Often I get up early, because it’s so much quieter and you can get some real work done without distraction. But sometimes your best intentions fall prey to habit.
One morning three years and change ago, while pouring that first cup in the still hour of 4 a.m., I decided for some reason — call it a disturbance in The Force — to switch on my smartphone and tap the Twitter app.
I saw rumors that the Colorado prisons chief had been shot to death.
The tweets were way out there at the forefront of unconfirmed hearsay; dangerous and horrifying and electrifying in that way of our profession. Whatever I planned to do that morning fell away. Now it was time for answering this question.
That the governor’s spokesman answered my e-mail query during that now-desperate hour confirmed the news before I even opened the response. And there it was: State corrections employees had been notified in the wee hours that a gunman took nationally recognized prison reformer Tom Clements from us.
Easily one of the most memorable moments of my career. And yet here we are, all this time later, with wildly conflicting explanations for how the gunman was able to pull off his crime, and the Colorado investigators tasked with solving the case apparently ready to shut it down.
Last week, the sheriff in El Paso County, the agency tasked with the responsibility, called a bizarre press conference in which he continued to express his intention to close the case, and asserted that evidence didn’t support theories that the gunman, Evan Ebel, worked with outside assistance.
“I can tell you definitively that Evan Ebel is the only one who killed Tom Clements,” Sheriff Bill Elder said. “To make the leap that there was a giant conspiracy is not supported by the evidence.”
The leap?
It would take a lot more space than I have room for here to dig into all the details. But what we know strongly suggests that justice remains due for the gunman’s enablers, and the public’s right to know continues to languish.
Briefly. Clements’ murder is the stuff of high drama. A reformer working to end warehousing inmates in the harsh conditions of solitary confinement is murdered in the doorway of his home, in front of his wife, by a gunman who had spent significant time in solitary confinement prior to his release.
The gunman, Evan Ebel, earlier killed another man who worked delivering pizzas in order to take from him the trappings he needed to trick Clements into opening his front door.
Fleeing, Ebel tangled with and was killed by Texas police. According to documents obtained in May by The Denver Post’s Kirk Mitchell, Texas Rangers clearly believe that a notorious white supremacist gang — the 211 Crew — ordered and assisted Ebel’s murderous rampage.
In the trunk of his getaway car, Ebel kept a pipe bomb and a hit list of other Colorado officials, forever raising the specter of threats to follow.
A week before his assassination, Clements denied a rich Saudi prison inmate’s request to finish his sentence in his home country. Investigators looked into whether the inmate had any influence with the 211 Crew.
Meanwhile, during the time the investigation was ongoing, El Paso County investigators were led by former Sheriff Terry Maketa, recently indicted for his scandalous time in office.
Despite what we’ve called in these pages the meltdown that was occurring within the sheriff’s office, the governor passed on his ability to appoint a special prosecutor to the case.
The Texas Rangers report names possible co-conspirators in Clements’ murder. The report states: “The murder of the Colorado Department of Corrections director was ordered by hierarchy of the 211 prison crew.”
Elder said last week his office still controls whether a criminal investigation of Clements’ cold-blooded murder advances.
At the press conference he initiated, Elder admonished reporters to stop writing so many stories about the case, as the stories hurt the family’s feelings.
Some mornings you wonder why you ever got out of bed.
E-mail editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett at cplunkett@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @cplunkett
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