Is a new 'Summer of Violence' brewing in Metro Denver?

Jun. 9—Metro Denver's recent fusillade of violent crimes involving the young and very young, both as perpetrators and victims, carries echoes of a similar period three decades ago, the notorious "Summer of Violence" of 1993. Then, the brazen, unrelenting toll of gunfire was shocking, and after two babies were caught by stray bullets there was broad public outrage.

Now, the numbers of those killed are not as devastating as then — 95 murders in 1992, 74 in '93, and 81 each of the next two years — but the nature of today's crimes, often in broad daylight, near high schools or on campuses in Denver and Aurora, in public parks, is raising similar alarms.

Some who came of age and survived the violence of the early '90s have long been involved in the effort to prevent similar outbreaks. They don't like what they are seeing now.

Rica Rodriguez-Hernandez fears that a generation later a similar summertime crisis may be brewing as kids get out of school and the days lengthen.

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"We are seeing kids catch gun charges," said Rodriguez-Hernandez, the director of Urban Impact, a program which is an arm of the non-profit Lifeline, designed to prevent acts of bloodshed through positive mentoring, gang intervention and prevention and other harm reduction services.

Urban Impact specializes in helping pre-teens and teens who are already in the judicial system with access and resources to employment opportunities, drug and alcohol treatment and education. At-risk youth are referred to UI's program as they are going through pre-trial and probation.

They also receive referrals through friends and family of at-risk kids, schools and other community organizations to hopefully prevent gang activity before the youth gets too entrenched into negative behavior.

"I'm feeling that this summer is going to be very hot," fretted Rodriguez-Hernandez, who at 13 was conscripted by family members into the infamous Sureños gang.

"Kids are hurting," said Beverly Kingston, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder. "The violence is the expression of the pain and the impacts are devastating. It can affect generation after generation if we don't stop it."

Kingston, who has devoted her life's work to stopping youth violence, believes that stressors related to the pandemic combined with complex factors such as inequality and poverty have caused kids to act out in anger and desperation. The temptations of negative activity through social media are also to blame, as is the fact that access to drugs and guns can be as easy as ordering fast food.

While some of the causative factors haven't changed much in 30 years, public response has.

Rodriguez-Hernandez and many others with direct experience of youth violence have helped create scores of programs in intervening years and one system has been developed to evaluate what works and what doesn't. Those programs began with a focus on youth interventions to prevent violence, delinquency and drug use, but have since expanded to focus on improving mental and physical health, educational achievement and promoting healthy youth development and adult maturity.

The available solutions to youth violence in Denver are now as varied as the factors contributing to the problem. But the question remains: With so many programs available, why is Denver's youth violence problem resurging?

Police and experts attribute everything from easy access to guns by juveniles to the emotional toil caused by a once-in-a-generation pandemic. They say heightened tensions stoked by social media also play a role along with ever younger youth adopting the violent culture of gangs while eschewing their traditional hierarchies and top-down leadership model.

Kingston moved to Colorado in the mid-90s and began digging into the root cause of how and why kids can so easily pull a trigger to deal with their problems.

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Working with famed criminologist and violence researcher Del Elliott, who retired five years ago at the age of 86, the pair were first nationally in producing a sort of "consumer reports" to rate programs aimed at curbing youth violence. The so-called Blueprint Solutions for Healthy Youth Development started with ten programs. There are now 106 Blueprint programs and they offer potential solutions for every age, including one in Colorado which starts in the womb.

The Nurse-Family Partnership is designed to guide first-time parents from pregnancy through the child's second birthday with bi-monthly visits. The Denver program addresses issues like expectant mothers abusing alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, improving women's diets, rest and exercise, maternal employment and the use of welfare and food stamps once the baby is born. Under the Partnership, nurses follow the child until the age of two monitoring, among other measures, behaviors.

The Denver program started in 1994 and is now one of the top in the country for early childhood development.

Underpinning Kingston's work is her belief that every child is born with a spark, which can be nurtured or, depending on circumstances and environment, extinguished.

She said it doesn't matter who sees the spark whether it's a parent, a teacher, a coach or a friend, as long as someone recognizes it.

"I love to find out what makes children shine," said Kingston. "What makes them seen?"

Learning to read

By the time he was nine-years-old, Tyrone Hill had already seen plenty of drug use and abuse between his addicted parents and the community. "I didn't find s--- except misguidance," Hill said.

At 15, he could count money for a drug deal and he knew the value of a gun, but he could barely read and write.

At 19, he landed in High Desert State Prison in Susanville, Calif., for second degree murder. There, he continued the lifestyle he had led on the outside, gang-banging and starting fights. And then, slowly, change came.

"I taught myself how to read while incarcerated watching PBS shows like Sesame Street. I saw how they sound out the vowels of the alphabet. A-E-I-O-U and sometimes Y," said Hill, now 46.

He got his GED behind the wire in 2011.

After a decade of volunteering, working and mentoring on the inside, he was released on parole in 2018. After 21 years, he had done his time.

Today, out of jail, free of the gang culture and presenting at six-feet-five a formidable physical presence, Hill considers himself part of the solution.

As a Lifeline counselor, Hill used his own harsh experiences to relate to troubled kids "who have masks on," he said. "Their trauma is so heavy they don't know how to become vulnerable." He has helped them get jobs and deal with their addictions, helping them stay out of trouble. It hasn't been a straight line. For example, one of his charges successfully kept a job. Another committed armed robbery. Hill said the latter result "about killed me."

Hill left Rodriguez-Hernandez' Urban Impact program earlier this year to focus on parolees.

Early intervention

On a recent rainy Saturday, Rodriguez-Hernandez' UI held a summer kick-off party for kids and families at Denver's Aztlan Recreation Center gym. Kids from age 4-to around 14 were roaming around playing corn hole, watching little girls in white lace dresses twirl for a Latina dance demonstration and talking with firefighters.

"COPSICKLES!" someone yelled and a group of children ran outside to meet a Denver police community outreach team which has pulled up with a trunk full of ice cream sandwiches and red-white-and-blue bomb pops.

Shawn Tingal, tall for a 12-year-old and not so sure it's cool to be seen talking to a grown-up, does so anyway. He explained that he came to the summer kick-off because his friends were there. "My friends keep me from getting into trouble," he said. "Some kids are nice and some kids are troublemakers."

He is standing outside of the front door of the rec center, hidden from curious eyes. Once 7th grade starts in August, "it's fifty-fifty" as to whether he'll choose to hang out with the so-called bad crowd or the "nice" kids. "It's difficult. Some kids might want to start a fight with you."

Tingal is wearing a grey sweatshirt which is covered with the Sharpie-scrawled autographs of his friends, including his best buddy Daniel, who signed the right front above the pocket.

Tingal joins a vagabond group of kids of all sizes piled in a row on a community sofa chewing on popsicle sticks. One is wearing a Spiderman outfit.

Muhammed Kheri wears his white t-shirt inside out on purpose.

"Are you gonna take my data too?" he asks a reporter. Data, he explains, as in "information about him."

"I'm tops in my class," said Kheri, 8, who goes to Trevista Elementary at Horace Mann. The third grader, whose parents emigrated from Congo, speaks three languages: English, Swahili and Spanish.

"Say yes," challenged one kid.

"Si"

"Say no."

"No. Same as English," Kheri, answered, a little annoyed.

Some of the boys wear red plastic firefighter hats.

The hats are in a stack at a table run by Capt. Ahmid Nunn, who is in charge of a Denver Fire's new Community Risk Reduction program. Nunn, who grew up in Montbello, said that events like the summer kick-off keep kids from getting into trouble. "It gives them an option so that they don't get involved with risky individuals," said Nunn. "We have to find the money to raise the kids the way they're supposed to be raised."

That did not happen for Rodriguez-Hernandez, who said that at age 13 she was jumped into the Sureños, affiliated with the Mexican Mafia, by six of her uncles.

She served several of years in California's Chowchilla State Prison after hiding a gun for a boyfriend and was charged with accessory to attempted murder after a gang brawl in the park where she lived. By the summer of '93 she was posted up in an alley dealing drugs to make ends meet.

Thirty years later, Rodriguez-Hernandez' shirt — emblazoned with "Lifeline-Peace in the Hood" — explained her transformation, which she said started when she gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome. "Life got real," she said. Among the offerings at the Lifeline table were keychains, free condoms and Narcan, the anti-opioid overdose agent.

'More violent person crimes'

Survey results revealed this March found that one in 4 Colorado teens said they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours. Almost half of those kids said they could get one in less than 10 minutes. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association for Pediatrics.

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While youth crime in general has declined in recent years, according to state statistics from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the deadly violence involving juveniles has stubbornly persisted. A partial roll-call:

— March 2023, a 17-year-old student with a history of gun violence shot two deans at East High School as they were patting him down before class. Austin Lyle fled in a red Volvo, which was found abandoned around 50 miles from Denver near Bailey in Park County. SWAT teams found his body not far away. The two school administrators recovered, but the shooting was the latest for East in what has been a traumatic year of violent incidents for students, parents and teachers.

— The day before Valentine's Day, 16-year-old Luis Garcia, a popular East High School soccer player, was shot after class and rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Garcia's family said he was planning a birthday party while sitting in his car along Esplanade, not far from East High's front door. His family took him off life support March 1. Denver police have made no arrest in the case.

— Two youth were killed and three others were injured in a shooting on Feb. 16 in Falcon in northeast Colorado Springs.

— Feb. 5, 12-year-old Elias Armstrong was shot and killed by the owner of the car he had stolen and taken for a joy ride. The 911 recording indicated that other kids in the vehicle were in a gunfight with the owner.

— Last Aug. 8, two days before his 15th birthday, Jozias "Jojo" Aragon was found shot in the back, stabbed and stomped on in one of the most vicious murders that even seasoned homicide detectives had seen. His body was found by a mother pushing her baby's stroller near a baseball diamond behind Southwest Denver Recreation Center. A 17-year-old was arrested and is being charged as an adult in Aragon's death.

— In one horrific 20-day stretch a year ago in December, 16 young people were shot in four separate Aurora incidents. Two died. Among those wounded, six were shot near Aurora Central High School and three more were shot near Hinkley High School just as a community rally for calm was about to start.

Last year, Denver police arrested 12 juveniles for murder, when they logged only one such arrest in 2012. They reported that 14 juveniles were murdered last year, up from the one juvenile murdered in 2012.

2022 saw a 29% overall increase in kids who were charged with a violent crime, according to the Colorado Division of Youth Services.

"We are seeing the types of crimes young people are committing to be much more severe. They are committing much more violent person crimes," said Val Krier, director of Greeley's Platte Valley Youth Services Center.

Rehabilitation over seclusion

On average, there are about 290 children and teens serving sentences in Colorado Division of Youth Services facilities on any given day. According to data from fiscal year 2022, the most recent complete stats available, 89% of them are boys and the average length of stay is about 18 months.

Colorado DYS Director Anders Jacobson said that often youth who start committing serious crimes have also experienced severe childhood trauma rooted in poverty, physical and sexual abuse, major drug use in the home, prostitution, and sometimes just living where gang life is akin to a religion.

"They've seen horrible things in their neighborhoods, they've seen dad beat up mom, and witnessed their brother shot dead in the streets," said Jacobson. "If we're going to help them, we have to focus on their background and come up with therapy treatment to work hard to put as much as they can in the past and then build more opportunity to move forward in the future."

Eighteen months ago, DYS changed the environment in its facilities to look more like home. White walls were repainted in bright colors, comforters replaced thin sheets, offenders wear khakis and polo shirts instead of jail scrubs.

Jacobson is convinced that if an environment looks like a jail, kids will act like criminals. "We suck out as much of the correctional feel as we can and we've found that it has an impact," he said.

Also gone is seclusion. Instead, youth who act up are given a chance to cool down. "Now they go in a chill out and lay on a bean bag. We're not wrestling kids on the ground and putting them into seclusion."

When DYS first put these changes in place, Jacobson admits that some staff quit, afraid that kids would "beat them up" if seclusion as a punishment was removed.

But that didn't happen.

The changes are working so well, Jacobson believes some staff who resigned would like to return to work for him. The ones who stayed are more productive. "Why would you want to work in a state jail like environment. This is much more human for everybody," Jacobson said.

Of the 400 youth in DYS overall, 84% require mental health services, according to the latest numbers from the department. Many of those kids are treated for substance abuse. Nearly 70% have co-occuring mental and substance abuse treatment.

Jacobson understands that victims of his hundreds of tenants in DYS are a huge societal focus, but it's his job to keep kids from hurting people once they are released. "That can't happen again. We're taking the next step not just focusing on the victim, we focus on the kid, too."

Colorado's youth offender system has recently been a national leader in behavioral health. The Colorado Department of Human Services, DYS Behavioral Health Services and Programming, was named 2022 Program of the Year by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.

Looking for the spark

Among other successful "Blueprint" programs in Colorado, one is designed for kids aged 9-11 who have recently been placed in foster care. Fostering Healthy Futures for Pre-teens is a 30-week initiative where mentors have weekly visits with fostered kids with an aim to increase self-esteem, social support, coping skills and social acceptance. FHFP is housed at Aurora's Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.

In one study, children who were mentored compared to kids who were not showed reduced trauma symptoms, needed less mental health services and got in trouble less.

Another program, Tools of the Mind, is designed for kids aged 3-11. It can be applied in classrooms across Colorado and promotes a child's ability to self-regulate by supporting cognitive, social and emotional development.

According to studies since its inception, Tools of the Mind has helped children with their reading, writing and attention skills, and had fewer aggression and conduct problems.

Kingston said there are also programs which started out with good intentions but have been found to be failures. She cited Scared Straight as an example. "Programs that involve harsh scare tactics seem to backfire. Taking kids on tours to prison doesn't scare them, it's glamorizing," said Kingston.

To be successful, as many of those are in the Blueprint listings, she explained it's crucial to have a plan. "These programs are delivered with structure and format and are demonstrated to be effective," she said.

Kingston and Val Krier are on the front lines as this new wave of youth violence rolls through Colorado. Kingston's aim is to treat kids before they get into trouble and Krier's job starts after they enter the system.

"I've seen kids who had multiple odds against them do their best work in life here," said Krier of her detention facility, Platte Valley Youth Services Center.

Before and after, both are looking for what Kingston described as the spark.