post.

Anderson and her colleague, Qusair Mohamedbhai, are two attorneys representing the families in a civil lawsuit filed against the school, its leadership team and a teacher.

Richelle Lowry, 44, never showed up to work after returning from a business trip in October 2023, according to a grand jury indictment from the 18th Judicial District. She was found dead in her Bennett home, 1120 Antelope Drive West, after her employer and soon-to-be-ex-husband each called in welfare checks to the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office.

When deputies entered, they found Richelle Lowry’s luggage in the dining room, with the checked baggage tags from her recent trip still attached, according to the indictment.

Ronald Elton Lowry, Richelle’s husband, was indicted on Feb. 24 on charges of first-degree murder, stalking and tampering with evidence, court records show. The 52-year-old also faces two violent crime sentence enhancers.

As the investigation into his wife’s death continued, the man called friends and family to tell them Richelle Lowry had killed herself, according to the indictment.

Richelle Lowry had two life insurance policies, one worth $300,000 and another worth $200,000, investigators said in the indictment. If her death had been ruled a suicide, Ronald Lowry stood to gain more than $1.33 million, Richelle Lowry’s estate lawyer told deputies, according to the indictment.

Ronald and Richelle Lowry both lived in the Bennett home until September 2023, when the husband moved out amid divorce proceedings, according to the indictment. The wife paid him a lump sum of $400,000 to purchase a new house in Wiggins.

Richelle Lowry repeatedly told family and friends in the months leading up to her death that she was afraid for her life and that, “if anything happened to her, Ronald would be responsible,” the indictment stated. She was “very adamant” that she would not kill herself, and her friends and family members who spoke to detectives all said they did not believe she committed suicide.

She told one friend that she was afraid her husband would take her out fishing and “make it look like a drowning,” or take her hunting, shoot her and “make it look like an accident,” according to the indictment. Richelle said she was “willing to give Ronald anything,” including the house they had shared, to have him out of her life.

On the day of her suspected murder — Oct. 25, 2023 — Richelle Lowry had picked up a prescription and dinner, which investigators discovered untouched, according to the indictment. She was also looking at houses, planning trips and was slated to be part of a wedding two weeks after her death.

Ronald Lowry’s phone was offline the evening before between 4:02 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., according to the indictment.

“The phone was either in airplane mode, restricting it from sending or receiving any signal, or it was turned off,” the indictment stated. “During the time that Ronald’s phone (was) off network, a male with a similar appearance to Ronald (was) captured on Richelle’s home surveillance system.”

The woman’s friends and neighbors told investigators that she had told them about overhearing a conversation in early October 2023 between her husband and his brother about the recent suicide of the brother’s wife, according to the indictment. The men were discussing the benefits the brother received after his wife’s death and “plotting,” Richelle Lowry told several friends, according to the indictment.

Ronald Lowry claimed not to know that Richelle Lowry had started seeing someone new as their divorce proceeded, the indictment stated. However, Arapahoe County investigators discovered several videos of the woman and her new partner had been taken on Ronald Lowry’s phone and later deleted. The videos were deleted on Oct. 25, 2023, just hours after he called the sheriff’s office dispatch to request a welfare check for Richelle, according to the indictment.

“Well you know they always say the truth will set you free,” Ronald Lowry allegedly wrote in a note discovered on his phone, which was included in the indictment. “…I’m so glad I’m FREE of that NARCISSIST, MANIPULATIVE, LYING, CHEATING PERSON. … Thank GOD I sucked as much money out of her as I could.”

Neighbors spotted Ronald Lowry walking around the home on several days in October 2023, including while Arapahoe County sheriff’s deputies were on scene investigating his wife’s death, according to the indictment. One neighbor said the man told him that Richelle Lowry had killed herself before pulling out his phone and offering proof of his whereabouts on specific days and at specific times.

Ronald Lowry had previously injured Richelle Lowry’s hand on a trip to Hawaii and had been seen throwing “scary” tantrums, Richelle Lowry’s associates told investigators, the indictment stated.

After his wife’s death, Ronald Lowry’s emotions seemed to come and go, Richelle Lowry’s sister told Arapahoe County investigators. He “would be completely fine one minute and then break down the next,” her testimony in the indictment stated.

He repeatedly made statements after her death, including “If she used a gun, I’m going to jail”, “I’m going down for this” and “I am going to jail”, the sister told investigators.

The Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office initially ruled Richelle Lowry’s manner of death as “undetermined,” but later classified it as a homicide and reissued the death certificate, according to the indictment.

Ronald Lowry is next scheduled to appear in Arapahoe County District Court on Thursday for a status conference, according to court records. As of Tuesday, he was being held without bail.

“This has affected my whole life,” Victoria Hursh said. “It����ap slowly eroded away at friendships and relationships … and that����ap why I need to do something. I don’t think it����ap fair to absorb all of it and just move on.”

Hursh filed a lawsuit against John Bardash in Arapahoe County District Court on Dec. 30, alleging that the optometrist drugged and assaulted her on a date in October 2021. The lawsuit, which Hursh pursued after the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges, seeks relief on claims of sexual battery, extreme and outrageous conduct and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“Dr. Bardash denies the allegations in the lawsuit,” , one of Bardash’s attorneys and a partner at , said in an emailed statement to The Denver Post. “The evidence that will be presented at trial in the civil case will show that Dr. Bardash is being falsely accused of wrongdoing.”

Milstein did not elaborate on what that evidence included.

Hursh met John Bardash of Aurora, an eye doctor practicing in Denver, when her coworker set the two up in 2021. Hursh and Bardash texted back and forth for a month, and then met for drinks before going back to the optometrist����ap apartment, where he made her another drink, according to the lawsuit.

She felt safe because she believed that, as a doctor, Bardash must have had background checks to obtain and maintain his license, Hursh said. The two had consensual sex, but it hurt, and Hursh told Bardash she didn’t want to do it again, according to the lawsuit. She decided to stay the night to sleep off the drinks, Hursh said.

“I woke up the next day and my body was covered in bruises and blood,” Hursh said. She found improvised restraints made from belts and neck ties on the bed and stairs, the lawsuit alleged.

Waking up was “horrifying” because her memory was blank and there was nothing to fill in the gaps, nothing to explain how she went from a perfectly normal date to bruised and bloody, she said. Hursh believes Bardash drugged her and repeatedly assaulted her while unconscious, according to the lawsuit.

“I didn’t quite register what was happening,” Hursh said. “I was very confused, really unsure of how one time of sex could lead to so much damage to my body, and it was clear from the condition of my body that it would be nothing I would ever consent to.”

Bardash told Hursh that they had sex several times throughout the night, including anal and outdoor sex, and admitted to tying her up, the civil lawsuit alleges.

Hursh stayed at Bardash’s house for several hours the morning after their date, trying to clear her head, she said. During that time, Bardash repeatedly tried to initiate sex, get her to drink more alcohol and wouldn’t let her leave until she kissed him, according to the lawsuit.

“I was really foggy for a couple of days,” Hursh said. “Some friends from work helped me piece things together as we talked it out and looked at my body.”

When she was still bleeding the next week, Hursh decided she needed emergency medical care, the lawsuit stated.

The Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges against Bardash in 2025 after reviewing the available evidence from the four-year-old incident, spokesperson Eric Ross said.

“We determined that the evidence did not meet the legal standard required to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury,” Ross said in a statement. “Ethically, prosecutors cannot move forward with a case when there is not a reasonable likelihood of a conviction at trial.”

In criminal cases, the evidence must prove the assault happened beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil lawsuits, the claims need only be more likely than not.

“I’m using a civil outlet to make my voice heard,” Hursh said. “I think that he’s dangerous, I think he’s confident in what he does and I think that the public should know that.”

Hursh waited to report the assault to law enforcement for more than a year, and initially reported it to the wrong agency — the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office. Investigators later learned that Bardash’s address fell within the Aurora Police Department����ap jurisdiction and directed Hursh there to make a new report, which was filed in March 2024, according to an affidavit from the police department.

No photos of her injuries were taken or provided to law enforcement, but Hursh did provide a medical exam and the names of several people who witnessed her injuries, according to the affidavit. Hursh said investigators told her that the lengthy time between the assault and the criminal case, and the lack of documented physical evidence, made pursuing a conviction difficult.

During the investigation, police discovered that Bardash had been arrested roughly 20 years earlier on assault charges in Broomfield and had previously been accused of sexually assaulting a patient, according to court records.

��DZ��ǰ������’s revoked Bardash’s optometry license in March 2004 after he broke into a sleeping woman’s apartment in Broomfield with a knife, according to Department of Regulatory Agencies records.

Bardash failed to appear for his hearing before the optometry board and lost the case by default, according to his license revocation. His actions violated the , the document stated.

Bardash pleaded guilty to second-degree assault causing injury with a deadly weapon in the Broomfield case on Sept. 3, 2004, according to court records. The plea agreement dismissed several other charges from his case, including burglary, and he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Bardash . He admitted to his previous felony conviction in the application and completed a three-year probationary period during which he was monitored by a board-approved optometrist.

Bardash fulfilled his probation requirements and regained his full license on Nov. 5, 2011, Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies spokesperson Sarah Werner said. As of Feb. 23, Bardash’s license was still active and no new disciplinary actions had been filed, according to .

Bardash was also charged with third-degree sexual assault in 2000 and third-degree sexual assault-false medical exam in 2001, both of which were later dismissed, according to Arapahoe County court records.

The dismissed charges stem from a 2000 incident, where Bardash was accused of rubbing his groin on a patient����ap knees at his office and telling her she had “big beautiful breasts,” police wrote in his 2004 Broomfield arrest affidavit.

Bardash’s attorneys wrote in a response to Hursh’s lawsuit that she failed to demonstrate a basis for relief and denied all allegations that Bardash drugged or assaulted her. His previous criminal history and the accusations of misconduct during an eye exam are “redundant, immaterial, impertinent or scandalous” and should be struck from the record, the response stated.

But those incidents are what made Hursh realize this “might not be a one-time situation” and gave her the confidence to report him, she said.

“I think that, with a background that shows violence, with somebody who works directly with the people every day and has patients in enclosed rooms, this is something people need to know,” Hursh said.

Vitalie Oprea, 47, took a deal and pleaded guilty on Monday to attempted first-degree murder after deliberation, according to Arapahoe County court records. He was sentenced on that day to 20 years in prison.

The plea deal dismissed 10 other felony charges, including a second count of attempted murder, six counts of attempted first-degree assault, two counts of motor vehicle theft and one count of criminal mischief, court records show. It also dropped seven misdemeanor charges, two sentence enhancers and six traffic offenses from Oprea’s case.

Oprea was driving near East Arapahoe Road and South Liverpool Street in Aurora on Feb. 19, 2023, when he saw two women he believed were lesbians standing on a street corner, according to a from the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Witnesses told police that Oprea began yelling at and making obscene gestures toward the women before making a U-turn and driving the wrong direction up Arapahoe Road to get closer to them, prosecutors said in the release. The women ran into a grassy area near Grandview High School to escape.

Oprea drove over a curb, onto a sidewalk and across that grassy area to pursue the women, witnesses told police. When the women got into a pickup truck, Oprea rammed it with his vehicle. He then exited his car, kicked the pickup and attempted to pull one of the women out, prosecutors said.

Oprea fled the scene and was arrested in Arvada later that day.

“I drove at the women because I saw them kissing and they were lesbians and I wanted to kill them,” Oprea told police while in custody, according to the news release.

Orlando Archuleta, 54, was arrested and charged with five felony counts of child sex exploitation, according to Arapahoe County court records. More than 15,000 child sex abuse images were found on his devices during a search, according to a from the Aurora Police Department.

Dzhamshed Yusupov, 38, faces seven counts of the same charge, court records show. Investigators found 69 images and more than 2,600 videos on his seized devices, police said.

As of Thursday, both men had posted a $10,000 bail, according to court records.

“Every image and every video represents the abuse of a real child,” Aurora Police Department Investigations Bureau Commander Marc Paolino stated in the release. “These are not files or data; they are innocent victims who deserve protection, dignity and justice.”

Aurora detectives received tips on both cases from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in early 2025, flagging online accounts sharing or possessing child sexual abuse material in Aurora, police said.

According to their arrest affidavits, officials with KiK, a messaging app, and Google submitted the tips after finding videos and photos of child sex abuse shared on those platforms.

The videos and photos showed infants, children and animals being abused and assaulted, detectives wrote in the affidavits.

Investigators traced the IP addresses of the accounts to Yusupov’s and Archuleta’s homes, police said.

Yusupov is next set to appear in Arapahoe County District Court on Feb. 25 for a preliminary hearing, according to court records. Archuleta will next appear on March 2.

The investigations both remain active, according to the Aurora Police Department. Anyone with any information can contact Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867.

Kiarra Jones, a former paraprofessional for the school district, shortly before 9 a.m. Monday to 10 counts of third-degree assault of an at-risk child, a felony, and two counts of misdemeanor child abuse, 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Eric Ross said. The deal dropped one charge of felony child abuse from her case.

The last-minute plea deal canceled a jury trial scheduled to begin Monday in Arapahoe County District Court, court records show.

Jessica Vestal, the mother of the boy being beaten by Jones in the video, said the plea deal didn’t come out of the blue, but she was still disappointed when it happened.

“The spiteful part of me was looking forward to a trial because that was all we had … to put her on display,” Vestal said. “She didn’t just hurt our kids, she actively partook in lying to me to make sure she could hurt them for as long as possible.”

Vestal said Jones would proactively text her about her son’s injuries, shifting the blame to other staff members or the child himself.

Brittany Yarbrough, another victim’s mother, called the plea deal “bittersweet.”

Yarbrough said she had viewed the trial as a chance to give her son a voice and was disappointed she wouldn’t have that opportunity. But, she added, she was grateful the plea deal meant Jones couldn’t appeal the ruling and drag out the case for even longer.

“This won’t ever be over for my son and for my family,” Yarbrough said.

“This defendant was placed in a position of trust with defenseless children, and she clearly abused that responsibility,” District Attorney Amy Padden said. “Her actions are inexcusable. This resolution allows the victims and their families to move forward without the trauma of a trial, while still ensuring accountability.”

Teachers at Joshua School in Englewood, where the three children hurt by Jones attended, reached out to Yarbrough after the video of Jones hitting Vestal’s son surfaced. They said the incident was similar to when Yarbrough’s son had broken his foot earlier that year and no one could figure out why.

The Littleton Public Schools transportation department is contracted to bus the students to the private school, which serves students on the autism spectrum.

One of the felony assault charges that Jones pleaded guilty to names Yarbrough’s son as a victim, according to the plea deal document.

Eight felony assault charges and one misdemeanor child abuse charge named Vestal’s son, according to the document. One felony assault charge and one misdemeanor child abuse charge named a third victim.

Each of the felony counts Jones pleaded guilty to carries a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison, Ross said.

If she receives the maximum sentence for each of the 10 assault charges during her March 18th sentencing hearing, Jones could spend 15 years in prison.

“As a mom, nothing would ever be good enough, but, realistically, that’s the best case scenario for this,” Vestal said. “There’s not a prison sentence in the world that would make me and my heart feel that it’s good enough.”

Jones’ sentencing date falls on the second anniversary of the last time she abused Vestal’s son, marking a full circle moment for the case, Vestal said. The report Vestal filed the following day kicked off the chain of events that led to the criminal case.

Littleton Public Schools fired Jones on March 19, 2024, of the previous day’s bus ride, according to the school district.

The video showed Jones elbowing the boy in the stomach, punching him in the head and slamming his face into the bus window. The boy was sitting calmly at the time of the unprovoked assault.

That video was the only one made public, but attorney Ciara Anderson of said the investigation uncovered days of video of Jones abusing the children on the bus.

Anderson and her colleague, Qusair Mohamedbhai, are two attorneys representing the families in the pending civil case against Jones.

“Her conduct was beyond criminal,” Anderson said. “It was cruel, it was chilling, it was inhumane.”

The civil case, which has not been filed as of Monday, according to online court records, will focus not only on Jones, but on who put her in that position and allowed the abuse to go on as long as it did, Anderson said.

Vestal and Yarbrough both said their sons were diagnosed with PTSD after the abuse was discovered.

Her son’s triggers are varied and difficult to guess, Vestal said. It ranges from music that played in the background during the abuse to a shirt he may have worn during one of the incidents.

“Trauma is a fickle (expletive),” Yarbrough said. “And it’s all compounded by the fact that he can’t tell me what he’s scared of. … he couldn’t tell me about the monster sitting next to him on the school bus for months and months and months.”

This is a developing story and may be updated.

The new system required many sex offenders to receive treatment in prison before they could be released — and then to continue receiving supervision once they got out. The new sentences would be open-ended, or “indeterminate,” lasting perhaps from two years at a minimum to a maximum of life — either in prison, for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t complete treatment, or on parole, for those who did.

Then-Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant praised the approach during the bill’s first committee hearing, saying it would provide treatment to sex offenders while ensuring that “the problem is going to be addressed and that that offender is not going to recidivate.”

Nearly 30 years later, as prison officials strain to hire staff and Colorado’s prisons are filling to their breaking point, the system has struggled to provide the treatment that it is, in principle, at its core.

Hundreds of inmates languish on a prison list, waiting for their turn to receive the treatment they must complete before they can be released. More than 160 of them are past their parole dates but remain incarcerated because of a yearslong shortage of therapists and resistance by state officials to allowing alternative methods of treatment. Some inmates have filed lawsuits challenging the delays, which in turn has seemingly become a tactic to move up the list.

“To me, this is a more fundamental fairness issue of, how on earth can we require people to do a program and then not deliver it — and then it����ap their problem and not ours?” said Laurie Rose Kepros, the director of sexual litigation for and a longtime advocate for sex offender sentencing reform.

Even as scores of inmates sit on a waitlist, nearly 2,000 people convicted of similar crimes have been released from state prisons over the last five years without having ever completed or received treatment, according to data provided by the Colorado Department of Corrections in response to a June records request.

Though they committed similar crimes as inmates who must be treated and are generally considered to be at higher risk of returning to prison, those offenders received a determinate sentence. That means their release date was certain and is not dependent upon receiving or completing treatment.

The result is a seemingly contradictory system: Treatment is effective and important enough to indefinitely stall some inmates’ release, while hundreds of others convicted of similar crimes are paroled, whether or not they’ve been seen by a therapist. The difference depends on what type of sentence is agreed to or levied by a judge. That, in turn, can depend on the experience of a defendant’s lawyer.

So chronically uncertain are some inmates’ release dates that several defense attorneys said they wouldn’t allow clients to plead guilty to indeterminate sentences.

“I wouldn’t disagree that the system does function to keep people who’ve committed sex offenses in (prison) for as long as possible. Whether it was intentionally designed that way or not — it doesn’t matter, it����ap what it does,” said Sarah Croog, a defense attorney and member of the state Sex Offender Management Board, which oversees standards for the prison-based treatment system.

“What it����ap intended to do is to lock up the most dangerous sexual offenders until they are safe to rejoin society, and to prevent them from being on the streets because they’re on some level too dangerous to be free,” she said. “That is not how it works in practicality.”

The Denver Post interviewed nearly two dozen defense lawyers, treatment experts, current and former prosecutors, victims and advocates, former inmates, and state officials for this story. The Post also reviewed more than 20 lawsuits filed by inmates challenging the treatment system, alongside hundreds of pages of reports filed by state officials about the system and attempts to address its shortcomings. Several current and former inmates who’ve struggled to access treatment declined to comment through their attorneys or would not speak on the record.

The Corrections Department declined interview requests by The Post, as did the management board’s leaders. In response to a list of written questions, Corrections spokeswoman Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia said the agency was charged with carrying out laws passed by the legislature and that people released without treatment would still be required to receive it “while under supervision in the community.”

Inmates sue, victims want clarity

In a class-action lawsuit filed last year, several inmates awaiting treatment alleged that the treatment waitlist would change suddenly and without explanation. One man told the inmates’ legal team that he’d moved from 678th on the list to 71st in the span of three weeks.

At times, an inmate’s ability to draft a competent lawsuit appeared to make the difference between receiving treatment and waiting, according to the class-action complaint and other legal challenges viewed by The Post. (In legal filings, Corrections officials have denied that lawsuits affected the waitlist.)

In a statement, the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault said victims wanted transparency and clarity, and to know when offenders would be released and under what conditions.

Determinate sentences — the ones with a certain release date — have frustrated some victims, too. In an interview, one victim told The Post that she was left “sick to my stomach” after the man who sexually assaulted her was released from prison last year without having received treatment.

He pleaded guilty in 2012 in Arapahoe County to kidnapping and sexual assault and received a determinate sentence, for which treatment wasn’t a prerequisite for release, though he was still likely referred to treatment.

“You can’t very well affect change in somebody if you don’t give them resources to try and change,” said the victim, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her identity. The Post is also not identifying the offender to protect the victim’s privacy.

“So clearly you just let a monster back out on the street with no recourse for his behavior,” she said, “except for having sat in a box for 10 years.”

Despite the treatment bottleneck, prosecutors and state officials have largely defended the system. It’s not perfect, but treatment is effective, most supporters and critics alike acknowledge.

“We’re certainly supportive of it and defend it and its existence as a policy in Colorado,” said Jessica Dotter, a legislative policy chief for the Colorado District Attorneys Council who focuses on special victims prosecution.

She said the backlog has improved and that most of the delays are among offenders serving short sentences because they’re immediately eligible for treatment; offenders enter the waitlist when they get within four years of their first parole date. Successful treatment lowers recidivism, research has shown, and Dotter said district attorneys have supported hiring more staff.

At the core of the problem is a shortage of those sex offender treatment professionals, Corrections Department data shows. More than 43% of jobs in the state’s treatment program — 26 out of 60 — were vacant as of early December. That significant shortage was still an , when more than half of the jobs were unfilled.

The department has also resisted efforts to provide treatment virtually, citing staffing and privacy concerns. Some inmates have sought to hire their own therapists, but the department has rejected those requests.

“The CDOC is committed to providing constitutionally adequate care and evidence-based treatment to the entire population,” Gonzalez-Garcia wrote. “We are actively working to mitigate our clinical staffing shortages so we can provide this treatment to all individuals as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Is state ‘unwilling to change’?

Research has shown that treatment — which includes months of therapy — is effective, and so has Michael Dougherty’s experience, the Boulder district attorney said. Colorado’s system “would and should be working,” he said, were it not for the treatment backlog.

“We just can’t accept that,” he said. “People won’t have a whole lot of sympathy for sex offenders, but everybody wants to see fairness in our justice system.”

The problems in this corner of Colorado’s justice system are not new. A 2016 audit found that Colorado’s sex offender treatment system spent as much as $44 million a year on more than 1,200 inmates who’d passed their parole dates but were still waiting on treatment. that, in 2013, inmates who did enter treatment were then fearful of being kicked out and restarting the process, causing some offenders to ” ‘appease the treatment provider’ instead of genuinely engaging in treatment.”

In 2024, said corrections officials were resistant to telehealth options because of privacy and staffing concerns. The parole board has long interpreted an ambiguous term in state law — that an inmate should “successfully progress” in treatment before release — to mean that in-prison treatment must be completely concluded.

Colorado’s approach to sex offender treatment is “notorious,” said Michael Miner, a Minnesota expert who has researched and provided treatment for sexual offenders. He has also worked in senior leadership positions with national treatment provider organizations. Treatment involves using psychotherapy to discern why offenders committed their crimes, while making “major” life changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again, he said.

It’s generally effective, Miner said, and has been shown to reduce recidivism.

But he questioned whether Colorado was providing the proper levels of treatment to lower-risk offenders. The 2016 audit report also criticized the department’s referrals, and the pending class-action lawsuit alleges that state officials have referred every inmate with a history of a sexual offense — amounting to 25% of the prison population — to sex offender treatment.

“The prison-based program has been a problem for a very long time,” Miner said. “It just doesn’t have the capacity that����ap necessary, given the laws that Colorado has passed about what you need to do to get out of prison. They’re unable, in some respects, to fix it because the capacity issue is related to the ability to staff, and the state seems unwilling to change the way they choose who needs to be treated and who doesn’t.”

Efforts to increase staffing have shown some success, as the department has offered hiring incentives and undertaken more national recruiting efforts.

But the backlog continues: As of June, 744 people were on the prison department’s “global referral list” awaiting treatment, according to data obtained in a public records request. Of those, 275 were serving indeterminate sentences, for which completing treatment was the only way to be paroled. One hundred sixty-nine of those inmates were past their parole eligibility dates, by an average of nearly a year and a half.

In other words, they’d served 18 months more than they otherwise would have, had they been given access to treatment sooner.

Dotter, from the Colorado District Attorneys Council, said those statistics have improved over the past decade and that officials have worked to improve staffing to reduce the backlog. But she said providers are difficult to hire. There are shortages of mental health practitioners across the country, and that shortage becomes more acute for therapists willing to treat sex offenders in rural prisons.

Recent hiring efforts have not solved the problem, to the frustration of budget-minded legislators.

“What do we do? It’s either something where we haven’t thrown enough money at it — or no matter how much money we throw at it, there’s no solution here,” Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat on the Joint Budget Committee, said earlier this month about overall staff vacancies within prisons, including within sexual offender treatment.

Budget analyst Justin Brakke replied that the Corrections Department had provided no “roadmap” to fix sex offender treatment in the past.

“People have to want to fix it in order to give you a roadmap,” he said.

Agency spokeswoman Gonzalez-Garcia said the Corrections Department does not “create laws.”

“Our department is committed to working with the legislature, the (Sex Offender Management Board), and our public safety partners to provide data and operational expertise on any proposed reforms,” she wrote.

Calls for reform, judicial intervention

Attorneys and advocates critical of the system have argued that the state needs to look at the underlying sentencing laws, not building out the stable of providers that implements them.

Stan Garnett, a defense attorney and former Boulder district attorney, said the legislature should “roll up its sleeves” and find a solution. When someone is sentenced to an indeterminate term, he said, no one — not the offender, not their victim, not the prison system — knows exactly when they’ll get released.

“The fact that we have hundreds of these people that are just freaking lingering in prisons is just horrific in a civilized society,” Garnett said.

Lawmakers have been hesitant to take on the issue.

that would have eliminated indeterminate sentences and replaced them with firm, determinate prison terms was killed in its first committee. (Miner testified in favor of it.) Quieter discussions about launching a fiscal study of the system were also shelved earlier this year.

The issue is politically toxic: Few lawmakers want to weigh in on sex offender treatment or reforming those offenders’ sentencing terms. Dougherty called it a political “third rail.”

“Nobody wants to touch it,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who tried to build support for the study bill earlier this year.

In the absence of legislative action, three factors now threaten to exacerbate the backlog.

First, that would require that indeterminate sentences be given to people who sexually abuse children. Legislators have defeated efforts to enact similar penalties in recent years, in part over concerns about the treatment backlog.

Second, the state’s prisons are nearly full. that the male prison population was expected to exceed the state’s capacity in the next fiscal year.

Colorado men’s prisons will run out space in next fiscal year, state warns

The final factor is the class-action lawsuit, brought by more than a dozen inmates, to challenge the sentencing system. It has progressed for nearly 18 months, despite the state's attempt to dismiss it. While other smaller lawsuits have failed or been dismissed because the inmate involved was moved into treatment, the class-action case presents a more concrete challenge to the sentencing system.

George Brauchler, the district attorney for the Castle Rock-based 23rd Judicial District and a supporter of the system, said he was not excited by the idea of judicial intervention.

"I'm a big fan of judges never, ever — never — making law or policy," he said.

A prominent conservative critic of Colorado's Democratic leaders, Brauchler said he was equally disinclined to trust the legislature to fix the problem; he alleged that lawmakers would just be more lenient. He and Danielle Jaramillo, his deputy district attorney who prosecutes sex offenses, both called for longer sentences and questioned whether treatment was effective at all.

In the absence of sentences that are "10 times" as long as current guidelines, Jaramillo said, the option of an indeterminate sentence is still preferable.

"An indeterminate sentence at least puts someone in front of a parole board," she said.

Kepros, the public defender, said calls for reform wouldn't necessarily mean lighter sentences. But reform would bring clarity and fairness, she and others argued.

"I understand people who don't care that someone who’s committed a sex offense is in prison longer, just because of the nature of the crime," she said. "But I don't think that����ap a position that is constitutional or is fair.

"It flies in the face of how our entire court system is supposed to work, where a judge imposes a sentence, and you're not supposed to serve a much longer sentence (just) because nobody bothers to give you the tools to serve the sentence you were given."

Jorge Trujillo, also an Aurora resident, was arrested in August 2024, four months after police say he shot and killed 18-year-old Jose Angel Hernandez near East Union Avenue and South Yosemite Street  early April 27, 2024.

Hernandez was found dead in an SUV that was stopped in the middle of the road with all the doors open and lights on, according to the

Investigators determined that Trujillo, Hernandez and two others met up the night before to sell drugs at a Denver club and started arguing after leaving the club.

The group pulled over as the argument got more heated, and witnesses said Trujillo started shooting Hernandez without warning before running from the scene.

Hernandez is set to be sentenced in Arapahoe County District Court on Jan. 12, court records show.