But last week, she shuttered A Line Boutique’s store at 1750 Wewatta St., telling BusinessDen the location lost $400,000 last year.

“It never came back,” she said of the pre-pandemic environment downtown.

Berensten bought A Line in 2012 when it had a single location in Greenwood Village. Along with the store at the base of the Coloradan condominium complex, she added locations in Denver’s Cherry Creek, plus Salt Lake City and Carlsbad, California. She moved the original store in 2018 to the Denver Tech Center’s Belleview Station.

Those four stores are profitable, she said, selling designer brands like L’agence, Zimmermann and Max Mara. But with the 3,200-square-foot Union Station store deep in the red, she said, 2024 was the only year in her tenure that A Line’s overall sales numbers shrunk.

“Every other store grew, but Union Station dragged it down,” she said.

Berensten blames vagrancy and theft issues, and a lease she now sees as overpriced.

At a crossroads: Downtown Denver is waiting for its rebound

People have walked in and stolen thousands of dollars worth of purses, she said. Another woman stayed in the dressing room for hours past closing before finally running out the door with clothes. Berensten said building security has been unresponsive in the last few years and hiring her own private security guard would cost too much.

“Guys come in and grab a $2,000 purse and walk out. And then the police are like ‘Did anyone get hurt? No? Then file insurance if you want,’” she said. “We have homeless people sitting right against our door and no one will do anything. You would think they would. We have to keep the door locked and have a Ring doorbell.”

Since the pandemic, A Line’s Union Station spot has lost seven employees — compared to one across all her other stores — nearly all because they felt unsafe, Berensten said. One stylist even brought in bear spray for protection before she quit.

Berensten said she’s paying rent of $55 a square foot per year for the space along with utilities, property taxes and insurance as part of the 10-year lease she signed in 2019. She thinks the market value today is closer to $30 a foot, mainly because of the area’s decline in recent years.

“The current market rate is half of what our lease is. We’ve tried and tried and tried to get it negotiated, and (our landlord Ascentrist) wouldn’t even come to the table,” she said.

With A Line leaving, six of the 10 retail units at the Coloradan are available, according to a JLL listing. The restaurant Eggs Inc also closed there earlier this month after opening in January.

Berensten said the focus is now on her four other stores and continued out-of-state expansion, hopefully getting to a total of 10 stores. She thinks two spots is a good number for Colorado. A Line also closed a Castle Rock spot when its lease was up in March.

While her remaining stores are doing well, Berensten said it’s a challenging time in general for brick-and-mortar.

“Retail just doesn’t have margin, especially with tariffs now and online (shopping). It has never been worse in 13 years,” she said. “It wasn’t this hard during Covid. Everyone now expects not to pay full price.”

The 51-year-old former tech entrepreneur, who sold her consulting firm GB Synergy for millions at 33, also wants to expand A Line Experiences, whose trips include African horseback safaris and Paris Fashion Week excursions.

“I am a woman who has range,” she said. For a long time I felt like I needed to be in a box, be a working woman but be in a man’s world… You have to be able to go to the dark night of the soul.”

Read more from our partner, BusinessDen.

The agency provided limited information about most of those detained in the eight-day operation, which ended Sunday. The people arrested either had been sought in connection with or charged with crimes or had been convicted of offenses, the agency said in a statement.

ICE did not provide a breakdown of convictions or charges for most of those detained. It’s also unclear from the statement if the 243 announced arrests represented all of the immigrants detained in the operation, or just those who had some level of criminal background.

Steve Kotecki, a spokesman for the Denver ICE office, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Wednesday afternoon.

“By partnering with federal agencies, we have successfully apprehended individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety,” Robert Guadian, the official leading ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit in Denver, said in the agency’s statement.

The operation ran from July 12 through Sunday, the agency said, and resulted in arrests of immigrants from 17 countries. The release identifies six people who had been convicted of a crime, plus a seventh who’s facing felony charges for sex crimes. An eighth person named in the release was alleged to be a member of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

At least some of those people arrested in the operation were already in state custody. Rigoberto Carranza-Mendez, 47, matches the name of a person who was serving a 25-year sentence in state prison for a 2014 murder, according to court records. He has been since been deported to Mexico, ICE said.

Another man identified in the release as having been convicted on drug charges also appeared to be serving a prison sentence in Colorado, according to a state Department of Corrections database.

A message sent to the DOC was not immediately returned Wednesday.

A third listed man, who was convicted of careless driving resulting in death, had been sentenced to a six-month jail term earlier this year.

ICE’s Wednesday announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of the agency’s operations in Colorado and across the United States. Arrests have increased here and nationally as Trump administration officials have pushed for more detentions as part of a mass-deportation plan. ICE data from the first several months of the year showed that a majority of those immigrants arrested had never been convicted of a crime.

The news release was also a rare public disclosure from ICE about its efforts and the scale of its arrests. The agency previously had refused to say how many immigrants it arrested or deported in high-profile raids elsewhere in Colorado this year.

The statement identifies the specific crimes associated with 55 arrestees who are not identified but, ICE said, have been charged, are suspected in or have been convicted of those offenses. One person was wanted on suspicion of murder, and another for human trafficking, though the release does not say if those suspects have been charged.

Drug offenses, assault, theft and driving under the influence represented most of the 55 arrests linked to specific crimes, whether charged or convicted.

Nine of the 243 people arrested had alleged ties to gangs or drug cartels, the release says.

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Sonya Jaquez Lewis was charged with the felony by the Denver District Attorney’s Office on July 2, according to Denver District Court records. The filing came nearly four months after prosecutors in Boulder and Denver said they were investigating the Longmont Democrat.

Jaquez Lewis turned herself in to Denver police on July 6, spent a night in jail and was released the next morning, said her attorney, Craig Truman, on Tuesday morning. She will be arraigned in early August.

Truman declined to comment on the charges, other than to say that he was “sure when all the facts are known in this difficult and complicated case, justice will be done for both sides.”

Matt Jablow, a spokesman for Denver District Attorney John Walsh, confirmed the charges Monday night. Jaquez Lewis’ case, which wasn’t publicized at the time it was filed, was first reported by Colorado Politics.

Jaquez Lewis resigned from the legislature in February amid an ethics probe into her treatment of her legislative aides. Her resignation came just before the ethics committee learned that Jaquez Lewis had faked a letter of support from a former legislative staffer.

The then-state senator had sent the committee, made up of her colleagues, five letters as part of her defense against allegations that she required aides to do work around her house and had resisted signing off on a staffer’s timecard.

Of five people who submitted letters purportedly on Jaquez Lewis’ behalf, two told investigators they did not author them, according to court records. Another person said she thought a letter submitted under her name wasn’t the letter she’d written, and a fourth alleged author laughed as a Denver investigator read her letter aloud, according to charging documents. The fifth letter was submitted to the legislative committee anonymously.

The Boulder and Denver district attorneys’ offices began investigating Jaquez Lewis in March. Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Democrat who chaired the ethics committee, told The Post then that she contacted prosecutors “about the materials we received from (Jaquez Lewis) as part of the Senate Ethics Committee process.”

At the time, Jaquez Lewis said the letter had been “accidentally submitted.” The alleged author of that letter told investigators that Jaquez Lewis had contacted her repeatedly in January, including by mentioning a potential job lead, according to court records. The woman then learned of the ethics investigation and ignored the then-senator’s calls and texts because “she did not have great things to say about Ms. Jaquez Lewis.”

The Denver Post later confirmed that a second letter of support given to the committee had also apparently been faked. In March, Jaquez Lewis declined to comment about the second letter. Investigators spoke with that purported author, too, and she confirmed she did not write it.

An investigator with the DA’s office also spoke with someone — the name is redacted — who said Jaquez Lewis had asked her to “copy and paste language from an attorney” into a letter that the senator wanted the person to submit to the Secretary of State’s Office on behalf of Jaquez Lewis.

According to court records, the alleged author of another letter said she had written a letter to the ethics committee on the senator’s behalf. But “she believed the letter submitted by Ms. Jaquez Lewis was not the letter she wrote.”

When an investigator called a fourth purported author, the person laughed as the investigator read the letter aloud. The person declined to speak further, according to court records.

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The lawsuit, filed last month in Pitkin County District Court, is the latest fallout from a financial scandal involving Lugano Diamonds, which has a store in Aspen, and its founder Moti Ferder. Lugano’s parent company fired Ferder in May and sued him for fraud in June.

“What has been uncovered through the investigation thus far does not reflect who we are as a business and the values we uphold,” Elias Sabo, the CEO of Lugano parent company Compass Diversified, said in May of an audit that revealed financing oddities and misconduct.

One aspect of that financing is the source of the recent Aspen lawsuit. Bryan Gadol and Darren Testa, two investors from Orange County, California, say that Ferder approached them last year with an opportunity: The duo would give him money, he would buy diamonds and create rings from them, and Ferder would then split the profits with them after the jewelry sold.

Some Lugano pieces sell for north of $10 million, according to a recent Forbes cover story.

Gadol, a partner at the national law firm Holland & Knight, says he invested $3 million in Ferder’s diamonds. Testa, a technology executive, says he invested $2.5 million.

“Mr. Ferder did not actually buy diamonds with most of the money that he obtained from investors, including the plaintiffs,” they wrote in their lawsuit June 18.

Gadol and Testa say they are now owed $7.9 million and $6.4 million, respectively, from Ferder and Lugano. After their demands for payment were ignored in May, they sued Ferder.

“The actions of Mr. Ferder were malicious, oppressive and taken in reckless disregard of the plaintiffs’ rights,” Gadol and Testa allege, “so as to justify an award of punitive damages sufficient to punish and deter Mr. Ferder from engaging in such conduct in the future.”

Ferder did not respond to BusinessDen’s emails. Gadol and Testa declined to comment.

The investors’ lawyers are Michelle Schindler and Marcus Gould with Ferguson Schindler in Aspen, plus Alice Hodsden and Jonathan Altman at Theodora Oringher in California.

Ferder, 55, was born in Israel and emigrated in 2005 to Orange County, where he and his wife started Lugano Diamonds. The company has nine stores. Ferder bought the 6,000-square-foot home at 1220 Red Butte Drive in Aspen for $18.7 million in 2021.

J.E., who is being identified by her initials to protect her daughter’s identity, wanted the suspect to be convicted, locked away. She wanted to know he couldn’t hurt anyone else, at least for a while.

But that’s not what happened.

Jesus Alberto Pereira Castillo, 21, posted $5,000 bail and was released from the Jefferson County jail on Nov. 27, 2024, court records show. He was subsequently arrested by federal immigration authorities and was deported from the country by May.

“Clerk notified via email that deft” — the defendant — “has been removed from the country,” Chief Judge Jeffrey Pilkington wrote in a May 19 order.

The deportation effectively ended the state’s criminal case against Castillo — the prosecution cannot continue without his presence in court, though he remains wanted on a warrant and could be prosecuted if he were to return to Colorado.

There was no conviction, no sentence, no jail time — just a deportation.

“It’s been pretty hard on me and my daughter,” J.E. said. “She doesn’t feel like she is getting the justice she deserves. It just has been so easy for immigrants to come into the country after they are deported. So the fear is that he might relocate somewhere else in the U.S. and do this to someone else. Them deporting him ruined justice for my daughter.”

At least two dozen defendants and one witness in criminal cases in metro Denver have been taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported in the middle of ongoing state prosecutions since September, The Denver Post found. District attorneys across the region started to notice more defendants disappearing into ICE custody this spring, as President Donald Trump ramped up deportations nationwide.

Colorado district attorneys who spoke with The Post said such deportations are not in the interest of justice and do not improve public safety over the long term.

“If I can’t hold someone accountable because the defendant is deported before we’ve reached a just outcome in the case, and the defendant finds their way back here and commits another crime, that does not make the community safer,” 17th Judicial District Attorney Brian Mason said. “If victims of crime are afraid to call the police after they have been sexually assaulted or some other terrible crime because they are worried about being deported, that makes our community less safe.”

The defendants deported were charged with crimes that included driving under the influence, car theft, drug distribution, assault, domestic violence, attempted murder and human trafficking.

Again and again, court records reviewed by The Post showed criminal cases stalled by deportations.

“Def does not appear as he was deported and is no longer in the U.S.,” a document notes in the file for a  26-year-old man from Brazil who was accused of swinging a knife at his wife.

“Deft no longer in the country. Defendant (failed to appear),” a record states in the file for a 32-year-old man from Mexico charged with driving a stolen car.

‘Full force of the law’

Detectives with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office and the Denver Police Department spent six months building a case against a 28-year-old man from El Salvador who they alleged sold drugs and was connected to a woman who fatally overdosed at an Arapahoe County apartment complex in October.

The investigation included a drug deal with an undercover Denver detective and ongoing surveillance. The man was charged with four felony counts related to drug dealing and two counts of child abuse after the six-month investigation culminated in his arrest on April 9.

The man’s arrest affidavit notes that he was arrested by the Aurora Police Department’s SWAT team, and then, without further explanation, says he was taken into custody by ICE.

Aurora police spokesman Joe Moylan said the city’s SWAT team assisted in the arrest and then turned the man over to the sheriff’s office while at the scene. Anders Nelson, a spokesman for the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, said the agency “partners with ICE” when pursuing cases against suspected non-citizen drug dealers.

“ICE uses various means to positively identify these individuals, and so when they are arrested, ICE agents respond to identify the individual so that we can charge them accordingly under their correct name,” Nelson said. “In this case, the subject had a lengthy criminal history that included active warrants for his arrest and had entered the U.S. illegally on several occasions, and so ICE agents took custody of him.”

The suspect accused of selling drugs was deported within a month. The state criminal case remains open.

“Deft has been deported,” the man’s court records noted on May 9.

In an emailed statement, Denver ICE spokesman Steve Kotecki said the federal agency “arrests aliens who threaten public safety and commit crimes.”

Before their recent arrests and deportations, the two men from El Salvador and Brazil had previously been cited only for traffic violations in Colorado, according to records kept by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. The man from Mexico had prior convictions for car theft and drug possession.

“ICE recognizes the importance of addressing unlawful actions with the full force of the law, ensuring that individuals are held accountable for their actions,” Kotecki said in the statement. “We are committed to creating safe and thriving communities by supporting effective and fair law enforcement practices.”

Tristan Gorman, a criminal defense attorney, noted that ICE’s mid-case deportations, which come before a defendant is convicted of a crime, are “completely disregarding the constitutional presumption of innocence.”

Mason, who serves as DA for Adams and Broomfield counties, said federal agencies “are under enormous pressure to implement the policies of the current administration.”

“This is new,” he said of the growing number of mid-case deportations.

Long-used process is no longer reliable

In the past, when ICE detained defendants while their state cases were ongoing, prosecutors relied on court orders called writs to ensure the defendants still appeared in court. A writ in this context is a judge’s order to a custodial agency, like a jail or immigration detention center, requiring the agency to bring the defendant to court.

ICE is no longer reliably complying with writs to produce defendants for their state hearings, First Judicial District Attorney Alexis King said.

“It’s hard to know and it’s hard to predict how a writ will be honored or not,” she said. “…A writ was our standard process that we relied on to keep someone available for a criminal proceeding. It is not consistently working.”

ICE hasn’t communicated its policies or procedures in any cohesive way to her team of Jefferson and Gilpin county prosecutors, King said. Her office is relying on personal connections between staff and officials at ICE to try to ensure defendants in federal custody are brought to court.

“It’s felt pretty ad hoc, and often reliant on us being very proactive,” she said.

ICE officials informed the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and the Denver Sheriff Department in June that the agency would no longer comply with writs for detainees in immigration custody to physically appear in the counties’ criminal courts.

“ICE Denver is no longer honor (sic) writ from Denver County Court due to the Denver County Jail do not (sic) comply with immigration detainer or fail to transfer custody of aliens in a safe and orderly manner,” Hung Thach, a supervisory detention and deportation officer in the Denver field office, wrote in a June 16 email to Denver officials.

In a statement issued to 9News and Colorado Public Radio, Denver Field Office Director Robert Gaudian said ICE would not honor the writs because agency officials were not confident the detainees would be returned to ICE’s custody after their state court appearances.

Kotecki did not respond to a request to share that statement with The Post. He previously has requested blanket anonymity for his statements as a spokesman for the federal agency, which The Post declined to grant. He also has said he would no longer provide information to The Post unless the newspaper complied with his request for anonymity.

“In the past, ICE Denver and the Adams County sheriff have enjoyed a great working relationship, with ICE honoring writs for trials and the sheriff notifying us of an alien’s release,” Gaudian said in the statement, according to 9News. “This relationship must be reciprocal, though. If I’m not confident that the sheriff will return an alien to us, then I cannot in good conscience release that individual.”

Denver sheriff’s spokeswoman Daria Serna defended the department’s practices for handling writs in a statement Wednesday.

“The Denver Sheriff Department’s policy and practice for the transfer of people in custody are in alignment with state and local laws,” she said.

ICE approach varies by jurisdiction

So far in Boulder, immigration authorities have largely complied with writs to produce defendants for state court hearings with just a handful of exceptions, said Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney.

The bigger risk for his office is not knowing about ICE detainment in time to seek a writ and delay deportation, because federal agents are failing to consistently alert prosecutors when they arrest defendants in state criminal cases, he said.

“ICE should provide a notification anytime they pick someone up and the person is a defendant,” Dougherty said. “That has not always happened. What has happened, more often than not, is we find out from the defense attorney or someone connected to the defendant that someone has been arrested by ICE and held for possible deportation.”

Dougherty noted that deportations seem to be happening much faster than in past years. When a defendant is deported in the middle of a case, it has a broad impact, he said.

“The victim never had his or her day in court,” he said. “We couldn’t do justice. There is no conviction, no sex offender registration and no consequences. And the person is deported to a country. We have no reason to believe the person is held responsible for the crime they were accused of.”

In Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties, prosecutors have not had any issues with ICE agents deporting defendants mid-case, said 23rd Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler. He said federal agents have given his office warnings when ICE is interested in defendants, which has allowed prosecutors to revoke defendants’ bonds to keep them in jail — in state custody — while the criminal case is pending.

Gorman, the defense attorney, said revoking bond simply because a person could be deported is fundamentally unfair.

“We’re just basically saying to them, ‘Yeah, we put all these terms and conditions on your bond and you’ve got to comply with them or we will revoke your bond,” she said. “But even if you do absolutely everything right and show up at all your court dates, we might revoke your bond anyway… even though you followed all the rules.”

Arrests at courthouses

Colorado law prohibits ICE agents from arresting people at or near state courthouses for civil immigration purposes — a line that federal agents have crossed multiple times this year, including in Denver and on the Western Slope.

Federal agents have also been routinely making immigration arrests at Denver’s federal courthouses, which are not covered by the state prohibition.

In Garfield, Pitkin and Rio Blanco counties, federal agents monitored courthouse dockets in order to detain defendants for immigration proceedings, Ninth Judicial District Chief Judge John Neiley wrote in an April 8 order instructing federal agents to stop.

“In short, these types of arrests make courthouses less safe, frustrate the process of justice, and could have a chilling effect on litigants, witnesses, victims, court personnel and other members of the public who have a right and obligation to participate fairly in the judicial system,” Neiley wrote in the order.

Although the practice is against Colorado law, there are no criminal penalties for federal agents who make such prohibited arrests. Rather, state law says they can be held in contempt of court or sued by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office. Spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said the office could not confirm or comment on any such investigations.

“Attorney General (Phil) Weiser is concerned about reports of ICE arrests at state courthouses interfering with state criminal prosecutions and having a chilling effect on witnesses and victims in criminal cases,” Pacheco said. “Federal immigration arrests at courthouses make our communities less safe and violate state law.”

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So far this year, nearly one in every five stolen cars has been a Hyundai or a Kia, according to a news release from the agency.

Cars from those two manufacturers made up five of Colorado’s 10 most stolen vehicles in 2024, state patrol officials said. That list included the Hyundai Elantra, Hyundai Sonata, Kia Optima, Kia Soul and Kia Sportage.

Hyundai and Kia-manufactured vehicles also accounted for 23% of all Colorado car thefts in 2023.

“If you own a key Hyundai, Kia or any vehicle in Colorado’s ‘Top Ten List,’ you must do more to prevent theft,” state patrol officials stated in the news release.

State officials said Hyundai and Kia owners should check with their local manufacturer service center to determine if their vehicle qualifies for a security software update.

Beyond locking the car and not keeping the keys inside it, the Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority recommends:

• Parking in a garage, secure parking lot or an area with constant supervision
• Keeping a clean car with no visible items to steal
• Using a steering wheel lock
• Using a GPS tag and enrolling in Denver Track or Metro Track
• Installing gear shift or pedal locks

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The tractor-trailer driver discovered the theft during a pre-trip inspection at a Love’s Truck Stop in Bennett just after 8 a.m. on Sunday, June 8, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office.

During that inspection, the driver discovered that several pallets of the newly released Nintendo Switch 2 gaming consoles were missing, the release stated.

Sheriff’s officials said 2,810 consoles, valued at $499 each, were stolen.

The driver told deputies he was headed to a GameStop store in Texas from Nintendo of America in Redmond, Washington. He told deputies he didn’t know what was in the trailer, only that it was games or toys.

It’s unknown if the heist happened while the driver was stopped in Bennett or if it happened in another city along his route, sheriff’s officials said.

Anyone with information about the theft is asked to contact investigators at 720-874-8477.

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An Adams County jury on Monday convicted Orest Schur, 29, of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder in the July 2023 shooting, according to court records.

The jury could have convicted Schur of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder, but chose the lesser charges.

Schur woke up to a car alarm just before midnight on July 5, 2023, and spotted two teenagers dressed in black outside his Aurora home in the 19400 block of East 59th Place.

The 13-year-old and 14-year-old, who Schur suspected were trying to break into his wife’s car, sped away in a separate car, police said.

Schur chased after the teenagers and, when they crashed a few blocks away, shot them. He told police the teenagers had shot at him first, but investigators said in his arrest affidavit that they didn’t find any evidence of anyone firing at Schur.

Paramedics took both victims to the hospital, where the 14-year-old died from his injuries.

At the time of the shooting, Schur was a sergeant posted at the Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora and had received weapons training. He received combat service and other medals following his Army tours in Afghanistan, according to military records.

Buckley officials confirmed Tuesday that Schur was a signals intelligence analyst at the base and was discharged in July, but declined to comment further and referred questions to Aurora police.

Schur is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 15, according to court records.

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The off-duty officer had pinned the Black woman to the ground, Cummings told the cops. She thought he was going to kill her, so she tried to shove him off.

A man with a python hanging around his neck — a female snake named Cleo — stood a few feet away with cellphone video to show the two bicycle officers. In the background, a woman in a white tank top wore an adult diaper over red boxer shorts. She stood in front of a phone mounted at shoulder height on a monopod, waving her arms and loudly livestreaming from the sidewalk.

The mall was busy, packed with professionals, families with kids, construction workers. Passersby gave the woman in the diaper a wide berth. At the Ross, shoppers ducked past the two bicycle cops, the store security guard and the small crowd of clamoring witnesses at the store’s front doors with barely a second glance.

This was 16th Street on a sunny Monday afternoon.

The 13-block pedestrian corridor has become a lightning rod in the debate about Denver’s downtown: whether it is safe, whether it is pleasant, whether it is worth visiting. The area has experienced high business vacancy rates in recent years and has been under renovation for four years, work that city officials expect to wrap this year.

The corridor has been criticized for public drug use, homelessness and, at times, violence: an attacker killed two people and wounded two others in a spree of unprovoked stabbings along the mall in January. Authorities charged a 24-year-old man with a long history of mental illness with the attacks, which shook public confidence in downtown safety.

In April, weeks before rebranding the mall as just “16th Street,” Mayor Mike Johnston announced a new police focus on the street: a 10-member team of bicycle and horse-mounted officers patrolling the area between 14th and 18th streets, from Union Station to Broadway.

To learn more about the people police are encountering in this high-profile corridor, The Denver Post spent eight hours over two days in May following two members of that detail as they made arrests and issued citations along 16th Street — for obstruction, an open container of alcohol, for possessing fentanyl paraphernalia and for trespassing.

The Post then uncovered the stories of those people, discovering a U.S. Army veteran who lost his way, a woman who spent a decade living on the streets, a man with a history of alcohol-fueled crime, and another with an arrest record dating back 25 years.

The woman in the adult diaper was TikToker @AmberUnavailable, an account with almost 800,000 followers, The Post found. She travels from city to city, making videos and staying in Airbnb rentals. In recent posts, she put produce down her pants in grocery stores while bystanders ogled.

Cummings, who shoved the off-duty officer at the Ross, was visiting Denver from Georgia and was only in town for a few hours, she said. She was arrested for interfering with police.

When officers put her in handcuffs, she caught a reporter’s eye.

“It’s all right,” she said calmly. “Because if I wouldn’t have shoved him, he would have killed her.”

This was not Cummings’s first time going to jail.

‘Not ashamed of what I’ve been through’

Cummings’ mother was murdered at the age of 31, strangled to death on an August night in 1983, her body dumped in a wooded area in Jacksonville, Florida.

Cummings was 10. She remembers how her mom left to go to a family get-together, how she wanted the kids to come, too, but the siblings decided to stay home. Cummings, now 51, still wonders sometimes what would be different if she’d gone that night, and whether her mother would have lived.

“It haunts me to this day,” she said.

Her mother’s death sent Cummings into the foster care system, and she grew up rough, she said, describing herself as “from the hood.” She lives with bipolar disorder with schizophrenic tendencies. It runs in the family.

She’s been in trouble with the law routinely over the past two decades, court records show. She pleaded no contest to a 2011 robbery in Fort Lauderdale and was sentenced to two years in prison. She wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the case in 2014, asking that she be released early to help her daughter out of homelessness.

“For one full day, I contemplated every bad decision in my life,” she wrote from prison. “And came to the same conclusion in every scenario — I doomed my life for the things I could control. Wow. These decisions have cost me dearly.”

Cummings planned to seek mental health treatment, she wrote in the letter. After she got out, she was arrested in 2015 for using a stolen driver’s license to get a job, representing herself at work as the woman on the stolen license. A judge ordered that she undergo mental health treatment, and Cummings was found to be too mentally ill for the case to go forward. The charge was dismissed in 2021.

Cummings went on to plead no contest to a shoplifting charge in which she was accused of stealing $59 in children’s books from a Florida Hobby Lobby in 2022, court records show. She told the arresting officers she was depressed and felt like she should be in jail. The next year, she was arrested for running a stop sign and for possessing a small amount of bath salts, court records show. That case is pending in Florida.

For years, she’s been ready for a confrontation at the drop of a hat, Cummings said. But recently, she was out shopping with her grandchild and realized she was scaring the child. It was a turning point, she said. She sought out more treatment: anxiety medication and hypnotherapy.

“It has tremendously helped,” she said.

She and her daughter came to Colorado for her daughter’s court appearance on theft charges in Larimer County. They stopped by 16th Street after that to buy a carry-on suitcase at the Ross Dress for Less before their flight home that afternoon, Cummings said.

She watched the confrontation between the other shopper and the security officer and felt the shopper was being racially profiled, Cummings said. When the officer pinned the woman to the ground, Cummings thought she was doing the right thing by trying to shove him off.

Looking back on her arrest after returning home, Cummings felt it was a step forward for her. She showed more restraint than she would have in years past, she said.

“That situation made me know that I’m being healed,” she said. “(Before), I would have tackled that man and we would really have been going. But for me to just slightly push him, try not to harm him, just to make him aware of what he is doing… I know I did change. Back then, I’d have picked up a gun, a bottle, or anything.”

She was released from jail on a personal recognizance bond after a couple of hours at the Denver Downtown Detention Center. She missed her planned flight home, but caught one later that night, she said.

“I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through,” she said. “It is what it is. That’s what God gave me. I dealt with it, I overcame it, I’m here.”

Five months of bike patrols

Officers John Singapuri and Siena Riley zipped through 16th Street on heavy, camouflage-green electric bicycles. They said hello to business owners out on their patios, paused at stoplights and, every few minutes, told passing bicyclists that they can’t ride on the mall.

The street is closed to bicyclists, though they are ubiquitous. Singapuri and Riley give warnings for bike riding, not tickets.

They’ve patrolled downtown on bikes since January, focused on building relationships with downtown regulars — business owners, shopkeepers, nonprofits — but also proactively policing what Singapuri calls “quality of life” crimes. They look for public urination, drug use, trespassing, alcohol consumption — the stuff that actually impacts someone’s day. (Bicycle riding on the mall, not so much.)

When they started this route five months earlier — before the fatal stabbing spree — there was more open drug use along the street, Singapuri said. But as they’ve been consistently issuing citations, the drug use has shifted away from public view.

“For the most part, it’s way down,” he said. “It really is. …We still see a lot of the same people we were citing, but they’re not doing all the same stuff.”

Reported crime in the Union Station and Central Business District neighborhoods that cover the mall for the 180 days before June 9 is up about 27% when compared to the same six-month span last year, but is down about 8% when compared to that period in 2023, and down 31% from 2022, crime data maintained by the Denver Police Department shows. The department recorded 1,794 crimes in the two neighborhoods over the last six months, compared to 1,403 in that time frame last year, and 2,600 in that span in 2022.

Violent crime showed a similar pattern. For the 180-day span before June 9, the two neighborhoods recorded 146 violent crimes, compared to 142 in that time frame in 2024 and 157 in 2023. This year’s numbers are down about 18% from that six-month span in 2022, when police recorded 179 violent crimes.

Riley and Singapuri don’t interact with unhoused people who are not committing crimes, unless they’re unconscious. Then the officers will call out with a “Hey, are you OK?” or a “Denver police, do you need anything?” They’ll shake a person’s leg, or tap a shoulder. They move on when the person comes around.

The officers direct unhoused people to the Denver Outreach Court when they issue citations. It’s a subset of Denver County Court that meets at the Denver Public Library’s downtown branch and focuses on defendants who are unhoused, with the court process aimed at helping them get back on their feet, rather than punitive outcomes like probation or fines.

“We’re still trying to help them, and that is the goal, but, unfortunately, you have to get them in a position where they really have to do it,” Singapuri said.

On bikes, they can spot what officers in cars might miss, riding up to an area quickly and quietly.

Anthony Caproni, 62, saw the officers a beat too late as he drank a 25-ounce can of 8% Natty Daddy at the corner of 16th and Curtis streets at about 3:30 p.m. on a Monday. The officers spotted the drink — and watched as he tried to tuck it out of sight.

They turned their bikes around.

“I know you saw me,” Caproni said as they approached. “You caught me red-handed.”

He set the beer down and gave his information to Riley and Singapuri, who suggested the Denver Outreach Court. Caproni said he’d rather just pay a fine. He rattled off his phone number, sweaty and slurring a bit, then realized it was wrong. He couldn’t quite get the right number out.

He offered to pour the beer into a flowerpot; Singapuri directed him to a trash can across the street.

“This is gonna hurt,” Caproni said, heading to the trash can.

Caproni could not be reached for comment after his citation, but he has a history of alcohol-fueled crimes, The Post found. In 2008, he was charged with sex crimes after he molested a woman, then grabbed her head and feigned oral sex at a condo in Keystone. He was so drunk at the time that officers took him to the hospital before they took him to jail.

And in 2020, he drove a minivan to his former boss’s Denver home and ran over a trash can and 70 feet of fencing. He appeared drunk, the boss told police. He’d fired Caproni three years earlier, but Caproni still thought the boss owed him $400, according to a police report.

Caproni pleaded guilty to felony sex assault and was sentenced to three years in prison in the 2008 case, court records show. In the 2020 incident, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief and received probation.

On the 16th Street Mall, Caproni dismissed officers’ concerns that he might not cooperate with them.

“Over a beer, on a nice sunny afternoon?” he said. “That’s insane.”

From the U.S. Army to 16th Street

Fourteen years ago, John Shipman was deployed with the U.S. Army to Afghanistan.

He was a year into what would become a 10-year career, joining the Army as an infantryman in 2010, deploying for 12 months in 2011 and departing the service in 2020 as a sergeant first class. He was a top marksman in his class, his sister, Kelly Shipman, said. He bought a house, was in a committed relationship, had dogs, horses, a brand new truck.

“He had a beautiful life,” she said.

Shipman long struggled with substance abuse and his mental health. He started smoking weed and taking pills as a teenager, and used substances to cope with anxiety and depression after their mother died from cancer in 2009, Kelly Shipman said.

He enlisted in the Army to straighten himself out, and he excelled for a while, she said. He is goofy, a good cook, and a fan of the ocean and bodyboarding. Anywhere he could fish, he did, his sister said.

“He got into the Army and that saved his life,” Kelly Shipman said.

But it also brought challenges: the stress and trauma of a deployment overseas, and a parachute accident during a training exercise that broke his back, he and his sister said.

“They gave him pain pills in the hospital, which is his kryptonite,” she said.

He started using harder drugs, she said, and his stable life unraveled — his relationship ended, his Army career ended. He moved in with an aunt for a while after the Army, tried working in the private sector, but a year ago she kicked him out of their Castle Rock home with a command not to come back until he was clean.

He’s been homeless since, Shipman said just before 9 a.m. on a cloudy Tuesday as Singapuri and Riley wrote him a ticket for possession of drug paraphernalia. They’d rolled up on him and two other men sitting among the sunken sculptures in Skyline Park, tucked just off 16th Street.

Singapuri saw Shipman shove aluminum foil and a blue straw in his pocket as the officers rode their bikes down a set of stairs to reach the group. The other men walked away — the officers hadn’t seen them do anything illegal — but Shipman was cited.

He was using fentanyl powder, he said. He thanked the officers for giving him a ticket instead of a ride to jail.

“It’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest,” Shipman said of his situation. He has almost no criminal record in Colorado, court records show, just a previous citation for possessing drug paraphernalia along the Platte River trail in January 2024.

His family is desperate to help him. They lost touch with him and didn’t know he was homeless. Kelly Shipman said her brother sometimes struggles to take accountability for his own actions, and fails to recognize when he needs to seek help.

“You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink it,” Kelly Shipman said. “It just breaks my heart. …It just crumples me to think that he is on the streets. …It’s just devastating. He’s suffering. It’s not like he wants this life. He is in so much pain.”

Struggles with substance abuse and mental health are common in their family, Kelly Shipman said. She herself just finished detoxing from alcohol and has been sober for two months.

“We care about John and love him,” Kelly Shipman said. “And we want to be there. We would help him in a heartbeat. If he wanted to get help, we would help him.”

Trespassing by a dumpster

An hour or so after citing Shipman, Riley and Singapuri cruised up the 16th Street mall on their e-bikes. They swerved down an alley, cornering a man and woman crouched behind a dumpster near 16th and Welton streets, not far from a “No Trespassing” sign.

The alleys abutting 16th Street are closed to pedestrians — an effort to cut down on unhoused people hanging out in them.

The 58-year-old man behind the dumpster came out quietly and sat against the wall of a Target store.

Court records show he’s been charged with crimes seven times since 1999. Of the 14 charges he faced across those seven cases, all but four were dismissed. He’s pleaded guilty three times to possessing a controlled substance and once to attempted robbery, court records show. He could not be reached for comment after his trespassing citation.

The 48-year-old woman with him emerged from behind the dumpster upset, telling officers she was just changing her shirt and loudly protesting when they told her she’d be cited for trespassing. She also protested when a Denver Post photographer took her photo, calling it a violation of her privacy.

She gave a name and a birthdate, and Riley looked her up. The officer studied the photo attached to the name. She was not sure the woman in front of her matched the photo — though it was close.

“What’s your real name?” Riley asked the woman.

“Are you kidding me?” she shouted, apparently outraged. She then repeated the same name, adding a maiden name as well.

Riley wrote the ticket under the name the woman gave. The Post later discovered the woman gave her sister’s name.

She has long struggled with drug addiction and spent years unhoused, said Jeff Connell, her former brother-in-law. For decades, she’s cycled through rehab, months-long bursts of sobriety and relapses, he said. He and her sister adopted the woman’s child as a baby, he said.

She and her sister declined to speak with The Post for this story.

When reached by a reporter, Connell echoed a sentiment that Shipman’s sister had expressed: they’ve been waiting for an unexpected phone call from a stranger about their loved one.

“We’ve known for many, many years, probably 35 years, that we are going to get a phone call any day that it’s gone too far, and it’s over,” Connell said.

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Brian Jason Wagner has continued to show up at Swift’s LA home since July 2024 and claimed he was living there, that he was in a relationship with Swift and that she was the mother of his son, according to NBC News.

A judge granted Swift a temporary restraining order against Wagner on Monday, USA Today reported.

Swift told the court she fears for her and her family’s safety, and his escalating behavior in recent weeks creates a fear of imminent harm.

Wagner returned to her home twice in May asking to see her, which prompted her security team to look into his criminal history. Swift’s team found he was incarcerated in 2023 when he started sending her “lengthy communications” about his infatuation with her, NBC reported.

“Mr. Wagner has also sent my staff hundreds of emails with similarly concerning and threatening language, tried to divert mail from my residence to his attention, and even lied to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to somehow change the address on his driver’s license to my Los Angeles home,” Swift wrote in the court filing.

According to court records, Wagner’s criminal history in Colorado includes pleading guilty to misdemeanor motor vehicle theft in Jefferson County and felony forgery and misdemeanor theft in Clear Creek County, all in 2023.

Swift has previously dealt with harassment in Colorado, including a former radio DJ who was found liable in a federal civil trial for groping her before a 2013 concert in Denver.

A court hearing in the Los Angeles case is set for June 30.

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