Cortez “Tez” D’Angelo Dennis took a deal and pleaded guilty on Feb. 17 to pimping, a felony, according to Jefferson County court records. That deal dropped a second felony charge of human trafficking for sexual servitude from his case.

Dennis, 32, was sentenced to six years in the Colorado Department of Corrections for the pimping charge, court records show.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office after an undercover officer set up a meeting with two women through an ad on Secret Hostess, a commercial sex website. When the women showed up to the meeting at a house in the 1600 block of South Golden Road on Jan. 22, 2025, they were met by sheriff’s officials and victim advocates.

Both women identified Dennis as their pimp, sparking a months-long investigation, according to his arrest affidavit. One of the women told investigators she had been “recruited” into prostitution when she was 14 years old.

Investigators traced Dennis’ operations to a house in the 4500 block of South Jebel Court in Centennial, the address of which was linked to his Venmo account, according to the affidavit.

Jolene Dorothea Mathiesen, 45, was found unresponsive in her bunk at the jail in Golden shortly after 4:15 a.m. Wednesday, according to a .

Deputies and medical staff at the jail started CPR and administered Narcan, but she was declared dead at 4:56 a.m., the release stated.

Mathiesen was arrested Monday by the Lakewood Police Department on suspicion of a parole violation related to child abuse charges, sheriff’s officials said.

The First Judicial District Critical Incident Response Team is investigating the incident, and the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office will determine the woman’s cause of death, according to the sheriff’s office.

The 16-year-old attacker had the phrase “ER SENDS HIS REGARDS” carved into the sole of his shoe, according to a report released by the last week in a cache of 664 pages of witness accounts and deputies’ reports about the Sept. 10 shooting that seriously injured two students and left the attacker dead.

That carved message likely refers to Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old man who killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 and has become a prominent figure for the movement. The largely online group consists primarily of men who blame women and society for their lack of sexual or romantic attention.

Rodger was the first in the modern incel movement to shift from online talk to real-world violence, and has since in the misogynistic ideology, to the point that extremists use the phrase “Go ER” to refer to committing a mass shooting, experts said.

The message, along with other details released in the reports, confirm that the 16-year-old school shooter was part of a new wave of online extremism known as nihilistic violent extremist networks — groups that focus on using violence to destroy society — and that the radicalization was a core reason he carried out the shooting, said Matt Kriner, executive director of the nonprofit .

“This paints a more clear picture of him being embedded in the space as a motivating factor, rather than it being a corresponding factor,” Kriner said. “It goes from a sidecar element, this association, to this is the motorcycle he is driving. This is an essential part of who he is. He is clearly an accelerationist, clearly involved in inceldom and clearly in the nihilistic extremist network.”

The shooter also used a photo of Rodger as the profile picture on at least one of his social media accounts, where he espoused white supremacist and antisemitic views and showed a deep interest in violence and mass shootings.

He showed some “fringe fluidity” by picking and choosing from a variety of extremist ideologies, said Meredith Pruden, an assistant professor at who studies the incel movement. White supremacy and male supremacy ideologies are closely connected but distinct, she noted.

“Whether he put that on his shoe right before going to school that day or whether it had been on his shoe for some amount of time, he definitely had, at the very least, admiration for misogynist incel killers, which is important,” she said. “And we need to think about how male supremacism and violent misogyny are dangerous ideologies in their own right.”

The shooter, Desmond Holly, also carved the words “BYE!” and “SMILE” into the soles of his shoes, according to the Jeffco sheriff’s reports. The latter phrase could be related to a , “Never lose your smile,” which is usually accompanied by a half-skull image, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The newly released investigative reports offer some indication that the shooter’s radicalized views seeped into his offline life before the attack.

A friend told investigators that Desmond kept videos on his phone of school shootings set to music, that he made “dark” jokes and discussed neo-Nazis. The friend described the teenager as “pretty racist,” and that he’d paid a “creepy” amount of attention to one fellow student at the school, once secretly taking a photo of the student.

His sister also told investigators that Desmond used the term “femoid,” a derogatory slang term for women that is used within the incel community, and that he’d at one point dated a boy, but seemed to still be figuring out his sexuality. On the day of the attack, Desmond had cut marks up and down the insides of his arms that were in various stages of healing, the reports revealed.

The new reports make clear there were enough warning signs before the attack that adults should have been able to intervene, Kriner said. The FBI was alerted to the attacker’s online extremism two months before the attack, yet was unable to identify the teenager before he acted.

“In retrospect, this is a failure,” Kriner said. “The system failed to prevent an act of violence that could have otherwise been prevented. There was enough there to figure something out and divert this person from what they clearly identified to the world what they were intending to do.”

New details of attack

On the day of the attack, Desmond rode the bus to school and attended his morning classes without incident, the reports show.

The typically quiet, withdrawn student seemed more engaged in his first-period class than usual, English teacher Sarah Murer told investigators. He was talkative and high-energy. In third period, he was similarly engaged. He gave no indication of his plan, teacher Chad Mott said.

Desmond attended lunch, which typically starts around 12:10 p.m. A student who sat at the same table told investigators Desmond appeared “happy,” and held a conversation with another student instead of focusing on his phone. Desmond was at lunch for only a few minutes before he walked away, the student said.

He then apparently made his way to a boy’s bathroom in a hallway in the school known as G-Hall, carrying a backpack that contained an empty 50-round box of .38-caliber ammunition, a butterfly knife and a black T-shirt with the word “Wrath” written in red. He’d posted a photo on social media wearing a shirt with that design a few days before the attack; it is similar to what one of the killers wore in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Desmond wore a large knife on his belt and carried a black fanny pack filled with ammunition.

Evidence suggests Desmond fired a shot from a Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver into the bathroom ceiling before making his way farther into the school, according to the reports. The revolver — an heirloom that had been kept in a safe in his family’s home — was the only gun Desmond used during the attack, which began around 12:24 p.m. and lasted about nine minutes.

Witnesses saw Desmond emerge from the area near the bathroom and start shooting, according to the reports. He shot a 14-year-old boy on a stairway between the school’s floors. The boy, who has not been publicly identified, was shot twice and fled up the stairs, into and out of the school’s library, and eventually ran out of the school to the Wulf Recreation Center. Teachers and center staff there put the boy on a conference room table and applied pressure to his wounds.

Seventy-three students took shelter in the recreation center, mathematics teacher Alison Meyers told investigators. Other students hid in locked classrooms, ran outside or holed up in homes in the neighborhoods that bordered the school.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office redacted the shooter’s precise movements through the school from a report that detailed his path and has consistently declined to make public the chronology of the attack, so Desmond’s exact route during the shooting remains unclear.

Witnesses, however, described several key moments.

Soon after the lockdown alarm blared through the school, a group of teachers in a teacher’s lounge peered out into the hallway and spotted a student near the library. They urged the boy to take cover in a classroom, and he jogged toward them with his hand in either his pocket or a fanny pack. One of the teachers asked the student what was in his hand, and the student — Desmond — pulled out a gun and shot at them, three witnesses told investigators. The teachers retreated, some taking cover in the room. At least one ran through the school warning of a shooter.

The teenager also at one point approached the room where the Gay-Straight Alliance club met — also in G-Hall — shouted a homophobic slur at the students there and fired at them, two witnesses told investigators.

Desmond eventually exited the school and was locked out. He approached the exterior door for the school’s band room — Door #26 — and peered through the door’s window. Witnesses in the band room said he smiled and waved and greeted one student by name before he fired through the door’s window, then hit the glass with the gun, thrusting the weapon through the broken pane.

Investigators later found five spent casings near the door, and a trail of blood outside the school building that began at the band room’s door, trailed around the north side of the school’s auditorium, went up stairs to the double doors of the auditorium then back down, then around and up stairs to another exterior door labeled #16, and back down, the reports showed.

A few minutes after the attack began, a witness saw Desmond walking down stairs from the outdoor track to the soccer field. He sat on the stairs for a moment before getting up and walking “casually” across the soccer field, Betty Grosbach, who lives nearby, told investigators. She saw the teenager was carrying a handgun and fled as he walked toward South Olive Road.

There, Desmond encountered Matthew Silverstone, an 18-year-old student who ran from the school’s main hallway, where he’d been eating lunch, with a large group of students when the shots began. Silverstone ran to the intersection of South Olive and Buffalo Park roads, then stopped and waited.

Desmond shot Silverstone twice at that intersection as deputies closed in. A deputy and security guard held Desmond at gunpoint and ordered him to drop his weapon. The teenager said that he would, then lifted the gun and shot himself in the head, according to the reports.

Silverstone’s mother, Paige Silverstone, received a phone call from her son’s phone, but he didn’t speak. She stayed on the line for nearly an hour as she heard other people say phrases like “You’re OK,” “Breathe” and “He’s actually got two.” She heard what sounded like an ambulance, but she wasn’t sure whether it was her son who was injured or someone else. She rushed to the reunification center and learned there that her son was in critical condition.

Silverstone and the 14-year-old boy both survived the attack. Desmond died from his self-inflicted injury.

Transparency and prevention

The 664 pages of reports released by the sheriff’s department largely include first-person accounts of the shooting. Officials have chosen not to release particulars of the shooter’s movement through the school, surveillance video of the attack, records made by the shooter, some crime scene photos and records from juvenile victims’ phones, the agency wrote in a February letter.

The sheriff’s office opted to withhold details of the shooter’s path — including both surveillance video and a written description of his movements — out of concern that the details might inspire other school shooters or allow the event to be re-enacted, spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said in an email.

She noted that the sheriff’s office learned lessons in the wake of the shooting at Columbine, which continues to inspire violence nearly three decades later.

“Our hard-won understanding of the importance in being deliberate about the information we release has included expert lessons that certain details can unintentionally memorialize a shooter,” Kelley said in an email.

The decision highlights the near-complete discretion law enforcement agencies have to withhold records from the public in criminal matters.

The process, governed by the , requires law enforcement officials to balance various interests when deciding whether to release a record — including public interest, privacy concerns and investigative value, among other factors.

As long as officials explain their reasoning, they have broad discretion to act as they see fit, and their decisions are very difficult to challenge, said Jeff Roberts, executive director of the .

“Essentially, it is not reviewable,” he said, noting that the process for criminal records is different than records kept by other public entities, which are governed by the . That law mandates records be released unless particular exemptions apply.

There’s a real danger that details of an attack could feed online radicalized communities, Kriner said.

“That does come up quite a bit, the hyper-detail-oriented review of attackers’ physical movement, the way they did things, it absolutely feeds into a radicalization structure in those communities,” he said. “It can also help them to consider how to do their own target.”

But understanding the details of an attack can also be critical to preventing future attacks, he said, and it is difficult for communities to challenge law enforcement or school officials’ actions and hold them accountable when investigators withhold information. One of the Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies showed up to the attack while drunk, and that information did not become public for months.

The sheriff’s office also characterized the shooter’s parents as uncooperative during the probe, but the released records show the couple answered investigators’ questions about Desmond.

“I’m pleased to see that the sheriff’s office is finally being transparent, and that transparency is illustrating that we were transparent all along,” the family’s attorney, Doug Richards, said Thursday. He declined further comment.

Local law enforcement might also fail to recognize the importance of particular details that, if released, would shift researchers’ understanding of the attack and improve broader prevention efforts, Kriner said.

“There is danger on both sides of this,” he said. “Having the detailed movements like that does provide a kind of blueprint for others to follow or fixate on, but it also means people might not be able to integrate the understanding — like, yeah, maybe there is something about bathrooms that opens up a risk space we should evaluate, or something about how he is moving around the school ahead of time that should have been considered. Like, can you walk us through how an individual was able to carry around a firearm until lunch and then decide to use it? What does that accountability space look like, if (communities) don’t have that information?”

He noted that the response to the Evergreen attack has been “muted” in online extremist forums, and he hasn’t seen the same kind of positive reaction to the Evergreen shooting as other mass-violence attacks.

Denver Post staff writer Katie Langford contributed to this report. 

The crash happened at 9:19 a.m. when a red Toyota SUV headed westbound on the bridge over Ken Caryl Avenue drifted to the left, went off the road and hit a guardrail, state officials said in a news release.

The driver, a 31-year-old man, and a 30-year-old woman and a 2-year-old boy were taken to the hospital after crash, and the man was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to the state patrol. The woman had non-life-threatening injuries and the toddler was not injured.

Colorado State Patrol officials initially said the woman had serious injuries and that the toddler was 3 years old and had minor injuries.

The group was traveling back to New Mexico at the time of the crash, state officials said.

The man’s father, Mark Watkins, identified them as Stuart Alexander Watkins, Halli Watkins and their son Ryker Watkins of Farmington, New Mexico.

The family was coming home from a vacation when the crash happened, Mark Watkins said.

Westbound C-470 was closed at the West Ken Caryl Avenue exit for two hours after the crash and

The state patrol’s vehicular crimes unit is investigating the crash.

Initial investigation shows a motorcycle and a pickup truck collided on the highway near milepost 4 in the northbound lane of the highway, according to a release from the state patrol. Troopers responded at about 3:48 p.m., and the motorcyclist, a 55-year-old man, was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The northbound lane was closed between 64th and 82nd avenues, but it had reopened as of 5:45 p.m.

Drivers should avoid the area, officials said. The Colorado State Patrol is investigating the crash. Anyone with information about the crash who has not spoken to an investigator should call Colorado State Patrol dispatch at 303-239-4501 and reference 1A261161. Witnesses should be prepared to leave their contact information for a call back at a later time.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office announced Thursday that the investigation started after an anonymous tip alleged that 25-year-old Hunter Covelli was selling large quantities of cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and LSD in Wheat Ridge.

The drug task force began an investigation and ultimately arranged several purchases between Covelli and an undercover detective, law enforcement said in a press release.

In January, police say a search warrant on Covelli’s home led to the seizure of the following:

• 60 lbs. crystalline MDMA
• 11,000 2CB pills
• 100 lbs. psychedelic mushrooms
• 55 grams ketamine
• 31,000 MDMA pills
• 40 grams cocaine
• 60,000 LSD tablets
• 8 firearms
• 18 LSD liquid vials
• 1 pill press
• 13,000 MDA pills

Investigators tracked Covelli to Walworth County, Wisconsin, where he turned himself in Wednesday, according to the release.

The sheriff’s office said Covelli is being held on 35 counts, including nine level one drug felonies, seven level two drug felonies and nine level three drug felonies for possession with intent to distribute.

Additionally, he faces eight charges of illegal possession of a weapon and two misdemeanors for unlawful possession of a controlled substance. Covelli will be extradited back to Jefferson County for court proceedings.

The West Metro Drug Task Force is a multi-agency effort that brings together investigators from Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Golden, Lakewood and Wheat Ridge Police Departments.

The task force focuses on reducing the presence of illegal drugs within the community by investigating drug trafficking organizations, distribution networks, and illegal marijuana operations, with an emphasis on identifying and sanctioning those responsible for supplying controlled substances.

The student hid the knife, which was taken from their home kitchen, in their backpack and attended the targeted teacher’s class Tuesday morning, the .

“The student did not act on the plan and instead went to the school office with the backpack, asked to speak with a counselor, and disclosed what they had intended to do,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.

Staff at the school near Littleton confiscated the knife and notified a school resource officer, and the student was arrested on suspicion of unlawful carrying of a weapon on school grounds and booked into the Marvin W. Foote Youth Services Center in Centennial.

Prosecutors may file additional charges in the case, the sheriff’s office said.

The student is set to appear in court on Wednesday.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

Joshua Young, 47, and Corinne Wallen, 45, had been traveling across the country and had no known connections to Colorado, the said Wednesday.

A passerby noticed a blue Toyota RAV4 had been parked along Colorado 103 at mile 30, close to the Clear Creek County line, for at least two days and stopped to check on the vehicle on Tuesday, sheriff’s officials said.

Both Young and Wallen appear to have died from gunshot wounds to the head and a gun was found in the vehicle, along with “several notes written by the couple on the dashboard,” according to the sheriff’s office.

“We are trying to determine exactly what happened in the car,” spokesperson Jacki Kelley said Wednesday. “Forensic work will help us get to the answer to that question.”

Sheriff’s officials said there was no threat to the public.

The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office is conducting the autopsies and will determine the cause and manner of death.

The highway was closed at Johnson Road near Colorado 470, according to the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Traffic Alert. Highway 6 is closed in all directions at Johnson St. due to a traffic accident involving a cement truck and a box truck—causing a hazmat spill. Please choose an alternative route due to this lengthy road closure.

— Jeffco Sheriff (@jeffcosheriffco)

The crash caused a hazardous materials spill and closed the highway for over two hours, sheriff’s officials said.

This is a developing story.

The girl, 14, was last seen Friday in the 6500 block of South Balsam Court in Littleton, .

She was found safe Sunday afternoon, according to a from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

related_articles location=”right” show_article_date=”false” article_type=”automatic-primary-section”]