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Crime Briefs: Love triangle grows violent

New Castle police walked into a violent lovers’ triangle after reports came in of screams heard from the house.

Police, too, could hear screaming when they arrived.

A 31-year-old man and his husband at the house told police they’d been involved with a 23-year-old man. When they told the young man that they wanted to break off their relationship with him, and after he’d had about 10 shots of liquor, the 23-year old became irate and bit one of the men, they told police.



The 23-year-old was on the couch bleeding heavily from the nose from being punched in the face, according to an affidavit.

Another man, naked and dripping wet, left the room when officers came in, wrote one New Castle officer. Officers noted bite marks on his arms and chest.



The 23-year-old became upset and started yelling insults at the man he was accused of biting, “calling him a woman and feminine,” according to an affidavit.

When a police officer approached him and tried to calm him down, he swung a fist at the officer.

When the officer was arresting him, another one of men tried to calm down the 23-year-old. But the young man responded to grabbing him and biting him on the base of the neck, wrote the officer.

The 23-year-old was arrested on charges of second-degree assault on a peace officer, a class 4 felony, along with third-degree assault, resisting arrest and obstructing a peace officer, all misdemeanors. Domestic violence could be used as a sentence enhancer.

Forgetful thief Returns

Police say a truck thief quickly returned to the scene of the crime at the West Glenwood 7-Eleven and wound up behind bars May 25.

Glenwood Springs police got a call about a vehicle theft from the convenience store, where a driver left his Ford F-250 running in the parking lot while he went in to get a soda.

The driver suspected a man with “scraggly dark hair” who was sitting between the 7-Eleven and Burger King had stolen the truck. Where the man had been sitting was still “a cellphone, a mostly drunken Coca-Cola and an empty pack of cigarettes.”

Moments later, the officer got a call that the truck was spotted at Vic’s Route 6 Grill, and a man who had been driving was seen walking quickly away from the parked truck.

Officers went to collect the miscellaneous items that had been left on the ground, when a “scraggly haired” man walked up and said “you found my cellphone,” according to an affidavit.

The 33-year-old Westminster man was immediately placed in handcuffs and detained.

The man said he’d been laid off from his job in Aspen and came to Glenwood Springs to make his way back to Denver, where he lives now.

A woman at the grill identified him as the man in the truck, and police later found the keys stashed under the lip of a planter at Mountain Chevrolet, between the grill and 7-Eleven.

He was arrested on charges of second-degree aggravated motor vehicle theft, a class 5 felony, first-degree criminal trespass, a class 5 felony, and misdemeanor second-degree criminal tampering. He went with police without protest, according to an affidavit.

quarrel leads to auto theft

Just past midnight on May 27, Rifle police were dispatched to a home for reports of a woman screaming.

A 22-year-old man told police that a 22-year-old woman who’d been staying at his residence for three weeks had stolen his vehicle.

That night they’d had a confrontation; she hit him in the face and stole his work truck, a white 2004 GMC with a Western Slope Waterproofing logo.

The man “didn’t want to elaborate on the conflict,” an officer wrote in an affidavit.

Officers found that the 22-year-old woman had three warrants for her arrest.

After being alerted to the incident, Garfield County sheriff’s deputies stopped her in Battlement Mesa.

The woman told police that she and the young man “had an altercation and she decided to find a different place to sleep tonight.”

She was arrested on a charge of aggravated motor vehicle theft, a class 5 felony.


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