CBS News reporting in EVANS, Colo. — Two sheriff’s deputies in Weld County, Colorado have been fired, according to a Weld County Sheriff Department source, and an independent investigation is underway to review why the deputies didn’t follow protocol in the shooting death of Ashley Fallis in 2012.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/deputies-fired-amid-internal-investigation-in-colo-moms-death/
Fired Fort Collins cop gets prison for stalking
Jarett Branson was sentenced to four years in prison for stalking a woman while on duty.
Check out this story on coloradoan.com: http://noconow.co/1z2Q6Cx
Criminal investigation of Weld County Sheriff’s Office employees starting over Ashley Fallis case. Article by Justin Joeseph of Fox NewsWeld County DA Michael Rourke confirmed Wednesday night his office would ask for an impartial and independent criminal investigation into the Weld County Sheriff’s Office and its four deputies who are accused of failing to cooperate with the Evans Police Department during the investigation of Ashley Fallis’ death in 2012.
weld-da-to-ask-for-investigation-into-weld-county-sheriffs-office-over-ashley-fallis-case
After only 3 days Ashley Fallis was determined to be a suicide, but she was really murdered. Her parents fought for the truth to come out and after a grand jury convened for only 3 days her murderer was extradited back to Colorado and is going to stand trial. Now the officers that tried to cover-up the murder are on the hot seat. Cross your fingers that indictments are made.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY TO ALL THE WONDERFUL MOTHERS OUT THERE
Being a mother is the most fulfilling and gratifying thing in the world. For me there have been so many wonderful moments, along with some really awful moments, but I would always choose being a mother. The overwhelming love you receive when you look into your child’s eyes can never be duplicated by any other means. And that love can never be taken away… not by anyone.
Yesterday was a hard day for me. It was a day of tears. I told myself it was okay to hurt. Then while I was out and about, trying to move forward I looked over at a woman with a baby stroller. My eyes immediately looked into the stroller and this adorable baby was beaming up at it’s mother, with a big smile on her face. Her eyes were sparkling with an immense amount of love – you could just see it from where I was standing. My heart filled with love remembering that look. It was a BIG reminder of how special it is to be a mother and a reminder that my heart does still feel, and see, all the true love I have been blessed to be surrounded with.
I miss Morgan every single day… she was my baby, my best friend, and she grounded me. Morgan would always jokingly lament how Steve and I were both water signs, while she was a fire sign. She would go on to explain all our frailities by being water signs, and she was usually right on. Morgan would then laugh and tell us we were lucky because all 3 of our children were not water signs so they gave us some very needed grounding.
Morgan took this picture. She was always my little ballerina. On her first birthday she took off walking on her own, and it was straight up on her tippy toes. Most of the time when I saw her walking anywhere she usually started out on her toes. In this picture there is a little “coupon” that she made for me one Mother’s Day. She actually made 6 coupons and gave them to me as a Mother’s Day present. Morgan almost always took the time to make every gift she gave, making every one so extra special! She always gave from her heart. Every one of these “coupons” she gave me was for something she wanted do for me… she wanted me to “redeem” them for a dinner cooked by her, or a day together down at the ranch, just little things like that, but all the things she knew would make my day just that much brighter. That was Morgan and I still have some of these coupons to look at – I never got a chance to redeem them all. Now I can hold them in my hands and remember all the love she constantly gave.
Life without Morgan has been indescribable. The pain can be so very deep, yet at the same time my memories of her are so wonderful that they fill my heart with joy. It can all be very bittersweet. I’m sure this will sound strange to most of you that have never lost a child, but up until recently I could not even bring myself to buy any of Morgan’s favorite items at the grocery store. It has been over 3 years and while we shared so many favorites, even looking at them in the grocery store caused me to cry, so there was no way I could actually buy them. Over the holidays it was pomegranates…her fav, but I couldn’t even look at them. Recently I finally broke down and bought raspberry Noosa yogurt, another one of her favorites. I sat outside and ate it very slowly, while looking at the ocean. I savored every bite while thinking about Morgan and I was actually able to smile remembering how much she liked eating that yogurt. I also knew she was happy that I was looking at the ocean while eating the yogurt and thinking about her. That probably sounds strange too, but even though Morgan was only 20 years old she told me her dream was to get her law degree from Stanford, and after a career in law she wanted to retire in northern California overlooking the ocean. So while I was looking at the ocean I could “feel” Morgan right next to me and it felt peaceful and joyful.
Today I feel blessed not only to have such love from my 2 older children, as well as my 2 grandchildren, but I am also so grateful that I can still feel immense amounts of love from Morgan. Yes, I still cry every single day wishing my youngest daughter was still sitting next to me, but I don’t cry for very long – I always get a “blast” of warm love that curses through my body and fills me with so much love that I have no choice but to stop crying every single time I feel it. This is another hard thing to try and verbalize to others, but I just wanted to try to express what happens to me, and how I know Morgan is still close by. Mothers always remain connected to their children, the greatest gift there could ever be…
How could the sheriff’s never see the stalker?
Morgan’s stalking started with a clear pattern, the stalker would come, terrorize, and then leave, all unseen. We were never fast enough out the door to catch more than a glimpse, because he was outside hunting Morgan and then watching our response – provoking, then observing and measuring – predatory stalkers do this, it’s well documented. It was almost the same pattern almost every time and it became maddening, exhausting, and extremely upsetting for us all. There was no warning for Morgan that it was coming, then it would just happen.
The Sheriff’s also had a very similar pattern…
The typical Garfield County Sheriff response to a call about the stalker tapping or banging on her windows again.
This night it was a call to the sheriffs about how relentless the stalker was and the call was made almost an hour earlier, before this was caught on video camera. The deputy parked out front and sat in his truck for a few minutes, very common, then he came over to shine the flashlight under Morgan’s window. They all knew exactly which window because they had been there and seen it so many times before. This time he did not circle the house, he just walked to the corner and then came back to her window. He seemed to see something on the ground and kicked at it with his foot, but he never knelt down the the ground for a closer look, he did not take any pictures, and while Colorado law is very clear that the sheriff’s must:
respond as soon as reasonably possible to a report of stalking and to cooperate with the alleged victim in investigating the report. Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18-3-602(7)
The deputy, or anyone else for that matter, never followed up with Morgan to get all the details, and they never did anything else to investigate her stalking, this was not just common it was every single time. The deputy then went out to sit in his truck for a few minutes before leaving. There was no report by the sheriffs of what actually happened, and obviously absolutely no, “cooperation with the victim in investigating the report.” Well over a year after Morgan’s murder when we finally saw the sheriff’s reports for the first time, there was a reference to this incident that called it a, “trespass,” and that was it. It is no wonder that Morgan at times believed the sheriff’s were doing nothing to catch or stop her stalker. Morgan was killed two nights after this incident.
Now… does anyone really think there was any chance this deputy is going to see the stalker? The stalker comes, terrorizes, then he observes from the darkness before leaving. Steve always swore he could feel him out there in the darkness. Then, much later, long after the stalking incident was over, one or sometimes two deputies came, shined a light, talked, maybe walked around the house, then left. It was not even close to two ships passing in the night, it was two ships in opposite directions avoiding each other. This pattern of response had zero chance of ever seeing, much less catching the stalker. There needs to be education and training in order to help future victims of stalking.
If you are being stalked, you must know this – Most violent crime begins with some form of staking. If there is no investigation, they will never catch, or otherwise confront, the stalker, and until the stalker is confronted there is little chance the stalker will be stopped.
What is wrong with this picture?
The man in the middle is a detective on the morning Morgan’s death scene was being investigated. He is taking video of the exterior of the house. He’s the one front and center, standing 50 feet away, the two men behind him are deputies. To the left are Morgan’s bedroom windows, the same windows that the deputy was looking under with his flashlight 2 days earlier.
The problem is where he stands right now is the closest he will come to Morgan’s windows. I will say it again, THAT IS AS CLOSE AS THE INVESTIGATOR WILL GET TO THIS ENTIRE SIDE OF THE HOUSE WHEN TAKING VIDEO ON THE DAY HER BODY WAS DISCOVERED! Even the deputies who responded to a stalking incident would walk right up to the windows and wave their flashlights at the ground. It’s how they saw footprints in the dirt, scuff marks, they touched her windows and wondered aloud how the stalker would make the banging noise that startled Morgan every time. In front of that is right where Detective Glassmire knelt to the ground 4 days earlier and tossed rocks he picked up from the ground and threw them against that window, saying, “there is your stalker!” Right before he told me Morgan’s stalking was expected to escalate.
But four days later, after she was discovered dead, the investigator at her death scene was satisfied to take one quick flash of video from all the way back where he stands. Possible murder investigation or just going through the motions instead of investigating? Incompetence, or cover-up, call it whatever you want, but it was not an investigation. The back doors where we believe the stalker entered were not filmed either, nor were they fingerprinted, and the drapes were never touched from the inside, yet the sheriff’s can claim to be certain there was no sign of forced entry, when in reality that is just another false statement.
The night of Morgan’s murder everything went wrong…it was the perfect storm.
▪ It was one of the only two nights that week that Morgan wasn’t able to get a friend to sleep over on the couch. Our bedroom was on the back of the house, and her room was on the front – very far apart. She was scared to sleep alone and could no longer handle sleeping on the floor of my closet for protection as she did for the first month of her stalking. She was very much looking forward to being gone babysitting for the families of military veterans over the weekend.
▪ The sheriffs had increased their patrols and since their large trucks would set off our front door motion detector alarm and wake us up, Steve turned it off that night after Morgan returned home at 9:03 pm so we could all get some sleep. All 3 of us were way beyond exhausted.
▪ We always left our dog loose in the house to watch over things while we slept, except on the nights when Morgan had friends sleep over. That night we put her up in our bathroom, because earlier in the evening she had positioned herself by the front door to watch out the window, and we thought she would keep us and Morgan awake all night.
▪ We made all these mistakes -plus so many more that night. We had no idea what was about to happen. When you have a stalker you think that you have gone through all the motions before you go to sleep at night, but you never remember all of them, and as soon as there is a crack to squeeze through stalkers always manage to find that crack… it makes me physically ill to think about all the mistakes we made, especially since that very night my “intuition” was screaming at me, I was so worried, and yet I did not listen to myself. So now I always remind everyone to LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION!
▪ The night before Morgan was murdered she asked her father to buy her a knife, which he did. She had it in bed with her when we found her body. This is how scared she really was.
And really:
This is a picture of Morgan arriving home after trying to sleep at a friend’s Aunt’s house on their couch, and when that didn’t work out she went to ask another friend if he would sleep over our house, but that didn’t pan out either so she came home alone. She wasn’t trying to stay away from home because of her parents – that is one of the stupidest thing so far that I have heard…she had a predatory stalker and she was afraid to sleep alone and she had every reason to be afraid. The Colorado statutes spell out the terror of stalking, and Morgan was living it. Everyone failed her, and the sheriff’s would rather blame the victim then man up and admit they made a mistake. How brave they are. If people can’t understand why a victim of stalking would be afraid then I suggest they read the Colorado Legislative Decree on stalking, they understood it and they summed it up well. Morgan had every reason to be afraid that night, the stalker’s pattern had changed again – and then she was murdered.