Former mayor of Boulder gets year of home detention
SAN LUIS » Former Boulder Mayor Bob Greenlee was spared prison but was sentenced to one year of home detention and 10 years of probation for his role in a high-speed crash that killed a woman in southern Colorado in late 2016.
Greenlee also was ordered to perform 200 hours of community service and fined the maximum of $100,000, and must make contributions totaling $1 million in $100,000 annual installments to a charity of the prosecutor’s choosing that will not be tax deductible.
Greenlee, 77, was sentenced by Judge John Kolomitz in Costilla District Court on Thursday, two months after he pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide, two counts of careless driving causing injury and reckless driving in the death of Patricia Lucero.
Prosecutors and Lucero’s family members asked Kolomitz to sentence Greenlee to prison or jail.
While the charge of criminally negligent homicide was punishable by up to three years in prison, Kolomitz said he was swayed by a presentence report in which a physician said that, due to Greenlee’s health, any sort of incarceration would likely kill him.
“His doctor’s opinion is that under the circumstances, a sentence to incarceration would in effect be a death sentence,” he said. “It is not the intention that one death should be paid for by the death of another.”
But to make up for it, Kolomitz issued a probation sentence double what prosecutors were asking for as an alternative to prison.
“Despite the fact that I consider probation to be the appropriate sentence here, I cannot disregard or speak lightly of the conduct of the defendant,” he said. “This is an egregious act, an act of inexplicable conduct by the defendant. It was inexcusable behavior.”
Greenlee spoke at the sentencing but spent most of it turned toward Lucero’s family and friends, and addressed remarks to them at the end of a nearly four-hour hearing. “I will live with this for the rest of my life,” he said.
Greenlee was one of the drivers involved in a fivevehicle crash on Dec. 28, 2016, that killed Lucero, 70, of Monte Vista, and left Greenlee and his wife hospitalized with critical injuries.