How mass killers slip through Colorado’s safety net

Assessing credibility of threats is difficult.

A man at Denver International Airport told his father he’d ram his truck through a gate, hijack a plane and shoot up the airport.

A husband promised carnage at his former place of worship.

A woman in east Denver vowed to open fire in a grocery store to make people listen to her.

An author published a book detailing gruesome killings.

A young person with bombmaking supplies pledged to be the next mass killer.

A Colorado Springs man threatened a mass shooting at a street fair.

In the last 15 months, three of those people acted on their threats. And 12 Coloradans died.

After those attacks, the three suspects’ prior threats loomed large — missed warning signs of impending tragedy. A year before authorities say a 22-year-old killed five in a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub, a judge said the suspect was clearly planning an attack and it would be “so bad” if the person did not get mental health treatment.

Before a man shot and killed five in a targeted spree across Denver and Lakewood, a reader tipped the FBI and Denver police that his murderous novels might be a manifesto.

And before a man attempted to bomb a Jehovah’s Witness hall in Thornton on Christmas Day — and fatally shot his wife and then himself — a family member became so worried about his escalating anti-social behavior she asked the police to intervene.

None of it was enough to prevent bloodshed.

The failings in those cases have been well-documented. But a review of red flag filings and interviews with law enforcement and mental health professionals by The Denver Post shows people across Colorado regularly make threats of mass violence, and the safety net intended to prevent such attacks is a complex, fragmented system that pits personal freedoms against public safety.

Patchwork funding means some communities are better equipped than others to investigate threats of mass violence and to get help for those who

need mental health treatment. Assessing the credibility of threats is difficult, messy work, and state law can make it hard for bystanders, mental health professionals and police to intervene until a situation becomes dire. Mandatory holds for people experiencing dangerous mental health symptoms are shortlived and too often result in a person being released back into society with few resources.

“That grey area where there’s not necessarily criminal charges, but how do we make sure this person doesn’t do something in the future — that’s the tricky situation,” said Denver police Cmdr. Paul Jimenez of the department’s strategic investigation bureau, which includes the counter-threat section.

Colorado doesn’t have a statewide, multidisciplinary threat assessment team, law enforcement and government officials told The Post. There is no overarching system to track a person’s threats or threatening behavior across jurisdictions and time — especially if that person is not charged with a crime.

Frustrated families are often left to advocate for a loved one, even as that

loved one might pose a threat to them. And people fall through the cracks.

“This is one of the great challenges of our time,” 18th Judicial District Attorney John Kellner said.

By the time Denver police officers responded to reports of a man claiming to have a gun and pushing an empty wheelchair at Denver International Airport in September, that man’s family had been trying to get him help for five months.

They weren’t surprised to hear that officers took the man to a hospital for an involuntary mental health assessment after determining he was unarmed but “acting highly erratic.” They weren’t surprised when he was released from the hospital and was back at DIA the next day. It wasn’t a shock when the man then called his father from the airport and threatened to carry out a mass shooting, to hijack a plane.

“Thankfully he hasn’t gotten to where he has hurt anybody,” the man’s sister said. “But it’s just terrifying. When someone is this far gone, unless this trajectory can be stopped, where is this going to end? You just don’t know.”

The man’s sister spoke to The Post about her brother’s long-term mental health issues with his permission, on the condition that neither sibling be named in order to protect the brother’s career. The 40-year-old man lives in rural Colorado and was diagnosed 20 years ago with bipolar schizoaffective disorder, which means he experiences episodes of mania — a high mood, with high energy and activity — coupled with delusions and a break from reality.

“My brother is a pretty normal person who is just plagued with his mind getting hijacked sometimes,” his sister said.

People who are mentally ill are much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators, and the vast majority of people with mental illness do not carry out mass violence, experts told The Post. But mental illness does often play a role in mass violence.

A study released in January by the U.S. Secret Service that looked at perpetrators of 173 mass-violence attacks in public spaces between 2016 and 2020 found that the majority of attackers experienced mental health symptoms, including depression, paranoia or suicidal thoughts, prior to or during their attacks.

In Colorado, several suspects in mass shootings have had documented mental health conditions.

The suspect in the Nov. 19 attack at Club Q in Colorado Springs had been prescribed medications used to treat schizophrenia, mood disorders and depression. The man accused of carrying out a mass shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015 has been consistently found mentally incompetent to stand trial. And the man who killed 12 at an Aurora movie theater was diagnosed with schizophrenia, as was the man charged in a 2021 mass shooting at a Boulder King Soopers.

The Secret Service study found that effective mental health treatment is part of mass violence prevention and that communities should work to ensure people who are in a mental health crisis can get the help they need.

But that’s easier said than done. People who need mental health care in Colorado must navigate a complex system that doesn’t easily share information between providers. And those who don’t want care — even though they need it — have to become a threat to their own safety or others before they can be helped against their will.

A disconnect between Colorado’s court system and medical system means some people who need help are never connected to care, said Andrew Sylvester, a psychiatrist at Uchealth.

There are only a handful of mental health courts across the state — courtrooms that are focused on helping people with mental illness who are accused

of crimes. There are five such courts serving 10 counties in Colorado, according to the Colorado Judicial Branch.

When the man who made threats at DIA is healthy, he’s a friendly, compassionate guy who is deeply dedicated to his family, his sister said. He holds down well-paying remote-work positions and keeps up romantic relationships. But when he’s sick, he becomes a different person: he uses a different name, changes his phone number to the 202 area code and dresses differently. He’s rude and entitled, and he shuns his family in favor of spending time in bars with acquaintances.

Over the last two decades, he’s had regular episodes of mania and delusions that can last weeks or months, his sister said. Once, he went five years without having an episode, his longest healthy stretch. In early 2022, life was good for him: new job, likable colleagues, new girlfriend.

“And then in May, he said to my aunt, ‘Something is wrong, my eyes don’t look right, I’m afraid I’m going manic,’” his sister said. “And within days, he was no longer himself. And then it lasted for six months.”

When he’s delusional, her brother believes he’s part of some grand plan, she said. He’s in the FBI, or he has to stop a global war, or he has a mission against looming dangers that he can’t quite articulate.

In 2011, he tried to break into the White House to personally warn the president of danger he perceived. “That did not go well,” his sister said with a laugh. Her brother was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer.

The episode that hit him in May was the longest he’s ever experienced, his sister said. Over the years, he’s figured out how to recognize the signs of an episode early and get himself medical help. And he tried to last summer, she said.

He checked himself into the emergency room more than a dozen times, she said. Got inpatient help 10 times. But he’d often complain of something unrelated to his true problem once he got there, like foot pain, and he’d refuse antipsychotic medications — the only treatment that pulls him back to being healthy, she said. He always left the hospital as delusional as he was when he walked in, she said.

“He says it’s like fighting with himself,” she said. “He’s trying to get help, and then he arrives at the institution and the manic and delusional part of him takes over and he’s like, ‘No, no, no. We’re not going to let them do that.’ … It’s a battle. And it’s a battle where the further he goes into the delusion it appears to be harder and harder to get help.”

Last summer, she watched her brother repeatedly refuse the only effective treatments for his illness, she said.

“You have a right to be mentally ill,” his sister said.

Colorado law allows a person to be detained for 72 hours against their will in order to receive mental health care — what’s known as an “M1 hold” — but only if the person presents an imminent danger to themselves or others due to a mental disorder, or is so sick they can’t feed or care for themselves.

The patient must be evaluated within 72 hours. At the end of that time, the patient can either agree to receive ongoing voluntary care, be released with no further treatment or authorities can begin the court process of certification to force the person to undergo additional involuntary treatment, including involuntary medication. A person who has been certified can be held in a medical facility for care, or be released for court-ordered outpatient care, said Sylvester, the Uchealth psychiatrist.

In 2021, medical providers executed just under 36,700 72-hour M1 holds across Colorado, most for people who were considered a danger to themselves, according to statistics published by the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration. In about 1,450 of those holds, the person was considered a danger to others, according to the records. That same year, medical providers reported 4,500 certifications for longer-term court-ordered involuntary treatment.

“The standard to put someone on an M1 hold is very specific; Colorado wants to make sure people’s rights are not being violated,” Sylvester said. “…There has to be a specific target with a specific timeline demonstrating imminent harm… Vague threats — ‘I’m angry, I feel like hurting people’ — that is concerning. Very concerning. But without a specific threat, I can’t do anything about that.”

The laws around involuntary holds and certification were tweaked in 2022, with phased changes set to take effect on July 1 and in 2025. The new laws will allow police officers to take a person to medical treatment instead of jail even if a warrant is out for the person’s arrest, increase the required paperwork around involuntary holds, and give the right to an attorney to people going through the court certification process, among numerous other procedural changes.

Lawmakers initially proposed allowing relatives to seek a court order for involuntary treatment for a family member, but that proposal was cut out of the final bill.

The sister of the man who made threats at DIA feels family members need better tools to help their loved one with mental illness.

“If the family could provide information that today he bought a gun, then he will be secured,” she said. “But when we say, ‘He has this history and he’s in a delusional state,’ they say, ‘I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do.’ …You’re accepting a community threat and deferring to the rights of the mentally ill person to make decisions when they’re not mentally well enough to make decisions. What can we do? Not to get all the way to involuntary commitment just willy-nilly, but the pendulum has swung too far right now for meaningful interventions by family or the medical community.”

She and her frustrated family members called hospitals, told them her brother’s medical history, and explained what medication he needs, but the hospitals couldn’t act without her brother’s consent. Sometimes medical staff assumed he was homeless, she said, or that he didn’t have family support.

For her brother, the right to be mentally ill meant he got sicker and sicker until he eventually made threats of mass violence.

“Would he actually get on a plane and cause issues?” she said. “Would he actually bring a bomb? I don’t think so. I think of it as a plea for help. But you can’t know that as law enforcement. And I can’t know that, because he’s off in a different world.”

Early on in this summer’s episode, her brother ended up in Salida, and she convinced her father to pay for a hotel room out there for a few days, hoping it might help him to stabilize.

“It’s like throwing spaghetti at a wall,” she said. “At any moment, you’re like, ‘OK, what might work?’”

A few days later, her mom drove out to pick her brother up.

“And there he is with this crazy rifle, trying to get into the car, acting totally normal,” she said. Their mother had him put the weapon in the trunk, and, later, they took the gun from him and realized it was an Airsoft gun, though it looked real.

At the time, there was nothing barring her brother from buying a real gun. Even when sick, he presents well to strangers and can pass as well, she said. After he made the threats at DIA, Denver police asked for and received a temporary extreme risk protection order under the state’s red flag law, which barred him from buying or possessing any guns for 10 days.

He wasn’t arrested for making threats, but was charged with petty theft for taking a limo to the airport and then refusing to pay, as well as trespassing. Both charges were later dismissed, court records show.

The threats at DIA were the beginning of the end of his manic and delusional episode. He eventually was connected to the Denver Police Department’s co-responder team and to one of the state’s 17 community mental health centers. Staff there went through the certification court process to medicate him against his will, and he was given an antipsychotic injection.

Within two weeks, the man was back to himself, his sister said. Then he had to deal with the aftermath of the crisis: the criminal charges, a lost job, damaged relationships, unpaid debts.

“When he comes out of it he has inklings of what happened, but it’s like someone waking up from a bad dream,” his sister said. “You know some of these things happened, but you weren’t fully present for it.”

Once he’d been certified for involuntary treatment, he was barred from buying a gun under federal law, and Denver police did not pursue a permanent extreme risk protection order, which would have barred him from possessing guns for one year, on the grounds that it would be redundant.

Federal law prohibits anyone who has been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility from possessing a gun after being released. Most states also have similar or more restrictive laws on their books; Colorado is one of a handful of states that do not, instead relying on the federal statute, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Every day, law enforcement officials in Colorado triage reports of possible threats. With each report, they have to determine how credible the threat is and how many resources to devote to investigating it.

Few of those investigations lead to arrests, officials said.

“There are a lot of very hateful, nasty things that are said but are First Amendment-protected material,” said Ash Thorne, supervisory special agent over domestic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction at the FBI’S Denver field office.