Colo. suspect freed in error
Police reacted slowly to bracelet removal
DENVER — Evan Spencer Ebel ran up a long list of felony convictions before turning 21, joined a white supremacist gang behind bars, assaulted one prison guard and wrote that he fantasized about killing others.
Along the way, he benefited from a series of errors in the criminal justice system before he became a suspect in the slaying of Colorado’s prisons chief and a pizza deliveryman.
He got out of prison four years early because of a clerical error in a rural courthouse. He slipped his ankle bracelet and violated the terms of his parole last month, but authorities didn’t put out a warrant for his arrest until after the killings of pizza delivery man Nathan Leon and corrections chief Tom Clements.
Ebel’s streak came to an end on March 21 after he was pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy in rural Texas. He died after the ensuing car chase and shootout. The gun he used was the same used to kill Clements; the trunk of Ebel’s car held a Domino’s pizza box and shirt.
“We have to do better in the future,” Tim Hand, the head of the Department of Correction’s parole division, said in an interview Tuesday. “It forces us to Evan Spencer Ebel step back and see what things we need to examine.”
Ebel entered Colorado prisons in 2005 after a series of assault and menacing charges that combined for an eight-year sentence. Within six months he landed in solitary confinement, and he bounced in and out of that restricted state until his Jan. 28 release.
In 2006, he slipped his handcuffs, punched a guard in the face and threatened to kill the man’s family. Ebel agreed to plead guilty to the attack and receive up to four years more in prison, to be served after his sentence ended.
There was no question in the courtroom that Ebel was supposed to stay in prison well after 2013. “I just think four years is a little stiff, you know,” he told Judge David Thorson, according to transcripts of the 2008 hearing released Tuesday.
“By the time I get out, I’ll be 33.”
The judge, however, didn’t say the sentence was meant to be “consecutive,” or in addition to, Ebel’s current one, so it went to the prison system as a sentence to be served simultaneously.
As a result, Ebel was out before his 29th birthday.
Chief Judge Charles Barton and court administrator Walter Blair said in a statement that the court regrets the oversight “and extends condolences to the families of Mr. Nathan Leon and Mr. Tom Clements.” Rev. Timothy McDonald (center) leads a protest against the high bonds set for 35 defendants in Atlanta’s school cheating scandal outside the Fulton County Jail on Tuesday.