Adams County District Attorney Brian Mason personally goes to the scene of all homicides in his jurisdiction.
He didn’t get much sleep this weekend.
There were six homicides in 36 hours in Adams County, one in Aurora and five in Commerce City - a single weekend that matched that city’s typical homicide count for a full year.
“In my 17 and a half years as a prosecutor I've never had that many homicides occur in such a short amount of time,” said Mason, who noted that the various incidents are not related.
In Commerce City, it started on Friday around 8 p.m. when two people were shot in a 7-Eleven parking lot at 104th Ave and Highway 85. Both died, and the suspect was found dead on Sunday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Then at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Commerce City Police Department posted on X that they responded to reports of a shooting at Pioneer Park. Police found one adult male dead, and detained a person of interest, later identified as Lumumba Sayers.
Sayers, a prominent Aurora anti-gang activist, was arrested for homicide, and appeared in district court in Brighton Monday morning. His bond was set at $1 million cash-only, despite arguments that Sayers has deep ties to the community, which Judge Jeffrey Ruff acknowledged.
“However, the community safety issues involved in this case certainly tip that back in the direction of a higher bond,” said Ruff in court.
An arrest affidavit filed in the case identified the victim as Malcolm Watson, 28. A witness told police the killing occurred in the parking lot outside a birthday party for Watson's child. Another witness reported seeing a man with Sayers stand over Watson's body and heard him say, "I got you," followed by an expletive. The affidavit suggests that the shooting could have been in retaliation for the murder of Sayers' son almost a year ago, on Aug. 18, 2023.
Pioneer Park includes a large water park — a lazy river, water slides, and a large toddler pool, but the police department wrote on X: “The incident was contained to the parking lot and did not occur or spill over into the pool or park.”
Later in the day on Saturday, another incident near 65th and Monaco was caught by Commerce City’s new shot detection sensors. A passenger in a stolen vehicle was killed, and another person was found dead in the yard of a residence. The stolen vehicle was pursued by police into Aurora, where it crashed. The driver and another passenger were taken into custody.
Mason said he could not provide many details about the stolen car shooting since it is still under investigation, but he said that it “involved a gunfight between juveniles.”
Five homicides in Commerce City, in a city that typically sees only four to six homicides a year, according to FBI statistics.
“Probably one of the most violent weekends we've ever had,” said Joanna Small, a spokesperson for the Commerce City Police Department. She said the city now stands at eight homicides in 2024, which is the most since at least 1985. And summer isn’t over yet.
The violence of the weekend was not contained to Commerce City. There were several shootings reported in Aurora within half an hour of each other after 1 a.m. on Sunday, with multiple victims in each shooting, including one death. Thornton police, meanwhile, shot a suspect on Sunday night, and he’s expected to survive. In Denver, there were three separate stabbings that resulted in one death and two injuries, and four shooting incidents with a total of six victims, all of whom apparently survived.
Boulder had three teens shot on Saturday at a party, and all of them are expected to survive.
“This was a brutal weekend of violent crime,” said Mason.
The only thing that links the homicides over the weekend in his jurisdiction: guns.
“The community is flooded with guns, there's no other way to say it,” said Mason, who emphasized that he has nothing against law-abiding, responsible gun owners, exercising their Second Amendment rights. “We can protect those rights, and address the plethora of illegal guns that are sold and spread and used to kill innocent people, including kids.”
Colorado has been a leader in recent years in regulating access to guns: a red flag law, safe storage, waiting periods. But State Senator Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, said there needs to be a community-wide response.
“Are there other ways that we can resolve issues of violence without picking up a gun, and I think we have to teach kids at a very young age, all up to adulthood that we have to be able to resolve conflicts with others without violence,” said Fields, whose son Javad Marshall-Fields was murdered in 2005 to prevent him from testifying in another murder case. “The whole community is shattered by gun violence, and so at some point enough has to be enough, and it can’t be just legislation, there's no way you can legislate out of this.”
Editor's note (Aug. 13, 2024): This story has been updated with details from an arrest affidavit.
Correction: Due to an editor's error, the updated story contained an incorrect reference to the speaker of words said over the victim's body. They were said by a man witnesses told police was with Sayers.
