Shortly after graduating from Green Mountain High School in Lakewood Peter Glaser was to have started automotive college.
Peter Glaser, 18
“Cars were his life,” his mother Christa told a reporter. “He knew so much.”
But 30 years ago, Peter Glaser was shot in an apparent robbery and never had a chance to go to the school.
His case wasn’t considered a homicide though until he died in 2003, 21 years after he was shot.
The reason it was reclassified was that the shot in 1982 led directly to Glaser’s death.
He had been in a vegetative state most of his life.
On the night of Sept. 17, 1982, Glaser, 18, was working at Phillips and Andersons Lakewood Tire and Wheel, 6321 W. Alameda Ave.
Coworkers went out for pizza. When they returned to the shop just before midnight they found Glaser on the floor beside a lift.
His head was bloody and the coworkers at first believed that he had been in an industrial type accident. That’s the way his injury was viewed at first.
But when a spent shell casing was discovered behind a tire, the investigation went in a completely different direction.
X-rays three days later confirmed that he had been shot.
A bag of money was missing from the office, leading police to believe he had been shot
during a robbery.
The next month, police learned that the same type of weapon used to shoot Glaser, a .38-caliber semiautomatic, had been fired during a street robbery in Aurora, according to an article by former Denver Post reporter Marilyn Robinson.
The victim in that shooting reported he had been shot at twice by a man wearing a ski mask, a green Army fatigue jacket, blue jeans and dark boots. Because the gunman was about 35 feet away, he couldn’t provide a better description.
Tests by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation showed the two casings recovered in Aurora had been fired from the same weapon used to shoot Glaser, Lakewood Detective Alex Jameson told Robinson.