Clint Burtts was attacked during a fight near a busy downtown Denver intersection. In broad daylight. During rush hour.
Burtts, who was homeless, lay on the street near the Colorado Convention Center bleeding before he was taken to a hospital, where he slipped into a coma. The 52-year-old later died from the beating.
Five years after the September 2013 fight, Denver police haven’t made an arrest in the killing of Clint Burtts. Investigators issued a call for help locating a potential witness to the fatal fight about a year after the homeless man’s death.
Then, nothing.
Burtts is one of more than a dozen Denver homeless homicide victims whose cases over the past decade have never been solved.
Since 2008, 39 people experiencing homelessness have been victims of homicide, according to Denver police data. Of those killings — a total of 37 cases — police have identified a suspect or made an arrest in 22 for a clearance rate of 59 percent, slightly lower than the department’s overall homicide clearance rate.
Over the past seven years, the clearance rate for all Denver homicide cases was about 62 percent, according to previous Denver Post reporting and federal data. Those success rates are higher than the national average. About 49 percent of murder or nonnegligent manslaughter cases in cities with populations comparable to Denver’s were cleared in 2016, according to federal crime data.
Police investigating killings of the homeless face a number of obstacles that are exacerbated by the victim’s housing status, said Lt. Matt Clark of the Denver police major crimes unit. It can be difficult to track down family members of the deceased who know about the person’s background, especially if the victim did not have identification. Investigators also struggle to find other people experiencing homelessness who witnessed the killing or knew the victim because they don’t have fixed addresses or telephone numbers, he said.
“Once we do contact these witnesses, they often cooperate,” he said. “They don’t want those violent offenders in their community. They don’t want to live in fear.”
Such cooperation was key in the shooting near Interstate 25 last month that killed three people experiencing homelessness, Clark said. Tips and information contributed by the homeless community were instrumental in the arrest of a suspect, Clark said. Testimony from homeless witnesses was also critical in the case of a man convicted last month of murdering a homeless person living by the South Platte River in 2016, he said.
The police department’s homeless outreach program helps establish trust between officers and the transient community that is crucial to solving crimes against the homeless.
“We rely on the trust and help of the homeless community to make progress,” Clark said.
While killings of homeless people occasionally make headlines — like the series of killings in 1999 and the man in a clown costume who stabbed a homeless man in the neck in 2017 — others receive little more than a news brief. The city saw an unprecedented spike in 2013 when seven people experiencing homelessness were killed. Only one of those cases was ever solved, but it is difficult to find coverage of the killings in Denver news media, including the Denver Post.
The number of total reported crimes against the homeless in Denver continues to grow as well. In 2013, police received 712 reports of crimes committed against homeless people. That number jumped to more than 1,000 crimes in both 2016 and 2017. The most-reported crimes include simple assault, aggravated assault and theft. In that same time period, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city also jumped from about 2,900 in 2014 to 3,700 the following year.
Through Aug. 23 of this year, police received 651 reports of crimes against the homeless — just shy of the total for all of 2014.
The number of crimes committed against people experiencing homelessness are likely underreported, said Kerry Daniel, director of case management at Catholic Charities of Denver, previously told The Denver Post. Victims are often fearful of law enforcement or don’t understand the justice system, she said.
It’s a tension Ray Lyall knows well.
For seven years, Lyall slept on Denver’s streets. He remembers often being startled awake at 4 a.m. by the honking horn of a Denver police cruiser before being ordered to move by an officer.
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” he said. “I was just sleeping.”
He said it would be hard for police officers to rebuild relationships with homeless people who may have had negative experiences with law enforcement in the past.
Lyall is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the city claiming that police sweeps that uproot homeless people from the parks where they sleep and confiscate their personal property violate their civil rights. The sweeps and the city’s camping ban encourage people to sleep in places hidden from view, putting them at higher risk. Women sleeping on the streets often cut their hair and wear baggy clothes to appear like men in order to sleep a little safer.
“When they start hiding, they get more unsafe,” Lyall said. “Stuff gets stolen. You get hurt.”
