Worth More Dead

the last person who would die in a shoot-out.
    The woman, whose lovely face later appeared in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News and on the eleven o’clock television news was familiar to only a few. She was Teresa Perez.
    The members of the Gang Unit had no idea what led up to the bloodbath in their parking lot, but they soon learned about the end of the affair between Rosen and Perez and then what detectives found when they traced their lives back to their childhoods.
    The tape in the recorder unveiled much of the story of the relationship between the old man and the beautiful younger woman. It was a soundtrack for the last reel of a true-life Fatal Attraction. Of course Justyn Rosen in no way resembled Michael Douglas, but Teresa was as attractive and obsessed as Glenn Close was in that memorable—and frightening—movie.
    Teresa apparently felt the need to let the world know why she was choosing what she believed was her only way out of a tangled and tragic life. That tape, combined with interviews detectives and reporters had with people in Rosen’s and Perez’s lives, explained many of the whys of the carnage outside the Gang Unit.
    After brooding and sobbing all day on October 2—her daughter Lori’s twentieth birthday—Teresa grew more upset. She hid from process servers who knocked on her door to deliver the restraining order to keep her away from Justyn. She called Bob Costello and asked him if God would forgive her if she committed suicide. She had threatened to kill herself before, so alarm bells didn’t sound as loudly as they would have for the average woman. Costello assured her that God would forgive her, and he asked Teresa to call him back later so they could discuss the matter. That approach usually worked to calm her down, and it would give her time to think.
    But she had thought about her life for a long time, and she had apparently found only hopeless dead ends. One warning sign that indicated her desperation was that she gave her precious dog, a little Yorkie named Shelby, to her daughter, Lori, for her twentieth birthday.
    Teresa Perez had made up her mind. She was not going to be ignored. The next day, she also called her foster mother in a hysterical rage. “He scammed me all along, didn’t he?” Teresa demanded to know. “I could’ve gone on with my life and done other things. But I sat here and waited for six years!”
    She seemed to be out of control, heartbroken and angry that the man she truly appeared to love—despite his age and infirmity—was using legal means to get rid of her.
    Perhaps both Teresa Perez and Justyn Rosen were thinking about their religious beliefs during the final few days. She wanted to be sure she would go to heaven if she killed herself, and Justyn, a devout Jew, might have been adhering to his religion. Yom Kippur, the highest Holy Day of the Jewish religion, would be on Sunday, October 5. It is the Day of Atonement, on which Jews make amends for their sins of the year just past with fasting and prayer. By Sunday, Justyn would need to demonstrate his repentance and try to make up for his sins. If he wanted to change the judgment written in the book in which God inscribes all names, he needed to accomplish it the next twenty-four hours. The fasting would begin before sunset on Saturday night and continue for twenty-five hours until after dark on Yom Kippur with many of Denver’s devout Jews praying for hours in their synagogues.
    Now it was approaching sunset on October 3. Justyn Rosen and his family would, in all likelihood, pray on Yom Kippur at Temple Emanuel. Arguably, the old man had much to atone for.

    Hours earlier on that Friday evening, Teresa had decided to be in charge of her last act. She rented a dark-colored SUV so that Justyn wouldn’t recognize her own white car. Once she was in the posh Hilltop neighborhood, she parked near the bottom of his driveway, partially blocking an exit. She left the engine running as she knocked on the Rosens’door, forcing her way in at gunpoint when it opened.
    Justyn’s wife and daughter later found Teresa’s rented car. Curious, they looked inside and saw a backpack, an empty gun case, and some envelopes with notes in them. They felt they knew who they belonged to, and they told a friend that the messages were from a woman who “wanted money from their family.” He glanced at one of the notes and sensed that it was really a suicide note. He called police and waited for them to arrive.