The violent sex offender with 29 arrests going back to 1974 had been on the run three months when special parole agents and Lakewood police officers crept up to his hideout in the Big Bunny Motel on West Colfax Avenue.
Armed with a Glock, an officer took a key he retrieved moments before from the manager, slipped it into the door lock and led the rush inside. The no-knock raid left the stunned — and nude — sex offender with no fight-or-flee options.
Richard Romero, 59, thus became the 812th parole fugitive whose case was either solved by arrest or cleared by discovery by the elite Fugitive Apprehension Unit after its first full year of operation.
“The team has done a phenomenal job,” said Alison Morgan, deputy director of parole for the Colorado Department of Corrections. “The results speak for themselves. The team members are excited about it.”
As in Romero’s case, the fugitive usually discovers his desperado days are over when he suddenly finds himself surrounded by a half-dozen well-armed officers wearing body armor.
“We do this very low-key, very strategically,” the director of the FAU, a former police chief, said in a recent interview. When asked his name, he quipped, “I do not exist. I am a figment of your imagination.”
FAU agents found fugitives in every conceivable circumstance: one on death row in Texas; another living as a woman in Arizona; another buried 6 feet under in an Oklahoma cemetery; a repeat child molester staying in a Denver motel room with two kids; and a paroled robber communing with a Hawaii branch of the Hare Krishnas.
The FAU was formed Aug. 1, 2013, in the aftermath of the murders five months earlier of Commerce City father of three Nathan Leon and former prisons chief Tom Clements. Parolee Evan Ebel had shot both men before his parole officer had even sought an arrest warrant, even though Ebel had cut his ankle bracelet six days earlier.
The slow response to Ebel’s actions drew intense media and governmental criticism and presaged the formation of the FAU. The unit is composed of SWAT-trained, decorated officers.
Colorado Department of Corrections officials allowed a Denver Post reporter and photographer to tag along with the unit last week when FAU agents arrested Romero, on condition that the journalists did not identify any members of the unit.
Leaders of the unit declined to reveal certain techniques used to catch fugitives. The Department of Corrections didn’t have previous figures of captured absconders and escapees because those statistics weren’t ever kept, said Adrienne Jacobson, department spokeswoman.
Before the FAU, parole officers tracked down their own offenders when they weren’t shepherding 60 other offenders through daily phone check-ins, weekly visits, court appearances, prison visits, surprise home inspections and myriad other duties. As a consequence, parole officers had to prioritize, and absconders often weren’t caught until they committed a new crime, including rapes and murders.
FAU team members don’t have parolee caseloads. Tracking down fugitives is what they do, and “we’re good” and speedy, the FAU boss said. They operate with an urgency they hope will keep the community safe.
On Jan. 13, Pueblo police notified prison officials that parolee Paul Sierra, a member of a Sureños street gang, had shot a man in the head at a bar the night before. FAU officers arrested Sierra in a room at the La Quinta Inn in Pueblo the same day.
The FAU got another tip on Feb. 5 that parolee Christopher Nelson may have been involved in a robbery of a Pueblo bank. The same day, FAU agents obtained a warrant for Nelson’s arrest for technical violations of his parole.
The next day, they tracked him to a Super 8 Motel on U.S. 50 in Pueblo. The team arrested Nelson and his girlfriend, Michelle Martinez, also a parolee.
In collaboration with local, state, national and international law enforcement, FAU agents have tracked fugitives across the country and to other nations, mostly in Latin America.
A month after the FAU was formed, convicted killer Melinda Stewart cut off her ankle bracelet on Sept. 11 and bolted.
In less than a week, FAU agents called the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina and made a prediction. They told deputies that Stewart, who was traveling with her sister, would be staying in Greensburg, Mo., before heading to her father’s house in Randleman, N.C. Based on that information, sheriff’s deputies arrested Stewart in North Carolina on Sept. 16.
Weapons trafficker Steven Amiot, a member of the 211 Crew — the same white supremacist prison gang Ebel had belonged to — fled from a Denver halfway house. FAU agents tracked him to a home of another 211 Crew member and called Denver police. On Oct. 30, he sped away from the house in a stolen car, crashed that car and was arrested while trying to carjack a woman driving on Interstate 70.
FAU agents have also shined when called upon to help other agencies run down fugitives.
On March 4, four inmates beat two Otero County Jail deputies and escaped. Scores of local, state and federal agents joined the hunt. FAU agents were directly involved in the capture of Malcolm Hoffert, Johnny Nunez and Curtis Apodaca.
The FAU team has also tracked down parolees who fled Colorado years earlier.
Career criminal Steven Paul Cappelli, convicted for impersonating a federal agent, absconded from parole on Sept. 15, 1990. Cappelli remained on the Department of Corrections’ fugitive list until Feb. 3. That’s when FAU members determined that Cappelli had been going by the alias of Steven Tucker Blakeway until he died on May 21, 1994, in Sand Springs, Okla.
Learning Cappelli’s fate meant Colorado parole officers would no longer have to spend time searching for a dead man.
Cappelli wasn’t the only one who changed his identity on the run:
• Sex offender William McClellan absconded on July 31, 1985. FAU agents learned that he had changed his name and died in a Texas prison while serving a 35-year rape sentence.
• FAU agents discovered parolee Michael Lopeman living as a woman in Quartsite, Ariz., seven years after he fled the state.
• Robber Jeffery Drury absconded from parole on June 29, 2013. FAU agents called Honolulu police on April 18 and told them where they could find a man going by “Mathura.” He was inside a compound living with many other Hare Krishna adherents.
“We look under any and every rock we can find,” the FAU boss said.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, denverpost.com/coldcases or twitter.com/kirkmitchell
Updated Aug. 14 at 3:55 p.m. Because of a reporter’s error, this story said parolee Michael Lopeman was a sex offender. He was charged but not convicted of two charges.
