By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
The flyer set the time at noon, Friday, September 4, at La Alma-Lincoln Park. No work. No school. No shopping. ICE out. There was a DJ. There were food trucks. Kids danced.
Then the water bottles started flying, and by the time the crowd cleared, three people had gone to the hospital and at least one woman had been beaten until one eye was swollen nearly shut.
Denver police counted five assaults or altercations in a little over an hour at the park at 1200 N. Osage St. Three people who came with cameras told RMV they were chased, hit, robbed, and in one case kicked on the ground while curled in a ball. Their footage, and photographs published by a mainstream Denver paper, show a good deal of what they say happened.
What the police reported
Between roughly 12:45 and 2 p.m., officers say, five assaults or altercations broke out among the demonstrators. Three people were taken to the hospital. One was treated at the scene. A fifth left before officers could make contact, and police asked that person to call 720-913-2000.
Officers say they contacted or identified several suspects, and that those cases are open. Two people were cited for graffiti.
The department did not call the people who were hurt protesters, counter-protesters, or journalists. It called them victims. And it faulted how the day came together, describing an unpermitted demonstration organized without a safety plan, which it said contributed to an unsafe environment.
The walkout was organized by the Colorado Youth Coalition, a student-led group co-founded by Bre Kennedy, a 16-year-old junior at Grandview High School.
The tables
Independent reporter Corey Blair, who covers protests for Break the Chains Media, says he went to the park to interview students about ICE. He walked up to the Denver Communists table and greeted a man he says he knew from covering past events. The man, he says, flipped him off and cursed at him.
The video shows the encounter. When Blair walks up, the man flips him off. A woman in a yellow vest steps in front of his camera. A red-haired man in a kilt argues with Blair about communism and calls himself a communist, and the man Blair greeted gets in his face. A chant starts up. “Nazi scum, off our streets,” and a crowd begins to gather.
Blair and others describe the man he greeted as a leader of the Denver Communists. Video also shows the same man shoving one of the other journalists at the park.
Photographs taken at the park show tables for the Denver Communists, the Revolutionary Communists of America and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, stacked with newspapers and pamphlets. One newspaper carried the front-page headline “Gen Z is going communist.” Among the literature on the tables were copies of “The Communist Manifesto” and pamphlets titled “No One Is Illegal.”
Whether those groups ran the walkout is a separate question, and the answer, on the record, is no.
The event was student-led. Westword reported that groups including General Strike US, the Brown Berets of Tepetlán, PULSE Colorado and 50501 Colorado were named as backing organizations alongside the Youth Coalition. Backing an event is not the same as organizing it.
What the reporters and the footage establish is that the groups were there, tabling and handing out literature, at a rally full of teenagers.
The first attack
Blair says that within 20 or 30 seconds, about 40 people had rallied around him.
He started to walk toward the side of the park, he says, and the crowd followed him. That is when someone threw a rock into his back, “a little bit bigger than a baseball.”
Blair says someone then swatted his body camera out of his hand. When he bent down to grab it, people started kicking and hitting him, and someone ran off with the camera.
“They just robbed and assaulted me,” he told RMV. He says the camera was worth about $400, that his glasses were broken, and that he was hit in the head.
He was pushed out of the park, filed a police report, and says officers photographed the marks on his back. The video, shot by Blair and picked up on a separate live-stream at the scene, shows the crowd closing around him and a young man in a safety vest trying to hold others back.
“I was not in any regard expecting to be assaulted and chased out of the neighborhood,” Blair told RMV. He was targeted, he said, “just because we were in the park recording and trying to document and report on what was happening in the park using our First Amendment. They didn’t like that.”
Across the street
Blair says he was pushed out of the park in the first attack, left to file a police report, then returned and stood across the street.
From there, he says, he watched the crowd take a pro-ICE demonstrator’s sign and chase him, throwing water bottles.
About 10 minutes later, he says, the crowd pushed two more reporters and his friend out of the park. Ten or twelve of them ended up on the sidewalk at 12th and Mariposa while the crowd chanted and threw water bottles from across the street.
Then, Blair says, “the wall broke.” The crowd ran across the street.
A group went after his friend, a woman he identified as Missy, and “clocked her in the head.” He ran to cover her, and says the crowd started hitting him, grabbing his bag and his shirt, and knocked both of them to the ground while pulling Missy’s hair and punching her.
He got her into a nearby business with a door open, he says, where someone found an ice pack for her until EMTs arrived. He waited for the ambulance, watched Missy taken away, and left through a back alley. She was treated for a concussion and two black eyes, Blair said.
Photographs published by the Denver Gazette, taken by staff photographer Stephen Swofford, show the sequence: Blair with his arm around the woman as water is thrown, a person punching her, the same person pulling her hair, and, in a later frame, Missy back on her feet with her cheeks swollen and one eye nearly closed.
The Laugesens
Wayne Laugesen and his son George cover the state for the Wayne’s Word Podcast. Both say they were, also, assaulted at the park.
Wayne says they got there early to talk to students walking out of nearby schools, and that the students were “incredibly sweet.” Most, he says, believed they were going to a protest against ICE, and thought they had their schools’ blessing to be there.
He says he had civil conversations at two of the tables, the Revolutionary Communists of America and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Then he went to the Denver Communists table.
In one video, Wayne reaches past a man with his microphone, toward a couple of people who had come over with drums. The man pushes his arm. Wayne says something and points at him. The man shoves him.
After that, George says, three adults, one with a megaphone, told the students the journalists were fascists and to “get them.”
Water bottles began to fly, and the two started backing out of the park toward the street. Wayne describes the same thing, saying “adult provocateurs” encouraged the children to attack him and his son.
George says he never spoke to anyone and was only there to film. “I didn’t say a word to anyone the whole time,” he told RMV.
In one video, students holding a mock Israeli flag marked with fake blood follow him and raise it to block his camera. He lifts the camera high with both hands to film over it. Someone shoves him from behind.
From there, George says, he was chased from the east side of the park to the intersection of 11th and Osage, where the crowd took him to the ground. He curled into a ball, he says, “trying to cover my camera and protect my vital organs and my head,” while people kicked and punched him. He says his GoPro was stolen and his microphone damaged.
A separate video, shot by someone else, shows him there.
In it, George is on the ground as at least six or seven people kick him, and a young man in a safety vest tries to push the others back.
“I felt very violated after I was personally attacked in the street,” he told RMV. He filed a police report, he says, and was told to submit his footage and call back for a case number.
Wayne came away bruised. “I’ve got bruises all over my body from being hit by water bottles,” he told RMV. “The frozen ones, those hurt.”
Both father and son put the blame on adults, not the students.
Some of the students had been hostile at first, Wayne says, confronting him and calling him a Nazi. After he told them he wasn’t, and answered their questions, he says, they apologized, telling him he was not what they had been told.
George said he overheard an adult tell a group of kids that anyone with a camera should get in their way and block their footage, and that adults would point someone out as a fascist and the students would move on them.
Footage from the reporters shows adults, including a woman with a megaphone, taunting the journalists and urging students on while water bottles and objects flew. More than once, it also shows someone in the crowd trying to pull the violence back.
The officials on the stage
Two people with political standing spoke to the students that afternoon.
Melat Kiros, the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District and a candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, told the crowd she knew many of them had faced “a threat of suspension, expulsion, getting harassed online” and had come anyway.
She praised them for it.
“Please do not let this action be your one and only action,” she said, calling the day “step one in abolishing ICE, prosecuting ICE agents, and finally getting a pathway to citizenship for every undocumented immigrant in Colorado.”
She told them she hoped to see them “at the next protest, the next action.”
The other was Monica Hunter, a sitting member of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education.
From the stage, about 23 minutes into a livestream of the event, she told students, “we don’t need to mess with the clowns who are here,” and, “we will not stand for ICE in our community,” then led them in an “ICE out” chant before stepping down.
Fred Espinoza, a candidate for the State Board of Education in District 1, wrote to the district before the walkout asking whether parents had been told, who would supervise students who left, and whether the same rules would apply to a walkout for a conservative cause.
After Friday, he said the assaults were the reason parents should have been warned.
“Students have the right to express political opinions,” Espinoza said in a statement to RMV. “They do not have the right to assault people for expressing an opposing viewpoint.”
Denver Public Schools told Espinoza the walkout was not a district event or sanctioned by the district, and said it was not providing notices to parents for that reason.
In an email shared with RMV, DPS Chief of Staff Deborah Staten wrote that the district could not confirm which schools were taking part, that students who left would be subject to attendance rules, and that staff would be sent to keep walkout students safe.
Blair said DPS resource officers and what looked like an RTD vehicle were the only official presence he saw for much of the afternoon.
Wayne also said DPS officers were there before Denver police arrived.
RMV has asked the district whether and why DPS resource officers were stationed at the event.
Wayne said he called 911 three times, and that it took the better part of half an hour for police to arrive in force. “The third time I called,” he said, “I said, people are getting hurt out here. This is dangerous.”
The investigations are open.
DPD has not said whether anyone will be charged beyond the two graffiti tickets, and it has not released the affiliations of the people who were hurt.
RMV has asked the department for that information and for the records behind Friday’s response, including how long officers took to arrive.
Two of the reporters say they filed police reports. George Laugesen said he was told to submit his footage, and Blair said he was still waiting to hear back. Wayne had planned to file one, as well.
The woman beaten to the ground has not spoken publicly.
For now, much of the most detailed visual record of what happened at La Alma-Lincoln Park comes from the people who were pointing cameras at it, several of whom say they paid for the footage with the equipment in their hands and the bruises on their body.
This is a developing story. RMV has requested additional records and comment from the Denver Police Department, Denver Public Schools, and the individuals named, and will report further as they respond.