The City Council drafted the proposal in light of a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that prohibits cities from handing down sentences that are harsher than the state’s penalties for the same offense. But , brought by the council’s three most progressive lawmakers, goes beyond what the ruling mandates by also changing the sentences for low-level, municipal-only crimes in an effort to decriminalize what they call “crimes of poverty.”

“When we just put people on a conveyor belt through the jail because they are poor, because they are unhoused, because they are committing crimes of desperation, that does not solve those issues. It, in fact, makes them worse — and it is a massive waste of public resources,” said Councilwoman Sarah Parady, one of the bill’s sponsors, during the first full council vote last week.

that don’t have a counterpart in state law include the failure to leash a dog, violating curfew, smoking indoors, disturbances of the peace and littering. The proposed changes would reduce them to a maximum penalty of 10 days in jail and a fine of $300, down from the 300 days in jail or $999 fine that are the current maximums for most municipal crimes.

The proposal has gone through more than a dozen iterations as the sponsors have worked with Mayor Mike Johnston’s office to find compromises over how to reduce some of those sentences without risking public safety.

In a letter to the council, Johnston said he was no longer opposed to the legislation after the most recent round of changes.

“As a result of the dialogue between my office and the ordinance’s sponsors, we were able to resolve every single concern we had with the legislation,” Johnston wrote in the June 24 letter.

His administration called out specific municipal-only crimes that officials prioritized for keeping a more severe sentence, including some that often intersect with domestic violence, like threats to property and flourishing a weapon.

Other local crimes, such as indecent exposure and wrongs to minors, will also remain in a higher sentencing tier.

What the proposed changes would do

The proposed ordinance — which is set to have its final vote Monday unless a majority of the council votes to postpone it — would lay out a new 5-tiered sentencing structure and align the city’s maximum punishments with state statutes for similar offenses.

The new municipal sentencing scheme would break down offenses in five buckets:

• Class 1, which deals with the most serious offenses, such as assault or domestic violence, would stay the same. Those penalties cannot exceed 364 days in jail and a $999 fine.
• Class 2 would now equate to a Class 1 misdemeanor offense under state law. These crimes — such as threats, trespassing and harassment — would be punishable by up to 300 days in jail and a $999 fine.
• Class 3, which includes prostitution, resisting arrest and shoplifting, would line up with Class 2 misdemeanor offenses under state law. People convicted under this tier would face up to 120 days in jail and as much as $750 in fines.
• Class 4 would encompass crimes considered petty offenses under state law, such as public urination, panhandling and public indecency. They would be punishable by up to 10 days in jail and not more than a $300 fine.
• Class 5 would concern civil infractions under state law and could not carry jail time.

The ordinance also would create a commission to make recommendations for appropriate penalties for municipal-only crimes. The committee would include about 20 people and would submit a written report by next March.

It would include representatives of the mayor, the city attorney, the municipal public defender, the Denver Police Department, a business improvement district, and advocates for immigrants and racial justice reform, among others.

How Denver got here

The court-mandated changes have been a long time coming. In 2021, on the heels of nationwide protests for racial justice, that significantly lowered the potential penalties for misdemeanor and petty offenses in Colorado’s state courts.

The changes made many low-level crimes, like petty theft, shoplifting and trespassing, punishable by a maximum of 10 days in jail.

In his letter to the council, Johnston said he disagreed with the state’s decision to reduce penalties for many of those crimes, saying he believed the change would have a “negative impact on public safety.”

But those reforms didn’t impact municipal courts, which are not part of the state judicial system. As a result, someone charged in municipal court faced the possibility of exponentially more jail time than an individual charged with the same offense in state court.

In 2023, Denver councilmembers and stakeholders began working to address the sentence disparities. Then, in December, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously that it����ap unconstitutional for a city to exceed state sentencing caps for like crimes.

The ruling forced cities around Colorado to reexamine their codes, judges to alter their advisements and prosecutors to change their plea deals.

“The majority of this, it����ap already happening,” Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, one of the bill’s sponsors, said of what’s proposed. “We’re not making any new crimes, we’re not taking any crimes away. People will still be accountable.”

The council sponsors initially wanted to classify all municipal offenses that don’t have a state counterpart as Class 4 violations — meaning judges could impose a maximum of only 10 days in jail. They pointed to data showing that the vast majority of people charged in Denver’s municipal court — at least 75% — are at or below the federal poverty level.

About 12,000 municipal-only offenses are prosecuted each year, and between September 2023 and September 2025, 600 people were sentenced to more than 10 days in jail for municipal-only offenses, according to the sponsors’ presentation.

Johnston’s administration and several council members opposed that change, saying it would hinder the city’s ability to enforce fire and licensing codes for things like landlord regulations.

In response to the pushback, the sponsors decided to leave the majority of the city’s code at the general penalty (300 days in jail and a $999 fine).

Tensions around changes

The council conversations around the ordinance have been exceptionally tense, with council members losing decorum in some meetings as emotions have run hot. The council committee chambers overflowed during an April meeting when members of the public had a chance to weigh in on the changes.

Council members Darrell Watson, Amanda Sawyer and Kevin Flynn have led opposition to the bill. Council members Chris Hinds and Flor Alvidrez also voiced concerns throughout the process.

“If we make a mistake and pass something that has a dramatic effect on victims of crime … we can make whatever changes we need,” Watson said during the initial council vote. “But victims of crime, for the decisions we make tonight and next week, do not have a do-over.”

During last week’s discussion, Watson pressed the sponsors on their motivations for earlier versions of the bill, even as they amended away some of the elements he opposed.

Council members, including the President Amanda Sandoval, have lambasted Watson, who is the chair of the committee that first considered the bill, for using that position to hinder the bill’s passage.

In a 10-2 vote last week, Watson and Sawyer were the only members who voted no, with Flynn absent. Hinds, who represents the city’s urban core, voted yes but hinted he may not support the bill’s final passage.

“There is a concern from the community that the revitalization of downtown is fragile, and we don’t want to negatively impact the revitalization of downtown by eroding municipal-only offenses,” he said.

The council will take its final vote after another public hearing on the ordinance that’s set on its 5:30 p.m. meeting agenda.

Teacher discipline in Colorado spiked over the last five years, with the revocation, suspension and surrender of teachers’ licenses reaching a record high in 2022 with 31 lost licenses and remaining elevated in the following years, according to a Denver Post analysis of disciplinary records kept by the .

Incidents that led to educators losing their teaching licenses increased by 77% between 2021 and 2025 when compared to the previous five years, The Post found. Sexual offenses by teachers also went up along with the overall jump in disciplinary cases, though not as sharply: 29 teachers lost their licenses for sexual offenses between 2016 and 2020, compared to 45 between 2021 and 2025, a 55% increase, The Post found.

The uptick in the most serious type of educator discipline, which reflects a tiny fraction of the state’s teachers, comes after the COVID-19 pandemic threw schools into turmoil and follows a handful of high-profile cases of teacher abuse that have cost Colorado schools millions of dollars in legal settlements. The increased discipline also follows legislative changes that strengthened the state’s mandatory reporting laws and comes as the state faces a shortage of teachers.

Each of those factors might be influencing the increased levels of discipline, experts told The Post. They generally felt the higher number of disciplinary actions reflected better training and reporting, rather than an actual increase in bad behavior.

“As a society, our community has done a much better job of making it possible for people to come forward and feel safe,” said George Brauchler, who has handled a number of teacher sex assault cases as the elected district attorney for the 23rd Judicial District, which includes Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties.

“What I don’t want to believe — and I’m not convinced is true — is we are seeing an increased number of teachers who are going to prey on our kids,” he said. “My hope and thought is that because we are looking harder, we are taking it more seriously, the outcry is increased, and we are able to investigate and hold more people accountable for this.”

Colorado has about 54,000 teachers at the kindergarten through 12th-grade levels, according to the state Department of Education.

The Post examined 341 cases in which teachers surrendered their licenses or state authorities revoked or suspended licenses between 2000 and 2025 and sifted through thousands of pages of to build a complete picture of the state’s teacher disciplinary history during the last quarter century.

That analysis showed that sexual offenses by teachers led to nearly half — 44% — of lost teaching licenses in Colorado over the last 25 years.

The most common reason for teachers to lose their licenses was sexual contact with students, accounting for 76 cases, according to The Post’s review. The second most frequent reason was a non-sexual criminal conviction, seen in 52 cases, followed by sexual contact with minors who weren’t students, noted in 20 cases.

Theft, excessive physical force on students, possession of child sexual abuse material and domestic violence were also common reasons for teachers to lose their licenses.

Colorado’s upswing not reflected nationally

The disciplinary cases included a Morgan County wrestling coach who taped a boy to a bench as punishment for misbehaving in 2006, including taping over his hands and mouth, as well as a Pueblo middle school teacher who watched pornography and masturbated in his classroom in 2012 — an act that was observed by two 13-year-old girls who peered into the classroom through a partially covered window.

A Montrose teacher sent sexually explicit text messages to a teenage student and tried to arrange to have sex with him in 2024. A Douglas County middle school teacher sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy for more than a year beginning in 2023, then stalked the student, creating fake phone numbers to try to reach him by text.

The Post’s analysis is based on the date the offenses occurred, not the year the teachers’ licenses were revoked, as the license actions routinely trail incidents by months or years. In some cases, teachers lost their licenses occurred because an adult victim came forward about prior childhood abuse, the records showed.

That pattern suggests that lost licenses for incidents that occurred in 2025 are likely to rise over the next year.

The upswing in Colorado’s discipline wasn’t seen to the same degree nationwide, said Jimmy Adams, executive director of the , can organization that maintains a nationwide database of teacher license actions. Prior to 2020, the agency received, on average, records of 6,000 teacher license actions annually from all 50 states, Adams said.

That nudged up to an average of 6,100 actions annually beginning in 2020 and has remained around that average since, he said, noting that each state sets its own standards for discipline, which makes it difficult to draw comparisons across state lines. The vast majority of teachers never face license-level discipline, Adams said.

Until 2022, Colorado saw 18 or fewer lost teaching licenses annually, the records reviewed by The Post show. That jumped to 31 in 2022, then 24 in 2023 and 28 in 2024. So far, 16 teachers have lost licenses for incidents in 2025, according to the records.

“When you are driving down the road somewhere, the vast majority of other cars are doing exactly what they are supposed to do,” Adams said. “When you go to the doctor, the vast majority of doctors do exactly what you want them to do. And the same is true for teachers.”

Shifts in discipline are often caused by changes to the state’s approach to enforcement, improved training and education, or shifts in state law, Adams said.

Colorado Department of Education spokesman Jeremy Meyer said the state agency has not changed the way it handles discipline in recent years. He declined to make anyone available to speak with The Post about the shifts in discipline, saying agency staff — who do not track how many teachers are disciplined annually or why — could not comment on The Post’s findings without doing their own additional research.

Spotlight on teacher sexual abuse

The jump in Colorado teacher discipline came soon after a handful of high-profile cases put a spotlight on teacher sexual abuse and the responsibility of administrators and colleagues to report such allegations to outside authorities.

In 2018, Denver prosecutors brought criminal charges against five East High School staff members for failing to report an alleged sexual assault by one student on another. The charges were all dropped in 2019.

Also in 2018, three staff members at Aurora’s Prairie Middle School were charged with failure to report child abuse after they pressured a 14-year-old student to recant her claims that a teacher sexually abused her, ultimately forcing the student to apologize to the teacher and hug him before suspending the girl for making a false report. The teacher later confessed to sexually assaulting five students at the school.

The Cherry Creek School District paid $11.5 million to settle a lawsuit from the five victims. The failure-to-report charges were dismissed against the staffers in that case as well, because they fell outside the statute of limitations. In 2019, Colorado lawmakers extended the statute of limitations on failure to report child abuse from 18 months to three years.

As part of that $11.5 million settlement, the school district agreed to put together a comprehensive training on mandatory reporting, said attorney Siddhartha Rathod, whose law firm represented the five victims. The district went on to put together a “phenomenal” program that reached beyond just the Cherry Creek district, he said.

“So when teachers do see something, they are starting to realize, ‘Hey, we really do need to say something,’ ” he said, adding that he thinks the license actions show just “the tip of the iceberg.”

Similarly, more people have attended trainings offered by the in recent years, with annual attendees climbing from about 8,000 in 2018 to nearly 12,000 in 2025, according to the .

Those trainings cover topics like child sexual abuse prevention, mandatory reporting and cyber safety, said Gianna De Fries, a spokeswoman for the , which houses the office.

State lawmakers reformed Colorado’s mandatory reporting laws in 2025 in an attempt to clarify the often-misunderstood law, which requires certain professionals to report suspected child abuse to state authorities. Across the state, 27 people were charged with failure to report child abuse between 2018 and 2025, according to the . The highest annual count was six cases in 2022.

Among the 12, eight people have already been arrested and charged with violating the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act when they drained people’s Colorado EBT accounts of funds, according to a Boulder County District Attorney’s Office news release. The Lafayette Police Department took the lead on the investigation — dubbed “” — into the crime ring, according to the release.

One minor was also arrested, according to the release. The eight arrested and three others were indicted on the following charges and remain in custody at the Boulder County Jail, according to online court records.

• Romario Ciuciu, 26, was charged with 34 counts, including COCCA, cybercrimes, theft and identity theft. Ciuciu is being held in jail on a $1 million bail.

• Viorel Isirius Tudor, 29, was charged with 23 counts, including COCCA, cybercrimes, theft and possession of identity theft materials. Tudor is being held on a $1 million bail.

• Ion Ciuciu, 49, was charged with 10 counts, including COCCA, cybercrimes, theft and possession of identity theft materials. Ciuciu is being held at the jail on $500,000 bail.

• Felicia Ciuciu, 48, was charged with 14 counts, including COCCA, cybercrimes, theft, tampering with evidence and possession of identity theft materials. Ciuciu is being held at the jail on $500,000 bail.

• Madalina Velcu, 21, was charged with six counts, including COCCA, tampering with evidence and possession of identity theft materials. Velcu is being held at the jail on $500,000 bail.

• Denisa Barbu, 24, was charged with 21 counts, including COCCA, cybercrimes, theft, tampering with evidence and possession of identity theft materials. Barbu is being held at the jail on $500,000 bail.

• Ana Maria Dumitru, 25, was charged with five counts, including COCCA and possession of identity theft materials. Dumitru is being held on a $250,000 bail.

The group, many of whom were members of two families, is accused of using card-skimming machines on ATMs and cash registers to target people on Colorado EBT, a government food assistance program. Some had their accounts drained, according to the release.

The machines would secretly record card and PIN numbers when people used the machines so the group could clone the cards and access accounts, the release states. The group targeted convenience stores — often 7-Elevens — in Boulder County and surrounding areas, including Westminster, Lakewood, Aurora, Arvada and Denver, according to an indictment.

The DA’s Office said the group operated for less than six months and stole or tried to steal at least $301,400.61 across 447 Colorado EBT cards. Law enforcement seized 236 cloned cards, the release states. Investigators also found devices believed to have been used to make the skimming devices in a search of one of the family’s apartments, according to the indictment.

In December, law enforcement placed a GPS tracking device on a vehicle that had been seen on surveillance footage at some of the convenience stores where card thefts had been reported. Detectives tracked the vehicle to two 7-Eleven locations in Longmont and later found card-skimming devices had been installed at those locations. Call records also placed members of the group at locations where the devices had been placed and locations where cloned cards were used.

“Once again, a crime ring victimizing people across the Front Range made the mistake of venturing into Lafayette,” District Attorney Michael Dougherty said in a statement. “Over the past few years, the Lafayette Police Department has repeatedly connected seemingly unrelated offenses to major crime operations to bring them to a halt.”

The bronze Works Progress Administration marker was installed near the intersection of West Alameda Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard to commemorate the 5,000 workers who extended Alameda Parkway to Red Rocks Amphitheatre during the Great Depression, according to Alameda Connects, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting the corridor.

The nonprofit’s executive director, Tom Quinn, noticed the plaque was missing from its red sandstone base and reported the apparent theft to Lakewood police on April 10. A theft investigation is underway, police spokesman John Romero said.

The bronze plaque is likely worth less than $50 as scrap metal, said Morgan Smith, a buyer at Rocky Mountain Recycling. It holds significantly more value as a historic artifact, Quinn said in a news release.

“This marker was intended as a permanent record of the New Deal legacy Franklin Roosevelt built and what social programs and public investment can achieve,” he said. “It is a somber reflection that trends indicate it was stripped for scrap by those for whom social safety nets were established to prevent this kind of desperate act.”

Brass is selling at slightly more than $3 a pound right now, Smith said, which is about the regular range, although perhaps slightly elevated because of its copper content, which is selling higher.

“So they’re doing thousands of dollars of damage to collect a few bucks,” Smith said of the potential thief.

He noted that if someone brought in the stolen historical marker or any other suspicious object to Rocky Mountain Recycling, the company would alert police, buy the item and collect the seller’s personal information.

“And usually, 99% of the time (the police) get here before the guy leaves,” he said.

A divided Colorado House approved on a 33-32 vote. The state Senate is expected to adopt changes made in the House and send the measure to Gov. Jared Polis, whose spokesman said he would sign it into law.

The bill would require that farmworkers reach 56 hours of work in a week before they qualify for overtime, an increase of eight hours in the threshold for those workers operating outside of peak harvesting seasons.

In both the House and the Senate, a majority of Democrats opposed the measure. It passed only with the unanimous support of Republican lawmakers, who are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 in the legislature.

The bill was backed by the agricultural industry, which warned that several pressures — including increased labor costs — were economically squeezing Colorado’s farmers and ranchers. The bill’s supporters argued that farmers and ranchers have cut workers’ hours to limit overtime and that the state has lost some workers to neighboring states.

While few farmworkers testified on the measure during committee hearings, one, Mike Drieth, said he’d been sent home to keep him below the OT threshold.

“We’ve seen historically low commodity pricing; rising operational costs for fuel, fertilizer and equipment; tariffs — and, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the historically low snowpack that has led to a shortage of water in the San Luis Valley,” said Rep. Matthew Martinez, a Monte Vista Democrat who sponsored the bill with Republican Assistant Minority Leader Ty Winter.

“All this requires pause and a call to evaluate” overtime requirements, Martinez said.

Depending on the season, farmworkers currently have to work 48 or 56 hours to qualify for overtime through rules set up by a 2021 law. Initially, SB-121 would’ve set that threshold at 60 hours across the board, but the bill’s Senate sponsors — Democratic Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez and Republican Minority Leader Cleave Simpson — pared it back to 56 hours. Martinez and Winter added an amendment tightening penalties for agricultural wage theft.

But the bill was still opposed by labor groups and progressive organizations, which backed a separate measure that would have lowered the overtime threshold to 40 hours. That bill died in its first Senate hearing.

Legislative critics of SB-121 argued that the measure sought to help one industry at the cost of its workers, who — they argued — labored in difficult conditions and were vulnerable both to abusive employment practices and to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“It is true what our farmers are facing. Costs are up, margins are small. There is no argument about that from me,” said Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat. “… We need to find a world in which those farms can be sustained so that they can offer hours. But when we are faced with this challenge … we should have an opportunity to address it where we do not pit those against each other. Because costs are going up for everybody.

“Whether you are a farmer or a farmworker, milk is the same price.”

The bill hit on a familiar sore spot within the broader Democratic caucus in the legislature: how to balance business interests against protections for workers.

In a similar fight last year, lawmakers debated whether to cut tipped workers’ minimum wages to help shore up the restaurant industry. That bill’s Democratic sponsors eventually stripped the measure of its wage-cutting provisions and punted the decision to local governments.

In a statement, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said the governor “strongly supports” SB-121 and intends to sign it.

“This bill will set a reasonable overtime limit for agricultural workers who want to earn more money and more hours without diminishing worker protections, while increasing the fine amounts for agricultural producers who steal wages from their workers,” Maruyama wrote. “This bill is an important step in the right direction for Colorado agriculture and will create a more economically viable future for Colorado farmers and workers alike.”

The bill’s opponents were less effusive.

“It is shameful that 11 House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass what is quite literally injustice and political patronage masquerading as legislation,” Christopher Nurse, the political director for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, said in a statement. “CIRC and other organizations worked tirelessly to put protections for farm workers into law, only for some of the same legislators who voted for those protections to essentially tell migrant farm workers today that their labor is expendable.”

Once it’s signed, SB-121 will take effect Jan. 1.

The statewide grand jury indicted George Gonzalez, 55, on nine charges of insurance fraud and five counts of theft, all felonies, according to court records. The charges stem from several years in which Gonzalez allegedly diverted tens of thousands of dollars in customer payments to himself rather than paying the insurance companies he brokered policies for, according to a .

Gonzalez, the owner of , sold workers’ compensation insurance policies from Pinnacol Assurance to businesses, . When customers paid Amerimex for an insurance policy, they would make a down payment on the total policy amount and finance the remaining balance over the policy term. Those funds were supposed to be paid to Pinnacol, after which the company would pay Gonzalez a commission, the indictment stated.

Pinnacol discovered the fraud after a new customer called to check on his policy, according to the indictment.

“The customer had paid Gonzalez and Amerimex $1,082 for the policy. However, Gonzalez reported via email that the customer only paid $752 and ultimately remitted $754 to Pinnacol,” the indictment stated.

Pinnacol investigators discovered eight policies Gonzalez created between February 2022 and January 2024 in which Gonzalez collected funds but kept some for himself, according to the indictment. The company reported Gonzalez to the in January 2024, after which state investigators discovered an additional eight companies being stolen from, the indictment alleged.

In total, Gonzalez is accused of diverting roughly $97,233 from the nine insurance companies, according to court documents.

“Insurance fraud is a serious crime that affects all consumers,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “Those who attempt to engage in insurance fraud will be held to account.”

Anyone who made payments to Amerimex Insurance between 2023 and 2026 and believes that their payment may have been more than what was paid to their insurance company is asked to contact the Colorado Attorney General’s Office at amerimexinfo@coag.gov.

Vehicle thefts dropped 34% from 2024 to 2025, marking the third year in a row that reported thefts decreased in the state, according to a . Across the country, vehicle thefts fell by an average of 23% during that time.

Last year’s drop also marked a 56% decrease for Colorado auto thefts since 2021, the report stated.

Colorado’s 16,291 car thefts in 2025 ranked 14th in the country for volume, state officials said. The state’s motor vehicle theft rate per capita — 271 per 100,000 residents — was also the sixth worst in the country. That’s down from 2021, when Colorado documented the most vehicle thefts per capita, according to the report.

A sharp spike in thefts landed Colorado at the top of the list of all states for per capita auto thefts in 2021, with just over 500 stolen vehicles per 100,000 residents, according to . Motor vehicle thefts more than doubled in the state between 2019 and 2021, agency officials said.

“As we look to further safeguard our cars and our communities, we need additional commitment from every driver,” Col. Matt Packard, chief of the Colorado State Patrol, said in a statement. “Locking your cars and taking your keys is the bare minimum, but with tools from the — like free steering wheel locks at State Patrol offices, this is the best time to do more to protect our roads and our communities from the dangerous crime of auto theft.”

Hyundai and Kia thefts accounted for roughly 15% of all Colorado thefts in 2025, with a combined total of 2,445 vehicles stolen, according to the report. State officials said the 10 most stolen vehicles of 2025 included the:

• Chevrolet Silverado: 683
• Hyundai Elantra: 621
• Hyundai Sonata: 369
• Ford F-150: 358
• GMC Sierra: 326
• Ford F-250: 311
• Jeep Grand Cherokee: 222
• Honda Civic: 221
• Kia Optima: 216
• Honda Accord: 215

Most of the thefts happened inside metro Denver, including Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, Gilpin and Jefferson counties, according to the report. In 2025, the metro area accounted for 69% of all vehicle thefts in Colorado.

The eagle figure–valued at about $1,000—is from the Operation Red Wings memorial, which honors 19 U.S. service members killed in the 2005 Afghanistan mission.

The theft was discovered on Wednesday morning.

The monument is dedicated to Colorado Navy SEAL Danny Dietz and his fallen teammates.

No suspects have been identified, and anyone with information is asked to contact Littleton Police at 303‑794‑1551.

Frayer Contreras-Gafaro, 24, was convicted in December on 11 felony charges, including several counts each of second-degree kidnapping, aggravated robbery and burglary, Arapahoe County court records show. He was sentenced last Monday to 75 years in prison.

The jury acquitted Contreras-Gafaro of nine additional charges, including theft in a range of $20,000 to $100,000, felony menacing, third-degree assault, child abuse, false imprisonment and criminal mischief, according to court records.

Contreras-Gafaro and another man, who officials did not identify, pulled out guns inside an Aurora apartment in the 1300 block of North Laredo Street on June 12, 2024, according to a .

The men had reached out to the apartment resident, a 33-year-old woman, on Facebook after she listed jewelry on the social media platform, the news release stated.

“The victim’s two children were inside the apartment at the time and were ordered into a nearby room,” prosecutors stated in the release. The children were told that she would be killed if they screamed, the woman told police, according to the release.

The men stole dozens of jewelry pieces, valued at approximately $20,000, according to the DA’s office.

Contreras-Gafaro blocked the victim on Facebook after the incident, but she was able to use her husband’s account to find the man, officials said in the release.

“This decades-long sentence ensures this defendant will no longer have the opportunity to terrorize another family,” Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Johnny Lombardi said in a statement. “This was a calculated and violent crime carried out inside a home where a mother and her children should have felt safe. We hope this sentence brings the victim and her family a sense of justice and closure.”

The 24-year-old man will not be eligible for parole until he’s 84, according to the DA’s office.

The statues, which depicted Saints Rita and Paul, were stolen from the front of the church by a man on a skateboard just before 4 a.m. on March 4, according to the Catholic parish’s website.

The two statues have graced the facade of the church for more than 100 years, since Holy Ghost Church opened as a basement church in 1924.

“It leaves a literal hole in the wall and in your heart,” Nguyen said. “It’s been very hard for the community wrestling with it.”

Denver police found the statues on Wednesday. An investigation into the theft is ongoing and no one has been arrested as of Friday, the Denver Police Department said.

The rediscovered statues were cut up and ready to be sold for their metal value, Nguyen said.

The church has found artisans who can fix the statues, but it is going to cost about $4,000, he said.

“We’re kind of hoping police go ahead and make the arrest that is relevant to that case and see where it goes,” Nguyen said. “It would be nice not to have to use our rainy day fund for something like this since it’s vandalism and there is a responsible party.”

Holy Ghost Church, 1900 California St., has about 2,000 registered parishioners.