5280 Magazine

In 2012, President Barack Obama said the fight against human trafficking was “one of the great human rights causes of our time.” So why are so many Colorado children still being exploited?

Lipstick kisses stain the corners of the mirror. Open tubes of mascara, a rainbow of eye shadows, and a warm curling iron cover the counter of the pink bathroom. T-shirts, skirts, and heels are scattered on the couch and spread along the floor of the basement. Sixteen-year-old Susie discards an entire pile of tops before settling on a cropped T-shirt, jeans, and wedges. Her naturally curly black hair is stick straight, her nails are freshly manicured, and her youthful olive skin needs no makeup. She hums along to some current mid-’90s radio hits—Mariah Carey, Tupac, Biggie—and helps a friend apply yet another layer of eyeliner, while the giggles and chatter of two other girls, ages 15 and 16, fill whatever space is left in the cramped room.

An examination of Colorado’s mental health care system after the Aurora theater shooting. The state passed a $25 million initiative to restructure its crisis system for mentally ill patients, but still has a lot of work to do:

Colorado has underfunded mental health care for decades. Exactly how much is uncertain because there are at least 34 separate mental health line items in the state budget. “At the state Legislature, we cut provider rates for Medicaid and for drug and alcohol [programs] in 2002, when we had the downturn,” says Moe Keller, who spent 16 years in the state Legislature and is now the vice president of public policy and strategic initiatives at Mental Health America of Colorado , the local outpost of a national group that advocates for mental wellness reform. “We cut beds, and we closed a couple of units around the state. We never really re-funded that when the economy came back.” Then in 2008, the state again cut Medicaid providers and closed more units along with consolidating and reducing services. “Today, the prison system is by default the largest behavioral health center,” Keller says. “Police are the first responders.”

Natasha Gardner on girls and early puberty, and what happens after they grow up:

In the United States, menstruation generally arrives when a girl is 12-and-a-half years old; that hasn’t changed significantly in recent decades. What has changed is the onset of early, or “precocious,” puberty, which triggers breast development and pubic hair as early as seven (for boys, the cutoff is nine). Until the late 1990s, researchers thought puberty usually started around age 11. By 1997, the average age bumped down to 9.96 years; today, it may start as early as six-and-a-half years old. Although environmental chemicals, hormone levels in water supplies, and mere evolution have been cited as possible culprits, researchers still don’t know why the shift is happening.

A tragic accident and a family’s struggle to process what led to the night’s events:

Often, in the hours after midnight, Bill thinks about everything that has happened, about his daughter and the accident. There have been so many moments for the Grohs to process: the time Jill said she was considering coming home to Arizona and Bill encouraged his daughter to stay at her job in Denver; that night at the Westin when Jill and her friends wandered into the night and her parents couldn’t protect her; Jill deciding on the hospitality profession and being sent to Colorado; a car breaking down on that particular stretch of highway at that particular moment on that particular night; Shafner taking their case; the Court of Appeals judge retiring when he did. The moments are easily divided into two categories: before and after the accident. ‘It’s really like our lives have two parts,’ Bill says. ‘Everything is so different.’

Twenty years ago, Steve Rolln and DC the Brain Supreme released their hit “Whoomp! (There It Is)”. The story behind the one-hit wonder:

“When he learned about the chant, Whoomp! There it is­, in the summer of 1992, he pitched the idea for a bass-heavy party song to Steve. Both men were now 26 and seriously considering their futures in the music business. They didn’t have a full album or a deal with a record label, and no one was paying attention to the one-off songs they were releasing in the club. With ‘Whoomp!’ though, DC thought they had something—even if he hadn’t written lyrics yet. Make a few beats, DC told Steve. Do the bass your way.

“At the recording studio in his house, Steve put together five beats and brought DC over to listen. They were good, DC said. But one stood out. Steve had sampled a 1980 dance track, ‘I’m Ready,’ by an Italian group named Kano. He’d heard the song years earlier and especially liked the synthesized, funked-out intro. To the Kano sample, he overlaid the bass—a sort of BOOOOOM-booooooooom rumble—and then the cymbals.”

A victim of domestic violence escapes an abusive situation:

“She led the kids to the Houston bus station’s loading zone, where only ticketed passengers could sit. She’d already turned off her cell phone so he couldn’t call her. Their bus didn’t leave for hours, though, and Krystal was getting nervous. She told a police officer standing nearby they were running away. ‘Don’t worry,’ the cop said. ‘If you don’t have a ticket, you can’t get back here.’ Could he see them through the terminal windows? Could he buy a ticket and try to stop her? Though he’d menaced her countless times, she’d never been so frightened as when she stared at the bus station clock and watched the seconds creep by.”

“Finally, they boarded the bus. Krystal didn’t stop worrying until the doors closed behind the last passenger. Adara quickly fell asleep. Jay couldn’t stop smiling, a wide grin that softened his eyes and made him look more like the boy he used to be than the man he was becoming. At last, Krystal slept.”

A 28-year-old man with Asperger’s syndrome survives the unforgiving southern Utah desert for more than a month on by eating plant roots and following the Escalante river before being rescued:

“Will could see himself wasting away. It was late June, and what little fat he’d had on his body had evaporated, and his skin had gone slack over his midsection. Will dropped into the river one morning and could see his hips sticking out from under his pants. His body would soon begin to eat away at his organs. After that, it could be anything: kidney failure, liver failure, heart attack.

“His walking had become labored and brought him to the point of exhaustion after less than an hour. Each time he stopped to put his head into the water, or to pull another root off a plant, it was harder to regain his momentum. He briefly considered setting some brush on fire with his lighter, perhaps a tree. But Will couldn’t bring himself to destroy even a sliver of the desert. He staggered over boulders, meekly pushed away brush and tree limbs. The hearing in his left ear faded in and out, and his shallow breaths echoed in his head.”

Two cold case investigators uncover a serial killer’s trail in Colorado:

“Yearling turned to his computer and pulled up a map. The site where Ramey’s body was dumped—an area southeast of East 56th Avenue and Havana Street—was now a jumble of loading docks, and strips of asphalt and concrete. The detective typed Ramey’s name into a Google search. After a few minutes clicking through different websites, Yearling stumbled upon a message board devoted to cold case investigations. In one comment thread dedicated to unsolved Colorado homicides, he found a simple who-what-when on a young woman who disappeared in August 1979. Her name was Norma Jean Halford. Yearling scrolled down the page and found a copied and pasted, 21-year-old newspaper story that included Ramey’s name on a list of women who were murdered or disappeared across the Denver metro area from 1979 to 1988. According to police at the time, the story said, one man might have been responsible: a man named Vincent Groves.”

After a couple has trouble having a second child, they turn to genetic screening and in vitro fertilization:

“When I awoke, the embryologist relayed the excellent news: We had 20 eggs—five more than we thought possible. As soon as the April sunshine hit my face, I called my mom. Heath called his. For the first time in many months, our laughter was robust and genuine.

“The next day, we learned that 16 of the eggs fertilized successfully. Even the embryologist seemed pleased. My mood lifted, despite being so sore that I couldn’t get in and out of bed on my own. Within 24 hours, we got another call: Ten embryos were progressing. From 20 chances to 10 in two day’s time; it was a pointed lesson in survival of the fittest. I’m not especially religious but I turned my head skyward, thankful we had so many miracles.”

Since 2001, the bureau—often helped along by informants—has been instrumental in stopping at least 40 known terrorist plots, most of them smaller, “lone-wolf” schemes. Although it has faced some criticism for its activities and investigative techniques, the bureau’s post-9/11 record is remarkable, with no subsequent Al Qaeda attacks on U.S. soil. The person who came closest to breaking that streak, according to federal prosecutors, is Najibullah Zazi.