The Arizona man accused of breaking into the Colorado Supreme Court’s building earlier this month caused an estimated $35 million in damage and rendered three floors unusable, State Court Administrator Steven Vasconcellos said during a legislative hearing Friday.
Brandon Olsen, 44, is accused of shooting his way into the Ralph L. Carr Judicial Center around 1:15 a.m. on Jan. 2, threatening an unarmed security guard and then starting a fire on the seventh floor of the courthouse before eventually surrendering to police.
Olsen told police he was hallucinating during the incident after smoking methamphetamine and taking fentanyl pills.
The seventh-floor fire was extinguished by the building’s sprinklers, which ran for a couple of hours and caused significant water damage, Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice Brian Boatright said Friday during the legislative hearing at the state Capitol.
Vasconcellos said there was ankle-deep water in the building and that three floors were largely destroyed. The fifth, sixth and seventh floors “will have to be rebuilt from scratch,” he told lawmakers on the Joint Judiciary Committee.
Water from the sprinklers seeped through the building all the way to the basement, Vasconcellos said. Olsen also sprayed fire extinguishers on several floors, and those particles were sucked into the building’s HVAC system, Vasconcellos said.
The courthouse has been closed since the incident, but court officials said Thursday that the Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals will reopen to the public Tuesday. Other less-damaged floors in the building may reopen by March 1, Vasconcellos said, while the seriously damaged floors will likely be closed for at least a year.
“It is a disaster recovery site, and not a workplace at the moment,” Vasconcellos said. He cautioned that the $35 million estimate will change with time.
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office is housed on floors six through 10 of the building, spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said. Staff are working from home and other remote locations while the building is closed, he said. Some workers are using the State Services Building for basic office functions like mail intake. The Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, which handles professional discipline for Colorado’s attorneys, is on the fifth floor.
Pacheco said the Attorney General’s Office did not lose any “critical records related to our daily work” in the incursion.
Olsen is charged with two counts of felony arson, criminal mischief and reckless use of a gun, court records show.
After the incident, authorities were quick to say the break-in did not appear to be related to threats against Colorado Supreme Court justices in the wake of the court’s ruling that Donald Trump could not appear on the state’s primary ballot because of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and the riot at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
But Denver police would not elaborate on why investigators believed the incident to be unrelated. The police department blacked out Olsen’s statements from an arrest affidavit the department released on Jan. 2.
A less-redacted version of the affidavit obtained from Denver County Court on Friday reveals that Olsen told police officers that he’d taken several fentanyl pills and smoked methamphetamines before the incident, and that he felt like people were chasing him.
“This was a very random act,” Boatright said. “It had nothing to do with the recent court cases we had. I’ve told people we could have been a Walmart and it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Olsen is accused of crashing into another vehicle at 13th Avenue and Lincoln Street — just outside the judicial center — before he shot out a window to enter the building. He told officers he was driving fast because he wanted to avoid the people he thought were chasing him, and that he entered the Colorado Supreme Court building only because it happened to be the closest building to the crash, according to the less-redacted affidavit.
Olsen told officers he believed he was hallucinating and that he used a lighter to set fire to papers inside an office. He said he shot at several windows to try to clear out the significant amount of smoke that the fire created.
Olsen eventually noticed police outside the building and called 911.
“I’m the guy holed up in the building that they’re surrounding,” he said, according to the affidavit. He then left his gun on a table and surrendered to police at around 3 a.m.
Olsen told police he struggles with addiction and has relapsed in the past.
His ex-wife previously told The Denver Post that Olsen was experiencing a mental health crisis during the incident. She said he unexpectedly called her on New Year’s Eve to say he was driving from his home in Arizona to Colorado to try to see their children. Olsen also recounted that trip to officers, according to the less-redacted affidavit.
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