Beth McCann
The strange short career of Beth McCann as District Attorney of Denver gets darker virtually every day. As reported in our August editorial McCann had gone on the Craig Silverman Show on 710 KNUS to explain why she had not charged illegal alien Ricardo Lopez-Vera in the jailhouse death of William Anderson. She claimed that her chief deputy (apparently Ryan Brackley) had determined that the death was a matter of self-defense in a one punch landed fight after which Anderson had then fallen down and hit his head.
She declared the whole matter had taken no more than 12 seconds and a deputy sheriff had rushed up and saw Anderson in a wobbly state and falling down. She declared that there was only one witness to the actual fight who said it was a mutual combat scenario with Anderson throwing the first punch which missed and when Anderson was drawing back to throw another punch Lopez-Vera hit him causing Anderson to fall and hit his head on a step.
Without even waiting for a formal coroner’s autopsy report she declared Lopez-Vera innocent due to self-defense. Two days later she had him released on a de minimis $1,000 bail. He was then purportedly given a lift by the deputies to a hospital after which he disappeared.
The problem for McCann was that sheriff’s deputies who saw the mangled and battered body of Anderson knew that it could not have been caused by a one-punch fight and leaked that McCann was lying.
Federal ICE agents were also outraged that McCann refused to honor federal retainer requests and accused her of harboring and hiding a criminal illegal alien. McCann is a strong advocate for sanctuary city policies but even she does not go so far as publicly declaring that murder is allowable in Denver by persons illegally in the country.
It turns out McCann knew exactly where Lopez-Vera was after he was released from police custody since she had him on a monitored ankle bracelet. As far as the assertion the death was due to “self-defense” C.R.S. 18-1-704 explicitly states a claim of self-defense is not valid in the case of mutually agreed combat and, furthermore, there is no such thing as legal mutually agreed upon combat inside of a city jail.
Cyril Wecht
The Denver coroner has now issued the autopsy and it is clear that the so-called one punch fight was an utter fabrication. World famous forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who has performed 20,000 autopsies and supervised or reviewed 40,000 more, went on the Craig Silverman Show and declared that the multitude of head injuries, including the injuries to both sides of the neck, and injuries to the lower back could never have happened from a one punch fight where the victim fell down and hit his head. Apparently, it is far more likely that after punching Anderson, Lopez-Vera grabbed him by the neck and smashed his head into the concrete and then kicked the dying or dead Anderson.
The one witness to the fight appears to have been a gang member lookout for Lopez-Vera. What about the Deputy Sheriff statement that he was there in under 12 seconds and watched the wobbly Anderson falling over and hitting his head? In fact, we only have McCann’s claim to the same as the Sheriff’s Office is refusing to release to the press the Sheriff’s Report on the incident claiming the matter is confidential, since it is still under investigation. But, of course, the DA is not investigating the Anderson killing any more as she has publicly declared the same to be a matter of “self defense.”
As for DA McCann, she has gone into hiding, refusing to comment on the matter, having been caught red-handed lying about the facts of the case by Cyril Wecht.
Sheriff deputies and ICE agents want a grand jury empaneled by the U.S. Attorney’s office with McCann and her chief deputy Brackley indicted for conducting a fraudulent investigation and harboring an illegal alien in violation of federal law. Unfortunately for law enforcement, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado is Bob Troyer. He was an attorney in the Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber and Schreck law firm which means he is highly politically connected with the legal cesspool in Denver run by the Brownstein law firm that protects persons like DA McCann.
Some in law enforcement hope that a regular U.S. Attorney for Colorado will soon be appointed who is not part of and controlled by the Brownstein firm but they realize that the firm has its tentacles virtually everywhere as stated by journalist David Sirota. [Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle, Editorial, October 2017, page 3.] Additionally they have apparently sworn that they will not stop in their pursuit of bringing DA Beth McCann to the bar of justice.
— Editorial Board