Aurora Politics

Somebody Call 9-1-1

/ bperica / Leave a comment

The following is an incomplete list of events I forgot to add to our real estate listing last spring when we sold our Denver house and bounced way north to our new landing spot, Fort Collins.

Halloween 2016…maybe – Hooligans decide to throw a large block through the glass rear dear of a neighbor’s house. I remember speaking to a DPD officer that night about a security system, asking him, is it worth having one? Does it work? He bluntly said, No. These people out here who are going to actually break into a home do not stop at a security system. They know what to do. They are fast and a siren isn’t going to change that. I took that to heart. We didn’t have one at the time (never did), although we still had the ADT sign in the front yard and the stickers in the window from the previous owner. We left those there. Note: Every other neighbor had a security system.

Kids watch as the criminals' truck is towed away.
Kids watch the truck involved in a crime get towed away after three months on

Late Summer 2020 – This is when things really pick up. People are bored. We’ve spent a lot of time indoors. They made us wear masks! (Cry more!) People needed to get out and do some major crime as evidenced by the moderate-sized moving truck that appears in front of the house. It is illegally parked, but at least on the far side of the street. In December of 2020, it is finally moved after I called the police, sheriff, and my city councilwoman. I did examine the truck at some point. It was empty and unlocked. The steering column had been torn up so the truck could be hot-wired, just like in the movies! Cool!

One night I woke up to some talking outside my bedroom window. I looked outside and spotted a man with a sign standing at the bottom of the stairs to our front door. He kept talking for a while and I kept watching from the window, but after thirty minutes or so he started walking up our stairs. That’s when I got a bit worried and made my way downstairs. Right before I made it to the front door he very violently tried to open it. We were fine, it was locked, but I yelled at him that he needed to stop and leave the property. The police were called and they showed up in 15 minutes. This incident did motivate me to get a Nest doorbell.

My Nest doorbell was awesome! It worked way better than the Ring doorbell and accompanying app that we have at our Fort Collins house. One of the first things our Nest doorbell caught was a man crouching on our front patio. It looked like he was trying to hide behind the planter and large pine tree that was on the NE corner of the front yard.

Initially, the neighbor’s car was shoved up onto their yard. The police put it back on the street.

During the warm, but not the warmest months, we slept with our window open, facing the front of the street, and our busy corner of Denver. We heard and saw a lot of interesting things from that window, but nothing louder than a car speeding at approximately 60mph from the east, crossing Dayton, and slamming into a parked car two houses west of us. The first car that was hit wound up in the neighbor’s yard. The other cars hit got stacked up on one another. I was at the window in a split second to see police already approaching the crash scene with lights off and guns drawn. I found out later, they were responding to a robbery at a weed shop about a mile east of us in Aurora. This was a car chase that ended in front of our house! The perp threw a gun into my neighbor’s front yard and was able to evade police.

Neighbor’s car that took the brunt of the 60mph impact.

Around this same time, a stolen car was crashed into the apartment complex in front of the house. It didn’t go through the fence, it went under it, the fence swinging upward like an old school garage door, letting the stolen vehicle neatly crash into a parking spot. The perp ran. The perp got away.

Stolen car. Driver ran away, north on Dayton.

Late one morning, a car sped down Dayton, crashing into multiple parked cars and came to a stop in the middle of the road. The owner of one vehicle came out of the apartment buildings along Dayton and began yelling at the driver, You hit my car! You hit my car! The driver of the car was standing next to his broken ride and didn’t say anything. After a long moment, he ran. The car, broken as it was, stayed there for another 12 hours before someone decided to report it. Snitches get stitches in this neighborhood. It was almost certainly a stolen car. The perp, as far as I know, got away.

A driver decides to do a u-turn in front of the house. Street not wide enough? Ah, that’s okay, I’ll just run over your new tree.

Look kids, a murder scene. I didn’t know at the time. I probably wouldn’t have walked them over there.

Most alarming was the time I noticed about a dozen cop cars three houses west of the house. They were Aurora police, which means they followed criminal activity from east of Dayton into my neighborhood, which is in the City of Denver. I went to take a look by myself and then took the kids over there. There was no sign of an ongoing threat, but just to make sure I asked an officer and he said, there’s nothing to worry about. Well, great. Time for a photo op. I found out later that night that someone had been shot on the corner three houses west of us. He was in his car. And, after being shot, he was driven eastward into Aurora a couple blocks and died. It was truly tragic. This murder remains unsolved. Since it took place, there’s a small memorial to the victim. I cleaned it up a few times before we moved away.

There was that one time we were having a nice family dinner and I was beginning to move around, do some dishes, and clean up, when I noticed a red 4Runner park right in front of the house. The two guys in the front arranged lines of coke on a pocket mirror, snorted them, and drove off. Sorry, no picture! They were so fast!

Last, but not least because this couple was fighting for years, we have this nice image of a lady on top of a moving car. She was on the phone and also yelling at the driver. I took several videos of this fight and others, certain I would catch something of interest to the police if anything seriously bad happened. Luckily, no such video exists, but these people would fight in front of our house, mostly at night, on and off for about two years. Their dialogue, much of it recorded by yours truly, can not be repeated here.

Fast forward a few months and we are spending the first night at our new house in Fort Collins. The home has a huge covered deck out back where we were enjoying the remnants of our drinks. I was thinking of the corner we left behind, the very urban setting. It’s not like we moved to the country, there are about 170,000 people living in FoCo, but still, I told Kate, “It feels like we are camping.”

A Drive Up Dayton

/ bperica / 1 Comment

As I drive Dayton Street north to take my kids to school the city boundaries are so zig-zagged that I may be in Denver one block and in Aurora the next, never really quite knowing which city I am in from the moment I turn onto the street until I turn off of it in the Central Park neighborhood of Denver.

My house borders Dayton in southeast Denver, so I start the drive there, but I am quickly surrounded by the western edge of Aurora, the city that Trump claims has been taken over by a Venezuelan gang. I even drive within one block of the Edge at Lowry apartments, which made national headlines in the late summer/early fall when a ring doorbell camera recorded armed gang members knocking on an apartment door. Further north I drive by Vintage Theater, a staple among theater venues in the greater Denver area.

When Dayton approaches and crosses Colfax is when things get interesting. Colfax is bustling any time of day, but in the morning it’s full of pedestrians and bus riders going to and from school and work. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to how pedestrians cross the street here or how drivers navigate the madness.

Once north of Colfax, Dayton is lined with day laborers who have congregated there for over two decades. They line the sidewalks with their lunches (if they are lucky enough to have them) and wave at any car that drives by, hoping the driver is looking to hire them for a project. When they wave at me, I don’t wave back, out of not wanting to give them some false hope. When a car does pull over though, it is surrounded and overwhelmed by people willing to work on just about any project I imagine. Regardless of the weather or time of year, Dayton Street from Colfax to 16th Ave is lined with those willing to work. I have seen a hundred workers on this block of Dayton.

Naturally, I have been interested in how Trump’s policies would affect this block of Dayton, especially since it is in Aurora and Trump stated that immigration raids would start in this city. Well, he’s a bit late, so he lied again, but they did start yesterday. Even prior to the raids, the number of day laborers drastically decreased. This morning, I counted five of them on the street, still friendly, still waving, still eager to do the work no one else is going to do.

Where have the rest gone? Well, that is a good question and I think in the days, weeks, and months ahead we might get answers or we might not, but for starters here is a fact (remember those?): based on the promised mass deportation, “Gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.” It is not a stretch to conclude either that day laborers who used to get regular work by lining the sidewalks of Dayton have been forced into a cat and mouse game with ICE agents, in which the immigrants might become more and more desperate to make a living here in Aurora or Denver. Surely, that will be the case for some immigrants. Where do they look for work now? Pushing them off the streets into the dark recesses of an Aurora apartment complex for the entire day can’t be good. They are looking for decent pay and constructive work in the daytime. When forced onto the streets at nighttime, the same might not be said. This would be a very unfortunate result of ICE raids here in Denver and elsewhere, but do keep in mind this is a population that respects the rule of law here in the US more than US-born Americans. So, they have that going for them, even though the strongest and most capable government in the world is not willing to help them anymore.