The prediction that Ishmael Shelton had a 2-in-3 chance of committing another crime when he left prison on parole was deadly accurate. Eight months later, he stabbed his girlfriend to death.
Parolee Douglas Taylor didn't get picked up for violating his parole or on an assault charge. Still on the streets, he torched an Aurora apartment building in a jealous rage, killing a man.
Longtime criminal Terry Leslie skipped out on his parole officer five months before he murdered a Lakewood attorney who was found in his basement bound by duct tape.
All three are among 33 inmates who walked out of Colorado prisons and were convicted or charged with murders while on parole since 2002 — in some cases within a matter of weeks.
Between them, they took or are accused of taking 38 lives, including that of a pregnant woman a month away from her due date whose unborn daughter also died.
On average, they were on the streets just six months before they killed or were accused of murder. The shortest time from release to murder was two weeks.
In nearly every murder in which a Colorado parolee was convicted or accused, The Post found a breakdown in the system that was supposed to monitor them:
• Three parolees who killed had been arrested or charged with a crime while on parole, two of them accused of brutalizing the women they would later murder. Police investigated another who was not arrested.
• Nine parolees who murdered had warrants out for their arrest but had not been picked up or were missing.
• Twenty-nine of the parolees committed violations ranging from using cocaine and moving without permission before they were arrested for murder.
• A third of parolees who murdered left prison with no home but for a shelter or motel.
• Five had been suggested for intensive supervision parole, which requires electronic monitoring and state-paid drug testing, but were placed on lower supervision levels. Three were not placed on intensive supervision because of budget constraints or program caps.
• More than half of the convicted killers spent time in solitary confinement in prison, deemed too violent and unpredictable to live among the general population; three were released directly from what is known as administrative segregation to the streets.
• Rehabilitation was absent in many cases. One murderer tagged for drug treatment was wait-listed for a substance-abuse program and released from prison, walking out on the streets never having received the class. In another case, a sex offender never received treatment and while on parole killed the daughter of a lover who had spurned him.
Colorado parolees also have returned to prison for more than 3,500 other upper-level felony crimes since 2002, according to a Denver Post analysis of corrections department data. Those include 18 cases of attempted murder; one case of manslaughter; 12 child-abuse cases including one that resulted in death; and 30 sex crimes, of which five were sexual assaults on children.
Lonnie Herrera, on parole for a few months, was arrested in Delta County in 2008 for beating his 23-year-old girlfriend. The corrections department never learned about it, his parole documents show. He bonded out and killed his pregnant girlfriend two weeks later.
When parolee Shelton left prison at the end of 2009, he had racked up 34 citations. Shelton's final stint on parole lasted eight months. Near the end, he reported to his parole officer that he was bingeing on crack cocaine "and needed help," according to parole documents. Within days, he stabbed his girlfriend to death.
Taylor was on parole less than a year when he set an Aurora apartment complex on fire in 2009. Taylor had been charged by Aurora police with assault and battery several months earlier and absconded. There's no record in his file that his parole officer was notified. Taylor had tested positive for cocaine and his parole officer found evidence of drug use in his home. Yet he remained on the streets.
Leslie had fallen off his parole officer's radar five months before he broke into the Lakewood home of an attorney and robbed and murdered him in September 2003, records show. Attorney Thomas Roberts' body was found under the covers and mattress of his bed, a pillowcase over his head, and his ankles, knees and hands bound by duct tape. ..Source.. by Jennifer Brown, Christopher N. Osher and Karen E. Crummy
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