Death Sings

Floating out of the grey of the early dawn he had come.

A phantom. A spectre. Lone and undeterred, unerring in his way, hailed by the blood song no mortal ear could hear. Down from the mountains came the misty white. It strode like ghosts through the wood, tiptoed over the sodden earth into the meadow and wreathed him who should not be.

The outlaw was here…

A whispering breeze moaned as it stirred the still morning air. The wood began to talk, but only in its hushed voices. The mountains peered here and there where they might glimpse through the milky haze him who made the blood to sing. A thousand, thousand voices rose from the earth. Chilled and whispering. Calling after him. One upon another in a dismal harmony. Straining. Pleading. Yearning. But no one heard them… who is it that hears the dead?

He did not.

Though it was he who watered the earth with their blood, who gave them their sorrow. A father of misery not yet done siring his ill brood. The grave is still, the flesh is gone, but the blood calls. It is not quiet. It’s whispers perturb the living. A million things—for million things the red water calls: for contempt, repudiation, for vengeance and sorrow, grief, for pain, for misery and the infinite of loss. The blood of a thousand, thousand souls raised in one woeful dread, a chorus even death could not silence.

He had come to add to their harmony.

Officers could hear a "struggle or altercation" happening in the room, and attempted to open the door, Thomas said.

After their commands to open the door were not followed, officers used a battering ram to force it open.

When they entered the backroom, they found three men in the room, including the suspect, who appeared to be threatening another man with a "sharp instrument."

Thomas said officers fired their weapons at the suspect; when the gunfire stopped, the other two men were able to escape the room.

Thomas said officers performed life-saving measures in the suspect before he was transported to a hospital, where he died of his injuries.

The two male victims were were not injured during the incident, he said.

DPD, Colorado State Patrol and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation will conduct a joint investigation into the shooting, Thomas said.