Worth More Dead

his rearview mirror or in the city so close to him. How did she always know where he was?
    “Teresa Perez represents a threat to my mental and physical health,” Justyn Rosen stressed, citing his age and his illness. “I feel as if Teresa Perez has long been manipulating and taking advantage of me. I need it to end now.”
    Judge Kathleen Bowers granted a temporary order prohibiting Teresa from getting within a hundred yards of the Rosen home in the Hilltop neighborhood or of his car dealerships. Another hearing was set for October 16.
    Process servers attempted to reach Teresa at her apartment, but she hid behind her locked doors, crying. In hysterical tears, she called her former foster mother.
    She was panicked and heartbroken. She was also angry and desperate.

2
    Shortly before six PM on Friday, October 3, Captain Joseph Padilla was on duty as the head of the Denver Police Department’s Gang Bureau at 2205 Colorado Boulevard in the center of Denver. The Gang Bureau was housed in an old firehouse located on the western edge of the city’s sprawling City Park, just northeast of the Denver Museum of Natural History. The park was lush and green and boasted two lakes: Duck Lake and the much larger City Park Lake. The onetime firehouse was also close to Saint Joseph’s Hospital, the Presbyterian Saint Luke’s Medical Center and the National Jewish Medical and Research Center.
    Padilla, a big man with a thick mustache, had twenty-five years of experience as a cop, nineteen of them with the Denver Police Department. He’d been in some tough scrapes before, two where he had to fire his gun. He hoped never to have to do that again. This Friday evening was quiet. It was shift change at six, and red-haired Officer Randy Yoder left the gang unit to walk to his black Ford F-250 pickup truck, where he’d parked it hours earlier in one of the lots near the police building.
    It was still light out, although the sun would set at about twenty minutes to seven. The forerunners of winter hadn’t hit Denver yet, and it was dry and mild with temperatures in the low sixties. The weekend lay ahead, time off for most of the cops stationed at the Gang Unit substation.
    Yoder stood at the passenger side of his rig as he took off his police equipment: his police radio from where it was clipped to his shoulder, his gun belt, the bulletproof vest that was a somewhat bulky—but necessary—part of his uniform, and his blue uniform shirt. Wearing just a black T-shirt and his uniform pants, he put the other items into his bright blue gym bag. He was the only cop in the lot at the moment as he scanned it idly.
    He watched as a new white Ford Expedition SUV turned at relatively high speed into the driveway southwest of the Gang Unit building. The driver appeared to be a man, and there was a woman in the passenger seat. The driver didn’t park in one of the slots set aside for the public but instead drifted into the spaces reserved for patrol units and cops’ personal vehicles. It pulled up close to Randy Yoder, whose truck was headed south.
    “I was in my driver’s seat at that point, and I got out and walked up to the SUV,” Yoder recalled. “It kind of struck me as odd. The window was cracked just a little bit, like a half-inch. I guess I was kind of expecting him to roll down the window and say, ‘Where can I go?’ But he says, ‘Are you the police?’ ”
    Yoder saw an elderly man at the wheel. “I told him, ‘Yeah, I’m the police. What can I help you with?’ And before I could finish [saying that], he flings open the door, kind of bumps into me, and takes off running. And he runs around, and as he’s running, he says, ‘She’s got a gun! She’s got a gun!’ ”
    Startled, Yoder looked into the SUV and saw that the woman in the passenger seat did indeed have a gun. She was pointing it at him. He wasn’t going to stick around and ask her why.
    Yoder backed up to his pickup truck and frantically started to search for his police-issue weapon and radio. As he did that, he kept his eyes on the woman.
    She got out of the Ford Expedition, and Yoder could now see that she was still holding a silver handgun. She began to walk toward him, asking, “Where is he? Where is he?”
    Yoder could see the old man trying to hide behind Officer Joey Perez’s vehicle. At the time, Joey Perez (no relation to Teresa Perez) was inside the Gang Unit’s offices.
    Yoder found his radio first, but he couldn’t turn it on by just feeling