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Nearly 20 people have been detained after a now-infamous Denver-area apartment complex was used as a site to allegedly “torture” individuals believed to be the victims of a Venezuelan gang.
(Video Credit: Denver7)
Tuesday in Aurora, Colorado, Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlin held a lengthy press conference where he explained the latest incident at the Edge of Lowry apartment complex. Included were details on what happened to a bound male and female victim “terrorized” by a group under a “high assumption” of being members of the prison gang Tren de Aragua.
“To see this re-unfold again…am I fired up? Yeah, I’m fired up,” Chamberlain said at a press conference Tuesday. “Something is seriously wrong and we are going to try to fix it as best we can. And we have been.”
“Victims were held against their will, they were actually bound, both the male and the female,” he outlined. “They were pistol-whipped, they were beaten, they were terrorized. The fact that one human could treat another like this is appalling.”
After 14 individuals were initially detained, with the chief explaining it was likely as many as 16 suspects were involved in the incident, 13 men and three women, another five detainments were made Tuesday evening, bringing the total to 19.
“We are not going to rest until we verify every individual in this incident is in custody, every individual who mistreated another human being the way these victims were treated is in custody and we will use, again, every resource at our ability to do that. We have proactively been focused on that apartment complex,” said Chamberlain. “As everybody here knows, and as the nation knows, this complex is an incredibly problematic complex. It’s an incredibly crime-riddled complex.”
While gang affiliation was not immediately confirmed and charges were not brought until the victims could identify those responsible, the police were working under a “high assumption” that TdA was involved.
“It could only be them. They run Edge of Lowry,” an officer said of one of the three apartment complexes overrun with the gang to the Daily Mail.
Police had been instructed to call for backup before responding to those properties due to the increased danger associated with the complexes.
During the press conference, Chamberlain lauded the victims for contacting law enforcement around 2 a.m. Tuesday, shortly after their release, as he commented on the typical behavior of the gang to target those of a similar ethnicity who might fear police involvement if they were in the country illegally.
“These individuals, like many gangs and many individuals involved in this type of activity, they victimize their own race and their own ethnicity, and the reason they do that is because they are easy victims because they know — because of their status — they will not come forward to the police,” he said. “They know that they can do things to them that they couldn’t do to anybody else in the community based upon their fear of what the ramifications would be if law enforcement gets involved in that.”
Immigration lawyer Arturo Jimenez, who spoke with Denver7 about U nonimmigrant status, or U visas, offered to victims who help law enforcement in criminal investigations, said of reports that some of the detainees had been turned over to U.S. Immigration Enforcement and Customs, “That tells me that there is some cooperation between police in terms of turning people over based on their immigration status.”
“And that tells me that Aurora is willing to put their system of people coming forward and assisting with investigations in jeopardy,” he argued.
Meanwhile, as President-elect Donald Trump has been vindicated by the latest arrests while planning mass deportations upon his White House return, the police chief decried the lack of concern that had been offered by an official at the White House he’d spoken to earlier in the year.
As he recalled, the focus of the Biden-Harris administration was on those crossing the border and not what they did after that.
“To me, that’s a problem, that’s a huge problem because we have individuals come to a country, they get dropped off into a community, they have absolutely no infrastructure, they have absolutely no support, they have absolutely no guidance from the federal government about what to do, how to live, how to survive and this is the ramifications of that activity. This is the ramifications of not monitoring what’s occurring, how it’s occurring and who is it occurring to,” said Chamberlain. “And so, Aurora, we are now in the process, as many other cities throughout this nation, of trying to pick up the pieces of an incredibly bad system that was in place.”
The press conference can be viewed below via the Aurora Police YouTube channel:
(Video Credit: Aurora Police)
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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